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 131 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
Kalanick: Founders definitely should not raise capital from Benchmark Capital
“You definitely shouldn't raise from benchmark capital.”
Dell: Elon Musk's greatest contribution is training engineers to build companies
“It's the most incredible contribution I think anyone has ever made to humanity. It's not just the company that he's built, but the engineers that he's trained that have gone on to build other great companies. It's like I said, he's the greatest technologist of…”
White Calls PFL, Bellator, and ONE Championship "Failing Companies"
“PFL, Bellator, One FC, many, many other failing companies.”
Armstrong: Gensler and Warren unlawfully tried to kill US crypto
“And so it turns out in the past, this ambiguity about where crypto assets set, you know, sit between the two federal regulators, that lack of clarity was really weaponized and by Gary Gensler, the former SEC chair, and Elizabeth Warren and people like that who…”
Armstrong: Elizabeth Warren is a socialist who wants government running financial services
“Well, ok, so Elizabeth Warren is you know, in my view, she's a socialist. She believes the government should be running all financial services.”
Mackey: Musk and Rockefeller are among the greatest heroes in history
“And somebody like Elon Musk, he gets a very, very, very tiny sliver of the value that he creates for the whole world. I mean, He's created, he and people like Rockefeller, they're lambasted as the villains when they are the greatest heroes that have ever, ever…”
Leone estimates that only 20% to 30% of VCs are competent
“Out of 10 venture folks, and I've said this, and I've taken Shifford, maybe 30% are incompetent. They don't know what they're doing. Another 40% I call them no ups, no damage, no anything. They nod, you know, they nod with a group and maybe 30% of fewer, maybe…”
Reil: The era of military tanks is probably over
“And so I think the area of tanks is probably over.”
Altman: AI safety advocates asking humans to surrender autonomy are anti-human
“I think there are some people in the AI field who effectively say we're going to give the world a cure to all disease and we're going to make stuff really cheap in exchange for people giving up their autonomy and impact over the future and power and also in th…”
Kalanick: Lyft remains smaller because Uber executed better on network efficiency
“This is why, you know, like Lyft is smaller than Uber because we were better at this part of this, the thing, and people don't really know that's what it takes.”
Kalanick: Only 10% of VCs "do no harm," just 1% are helpful
“10%. And then the one percent is helpful.”
Traditional PR is dead; filtering corporate messages through intermediaries fails
“The key idea in the manifesto is that traditional PR as we know it is dead. Maybe you can see the body, but it doesn't have a pulse. And it's a good thing, because traditional PR meant that you would have to filter your message through somebody else's prism.”
Ross: West Coast VCs act like lemmings, East Coast VCs think independently
“Well, the way I like to put it is typical, typical, not all, but typical West Coast VCs are more like Lemmings, and typical East Coast VCs all think that they're smarter than each other.”
Stoute: Labels Avoided Spotify Fan Data Deals to Preserve Power
“The record companies, I believe, never negotiated that when they had that leverage, because they didn't even want to have to share that information with the artist.”
Jack Welch Gutted GE and His Disciples Later Damaged Boeing
“It's split up into pieces. And it was completely fragile. Not robust because he gutted it of the future research. But the people that were there were hired and considerably valuable because they'd grown up in that system. Two of them which went on to become le…”
Söderström: Apple's aging senior leadership missed the shift to AI
“Maybe this is one of the challenges that Apple had with machine learning and AI. So on average, they were slightly too old to see that probably people in their org knew all about it. We're all over it. It was too late to see it. They should have, like, gotten …”
White: Traditional Media Lost All Influence to Young Digital Creators
“The media does not have the influence anymore. They're gone. Nobody trusts them. You know, they're all full of shit. They're always, you know, lying and they don't have the trust of the people the way that they used to. These young kids are the influencers. Th…”
Spiegel: Meta needed Luxottica partnership to camouflage its unpopular brand
“I think Meta needed to partner with Luxottica because the Meta brand, I think, is not something that people want to put anywhere near their face. So I think I think that Meta really needed it. I think what's, what's challenging for Luxottica is they took like …”
Andreessen: Century-old manager-led institutions are fundamentally collapsing
“What's happening is all the old edifices, all the old incumbent institutions in the last hundred years that are run by managers, they're all in some state of fundamental collapse. Like, they're all collapsing in, like, trust and credibility because they can't …”
Fried: Treating Startups as Financial Instruments for Exits Is 'Repellent'
“I think playing entrepreneur is like spinning up businesses all the time, making all sorts of stuff, and giving it a name, and giving it a logo, and trying to raise money, and coming up with valuations, and talking about all this stuff, and there's like nothin…”
Fried: Startup Stock Options and RSUs Are Largely Bullshit
“No options, no RSUs, no stock, no, like, any of that BS. I find almost all that to be pretty much BS, unless you're like a really well-established public company.”
Iovine: Music streaming services risk obsolescence by restricting artist communication
“So the streaming services, to me, are minutes away from being obsolete because of that. You can't rub against the artist like that. You just can't. You gotta give them what they want. They're driving this ship.”
Lütke: Staying private sequesters growth gains to accredited investors
“All these accredited investors accredited investor laws and stuff like this all they do is, like, make it so that
Like, when you're rich, you can invest in private company stock.
And when you're not, you can't.
