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 292 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: 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.”
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: 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: 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: 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…”
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.”
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.”
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.”
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…”
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: 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.”
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.”
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.”
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 …”
Kagan: Only 3 to 4 out of 100+ podcast appearances moved the needle
“I would say I did a hundred plus podcast The reality, even though it was good to practice on all of them, only three, I would say three or four really moved the needle.”
Hampton generated $1M in the bank before launching a website or posting
“Hampton had a million dollars in the bank account before I even shared it online. We didn't even have a website.”
Wilkinson Spent 2-3x Flow's Monthly Revenue From Personal Funds
“I was consistently spending two to three times our monthly revenue and losing money, and not venture capital out of my personal bank account.”
Why No Successful Consumer Social Network Launched Since 2019
“There is a reason why basically no successful consumer social network has been created in the last five years, and the biggest social networks, Meta, Snapchat, etc., just continue to accrue value and power.”
Lieberman: Future Vision Pro generations could replace phones, computers, and TVs
“As technology continues to improve, I would not at all be surprised to see a future generation of this product that not only is mass market, but is delivering society a better new version of phones, computers, TVs, and gaming consoles in a single experience.”
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: Founders Regret Not Selling Sooner, Never Selling Too Soon
“What I can tell you anecdotally is that I have talked to a lot of founders who regret not selling sooner, and I have never talked to a founder that regrets selling too soon.”
Siroker: Rewind's public pitch deck got over 1,000 investment offers
“We got well over you know, we got millions of views over a thousand offers to invest, many from really great investors, and I spent the next week in meetings with folks.”
Siroker: Rewind received 20 funding offers at $1B valuation or higher
“We had 20 offers at a billion dollars or more but 20 out of a thousand is pretty small.”
Siroker: Early Google promoted engineers for technical sophistication over customer solutions
“When I was there early on, a lot of people valued. You got promoted by the sophistication of your technology, not by the problem it actually solves for a customer.”
The average Kajabi creator makes about $40,000 per year
“Like average creator makes about 40,000 dollars a year because we take that commerce part of it dead seriously and making sure that we're getting the right kind of people on the platform.”
Andrew Huberman podcast ads scaled Momentous Protein to $30 million annually
“They ended up having Andrew Huberman promote Momentous Protein on the podcast as an ad read, and for those of you that don't know Andrew Huberman, he has one of the largest podcasts in the world where he focuses on talking about Science and health and things w…”
Pujji: The Plunge could be a $10M business generating $2M annual profit
“Cause I think it, I still believe what I've said to you every time, which is, is this going to be a hundred million dollar business? I don't know, but do I think it could be a ten million dollar business that made one to two million dollars a year? A hundred p…”
Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff requires weekly meetings if leaders miss 20% growth
“Everybody submits a plan, and typically that plan has to grow a minimum of 20%, because that's just, like, Mark Benioff's thing. We grow 20% every year. And if you're hitting the plan, you meet with him once a quarter. And if you're missing the plan, you meet …”
Jain: Bilt has had profitable unit economics from day one
“We have unit economics that are profitable from day one, right? So we can make money and not need capital.”
Lieberman: Founders in a single group chat pulled $2B from SVB
“There was one group chat I'm in. There's a post exit founder group chat I'm in. Just in that group, there was like a tally taken of how much money was taken out by just those founders, and it was two billion dollars of deposits.”