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
Epling: Unifying product and engineering leadership accelerates cross-functional trade-off decisions
“I think what you gain is a faster decision-making process. So when you want to go through and decide, hey, do we need to do this big technical re-architecture, and that's gonna trade off against some product features, you need to go through and, like, make tho…”
Epling: Habitual devil's advocacy is counterproductive on executive teams
“I think when it gets, when it feels like someone's just becoming devil's advocate, that becomes negative from my perspective, because it's just like, I'm just trying to find issues in everything and any plan you can find issues in, you know what I mean? So I t…”
Epling: Engineering teams should target hitting 90% of dates to avoid sandbagging
“We ask people to write dates and commit to them. We expect us to be able to hitting, like, 90% of the dates, which I think is, like, reasonable. If it drops down to 85, I'm not worried. If it drops down to, like, 80 or 75, I start to get worried. Like, I want …”
Epling: Leaders at companies under thousands of employees must stay in details
“I think when you're still in the thousands, though, like, you should still be doing it, and I think that's part of our philosophy. Like, at Vanta, I think we really expect people to be in the details, and that's something that I believe a lot. Like, It's just …”
Epling: Senior leaders must label feedback levels to control executive megaphone
“He actually just puts, like, what level of feedback is in front of everything. Like, this is an idea, this is a suggestion, or, like, I expect you to take action on this. I think that's something I've learned from my team, that the, like, the more I've kind of…”
Epling: New Vanta engineers must ship to production in week one
“Our expectations, you're going to write a PR your first week and like ship something to production.”
Epling: Boards nitpick minor issues more when a startup performs well
“The board is, like, harsher when we're doing well, because there's, like, no real problem to, like, talk about, you know what I mean? So it'll be, like, pushing on all these, like, little things that, like, kind of matter, but not as much, but, like, If anythi…”
Epling: Companies succeed by embracing conflict and viewing escalations positively
“I do think there's always a bit of, like, built-in tension, you know, in the system that I actually don't think is a bad thing. Like, I'm comfortable with conflict and things and thinks, like, companies are more successful and more comfortable they get with co…”
Epling: Never give a founder CEO complete product ownership without a PM
“I never give them, like, complete ownership, if, like, in that regard, I would say I always assign a PM with it. And it's a PM that's like exciting cause it's cool to work with like the CEO and the founder on things.”
Epling: Specialty sellers unlocked growth for Vanta's new products
“And that was like one of the fixes we did this year where we're like, wow, when we talk to the general sellers, they just don't know how to go into these deep conversations for the new product. They're kind of scared about selling it because this thing's alrea…”