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
Varanasi: No single large company today is not vertically integrated
“What's ironic to really think about is there is not a single large company in the world today that is not vertically integrated. There's just none.”
MacInnis: A top SMB payroll rival lost its edge by adopting Workday
“This company, you know, is pretty well known, and they've got a good SMB payroll business going, but like, at a certain scale, they switched to Workday. When they switched to Workday, they stopped using their own product, and when they stopped using their own …”
Moreno: Structured Software Rollouts Far Outperformed Self-Serve Marketplaces at Windsurf
“Because six months in, companies that did structured rollouts were a lot more successful, and we ended up collecting a lot of data on this because it became part of how we sold. Then the companies that said, hey, I've got tool A, tool B, and tool C, we're gonn…”
Moreno: Top AI sales comp plans require 10x to 30x OTE performance
“In AI right now, the top tier is like.
30 X your OTE.
Like I remember in the days where it was like, oh yeah, if you're doing like five X OTE, that's like spectacular.
And now quote is like 10 X OTE first accelerator tiers, 20:02 is 30.”
Kreps: Amazon built Kinesis to imitate Kafka before monetizing the open-source
“Amazon had a system that was actually built in, I believe imitation of Kafka called Kinesis. So it was incompatible, but kind of looked roughly like it. And that was popular. And we were like, oh man, that's going to take the opportunity. And if it doesn't, Th…”
Major film studios actively seek generative AI video tools from fal
“Something changed this summer and we are getting a ton of interest from basically all the studios in LA or elsewhere. Everyone is really interested to at least do something about it because now they understand this is good enough and they can actually save mon…”
fal employs over 30 engineers with zero dedicated engineering managers
“Yeah, we don't have engineering managers. We have around like. 30 to 34 engineers. We do have leads. Obviously we have leaders in the In the team, but you know, we don't have this engineering manager role. Everyone is always, like, contributing, writing code. …”
Sparks AI teaches kids early literacy in months without human intervention
“We can take a kid from not knowing how to read to early literacy in like three or four months in about 15 minutes a day with no humans involved. That's never been possible before.”
Agrawal: Parallel has the only APIs reaching superhuman performance on research benchmarks
“In fact, like the products we've shipped recently are the only APIs that hit human and even higher than human level performance on a variety of deep research benchmarks.”
Younis: Levels.fyi shows startups paying higher compensation than Google or Facebook
“You, like, you can just look on levels, FYI, you get paid more to go to a startup than you do at Google or Facebook, and those companies generate billions in cash flow a month.”
Intercom shipped the first AI service agent a year before Zendesk
“We shipped the world's first AI service agent in March, 23, a whole year and change ahead of Zendesk and HubSpot and all the incumbents.”
McCabe: Intercom AI bot resolves 48% of tickets vs Zendesk's 29%
“Zendesk Bot has a resolution rate of 29% or high twenties by our benchmark, which is the rate at which it successfully closes the ticket.
Ours is currently 48% and that's what a year head start gets you.”
Winters: Grubhub data showed resolving bad orders boosted retention over flawless orders
“Early on, we were basically like, look, if there's an issue with the driver, if there's an issue with the order being late, we'll take it on as the marketplace, because we know if we make up for a bad experience by going above and beyond, we'll actually have b…”
Habib: Writer's largest models match GPT-4 quality at lower hosting cost
“Now we've got 18 models. The biggest ones are GPT-IV level quality, but at a fraction of the cost of hosting. Super, super fast for the enterprise use cases that That our customers run them on.”
Very few PLG companies outside of DevOps have truly broken out
“There really aren't many successful PLG companies outside of like the DevOps ones like Datadog and Atlassian that have actually really broken out.”
Information retrieval is not the majority use case for Google Bard
“Some people, and it turns out not the majority use case, but some people are going to use it to try to find information.”
Noronha: Presentations are the third most requested enterprise AI use case
“Well, everyone needs just a chat tool for sure. The engineers all need a tool like a cursor or cloud code or whatever. And it turns out the third use case that's bubbling up over and over is presentations. People are wasting all this time just like formatting …”
Noronha: AI Integration Unlocked Organic Virality and Free Distribution for Gamma
“The inflection point came when we truly solved virality in the product by introducing AI. And at that point, we started getting distribution for free because people would make something great. They would share it with someone else. Those people would try it ou…”
Gamma surpassed 100,000 daily signups in its first year without paid marketing
“And we were still doing no paid marketing at this time. So the only explanation for this was word of mouth growth, basically, you know, different kinds of word of mouth. But that 10,000 kept climbing upwards, 10,020 1030 thousand, to the point where in our fir…”
Sager: Fintech competitors that sacrificed precision for speed failed completely
“I think we've had competitors that sacrificed, you know, everything at the altar of speed and it didn't work out and it didn't, and not at all.”
Copplestone: Support outreach boosts Supabase account usage growth to 125% QoQ
“And what we do is we measure those who don't respond, how much did their the usage growth and actually we know like quarter over quarter, it's 25% versus those who have chatted to a success person and that's a 125%. So we can see the incremental uplift from th…”
Xero's AI financial chatbot hits 95% accuracy on scenario and advice queries
“One is like, we're ahead in the market. Nobody else does it. Second, and we're at like, 95% accuracy or something, like in the answers written on.”
