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 10 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
Levchin: Startups need professional respect over collegiality during market downturns
“I over-indexed on this idea of, hey, we really have to have just a lot more collegiality, and that works really well if you are doing great as a company. But inevitably, every company goes through ups and downs, and sometimes downs take a long time, and, you k…”
Levchin: Social web behavior is driven by the seven deadly sins
“If the world of the internet becomes suddenly very social, there are all these humans that are emotional. What will they do? What will they need? They're all going to just follow the seven deadly sins because that's what humans do. We're all wired to transgres…”
Levchin: Valuable things are hard, but hard things aren't always valuable
“Hard is not always valuable. Valuable is typically hard, but the inference doesn't work the other direction all the time.”
Levchin: Traditional credit companies treat solvent late payers as revenue opportunities
“If you are, what's in the industry is evocatively called a sloppy payer, which is someone who generally pays their bills, but are almost never on time. The normal financial industry behaviors say, great, you're a fantastic revenue opportunity. You have the mon…”
Levchin: Capitalizing on luck requires relentless grinding and compromising work-life balance
“And what do you do after, once you see one of those, have one of those, it does come down to work ethic and just willingness to grind and, you know, sleep less and Compromise things like work-life balance, which have their own consequences. It's not free, and …”
A 50/50 equity split caused the bitter internal battles at PayPal
“And then you merge, and it's a fifty-fifty merger, which means just no one knows who won. And that's, by the way, sort of the root of all complexity at paypalx.com story is that because we sort of settled on this, well, there's not really a senior partner. Equ…”
Levchin: Entrepreneurs realize their true nature when following others' rules
“For an entrepreneur, you get reminded you're an entrepreneur when you're not trying to run a company the most. You start realizing that sort of rules are written and you kind of have to follow them because you're in, in someone else's backyard.”
Levchin: Mobile payments must be easier and faster than cash and cards
“And if it's not easy, it's just not going to work with money. Money works pretty well when it's in paper form and it works Really well when it's a card form. So if you're trying to push it into an application or into a mobile device, it better be easier and qu…”
Levchin: Founders Only Get Scared Once They Have Something to Lose
“Once you get some barnacles of good life on you, that's when you start getting scared until you have something to lose. It's not that scary to be in this permanent concern state.”
Levchin: Early startup failures came from building overly complicated software
“Most of my failures as a startup CEO, CTO, whatever I thought I was, or because I would build things that I thought were good and easy to use. And then I would show them to someone like the classified software and people were like, this is a really great But I…”