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 760 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 11 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
AI Is Shifting Designer and PM to Engineer Ratios to 1:20
“The number of designers and product managers related to the number of engineers, when I was growing up in product, it used to be, one to three or one to 10. It's going to one to 20 now.”
Slack Revoked Glean’s API Access to Protect Its Own Platform Value
“Slack has done it most publicly. Slack is owned by Salesforce. They cut off access to Glean, where Glean can no longer access Slack data. And the reason is they don't want Glean to build on top of them. And then slowly suck out the value that Slack has.”
Hastings: Netflix's first-year employee attrition rate was probably around 20%
“I think it's probably 20% in the first year.”
Quants and short-horizon platforms drive 80% to 90% of institutional market flow
“We estimate somewhere between 80 and 90% of the institutional flow is basically driven either by the firms that have one month and three month agency or the quants that have to take these price signals into account, and then their models are optimized for this…”
Post-training scaling laws drove all AI benchmark progress since October 2024
“And so all the progress we've had immense progress since October, 24 through today was based entirely on these two new scaling laws.”
AI automation allows startups to generate revenue with significantly fewer employees
“There's all these charts that for a given level of revenue, a company today Has significantly lower employees than a company of two years ago. And the reason is AI is doing a lot of the sales, the support, and helping to make the product.”
Anthropic is growing faster and burning dramatically less cash than OpenAI
“Anthropic is a good company. You know, they're burning dramatically less cash Then open AI and growing faster.”
George: Waymo surpassed Lyft in San Francisco Bay Area market share
“There are something like 50,000 Lyft drivers in the San Francisco Bay Area and Waymo overtook them in market share.”
Escobari: General Atlantic's backtested AI model outperformed human investors
“And she's much better than the humans. But it turns out someone who's been trained in the past is very good at the past.”
Emanuel: Elon Musk showed me Optimus robots throwing punches and kicks
“And what the hand could do beyond, I mean, it's, it does what you and I do. And then he showed me a couple of them that could fight and throw punches and kicks and the balance and the pushing. Unbelievable.”
Emanuel: Endeavor paid $44M to buy out William Morris executives
“Was quote unquote merging with William Morris, forty four million dollars paid out the CFO and Jim Wyatt. They never thought we were going to write a check for twenty million dollars and have the votes to fire them. Patrick Weissel and I did that and got the d…”
Emanuel: Sam Altman has $1.2T in obligations and 800M subscribers
“Sam has made a trillion two in obligations. He has eight hundred million subs. Let's just say he does fourteen billion in revenue. We'll probably lose five billion.”
Dan Wang: Chinese researchers produce an increasing share of top-cited science papers
“By most metrics that we can identify, Chinese scientists are producing better qualities of work, not just quantity. If we take a look at some of the most, the top one percent cited scientific papers, Chinese researchers are producing an increasing share of man…”
Wang: Majority of Disclosed Meta AI Lab Hires Attended Chinese Universities
“And at least from what we can tell in some of the publicly listed hires for Meta's super intelligence lab a substantial number of these really elite. I think there are 11 engineers who are publicly disclosed. Something like seven of them had gone to Chinese un…”
Wang: Chinese State Forbids DeepSeek From Communicating With Foreigners
“These companies generally don't like to talk to foreigners at the best of times. And then you have, An overbearing state that in some cases forbids deep seek from chatting with foreigners.”
Wang: Chinese state arbitrarily detained personal friends for years
“I have friends in China who have been detained by the Chinese state arbitrarily for a number of years based on who they were. And based on alleged activities that we don't believe are true.”
People falsely claim to be Decagon customers on investor expert network calls
“We have people who had said that they've used us, and we literally never heard of them.”
Patel: OpenAI Struggled on GPT-4.5 Cluster Scaling and Reinforcement Learning
“They actually tried that with 4.5. They screwed up some things cause it was really hard to get, you know, a 100,000 GPUs to work properly. There's challenges there. Also, they hadn't figured out the whole reinforcement learning paradigm at that time.”
Patel: GPT-5 Is Roughly the Same Size and Cost as GPT-4o
“GPT-V. It's basically the same size as four O and roughly the same cost. That's actually a little bit cheaper potentially.”
Patel: Over 10% of Etsy Traffic Comes Directly from GPT
“And it's like, but it's like, comparing them, like, these models now can, like, actually, like, figure out exactly what you want, and more than 10% of Etsy's traffic is straight from GPT.”
Patel: OpenAI and Meta waste massive amounts of compute exploring architectures
“They're wasting a ton of compute. They were, you know, maybe they still are, but you know, like, and everyone's wasting compute, right? OpenAI's wasting tons of compute. Because, you know, what's the Pareto optimal model architecture? Who knows?”
Patel: Human-Level Engineering AI Represents $2 Trillion in Value
“If I could have an intelligence as smart as a Google senior engineer, that's two trillion dollars of software value, right? Because that's how much I pay, the world pays to software engineers today.”
Patel: ERCOT and PJM are instituting rules to cut data center power
“So this has happened in Texas, ERCOT, and it's happening in PJM which is the main, you know, the sort of northeast kind of area-ish. These two grids are putting these, like, rules where, hey, we're gonna actually say, hey, big loads, we can tell you, 24 hours …”
Patel: ByteDance Is Second or Third Largest GPU User Globally
“They have ByteDance, who's, I think, the third largest user of GPUs in the world after OpenAI, and You know, probably Meta, although ByteDance may be bigger than Meta, the third largest user of GPUs in the world, or second maybe, even ByteDance is.”
