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.
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Levels shares recordings of all 1-on-1s and board meetings company-wide
“All of our meetings, including our one-on-ones are recorded and shared by default to the whole company. So our board meetings, generally speaking, are shared with the whole company.”
Sahil Lavingia: Gumroad operates purely asynchronously without any meetings or audio calls
“Basically it's a GitHub repository that, you know, sort of is the source code for a website and a bunch of 10 99 contractors, freelancers work on it. And they do it just like they would work on an open source rails or something like that project where they're …”
Gumroad contractors convert up to 80% of earnings into dividend-paying equity
“People can earn equity in the business as well. So they can choose to take their hourly rate and convert up to 80% of their cash into equity. And then that equity entitles them to dividends, cash flow in the business.”
Fried: 37signals does not offer equity compensation to its employees
“We don't offer equity to employees.”
Levels delegates PM admin and retrospective drafts to Philippine executive assistants
“We've been working with our EAs in the Philippines to do a lot of that admin work, and so they, we've we taught them how to do the daily check-ins, how to do, they even write the first draft of most of our retros now, because they can see all the daily updates…”
Amoruso will no longer build identity-based consumer brands
“Honestly, I don't want to play into people's identities anymore. I've played enough in that realm. I just want to be really good at things and build things that people love that aren't necessarily like I'm a blank because. That can get outdated.”
Sadeghi Cold-Emailed the Future Nucleus CSO 50 Questions Under a Pseudonym
“I emailed, under pseudonym, just to be honest with you, under pseudonym, our, again, current chief scientific officer, and I asked him, like, you know, 50 questions, right? And he was kind enough to actually, he answered all the questions.”
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.”
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.”
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: 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…”
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: 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…”
Corcos cancels 1-on-1s with direct reports if no agenda is prepared
“If I have one-on-ones scheduled for all of my direct reports, but I've made it very clear and everyone's on the same page that a one-on-one calendar hold is not an entitlement. It is a hold so that I don't double book myself. And if there's nothing on the agen…”
Adcock: Retooling Archer's Board for NYSE Independence Rules Was a Mistake
“I took my company public on the New York Stock Exchange. You have to have the majority of all your board seats be independent. So I had to basically retool my whole entire board at Archer when I went public. And it was a, you know, I made like a, basically loo…”
Siroker: Rewind holds six years of runway
“Yeah, and that's why we have six years of runway, and I hope to increase that, not decrease that over time, is I've learned that mistake, and, you know, it's great to raise money when you can.”
Girdley hires and pays potential co-founders pre-idea with no strings attached
“So my model is I bring people on pre-idea. Like I go find co-founders first. So like I'm a big believer in like right people, right structure, right mission in that order. ... And so my associate model has been historically, I hire a few of them at a time and …”
Lieberman paused his new business's customer growth to secure product retention
“I think the right thing to do with this business right now is to not grow our customers. It is to make sure, going back to, you know, the first thought I had, it is to make sure we have the right product, we know who the right audience is, and we are serving t…”
Figure aims for human-speed robot performance by the end of 2023
“We actually have a full warehouse built in our lab here, and we want to do full end-to-end human speed performance of the robot by end of year.”
Jain: Bilt is rolling out full payment collection to lock in distribution
“So it's like right now we are rolling out a payment solution for every apartment building to collect all rent payments through built. So whether you pay by check or ACH or credit card or the built card, we collect a hundred percent of payments. That is my numb…”
Medeiros: Fired His Own Mother From Warehouse Role
“So, I've had to fire my mom, so no. ... She was just picking and packing at the warehouse because we needed extra help, honestly.”
Jonathan Swanson employs six executive assistants to manage his daily life
“I'm lucky to have a half dozen EAs who support me now, and I know that may sound insane to lots of people, but to me, it's obvious it's not enough.”
Lieberman: Staying in the CEO role too long was his biggest mistake
“I think the biggest mistake was probably actually staying in the CEO role too long.”
Lieberman: Happiness plummeted after selling Morning Brew and stepping down as CEO
“Deal was October of twenty-twenty. Moved out of the role in April of twenty-twenty-one. My happiness actually went down a lot.”
Sanchez says she will never hire anyone who supports quiet quitting
“I'll never hire somebody who believes in quiet quitting or would ever do that.”
Pujji: Growth Assistant delayed legal review until business validation
“And, you know, example, we were starting growth assistant and someone, you know, Adrian was like, well, we need to figure out if it's legal to do what we're doing. And I'm like, well, no, we're not going to spend any money on that. Let's go see if there's a bu…”
Pujji: TechCrunch 'McKinsey of Growth Marketing' Label Was Fabricated by Me
“If you Google amp push and McKinsey, there's an article by tech crunch, which describes amp push as the McKinsey of growth marketing. And I literally like before the call with the reporter, I was like, Many people are calling us the McKinsey of growth and mark…”
Kan refuses to build startups through constant stress and fear
“Maybe I don't think it's the case, but it could be the case of like being super wound up about like your company is what's going to work best, but I'm not going to live that way. So we're going to run the experiment and see if this works.”
