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 740 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
Hastings: Companies should operate like pro sports teams, not families
“Don't use things like we're a family. I treat you like my family. Okay. Which is like a little bit true, but not true enough. And instead we're a professional sports team and we all got to fight every year to keep our position. Because if we can upgrade, we mu…”
Gurley: Endowment VC Managers Are Bonused on Paper Marks
“But the thing people may not realize is the managers of the VC group at the large endowments have no incentive to try and right size this number. In fact, many of them are bonused on paper marks. And so, if anything, they have the reverse incentives to get the…”
Vishria: SaaS companies destroy equity value by hitting pre-AI plans
“Every single day that you are hitting your plan, you are destroying equity value.”
Giffon: Billionaires are now culturally subservient to the posting class
“And that now I think the billionaire class has become subservient to the posting class.”
Long-Term Investing Horizons Are Mostly Used as Excuses for Poor Short-Term Performance
“I think when people say that, for the most part, what you end up with, and I do mean the most part, is some form of excuses as to why, sure, this is not great, but it will be if you wait long enough.”
Loeb: Abandoning shareholder primacy is a distraction from board duties
“Not to say that the board doesn't have other responsibilities, but I think ultimately they should feed into creating shareholder value. If you go back to both Milton Friedman and things that Warren Buffett have said, of course, boards care about the communitie…”
Anthropic CFO: AI creates a Jevons paradox for labor, increasing hiring
“And there's a little bit of this I think of it again like Jevin's paradox, but for labor, which is that we have people who become incredibly more productive. We actually, we've hired a lot more people because of that, because there's no shortage of work to do,…”
Chesky: Founder Mode requires staying in details over delegating to managers
“Founders were over-delegating their companies to these professional managers. I'm not disparaging them, but they were detaching themselves, and they were being managed, rather than managing the company. And it was really about not apologizing about how you wan…”
The venture capital hamster wheel prevents startups from being genuinely long-term oriented
“The hamster wheel of VC doesn't actually allow us to be long-term. Because if you are having to spend a lot of money for employees and you're burning a rate of you have to raise every, like, year, year and a half, you end up optimizing for that next fundraise.”
Early-stage startup employees take significantly more personal risk than founders
“Cause the weird thing is an early stage employee takes way more risks than early stage founder.”
Founders should target lucrative industries characterized by low-talent competition
“I think if you want to be successful, you can go look at every single industry and you can say, okay, who is the dumbest people and what makes the most money? And if you go like attack that area, Probably pretty good space.”
Founders should avoid building ideas from YC's Requests for Startups list
“You know, YC puts out this you know, quest for startups. My recommendation is like, that should be a list of startups you should not start. Because by the time that gets so consensus that this is a good area or super interesting, the amount of capital and the …”
Sankar: The best corporate cultures are almost cult-like and highly differentiated
“The best cultures are really almost cult-like. You know your culture is highly differentiated. It should actually kind of be hard for someone to inorganically insert into your culture, otherwise it's not a very differentiated culture whatsoever.”
Housing subsidies worsen long-term affordability despite short-term popularity
“And one of the easiest thing to do there is if you have access to the budget, which, you know, federal politicians do, you just start subsidizing things, which makes the problem worse in the long term. But, you know, the electorate likes it in the short term.”
George: 75% AI Gross Margins Mean Customers Are Not Actually Using It
“Now it's like a badge of honor to have low gross margins because we're like, oh, at least people are using your AI products. You know, if we see, like we get these pitches and they're like, I have an AI thing and I got 75% gross margins. I'm like, well, no one…”
Ferrari: Most software R&D is a waste of money
“I think people in general overestimate the value of R&D. Let me qualify. They think that generally pouring money into building stuff pays, pays off. It's really not true at all. What we find is that there's a very small number of things that pay, pay off hands…”
Patel: If Taiwan Geopolitical Risk Scares You from TSMC, Avoid Apple Too
“I know a lot of people's PMs are like, oh, you can't invest in TSMC because geopolitical risk, and it's like, no, dude, you can't invest in fucking Apple.”
Liemandt: Traditional classroom lecturing is the worst instructional method for children
“The teacher in front of the classroom is like the worst way to teach kids. And there's all these ways where kids can learn two, five, 10 times faster. But it doesn't work in the teacher in front of the classroom.”
Liemandt: Reforming public education is impossible because parents disagree on its purpose
“The biggest issue, education is hard because you have to define the product, and your customer bases have very different needs, right? This is why when I talk about public school being impossible, you, parents do not agree on what the purpose of an education i…”
Liemandt: Surprisingly few parents actually care about their children's academic performance
“You know, one of the things that I did not realize going in is how few parents actually care about academics.”
