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
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 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.”
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…”
Zima: Looker's original product was built via the command line
“The original product was literally a model that you had to build in the command line. It just was technically elegant for the exact problem that it was solving. And it really aligned well with the user that we were selling it to.”
Foster: Veterans United is owned 50/50 by two brothers with zero outside funding
“It's owned by two brothers, 50, 50, and never raised any money.”
Shippo spent eight to nine years closing its FedEx partnership
“Just this year, we got our, like, we got FedEx to agree to this kind of account structure. So it's really, it's literally taken us like eight to nine years with certain shipping providers to get them comfortable with that.”
Behrens Wu: Shippo was rejected by YC before joining 500 Startups
“We did get into like an accelerator at some point, like we were rejected by YC and then got into 500 startups.”
Albert Wenger passed on Shippo's seed before leading its Series A
“I met one investor during our seed round, Albert Wenger from Union Square Ventures, who wouldn't invest at that point in time, but we really, like, hit it off, and he's also from Germany, and we, like, just decided to stay in touch, and I think it was more of …”
Jackson: Rewind AI raised over $33M from a16z, NEA, and Sam Altman
“You've raised over thirty three million dollars, I believe at this point from great folks, Andreessen Horowitz, NEA, Sam Altman, and of course us here at First Round.”
Siroker: Rewind compresses screen recordings 3,000x for local storage and OCR
“We capture everything your screen is showing. We compress it, you know, 3000 times smaller, so it stores, it can be stored locally. We do optical character recognition on every word that appears on your screen. And now, you know, we're doing transcription as w…”
Elliott-McCrea: Half of all software engineers joined the industry in the past decade
“You know, if you look at the last 10 years, half of everybody working as a software engineer joined the industry in the last 10 years.”
Weiss outlines Google's 70-20-10 product portfolio allocation framework
“When I was at Google, they used to have this model they called seventy-twenty-ten, and I think they kind of classified as, you know, 70% should be, that first category you said, like, low-hanging fruit, obvious wins, incremental. 20% should be kind of extendin…”
Seshan: Amber Feng and Christina Cordova built Stripe Connect's initial multi-party version
“And then we had started exploring this thing called Connect where Amber Feng and Christina Cordova had built an initial version of this, like, multi-party payments idea that Someone like Shopify or someone like Lyft could be able to route payments in multiple …”
Grosser: Vercel headcount exceeds 600; Stripe reached 8,000 before departure
“When I was at Stripe, we were, I think, 8000 people by the time I left. Vercel is now north of 600.”
Grosser: Claire Hughes Johnson managed People before marketing at Stripe
“If you took Stripe under Claire, She had people, but didn't have marketing at the outset, had marketing at a later point.”
Kanter: Automotive aftermarket has a $200B repair and $40B upgrade market
“There's the kind of need-based repairs, which is, you know, somewhere as a Two hundred billion dollar market, so you know, your tire blows out, or you need a new muffler or something. And then there's the want-based purchases, which are the upgrades, and I was…”
Sekar: Meraki succeeded by selling networking gear through channel partners
“Meraki, we sold through channel partners, and it turned out that that was the way that people like to buy networking.”
Asthana: Teleport Me reached six to seven million users
“We had, I think, about six, seven million users.”
Melanie Perkins' previous yearbook business generated two to three million in revenue
“I think it did two or three million dollars in revenue.”
Song: Japanese ID verification requires custom parsing for the Imperial calendar
“All their ID cards, these, they don't use a Gregorian calendar, right?
So like we had to do a lot of custom work to make sure, even for like Japanese date parsing, making sure that it respects the Imperial calendar there and all sorts of aspects.”
1Password was entirely consumer-focused and Apple-centric in 2012
“Yeah, it was all consumer at the time. Honestly, it was mostly Mac. It was like Mac and iOS. It was very, very little. I think they had a reader for Android and something similar for Windows, but it was really very much of an Apple focused company.”
1Password originally operated on a perpetual license model with third-party syncing
“And it was all license-based as well. And that was the interesting thing. So it was, you know, you would buy the license of, I don't know what password, four, maybe it was, or three. I can't even remember the version back then. And you would hold that and then…”
1Password originated as an internal autofill tool for web development testing
“And so they thought one of the ways that we can make it less expensive is to automate some of the testing. We'll just spend a few weeks, build this tool that will allow us to autofill so that when we do testing, we can use that tool to autofill addresses and c…”
The average American restaurant owner makes only $50,000 per year in profit
“The average restaurant owner is making 50,000 a year in profit. So 6000 a year is a lot.”
Amin: Clay has roughly 4,600 members in its customer Slack community
“We have maybe 4600 people today in the Slack channel, and that's pretty active.”
Germanidis: Runway's co-founders met in an NYU art and technology program
“So three co-founders we met in art school, which is not the place where usually AI companies start from. So we met at the program at NYU that was kind of focused on the intersection of art and technology.”
Rauch regrets unnecessarily launching two other open-source projects alongside Next.js
“When I launched Next, concurrently, we launched another two really successful open source projects, and there was just no need.”