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
Sahil Lavingia: Gumroad operates purely asynchronously without any meetings or audio calls
“Basically it's a GitHub repository that, you know, sort of is the source code for a website and a bunch of 10 99 contractors, freelancers work on it. And they do it just like they would work on an open source rails or something like that project where they're …”
Gumroad contractors convert up to 80% of earnings into dividend-paying equity
“People can earn equity in the business as well. So they can choose to take their hourly rate and convert up to 80% of their cash into equity. And then that equity entitles them to dividends, cash flow in the business.”
Fried: 37signals does not offer equity compensation to its employees
“We don't offer equity to employees.”
Fried: Ambition should mean sustaining a business, not destroying competition
“The ambition typically, or ambition is typically a word used to talk about, like, amassing, and collecting, and growing. You know, it can also mean, in my opinion, like, it should mean existing, sustaining. I'm ambitious at that level, but I don't need to go d…”
Bezos: PowerPoint is a sales tool unsuited for internal truth-seeking
“PowerPoint is really designed to persuade. It's kind of a sales tool. And internally, the last thing you want to do is sell. You want to, you're again, you're truth seeking. You're trying to find truth. And the other problem with PowerPoint is it's easy for th…”
Nagpal: Startups should give first employees 2x to 4x more equity
“Fundamentally, I do believe early startup employees, like the first few people are undercompensated in terms of what are like norms of how much to give early employees. Like historically, a lot of people, you know, would give First employee, one percent, and s…”
Lieberman: Companies will pay top creators as much as executives
“Individual content creators should be the highest paid people in a content org. I believe even though we are in an age of content abundance, the percentage of content that is truly exceptional is not increasing at the same rate. It is really hard to create tru…”
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…”
Slack is a synchronous communication tool masquerading as asynchronous
“Slack is a, it's a synchronous tool that masquerades as an async tool. And so, you end up getting into these multi-hour conversations with your thumbs, where you're, like, waiting for five minutes for them to get back to you, and you're just staring at your ph…”
Levels delegates PM admin and retrospective drafts to Philippine executive assistants
“We've been working with our EAs in the Philippines to do a lot of that admin work, and so they, we've we taught them how to do the daily check-ins, how to do, they even write the first draft of most of our retros now, because they can see all the daily updates…”
Siroker: Rewind raised Series A at $350M valuation with $700K ARR
“We raised it a three hundred fifty million dollar valuation with 700 K and ARR.”
Adcock: Risk-Averse Boards Directly Conflict With Early-Stage Startup Needs
“Generally the board is a very They're frightened of risk. They're frightened of getting sued. They're frightened of told the wrong thing. Like, a lot of times doing nothing is easier than doing something that might be very aggressive, that'd be hard, and a lot…”
Adcock: A Board Coup Will Never Happen to Altman or Me Again
“Like this will never happen to Sam ever again. This problem that we're talking about here will never happen to me going forward again.”
Nagpal: Founders should always take secondary liquidity if employees get equal access
“I think you can always, always, always take a secondary if someone offers it to you with the caveat that you make the exact same offer to the rest of your team. I think that's a really important rule, but otherwise, I know a lot of investors are like, oh, you …”
Siroker: Rewind's 20-person team ships faster than Optimizely's 400
“We're a team of 20 at Rewind, and we're more productive. We ship faster than we ever did when I had a team of 400 at my last company.”
Solopreneurs Require Enterprise-Level Onboarding But Churn Quickly From Growth Assistant
“A lot of the stuff that came from Twitter were people who were one to five person companies, You know, solopreneurs, which I don't have anything against solopreneurs, but they would tend to bring someone on. They don't have the time to actually manage them. An…”
Lieberman: 99% of creator businesses will fail without product focus
“I also think that 99% of creator businesses will fail, not because I'm bearish on the creator economy or creators. I'm actually hyper bullish on them, but I just think a lot of creators are going to launch businesses as a short term cash grab. They're not goin…”
Timmer: Equity rally driven by P/E expansion is ending
“If that earnings pivot comes and that earnings recovery happens, then the market can continue to advance on the basis of rising earnings, but the phase where it rises purely on the P.E. Going up, that, I think, is, is now ending, and I think, you know, in the …”
Billions of humanoid robots will be manufactured to solve labor shortages
“We think there's an opportunity to manufacture millions and ultimately billions of robotics to help with the world, and we think that's going to have, like, very substantial impact on the economy.”
Special-purpose robots will never reach high volumes or scale AI
“And then the problem there is you're building one product for one application. That application will never be done. A product will never be manufactured in high volumes, which is hard for cost. And you're never really going to build an AI data engine on one pr…”
Figure aims to ship one million humanoid robots within 10 years
“I hope within the next, you know, 10 years, we can ship at least a million robots into the world.”
Airbnb Only Takes on Projects Brian Chesky Can Personally Focus On
“Brian now operates in an extremely hands-on way, where he is involved in every single project in the company, and the company only does as much as Brian can personally focus on.”