Payne: DoorDash never subsidized expansion by selling dollars for 90 cents
“For a while, there was a narrative like, oh, we're giving away dollars for 90 cents. Absolutely not. You couldn't do that because you would lose money very, very rapidly. Too fast for a company that didn't have a lot of money.”
Payne: DoorDash grocery, retail, alcohol, and Drive are each multi-billion dollar businesses
“So if you look at DoorDash, you'll say, okay, it's restaurants, it's grocery, it's alcohol, it's retail, right? It's DoorDash Drive, our platform business. All of these now are multi-billion dollar businesses that are, and so you have to have that.”
Missing new logo targets slowed Snowflake's growth despite hitting revenue goals
“We were going to miss our new logo goals. Who cares? We're hitting our revenue goals. Well, it turns out it did matter and it slowed our growth. And then we put our foot on that gas and again, or that pedal again, and then we reaccel and that, that reaccelerat…”
Snowflake once paid a single sales rep a $1 million deal commission
“And because our commission rates were not built to like get these three million dollar deals, you'd have a rep that might make. A million bucks on that deal. In fact, we did. And so the rep makes a million bucks”
Grosser: John Collison said cross-functional colleagues she doubts are "dead to her"
“He said, within your own organization, you do a great job of being both demanding and supportive. Cross-functionally, when you don't think somebody's good at their job, they're dead to you.”
Kanter: Healthcare transactions cost orders of magnitude more than SMS or AWS
“When you compare the price of a, Claim or an eligibility check to a text message or to a transportation status message or to an S three read or write or storage or something like that. It's orders of magnitude more expensive.”
Stauch: Serval supports the entire Microsoft stack via API context
“For us, it's as simple as giving our system context on the Microsoft API, and now we support everything Microsoft. And that architecture decision allows us to just, you know, serve those customers instantly and with very few Hours of development”
Stauch: Verkada scaled to 1,000 employees with only two product managers
“I mean, Verkata was a thousand people and had two PMs.”
Sekar: Samsara hired its first SDR before having a finished product
“And in fact, we hired our first ADR or SDR before we had a product to sell. And their job was to book demos. So myself and one of our product managers could basically do Live demos of what we were building and get people to say, hey, I will try this out once i…”
Series A investor rejected co-CEO structure to have someone to fire
“I remember in our series A, We had like an org chart because that seemed important to put in the deck when we turned up and we had like co-CEO on there for me and him. And one of the investors like this, what is this? Like, what is this nonsense? I need someon…”
ClassDojo has never spent a single dollar on paid user acquisition
“To this day, we still haven't paid a dollar for user acquisition. So a hundred percent of our growth has been some combination of word of mouth, virality you know, some community stuff, like basically zero marginal cost programs.”
ClassDojo retained users at 6x the rate of typical consumer apps
“You see companies with consumer apps usually have five to 15% retention to 30 days later or something. And we were at like six X that like six months later, you know, and it was wild.”
ClassDojo raised a Series C at year seven with zero revenue
“We got to seven years in, and we were 30 people, and we'd done the Series C at 30 people, right with zero dollars of revenue.”
Two-thirds of ClassDojo Tutor customers had never hired a private tutor
“But the thing that really blew me away was something like two out of three families paying for that had never paid for a tutor before in their lives.”
Akhund: Mercury Had More Total Customers Than SVB at Collapse
“We were actually like bigger than SVB at that point in terms of number of customers, because SVB was really focused on like venture-backed startups, whereas we had like a broader set of SMBs”
Younis: Applied Intuition has retained nearly all of its $1B raised
“We are a profitable company. We've been for many years. We've grown, you know, we've raised, you know, hundreds of millions in the company's history, close to a billion. We have all of that in the bank.”
Cramer: Sentry's open-source core technology is used by every single competitor
“All the tech that makes Sentry valuable is permissive open source. And for example, we have this one technology used by every single competitor in the world, you know, from the biggest to the smallest. We give that away for free.”
Reducto won a Fortune 10 customer by shipping fixes within an hour
“We actually certainly were not like a full feature parody option compared to some of the other vendors that must have talked to them. But a big part of what they were betting on wasn't just the immediate state of the product. It was Me and Ronak, it was them s…”
Guild: Most restaurant discovery happens on Google, not DoorDash or Uber Eats
“It's still not DoorDash or Uber Eats. The vast majority of restaurant discovery still happens on Google, but that was especially true eight years ago.”
Stripe's internal culture doc was eviscerated on Hacker News
“There was some controversial, controversial, there was some stuff in there that was basically just like, you got to be willing to work really hard to actually, you know, be successful here long term. Oh my gosh, it was so controversial when it came out on Hack…”
Busque: Guideline created the SMB 401(k) market with Gusto's help
“We totally made this market with the help of gusto in our early days.”
Busque: Guideline was first in US to charge SaaS-based 401(k) fees
“We're the first one charging a SaaS-based fee for a four one K benefit in the country.”
Busque: Integrated 401(k)s cut payroll churn in half and double LTV
“When you take that into account and you attach a four one K or an integrated four one K solution to the payroll product, it cuts it in half. Right. So their LTV doubles, which is fantastic for them.”