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
Lieberman: The urge for originality prevents customer-centric business building
“Over time, I have learned that originality is driven by my ego because of some story I have that being original is cool and being cool make people like me. But in an effort to be new, first, or inventive, I prevent myself from building things that put customer…”
Stepping down as Morning Brew CEO triggered near-depression for Alex Lieberman
“After stepping out of the CEO role for Morning Brew, I felt like shit. I feel lucky that I've never experienced depression in my life. But the six to 12 months post leaving my role were the closest that I have felt to being depressed.”
Alex Lieberman admits his historical bias toward hiring extroverted, articulate employees
“I've always biased to hiring extroverted, well-spoken employees because they feel most like me.”
Sahil Lavingia retained approximately 57% equity ownership in Gumroad
“I still own 57 or so percent of the company.”
Lieberman: StoryArb funded its first employee with a $7,000 upfront payment
“For StoryR, we never raised a dollar. We used our first client who paid us 7000 dollars up front to, we took the net income of that client to hire our first employee, and we just know that if we never get An investor dollar for story are, which we never plan t…”
HubSpot funded 8 50-yard line National Championship seats for a guerrilla stunt
“Eight of us are being sent to this game. We'll be sitting in some of the best seats in the house at the 50 yard line. We will be in these seats for free. We did not pay a dollar for these seats. The reason is HubSpot, a twenty seven billion dollar publicly tra…”
Lieberman angel invested for 12 months and hated the experience
“I angel invested for 12 months and absolutely hated it.”
Lieberman: Managing OCD made him a subpar Morning Brew CEO
“I think I was probably a subpar CEO because I had my full-time job managing my OCD, my part-time job being CEO of morning brew.”
Eisenberg: YouProbablyNeedAHaircut.com took four hours to build and quickly went viral
“So, from that, so I got my initial seed, and I went on squarespace.com, and I created a one-page website called youprobablyneedahaircut.com, and it was a way that connected barbers in Williamsburg Primarily with people who needed haircuts, because at this poin…”
Fried: 37signals ran its agency and Basecamp in parallel for a year
“And we ran them in parallel for about a year. And the idea wasn't that Basecamp was going to replace that. It just happened to do that. It happened to become so popular so quickly that we're like, you know, what do we rather do? We have limited time. We'd rath…”
Lieberman: Morning Brew was priced out of brew.com at $100,000
“We looked into that in the early days of brew and most definitely could not afford it. I don't know what it costs now, but it was like a 100,000 dollars at the time.”
Lieberman: Morning Brew Botched an Executive Hire Due to Contrast Bias
“After letting go of a senior leader at Morning Brew because they had done a great job but had reached their ceiling, we hired a new senior leader who we thought was an absolute veteran compared to the other employee. But what we learned after a while was the n…”
Adcock: Figure's Initial Board Gave Him Control of Three Seats
“When I set up the business, like here at figure, like I set up basically three seats. For myself. So two for common shareholders, which I'm a majority of the common. So the common get to vote on two seats. I'm the majority of that being the, you know, the foun…”
Adcock: Figure and Archer Used 10-to-1 Supermajority Founder Voting Stock
“What I've done at Figures here is I have a special class of stock, and I had this work at Archer that is super majority. So my stock is has a 10 for one vote versus the common and preferred. And that's sitting in the special share class of common stock.”
Lieberman: Morning Brew founders took $60k salaries after raising $750k
“After we raised our round we raised the 750 K, Austin and I took 60,000 dollar salaries.”
Lieberman: Morning Brew founders reached $350k salaries as revenue hit $25M
“Our revenue basically went from zero to 70 K to 750 to three million to 13 to 25, but headcount absolutely did not grow linearly. It grew less than linearly, and so, I think at a certain point, Austin and I got up to 350 K. That we were paying ourselves.”
Corcos: Levels is shifting product strategy and go-to-market within software
“Right now, most of our major priorities are ultimately within the software org on changing our go to market, shifting our core product strategy. And so a lot more of my time is going towards that.”
Corcos: Levels is probably six months away from active fundraising
“Fundraising is probably still six months away from that being a real push, so I don't need to prioritize that.”
Sam Corcos blocks off quarterly 'think weeks' disconnected from all communications
“I block off one week per quarter. I just directly stole this from Bill Gates to do a think week where I don't engage in email. I don't engage in comms. I just focus on thinking about strategy, and it often takes me two or three days to see the forest.”
Denk: Beehiiv's three co-founders spent first 12 months solely coding
“The zero to one is nothing but 12 months of building. So me and my two co-founders were heads down coding for the first 12 months to build the one and the MVP of the product.”
Denk: About a dozen full-time Beehiiv employees started on contract
“I'd say probably about a dozen of our hires now that are full time started on contract. Doing some sort of work for us.”
Denk: Six or seven of Beehiiv's first 10 hires were engineers
“And our first 10 hires, I think six or seven were engineers.”
Beehiiv reserves 20% of quarterly product roadmap for user feedback
“And so I'd say it's about eighty-twenty pre-built each quarter and 20% listening to feedback and building there.”
Growth Assistant Reached Its Scale Without Meaningful Paid Marketing Spend
“We've never done any paid marketing or any real meaningful paid marketing.”
Eighty percent of Kajabi's workforce operates remotely
“The situation we're in is like, we also have to look reality in the face and be like, 80% of our workforce is not here. So how do we build, what is reality and how do we build toward making that reality as productive as possible?”