And, well, where are the returns?
Like, of co…”
Dyson claims he learned absolutely nothing from his £500M EV failure
“One of the, everybody said, you know, you must have learned a lot from that experience, and the answer is I learned absolutely nothing.”
Dell: Residential battery companies are focused on the wrong business model
“The distributed architecture is the answer. And all the companies that are around that problem, they're focused on the wrong business model. They're focused on high margin upfront sales.”
Reil: 100,000 strike drones would destroy 3,000 invading tanks within hours
“The deterrence that you get out of having a very large number of strike drones at your border, I think is, is pretty is pretty strong, and the reason is that if you turn up with tanks on the other side, let's say you turn up with 3000 tanks, 100,000 strike dro…”
Reil: Europe lacks breakout companies because founders lack aggression
“And then we sadly have a continent where we don't have breakout companies because people just lack the aggression.”
Reil: Social media commentary is entirely worthless and net negative
“I think commentary is entirely worthless and it has almost, it has no positive contribution. The only thing that it does is It I think it drags some people down so it has a net negative benefit, and it obviously is, is encouraged through you know, the way the …”
Altman: AI Is Currently in Its Pre-iPhone Era
“The phase that we're in now reminds me of like smartphones before the iPhone. I was like an early adopter. I had like a Palm Trio in, you know, 2003 or four or whatever. You ever had a sidekick? I never had a sidekick. I thought they were super cool. I wanted …”
Altman: The two biggest AI risks are control loss and centralized power
“Maybe the two big risks that I'm most worried about with AI, which are a little bit in tension. One is like a loss of control where, you know, AI somehow just becomes too powerful in a way that we can't guarantee the control we want. And the other is power get…”
Altman: OpenAI Should Be a Platform Company Rather Than a Product Company
“Actually, I think we should be more of a platform company than a product company.”
Culture is abandoning a decade of aesthetic relativism for objective beauty
“People are allowed to care about objectively beautiful things again. We had probably a decade or the better part of a decade where we had to take this aesthetic relativistic view of everything is beautiful in someone's eyes, and this piece of art that is like …”
Malka: Dee Hock considered Visa a failure because it lacked smart contracts
“For him Visa was a failure, if you talk to him, because he only got to release The simple version of it, which was payments, he wanted to do a lot more, which looked a lot like blockchains and smart contracts are today, but he was probably 60 years ahead of hi…”
DHH: Windows is the epitome of having no design taste
“Apple for the longest time Was the undisputed leader in that, especially when you compared it to Windows, which was the epitome of having no taste, of having no sensibilities about how things should look, and having no cohesive vision for what a computer shoul…”
DHH: Rich entrepreneurs have a moral obligation to buy Italian supercars
“If you sell a product or service and you make a lot of money on it, put that money back into the system, send some of that money to the craftsmen of Italy to create you a beautiful Ferrari, right? Like, there's someone who has to stitch that seat such that it'…”
Glyman: AI research labs are Ramp's most comparable competitors
“In some sense, it is a form of knowledge, work, and intelligence that we are serving and servicing for you, and I think that labs are, in some sense, the most comparable provider of this type of service.”
Stoute: Black consumers are the world's best by buying unmarketed goods
“Black consumers are the best consumers in the world. Because they buy products that aren't marketed to them.”
Steve Jobs Transformed His Leadership Style Between 1991 and 1995
“What people didn't understand, and I think they didn't know, was that years of 91 to 95 was when Steve made this major transformation.”
Bobby Kotick Created the Most Value in Pure-Play Gaming
“I would argue that, I mean, for pure play, probably Bobby Kotak has with Activision.”
Grand Theft Auto is the Most Valuable Entertainment IP Ever Created
“I think if you counted every, like, Mario Kart and Call of Duty and a bunch of others, it's not entirely clear, but I think in terms of the value of the IP, most people believe it's the most valuable entertainment IP ever created.”
White: Philippe Dauman Was One of the Biggest Brand Killers Ever
“That guy ended up being one of the biggest brand killers of all time. Oh, Phil Duman MTV fucking, you know, think about all the Viacom Legendary networks they had that this guy had sucked the life out of and killed.”
White: Showtime Boxing Had the Most "Dog Shit Production Ever"
“And I fucking thought that Showtime was the most dog shit production ever. In boxing.”
White: UFC Fight Island Was the Only True Sports Bubble During COVID
“It was the only true bubble that existed in sports at that time. All the other ones were bullshit.”
White: Reporters Covering the UFC Are Zeros Who Have Accomplished Nothing
“These guys who report on what we're doing that have no clue what we're doing. Why would I want to hear any of the, anything they would have to say? They're zeros. They've literally never done anything in their life, especially in this business. Why would I lis…”
Foroughi: Only AppLovin, Meta, and Google have mastered true advertiser arbitrage
“And if you do that, and what I call performance marketing is that make the advertiser an arbitrage. Very few people define performance marketing as that, and very few companies have executed. Facebook's done a fantastic job of it. Google, part of their busines…”
Spiegel: Holding a Smartphone Screen Is Not the Future of Computing
“It was obvious to me that, you know, if you looked at the evolution of computing, that like holding this tiny little screen in your hands was not the future of computers. Like it makes absolutely no sense, especially for humans that want to like live and work …”