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 23 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
Younis: Applied Intuition's culture is closer to Elon's X than Google
“On the spectrum of like Google to, you know, working for Elon at X, like we're more on the Elon X. I don't, we're not anywhere near there, but we're more towards that than being like Google.”
Younis: Recruiting a co-founder after an idea creates glorified employees
“It's not come up with the idea and then go find a co-founder. Brett Berson: Why is that a bad idea? Qasar Younis: Because then it's my idea and then you join Brett as really a glorified employee. Because you weren't there at the birthing of the idea. And most …”
Younis: Applied Intuition has retained nearly all of its $1B raised
“We are a profitable company. We've been for many years. We've grown, you know, we've raised, you know, hundreds of millions in the company's history, close to a billion. We have all of that in the bank.”
Younis: After finding a co-founder, market timing is everything
“After a good co-founder, market timing is everything. It's the beginning, middle, and end.”
Younis: Full vertical integration in autonomous vehicle tech crushes companies with costs
“When you verticalize all this stuff, it's so expensive that literally the costs will crush you.”
Younis: Applied Intuition would not be profitable with three well-funded competitors
“If we had three super well-funded competitors, you bet your bottom dollar, we're not a profitable company.”
Younis: Marc Andreessen is Applied Intuition's only board member
“We have Mark Mark Andreessen is our it was our major investor. We started the company and he's, Formerly the only board member we have, even though we're like a pre IPO company, which in itself is a crazy weird thing.”
Younis: Multi-product businesses are hard because repeated product-market fit is rare
“It's really hard to find product market fit again and again and again. It's really hard to manage dozens of products and make sure they're all the right products and the market needs them. And some of you're not just holding onto them because you started them …”
Younis: Marc Andreessen questioned why Applied Intuition didn't build self-driving cars
“And even Marc Andreessen, when he was funding the company in the, in that first round, he said you guys build all these tools, like, that might be as difficult to do than doing the autonomy thing itself. Why wouldn't you just do self-driving Cause the tools ar…”
Younis: Over five early AV simulation competitors are now dead or zombies
“We had, there were a bunch of SIM companies at the time, and like, north of five. I don't think any of them exist. I mean, if they exist in name only. Like, they just are kind of zombie companies”
Younis: Auto OEMs act as decentralized conglomerates with separate autonomy teams
“Individual brands, like individual companies, like a Stellantis of 12 brands, individual brands within, or 14, within them will have lots of product lines, and then each of them might have their own self-driving team, and, you know, it's just such a, you know,…”
Younis: Building horizontal platforms mitigates market timing risk in emerging tech
“Our view was like, just getting into the details, like how do you actually build a product that's going to be used when you're talking about this ecosystem where you don't know, is a self-driving car going to win? Is it going to be a self-driving truck? Is it …”
Applied Intuition beat Nvidia and Ansys in a 28-bidder GM RFQ
“That at some point the product's good enough that you can actually pitch at General Motors, which we did in a formal RFQ, that 28 companies bid for that, you know, tooling, you know, business, well, many years ago now, 20, twenty-eighteen, twenty-nineteen, and…”
Younis: Founders should target rapidly growing markets over crowded niches
“If you're a wannabe founder, you gotta go to a market where it's exploding in growth. You go to a market that's like dentist CRMs that already has seven players and they're already kind of, it doesn't matter that you can do it way better than them. Like the, i…”
Younis: Studying history and great art makes someone a better founder
“By reading, you know, Roman history, you actually learn on how to build a company. Like, I really believe that, and that's the kind of the rule around, like, knowing what good art is makes you a better founder.”
Younis: A startup across the street pays double Applied Intuition's rent
“We in this office pay an X amount for rent per square foot. There's a very well funded high growth company across the street that pays two X. Literally two, two times the per square foot.”
Applied Intuition expands into new verticals by hiring multi-generational industry insiders
“We're like, we're going to get into defense. We got to find people who are like us in defense. Who's dad and grandfather words and we're in the military and we work at the DOD. Then we do trucking. Same thing. It's like you start pattern matching to what worke…”
Younis: Applied Intuition chose early on to be a multi-product company
“We went from our first product being a planning simulator and then to being a perception simulator, and then to like a data, you know, logger, literally conversations. And we've, we, you know, from the early days of the company, as a founder, you kind of have …”
Applied Intuition evaluated code completion tools and adopted Cursor company-wide
“We did a whole internal evaluation with, you know, hundreds and hundreds of engineers of all the products that are available, and Peter, my co-founder, in all hands, I don't know, six, nine months ago, whenever, when we ultimately concluded that we, as a compa…”
Younis: Applied Intuition and Sam Altman's companies collaborate on projects
“Obviously our companies are working on things together.”
Younis: Most Applied Intuition employees reached 99th percentile compensation via stock growth
“We recently did exercise, vast majority of our employees are in the 99th percentile of compensation. But they're not there from their first offer. They're there because the stock price grew.”