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 2,678 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 42 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
Rizik: Specialist venture funds will drive outsized returns over mega funds
“We're looking at more and more funds that are specialists, that may specialize in a specific industry, or a few industries, as opposed to being generalists. So that is counter to probably the way most people you talk to are looking at the world, but we think t…”
Morgan: B Capital Has Paused New Investments in China Due to Geopolitics
“A little bit of presence left in China, Hong Kong and Beijing, but not doing new investing in China right now, geopolitics being what it is”
Morgan: Perplexity will be worth a couple hundred billion if successful
“I mean, we invested in perplexity at nine billion, which was kind of crazy in some ways. On the other hand, if it works, it's going to be worth a couple hundred billion.”
Morgan: Jim Simons Valued Novel Data Sources Over Superior Trading Algorithms
“And Jim once said to me, if somebody comes to me with a much better algorithm for trading, and another guy comes to me with a new source of data no one else has, I'm much more, I'd much rather pay for the data. You know, we'll figure out the algorithms.”
Morgan: Solo GP funds are unnerving due to lack of governance
“Way too many funds, way too many solo GPs, which is on, on, on I don't know what the right word is, an unnerving trend, because as a, as an investor, because on the other side I have a family office, we're investors in ADVC funds, and we worry about solo funds…”
Morgan: Relying on secondaries will reduce overall VC industry returns
“It's going to cut off the long tail. And if you look at the Ubers and the Roblox's and so on, it's that long tail where you make the giant returns. And so if you keep squashing it down, then the overall industry returns are going to, are, there's no question t…”
Morgan: Agrees With Elon Musk That Earth Will Have Billions of Humanoids
“You know, Elon Musk has said he thinks there'll be billions of humanoids. I agree with him on that. I don't agree with him on a lot of things, but that one I do agree.”
Devillieres: Vitesse Automation uses natural language to code industrial machines in real-time
“He created a company called Vitesse Full Speed Automation. He can code any machine with natural language, real-time.”
Rajagopal: Amazon was the first to launch a digital wallet in India
“I think we were the first to you know, put out that wallet in the system in Indian system.”
Wharton: China dominates clean tech because Beijing funds mid-stage scaling
“And I think that's part of the reason why the Chinese are winning is that they, their government is giving money into this particular area where companies need it most. And our government is not doing it.”
Shtabtsovsky: Backtested AI Deal-Sourcing Algorithm Yields 14x Portfolio Returns
“So in the paper I mentioned before that inspired the tool, actually we predicted, so we backtested this algorithm finding the companies and it predicted to have a 14 times revelation on the whole portfolio of startups that you invest in using this algorithm. S…”
Shtabtsovsky: AI Sourcing Algorithm Predicts Startup Exits With 86% Accuracy
“There is another metric that probably worth mentioning is that the algorithm is right in about 86% of the cases that it's solving. So it's, again, it's looking at the startup and deciding ultimately, will it have an exit, a good exit, Or not. And in 86% chance…”
Huang: CVCs must prioritize financial returns to survive parent company leadership changes
“If you are a CVC, if you want to maintain your life and sustain yourself over the very many vicissitudes of a corporate, of your mother company's kind of changes, it's really
That's to be on the financial side.”
Anderson: KiHealth validated liquid biopsy detecting diabetes two years before symptoms
“And we just clinically validated the first liquid biopsy test that can identify diabetes two years before you're symptomatic.”
A plant-based therapeutic demonstrated 75% efficacy compared to synthetic GLP-1s
“And in a head-to-head study, it had 75% efficacy comparative to GLP ones, which are obviously artificial.”
Malhotra: A significant number of future pixels will be generated, not recorded
“I believe most, okay, the most, but a significant number of pixels in the world in the future are going to be generated. And not actually recorded.”
