The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 233 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Torsten Reil: Helsing will never sell the company
“We try really to keep the foot on the gas really aggressively, because we want to build a company that really matters, and we will never sell the company.”
Altman: OpenAI Killed Sora to Reallocate Compute to Codex
“But last year, for example, we killed Sora. Which was, you know, good product, and fun, and cool, but used a lot of compute, and not as important as Codex, where we put the compute.”
DHH: 37signals offered six months severance to employees rejecting politics ban
“If you can't see yourself at a company where we're not going to discuss fucking Palestine during work hours with your random coworkers, we will pay you up to six months salary to go somewhere else.”
Ivanka Trump definitively states she will not serve in government again
“I know that my children really need me there for them, and I'm not willing to make them bear the sacrifice of serving again, and I'm extraordinarily inspired by the ability to impact Positive change in the private sector.”
White: I Told a Sponsor to Drop Dead Over a Trump Video
“It started with, I posted a video supporting Trump on my social media. And they called and they said, you need to take that down. And I said, are you out of your fucking mind? Who the fuck are you to call me and tell me who to vote for? It's not coming down an…”
Foroughi: AppLovin tied executive compensation plan triggers to a $1 trillion valuation
“We believe there's a path to a trillion dollar outcome, and we don't set time, it's just that this business can be as big as what you would need to be a trillion dollar business, and we actually just did a comp plan to some of the key people that, is built on,…”
Armstrong: Coinbase stays strictly apolitical unless an issue impacts crypto mission
“Outside of work, people can do whatever they want. You can go protest. You can be left or right or whatever. But just inside the workplace, we're not going to be political. We're just going to focus, unless it has to do with our mission, crypto and economic fr…”
Altman: I was wrong to expect immediate software disruption after GPT-4
“When we got to GBT four, which was back in 20, 23, I think that very quickly after that, there was going to be much more disruption in software business being up for grabs right, right away than turned out to be. And the thing that I think I was wrong about a …”
Altman: OpenAI Killed Its Web Browser 'Atlas' to Refocus Talent
“We killed our web browser called Atlas, which, again, I think was a great product, it was the best web browser, but not as important for us to focus on as somewhere else we could put that talent.”
Kalanick: Atoms builds specialized industry robots, not general humanoid robots
“It's I wouldn't call myself anti-humanoid. It's just what we're doing is not that. It's specialized robotics that it's not like we make robotics and anybody can have some. It's more like robotics and AI that go after an industry, one industry at a time.”
White: UFC Live Event Production Is a "100% Dictatorship" Under Me
“There is no committee here. There is no whatever. This is a dictatorship. 100% of dictatorship. And. I'm listening to how loud the music is, if it's loud enough, if it's not, and things are happening in-house, and I'm watching what's happening on TV. All of th…”
White: No Corporate Sponsor Will Ever Have the Power to Fire Joe Rogan
“And for anybody, I don't give a fuck how much money you have sponsored or whatever. Yeah, no, nothing's happening to Joe Rogan.”
Foroughi: AppLovin gives equity to only ~100 core employees
“And so we took it down to a little over a hundred people that we give equity to in the business.”
Xu gave candidates $20 and 8 hours to acquire 100 customers
“I would literally ask you, I said, well, this could be a really long or really short interview where I'm going to give you 20 minutes and you can ask me any question that you want. But after the 20 minutes expires, I'm going to give you 20 dollars that you can…”
Brian Armstrong says being on the autism spectrum aids his focus
“I think I'm somewhere on the spectrum. You know, I've taken some online tests and things like that, and there are things like where, you know, I have difficulty like reading people's faces and emotions sometimes. And, you know, I kind of can get overstimulated…”
Fried: 37signals Intentionally Leaves Money on the Table by Skipping A/B Testing
“We're definitely leaving money on the table. I'm sure of it. Like, we don't optimize our pricing. I'm not testing pricing, not constantly. We're not A-B testing constantly. I'm certain there's some formula that we're not following that could lead to more growt…”
Fried: 37signals Left AWS and the Cloud to Run Physical Data Centers
“We just recently left the cloud, left AWS, and we're running our own stuff now in data centers.”
Lütke: Conventional executive delegation almost killed Shopify post-IPO
“I really tried everything and learning like you know, just how to, you know, build the team in such a way that I delegate everything, and I have my different business lines and you know, arrange things. This is sort of after the IPO, and I realized I have to b…”
Lütke: Shopify avoided Silicon Valley to dominate East Coast talent consensus
“The reason why I didn't move to Silicon Valley is because I knew how to create geographical consensus in the eastern seaboard that Shopify is the best company to work for, full stock.”
Lütke: Shopify deliberately avoids offering top-of-market compensation packages
“We attempt to never be the highest compensation play bid. Because we have found that the people who Optimize for that, above all else, actually don't do well at the company.”
Mackey: Whole Foods Went Public to Escape Venture Capitalist Control
“We needed to go public to, because I didn't want the VCs to get control of the business.”
Staniszewski: ElevenLabs will not build text-to-video foundation models from scratch
“Still a conscious decision we are taking is not creating the model from scratch. So like true text to video or like, you know, VO free type models that exist. We want to be at that intersection where we know the audio can give you the unique advantage”
Staniszewski: ElevenLabs embeds engineers in non-technical teams like legal and ops
“In all the small teams that we have, in all the teams that we have, we bring, even non-technical teams, we bring engineering talent in those teams. So our talent team, our ops team, our legal team, all of that will have engineers that help both. Automate some …”
Staniszewski: ElevenLabs will not sell and is going all in
“No. AI is changing the world. We can build a frontier of that change. We are going all in.”
