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 173 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
Bob Moesta boosted housing sales 70% by advertising in the obituaries
“So Bob took this and they just took their newspaper ads and moved them from wherever they were into the obituary section. And it worked. They increased their sales by like, 70%.”
Moore: RJMetrics alumni later founded prominent data companies dbt, Stitch, and Omni
“The three co-founders of DBT all worked at RJ Metrics. The founders of Stitch, myself and Jake, which became the early competitor to Fivetran and played in that space. Omni, which is a hot new ticket in the BI space, their founding CTO, Chris Merrick, was our …”
Moore: Crossbeam raised $100M and rival Reveal raised $50M during ZIRP
“Where we had raised, you know, a hundred million dollars from Andreessen Horowitz and others during the Zerp era, they raised fifty million dollars from Insight Partners and others during the Zerp era.”
Muthukumar: ChatGPT has over 100 million weekly active users
“And in ChatGPT, we see more than a hundred million active users on a weekly basis.”
Desai: Sentry SaaS and open source have zero feature delta
“Number one, the software, a SaaS offering is exactly the same as the open source offering. There's no feature delta. So as a company, you can run the fully functional, up-to-the-minute value of Sentry on your own without paying us anything.”
Wealthfront pioneered automated ETF tax-loss harvesting and launched direct indexing in 2013
“Wealthfront was the first to do ETF tax loss harvesting automated. And then we did direct indexing. Direct indexing is so hot right now in the industry. It's 20, 24. Direct indexing is so hot. We launched it the end of 2013, my first year there, because it was…”
Adding donation presets in multiples of 18 increased median Jewish donations 80%
“The reason I got written up in the New York Times is it turned out that one little feature actually moved our median donation to Jewish charities by 80%. It increased it. That median donation went from a hundred dollars to one 80.”
Masad: JS REPL was first to run Python and Ruby in browser
“I got a prototype running and we're the first to put Python and Ruby and a few other languages in the browser. And I open sourced it.”
Berner: Snowflake ships its customer success motion to the sales team
“Sometimes even in those cases, you don't really need a lot from a CSM, like a success motion, and sometimes that success motion gets, gets shipped over to the sales team. Sometimes I've seen that happen, and sometimes that works, like that's how Snowflake does…”
Amin: Clay grew from ~120 to ~1,000 customers over the year
“Yeah, I mean, we've grown from maybe a 120 customers at the beginning of the year to we should end the year at around a thousand.”
Google Bard no longer hallucinates on time and weather queries
“Which, happy to report, Bard does not hallucinate now on time and weather.”
LLM inference costs will decrease significantly in relatively short order
“I think you're gonna see the cost of inference tend to go down. Inference is the cost to actually serve and run the model. I think you're gonna see those things go down in relatively short order.”
OpenAI built the ChatGPT web interface using the Next.js framework
“ChatGPT itself is built on Next.js.”
An open core model is a purchasing requirement for many government agencies
“Outside of some, you know, I visit with a lot of customers in PubSec, and that is actually for a lot of the agencies, a requirement.”
Gartner will adopt the 'DevSecOps platform' category within three years
“And so that's not something that happens overnight. That's something that will take about three years probably for Gartner to say, no, GitLab was right. It is a DevSecOps platform MQ that we're going to do.”
Zapier only ever raised a $1.3 million seed round
“We raised the 1.3 million seed round. That's all we raised.”
Siroker: Rewind records user activity and stores all data locally
“Rewind is a truly personalized AI. So it captures everything you see, say, and hear, stores it all locally on your devices.”
Elliott-McCrea: Tech employee tenure averaged 18 months over the past decade
“For the last decade, you know, average tenure has been about 18 months in these kind of companies that we're talking about, which means it's very hard to actually build an experiment with culture in the way that we were for a while.”
Weiss: Slack reached $80M-$90M ARR before hiring a sales head
“I think we got to,
I want to say, 80 or ninety million dollars in ARR before we hired a head of sales.”
Parikh: Facebook scaled deployment from daily to continuous release cadence
“When I was at Facebook, when I joined, we did, which was like, really fast at the time. We used to ship The main core of Facebook once a day, and it was like a Herculean effort that, you know, most of the time went okay, but sometimes it didn't go okay, and, b…”
Copplestone: Supabase originated from the tech stack built for Nimbus
“I built Nimbus with the same tech stack and that tech stack now is what is super base.”
Copplestone: Supabase now serves eight million developers
“We could just kind of push things out and people would adopt them and we didn't have to worry about, you know, eight million developers trying something out on day one now.”
Figma ships net new product launches multiple times per week
“We have. We're, I mean, at the cadence of multiple a week.”
Hirshberg: Artemis reached 30 employees in seven months, adding 1-2 weekly
“We started seven months ago and we are now about 30 people in the team. Growing about one to two people every week and scaling across engineering product research and go to market.”
