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
Desai: Sentry SaaS and open source have zero feature delta
“Number one, the software, a SaaS offering is exactly the same as the open source offering. There's no feature delta. So as a company, you can run the fully functional, up-to-the-minute value of Sentry on your own without paying us anything.”
Desai: Sentry has surpassed 100,000 SaaS organizations
“We've just crossed a 100,000 SaaS orgs because of the sustained kind of commitment to building a great product, being in the community, making sure access is easy, and then participating in the community.”
Reid Hoffman stayed directly involved in LinkedIn's product as chairman
“Even as a fact, even when he stepped out of the CEO role and was chairman, he kept his hand pretty directly in product.
He might even argue too much at some times.”
LinkedIn had no mobile product strategy in 2009 beyond an intern's project
“So in 2009, I was handed LinkedIn mobile.
It had been literally a fun, innovative thing that one of the engineers had built.
We had an intern over the summer work on actually keeping it up, but we did not have a heavy focus on mobile.
And it was because when I…”
Wealthfront pioneered automated ETF tax-loss harvesting and launched direct indexing in 2013
“Wealthfront was the first to do ETF tax loss harvesting automated. And then we did direct indexing. Direct indexing is so hot right now in the industry. It's 20, 24. Direct indexing is so hot. We launched it the end of 2013, my first year there, because it was…”
Early eBay evaluated every proposed product feature using three-year NPV financial spreadsheets
“EBay worked very much. They had an incredibly detailed financial spreadsheet that literally every feature we built went into a spreadsheet with a three year kind of NPV based that even built in eBay's cost of capital.”
Adding donation presets in multiples of 18 increased median Jewish donations 80%
“The reason I got written up in the New York Times is it turned out that one little feature actually moved our median donation to Jewish charities by 80%. It increased it. That median donation went from a hundred dollars to one 80.”
In 2015, 30% to 40% of mid-market sales calls happened over video
“I would probably want to say 30, 40% of calls were, at the time, it wasn't even Zoom, right? It was Webex and BlueJeans and all sorts of names. Sales were happening. Obviously it was more hybrid than now, mostly for mid-range customers.”
Most VCs initially rejected Gong because they believed CRMs were sufficient
“Most VCs did not want to invest in Gog in the beginning. They're like CRM is good enough. It's a done deal. You don't need any more sales tools.”
Gong initially avoided the term 'AI' because buyers were afraid of it
“It wasn't about AI at the time. I mean, we didn't even use the term AI because people were scared of AI, but it was a lot around more like sense efficiency.”
Gong converted 11 of its 12 free beta design partners to paid
“So we had like a 12 design partners. We got them through a network and a consultant we had worked with, and then we all, it was all free... We called all of them and said, hey, beta is over. We're starting to charge something. That was six months into the comp…”
Every Unblocked user first asks questions they already know to test it
“Every single person who onboards to Unblocked, without fail, the first question they ask is something that they're an expert in. They look to build confidence in the system. It's a hundred percent reproducible. I've never seen an exception outside of it.”
Buddybuild doubled pricing on Stewart Butterfield's advice, immediately doubling revenues
“He was right. We doubled it. It had no impact on the business in terms of customers coming in or what have you, other than we doubled our revenues on that day moving forward.”
Masad: JS REPL was first to run Python and Ruby in browser
“I got a prototype running and we're the first to put Python and Ruby and a few other languages in the browser. And I open sourced it.”
Masad: Replit submitted a Rickroll video for its Y Combinator application
“So I put in the Rickroll video. Rick Astey is never going to give you up. And till this day, if you go to the YC portal and you click on Repplin and you click the video where it should be the founder interview, you'll get Rickrolled.”
Berner: Snowflake ships its customer success motion to the sales team
“Sometimes even in those cases, you don't really need a lot from a CSM, like a success motion, and sometimes that success motion gets, gets shipped over to the sales team. Sometimes I've seen that happen, and sometimes that works, like that's how Snowflake does…”
Berner: Many $100M+ companies lack operationalized onboarding functions
“You would be amazed at how many big organizations, like over a hundred million in revenue, That don't have an operationalized onboarding or implementation function.”
Amin: The spreadsheet is the world's most popular programming environment
“We started playing with the metaphor of a spreadsheet because it was the world's most popular programming environment.”
Amin: Most outbound tools build proprietary datasets to minimize time to value
“Most tools choose to build their own data set. And they're like, this is the best data set, the one that we built. And they try to be as easy to use as possible because they think that the best way to go is to be the, you know, shorten the time to value.”
Amin: Multiple consultants earned over $1M implementing Clay for clients
“And actually a couple of them have made more than a million dollars just implementing clay for other customers, which is kind of wild.”
Amin: Clay grew from ~120 to ~1,000 customers over the year
“Yeah, I mean, we've grown from maybe a 120 customers at the beginning of the year to we should end the year at around a thousand.”
