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 675 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: 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.”
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…”
Lavingia: Gumroad generates $20M revenue and $8M-$9M profit with no full-time employees
“Twenty million in revenue. We have 35 people working like this. We do, you know, eight or nine million in net income. And yet still we have no full-time employees. Like I'm not interested in hiring a single full-time employee.”
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…”
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.”
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…”
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 …”
Lieberman: Software Recurring Revenue Quality Will Decline
“And so I think what was typically considered to be a more quality recurring revenue stream in software products is going to be less true than it's ever been.”
Lieberman: AI consultancy Tenex can reach $100M in annual agency revenue
“I think Tenex just as a, an agency business can be a hundred million dollar a year business because I view the opportunity for AI transformation to basically be the GDP of the United States.”
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.”
Lieberman: Elizabeth Holmes went to prison for defrauding investors, not patients
“Yes, claims about health care solutions warrant scrutiny beyond whether or not rich investors get their money back, but Holmes wasn't convicted for defrauding patients. She's going to prison because she ripped off George Shultz, not because her bogus blood tes…”
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…”
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: 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.”
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.”
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.”
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.”
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: 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.”
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…”
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: 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.”
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…”
Scudamore: Fired entire 11-person team at 1-800-GOT-JUNK over culture
“It was the day I fired my entire team. Now, literally, I didn't preserve one. There were 11 people in the company. I always say that one bad apple spoils the whole bunch, and I think I had nine out of 11 that were bad apples. Now, not bad human beings, but jus…”
Sanchez: Reese Witherspoon's net worth is an order of magnitude higher than Brad Pitt's
“Reese Witherspoon is worth more than Brad Pitt at an order of magnitude.”
Lieberman: AI Will Enable Testing New Businesses From a 20-Minute Quiz
“I ultimately think within entrepreneurship generative AI is going to make entrepreneurship significantly faster, meaning that the speed to be able to start and test a business is gonna go down, like, by multiples. So I think the cost of entrepreneurship came d…”
Amoruso: Index Ventures built Nasty Gal's pitch deck for $50M investment
“When Index invested fifty million dollars, they literally made a deck. I had never made a presentation, and they were like, we want to invest so much in this company. They propped me up in the boardroom in front of all their partners and just said, like, speak…”
Lieberman: Next Procter & Gamble will be a creator-led brand holding company
“So the whole thesis here is that I believe the next Procter & Gamble is going to be a holding company of creator first or creator led brands.”
Mailchimp Founders Split $11.7B in Intuit Deal While Employees Received $500M
“Ben Chestnut and Dan Curzius each owned 50% of Mailchimp. In 2008, Mark Armstrong, the other co-founder, was bought out of the business. Three hundred million dollars was given to employees as bonuses for the deal, and two hundred million dollars worth of rest…”
Lieberman: AI Will Give Agencies Software-Like Margins and Operating Leverage
“AI is going to have a massive impact on the margins of agency businesses long term. As this technology, being AI, lowers the cost of intelligence, agentic workflows that support smaller agency teams will start giving these businesses the type of leverage that …”
Lieberman: AI Will Create a Massive Oversupply of Niche Software
“Like the oversupply of content on the internet, you will have an oversupply of software that is, one, more specific and niche than it's ever been, So there's going to be this whole long tail of software products that are created for the first time ever. Some, …”
Lieberman: Agencies will be ground zero for building new AI software
“I believe agencies are going to be ground zero for new AI tools and workflows to be built, and if agency owners are ambitious, long-term minded, and commercial enough, they can use the cash flows of their businesses to incubate non-agency products.”
Hustle Fund partners advocate for seedstrapping software startups
“You have Eric Bond and Elizabeth Yin from Hustle Fund who are bullish on seed strapping. Eric said founders raise a little at the beginning, they get started, and then bootstrap the rest of the way to get big results. That was followed by Elizabeth saying seed…”
Future white-collar value narrows to trust, taste, attention, and coordination
“Second, I also think the skills that make human white collar workers valuable will narrow to a few key traits that are uniquely human. The first is trust building through demonstrated empathy and service. The second is taste by having a deep intuition of what …”