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 130 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: 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…”
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.”
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.”
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”
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…”
A Negative WSJ Article Forced LiveRamp's Pivot to Product-Market Fit
“We ended up having this Wall Street Journal article come out about the company that was really negative about the practices that we were using around data collection on the internet. So we ended up having to really shut that down and pivot to a totally differe…”
Schillace: Physicians paired with AI diagnostic tools perform worse than AI alone
“There's a study I saw a while ago that compared like an AI based system, AI only physician only and AI plus physician An AI plus physician did worse than AI only. The physician kind of dragged the AI down because they didn't trust it.”
Winters: The pandemic permanently fixed DoorDash's unit economics by eliminating latency
“Then the pandemic hits and all the unit economics of DoorDash flipped positive because everyone's all of a sudden ordering online and all the drivers are much more busy, which means all the latency in the model that was creating the losses went away.”
Mark Zuckerberg once argued having multiple online identities was intellectually dishonest
“Mark Zuckerberg was very adamant for a while that in the future there would be one profile online. There was a point where he thought it was almost intellectually dishonest to represent yourself in different ways online.”
Siroker: Rewind stores data locally and Rewind has no access to it
“They just passively capture everything in a privacy sensitive way. It's stored locally. We don't have access to it. Only you have access to it.”
Noronha: Gamma has over 100 million registered user signups
“We have more than a hundred million users who've signed up for our product”
Sager: Plaid signed hundreds of AI firms including OpenAI, Perplexity, and Replit
“Now we've had, you know, hundreds of AI companies signing up and we just announced, you know, OpenAI, we announced Perplexity, we announced Replit.”
Copplestone: Supabase developer growth accelerates off a 7-8M user base
“And then phase three is largely from January this year, the likes of Cloud Code and Codex and everything that are just ramping up really, really fast. And these are the tools that are using more of the CLI MCP type workload, and we're seeing huge adoption from…”
Hirshberg: Cybersecurity startups typically spend one to two years in stealth
“Typically, companies stay about a year to two years in stealth.”
Payne: DoorDash was running out of money and couldn't raise in 2017
“There were periods where DoorDash was running out of money and couldn't raise money in 17”
Varanasi: Cisco built its hardware stack via acquisitions, unlike Meter
“So if you look at our industry, Cisco has a rack like ours where they have, you know, 10 different pieces of hardware. But majority of that was done through acquisition. So they bought their switching business called Crescendo in the nineties, et cetera, Merak…”
Varanasi: Academic RCTs prove management directly drives superior factory outcomes
“We have really great RCTs and A-B tests essentially of same problem, same factories, half management, half without management, and outcomes being entirely different.”
fal hosts around 600 models compared to under 10 at AI labs
“So the number of models they have to host is like less than 10. And for us, it's like around 600, which is, complicates things like a lot.”
Chaudhary: Most EdTech companies remain small and fail to scale
“Most education companies basically just like remain small businesses. Yeah. They never reach billions of people. They never reach tens of billions in revenue. They never reach hundreds of billions in market cap.”
Canva has grown to 230 million monthly active users
“Going from zero to two hundred and thirty million people that now use Canva every single month.”
Canva intentionally never built an in-platform community forum for its users
“So we've never built like a community, like a forum. We don't have this spot on Canva where people come to talk about design. We've fostered community where it arises.”
Adams: Canva's top five markets are US, Brazil, Indonesia, India, Philippines
“Our top five markets now are the US, Brazil, Indonesia, India, and the Philippines.”
Younis: Apple spent tens of billions trying to build a car
“You take Apple, Apple spent tens of billions of dollars trying to build a car. You never even saw the design of it because this whole misunderstanding of how this business works with these costs, these vertical costs are just so high.”
Delivery apps charge restaurants 30% and consumers 20% on average per order
“It's not just 30% that these delivery apps take from the restaurant. It's also 20% on average that they're charging the consumer.”
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: 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.”
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.”
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.”
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…”
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.”
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: 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.”
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.”
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…”
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.”
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…”
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.”
OpenAI built the ChatGPT web interface using the Next.js framework
“ChatGPT itself is built on Next.js.”
Zapier only ever raised a $1.3 million seed round
“We raised the 1.3 million seed round. That's all we raised.”
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.”
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.”
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.”
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…”