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 319 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
Bezos: Early Amazon investors were told they had a 30% chance of break-even
“Told all of our early investors that I thought there was a 30% chance of success, by which I'd just been getting your money back, not, like, Not what actually happened.”
Nagpal will step down if running Carry ceases to be gratifying
“And if at any point I find that, you know, being the CEO isn't as gratifying as it is right now, I'll be the first to step away.”
Lieberman: Most confident angel investments come from backing former employees
“I would say I'm a highly mediocre angel investor, but the check I feel most confident in is the Morning Brew employee who I watched for five years and literally no due diligence went into my conversation with him. I just gave him a check.”
Nagpal says he spends his day answering Carry customer support tickets
“If you want to reach an email right now, you would struggle unless you emailed support at carry money.com. I see that. I see that all day and I'm replying to those tickets all the time, right? That is the, I use that email inbox more than anything.”
Nagpal: Teachable deferred major legal fees until its M&A transaction
“Honestly, we didn't pay them very much through most of the company building journey, but they received a fair amount at the end when they helped us through the M&A transaction, right?”
Levels engineers typically average just three meetings per week
“If you were to look at the calendars of a lot of our engineers, it is Very common for engineers to have something like three meetings per week.”
Levels runs two weeks of synchronous standups before transitioning to asynchronous
“We found for a lot of our projects, people might do two weeks of daily standups that are synchronous live Answer questions, get more context, higher velocity, and then they eventually transition into async standups, where at the end of the day, they just say, …”
Levels enforces a strict company-wide rule banning acronyms
“We also have a no acronym rule because I can't remember them for the life of me.”
Nagpal: Gifting shares to family members creates multiple $10M tax exemption limits
“So what I've done this time around is given shares to my brother, my mom, my dad. So if the company were to ever have a successful outcome, each of them would have their own ten million dollar limit.”
Nagpal used family and charitable remainder trusts to multiply QSBS limits
“I set up two trusts. I set up a trust for the benefit of my future children and family, and I made a gift of my shares to the trust, and as a result, that trust got its own ten million dollar limit, and then I set up another trust, which is called a charitable…”
Nagpal: Distributed co-founder equity pool across an entire founding team
“Instead of having one equal co-founder, I took the same amount of equity and I distributed it to a founding team.”
Sam Corcos tracks time spent with his wife on his calendar
“I keep track of how much time I spend with my wife, and some people find it weird that I have that in my calendar, but it is a real priority for me to know that I'm spending an appropriate amount of time”
Denk: Beehiiv co-founders took $100k-$125k salaries after $2.6M seed raise
“I think my initial salary is like, 101 25, I think, when we raised our seed round. And then for transparency, we raised 2.6 million. So me and my two co-founders all had the same salary of between 101 25.”
Denk: Beehiiv runs twice-weekly all-hands where all 45 employees speak
“We have two all hands a week. And we also, which is, it's getting to the breaking point, but everyone talks at the audience. We haven't broken it up. We're only the department leads. So for example, on Mondays we do, what's your top priority of the week? And t…”
Growth Assistant Hits $10M Run-Rate With 350 Philippines Employees
“The business is roughly ten million dollars in, in run rate kind of revenue. And we have over 350 people in the Philippines already and over a hundred customers.”
Lieberman validated StoryArb by advertising ghostwriters on Twitter before recruiting any
“I posted on Twitter saying, if you're an executive that wants to build their brand on Twitter or LinkedIn, but doesn't have the time or the skill set, let me know because I know a great executive ghostwriter. And by the way, I didn't know a great executive gho…”
Lieberman admits 60% of his motivation for Morning Brew was money and status
“I would say 70% of my motivation or not 70, 60% of my motivation for morning brew was financially driven. Financially or status driven.”
Lieberman quit angel investing because he prefers hands-on advising over writing checks
“After spending a year on angel investing, I ended up deciding I hated angel investing because my desire to partner with founders is not to partner from a monetary perspective. It's to partner from like Yeah, exactly. It's to partner from a knowledge and suppor…”
Lieberman: StoryArb launched and acquired paying clients without a website
“StoryArb, my agency, we don't have a website for it yet. We literally do not have a website. And my view is like, it just hasn't been mission critical because we've had enough demand from people where I can record a video of myself explaining this business. I …”
Lieberman: Agency vision includes co-founding spin-off companies using clients' audiences
“I want to build up the audiences for the next Nick Huber. And then I want to launch businesses off the back of their audiences. And I want to do it by testing ideas for businesses with their audience before actually launching them. So we mitigate the risk of t…”
Vettery's acquisition netted Brett Adcock over $20 million after tax
“I think roughly about, I think it's about a little over twenty million after tax, so like thirty million or so like that.”
All Figure leaders write code or design CAD
“Everybody here codes or cats are my directors like me, like our CTA. Everybody here is in the weeds working on the business, helping to build a better product. And so we're not sitting here doing like weekly reviews, like doing like quarterly, like three sixti…”
Lieberman expects his content agency to command 50% margins on $10k retainers
“On the other hand, I have this content agency where I have a high degree of confidence that I can charge clients six to 10,000 dollars per month and make a 50% margin on that, and I'm like, that feels really nice.”
Pujji continued running Ampush for years solely to satisfy external expectations
“And I know for many, many years at ampush, that was like the only reason I was continuing to run the company. And it took me multiple years to like unwind that from myself.”