Dell: Base plans to expand into generation, transmission, storage, and retail
“At a very high level, energy is four things. Make, move, store, and sell, right? You have to make it, generation, you have to move it, transmission, distribution, so you have to generate electricity, you have to move it to where it's made, store, battery stora…”
Zach Dell intends for Base Power to be his last company
“Ok, so this is your last company? Absolutely.”
Leone will leave Sequoia if still feeling irrelevant one year after return
“I told one of my partners just an hour ago that if nine months from now, which is the one year since I return, I feel just as irrelevant. I'm going to take myself out.”
Helsing acquired Munich aircraft manufacturer to build autonomous fighter jet
“So, so we decided to acquire an aircraft manufacturer outside Munich, our outside Munich with its own runway hangars and full aircraft manufacturing capabilities and build our own fighter jet, which is now called the CA-I and then put Centaur on it. As the cor…”
Reil: Helsing Systems Are Currently Deployed at Scale in Ukraine
“We never set it up, honestly, to have the systems deployed at scale in Ukraine, which is what we have right now.”
Reil: Helsing's CA-1 fighter jet can launch from public highways
“If you look at something like the like the CA-I our autonomous fighter jets, it's designed in such a way that it can take off from any kind of makeshift airstrip, which would be a road, an autobahn, a motorway, a highway, et cetera.”
Reil: Helsing closed a 1 billion framework contract in Germany
“We just closed a one billion framework contract in, in Germany”
Altman: OpenAI launched ChatGPT knowing it was early and embarrassing
“I don't even think I asked him before we launched HGPT, like, Hey, do you think we should launch this thing? But I knew what he would say. I knew it was still early. I knew it was still embarrassing. And I knew the right thing was to like, get it out and get i…”
Kalanick: Uber gave Baidu 7% equity to survive Chinese regulatory heat
“Now we eventually did get a partner, but instead of giving up 50%, we gave up, I think it was seven percent and it was to Baidu, but it was because we were getting massive regulatory heat. And as long as we had a partner by our side, we could be Chinese.”
Companies that purchase fake social media engagement should be written off entirely
“When that happens, I write off the entire company as fake. I don't think this was a fake video or fake engagement. I think to myself, it's a fake company. With a fake founder. I will never buy their product, do business with them. I would never recommend someb…”
Ovitz pitched Jurassic Park to Spielberg, who agreed to direct immediately
“When I put Jurassic Park together, and I read the book, I said to Michael a couple of things. I said, one, it's brilliant, and everyone loves dinosaurs. Two, you don't need a big star, because the dinosaur's the star, which was important financially. And three…”
Malka: Ribbit Capital gives all team members open access to internal inboxes
“Everybody can see my calendar in my inbox. They can see my emails, and I can see anybody's emails. We share all the information so we can actually become better as a team.”
Malka: Ribbit makes all investment decisions collectively without lead partners
“We don't make individual decisions. We make group decisions. And there's no, like, somebody asks, who's the partner responsible for that company? It's like, what partner?”
DHH: 37signals relied for two decades on out-teaching rather than outspending
“We're not going to outspend them on a marketing campaign. That was never going to happen, but we could outteach them. We could have better insights, and we could share them, and people could resonate with that and then reciprocate by buying our products, at le…”
Stoute: BigXthaPlug Made Over $20 Million on UnitedMasters This Year
“We have an artist on United Masters, Big Extra Plug. He's made twenty million dollars this year.”
Söderström: Spotify bundled podcasts into single app for distribution advantage
“So we chose to take the pain of doing a single app with all the complexity that comes with that for the benefit of reaching what was then already 300 something million users, maybe. But it was much harder. We chose like pain and cost somewhere to get benefits …”
Söderström: High third-party AI voice costs drove Spotify to acquire Sonantic
“We bought this company called Sonantic to be able to produce voice. I mean, you can buy voice anywhere on the internet today, but it's quite expensive per minute. So if you want to serve seven hundred million users with like a few minutes of voice per day, You…”
Söderström: Spotify counter-positioned Apple via freemium, personalization, and hardware ubiquity
“When we created our strategy, we bet on three things, and they were all basically counter positions to Apple deliberately. One was freemium. We believe that Apple would, if they even did a product, a free product, they would struggle to do advertising. They tr…”
ZMC Only Pursues Corporate Turnarounds as the First Team In
“We have a rule, we only, we're, we only do turnarounds if we're the first team in. Like if someone tried and failed, we don't do it.”
Grand Theft Auto VI is Roughly 18 Months Behind Schedule
“I think we're about 18 months behind the original date. Not, not much more than that.”
White: We Will Never Hold Another Event at Brooklyn's Barclays Center
“I said, I'll never, ever fucking come to your arena again. Just so you know that, you know, cause we were doing MSG in Brooklyn. I said, I will never hold another fucking fight in your arena ever again.”
White: Post-COVID, I Only Do Business With Culturally Aligned Partners
“And then coming out of COVID and that whole woke era, I was like, I'm only going to be in business with people that I'm aligned with.”
Foroughi: AppLovin discounted its 15 gaming studios to sell as one package to Tripledot
“We didn't want to go through. And say, we own 15 studios. We're going to sell off one at a time just to make a profit. So instead we just priced it down enough to make it enticing to a company like Triple Dot to just take the whole thing off our hands.”
Baszucki vows Roblox will never sell its 3D user telemetry data
“We would, of course, never sell that data. Never, ever, ever, ever. For several reasons. One is just from a values thing of respecting the community. Can you imagine, like, what kind of whacked out decision that would be? Yeah. Roblox is selling their three D …”