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
De Milliano: Executive hiring decisions fail 50% of the time within 18 months
“And then at the end, a couple of them will have seemed interesting and like they'll have to make some sort of agonizing decision and like still 50% of the time they fail in their decision after a year or 18 months.”
De Milliano: Stripe nearly rejected Claire Hughes Johnson when hiring at 150 employees
“Claire joined Stripe when we were around a 150 people, and we were very, very close to organ rejection.”
Busque: 65% to 70% of 401(k) participants don't know they pay fees
“It's like, 65, 70% of people don't understand they're paying asset-based fees in their for one K. No idea.”
Busque: Average 401(k) asset-based fees have dropped to 80-90 basis points
“It's not that way anymore. And I think guideline had a lot to do with that. But that industry average has come way down. It's now maybe like 80 basis points, 90 basis points or something like that, just fee compression over time.”
Busque: Legacy providers like ADP and Paychex weren't selling 10,000 plans yearly
“And you look at ADP and paychecks and like, they weren't selling 10,000 plans in a year.”
Busque: Guideline services nearly 60,000 businesses with 400 employees
“We're 400 people at guideline, but we service almost 60,000 small businesses at this point.”
Busque: Guideline manages nearly $17 billion in assets
“So we managed almost seventeen billion dollars in assets now.”
Busque: California retirement mandate affects 200K Gusto and Intuit businesses
“So if you have one or more employees in California, you now have to meet this mandate, which is just a huge, that's 200,000 small businesses across Gusto and Intuit alone.”
Magnuson: WeWork ran out of money building its Meatpacking location
“It was down in the meatpacking district. It was the early days of WeWork and they actually ran out of money while they were building it.”
Magnuson: Braze never received multiple term sheets until its Series D
“It wasn't until our series D six years into the business that we ever had a fundraising round where we got more than one term sheet.”
Magnuson: 85% to 90% of mobile SaaS in 2012-2015 targeted gaming
“If you go back to 2012 to 2015, probably 85, 90% of the SaaS businesses that were in mobile were very focused on helping the gaming industry because it was the kind of quickest route to make money in the early days.”
Magnuson: Competitors burned out raising $50M Series As in an immature market
“We actually had a number of competitors in the early days who went out You know, at the same time we went and raised 10 to fifteen million dollar Series A, they went and raised a fifty million dollar Series A, and they actually burned themselves out. Despite h…”
Anand: UX iteration cut Clay's sales cycle from seven demos to one
“And you can imagine that compounded over seven months is kind of how we went from these initial sales calls. We're taking like seven demos to get someone to pay two, 300 a month. To January, February of, where it was taking one call or even none.”
Anand: Clay pioneered usage-based pricing in sales tech in 2022
“We were a usage-based pricing model in twenty-twenty-two. At the time, it was fairly controversial because everything in sales tech was per seat. Now it's obviously changed with AI, so it's changed. But I think we were at the vanguard of that.”
Clay kept a waitlist until reaching multiple millions in ARR in July 2023
“We actually launched a product in February, 20, 20 to remove the waitlist. Two months later, put the waitlist back on. And then we didn't remove the waitlist until multiple millions of ARR in, you know, July of 20, 23.”
Anand: Anthropic tripled inbound enrichment rates using Clay
“Like Anthropic used us to automate all their inbound at scale and triple their enrichment rates on that and finding way more leads through that.”
Handy: dbt Labs grew 10% month-over-month for six years straight
“We grew consistently at 10% month over month for about six years running.”
Handy: Early cloud data startups ignored the transformation stage of ETL
“No one had taken seriously the T part of it, the transformation part of it.”
Handy: Data leaders hosted dbt meetups to expand their hiring pipeline
“One of the weirdest experiences was people in that community that were like, that ran data teams, they would host meetups for dbt to try to convince other people to use dbt because they needed more people to hire.”
Handy: In 2019, 3 dbt engineers supported 1,000 companies driving $100M+ compute
“Even when in 2019, we had a thousand companies using dbt, And continued, you know, three X year over year growth rate. I still didn't want to take venture, but it was so clear we were doing the product and the community a disservice by under investing in it. W…”
Handy: dbt Labs lost one-third of its team after taking venture capital
“We churned about a third of our team over the next year.”
Handy: From 2017-2019, open source founders feared AWS commoditization
“In the 2017 through 19 period, it was like a massive concern for every open source founder that AWS was just going to take your thing and put you out of business.”
Dylan Field mapped Design Twitter to seed Figma with top influencers
“And so he actually visualized Design Twitter into this graph And figured out the nodes that were the largest of, okay, who's following who, and then went to them and showed Figma, got their feedback, kept going back to them, not trying to sell them it, but jus…”
Real-time multiplayer design was originally seen as undesirable by designers
“The tension was this idea that everyone could be in the file at the same time. And that was now intuitive, but back then was considered undesirable to some extent. Like, you know, this idea that a hovering art director is always going to be in your file, like …”
Two-thirds of Figma's weekly active users are non-designers
“Two thirds of our users are, our weekly active users are non-designers, like developers, like PMs and others.”
Designers initially used Figma reluctantly because Sketch was a better single-player tool
“Around the time when I joined, I like to describe Figma as designers reluctantly using it because they recognize the value of collaboration, but like they themselves, a single player tool, like they felt it was insufficient relative to sketch.”