Malhotra: Visual AI Models Still Await Their Revenue-Driven ChatGPT Moment
“I believe that the, you know, the chat GPT moment for the image, video, and three models is still to happen. You could make a claim that an image that is kind of happened, but no one's making billions of dollars in revenue on image models. The way people are m…”
Martin: Heavily diluted $100M ARR founders often net same as early exit
“I meet a lot of entrepreneurs that have built great businesses, a hundred million AR businesses, but they've been at it for 10 years, and they've taken so many rounds and deluded themselves so many times that they would have probably had the same outcome if th…”
Pandemic-era Sunbelt syndications face underwater debts and forced cash-in refinances
“Where we're sitting right now is a lot of those purchases, 20, 20, 21, 22, their debts come and do and they're underwater. Like they're going to have to do what's called a cash in refinance. Which is a capital call to their investor base, which is not good.”
Gujral: Human-made content will command a premium in 20 years
“Over a period of time, and let's say 20 years from now, you'll have very small content which will be labeled as made by humans. Which will become very precious. Hey, this is actually made by humans. So you will create a premium on that content.”
Gujral: Media will bifurcate into AI short-form and premium human long-form
“Human-led experiences, human-led content will become a premium, and then content which is long-form, which again creates a premium, that somebody has the audacity to spend money and invest time and effort and money and resources to create something long-form, …”
Gujral claims Klarna rehired half the customer support staff it fired
“Less than a year later, they've come back saying we are rehiring half of those people we fired because, you know, it's really not working out because people want to talk to people.”
Gujral: Five Southeast Asian Markets Match India's Discretionary Spender Pool
“India is not, it's a large country with a lot of people, but the number of people who can spend 10,000 dollars a year on discretionary spend is much smaller number. To take that to Southeast Asia and you take that percentage of people who can spend the same am…”
Vaidya: Nobody Believed Indian D2C Brands Would Reach ₹1,000 Crores in 2021
“No one in twenty-twenty-one could foresee the scale that e-commerce would get, the growth that e-commerce would get, the ability for Indian brands to reach 1000 plus, like, we're only four years later or three years later from twenty-twenty-one. At that time, …”
Restive's post-2023 portfolio outperforms its entire COVID-era investments combined
“We look at every company in the portfolio that was started after January first, 2023, they make more money now and are growing faster and we have less dilution in those positions than Everything we did in COVID combined.”
Dye: Rapid AI startup ARR growth may be unsustainable enterprise test-driving
“It can be really tough to tell how much of some of the rapid ARR, ARR growth that we're seeing is really durable. I think there's a lot of enterprises out there that are kind of just test driving AI to see if it really works or not, and I do have a little bit …”
Dye: Even top VC funds have had minimal DPI for 4-5 years
“Even the best funds in the world haven't, haven't had much DPI for four or five years.”
Dye: Smaller venture funds lacking long-term track records will face consolidation
“There's gonna, I think there's gonna be a lot of smaller funds that if they don't have that long-term track record and help trust with LPs you know, raising a new fund might be pretty challenging, and so I do think there is going to be a bit of a shift and sor…”
Curry: Build Group backed Casetext when consensus viewed legal tech as dead
“One of our bigger successes, we had a company called Case Text which was in the legal space, which, you know, when I invested in that five years ago, I remember everyone saying, What are you doing? Legal tech's kind of a dead hole. And this was even different …”
Hieatt: Over half of mainframe migrations fail during reintegration
“Why I say more than half the efforts fail. It's not the translation so much. It's more the putting it all together. And does it still work? And how do you cut over from old to new up with a big bang, a huge risk fingers are crossed.”
Hieatt: Mechanical Orchard AI generates provably equivalent legacy rewrites
“So you end up with the AI agentic flow converging on a solution that's really good, clean, human readable code, and is provably equivalent to the old system.”
Heiss: Automotive personal data is a $1.9 trillion annual market
“Has a global value of about market opportunity of 1.9 trillion dollars, 1.9 trillion dollars every year. That's the value of that personal automotive data. So that means in terms of consumer that has a value of about 1400 dollars per per per per vehicle owner.…”
Jackie DeMarco: Dementia and Alzheimer's patients usually die from inability to eat
“And interestingly enough, you know, when people have dementia and Alzheimer's, they usually die because of, they can't eat. So that's a bigger problem than, you know, the dementia itself.”
