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 365 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
Movva: Sail Research will buy data centers with only 95% uptime
“You'd have missing zero buyers for a data center that is 95% uptime. I'm that first buyer. I will buy 95% uptime.”
Anthropic partners with SpaceX for compute at Colossus facility in Memphis
“We announced a partnership with SpaceX for their Colossus facility in Memphis. We're really excited about that. It's gonna allow us to continue to expand, especially on the consumer and prosumer side.”
Chesky: It is fatal for CEOs to completely delegate sub-executive hiring.
“I am the co-hiring manager for the top 200 people in the company. This is very radical. A lot of CEOs think it's their job to hire their executive, and their executive team hires their team. I think that is fatal.”
Bertolini scheduled his own assisted suicide at Dignitas due to chronic pain
“I was getting ready to go to Switzerland to end my life at Dignitas. It's an assisted suicide organization, but I had to prove I had intractable pain. And pain that can't be cured. And so, I was sent to a doctor, and the doctor evaluated me, and the doctor sai…”
David Senra deletes all unsolicited feedback unless the sender makes podcasts
“I get emails and the subject line, feedback on the podcast. Don't even read it. Right in the garbage. You link me to a podcast that you have made that is even in the world, like even in the same category, and then I will listen. But again, you think I'm making…”
Movva: Sail's Custom Chip Strategy Sidesteps HBM by Offloading to Flash
“When I talk about building custom chips, and they ask me, oh, so what's different? Basically, it's about sidestepping the HBM shortage and focusing on More extreme offload to other forms of memory, such as flash.”
Altman: OpenAI must eventually build robots to automate compute supply chain
“And then eventually, or maybe pretty soon, we have to build robots that can Automate that process to continue to drive the cost down. The cost of producing electricity, chips, the whole supply chain.”
Altman: OpenAI has no interest in building vertical apps or eating startups
“Building every vertical application on top of that, trying to go, like, eat every startup, eat every company, no interest in doing that really want to just provide that platform.”
Altman: Competitors Distilling OpenAI Models Is Not in His Top 10 Worries
“I would rather people not to steal from us for sure. Maybe I'm feeling too confident right now about our progress and what's like the models that are coming. But this is not in like my top 10 list of worries.”
Wachen: Etched AI chip operates at under half the voltage of rivals
“We're now bringing forward our first generation of this low voltage inference technology Which is running at under half the voltage of any other AI chip.”
Whale Rock sold almost all application software and went net short
“We basically sold almost all of our software, almost all of our application software. We still have one or two small ones, but entering this year, we were actually net, net short, and it really helped us in the first quarter.”
Khosrowshahi: Uber meters headcount increases as AI makes engineers far more productive
“We are going to meter headcount increases because to the extent that my engineers are getting Much more efficient. Their throughput is increasing. They're becoming superhuman in terms of their output. We, you know, one, there's a cost to that and it's a signif…”
Loeb: Third Point Now Checks Bank Balances After the FTX Fraud
“I will say that now our due diligence process, we definitely, like, check bank balances and do, like, the most basic due diligence that probably would have, you know, turned stuff up on, on this.”
Anthropic sacrifices customer capacity to maintain absolute minimums for model training
“There's a level of compute for model development that we will not go below, right? So even if it means it's harder to serve customers, or we have to do kind of unnatural things when it comes to that, we want to continue to make that long-term investment in dev…”
Anthropic signs 5GW TPU deal with Google and Broadcom starting in 2027
“So last month, you know, we signed a five gigawatt deal with Google and with Broadcom for TPUs starting in twenty-twenty-seven.”
Anthropic signs a $100 billion deal with Amazon for 5GW of compute
“We also signed a deal with Amazon for Tranium for up to five gigawatts as well. It was an over a hundred billion dollar commitment, and a lot of that computer's actually Like already landing and will land in the rest of this year into next year.”
Rao: Anthropic builds first-party apps when it has foresight into future model capabilities
“That said, like, we will also build our own applications on that same platform where a couple things are true. Number one, if we feel like we have, you know, a vision into where the models are going, and we can kind of demonstrate that and create customer valu…”
Anthropic adopts a strict 'America first' geopolitical stance on AI development
“We are very like America first in, in our approach. We want the technology to support the U S as well as, you know, democratic countries around the world. And that's one of the reasons why we've been working closely with the administration on something on some…”
Hockey pledged $1B in Plaid stock to borrow $70M to build Column
“I pretty much funded the entire company with debt. I went to a bunch of banks. And I said, here's a bunch of plaid shares. Like, please give me money. You know, I got like a, the best I got was like a sofa plus 10% loan at like five percent LTV. And so, you kn…”
Schwartz: 3G routinely paid certain employees multiples of their peers' stock
“I did not allocate stock equally to people. I gave certain people multiples of what other people got based on our thoughts of people's existing and potential future contribution.”
Horowitz: a16z fires staff who publicly disparage entrepreneurs to look good
“If you try to make yourself look good by making an entrepreneur look bad, you're fired.”
George: a16z Growth Uses Single Decision-Makers Instead of Voting Committees
“What we decided to do at the firm in the growth fund was do it totally differently. So we were going to actually make the decision process just like our venture process, which is single trigger puller.”
George: a16z Growth maintains zero capital reserves for large follow-ons
“So we reserve a tiny amount, and this is for small follow-ons where, you know, our participation is important, but we're not a lead. We do zero reserving for large investment amounts that we think we're going to make in a company, because I think that would le…”
Escobari: General Atlantic is accelerating its China investments after five years
“We've been underweight China for the last five years. We're, we just did two deals. We're gonna pick it up a little bit.”