Lieberman: Fear of financial instability was Morning Brew's primary driver
“It is incredible how much motivation can come from the fear of not having enough money, and the fear of, kind of, Your family members or the people that you love deeply, their quote unquote financial safety. And so that was, I would say, the biggest driver of …”
Lieberman builds a company portfolio to hedge against his own distractibility
“I am building a portfolio of companies versus just focusing on one. And I am only focusing on the early stages of these companies before I bring on a co-founder and a CEO. Basically, I've created this entire infrastructure around my life as a hedge for my dist…”
StoryArb tested its incoming CEO via a one-month freelance contract
“We agreed to a month-long freelancing CEO contract. Basically, the plan was that for a month, Abby would run the business to get a feel for if she'd be excited running StoryArb and working with me, and it would give me clarity on if I think she was right for t…”
Lieberman's multipreneur model: co-found all portfolio businesses, act as CEO for none
“My high-level plan with being a multipreneur has always been to build a portfolio of businesses That I am the co-founder of All Of and the CEO of None Of, which allows me to spend the majority of my time in my zone of genius.”
Lieberman aims to replace himself within 12 months of launching a startup
“My goal with every one of my businesses right now is to fire myself within six to 12 months of starting the business, and the only way I can do that is to drive enough revenue to hire my replacement.”
Sadeghi Acquired the Academic Polygenic Scoring Site of His Future CSO
“He ran this, like, academic site that gave people kind of D to C polygenic scores. It's kind of an eugenic analysis. And of course, I don't know, maybe a year later, year and a half later, we actually acquired it and bring him on.”
Rabois: Only ask domain experts why an idea cannot work
“My usual question is, explain to me why this can't work. That's the only question I ever ask experts with domain expertise, and if they can't identify anything, then I'm perfectly fine, like investing in a company that's going to try to reinvent, you know, som…”
Lieberman hired StoryArb's CEO through a one-month contract-to-hire trial
“What I decided to do, and I don't think I've ever seen this done, but it just made sense to me, is we basically did a freelance to full-time arrangement, where Abby acted as the freelance or contracted CEO for StoryArb for a month, and I set the expectation up…”
Lieberman: StoryArb's first ten hires must have future-founder potential
“When I think about having the right people, especially for, like, my first 10 employees, it is people who I could see being entrepreneurs one day, where they're using StoryArb as a launch pad for the next four or five years, where ultimately, I could see them …”
Lieberman: Selling Morning Brew brought no ecstasy compared to early building years
“Everyone thinks that when you sell your company, you feel like you're on top of the world. When you get money wired into your bank account after a sale, you must feel this ecstasy. And I felt none of those things. And when I think about the times that I felt m…”
Ads in Competing Newsletters Yielded Morning Brew's Best Paid Subscribers
“It's always been the highest quality channel for paid acquisition has been spending on ads in other email newsletters, because at least it is a behavior that someone already has.”
Lieberman: Time freedom after Morning Brew did not bring happiness
“Even though I had freedom of time after stepping out of the CEO role for Morning Brew, I wasn't happy. Because I didn't have a sense of purpose, and more importantly, I didn't feel like I was growing.”
Kleiner Perkins sold its $6 million Gumroad stake back for one dollar
“Kleiner at one point, I think we had one conversation before, but basically they were like, hey, we, you know, we'd be interested in selling our stake back to you for a dollar. And I was like, okay, sounds good. You know, like, I think they invested six millio…”
Fried: 37signals gives teams autonomy to decide scope cuts during cycles
“Our six-week cycle process is very much like this. We kind of, you know, orient people in a certain direction around an idea and go, here, you figure it out. You make the decisions about what work needs to happen, and you make the decisions about if we're not …”
Fried: 37signals Distributes 10% of Annual Profits as Cash
“We have a 10% profit share plan. So we hold aside 10% of our annual profits and distribute them to our employees as real money, not equity, not options, not based on what the fluctuations of the market is, but like cash you can spend tomorrow on a mortgage or …”
Fried: 37signals usually gives new employees one year to find their way
“So at 37 signals, we basically give people a year to find their way. Sometimes not a year, but usually a year to find their way.”
Lavingia: Gumroad develops products via scoper, designer, and builder assembly line
“And so we basically have these like three roles, right? We have scoper designer and builder. And like, it's very much like kind of like this assembly line, of course, this can go back and forth, but there's like a very, Well-defined pipeline, right?”