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 1,982 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 10 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
Creating wealth for employees delivers more social justice than DEI hiring initiatives
“Good people don't want to be hired because they fit a demographic. We made a lot of money for our people, and we delivered more social justice this way than we ever could have pursuing other people's ideas of that.”
Lieberman: Software and Agency Valuation Multiples Will Converge in AI Era
“And also, why do I think that software and agency multiples will converge? Short answer is I believe the business is The agency business will look a lot better in the age of AI.”
AI makes expecting more output with fewer employees entirely realistic
“This question would have come off as unreasonable for Toby to ask pre-AI, but with AI, the expectation of your team to get more work done with no more or even fewer people is all of a sudden totally realistic.”
Rippling sues competitor Deel alleging a corporate espionage scheme
“Parker Conrad, the CEO of Rippling, the HR software platform, tweeted on March 17th that Rippling was suing its competitor deal for running a corporate espionage scheme and stealing trade secrets from Rippling for months.”
Rippling caught a Deel insider using a honeypot Slack channel
“Rippling's general counsel sent a legal letter to three Deal executives mentioning a fake Slack channel called D Defectors that had supposed reputationally damaging information about Deal. Prior to general counsel sending this letter, the channel did not exist…”
Product Quality Is Not A Long-Term Competitive Advantage
“The best product doesn't always win, and product is not a long-term competitive advantage.”
B players destroy companies because their mediocrity is tolerated, unlike C players
“Organizations are not getting killed by their C players. Everybody knows who they are, and performance eventually is addressed. The people who kill organizations are your B players. It's the scourge of the enterprise, because there are many, and they are gener…”
Modern companies coddle employees and prioritize internal satisfaction scores over customer success
“Performance-centric thinking like this doesn't trend well with prevailing attitudes. Companies have become more fixated on their employees' MPS scores than their customers. They coddle their people. They get caught up in things that have nothing to do with the…”
Lieberman: Founders Lie and Embellish Necessarily to Launch Businesses
“Founders do lie, and founders do embellish, and they do it necessarily to get their business off the ground.”
Chesky: Companies should have zero pure people managers without domain expertise
“I think that every leader should be an expert in what they're leading. There should be no people managers in the entire company. And when I say people managers, meaning your only responsibility is people, not the work or not the domain, because you can't manag…”
Lavingia: Gumroad generates $20M revenue and $8M-$9M profit with no full-time employees
“Twenty million in revenue. We have 35 people working like this. We do, you know, eight or nine million in net income. And yet still we have no full-time employees. Like I'm not interested in hiring a single full-time employee.”
Lavingia: AI will enable 1-hour workdays generating $800 hourly value
“I want to get Gummer to a place where the average person works like an hour a day. Maybe they make like 800 dollars an hour but they work like an hour a day. They're producing an hour, you know, 800 plus dollars of value. They're assisted with AI to write thei…”
Eisenberg: The 'execution is everything' startup adage is completely wrong
“In our world, people say ideas don't matter. Execution is everything. And I violently disagree with that. I think that there's a set of several thousand ideas that you can actually figure out by mining using spy software essentially on the internet that are ju…”
Levels shares recordings of all 1-on-1s and board meetings company-wide
“All of our meetings, including our one-on-ones are recorded and shared by default to the whole company. So our board meetings, generally speaking, are shared with the whole company.”
Adcock: Independent Board Members Make Terrible Decisions Because They Lack Equity
“So you have like all these folks that have like no stock and no skin in the game coming in, trying to be impartial that are making the worst decisions I've ever seen. Like, it's just a fundamental issue with public companies. I fundamentally believe independen…”
Adcock: Everyone Moving Fast at OpenAI Is Going or Gone
“Everybody that's moved fast at OpenAI is gonna go, or is gone. Like, and they'll be left with folks that move slow, want to think about safety and all this stuff”
Adcock: OpenAI Will Suffer Unrecoverable Speed and Brand Damage
“And now open AI is going to have a
Massive issue with speed and brand and everything else, and it's going to be unrecoverable.
They're never going to be a recover from what happened.”
Founders cannot evaluate executives without knowing how to do their jobs
“Your ability to assess and know whether they are the right people, if you're willing to put that to luck, then sure, you can just hope that you hired the right person, and you have no way of assessing the quality of their work output. If you can write a strate…”
Humanoid robots will not displace labor near-term due to massive shortages
“I think in like the near and medium case, we're really not going to be displacing that much labor. I think what we're seeing every day we're walking into a warehouse or manufacturing a retail scenario, they have a tremendous amount of unemployment. The turnove…”
Pujji: Generating $1M SaaS ARR is as hard as $1M services EBITDA
“Getting a million dollar SaaS ARR is probably as hard as getting a million dollars in EBITDA, let's say in a services business. And guess what? They value those streams are valued exactly the same. So like the market is very efficient in terms of how it treats…”
Jain: Founders should avoid early VC because partners lack operational understanding
“I think entrepreneurs should do everything in their power to not allow venture capitalists to come into their business. VCs don't generally understand how to run a business. They generally don't understand what your business needs are, and their incentives are…”
Sanchez: Angel investing is dumb for 99.9% of people
“I think angel investing is dumb for your first dollars. You're going to lose 80% of your takes. So I still think angel investing is dumb for 99.9% of people. Don't play a game where you bet on other people's ability before you've bet enough on your own and sta…”
Lieberman: Stripe avoids official layoffs by forcing managers into a rating system
“Stripe, they're not doing layoffs. It's not called layoffs. It's what's known as backdoor layoffs, where basically they're requiring their managers to do a rating system of they're, they have to answer a question, would you hire this direct report if you knew …”
Lieberman: Software Recurring Revenue Quality Will Decline
“And so I think what was typically considered to be a more quality recurring revenue stream in software products is going to be less true than it's ever been.”
