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
Elliott-McCrea: Dropbox maintained unified engineering whereas Adobe runs multi-product via acquisitions
“Dropbox was a very unified engineering culture, unified practices, unified technology stack, unified hiring, all of those things. And Adobe is not like, it's just a little bit of a wild west in a way that's kind of crazy. And that's just the history of its of …”
Elliott-McCrea: Etsy ran many bad experiments because internal statistical understanding was poor
“At Etsy, it was about understanding experimentation beyond just AB. Like, we were a very experimental heavy company, but we did a lot of bad experiments because our statistical understanding was poor.”
Elliott-McCrea: Dropbox historically avoided internal financial discussions
“At Dropbox, Dropbox didn't ever care to talk about money. And so understanding, like, let's go with the basic unit economics. How much does a gigabyte of storage cost? I'm not going to answer that question because that's, you know, a secret for Dropbox and it'…”
Weiss: Slack reached $80M-$90M ARR before hiring a sales head
“I think we got to,
I want to say, 80 or ninety million dollars in ARR before we hired a head of sales.”
Weiss: 85% of Slack Enterprise Deals at IPO Originated from Self-Service
“I don't know what the latest set is, but I know when we went public, we had a sat, I think it was 85% of our enterprise deals by the time we went Public at our IPO had started off as paid customers through self-service, meaning that they literally got to the p…”
Parikh: Facebook scaled deployment from daily to continuous release cadence
“When I was at Facebook, when I joined, we did, which was like, really fast at the time. We used to ship The main core of Facebook once a day, and it was like a Herculean effort that, you know, most of the time went okay, but sometimes it didn't go okay, and, b…”
Small Microsoft CoreAI teams ship code multiple times per day
“We have teams now in Core AI and Microsoft that, you know, that I support, that I work with, that, Are shipping daily, sometimes multiple times a day, and, you know, some of this stuff is, like, newer products, so they don't have lots of tech debt and whatnot,…”
Off-the-shelf infrastructure could not match Facebook's massive scaling requirements
“When I got to Facebook, we weren't building our own data centers, we weren't building our own hardware, we weren't laying around subsea cables, and, you know, those types of things, but over the years, as we saw, one, kind of the scale that we needed to operat…”
Noronha: Presentation creators reported spending 90% of time formatting slides
“A lot of the quotes we heard, probably the single most common quote we heard from all these people, no matter what their job was, I spend 90% of my time on formatting and 10% of my time on content.”
Sager: Square leadership framed its IPO as merely another milestone
“I think I learned a lot there from my days at Square, where that's kind of how Sarah and Jack talked about the IPL. It wasn't the finish line. It was just another milestone amongst many milestones.”
Sager: Seven or eight Plaid ICs now run $100M businesses
“And we have so many people at Plaid, right. That like have internally kind of shot through the ranks that have gone from like IC roles to now running a hundred million dollar businesses. And so I could literally name seven or eight people on my team that have …”
Copplestone: Supabase originated from the tech stack built for Nimbus
“I built Nimbus with the same tech stack and that tech stack now is what is super base.”
Copplestone: Supabase now serves eight million developers
“We could just kind of push things out and people would adopt them and we didn't have to worry about, you know, eight million developers trying something out on day one now.”
Figma CEO Dylan Field responds to social media faster than the team
“The whole company is built around that, starting from Dylan, who every day will respond to people on social who are asking questions or giving feedback on what we're building. In fact, he's so fast, I have to give our whole team, we have a whole team of people…”
Figma ships net new product launches multiple times per week
“We have. We're, I mean, at the cadence of multiple a week.”
Xero's AI bank reconciliation hits 97% accuracy, saving businesses 22 hours monthly
“So we built automatic bank reconciliation. What this means is your transactions in an accounting system are matched to your cash in your bank. Our customers are like, no, no, no, no, no, no. You can't do this. You can't do this with the machine. There's so muc…”
Hirshberg: Artemis reached 30 employees in seven months, adding 1-2 weekly
“We started seven months ago and we are now about 30 people in the team. Growing about one to two people every week and scaling across engineering product research and go to market.”
Hirshberg: Artemis's first three customers asked to buy unprompted
“Reaching the level of trust and reaching the level of satisfaction where they actually came to us, the first three customers and told us that they want to buy before we ask them to buy the product.”
Payne: DoorDash targeted gross margin profit at 6 months, contribution profit at 12
“So you have to hit six months of volume to get the gross margin positive, and then you have to get to 12 months at a certain volume to get what we call contribution margin profit. To flow through the bottom line.”
Payne: My six-month stint as Tinder CEO was a total disaster
“But then there was the Tinder experience where, you know, it was a disaster. I got fired after six months and I, you know, it just didn't, I didn't fit there.”
Payne: Amazon launched its entire video business in six months in 1998
“This is in, you know, March or April of 2000, sorry, in 1998, right? And Jeff wants us to launch in October, right? And so, roll forward. October of 1998, we launch Amazon. I'm in every mahogany boardroom for every movie studio. So I went from, like, can't get…”
Payne: 92% of eBay sales went through search in 2009
“So when I joined eBay, they said, Christopher, go fix search. That was my thing. This was 2009. 92% of the sales went through search at that time.”
Payne: DoorDash's nationwide expansion succeeded through remote city launches
“And DoorDash cracked that. That was our, we figured out how to expand economically remotely. And that, that allowed us to expand across the country. Everybody calls it the suburb strategy, but it really was an expansion strategy.”
