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
London: Gusto's YC Demo Day pitch mapped expansion beyond payroll
“The last slide was all about that. It was about, hey, we're starting from payroll. The next step is benefits and HR. And from there, it's going to be a full what we call their people platform. So everything, you know, to help you start building, grow your busi…”
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…”
Abraham: Reducto co-founders won Anthropic's hackathon when Claude launched
“We did Anthropics hackathon when they first released Claude. Won that hackathon together and just even putting aside the projects, just really enjoyed working with each other.”
1Password transitioned from a $75 upfront license to $2.99 monthly subscriptions
“You think of our individual, we make two 99 a month on the individual. We used to sell the app for 75 bucks. Like, if anything, we're probably making less on it, but that's consistent, right?”
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: Under 2% of US taxpayers contribute annually to an IRA
“Most people, less than two percent actually contribute to an IRA annually from all the taxpayers in the United States.”
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…”
Anand: Clay has 50 community clubs globally
“We have, you know, 50 different clay clubs hosting community events all around the world from Bangalore to Sydney to Toronto.”
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…”
Acxiom Paid One-Third of Its Market Cap for Unprofitable Startup LiveRamp
“Axiom paid a third of its market cap for a live ramp, a thirty million ARR company when Axiom probably had like, I don't remember, like probably eight hundred million in revenue at the time and high cash flow for this company that was like not profitable and h…”
Muthukumar: About 10,000 developers completed Stripe's capture the flag challenge
“We launched a capture the flag tournament at Stripe and that's typically for, you know, InfoSec researchers and black hat type of areas of security research. And we did that at the payments domain, and we had no expectations of how many developers would partic…”
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.”
Amazon spent nine years experimenting before successfully adopting a marketplace model
“How long did Amazon spend trying to graft a marketplace onto Amazon? Nine years, I think, given their first efforts before it finally worked, but that wasn't an accident.”
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.…”
Masad: Glitch raised $30M seed and had 80 people vs Replit's 5
“Glitch at the time got, their seed round was thirty million dollars, and they hired, you know, right off the bat, tens of people that got like 80 people who were like four or five at the time or something like that.”
Masad: Replit launched 'Explain Code' with OpenAI in 2021
“I think the first feature we launched in partnership with OpenAI was in twenty-twenty-one was explain code. And I think it was like one of the first coding applications of GPT that went into production.”
Cieri: Square layered vertical solutions over its core POS to serve complex businesses
“At Square, what we did and what the company's still doing is, is came up with a vertical strategy where we had, okay, we've got our base square point of sale out of the box, you know, works for most industries with simple needs. And as you start to get more ad…”
Cieri: Gusto serves over 300,000 small businesses evenly across industries
“So if you break down our customer set and we have north of 300,000 small businesses on Gusto now, And you look at them sort of by traditional industry segmentation, it's very evenly distributed across a lot of industries.”
Parrish: Early Figma enterprise pricing was $540 per editor annually
“So for Figma pro it was 15 dollars a month. If you wanted to pay monthly, you could do it annual and that was 12 dollars a month for the year. And then our enterprise tier was 540 dollars for a design editor.”
Narkhede: Confluent was founded four years after Kafka was open-sourced
“So this conference started four years after Apache Kafka was open sourced and became successful and
It was very much an organic decision.”
Narkhede: Confluent Cloud is nearly larger than its on-premise software business
“And today, our cloud business is growing and is, you know, almost larger than the software business as well.”
Bard evaluates generated responses sentence-by-sentence against the web
“We recently launched something that we call the V-two of our Google It button, which when you receive a response on on BARD, and it happens to be something that you want a factual answer around, we go sentence by sentence and find, is there content from around…”
Stripe's core undocumented technical strategy was maintaining a Ruby monolith
“Undocumented strategies at Stripe was we use a Ruby monolith. And so everything was done in the Ruby programming language with a few minor exceptions.”
Germanidis: Runway shifted to video tools in 2020 with Green Screen
“Really the big shift towards video tools Happened with when we released a tool that was called Green Screen. And Green Screen is what's called in a video editing rotoscoping tool.”
Cloudup's real-time tech became the foundation for WordPress 5's block editor
“They were really interested in the real time technologies for collaboration so that you could go to WordPress and like edit posts, what later became the foundation of their block based editor for WordPress five.”
Most of Rauch's original Next.js codebase has been deleted
“Most of my original Next.js code is deleted now.”
GitLab governs its pricing model via 11 published community promises
“We have promises. So we have 11 promises listed out there on what we will follow to make sure that we're continuing to serve the community that helped us get where we are today, but also understanding that we're a commercial product now, and then help them dif…”
Kramer: Going public forced GitLab to restrict financial metrics via SAFE framework
“We became a public company, and so we had to introduce something our legal team noted as a safe framework. Please don't ask me what it stands for. You can Google it because I don't remember, but it's basically understanding if this is financial information, it…”