Patel: Blackwell manufacturing challenges slowed AI data center deployments
“Nvidia created Blackwell, they had a ton of manufacturing problems and challenges with it for their supply chain balance sheets went up for, you know, various companies in the supply chain are building servers and stuff, because they're trying to figure it out…”
Patel: Google has the lowest token COGS due to TPUs
“They have the lowest cost of goods sold for any token of any company because they have their own vertical stack on TPUs.”
Horing: Software development costs across portfolio are inching down, not collapsing
“First of all, we haven't seen any of it in our companies, like the cost of developing software. It's inching down, but it's not collapsing overnight”
Liemandt: Trilogy was the first AI product to sell $1 billion
“Our claim to fame in the nineties was we were the first AI product to sell a billion dollars.”
Liemandt: Alpha students scored 5s on AP World History in under 75 hours
“Our AP kids, like, they'll do AP, you know, world history, where our kids all got fives, because the test came back a couple weeks ago. They all get fives and they spend 75 hours max to do AP.”
Liemandt: Alpha School is alone in running a closed-loop learning engine
“We're basically the only place that has that closed loop, which is why we're able to get these crazy awesome outcomes”
Liemandt: Alpha raised a 740 math SAT by drilling third-grade multiplication
“We have one student who was, you know, and this is sort of a unique, an extreme example, and I hesitate to say it, but, you know, we had a student who was 7:40 on the math SAT. And in looking, right they were making careless errors, right? They were basically,…”
Liemandt: The median US high schooler's standardized test score flatlines over four years
“The median person in high school in America actually doesn't learn anything. Like scary that in a maps test, which is a 300 point scale, the median American, right. Goes up one point in four years, one point on a three point scale, not learning anything.”
Bertolini: Oscar built the first new health insurance platform since 1972
“First new platform for health insurance that has been built since 1972. So everybody uses the old Health Edge platform. I've modified Health Edge three times in my career and was built in 72.”
Bertolini: Aetna's overall healthcare costs fell 7.5% following corporate mindfulness programs
“Our healthcare costs went down. Not trend. The actual dollar cost went down seven and a half percent the next year.”
Bertolini: 20% of Aetna's lowest-paid employee families relied on food stamps
“I want to know who these people are. I want to know what their life's like, how much they make, and it was about 12 bucks an hour, and they were, 81% were women, 20% of the kids were on foods, the families were on food stamps, 25% of the kids were on Medicaid …”
Milgram: Early Uber Expanded NYC Car Service Rather Than Stealing Taxi Riders
“There was this perception that they were taking riders away from taxis, and that was not at all the case. The data was super clear. They were expanding point-to-point car service in New York. They were taking drivers away from yellow.”
Milgram: Fitch Data Shows 82% of Private Credit Is Single-B- or Lower
“According to Fitch, about 82% of, ah, the private credit market exists in the single B minus and lower credit, credit quality space.”
Milgram: Fitch Shows Largest Share of Private Credit Is CCC-Equivalent Debt
“Triple C's, for instance, default at about a three year, 30% cumulative default rate. So you know, the largest portion of private credit, according to Fitch, is in triple C equivalent.”
Naimi: Top art galleries offer million-dollar signing bonuses to poach artists
“We'll do a better commission split with you. You know, like, it's not fifty-fifty with us. We'll, we'll go sixty-forty. We'll go seventy-thirty. You want a signing bonus? Here's a million dollars cash up front. Like, go with us. Don't go with them. It's very c…”
Naimi: Dedicated seed funds rarely lead power-law rounds, excluding Uber and Roblox
“And what I'd realized over time was that if you eliminate Uber and Roblox from the equation whose seed rounds were led by first round capital, it's close to impossible to identify power law companies in which the seed round was led by a seed stage venture capi…”
Naimi: Abstract Fund I gave higher look-through ownership than any VC in 94% of deals
“By the time we fully deployed fund one it became pretty obvious that in 94% of the companies we'd invested in, There was not a venture fund you could have invested in anywhere in the world that would have gotten you more look through ownership in that company …”
Goldman Sachs' Special Situations Group avoided losing capital during the 2008 crisis
“We're, I think the only principal investing group, maybe there's one other that didn't lose money in 2008 on a lot of capital. Now, we didn't make any returns, but we protected capital”
Becker: TSA mandated physical escorting and heavy ID rechecks for Clear
“They put in some physical escorting policies so that a clear employee who verified you had a stand with you, which created all sorts of challenges. All of your team members are standing in line. Also, they wanted to recheck At a extremely high level identity d…”
Gurley: The AI boom prevented venture capital from having a full correction
“You never had a full correction here because AI came along and everyone got so excited.”
Gurley: Thrive Capital pioneered massive tender offers keeping top startups private
“I think Josh and the team at thrive have been leading.
They're not the only one, but they've been leading the way here where you go at companies that were already on the list to go public that the journal was talking about.
They're going to go public next year…”
Gurley: IPO underpricing and fees create a 33% cost of capital
“I had my friend Jay Ritter rerun the data. Is there, you know, up like 25, 26% underpricing. You add in the seven percent fee, and you're like a 33% cost of capital.”