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 577 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 7 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.”
Stauch: Product-oriented forward-deployed engineers will reduce PM and SE hiring
“I think the need for a lot of product managers is probably going to go down. If you hire really product oriented for deployed software engineers, then they're going to be increasingly making the decisions on what makes sense to build for the max Some number of…”
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 …”
Noronha: AI Agent Organizations Will Still Face Legacy Operational Friction
“I think even an org run by a thousand AI agents would actually hit this friction. It's just that they're all a few months old, and so we haven't seen it yet.”
Copplestone: AI agents will probably operate self-driving databases in the future
“If agents are building now, then they'll probably be operating in the future. So, at the moment, maybe developers end looking at things, whether the database is healthy or not. But of course, they probably don't want to be doing that, and that's actually where…”
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.”
Hirshberg: Within three years, AI agents will execute most global work
“When we think three years out in the future, we believe that most work will be done by agents. AI will direct the intent, sorry, humans will direct the intent, but AI will execute it. And that would go for probably most, let's say, work in the world, but speci…”
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…”
Degnan predicts Snowflake's enterprise software IPO record will be broken in 2026
“I'm sure someone will break it this year because there's companies that have much more revenue than we did, but the largest IPO software IPO ever and enterprise software IPO ever.”
Varanasi: Networking industry will move to square-footage pricing within 5-10 years
“I think now the rest of the industry will move there in the next five, 10 years is some scribbles and notebooks of me and Sunil where we came up with this.”
Stauch: AI Software Categories Will Be Dominated by Single Winners
“And I think the same thing is going to happen in AI. And in this case, a lot of times it might be the incumbent that still wins, but there are going to be AI native competitors creating a massive, massive value in these categories. And I don't know That it's g…”
Stauch: Legacy enterprise software giants will naturally lag in adopting AI
“They have this classic innovators dilemma that it makes it hard to steer the big ship to add these capabilities while still protecting their existing product and revenue not making drastic changes that are not backwards compatible. And so they're just naturall…”
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…”
Model commoditization will drive fragmentation, favoring multi-model platforms like fal
“So it looks like it's going to be really hard for someone to differentiate with the quality of the model. And we believe this is going to lead to even, even more fragmentation. So a company like Fall where you get to access many different models at the same ti…”
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: AIs will use the web 1,000x to 1,000,000x more than humans
“We believe that AIs will use the web a thousand X, a million X, more than humans ever have. And as a result, The web will need to transform.”
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.”
Agrawal: Recommendation systems, search, and databases are converging into one
“My worldview is currently shaped, shaping into a convergence between recommendation systems and search systems and database systems. I think they're all going to start looking like the same thing.”
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.”
Song: AI agent and human behavior will be indistinguishable in 2-3 years
“Genuinely believe that like within the next two, three years, you won't be able to differentiate human behavior from agentic behavior.”
Guild predicts Owner's CAC will match Shopify while LTV will exceed Toast
“Which ends up giving us customer acquisition costs in the future that look more like Squarespace or Shopify with lifetime values that are even greater than toasts over time because the attach rate is so high once you earn the trust on free products.”
McCabe: Intercom will be completely done if AI is all hype
“We're certainly betting the entire company on AI. If AI turns out to be all hype, we're done. Completely done.”
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.”
McCabe: Customer service work done by human seats will be replaced by AI
“AI is about to do the exact same in every category particularly categories of software for people to do work. So customer service, which is the one I focus on and obsess about for a living is about to be fundamentally changed because the work of customer servi…”
Schillace: AI tooling will expand engineering ambitions rather than shrink team sizes
“Programmers are definitely going to get more effective. We're going to get more agentic programming tools. So you're going to get higher and higher leverage, but I don't think it's going to make the team smaller. I think it's just going to make the ambitions b…”
Schillace: AI will make creating pixels free, radically altering software applications
“I have the suspicion that the nature of applications is going to change radically in the next five to 10 years. And so I think, you know, this idea that just in the same way that the internet made the distribution of information essentially free, AI, generativ…”
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…”
Virtual AI representatives will not replace human salespeople within ten years
“So I don't think they're going to go away. I mean, people are like, oh, can a virtual rep call you and sell you something? It's like, I'm not going to pick up the phone for what the next 10 years, but certainly make their work much more efficient.”
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.”
Habib: AI capabilities will outpace most organizations' capacity to absorb them
“And I do think the capabilities that are possible are gonna outstrip most organizations' capacities to absorb them, for most of their employees to absorb them without a lot of effort.”
Habib: Writer has the potential to become a 400 percent NRR company
“I think this should be a 400% NRR company.”
Masad: AI add-ons will become native within a couple years
“GUI was an add-on at some point, and I think this is where we are with AI. But I don't know, I think it's a transitionary period. I think at most couple years where most companies are going to take the approach we're taking.”
Masad: AI will bifurcate developers into 'creators' and 'engineers'
“I think that there's going to be a bifurcation of software engineer and software creator. Engineers are not going away. We need engineers in the same way that Instagram did not obviate the need for professional, you know, journalists and photographers and all …”
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.”
Blank: The entire Lean Startup methodology will be enabled by AI
“The entire lean method. Is going to be end to end enabled by AI.”
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.”
Persistent memory for LLMs will take much longer to solve than expected
“And so I am beyond Fascinated and intrigued by the research that's taking place around memory and being able to reference things from previous conversations, but I think it's going to take way longer than we expect.”
Future websites will be dynamically generated just-in-time for individual users
“The thing that we want to accomplish with the web is that we want to make it truly an AI driven web where when you go to a website, you get a copy of that page that is just for you generated just in time. And it knows it has all this context about what you wan…”
Adaptive AI systems will eliminate the need for major software re-platforms
“So using AI to continuously modernize, you can think of systems of the future that are self-tuning and adaptive. We no longer have to catch the latest trend or optimization By doing major re-platforms.”
Human software engineers will write very little code in 20 years
“If I had a bet, since you gave me the 20 year out, I would say yes. I think very little code, if any, will be written by engineers.”
Siroker: Thousands of multi-billion-dollar vertical LLM application companies will emerge
“There's whole categories of companies that are going to be cat, you know, Category defining independent successful big public multi-billion dollar companies that are just applications of large language models in a specific domain for a specific user with a gre…”
Siroker predicts 50% of work will be fundamentally changed within 10 years
“I think a lot of jobs will be gone in 10 years, but they'll likely be replaced with new ones.
I think that's probably an obvious
Conclusion.
I think on the order of probably 50% of work will go away.
It would be fundamentally changed.”
Siroker: AGI will eventually perform half the work of human engineering teams
“Eventually, you know, I don't think it will necessarily replace engineers, but it'll certainly augment them. You'll have plenty of, you know, half the work that an engineering team does will be done by AGI, and half will be done by humans, and the human stuff …”
Seshan predicts every public company will require carbon accounting in 10 years
“In 10 years, every public company will need to do some level of carbon accounting and have a decarbonization plan to underscore that.”
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 …”