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
Lieberman: Founding a venture-backed unicorn is not the likeliest path to wealth
“By the way, being an owner does not mean you need to be a venture-backed unicorn founder. Actually, if you were to ask me, what is the likeliest path to be rich? I wouldn't advocate for that path.”
Lieberman: Great Businesses Require Excelling in Sales or Software
“I believe you either need to be great at sales or great at building software if you want to build a great business today.”
Lieberman: Reading founder biographies is only useful after gaining operating experience
“I generally agree with this, but I would say studying the beliefs and behaviors of business greats through biographies, autobiographies, like the writings of proven Entrepreneurs and founders is a worthy activity, but only after you step into the arena yoursel…”
Performance Marketing Fails to Create Accumulating Advantages
“Performance marketing, though, doesn't create very good accumulating advantages, because it's not an investment.”
Lieberman: Negotiating culture to appease employees makes everyone miserable
“The problem with finding a negotiation between how you want to run a company, the people you want, Is that's a good way to make everyone miserable? Because what everyone really wants is clarity. What everyone really wants is to be able to row in the same direc…”
Lieberman: Being in the details is fundamentally distinct from micromanagement
“And I think there's a difference between micromanagement, which is like telling people exactly what to do and being in the details. Being the details is what every responsible company's board does to the CEO. It doesn't mean the board is telling them what to d…”
Chesky: Design and engineering should report directly to founders, not PMs
“I would make sure that you have engineering and design ideally report To the founder, product-led person. I would not have design under product unless you have an extremely good reason the product person kind of is a designer.”
Lieberman: Early-stage founders should only listen to their top 10% customers
“With finding customers, you're going to acquire customers in the early days of your business, and actually, one of your hardest but most important jobs is say you get your first a hundred customers, maybe only 10 of those first a hundred are going to be truly …”
Lieberman: Superfan referrals drove Morning Brew to 4.5 million subscribers
“We have four and a half million subscribers, but if you were to ask me what has been the number one growth driver for Morning Brew, I wouldn't say it's our paid marketing that we did on Facebook. I wouldn't say that it's cross promotions with other newsletters…”
Lieberman: Independent creators are shifting back to corporate partnerships and help
“I think we're seeing this big move back from a lot of people going independent to partnering in some way either with big companies or bringing on operational help, and I think it makes total sense.”
Lieberman: During downturns, only valuations drop while users and usage grow
“Second, the only thing that typically goes down during downturns are valuations. Typically, users, usage, and dollars spent actually go up.”
Lieberman: Founders raising capital should optimize for success over dilution
“Worry less about the economic climate, and if you have to raise capital, don't be dilution sensitive. Get the capital you need, and be success sensitive.”
Lieberman: Even the Wrong Focus Beats Being Unfocused for Startups
“Even the wrong focus is better than being unfocused.”
Annual growth of 60% to 80% is insufficient for Series B funding
“And that was when I learned, like, oh, like, growing 60, 80% a year, you know, series B is not, like, that was not good enough.”
Billion-dollar startup valuations are phantom wealth that drive founder unhappiness
“What is a billion dollar company? Right? Like, it means like the last share you sold for like, 11 dollars and you have like a hundred million of those shares out there... And you can like, maybe if you're lucky, get a loan on it or something. Right. But at the…”
Gumroad's charter permits 60% net income dividends without investor approval
“We updated the charter so that basically I could run a dividend at this sort of 60% annual net income rate without their permission.”
Founders should respect venture capitalists they raise money from rather than complain
“Like I always thought it's weird. Like founders are like, oh, like raising money for VCs. Like I hate VCs. It's like, if you're raising money, like you should respect them. Like they're smart, you know, like if you don't like find better ones, like they're goo…”
Lieberman: The 'default alive' framework is crucial before product-market fit
“I actually think that this concept of default alive or dead is as valuable in kind of the pre product market fit phases of your business before you know that there's a, they're there as it is in the post product market fit phases.”
Lieberman: Almost all tech startups overhired and spent wastefully during COVID
“During COVID, roughly all tech startups lost their way on spending. Capital was flowing freely, and teams often rapidly and dramatically overhired, boosted expenses on things non-crucial for the business, and spent wastefully.”
Lieberman: 99.9% of founders should not aspire to blitzscaling
“This is the definition of blitzscaling scaling popularized by Reid Hoffman, and it is not at all what 99.9% of founders should expect or aspire to have from their business.”
Lieberman: Timing matters more than business quality for startups
“A good business launched at the right time will always beat out a great business that has launched at the wrong time.”
Lieberman: Word of mouth is the only sustainable high-growth acquisition engine
“The only way to build a high growth, sustainable business is for word of mouth to be your greatest engine for new customers.”
Lieberman: Founders should scare away wrong candidates rather than soften culture expectations
“A huge failure of entrepreneurs in general, especially in the early days of their business, is to set unrealistic expectations of what the work or the culture is like because they are afraid of scaring away employees. Bezos takes the complete opposite approach…”
Lieberman: Market opportunity matters more than team or product
“This is just a reminder that there's good reason to believe that market is more important than people or even product when thinking about the potential for success of a business.”
Vohra: Marc Andreessen's PMF definition is a lagging indicator
“I think Marc's definition of And perhaps definition is the wrong word. It's sort of an observational awareness. You know it when you have it is great, but it is a lagging indicator.”
Vohra: A 40% 'very disappointed' user survey response signals product-market fit
“After benchmarking hundreds of startups, Sean found the companies that struggle to grow always get less than 40% very disappointed, and the companies that grow most easily almost always get more than 40%.”