Lieberman: StoryArb Generates Approximately $1M in Annualized Revenue
“Story are, we have, you know, about a million dollars in annualized revenue, which is like 83,000 dollars a month in monthly revenue.”
Lieberman defines daily success solely by completing two priority tasks
“Every day in the same journal that I'm marking when I go on social media and if I did my 6:30 in the morning workout, I am listing two things. Every day there are just two things that I must do that are the need to haves that are my only two priorities. If I g…”
Lieberman: StoryArb generated single-digit millions in inbound client interest
“There is, let's just call it single digit millions worth of interest in people who want to be StoryArb clients.”
Lieberman spent up to $50,000 validating his backyard game company, The Plunge
“Whereas take another business that, you know, I started, which was the plunge, which was my backyard game to be able to get to a point where Where I knew if there was appetite in the market, I had spent 37,000 dollars in the business. I probably had to spend 5…”
Contrarian Thinking generates 100M monthly views and millions of subscribers
“Today, I run a company called Contrarian Thinking, about a hundred million views a month, millions of subscribers.”
Codie Sanchez pays most of her executive team more than herself
“In fact, I'm probably one of the least well-paid people at my media company right now, where I pay most of the executive team, if not all of them, more than I make.”
Sam Parr set a $20M net worth goal before launching The Hustle
“So that's how I came up with that number, twenty million dollars, and so I said to myself, I want twenty million dollars by the age of 30, and that was my timeline, and that was my goal.”
Lieberman: Morning Brew raised $750K after running on $200 monthly costs
“We went and we raised 750 K in the early days of the business. We raised that money Actually, a year and a half after starting the company, because we were able to run our newsletter at basically, I think, 200 dollars of cost a month that, you know, that's one…”
Lieberman: Invested about $40,000 into backyard game startup 'The Plunge'
“I put about 40,000 dollars into the business, and our customers gave us data that we really had to think about.”
Lieberman shuts down backyard game startup The Plunge to cut losses
“And I spent the last few weeks thinking about it, and I made the decision to go with option D, which is to cut my losses and throw in the towel for the plunge.”
Lieberman has spent $37,000 developing backyard game startup The Plunge
“And I've already spent 37,000 dollars developing this game, and I've really loved it.”
Morning Brew Daily's brutal 4:12 AM morning production schedule revealed
“Here is just a quick summary of what has to happen to put the show out every day. And this was sent to me directly from Toby, one of our co-hosts. For 12 a.m., alarm goes off. For 30 a.m., in Uber. For 45, in office. Five 15 to five 30, the rest of the product…”
Morning Brew Daily operates as a low-risk talent incubator
“Another spoke is morning brew daily being a talent incubator where we can bring in guests or guest hosts and In order to test talent, low risk to us, and potentially leverage some of our best test guests or hosts to launch new shows under Morning Brew's umbrel…”
Lieberman: Ghostwriting clients pay $4,000 to $8,000 monthly for initial services
“These three clients are paying me between 4008 thousand dollars a month. I give an introductory price to the initial client for 4000 just because I didn't care about profit at all. I passed through the entire cost of the client to the ghostwriter.”
Lieberman: Agency target is 28 clients for $1 million in annual profit
“And my three priorities right now are a scalable, consistent quality content process, having a bench of ghostwriters that can support 28 clients or a million dollars a year in profit and finding a CEO to run this business.”
Figure employs 50 people and completed its full humanoid system
“We're, like, we're about a year in now. We're 50 people, and I think I just showed you before we started, but we're, our full humanoid system came together, like, last night.”
Everyone at Figure is an engineer except two longtime operators
“We basically have, like, two people, and then on the whole, everybody here is engineers except for two people. Those two people have been with me at Bettery. They're my first, like, my first hire at Bettery, and then the first hire is at Archer, and first, ver…”
Lieberman spent $36k developing The Plunge with zero revenue so far
“Like, I've spent 36,000 dollars on this game. My guess is to truly take it to market. If we run the, we're working with the Kickstarter agency, we run like their paid ad plan that they want to run with us. It's probably gonna be another 20 K. That's 56,000 dol…”
Lieberman Spent $37K Building a Backyard Game Before Validating the Market
“I've spent 37,000 dollars on a product that doesn't yet have a proven audience, and I don't know if this thing is even gonna sell.”
Lieberman Aims to Complete Only One Important Task Per Day
“I can only get one very important thing done in a day. That's the assumption I have to have, which means that I need to be ruthless about picking what is the one thing that I want to do in my day, and I need to assume that everything else needs to be delegated…”
Alex Lieberman aims for 4,000 one-dollar Kickstarter reservations for The Plunge
“Our goal is to raise 300,000 dollars on Kickstarter, which means we need 4000 people who have put down a dollar reservation by all measures relative to that.”
Jesse Pujji: Confident Scaling to $25M, Uncertain About $250M+
“I feel pretty confident I could scale a business to twenty five million dollars. You know, I've done it multiple times. I don't know if I could scale one to 250 or to 2.5 billion.”
Pujji: Customers requested Growth Assistant for years, unlike Kahani
“People were asking me for growth assistant, not in those words for years, years, like forever. And then it's like, okay, now it popped up and it jumped off and nobody has been asking me for Connie. Right. No one was like, yeah, I wish this was happening.”