Lieberman: AI consultancy Tenex can reach $100M in annual agency revenue
“I think Tenex just as a, an agency business can be a hundred million dollar a year business because I view the opportunity for AI transformation to basically be the GDP of the United States.”
Khosla partner Nikunj Kothari calls seedstrapping limits extremely short-sighted
“He basically said businesses that should be venture backed will always have an incentive to raise more and grow faster. He said, my hot take is that all of these amount raised and team size proclamations are extremely short sighted.”
Rabois: Successful founders share only one trait: a top 1% spike
“The only thing in common among successful founders that I've worked with, funded interacted with is they have one comparative advantage with the rest of the world where they're in the top one percent or top 10 basis points or sometimes even top one basis point…”
Rabois: Seed investments are horrific without one of three founder archetypes
“If you don't have one of those three things, a seed investment is a horrific idea.”
Rabois: If a founder's mother lacks early examples, they aren't top 1%
“If you're the most tenacious person in the world, if you talk to that person's mother, they can probably give you examples from the time that that person was five years old. And if they can't, it's probably not top 10 basis points. Or if you're the smartest pe…”
Rabois: Meta, Google, and Apple cannot accurately assess undiscovered talent
“So you've got to go find people who haven't yet proven what they can do that these large organizations think meta, Think Google, think Apple, think Amazon, think Microsoft, or even these days open AI. They don't know how to assess these people.”
Rabois: Keep pushing employees' scope until they reach their natural limits
“Take everybody on your team, I'll keep pushing along. The envelope of what they can do until you see where they're struggling. And then everybody will have a natural limit, but keep pushing until you find it. And then you're going to get people to achieve thin…”
Keith Rabois: Headcount doesn't scale output without adding more 'barrels'
“And the reason why parallels matter is you can only accomplish the number of things you have simultaneously in parallel that are defined by the number of barrels you have. So having more headcount does not allow you to accomplish more.”
Lieberman: An audience's greatest value for startups is hiring, not customer acquisition
“And I think the obvious benefit that companies get from partnering with a creator or someone who has audience is getting more customers. But I would actually argue that is like the least exciting thing about having an audience, When I think about the value tha…”
Competing In A VC-Funded Space Without Capital Is Foolish
“If you're in a competitive VC-funded space, it is foolish to compete without raising money.”
There Is No Moat In Productivity Software; Founders Should Avoid It
“There is no moat in productivity. Avoid it if you can.”
Good Product With Great Marketing Beats Amazing Product Without Marketing
“Good product with great marketing beats amazing product with no marketing.”
Employee pushback indicates leadership is raising performance standards sufficiently
“The shock to the system will be profound, or you are perhaps not taking it far enough. People may squeal, but consider that a sign you are bringing it on.”
The balanced scorecard management framework is academia's worst idea
“They were convinced a grown-up company had to have a balanced scorecard, arguably the worst idea to ever come out of academia.”
Lieberman: Sycophancy curdles founder confidence into a con
“Success begets acolytes who tell you you're right when you're wrong. Worse, you start believing them. This leads down a dangerous path where vision breaks from reality and, likely aided by a fear of failure, Curdles your confidence into a con.”
Lieberman: Elizabeth Holmes went to prison for defrauding investors, not patients
“Yes, claims about health care solutions warrant scrutiny beyond whether or not rich investors get their money back, but Holmes wasn't convicted for defrauding patients. She's going to prison because she ripped off George Shultz, not because her bogus blood tes…”
Chesky: CEOs should serve as chief product officers and stay involved
“I think that the CEO, unless they're not a product person, should think of themselves as a chief product officer, and they should be involved in the product.”
Vohra: PMF scores above 20% enable iteration; below 15% require pivoting
“22 or 20% plus, I would say, tweak your market, tweak your product. You can iterate your way there. It's when you're sort of in the 10 to 15% range That I start to think, well, you know, maybe you should just have an entirely different market or an entirely di…”
Vohra: Tweaking target market is faster than tweaking product for PMF
“Most founders, because we're builders, we obsess over the product itself. Well, you know, the product isn't resonating quite as much as it could or should, so let's keep tweaking the product. It turns out to be way faster to tweak the market, because you can l…”
Vohra: Only listen to feedback from users aligned with your core value
“Use the main benefit of the very disappointed users to segment the somewhat disappointed users. In our case, the main benefit is speed. So first of all, we have the somewhat disappointed users for whom speed was not the main benefit. I strongly advise that you…”
Vohra: Roadmaps must balance doubling down on core love and resolving objections
“If we only double down on what users love, and this is what vision-driven teams tend to do, we would not increase the product market fit score, because you're only addressing feedback from the people who already love you. If we only address the objections from…”
Nagpal: Nothing gives more tax benefits than owning a business
“The first sort of overarching piece of advice I have for everyone is, even if you have a full-time job, consider starting a side hustle, because nothing will give you more tax benefits than having your own business.”
Fried: Never dismiss a good idea because prior founders executed poorly
“Never dismiss a good idea because of poor execution. And five people could have gotten it wrong in a row. It doesn't mean it's bad. They just may have gotten it wrong.”
Fried: Gathering too many early opinions wrecks product development
“One of the ways to wreck new product development is to get too many opinions too early. Everyone's got an opinion, and especially when something's new, they're gonna tell you what they think, and then you end up having to sort of field and explain your reasons…”