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 337 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
Kanter: As CEO, I review every pull request across the organization daily
“The other thing I do is I look at, you know, take at least a cursory look at all the pull requests that are made throughout the organization every day.”
Stauch: Serval biases hiring toward technical generalists over domain experience
“No, I think we've definitely decided to bias more on really smart generalists that hopefully are technical or quantitative in some way, because I think all these technologies are going to change very quickly. The way of doing things is going to change very qui…”
Agrawal: Parallel deliberately built a slow API designed for AI agents
“One thing we did early on was we took the counter approach of saying our customer is an AI. And one of the things that led us down was we are going to design an API that is excruciatingly slow.”
Agrawal planned major Twitter headcount and roadmap changes within one month
“So one of the things I did as soon as I took the role is I think we changed the structure of the company. We changed the leadership team substantially. Within a month, I was about to meaningfully change how many people were at Twitter and what our roadmap and …”
Agrawal: Parallel aims to ensure AI agents have permissionless web access
“I think that's the same ethos we're taking at parallel, which is like, I think we want the web to be open, and we want it to be permissionless, and we want it to be a free market, and we want everyone to have access to everything, including AIs. We want AIs to…”
Akhund: VCs urged Mercury at day zero to copy Brex credit card
“Literally even our VCs were saying like, Hey, look at how well Brex is doing. Like, why don't you go build a credit card instead? Like at day zero, before we'd even launched.”
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.”
Braintrust operates with only one company-wide meeting per week
“Like, we don't have, we have one meeting per week as a company, and that's it.”
Cramer: Sentry deprioritizes Java and .NET because new projects avoid them
“Even today, I will tell you at the company, we deprioritize things like Java or .NET as a technology stack, because most companies are not starting a new project with Java or .NET or a bunch of these old languages, right? Doesn't mean they're not valuable and …”
Cramer: Sentry ran a billboard campaign mocking corporate CEOs
“We have this open source pledge thing. You can kind of figure out that we ran it, but, like, we put up billboards with these funny-looking faces on them that, like, made fun of CEOs and stuff, and it's like, activism.”
Song: Early Persona decided never to sign two identical customers
“The benefit, one kind of crazy thing we had at that time was I think as soon as we got that e-commerce shop, the position of the business was we will never get two customers who do the same thing.”
1Password raised $200M from Accel primarily to attract world-class executive talent
“And that's where the first round of funding came from was how do we announce ourselves to the world per se so that I can hire world-class talent, world-class leaders. And that's what we did. So at the end of 2019, we announced the, you know, the first ever fun…”
Guild: Owner mandates customers buy its entire bundled platform, not point solutions
“We said you can't buy one without the other because they work so well together, which we still do today. Like you've got to adopt the whole system because the whole system is designed to work together. And if you're buying us to grow your sales, this is what i…”
Patrick Collison designed Stripe's culture guide to repel half of candidates
“And at one point, like, Patrick Ping made me, he was like, hey, like, I really want us to write a guide to Stripe's culture, and I want us to share it with candidates when they join, when they are considering Stripe. And ideally, half of the candidates who rea…”
Clay rejects outsourced support in favor of premium technical in-house staff
“Our support team is super technical and this leads, we don't have like an outsourced support team in India or the Philippines. And this leads to the fact that sure we're paying a premium for these people, but they're delivering extremely high quality support t…”
Rubrik Mandates Sales Certification and Pitch Training for Product Managers
“We've started having new product managers go through the sales engineering training. We just launched a new first meeting deck at the company and did a big training with our sellers. All the sellers have to certify, get certified on the first meeting deck. And…”
Matt Lerner's best growth hires were scientists with zero marketing experience
“Personally, my best growth people I ever hired had no product and marketing experience at all. They were analytical thinkers, former scientists who had a bias for action and good people skills and start to get them stuck in on pieces of the problem.”
MacInnis: Rippling avoided hiring traditional product marketers for GTM
“And so in our case, in building out what we call a go to market management team, because we didn't even want to use the term product marketing. We didn't want to go shopping in that pool for talent. We were able to be focused on hiring people who were demonstr…”
Habib: Most enterprise buyers reject data sharing and Azure AI vendor lock-in
“And for us, the vast majority of enterprises we talk to, that stuff can't leave their environment, and they're not excited about the kind of lock-in that an Azure AI requires, right?
And the way that that scales the amount of engineering effort that's required…”
Habib: Writer runs without regular one-on-ones to preserve asynchronous culture
“And so we're able to have a really low meeting culture as a result because, you know, we are able to do things as a group. That meeting is 90 minutes. Sometimes it goes two hours, a little bit longer. But, you know, as a result, I don't really have one on ones…”
Masad: Replit will likely unveil fully agentic software creation in late 2024
“I think towards the end of the year, we'll probably have some things to share about fully agentic software creation.”
Parrish: Dylan Field instituted a strict no-discounting policy at Figma
“The other wrinkle I'll stay with Figma that was interesting, this is the first in my career, was that early on Dylan said we don't discount. We're not discounting the product.”