Parrish: Dylan Field had Figma's first sales hire work support for a month
“And the other thing that Dylan asked me actually to do in the first month of joining was to join the support team. He asked me to not do anything on the sales side, spend four months with the support team in the support queue, working on bugs, understanding th…”
Eighty percent of early tech unicorns were built on Asana
“A lot of the early unicorns, like when unicorns were still a big deal, 80% of them were sort of built on Asana.”
Asana had 5% company penetration compared to Dropbox and Slack's 30%
“We didn't have the dynamic that Dropbox and Slack had where you have 30% of a company using it, especially when you go outside of the big tech companies. And so, A lot of times it would be like five percent of employee base”
Google Bard no longer hallucinates on time and weather queries
“Which, happy to report, Bard does not hallucinate now on time and weather.”
Tech executives are struggling to find jobs after a year of searching
“And even in executive roles, I think there are people in there who are not getting traction after almost a year of searching, despite having many senior roles before.”
Automattic spent millions hosting WordPress.com while new apps remained tedious
“At WordPress they had invested
Millions and millions and millions of dollars in becoming proficient at hosting one application, WordPress.com.
But any incremental new app, new product, new feature was very, very tedious.”
OpenAI built the ChatGPT web interface using the Next.js framework
“ChatGPT itself is built on Next.js.”
An open core model is a purchasing requirement for many government agencies
“Outside of some, you know, I visit with a lot of customers in PubSec, and that is actually for a lot of the agencies, a requirement.”
Looker scaled support staff linearly with customer count through acquisition
“We were hiring linearly with support with customers all the way through our acquisition. And like support was the fastest growing org inside Looker.”
Zima: Looker's support quality inevitably declined as team reached 80 reps
“When you're training your 70th through 80th support reps with like support reps that you've hired in the last two years, it's really, really hard to maintain a bar where just everyone knows everything about everything. So the universal answer is like, yes, cer…”
Zima: Embedded reporting grew to 30% to 40% of Looker's business
“And like, lo and behold, four years later, it's 30 or 40% of Looker's business.”
Zima: Looker calculated it could hit $1B revenue in core product alone
“Like we calculated how much revenue we could get in our area of the product. And it's kind of nice when you set up a company and you're like, we can get to a billion dollars in revenue doing exactly what we do today, just more of it.”
Berson: Looker never missed a quarterly target across First Round's history
“Is I think in, in the history of first round across 450 businesses, it's the only company that didn't miss a number all the way through sort of massive exit or sort of somewhat directionally, that's the case.”
Zima: Looker hit its 80th-percentile target for 24 consecutive quarters
“We sort of just pick like the 80th percentile of a great business. And we said, that's our goal. And then we drew that line out for 24 quarters and hit it, which is, you know, no, no startup founder is going to be like, I am not happy with that.”
Foster: In 2012 only half a dozen notable tech companies hired remotely
“And the fact that there was maybe, you know, half a dozen tech companies of like name That were doing that at the time, you know, that were more than, say, 10 or 50 employees doing that. That really gave us an incredible advantage trying to attract top enginee…”
Zapier only ever raised a $1.3 million seed round
“We raised the 1.3 million seed round. That's all we raised.”
Zapier reached 40 employees before hiring anyone with prior management experience
“I think it took us till we probably had 30 or 40 people before we hired someone who had been a manager before into the company, which in hindsight was just like far too long.”
Behrens Wu: In 2013, no shipping interface matched Stripe or Shopify's usability
“There was just no good resource for getting advice and no like technology interface that we thought was kind of Up to par with the other e-commerce technologies we were using. And like, specifically we were using our e-commerce stack was like the usual one, St…”
Siroker: Rewind records user activity and stores all data locally
“Rewind is a truly personalized AI. So it captures everything you see, say, and hear, stores it all locally on your devices.”
Siroker: Rewind could not exist without Apple Silicon
“And it's so, you know, co occurred with Apple Silicon becoming really powerful and enabling this before Apple Silicon, you know, rewind couldn't exist.”
Siroker: Every Rewind engineer ships to production daily on average
“You know, we ship on average, you know, every engineer ships code production every day on average.”
Siroker: Every new Rewind engineer ships to production within 24 hours
“Every engineer, when they start at Rewind, within 24 hours of starting, they ship to production.”
Many AI startups failed between 2018 and 2020 over human-in-the-loop dependencies
“And a lot of startups actually went under in 2018, 2020, just realizing that they were not going to get there.”
Mehta: Square CEO Alyssa Henry reviews and critiques all submitted materials
“Alyssa reads everything. And I mean everything. And she's not above any real piece of work and nothing is beneath her at some level. Like if there is a material, a piece of material that is being put in front of her or is in her queue, she will get to it. It m…”
Elliott-McCrea: Capping Flickr's engineering team at 20 made it fragile
“Flickr was very famously a team of 20 people, and we never wanted to get larger than 20, which meant that once people started leaving, we didn't have a lot of resilience, and very quickly that organization got unhealthy.”
Elliott-McCrea: Tech employee tenure averaged 18 months over the past decade
“For the last decade, you know, average tenure has been about 18 months in these kind of companies that we're talking about, which means it's very hard to actually build an experiment with culture in the way that we were for a while.”