Gatina read his co-founder a hypothetical firing script before hiring him
“I walked Matt through when we first linked up, because Matt left as the CEO of his own company that was super successful. Shout out to Homestack. Matt left his company to work with me, and I walked him through not only, hey, I'm the CEO of this company, and I'…”
Lieberman generated 50 qualified agency leads from a single validation tweet
“I basically was like, if you're a founder who's doing more than ten million dollars in revenue, you understand the power of building audience, and you're willing to spend five to 10,000 dollars a month to build up your audience so that you create business oppo…”
Jain: Bilt raised exclusively from landlords, banks, and Mastercard
“The reason we raised money was to create aligned long-term incentives with all of our partners. And so all of the money we raised was from real estate owners, the banks that we work with, Wells Fargo, Mastercar, the payment networks, And that was it.”
Lieberman plans to hire expats, students, and underpaid copywriters for ghostwriting
“The people I'm going to be looking for are offshore English speakers. So people who are kind of expats in other countries where the cost of labor is lower. The second, and I think this is actually where the biggest opportunity is, is copywriters and creatives.…”
Lieberman proposes charging $5,000 to $10,000 monthly for executive ghostwriting
“My view would be, I would charge clients anywhere between 5000 to 10,000 dollars a month or 60,000 to a 120,000 dollars a year.”
Lieberman says excessive scrappiness hindered his growth as Morning Brew CEO
“I do think that scrappiness and busyness got in the way of me being an exceptional CEO, which I think I have the capability of doing. I think for far too long at Morning Brew, I was in the weeds selling advertisements versus growing as the CEO of the business”
Pujji left $1M in SVB and was unable to wire it out
“Yeah, so, you know, we left a million bucks there. We tried to wire it today after that announcement, and it's not getting wired, obviously.”
Pujji: Refuses to use out-of-office email responders on vacation
“I don't put an out-of-office responder on. I hate out-of-office responders.”
Medeiros: Mini Katana surpassed $10M revenue, targeting $15M in 2023
“And then for revenue, our target for this year is 15. Like we're barely above 10, just so everyone out there knows we're not huge.”
Ampush sold minority stake to Red Ventures with nine-figure buyout option
“We ended up selling a minority stake to this really cool company called red venture. Add punctuation. And we actually gave them an option to buy the rest of the business for, you guessed it, nine figures.”
Pujji: Ampush never provided pricing guidance to prospective M&A buyers
“We never gave pricing guidance because why would you do it? I mean, you know, if someone comes in, like, why would you signal?”
Pujji: Children will not receive unearned money or inheritances without work
“I'm not, there's not going to be a lot of free money given between me and them. And I don't just mean when they, you know, when I die, which is also probably not going to happen, but you know, like they'll, if they get allowances, they'll do chores for them. I…”
Peter Thiel and Founders Fund Passed on Investing in Thumbtack
“We tried to get Peter Thiel and Founders Fund to invest and they passed.”
Swanson's Powerset fund gives active founders capital to angel invest
“Power set is Founders backing founders venture fund. So we give capital and coaching to active founders, not to invest in their company, but so that they can invest in other startups.”
Lieberman: Morning Brew Did Not Hire Any Trained Journalists Early On
“In the early days I would say none of our hires were journalists, and we've hired a more, ah, let's call it like traditional, ah, journalist journalistically trained writers over time, as we've gotten a sense of, kind of, what we're looking for, but in the ear…”
Amoruso: I still write all marketing copy to preserve my brand voice
“I still write pretty much all the copy because I cannot figure out how to delegate my voice”
Lieberman: Passion for Morning Brew followed user momentum, not early excitement
“I was not wildly passionate about writing a newsletter in the early days, but I got passionate because it felt like there was momentum, and I got passionate because people felt like they were getting value, and that's what ultimately gave me kind of, you know,…”
Sanchez: First seller-financed acquisition yielded five-figure payout in month one
“So I started getting a check that was, you know, a five figure check the first month that I closed the deal from taking over this business and running it.”
Lieberman: Reallocating all angel investing capital to personal side projects
“I've learned in the last year that I hate angel investing. So actually my strategy has changed to, I'm just going to take all the money that I had your mark to put in angel investing. And I'm just going to use it to bet on side projects that I'm building mysel…”
Amoruso: Owned 80% of Nasty Gal When Raising $50M from Index Ventures
“When I took. Fifty million from index ventures and the comp, my company was profitable and didn't really need it. That was a really big deal. And that's, I owned 80% of that and it's rare, but it's possible.”
Lieberman: Avoiding VC and raising $750K was Morning Brew's best decision
“Not raising VC money and raising 750 K from family and friends. I think it was one of the best decisions we made in the business.”
Lieberman: Morning Brew made early employees bring their own laptops
“Oh, yeah, we didn't give computers in the early days. We made people bring their personal computers into the office like we thought that was like normal for an early stage business.”
Pujji: Would happily pay thousands monthly for Twitter business growth tools
“I would happily pay thousands a month if, especially if it came with more tools and other ways to grow the businesses that I've used.”
Bier: Gas prevents anonymous bullying with pre-written, uplifting friend polls
“So the way that we've designed Gas Gas is similar to a lot of anonymous apps that exist in the App Store today, but many of those have been plagued by bullying, and we use a novel mechanic where you answer polls about your friends that we write, and we make al…”