Escobari: General Atlantic uses an AI model to vote on all deals
“So we've been training the sixth member of the IC based on 45 years of data. So she votes on all our deals. And we've been having her do this for the last three years.”
Emanuel: TKO sent cease-and-desist to OpenAI over UFC data
“Well, we sent the bad letter to Sam. Like stop using the UFC and the WWE and so on.”
Ferrari: Bending Spoons offers near maximum upfront to avoid negotiating up
“We try to make an offer that's sometimes the maximum will to pay or close to it because we think although we could probably get a better deal in the moment if we started lower, Then we don't want to establish a reputation for people you can push around and get…”
Bertolini announced Aetna's minimum wage increase without prior board approval
“I was at the JP Morgan conference on January first, January second of 2015, and I announced it in front of 240 of our three hundred and forty million shares and said, we're going to do this. I didn't ask the board because they said, well, how did your board le…”
Spotify adopted the Chinese super-app model to combat declining app store installs
“Our entire strategy is basically, we decided this many years ago before it was popular, but you saw the Chinese app, the Chinese starting to build super apps, whereas the Western world built one app per use case. We kind of adopted the Chinese super app idea a…”
David Senra operates the Founders podcast solo, refusing assistants or editors
“The reason I still do every single social media post, the reason I answer all my emails, the reason I don't have an assistant, the reason I don't have an editor, is because I'm trying to make the world's best product”
Mehta's non-profit buys SF commercial properties and leases them below market
“I'm buying buildings in one street called Fillmore Street. It's in Pacific Heights. It's a street I grew up on. And I'm buying stuff at, like, a five and a quarter cap, which, you know, treasuries were five and a quarter when I was buying this stuff. Buying, l…”
Ovitz: Gulfstream's turnaround required a board of super-salesmen, not financial engineering
“And I said, Teddy, there's only one thing you can do. You need to recruit a board that becomes the greatest set of super salesmen in history, because You don't need our advice. You don't need our financial engineering. You don't need us to read balance sheets.…”
Kushner: I Began Middle East Diplomacy With No Subject Matter Expertise
“It was because I came with no subject matter expertise in the Middle East.”
Kushner: Middle East doctrine prioritized future interests over past grievances
“And I think that the doctrine that I used in the Middle East, which I think was different than what was done previously, was that I was focused more on mutual future interests instead of relitigating old problems.”
Kushner: Affinity Partners' three largest LPs are PIF, Lunate, and QIA
“My three biggest LPs are PIF from Saudi Arabia, Lunait from Abu Dhabi, and QIA from Qatar.”
Kushner: Affinity Partners Won't Raise Capital for the Next Four Years
“So we preemptively tried to avoid any conflicts so we don't have to raise capital for the next four years.”
Kushner: Told Biden Team Saudi Deal Was Achievable in Months
“When I met with the Biden team in the transition, I basically told them, you guys can get a deal done with Saudi in three to six months, and that's what they were telling me.”
Movva: Sail Scavenges Chips and Power to Avoid Bidding Against Anthropic
“Well, first we scavenge chips, and then we scavenge power for those chips. The idea is in both cases, I do not want to be bidding against Anthropic or of an AI for a complete capacity. I'm not going to win against them, and I don't want to. I want to be more c…”
Altman: OpenAI spread itself too thin before refocusing on core intelligence
“On the first part, I think we just, we're doing too many things. We're not focused enough, and they're actually all good things to do, but the trick is we're in this, like, unbelievable moment in history. Where you can only do the very few great things. So we …”
Altman: OpenAI Planned Media and Consumer Apps as GPU Hedge
“And so we were trying to think about like a lot of things such that if the revenue growth took longer, To materialize than we thought it might, we could have, you know, consumer apps and media and all these other things that could help us monetize the GPUs tha…”
Altman: OpenAI gained conviction in reasoning from GPT-4, not 3.5
“I would say we got real conviction with GPT-IV. Not even 3.5.”
Altman is experimenting with AI continuously monitoring his screen
“I have started just recently to experiment with what it means to like, let
An AI kind of look at everything I'm looking at on my computer.
I don't have this built yet.
and I'm still trying to feel out like where the limits of my comfort and trust should be.”
Sacerdote: Whale Rock passed on Anthropic at a $60B valuation
“We actually, we had a look at the sixty billion dollar round, and we didn't do it. We didn't know the company as well, and we The gross margins were negative, and frankly, we hadn't seen coding explode the way it had.”
Sacerdote: Whale Rock bought Nvidia in 2023 at four times earnings
“When we were buying Nvidia in 2023, we were paying four times earnings.”
Khosrowshahi: Uber prototypes with frontier AI models but scales on open source
“We're using the more expensive models to explore. Hey, let's try a new interaction here. And obviously You know, the, these frontier models, whether it's a open AI model or a cloud model, they really are terrific. And they're great to experiment against. Once …”
Khosrowshahi: Uber passes most Expedia deal economics to Uber One members
“We happened to make a deal with Expedia, my old company, and we're essentially giving the vast majority of the economics of that deal back to Uber One members.”
Khosrowshahi: Uber will commit capital to tens of thousands of AVs
“Today, our priorities are going to be keep building the services that we're building now invest in algorithms, invest in more engineers we are hiring, and then really invest in kind of the new realities of AV, whether it's investments in our partners or it's m…”
Loeb: Third Point made discounted Twitter debt its largest credit position
“The Twitter debt was a resale of the financing debt that was offered when Elon bought the company. Morgan Stanley sat on it for a while. It was deep underwater. When it got close to par, they decided to sell it. Most credit investors were really scared and ner…”