LiveRamp Suffered Attrition Finding Product-Market Fit Because Experimentation Ended
“There was actually like a big morale hit then, even though we were so clearly finding success. We lost a lot of people because they were like, well, I want to go build. Cause I said, we selected for the people that love just experimenting and building. And now…”
LiveRamp scaled from $30M to over $200M ARR between 2014 and 2017
“When we were acquired, we were thirty million ARR. In 2017, we crossed two hundred million ARR on the backs of getting these Fortune 500 customers from Axiom, and then being able to use those success stories to sell to other large brands.”
Popsa quadrupled App Store install conversion by changing copy to 'five minutes'
“So they changed it to photo books in five minutes and they quadrupled their install conversion rate overnight.”
Popsa will hit $40 million in profitable revenue without outside investment
“Actually, they're going to make over forty million bucks this year. They're growing. They are profitable, bottom line profitable. They're not taking investment and they've sold five million photo books and other products and photo products.”
Bob Moesta boosted housing sales 70% by advertising in the obituaries
“So Bob took this and they just took their newspaper ads and moved them from wherever they were into the obituary section. And it worked. They increased their sales by like, 70%.”
Moore: RJMetrics essentially combined early versions of Fivetran, Snowflake, dbt, and Looker
“RJ Metrics was Fivetran, Snowflake, DBT, and Looker. All together in one product. We built all four of those products in order to build RJ Metrics.”
Moore: RJMetrics alumni later founded prominent data companies dbt, Stitch, and Omni
“The three co-founders of DBT all worked at RJ Metrics. The founders of Stitch, myself and Jake, which became the early competitor to Fivetran and played in that space. Omni, which is a hot new ticket in the BI space, their founding CTO, Chris Merrick, was our …”
Moore: Stitch matched RJMetrics' eight-year revenue run in 19 months without capital
“So Stitch never raised any additional outside capital. We basically like landed the plane of creating a really good home for RJ, bankrolling Stitch, creating a little bit of outcome for folks that had been involved in the RJ journey along the way. And then we …”
Moore: 70% of Crossbeam sign-ups came via invites from existing users
“Seven out of every 10 of those companies that signed up for the platform signed up because they were invited in by somebody else who was already on that.”
Moore: Crossbeam raised $100M and rival Reveal raised $50M during ZIRP
“Where we had raised, you know, a hundred million dollars from Andreessen Horowitz and others during the Zerp era, they raised fifty million dollars from Insight Partners and others during the Zerp era.”
McCabe: Every VC met in 2011 said $100M SMB revenue was impossible
“When I started Intercom and was raising a seed around in 20 11, every single venture capitalist I met, and you remember that kind of era, told me that you can't build a hundred million dollar revenue business in SMB. Like, it cannot be done.”
McCabe: Intercom pull requests rose 41% in 12 months after CEO return
“In the 12 months after I went back pull requests, which are the kind of atomic component of shipped code, were up 41% over the 12 months prior.”
McCabe: Intercom scored in high 90s percentile on employee survey
“We ran a An anonymous employee survey three months ago. We had 16 questions, and the questions were, you know I agree with the leadership of this company, and they will make us successful. I agree with our new policies. I agree with our new values. I agree wit…”
McCabe: Intercom reversed logo decline and accelerated revenue growth
“We're now seeing it in our numbers, we've got like six or seven quarters of accelerating Aurora growth Our logos were decreasing for two years. Now we've like turned that around and like total number of logos are now increasing for six months.”
Muthukumar: Stripe delayed an open-source page by six weeks for animation
“We delayed the launch of that page by almost a month and a half because our design team wanted to implement the game of life in the background, in the header background of that page. And that sounds crazy. It's like, why would you delay the launch of that by s…”
Muthukumar: Stripe required 'red pen' reviews for content reaching 100 users
“So if it was, you know, touching an audience size of less than a hundred or so users, We would expect you to just get a peer to take a look at it to make sure that we didn't have any grammatical errors, but anything above that, it went through that review proc…”
Muthukumar: ChatGPT has over 100 million weekly active users
“And in ChatGPT, we see more than a hundred million active users on a weekly basis.”
Winters: Most winning marketplaces remain single-category rather than multi-category
“As we look at most of the winners in marketplaces, you know, where I would say small winners from like a hundred million to a billion or bigger winners, which are a billion or more, most of them are single category, but then there's some really big outliers th…”
Winters: Pinterest doubled activation rates in one year by simplifying onboarding
“At Pinterest, we were able to double the activation rates after a year of work, but we had to dramatically simplify onboarding. We had to make sure it worked a lot better in all these international use cases that we weren't that good in. We had to delete a bun…”
Winters: Eventbrite measured only net dollar retention, not cohort retention, when he joined
“They actually, Eventbrite, when I joined, was not really in the habit of measuring cohort retention. It just measured net dollar retention.”
Desai: Product marketing initially owned pricing and packaging at VMware
“Pricing and packaging was done by product marketing at VMware initially. Everyone was technical. They understood the product. They could actually You know, demo and sell the product, which helps. Some of the same principles we're using now at Sentry which is y…”