Vohra: The Sean Ellis metric predicts success far better than NPS
“It predicts success way better than net promoter score, and it's not only the best way to measure products market fit, like I said, we used it to develop our very own products market fit engine.”
Vohra: Superhuman's PMF engine automatically generates a score-boosting roadmap
“And with that engine, we now can systematically increase products market fit, and it even automatically generates our roadmap for us, and that roadmap is guaranteed to make the metric go up.”
Vohra: Never build features based on feedback from unengaged users
“Now first, and as painful as it is, we have to ignore the not disappointed segment. This might be difficult because they are very loud, but they are so far from loving the products that they are essentially a lost cause. And it's also very important because th…”
Nagpal: Founders can rent home to business 14 days tax-free
“Another crazy one is you can actually rent your house to your business for up to 14 days a year and pay no taxes on the income. It has to be legit. It has to be for like a meeting, an offsite or something, but literally, you know, income from one hand into the…”
Fried: Midwest location helped 37signals reject VC money and peer pressure
“It was easier for us to reject VC money because we didn't live in that world. We lived in the Midwest and that's not how people do things over there, you know? And we also didn't go to the parties and didn't go to the events and didn't like get influenced by t…”
Fried: Approaching projects with zero domain knowledge yields more original work
“One of the reasons why I don't go looking at other people's work is because once I have their work in my head, it's hard to have original ideas. I actually prefer the newbie approach. Like, I don't know what the hell I'm doing. I think people who go into somet…”
Fried: Taking Cash Out of a Business Reduces Compounding Downside Risk
“Taking cash out of a business, I think is a really healthy thing. In our industry, it seems like people are always pouring money back into the business. You know, shit can hit the fan at any time, and a lot of businesses that were worth something aren't worth …”
Fried: 37signals does not run public betas or broad pre-launch testing
“So we don't do public betas. We don't pull people in, you know, we launch something. Sometimes we have a few people look at it first right before we launch to make sure we didn't miss anything really material. But like we finished the thing and launched the th…”
Lavingia: Gumroad will distribute $6M in dividends from 2023 net income
“20, 23, we'll do 60% of our net income. So we'll do about eight or so million in net income, and then we'll dividend out about six or so million.”
Lavingia: Gumroad contributors self-select quarterly tasks without rigid assignments
“And the way we manage flexibility and freedom at all costs is I just say, hey, this is what I think we should get done this quarter. This is what I think feels reasonable to me. And then we kind of backfill, you know, people say, okay, I'm going to work on tha…”
Lavingia: Hourly pay yields higher workforce utilization than salaries
“And what you get out of hourly, just like Uber, just like Airbnb, just like instances on AWS, you get efficiency. You get much better utilization of these assets.”
Lavingia: AI is eroding the split between designers and software engineers
“All this AI stuff will, like, the whole designer-engineer split seems weird to me too, to be honest, because, like, the designer is really having to, like, write code now and then the engineer, like, it's, like, actually really, like, everyone is a designer.”
Eisenberg: Founders should use software for ideation instead of casual brainstorming
“When they come up with business ideas, they often drink a bunch of wine, and they're like, this would be a cool business idea, or have a lot of coffee, and this would be a cool business idea, when they should be using software to come up with business ideas.”
Fried: Startups cannot rely on volume to compensate for giving products away
“Don't give things away and think that volume is going to help you. Like, you know, the pizza shop in the corner is not giving away pizzas for free.”
Fried: Bootstrapping is superior to venture capital for most software businesses
“Software businesses that have, you know, basically humans and Some tech, which is cheap, either in the cloud or, you know, people just need a few laptops here and there. And there's not much that you need to get going and building a software business or tech b…”
Fried: Venture capital forces low-overhead tech startups into a single exit path
“I think a lot of tech companies act as if they are companies with huge capital expenditures, and they're not, and they put themselves in a hole. Because now they're beholden to someone else on someone else's time frame. They have to become a certain kind of co…”
Fried: B2B software companies do not need Uber-style venture capital aggression
“So yeah,
that's an exception, but like your B to B accounting software, you know, whatever, like, no, not that that can't be a great business.
It can be, but it doesn't need the same kind of approach as Airbnb or Uber.”
Lieberman: Raising venture capital does not equate to entrepreneurial ambition
“Raising venture does not equate to ambition, and I think that's just like a false story.”
Fried: Predicting a software company's three-year trajectory offers no real advantage
“I think businesses really, truly just unfold. And I'm here for that. I'm not here to predict where we're going to be in three years. I don't know, don't care, frankly. There's no real advantage to me predicting that.”
Bezos identifies primarily as an inventor seeking atypical solutions
“I'm really an inventor, and I look at things, and I can come up with Atypical solutions, and, you know, and then I can create a hundred such atypical solutions for something. 99 of them may not survive, you know, scrutiny, but one of those 100 is like maybe th…”
Bezos: Meeting participants should speak in ascending order of seniority
“If you're the most senior person in the room, go last. Let everybody else go first. In fact, ideally, let's try to have the most junior person go first, and the second, try to go in order of seniority.”
Bezos: Amazon and Blue Origin meetings start with 30-minute silent memo reading
“Meetings at Amazon and Blue Origin are unusual. When we get new, when new people come in, like a new executive joins, they're a little taken aback sometimes, because a typical meeting, We'll start with a six-page narratively structured memo, and we do study ha…”