Narkhede: Confluent relicensed add-ons to stop cloud vendors reselling managed services
“So we introduced value-added offerings like stream processing, KSQL, under licenses that were similar, very similar in spirit to the open source friendly Apache two dot O, but these licenses had specific provisions that prevented other entities from just offer…”
Google Bard refuses pediatric medical dosage questions to avoid hallucination risk
“How much Tylenol should I give to my kid when they have a fever? Very well-intentioned question, but you want to make sure that the answer that you provide is as tuned toward not hallucinating as possible. And so for early versions, and even to now, we think t…”
Runway's long-term goal is generating entire feature-length films with AI
“We want to eventually make it possible to generate using generative models to build an entire like feature length home. And we want to solve all the problems along the way to get there. And that's not something that could be tackled necessarily in a very incre…”
Eligible GitLab employees can shadow CEO Sid Sijbrandij for two full weeks
“Anybody at the company, I think you have to be here for a certain amount of time can apply to shadow him for two weeks. And when you shadow Sid, you go to one-on-one. So he, they would come to a one-on-one with me. It's kind of funny. It's like me and him talk…”
Zima: Looker's 6% spend on support drove 15-20% lift across metrics
“Even post Google, I wrote up a case study that said Google should retain Looker support because this six percent that we spend on support as a percentage of revenue is worth 15 or 20% in terms of, you know, like growth, retention, every kind of metric that we …”
Siroker: Rewind ensures it passes the 'subpoena test' by retaining zero data
“You know, for us, the test I always use is if we were subpoenaed by the government, would we hand over anything useful or meaningful? No, like we never want to be in a situation where We have data about anything you've done that then we could hand over and tha…”
Siroker: Rewind is exploring custom hardware due to off-the-shelf device limitations
“We are hiring for hardware people so it's possible that down the line if we cannot, by the way, I'm very much a big fan of software. I don't know if you're if you've ever done anything hardware related, but software has many, many benefits of which I'm the big…”
Elliott-McCrea: Stack ranking and firing the bottom 10% damages company culture
“I'm not doing a sort of a stack rank and cutting the bottom 10% ever, because I think it has other problems with the culture that it creates.”
Kracov: Dock avoids Slack communities because the marketing arbitrage has decayed
“A lot of these things go out of style and like a doc, I'm not starting a Slack community. There are way too many of them. They get noisy. It's hard to scale. There's still value and I'm sure some people can still make it successful, but for me, I just don't th…”
Microsoft CoreAI tracks engineering focus time via internal quantitative dashboards
“I'd say there's like a set of data that needs to be collected, and it's what we did when I joined and we created this core AI team, right? Which is, first of all, get both qualitative and quantitative data in terms of what is going on in terms of like that pac…”
Parikh demands teams escalate 24-hour blockers directly to him, bypassing managers
“If you get stuck for more than 24 hours in anything that you're doing, you call me, right? Because I don't want this to be like, oh, we have to talk to our manager who talks to their manager who then comes to me two weeks later.”
Microsoft CoreAI runs manager-free 'brain trusts' of individual contributors
“One of the things that I do at Microsoft is I have these brain trusts. And they're in different parts of our stack, and these brain trusts are formulated with, like, six to eight senior ICs, mid-level ICs only, and no managers, right?”
Noronha: Post-AI launch users emailed Gamma begging to pay before monetization existed
“We're talking servers going down every other week, at one point for even days at a time, a support volume we couldn't keep up with, we weren't even monetizing, and people were emailing us begging to pay for the product.”
Noronha: Gamma reached over $2 million in ARR per employee
“For a while we were at over two million ARR per employee, which actually felt like too much. It was like almost comically outsized in terms of the amount of work we had to do versus the size of our team.”
Sager: Plaid avoided hiring middle managers to keep organization flat
“We never really hired a lot of kind of middle managers, so to speak, right? The focus was really always on Hiring as many frontline folks as we need that are either, you know, building products, developing products, working with our customers, et cetera, or we…”
Sager: Unifying GTM functions under segment leaders boosted Plaid's CSAT and upselling
“So one thing that we did is we then created our segments. But then we put all the functions within the segment together so that the person leading the segment owned the entire end-to-end customer relationship, right? And so suddenly, even if it wasn't the exac…”
Sager: Reference calls often reveal executive candidates never met their buyers
“And even just like referencing, like in, in my world, like I oftentimes will talk to people that they sold to, right? So like you worked for X, you're trying to, you're coming to join Plaid, but I know people that you sold to. I'll go call them. I'll be like, …”
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: Supabase resisted pressure to rush upmarket, focusing on community and PLG
“We also leaned very hard into our community and the Pyeongchee motion. So that was good. Not trying to split our focus between Let's go up market really fast. We've just kept our finger on the pulse of the community and the PLG motion, even though we get a lot…”
Copplestone: Supabase launches unproven products with zero dedicated engineers
“So we're launching a product at the moment, and there's just no engineers on it. It's just a product person engineering it. And people say, oh, should we staff this up? And I said, well, absolutely not. They don't have an idea baked yet. And so it needs to be …”
Copplestone: Supabase only hired for 'hair on fire' needs until 150 employees
“We had this idea that we'd only hire when we had a hair on fire problem for the first probably four or five years, and so we got to maybe 200 people with that mentality, or a 150 people with that mentality, and then we quickly had to change. Like halfway throu…”
Copplestone: Supabase rejects bespoke enterprise feature requests
“Now, if an enterprise comes in and they say something that is also going to benefit maybe a thousand customers, then we'll add it. But if they say something that's bespoke to them, Then, of course, we'll just end up saying no because we really want to make sur…”
Working as an investor was the best preparation for the CMO role
“For me, the best lesson in how to operate as a CMO was spending some time in investing because I had the objective perspective of the companies that I was working with so closely and investing in, and I was able to sit at, you know, at that level as the invest…”
Figma uses the same brand narrative across SMB and enterprise customers
“The narrative and the brand is the same. Where there's variance is in specifically what they need, what their needs are. So as you're a larger organization, you care more about governance, you care more about, you know, specific admin features, et cetera. So w…”