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 13 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
Kreps: There is no business in selling pure open-source software
“And so, you know, if you're trying to sell a product which is purely open source, you know, effectively The price of that product should collapse to the cost of providing it, which is basically kind of a scale of zero, right? So, so there's no business in sell…”
Kreps: CEOs must learn ~80% of what functional executives know
“I think CEOs need to know, you know, about 80% of what their executives know about their function, I think, over time. So really kind of learn that discipline. Not enough to be good Add it, but enough to be, to know what good is and know if it's going well.”
Kreps: Existing Customer Pressure Naturally Starves Second Products
“I think inherently that a second product is always. Kind of irrelevant to people's main goals, you know, and the, all the pressure of a business is to satisfy the customers that you have, the big prospects coming in the door, that, that kind of main flow of bu…”
Kreps: Managers who recruit their own teams are massively more successful
“So I found that to be very true in hiring where, you know, people who just, you know, act like they have, they, you know, they just have to fight for their life to go hire this team by themselves as if there was no recruiting support and they're just really de…”
Kreps: Engineering decisions are knowable, early startup decisions are unknowable
“Certainly for engineering decisions. They're mostly knowable and there's mostly kind of right and wrong answers, but usually, especially the early phase of the company, you're making a lot of kind of very big critical decisions with a lot of unknowable aspects…”
Kreps: GTM construction is where early startups fail the most
“I think probably for early companies that go to market construction is, is probably one of the areas where this goes the most wrong. Where you're effectively, you're trying, you're talking to people and you're trying to cut and paste what they've done into you…”
Kreps: Half the challenge in ML products is data infrastructure, not models
“Half the problem in any of these products is actually not the machine learning stuff. It's actually just the data, like Getting, getting it, being able to work with it at scale, being able to apply it, being able to do that in the context of like a real runnin…”
Kreps: Open-Source Projects Require Product Marketing to Drive Adoption
“What was it that it took us probably several years to discover was basically product marketing. You know, in an open source context was, yeah, you gotta tell people why it's interesting.”
Kreps: Growing companies inherently lose their communication edge by addressing multiple audiences
“Usually as companies, as time goes by, as a result of that, many things become more watered down because you're trying to say something. To a bunch of people who have very different contexts. And you notice this, that companies kind of lose the edge in communi…”
Kreps: Startups can amplify founder-led sales by hiring early-stage IC reps
“And I think that's really a worthwhile investment of, you know, I think you can kind of amplify The founder led sale thing quite significantly with just a few people. But you need people who have been successful in early companies where they just.”
Kreps: High-level company problems are inherently cross-functional
“Anything that's not working
At a high level is inherently cross-functional. And you know, you'll see a weird phenomenon where people in each function are often don't have enough global context to totally diagnose it.”
Kreps: Demanding a three-month timeline forces engineering teams to break assumptions
“If you kind of just go back and say, well, okay, you know, what would the three month version of it look like? Maybe that's totally impossible, but a significant portion of the time, there is something you could do in three months. And what would that be? Is t…”