Payne: Tony Xu and I pitched The Cheesecake Factory in person
“Tony and I, who was showing up at the Cheesecake Factory selling the Cheesecake Factory? It was Tony and me, right? We were the little engine that could, right? We, and we were like, we're not in Rideshare. We're in food delivery. We're gonna, we're in, so the…”
Payne: My six-month stint as Tinder CEO was a total disaster
“But then there was the Tinder experience where, you know, it was a disaster. I got fired after six months and I, you know, it just didn't, I didn't fit there.”
Payne: DoorDash's nationwide expansion succeeded through remote city launches
“And DoorDash cracked that. That was our, we figured out how to expand economically remotely. And that, that allowed us to expand across the country. Everybody calls it the suburb strategy, but it really was an expansion strategy.”
Kreps: Confluent's initial seed round shifted to a Benchmark-led Series A
“And it went from something where LinkedIn was going to be the kind of major investor to being, you know, a smaller part of the round. And it went from kind of a seed investment to a series A through the course of that fundraising process. But yeah, it was, you…”
Epling: Post-acquisition GitHub ran independently on Google tools and AWS
“That company was run very independently. Like, I literally quit Microsoft. Like, your contract ended. It was like, we used all Google tools. Everything was built on AWS. Everything was Zoom. When Satya sent emails to the company, they didn't go to anybody that…”
Epling: GitHub Actions was GitHub's first usage-based pricing product
“You know, with GitHub Actions, that was, like, one of the products I built while I was there. You know, we were doing usage-based pricing. It was the first time GitHub had ever done usage-based pricing on anything”
Epling: GitHub racked its own Mac hardware in its own data centers
“We actually racked our own Macs in our own data centers there.”
Grosser: Nike self-hosts Next.js on Akamai rather than using Vercel
“Nike's on Next.js. They're not on Vercel. They, you know, have Akamai as their CDN and WAF.”
Varanasi: Apple Silicon switched to two shared software-defined radios
“When they did that, usually hardware had three separate radios for like, 2.4 gigahertz, five gigahertz and Bluetooth. When they moved, they were using what this thing called software defined radio, which is using two radios for all three of those things.”
Varanasi: Networking revenue comprises nearly 50% of IT channel sales
“Almost 50% of the channel is networking revenue.”
Varanasi: 90% of networking equipment is sold through channel partners
“90% of networking is actually sold through the channel.”
Kanter: Complex fitment criteria kept auto parts e-commerce penetration around 4%
“And because of the complicated fitment criteria, the e-commerce penetration rates in auto parts are very, very low. So I don't know the latest numbers, but when I was in the auto parts industry a number of years ago, the penetration rates in automotive were se…”
Kanter: Change Healthcare was down 60 days after cyberattack
“Change Healthcare, which was the largest clearinghouse for claims. They got hit by cyber attack and they were down for 60 days. You know, and even today, they're not fully back up. There's the dental portion of their business is not back up. There's a bunch of…”
Sekar: Meraki reached $100M revenue before $1.2B Cisco acquisition
“Fast forward to late 20 12, and we'd scaled the business to about a hundred million in revenue. Cisco acquired the company for a little over 1.2 billion dollars”
Sekar: Dash cameras are Samsara's top product by revenue and growth
“And it's actually now our number one product by revenue and growth”
Sekar: LLMs allow Samsara AI to reward defensive driving in video
“Now we can use LLMs as a starting point and we can start to do things that just would have been impossible before, right? So for example, now if you slam on the brakes and it's because someone cut you off or a pedestrian ran into the road or an ambulance cross…”
Chaudhary: 70% of education spending goes to personnel, leaving little for tech
“I think the number that's quoted usually is like three percent ish of GDP, but 70% of that is on salaries and benefits and people, right? And then there's a good chunk that goes into facilities and buildings. And so by the time you get to like, what could you …”
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.”
ClassDojo co-founder Liam Don helped build the iconic game RuneScape
“He'd helped build one of the world's biggest games for kids back in the day called RuneScape.”
Asthana: Google selected Postman as a top 20 Chrome Web Store app
“The biggest surprise for me was when Google reached out to feature Postman on the Chrome web store. They're building a version two of their web store and Postman was one of the top 20 apps to be recommended.”
Asthana: Postman rolled a $1M seed into a $7M Series A
“We had a million dollar inbound, like, kind of seed round or so, which we rolled into a seven million dollar total round in a series A.”
Canva expanded from 8 to 100 languages in consecutive years
“We launched eight languages in that year, and then the following year we launched Canva in a hundred languages, and this totally opened up new markets to us.”
Adams: Canva for Work had 200,000 people on launch waitlist
“We had 200,000 people on the waiting list, which was awesome.”
Canva spent two years rewriting its entire codebase while shipping almost nothing
“There was this one period where we decided to rewrite our entire editor code base, which was particularly trying. The reason was it took us like close to two years to do that. And in that time, we essentially launched nothing. We didn't put out any new functio…”