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
Varanasi: Cisco built its hardware stack via acquisitions, unlike Meter
“So if you look at our industry, Cisco has a rack like ours where they have, you know, 10 different pieces of hardware. But majority of that was done through acquisition. So they bought their switching business called Crescendo in the nineties, et cetera, Merak…”
Varanasi: SaaS recurring revenue models originated from the security and alarm industry
“Turns out it actually came from security and alarm industry. They were doing one-time sales and one-time revenue. Then there's this analyst consultant type person named Ron Davis in the security and alarm world. He started writing about this concept called RMR…”
Varanasi: Enterprise networking has multiple $200B+ giants yet no new entrants
“So what happened in the networking industry for the last 40 years is it's one of the only industries that has multiple 200 plus billion dollar businesses, yet no new companies come in.”
Varanasi: Academic RCTs prove management directly drives superior factory outcomes
“We have really great RCTs and A-B tests essentially of same problem, same factories, half management, half without management, and outcomes being entirely different.”
The first AppDynamics term sheet required hiring an outside business CEO
“Actually my first term sheet I got, it came with a condition that a business co-founder has to join a CEO.”
Cisco escalated its AppDynamics buyout offer to 2.5x the IPO price
“And this conversation started three days before the IPO Cisco came in and said, you know, we'll, we'll pay you more than you. The price you will list. And we said, no, it's, we'll go IPO. Said, no, they came with another price, which is like, we'll pay you mor…”
Harness compounds its revenue growth by launching three internal startups annually
“And every year we are launching three. So you start layering the waterfall of that. We are growing well now. Actually our business growth has accelerated, which at a certain size the growth starts coming down. Part of it is that compounding that comes from tha…”
Kanter: Auto parts startup's final EBITDA margin was 2.5x investor projections
“When I sold the business, I went back and I looked at those projections that I had sent them. And the actual EBITDA margin that I achieved, the actual real profit, not just a fake EBITDA margin, was two and a half times what I had shown to them at that time.”
Stauch: Prompt-to-code generation has advanced to where it is hard to break
“Code generation works super well now. So when we take these prompts to code, there used to be so many gotchas where the code wouldn't actually work, whether the API is not well supported or it makes a couple mistakes here and there. And now It's hard to break …”
Stauch: Some Serval Employees Make More from Referrals Than Salary
“There's some folks on the team that have done quite well financially that are probably making more money from referrals than they are from their salary.”
Top diffusion researchers abandoned image for video generation chasing VC hype
“There were so much to do there, but the price for video was much shinier and there was a lot of VC money being poured into it. All the researchers left doing image research and then focused on video.”
AI research labs actively approach fal for day-zero model releases
“And now with FAL's position in the market, we also get some early information from the research labs. Everyone like tries to talk to us. And release their models on file on day zero.”
fal hosts around 600 models compared to under 10 at AI labs
“So the number of models they have to host is like less than 10. And for us, it's like around 600, which is, complicates things like a lot.”
Sekar: Samsara scaled ARR from $1M to $17M to $70M in consecutive years
“By just running that feedback loop across a wide set of customers, we went from a million in ARR to 17, and then 70 the year after that.”
Chaudhary: Most EdTech companies remain small and fail to scale
“Most education companies basically just like remain small businesses. Yeah. They never reach billions of people. They never reach tens of billions in revenue. They never reach hundreds of billions in market cap.”
ClassDojo is currently used in 90% of US schools
“If you look now, Dojo's used in nine out of 10 schools in the country, and maybe two or three times as many as that internationally.”
ClassDojo PLUS generated single-digit millions in its first year
“Year one was like single digit millions. Yeah. Yeah. It was 2020. But that's, that just scaled very quickly, like a growing percentage of our base was like, actually, I want this.”
Chaudhary: Millions of tutoring sessions have occurred on ClassDojo
“So they joined Dojo, rebuilt the product on Dojo and it's just exploded. You know, it's like millions of tutoring sessions happening on Dojo.”
Asthana: Tech startup salaries in India have grown 5x to 6x
“Pay packages ballooned, like average salaries probably have grown five X, six X, and that's like the state of the market.”
Canva's founders committed after two hours in person and two Skype calls
“I think we officially spent two hours in person, two separate Skype chats, and that was it. A few emails. We didn't have any working sessions.”
Canva has grown to 230 million monthly active users
“Going from zero to two hundred and thirty million people that now use Canva every single month.”
Canva intentionally never built an in-platform community forum for its users
“So we've never built like a community, like a forum. We don't have this spot on Canva where people come to talk about design. We've fostered community where it arises.”
Adams: Canva's top five markets are US, Brazil, Indonesia, India, Philippines
“Our top five markets now are the US, Brazil, Indonesia, India, and the Philippines.”