Airbnb Boasts Higher Free Cash Flow Margins Than Apple or Google
“I didn't have an exact reference point for is that a lot or a little, but he basically shared that on a percentage basis, Airbnb is more efficient than Apple or Google when it comes to how much cash they actually generate for how much revenue they do as a busi…”
Lieberman: ChatGPT plugins will be worth multiples of Shopify
“Shopify is a sixty billion dollar company right now. I think OpenAI is thirty billion. You would have to think that the plugins to ChatGPT, which are gaining some popularity now as they're opening it up, is going to be multiples of that.”
Pujji: OpenAI will crush thin horizontal wrapper startups
“I think one of the challenges people to be careful of when building on top of open AI is like, if your solution is too horizontal, they're eventually going to eat your lunch.”
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.”
Mochari: Company-Operating Software Will Surpass Salesforce's $200B Valuation
“And of course, if that works, that should clearly be a hundred billion dollar company. You know, if Salesforce is a two hundred billion dollar company and it runs the sales team, An entity that runs the entire company should be worth more.”
Mochari: I've Never Lost An Outcome Bet Against Fear-Driven Founders
“And then I've made those bets hundreds of times. I have yet to lose and it's nothing magical. It's just that Again, their brain isn't working as well. So now they realize, oh, when I'm in fear, my prediction skills aren't as good.”
Mochari: Erasing Founder Fear Before Building Joy Causes Complete Demotivation
“The warning I give to people is before you do that, let's actually start building in actual joy into your day to day, because I have had the experience of CEOs that I coach effectively turning off their fear. And then going, yeah, I don't want to run this comp…”
Pujji: Most nine-figure e-commerce tech businesses do not rely on Shopify
“The biggest thing that, you know, industry or market wise was, dude, there's a bunch of nine figure e-com tech businesses. None of which, like with the exception of Klaviyo and maybe Attentive have anything to do with Shopify.”
Ankur Jain: Airlines and hotels make their money from loyalty programs, not core operations
“Airlines and hotels, I know you did a show on this, make all their money on the loyalty program and their credit card programs, not on being an airline and hotel... Delta, United, and American only exist because they make money on loyalty programs.”
Jain: Major airline market caps are lower than standalone loyalty programs
“When you combine the card business and the loyalty business with their airline business is worth less because the airline business loses so much money that the overall company Is worth less than the actual loyalty program in bank business.”
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.”
Medeiros: E-commerce brands with under 70% gross margins might die
“I think in general though, for e-commerce now, you have to have really fat margins to exist. And to survive. Like anybody with under 70% is gonna, they might die.”
Medeiros: Viral bullet-slice Short drove record views but record low conversions
“That video was also kind of a negative video, and that always shocks people, because what ended up happening is we got record views that month, sure, for that year, but also we got record low conversions, because that video was too low intent. It's like severe…”
Medeiros: Mini Katana will reach one billion monthly views in 2023
“What we're doing is we're going to get to a billion views a month this year, but we're optimizing that to be converting track, like converting views.”
Pujji: Creative is the new targeting in modern Facebook ads
“The new Facebook, you know, at paradigm is targeting like creative is the new targeting. So for anyone listening, running Facebook campaigns, you don't need to target anymore. It's broad. You let Facebook's algorithm figure it out.”
Swanson: Thumbtack Generated 25% of Craigslist's Service Postings Before Being Banned
“And this scaled up to a point where it was like a quarter of all Craigslist service volume, all these auto posts from Thumbtack pros. And then, you know, not surprisingly, we got a cease and desist that told us we should stop this and we'd been banned from Cra…”
Swanson: Active founders have the best deal flow and feed VCs
“Active founders have the best deal flow. That's actually where VCs get most of their deal flow and they have the most fresh and relevant operating experience.”
Pujji: Vertical media will become the dominant internet format in 2023
“I think I predict if we're right about Kahani that sometime this year, it's going to become a must have thing that your e-com site has tons of vertical media integrated into it to have the right rich experience that a user demands. But I think it's going to ha…”
Lieberman: Creator economy venture funding will dry up in 2023
“Creator economy, economy funding is going to dry up this year.”
Lieberman: Very few creator economy businesses have venture scale upside
“There are lots of businesses to build in the creator economy. Still, there are not a lot of businesses that are what I would call venture scale creator Economy businesses right now.”
Lieberman: Musk will step down as Twitter CEO by end of 2023
“Elon will no longer be the CEO of Twitter by the end of 20, 23, but Twitter as a platform will be thriving.”
Rief: Outgrown executives cause worse organizational bloat than outright bad hires
“There's two types of mishiring, and I think people usually think about the first that I'll give you, but it's the second that really kills you. The first is you just mess up. You hire a senior exec, you know within four to six months of the wrong person hopefu…”
Amoruso will no longer build identity-based consumer brands
“Honestly, I don't want to play into people's identities anymore. I've played enough in that realm. I just want to be really good at things and build things that people love that aren't necessarily like I'm a blank because. That can get outdated.”
Lieberman: Twitter will not 5x revenue to $26.4B by 2028
“I just think that it is going to take more than Call it, let's call it five years to five X revenue, given they haven't even really proven that they can scale one revenue stream, let alone what I believe will need to be multiple to get it to twenty six billion…”
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…”