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 132 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
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: 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: 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: 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.”
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…”
London: Early payroll software separated paying workers from tax filings
“Most payroll services back then actually split that job to two different things. There's one which is paying your employees, and there's two is paying your taxes. There was two different workflows, two different situations. Some companies just did one and not …”
London: About 500,000 new employers are created annually in the US
“There's half a million new employers coming in to the US every year.”
Kao: Completion rates for asynchronous video courses were only 3% to 6%
“I started digging into the completion rates of video courses and realized that they were abysmally low. I think three to six percent is completion rate.”
Song: Clay iterated for over six years before finding product-market fit
“Clay, I mean, right before we were talking, like they didn't start off with the product they have now. And unlike for many other startups, they went through constant iteration, a lot of discovery before they finally like just overnight found like the fit and i…”
1Password rapidly scaled its headcount from 176 in 2019 to 1,400
“So growing, we had grown from like a 176 people. I want to say we had at the end of 2019 to, you know, now the 1400”
De Milliano: Will Gaybrick had no operating experience when Stripe hired him as CFO
“Yeah, he was an investor and, you know, incredibly impressive background, but, like, no operating experience, really.”
Busque: 76% of US investors first learn to invest via 401(k)s
“I think the stat is 76% of all investors in the United States first learn to invest in their for one K”
Busque: 16 US states now mandate employer retirement benefits
“There's 16 different states that has a required benefit, required benefits. So you have to have some level of retirement benefit.”
Busque: 401(k)s are the second most requested employee benefit after healthcare
“And for one K is one of those sleepy industries that you don't realize, but it's the second most requested benefit next to healthcare.”
Busque: Felicis passed on Guideline's seed but later led its Series B
“Actually, I didn't send from Felicis, who's one of our series B, he passed on my seed. And this is the feedback. So you guys, like when you pass and you do give the feedback, it's really important. So I didn't was like, you're biting off too much. You need to …”
Magnuson: Braze launched as a cross-channel platform, avoiding single-channel silos
“Unlike a lot of companies that are built to just be, oh, we're going to be a push notification service, or we're going to do email marketing. Like they all start on a single channel. We were just trying to solve a business problem. And so we knew that we neede…”
Handy: Redshift democratized $100K data appliances for $160 per month
“Before Amazon Redshift, in order to get access to that class of performance, you had to be a large enterprise because the only products that were sold with that type of performance were called data warehouse appliances, Netezza, Vertica, Teradata, et cetera. A…”
Muthukumar: Stripe had no dedicated marketing hire before late 2013
“And I convinced them that they needed a marketer. They hadn't had a marketer until then and convinced them that they needed someone to think about marketing as a discipline full time. So I joined in, in late, 2013.”
Schillace: Over one billion people use Google Docs today
“There's like more than a billion people use gdocs today.”
Schillace: Microsoft cloud tools must preserve desktop compatibility, unlike Google Docs
“They're trying to keep the cloud very strongly competitive roundtrip, or very strongly compatible, you know, roundtrip compatible with the desktop. That's a design point Google does not care about, but Microsoft does care about.”
Winters: Expedia and Booking make most revenue from hotels
“So you see with the Expedia's of the world, the bookings of the world, they actually make most of their money off hotels where there's a lot more variety and a lot more fragmentation.”
Winters: Tony Xu delivered DoorDash orders himself for the first year
“Tony at DoorDash was delivering the meals himself. For like the first year, right? Cause he didn't know how to acquire drivers yet. And he didn't want to work on that until he validated that there was a real product there.”
Winters: Grubhub raised only $80M before its IPO
“So you're a company Grubhub that's raised eighty million dollars before you go public.”
Winters: Uber Eats protected Uber from pandemic shocks that hit Lyft
“That made them a little bit less fragile to the pandemic because while, you know, rides shrank during the pandemic, food delivery demand went up and Lyft didn't really have that counterbalance only being focused on rides.”
Winters: No single restaurant accounts for over 5% of Grubhub sales
“It's not like there's any restaurant at Grubhub that makes up more than five percent of sales. So it's still reasonably fragmented.”
MacInnis: Rippling employs 2,800 people and maintains massive revenue growth
“Everything I do today in my job at Rippling, we're, you know, 2800 employees. We're still growing at, you know, a massive growth rate on a very large base of revenue.”
Over 80% of the S&P 500 has turned over in 30 years
“How much of the S&P 500 has turned over in the last 30 years? I think it's over 80%.”
Sun Microsystems almost acquired Apple for roughly $2 billion in the 1990s
“Apple was almost bought by Sun and Sun balked at the price. I think it was like two billion, two point something too much.”
Gong was founded to automate the manual review of recorded sales calls
“What they found out is if they were, they started like recording the sales conversations to understand what's going on. And if they listened to dozens of them, eventually they got lots of good cues. And at the time he was like, there's gotta be a more efficien…”
Reshef: In 2015, Sales Tech Had Dozens of Tools Versus Hundreds in Martech
“I was looking at the marketing landscape and there was like dozens or hundreds, hundreds, literally hundreds of companies anywhere from campaign automation, whatnot, and sales really had dozens, which is not a lot. And my thought process at the time was sales.…”