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 515 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 2 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
Magnuson: Early app makers rejected Braze because engagement raised server costs
“And even when we went and talked to some of our potential early customers, I remember someone telling me that they didn't want our service because the sooner people stopped using their app, the sooner they could stop paying the server bill for those people. An…”
Anand: Clay manually invoiced customers via Stripe until hitting $1M ARR
“In January of 23, I mean, it'll be interesting to share that, like, we didn't have billing in the product. You couldn't pay for Clayton in the product until past a million in ARR. Until a million in ARR, I was just sending Stripe invoices to people, which was …”
Handy: Enterprise data migration to the cloud truly began in 2020
“Enterprises really started moving to cloud for their data in twenty-twenty. There was like Hadoop stuff going on before that, but that like never really achieved any level of maturity or real penetration. And yes, Redshift and stuff like did exist prior to, an…”
A Negative WSJ Article Forced LiveRamp's Pivot to Product-Market Fit
“We ended up having this Wall Street Journal article come out about the company that was really negative about the practices that we were using around data collection on the internet. So we ended up having to really shut that down and pivot to a totally differe…”
LiveRamp churned zero enterprise customers while stripping 90% of legacy features
“We didn't end up turning any of the customers, even in this move, because what they actually cared about was this piece of the technology really working and We did that within nine months”
Lerner: 95% of PayPal's Growth Came From Just Five Initiatives
“When I look back on it, all of our growth, all of like, 95% of it came from like five things.”
Moore: Crossbeam's most requested feature was integrating with its main rival, Reveal
“The number one requested feature throughout all of Crossbeam was for us to integrate with Reveal and to support the companies that were on the Reveal network.”
Schillace: Physicians paired with AI diagnostic tools perform worse than AI alone
“There's a study I saw a while ago that compared like an AI based system, AI only physician only and AI plus physician An AI plus physician did worse than AI only. The physician kind of dragged the AI down because they didn't trust it.”
Winters: The pandemic permanently fixed DoorDash's unit economics by eliminating latency
“Then the pandemic hits and all the unit economics of DoorDash flipped positive because everyone's all of a sudden ordering online and all the drivers are much more busy, which means all the latency in the model that was creating the losses went away.”
Mark Zuckerberg once argued having multiple online identities was intellectually dishonest
“Mark Zuckerberg was very adamant for a while that in the future there would be one profile online. There was a point where he thought it was almost intellectually dishonest to represent yourself in different ways online.”
Habib: Enterprise champions target $100M in cost reductions using Writer
“Showing people that we've got champions who are signed up with procurement to take a hundred million dollars of costs out of their organizations completely built on writer.”
Masad: Replit was first to deploy open-source LLM to production
“We had some of a breakthrough in June, 22, where we were the first to put an open source model in production. It was the Salesforce CodeGen model.”
Masad: Major AI labs have sharply reduced publishing groundbreaking research
“A lot of the labs have sort of closed down how much they publish, and you might have noticed that. There isn't as much, as many groundbreaking papers. A lot of the papers are rehashing things. A lot of the papers are fake.”
Google's famous 20% time policy was gamed and is no longer used
“I think even the Google thing got gamed. No one uses it now.”
Kyle Parrish: Over half of early Figma users were non-designers
“And in that first few months, I started realizing that, you know, more than half of our user base on any given customer account was not a designer.”
Parrish: Dropbox engineering and product teams would not build sales requests
“The product feedback loop at Dropbox, it existed. I learned that to operate really well with engineering and product design teams, but they were never going to go build what sales was asking at Dropbox. You can ask anyone that worked there in my time. They wou…”
Blank co-founded the precursor to Tesla but quit after six weeks
“Well, J.B. And I and Scott Andrews started a car company, which eventually became Tesla. And I did that for six weeks with him until I realized I couldn't get it up again. There was no way I wanted to jump on red eyes like I used to. I had a family, I had kids…”
Narkhede: Kafka was used by 50% of Fortune 500 when Confluent launched
“Confluent kind of started with a proven technology that was used at, you know, roughly 50% of Fortune 500 companies at that point in time.”
Zima: Looker and Tableau Acquisitions Left a Strategic Void in BI
“Looker and Tableau got acquired within a week of each other. And so again, now this gigantic market that is BI that has existed for the last 40 years has a pretty large sort of strategic hole in terms of there's not a new generational company that exists in BI…”
Zapier's early customer acquisition costs rounded to zero via SEO distribution
“You know, we figured out how to, A really good distribution engine that meant our customer acquisition costs like rounded to zero.”
Siroker: Rewind stores data locally and Rewind has no access to it
“They just passively capture everything in a privacy sensitive way. It's stored locally. We don't have access to it. Only you have access to it.”
Siroker: Rewind turned down 20 term sheets at a $1 billion valuation
“In fact, we didn't, we had. 20 offers or more of a billion dollar valuation. We turned down.”
Patrick Collison required new Stripe products to plausibly add $10B in enterprise value
“When Stripe got larger and larger, the question became not only why now, but like, what's the opportunity on the table for this idea? Like, this has to be an idea where we could eventually work it out to Patrick's, you know, sort of bar was, is this gonna add,…”
Facebook's infrastructure team controversially managed software up through the mobile stack
“At Facebook, the infrastructure team was not just the hardware. It was all of the software. And we actually went quite a bit up the stack to the end consumed, right? So The, a lot of the mobile stack even, in fact, was like run by the infrastructure team, righ…”
Noronha: One billion monthly presentation software users are unhappy with existing tools
“There's like a billion people that use PowerPoint and Google Slides every month, and they're not happy with it.”
