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
Payne: Focusing deeply on two to three problem areas quarterly scales executive leverage
“It's a strategy I've used in my career to scale myself. And so every quarter I might have two or three of those special areas that I'm going deep on with the hope that I can kind of scale myself. And to your question, I'm hoping I'm, while I'm doing that and h…”
Payne: Watching Tony Xu at DoorDash convinced me not to be CEO
“I decided I don't want to be a CEO. Like I was a CEO of my little company, but the truth is I watched Tony and I was like, holy cow. Like, I don't really like this job that he has. Right. I like my job. Right. And so one of the things for me is like, I've been…”
Kreps: Confluent coined 'data in motion' against databases for its IPO
“Our approach to that was for the IPO was very much like, okay, databases, data at rest. But now all the parts of the company are connected. There's going to be an equally important problem of data in motion. And so, you know, the goal was to convey, Hey, these…”
Epling: Never give a founder CEO complete product ownership without a PM
“I never give them, like, complete ownership, if, like, in that regard, I would say I always assign a PM with it. And it's a PM that's like exciting cause it's cool to work with like the CEO and the founder on things.”
Epling: Specialty sellers unlocked growth for Vanta's new products
“And that was like one of the fixes we did this year where we're like, wow, when we talk to the general sellers, they just don't know how to go into these deep conversations for the new product. They're kind of scared about selling it because this thing's alrea…”
Epling: New Vanta engineers must ship to production in week one
“Our expectations, you're going to write a PR your first week and like ship something to production.”
Early Snowflake contracts allowed customers to roll over unused consumption for $1
“Because we let them roll over any unused consumption for a dollar. As long as they renewed the contract for a dollar, they could just roll it over.”
Snowflake ran up to 20 custom compensation plans for massive enterprise accounts
“For some of our largest accounts, we would have custom comp plans because we'd want to incentivize the right behavior. We knew that like XYZ company was going to be our, or potentially our largest customer. You want to, you look at that account and say, how do…”
Grosser: Vercel is not yet excellent at executive selling
“We are not yet excellent at executive selling”
Grosser: Vercel CEO and COO compete in outbound SDR cold-prospecting
“So Guillermo and I currently have a contest on who's going to be the top SDR at the company. So, you know, he's beating me actually on, like, the founder outreach to startups. I'm probably winning an enterprise CXO outreach. But, you know, I, I'm personally do…”
Varanasi: Meter lost 100% of customer office activity starting March 12, 2020
“A hundred percent of our customers went to zero starting March 12th.”
Jyoti Bansal managed initial sales reps directly until Harness reached $1M
“Actually at harness, I initially didn't hire until the first million, I didn't hire out of sales. And I said, okay, I'll just hire a few reps. I know how to manage them.”
Jyoti Bansal spent 25% of his time managing a broken AppDynamics board
“I probably spend, like, One to two percent of my time managing the board in Harness or maybe not even that. In AppDynamics, I had like a kind of a broken board dynamic that I had to spend like. 25% of time, my time managing the board and the shielding our team…”
Harness requires feature parity and a binary differentiator before launching products
“The rule that, that I like to follow is like, we are not launching a new product until we have, these are the table stake parity capabilities. And these are the binary differentiator that we have at least one strong binary differentiator. Maybe it's two, but a…”
Kanter: Stedi shares good news only after it happens, bad news immediately
“To start with, I'm only going to tell investors good news after it happens and bad news Either hopefully before it happens or as soon as it happens, worst case.”
Kanter: Stedi screens for candidates held back by their current environment
“What we think about during interviews is what I look for during interviews. I want to get a sense that the person is held back by the environment that they're in, that this person could be achieving more if not for the team that they're on or the organization …”
Stauch: Serval prioritized enterprise compliance on day one, unlike Verkada
“Verkata waited several years to support things like SCIM and SSO and SOC II and various compliance frameworks. We did all of those things from day one because we knew that that was going to be a blocker to sell into the large accounts that unlocked the bigger …”
Stauch: Serval pairs every customer with a core engineer
“Every customer, in addition to having a forward deployed owner, also has a member of the regular engineering team as an assigned person. So every engineer on the team has a deep appreciation, understanding of what we're building, who it's for, why we're buildi…”
Stauch: Serval's product roadmap has remained unchanged since seed pitch
“Our roadmap hasn't really changed in a year and a half. When we first pitched first round, those slides are basically our roadmap today. You know, priorities shifted, but The same core things that we're trying to build are true then as they were true now.”
Serval expects forward-deployed engineers to spend 20%+ time talking to customers
“There is very little difference other than we expect the forward deployed engineer to be spending 20% or more of their time talking to customers.”
