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 16 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
Handy: Lean Startup and Y Combinator frameworks fundamentally misunderstand innovation
“I understand there's a lean startup approach and there's Y Combinator and all this. I actually am not a big supporter of these approaches because I think fundamentally what they're trying to say is you can take the process of innovation and you can put a metho…”
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: Successful Startups Are Good Pretty Quickly, Not Out in the Woods
“One of the things I saw at YC were the good companies were good pretty quickly, and then were good for like 10 years. And then they went public. Like they weren't like this out in the woods for a long period of time. It's the exception, not the rule. The rule …”
Copplestone: Building in SF is the right approach for 99.9% of startups
“They really want you to come to SAF and be based here and built here, and that is the right approach, I think, for 99.9% of the companies.”
Busque: Tackling the hardest foundational problems first isn't the standard YC playbook
“I think starting at the bottom and doing the hard things first isn't necessarily like the MO of YC, at least not out of the gate. Not that they don't do really hard things they do, but they don't do them first.”
Copplestone: Supabase team was engineered specifically to be YC-friendly
“I thought at the time, again, to de-risk things, I thought, I'm going to build a, the most Y Combinator friendly team and apply for YC and that will help from a DevTool point of view. I think that's the pitch that actually convinced him he really wanted to go …”
Copplestone: Startups should never compromise between high agency and high performance
“If you can keep the best people it was at YC yesterday and so on was saying, should I take someone who's high agency or should I take someone who's high performance? And like, it's very clear to me. It's both. Like, you just don't compromise on, on any of thos…”
Younis: Domain expertise is a true advantage as startup ideas become commoditized
“Today it is because there's, again, the Valley is different today in 20, 25 than it is ever before, because now there's no idea. I mean, you can go to an individual YC demo day and you'll see the same company, you know, three, Companies doing the same idea. So…”
Younis: YC gave feedback to rejected interviewees unless the issue was the founder
“At YC, we would write feedback letters for everyone who gets rejected, right? Literally emails is like, we didn't, this is the issue that we saw. So if you get an interview, I don't know if they still do it. You know, I've been gone eight, nine years at this p…”
Masad: Replit submitted a Rickroll video for its Y Combinator application
“So I put in the Rickroll video. Rick Astey is never going to give you up. And till this day, if you go to the YC portal and you click on Repplin and you click the video where it should be the founder interview, you'll get Rickrolled.”
ClassDojo reached roughly 10,000 active teachers by YC Demo Day
“And then we turned up at demo day and we had this like crazy looking hockey stick job. We'd gone from zero to like, I think it was like, 10,000 teachers using it out of the gate.”
London: Gusto's YC Demo Day pitch mapped expansion beyond payroll
“The last slide was all about that. It was about, hey, we're starting from payroll. The next step is benefits and HR. And from there, it's going to be a full what we call their people platform. So everything, you know, to help you start building, grow your busi…”
Masad: Replit was rejected by Y Combinator three times
“I applied to YC three times and never got in.”
Behrens Wu: Shippo was rejected by YC before joining 500 Startups
“We did get into like an accelerator at some point, like we were rejected by YC and then got into 500 startups.”