Preeti Vyas: Amar Chitra Katha Competes With Marvel for Ten-Year-Olds
“I am not creating new comics for forty-year-olds. Right. We are creating new comics for today's ten-year-old. Ten-year-old who's consuming Marvel, and who's consuming the best of the world. If I have to compete with that, we have to make it relevant.”
Preeti Vyas: Amar Chitra Katha Stopped Exclusively Drawing Fair-Skinned Female Characters
“Machita Katha has been accused in the past of having all the apsaras and all the beautiful women looking very fair always, having fair skin. So, we've changed that. We're Indian, they will have Indian skin tones.”
Padnos: VCs rate male founders higher in 13 of 16 success attributes
“The male and the female entrepreneurs responded to a long set of questions, almost identically. But when you ask the VCs, the question is a male or a female, what are the most important attributes first stack rank them? And then is a male or a female more like…”
Padnos: Female VCs hold identical gender biases to male VCs
“None of, and by the way, if you're wondering the male and the V and the female VCs answered almost identically. No. It wasn't just the men saying women face higher obstacles.”
Tepper: There are zero billionaire traders in the world
“So of that list, there's zero billionaire traders. And of the 3000 billionaires, they're split between stock investors, real estate investors, and entrepreneurs.”
Oversized early funds trap startups on a valuation 'hamster wheel of death'
“Why do companies end up in the Bay Area getting on the ham, what I would like to call the hamster wheel of death, where you're just like always trying to catch up with your last post money. It's because in a lot of cases, check size, mandatory check size of th…”
Startups waiting 24 months to raise again fall off the venture tracks
“If you wait 24 months to raise, you're not gonna raise. I don't care how amazing you are, how amazing your technology is, you're off the venture tracks.”
McDowell predicts the US will build a strategic Bitcoin reserve
“If America start building a strategic Bitcoin reserve, which I think they will, they probably already have, right? And they're talking about it now, who knows how long they've been buying for.”
McDowell predicts peak cycle prices: BTC $150k, ETH $10k, SOL $700
“I think realistic targets for this cycle, Bitcoin, a hundred and 150 K Ethereum, probably 10 K plus Solana could go to six, 700.”
Cole: Relying on customer success to sell software signals weak product-market fit
“If you need customer success for your product to be Appealing, then you need to get back to that product market fit. Then you probably don't have good product market fit and you need to enhance that as opposed to supplementing it with people.”
Cooper: Black enterprise founders raise Series A at 5x the market rate
“When you really study the category, one in three black founders who are focused on enterprise tech is getting the series A. Right. The gross number for everybody is one in 15. Right. So they're beating the market by a factor of five.”
Girdhar: Privva warned early interview candidates against expecting work-life balance
“Then when you think about bringing on a team, controversially, some of the things that I said to people in the interview process was that if you're looking for a job, this is the wrong place.
If you're looking for work-life balance, this is the wrong place.
Th…”
Novick: Sometimes product-market fit happens because the market comes to you
“And what people don't talk about a lot in ventures, sometimes you don't necessarily get the product market fit. The market comes to you. And we just saw that with AI, where the market has changed, like the trend has changed a lot. And suddenly a bunch of compa…”
Axelsson: Tastry Raised Directly From LPs, Cutting Out VC Middlemen
“Our investors, our private investors and the LP types of investors that these funds would typically fundraise from. So it had this relationship, this close relationship with my investors who Don't really run out of money and they just, we track progress. And w…”
Garber: Web3 is largely a gimmick and has zero fund investments
“It's not web three where I don't believe in it at all. I'm just a gimmick to some extent, which is what I thought in fund one, which is why there's no web three companies in there. And that's why I've never invested in a web three companies.”