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 31 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
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: 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 …”
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.”
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: Small Businesses Are a Bad Customer Base for Agencies
“The fourth is that small businesses are generally a really bad customer base. I think agencies that serve small businesses are the worst type of agency. I think the only companies that do well by serving small businesses are what I would call electricity, mean…”
Worthwhile startup advisors should personally invest $25,000 to $50,000
“Anyone who's worth being an advisor probably should have 25 to 50,000 dollars to put into your company.”
Medeiros: VCs who claim they invest in dropouts are lying
“There's VCs out there. They're like, yeah, we invest in dropouts. They don't actually invest in dropouts. They're all lying.”
Lieberman: 100% remote companies cannot match in-person retention and connection
“I'm going to go with thumbs down. I just think it's impossible to build the connection that is necessary to have people have enough affinity for a company to stay there for a long time. So I think retention becomes really difficult beyond other things like com…”
Lieberman: Unlimited PTO is a farce employees avoid due to pressure
“I think it's an absolute farce, and I don't think I don't think people actually use it, because I feel the, they think they feel the pressure not to use it.”
Amoruso: HR is where complaints die and payroll needs no specialist
“I think HR is where complaints, I think HR is where complaints go to die. I think anybody can administer benefits and payroll. I think learning and development is important, and I think all of the benefits that we're talking about can be run by someone much mo…”