Subscription revenue eclipsed Canva's two-million-dollar micro-transaction business within three months
“I think within three months, so our one dollar image revenue at that stage is, I think, about two million dollars. Within three months, our subscription tier had already eclipsed that and was growing far more rapidly.”
Canva has maintained profitability for eight consecutive years without external funding
“So since then, we've put a premium on being a profitable company, making sure that we don't need funding, that we can run the company without having to go to someone else and put our hand out. And that has informed the next eight years of profitability that we…”
Agrawal: Parallel serves millions of daily requests ranging from $0.005 to $10
“We now serve, like, millions and millions of requests a day, and it's our cheapest, cheapest requests on our system cost under half a cent. The most expensive requests to our system today can cost 10 dollars.”
Akhund: Most incumbent banks don't build their own apps or websites
“And it's pretty obvious that kind of incumbent banks are not ready for that trend. Like they, you know, most of them don't build their own apps. They don't build their own website. They, you know, it's a, It's kind of a secondary thought. They still think of t…”
Akhund: Mercury's sales team only handles about 5% of accounts
“Even today, our sales team is only Does about five percent of our accounts.”
Akhund: Mercury lost 60% of revenue in March 2020
“And COVID initially was like, seemed like a disaster. We lost 60% of our revenue. Obviously no one was starting new businesses in March, 20 20.”
Akhund: Mercury doubled in April 2020 amid branch shutdowns
“And then literally that was March and then April. We, like, doubled. Like, it was insane. April and May, 2020 was this, like, insane growth spurt, because, you know, e-commerce kind of blew up, bank branches were shut down, so people had to go to a digital exp…”
Akhund: Mercury Gained 8,000 Customers Within Two Weeks of SVB Collapse
“We had Like, 8000 customers sign up in like a week or two.”
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…”
Younis: Apple spent tens of billions trying to build a car
“You take Apple, Apple spent tens of billions of dollars trying to build a car. You never even saw the design of it because this whole misunderstanding of how this business works with these costs, these vertical costs are just so high.”
Applied Intuition beat Nvidia and Ansys in a 28-bidder GM RFQ
“That at some point the product's good enough that you can actually pitch at General Motors, which we did in a formal RFQ, that 28 companies bid for that, you know, tooling, you know, business, well, many years ago now, 20, twenty-eighteen, twenty-nineteen, and…”
Younis: Over five early AV simulation competitors are now dead or zombies
“We had, there were a bunch of SIM companies at the time, and like, north of five. I don't think any of them exist. I mean, if they exist in name only. Like, they just are kind of zombie companies”
Younis: A startup across the street pays double Applied Intuition's rent
“We in this office pay an X amount for rent per square foot. There's a very well funded high growth company across the street that pays two X. Literally two, two times the per square foot.”
Tantivi was the only search library to survive Braintrust's 100x benchmark
“There's one library called Tantivi, which is a Rust re-implementation of the Lucene search index, which is a very popular and well-regarded and used search technology. It's the technology behind Elasticsearch as well. And that was the only piece of code that w…”
Cramer: Major late-2000s Django projects relied on his third-party libraries
“I would say pretty much if you were building a Django thing in that era and you were actually trying to do anything of substance, you were using something I had written, not necessarily in the core of Django, but like some third party thing, like century was b…”
Cramer: Direct sales now account for one-third of Sentry's revenue
“And I think today, a third of revenue is sales, which is not that much at our scale, right?”
Cramer: JavaScript developers remain tech's largest and fastest-growing segment every year
“And that is like the P zero of the entire company is like, we have to solve JavaScript first. And it's because we recognize that was the growth of the industry. And I think, I don't remember where I got this data, I just quote it forever, was the first year wh…”
Song: State-of-the-art identity verification took 30 to 60 minutes manually
“A lot of the state of the art at that time was like getting a person to actually look at it. And you know, that would take anywhere from like 30 minutes to an hour.”
Song: Most early identity verification startups ended up verticalized in fintech
“Cause like a lot of identity prior to this is very verticalized. You'd have all sorts of businesses who are all like, you know, they all have this idea of we're going to build this universal thing, but in reality, it oftentimes just a vertical, like, Hey, we g…”
Abraham: Customers almost never ask Reducto about RAG chunking anymore
“Part of the initial interest for Reducto is RAG as a paradigm introduced this need for thinking about chunking, for example. So it wasn't just, can you parse the documents? It was after you parse it, what do I feed into my VectorDB? That was a, Initial selling…”
Abraham: Reducto crossed $1M ARR with just four employees
“I think we were at four employees when we crossed a million in ARR for the first time.”
1Password conceded no special investor voting rights or performance milestone deadlines
“We were able to sit there and say like, we're not giving up. There's no magic voting rights, no magic dates we have to hit.”
Delivery apps charge restaurants 30% and consumers 20% on average per order
“It's not just 30% that these delivery apps take from the restaurant. It's also 20% on average that they're charging the consumer.”