Noronha: Gamma cuts presentation creation time from 10 hours to 1–2
“What we did was we just eliminated maybe eight or nine of those 10 hours right off the board, and when you can give that concrete a time savings, the value is just so immediate concrete, and people left on it.”
Gamma reached PMF with 12 people, four designers, and zero sales staff
“Our original team, we had product market fit was 12 people, of which zero were in any kind of GTM role, so we had no sales or marketing. Four out of those 12 were UX designers.”
Noronha: Gamma has over 100 million registered user signups
“We have more than a hundred million users who've signed up for our product”
Noronha: Gamma mixes multi-provider models while incumbents are tied to in-house models
“We're also able to combine different models from different providers in a way that some of our competitors structurally aren't. They're kind of tied into their own House models, and so we get to directly test, you know, particularly in the world of image model…”
Noronha: Gamma's $10 Entry Plan Is Profitable, Not a Loss Leader
“We have at the low end, a 10 dollar a month plan, which is relatively episodic. It's our entry level floor. It's also more popular internationally in developing countries who don't have the money for very expensive AI products. It's not actually a loss leader …”
Noronha: Gamma signups jumped from hundreds to 20,000 daily after AI launch
“Before we launched our sort of AI product, and it was more kind of esoteric and hard to use, we were in the hundreds of signups a day. As soon as we launched this AI product, it jumped into the low thousands. We're talking one or 2000 a day. But the reason we …”
Sager: Plaid CEO Zach Perret does IC-level work every day
“Zach is a wonderful example of like a founder who actually does that, right? Like he really still does like IC level work like every single day. And I think he expects that of his leadership team, and then we expect that of the kind of the rest of the team as …”
Sager: Plaid signed hundreds of AI firms including OpenAI, Perplexity, and Replit
“Now we've had, you know, hundreds of AI companies signing up and we just announced, you know, OpenAI, we announced Perplexity, we announced Replit.”
Sager: Large enterprises scale massively on Plaid entirely self-serve
“One of the things you see a lot of is you see even very big customers companies implement with Plaid and scale to massive use cases without ever having to talk to anybody.”
Sager: Fintech tools measurably improved consumer trading fees and average APRs
“And I think, like I said, there's a lot of really tangible things that And we can share, you can look up around like, okay, well, what's happened to overlimit fees? What's happened to trading fees? What happened to average APRs and so forth? Adjusted for obvio…”
Copplestone: Bolt and Lovable launches initially looked like DDoS attacks
“End of 20, 24 was when the likes of Bolt and Lovable launched, and that was also And interesting, that was kind of the second tailwind. We thought we were getting DDoSed at the time, actually, because we just saw this customer launching lots and lots of databa…”
Copplestone: Supabase developer growth accelerates off a 7-8M user base
“And then phase three is largely from January this year, the likes of Cloud Code and Codex and everything that are just ramping up really, really fast. And these are the tools that are using more of the CLI MCP type workload, and we're seeing huge adoption from…”
Two-thirds of people building in Figma are non-designers
“So if you look at Figma, two thirds of people who build in Figma are non-designers. They're engineers, they're marketers.”
Moreno: Windsurf invested in partner networks $40M earlier than peers
“Being able to go and build credibility and build belief in the big partners and systems integrators was something that we started doing probably forty million dollars in revenue before most companies.”
Moreno: AI developer tools rarely face build-vs-buy resistance
“The interesting thing is that where I have sat in AI, I feel like there's less of a build versus buy conversation. Like pretty quickly, people realized that they weren't going to build co-pilot or cursor or windsurf.”
Moreno: Windsurf Decided to Route 100% of Revenue Through Partners
“So like we made the decision to run a hundred percent of our revenue through partners.”
Hirshberg: Artemis users spend three to four hours daily in the platform
“What we see in practice is that the users of the product spend about three to four hours every day in the product because they are just able to get the outcomes they want using Artemis.”
Hirshberg: Cybersecurity startups typically spend one to two years in stealth
“Typically, companies stay about a year to two years in stealth.”
Hirshberg: 70% of Artemis customers fully replace legacy security solutions
“What we're seeing from customers, from even our customer base, about 70% of our customers replaced our legacy solutions with Artemis, because they say, I'm clear that at this point in time, I have to make the change right now in order to be prepared for what i…”
Payne: Microsoft under Bill Gates required forceful defense of ideas
“Microsoft's a very challenging environment, very competitive environment and when, you know, Bill challenges you respond with force. You know, you gotta be You know, behind your idea and everything.”
Payne: DoorDash was running out of money and couldn't raise in 2017
“There were periods where DoorDash was running out of money and couldn't raise money in 17”
Snowflake's board pressured Bob Muglia to hire an external CRO over Degnan
“Bob felt pressure. From the board to bring in CRO over me. And he was like, well, why? Like, what are we looking for that Chris is not doing? You, you've asked him to hire great leaders. He's hired those great leaders. You'd asked him to open up Europe. He's o…”
Grosser: Stripe ran a 30-person leadership team across product, GTM, finance
“There was a lot of work that Will Gabrick did, to his credit, to get all of product, go-to-market, finance in sort of the same room. Like, we ran basically a thirty-person leadership team for a while, which is a lot to have in a weekly staff meeting, to have i…”