Payne: Tony Xu and I pitched The Cheesecake Factory in person
“Tony and I, who was showing up at the Cheesecake Factory selling the Cheesecake Factory? It was Tony and me, right? We were the little engine that could, right? We, and we were like, we're not in Rideshare. We're in food delivery. We're gonna, we're in, so the…”
Kreps: Apache Kafka Sat on the Shelf During First Open-Source Year
“And you know, it actually took a while, you know, probably the first year, it mostly sat on the shelf as a open source project, which we were quite disappointed about.”
Kreps: LinkedIn offered an unprecedented balance sheet investment in Confluent
“When we went to quit, LinkedIn was like, oh, okay, well, this is, you know, first of all, we don't really want you to leave, but if you're going to leave, we do think this is really valuable. We would be interested in investing.
And we were like, okay.
Off the…”
Kreps: Confluent's initial seed round shifted to a Benchmark-led Series A
“And it went from something where LinkedIn was going to be the kind of major investor to being, you know, a smaller part of the round. And it went from kind of a seed investment to a series A through the course of that fundraising process. But yeah, it was, you…”
Kreps: Confluent's one-year pitch roadmap took five years to complete
“What we had pitched was actually very close to what we built. It's just, I said we were going to do it in a year. And I think in practice, The first thing we launched was much less than that. And to do everything on the slide took like five years.”
Epling: Post-acquisition GitHub ran independently on Google tools and AWS
“That company was run very independently. Like, I literally quit Microsoft. Like, your contract ended. It was like, we used all Google tools. Everything was built on AWS. Everything was Zoom. When Satya sent emails to the company, they didn't go to anybody that…”
Epling: GitHub Actions was GitHub's first usage-based pricing product
“You know, with GitHub Actions, that was, like, one of the products I built while I was there. You know, we were doing usage-based pricing. It was the first time GitHub had ever done usage-based pricing on anything”
Epling: GitHub racked its own Mac hardware in its own data centers
“We actually racked our own Macs in our own data centers there.”
Epling: Nat Friedman gave GitHub Actions a strict nine-month GA deadline
“Talked to Nat, and he's like, hey, we've got GitHub Actions, and he was like, you have, like, nine months to get this to GA. And there's like no question of like, could I ask for more time or not? But it's like basically build it and get it to GA in nine month…”
Snowflake was trending toward $500 million in revenue when Frank Slootman joined
“Like when Frank came in, we were probably going to, we were trending towards you know, five hundred million.”
Snowflake launched with an entirely outbound sales motion and zero product-led growth
“We were very much an outbound organization. So everything was like just Cold call, or spam, spam, spam. We didn't have any, we had no PLG.”
Snowflake's inside sales model for companies under 200 employees worked like gangbusters
“At, I think, 200 employees and below, we started building out an inside sales model, and that thing worked like gangbusters. It worked really well.”
Frank Slootman required Snowflake executives to resolve peer conflicts directly without escalating
“That was something that Frank Soutman encouraged. Like you always say, go direct, like don't go to dad. And have dad go and deal with that stuff. So that would be like, you know, yeah, I'll go directly to Denise or I'll go directly to Christian Clownerman, who…”
Grosser: Nike self-hosts Next.js on Akamai rather than using Vercel
“Nike's on Next.js. They're not on Vercel. They, you know, have Akamai as their CDN and WAF.”
Grosser: Vercel's revenue growth model was most sensitive to ACV
“When we did the lead to revenue model, it, the model for Vercel this year was most sensitive to our ACV. So the most credible way for me to increase revenue growth rate was that particular area.”
Varanasi: Apple Silicon switched to two shared software-defined radios
“When they did that, usually hardware had three separate radios for like, 2.4 gigahertz, five gigahertz and Bluetooth. When they moved, they were using what this thing called software defined radio, which is using two radios for all three of those things.”
Varanasi: Alarm.com and ADT are valued more on RMR than GAAP revenue
“And today, if you go look at alarm.com or ADT or anyone, More than the gap revenue, this is the number that people care about. It's not even a gap metric, but what is the RMR?”
Varanasi: Shenzhen delivers manufactured circuit boards same-day
“You could design a circuit board in the morning and some kid would run over to your office by nighttime.”
Varanasi: 90% of networking equipment is sold through channel partners
“90% of networking is actually sold through the channel.”
Varanasi: Networking revenue comprises nearly 50% of IT channel sales
“Almost 50% of the channel is networking revenue.”
AppDynamics signed Netflix as its third customer during the streaming transition
“In AppDynamics, our customer number three was Netflix. And Netflix was just transitioning. And it sounds like an old time ago, very long time ago now, they were just starting to transition from DVD company to a streaming company.”
Jyoti Bansal faced 30 venture capital rejections while raising for AppDynamics
“About three months. And I got a lot of rejections. I got about 30 rejections.”
Harness operates 16 internal startups across different development and funding stages
“And we have You know, 16 startups inside harness now, and they're all of these different stages.”
Former company founders lead half of Harness's 16 internal product startups
“About actually half of our startup founders are former founders.”
Kanter: Complex fitment criteria kept auto parts e-commerce penetration around 4%
“And because of the complicated fitment criteria, the e-commerce penetration rates in auto parts are very, very low. So I don't know the latest numbers, but when I was in the auto parts industry a number of years ago, the penetration rates in automotive were se…”