Stauch: Serval evaluates every job candidate on their ability to recruit
“We evaluate every candidate on their ability to recruit the next candidate, and we consider that very highly. And that could be them actually being somebody that goes out and makes phone calls and recruits, or also just being somebody who's so good that we kno…”
fal built managed APIs to control code over arbitrary GPU orchestration
“Instead of Focusing on like GPU orchestration and letting people deploy whatever they want. We decided to build, you know, APIs. Every single code that's deployed is owned by us and we control the whole process.”
fal reached $100M ARR with only 6 to 10 go-to-market staff
“We have around six, maybe, maybe 10 if you include CSM and like all that.”
fal hired specific employees simply because they had active X profiles
“We hired couple people just because they had an active X and They ended up being like really active members of the community as well.”
fal hired six account executives before hiring a head of sales
“We built a sales team before we hired the head of sales. I think this is number one question, like series A or series B companies ask themselves what comes first. We decided to hire I think like six AEs first, everyone reported to either me or Burkai, and then…”
Sekar: Samsara does not charge separately for its platform layer
“So we don't charge for the platform. It's really a, the reason you would like to buy these Five products from Samsara as opposed to one product from Samsara and four from, you know, four other companies is each of these products kind of stands on its own as be…”
Sekar: Samsara abandoned channel partner sales because customers wanted direct relationships
“We tried that at Samsara, and a lot of actually specific partners that would have been very successful with at Meraki didn't work. And we found that actually these customers wanted to primarily buy directly from us and have a relationship with us. So that's so…”
Sekar: Samsara exclusively demos live software, never mockups or sandboxes
“Both at Meraki and Samsara, and really to this day, we start with a demo, right? And that can be over Zoom. It can be in person, but we start with, we're gonna show you a live working system. It's not a, you know, a sandbox. It's not Figma. We're gonna show yo…”
Asthana followed Stewart Butterfield's advice to take capital available on good terms
“I heard Stuart Butterfield from Slack say it at a conference that, you know, if the money is available on good terms, you just take it. And the money was available and on good terms. So I took it and it allowed us to invest.”
Canva rejected early investor pressure to launch an unpolished initial product
“Few investors asked us to ship a bit earlier than we would have. And we always said, no, we know what the product is. We know what we want to put out there as the first version.”
Canva has vowed never to do a massive codebase rewrite again
“So we've kind of vowed never to do a huge rewrite like that ever again.”
Agrawal: Parallel is fully in-person five days a week
“Twitter was famously remote friendly. Parallel, we're all in person, in one office, five days a week.”
Agrawal: Parallel operates with no formal roles, teams, or management hierarchy
“We don't talk about roles. We don't have teams. We don't have hierarchy. We're very chaotic.”
Agrawal: I only take jobs I would not hire myself for
“I only want to do jobs that I wouldn't hire myself for. And I think it's like, I do best when I'm slightly uncomfortable, insecure, don't feel up to it.”
Akhund: Mercury rejects goal-driven candidates who show ego or unhelpfulness
“So, you know, for example, for Mercury, we look for humble people that are helpful, that are curious, that are customer centric and product minded. I think all of those traits actually work pretty well together, but it's almost completely in contrast to some o…”
Mercury conducts product interviews for nearly all candidates, including non-product roles
“We have a product interview that we do for almost everyone, even non-product people get the product interview.”
Akhund: Mercury took a year and a half of building before launch
“Mercury took a year and a half before we launched. And I really think it was, yeah, maybe it could have launched a little earlier if everything had gone right, but it was minimum of one year to build this product end to end.”
Akhund: Mercury's initial TAM analysis was post-hoc justification for personal intuition
“Even if you take Mercury, like I was just so annoyed using the business banks that I used as entrepreneur. And like a lot of the things I did afterwards were like, you know, time analysis and this kind of post ad hoc justification to like get myself comfortabl…”
Younis: I have worked seven days a week my entire life
“I've worked seven days a week for as long as I can remember. I've never not worked seven days a week. So whether it's actually having multiple jobs or having one job where you work all the time.”
Younis: Marc Andreessen questioned why Applied Intuition didn't build self-driving cars
“And even Marc Andreessen, when he was funding the company in the, in that first round, he said you guys build all these tools, like, that might be as difficult to do than doing the autonomy thing itself. Why wouldn't you just do self-driving Cause the tools ar…”
Applied Intuition expands into new verticals by hiring multi-generational industry insiders
“We're like, we're going to get into defense. We got to find people who are like us in defense. Who's dad and grandfather words and we're in the military and we work at the DOD. Then we do trucking. Same thing. It's like you start pattern matching to what worke…”
Braintrust deliberately excluded traditional enterprises early to focus on product engineers
“We say our product is for product engineering teams that are trying to incorporate AI into their core products and services. And that description excludes and excluded a lot of, ah, sort of traditional enterprises, for example, early on, and we were okay with …”
Goyal cuts off all meetings at noon to protect afternoon focus
“So I cut off meetings at noon every day. I don't take any meetings afternoon.”
Goyal has worked every weekend since joining the MemSQL founding team
“I work every weekend. And I have since I joined MemSQL.”
London: It took five years and tens of millions in ARR to feel PMF
“It took me years, like maybe five years until I felt like, huh, ok, this is going well. So it may be like post-series B, like, you know, I don't know, like the tens of millions of AR, when I felt like, ok, this is actually, this is going well.”
Cramer: Sentry lacks product-market fit beyond its core error monitoring product
“We have some stuff that looks promising, but like I would not claim we have product market fit on, on the rest of our suite yet.”
Cramer: Why he gave up board control and hired his own replacements
“I gave up board control. I hired a CEO to take my job. I hired a CTO to take my job.”
Cramer: FedRAMP and China expansion are among Sentry's lowest roadmap priorities
“FedRAMP will be one of the last things we ever do, or maybe China, one of these really nuanced, complicated things to pull off that takes lots of resourcing, last thing we'll ever do, because one, the bucket of customers is smaller, not the dollars of customer…”