Naimi: Elite VCs take every deal intro; struggling VCs claim lacking bandwidth
“The VCs who I believe are the most successful VCs and have had the most, you know, storied careers tend to be the people that take every single introduction I send them, and then the VCs who are still building their careers and I send them deals are like, oh, …”
Naimi: Early liquidity was crypto's bug because rich founders stopped building
“Early liquidity was the bug and not the feature of crypto. People got rich too quickly and they stopped building things.”
Gurley: Copying David Swensen's 50% illiquid Yale model broke LP liquidity
“I would suggest that what we might be seeing is the exact result of everyone copying the Yale model. You know, Howard Marks famously said, you make a lot of money when you do something non-consensus and accurate. But what if everyone copies David Swenson? What…”
Mehta: Greenoaks actively seeks founders who micromanage, stay in weeds, fire fast
“Some of those characteristics are exactly what we look for in a founder. We like micromanagers. We like people that are in the weeds. We like people that fire fast.”
Mead: Pax Americana is in crisis, but American power is not
“All right, yeah, I mean, it is, it's a really interesting time because on the one hand the Pax Americana that we kind of developed after 1945 and then refurbished in 1990 at the end of the Cold War, Is really in crisis, but if you step back a little bit, Ameri…”
Mead argues US tech productivity is surging despite institutional collapse
“It's like our, the networks that we built up, the way of dealing with the world, the institutionalized relations with Europe, and so on, those are all burning or crumbling, but the United States as a power, it seems to me, is if anything, thanks to the informa…”
Mead argues high-volume dishonesty eliminates marginal reputational costs for politicians
“So, you know, if you lie enough, The marginal cost of your 10,000th lie is nothing, while the marginal law of your first, second, or third, the marginal cost is very high. So all of the normal constraints on, on political figures, reputation, reputational, and…”
Mead argues the internet drives public demand for personalist political rulers
“I think that one of the impacts of the internet is that people want to be ruled by people again”
Mead: Dominant maritime powers invite rivals to trade, creating strategic dependence
“Once you have built this global system, you then do something extremely treacherous, which is you invite everyone else to participate in your system.”
Mead argues China's green energy strategy aims for military autarky
“A lot of Chinese energy policy can be understood as trying to avoid the trap of dependence on the global economy. So, you know, they've, they're doing the solar, they're doing as much hydro as they can, and some of our friends in the environmental movement are…”
Mead argues US tech firms need global markets to outcompete China
“If our AI companies, if our tech companies can only benefit from the internal American market, that's actually not enough to generate the revenue and growth that they need, even to stay technologically equal, say to China, much less be ahead and be and be supe…”
Mead argues the information revolution drives civilizational divergence, not convergence
“The information revolution, I think, enables countries to use their own cultures, languages, and so on as platforms, and Turkey is more Turkish. It's less like Europe now than it was 25 years ago. India is becoming more, I think Japan is becoming more Japanese…”
Mead warns America's massive legacy weapon stockpiles invite technological disruption
“And it's also for us as a, as the power that has the most stuff, we're actually the most vulnerable to technological change because we've got more, we've got so many tanks that the tank becomes useless. That's more of a problem for us than it is for somebody w…”
Mead argues deterring Russia is vastly preferable to helping Ukraine fight
“What you don't want to do is help Ukraine win a war with Russia. What you want is for Russia to feel that if they attack Ukraine, the consequences would be so terrible that it's just not worth doing it. You know, that's anything other than deterrence involves …”
Mead argues automating foreign policy with AI increases deterrence by eliminating hesitation
“Automating your foreign policy decision-making process increases deterrence, and so we've turned that over to the AI, and if the AI thinks you're doing this, wham, right? And anything less than that is, no, I'm leaving a human decision point because I might de…”
Movva: There are no bad AI chips, only bad pricing
“I like to say there's no bad chips, there's only bad pricing. And I will make any chip work at the right price.”
Movva: Uncontrolled P99 latency yields unbeatable economics for background agents
“We tell our customers, look, our average throughput is going to be very competitive, but our P 99, our 99 percentile latency is not going to be controlled. It cannot be. And in return, I'll give you unbeatable economics. And I think that's the right fit for ba…”
Tolerating Data Center Outages Unlocks Cheap Power for Inexpensive AI Chips
“The trick is that it's going to give me better access to power that no one else is going to touch, because it is so annoying to deal with that kind of outage. And if my chips are cheap enough, they're probably not going to be Nvidia racks. And if my chips are …”
Movva: Compute startups should primarily attack Nvidia's reliance on HBM
“You want to pick something and say, I think they've underpriced the impact of how short we're going to be on HBM. We're going to push really hard in this other direction instead, which, you know, as an aside, I do think is probably the thing to attack most.”
Thompson: US dependence on China cannot be fixed outside conflict
“I think there's a little bit of magical thinking, which I just invoked in terms of manufacturing and whether it be fabs, whether that be actuators, like all these sort of precursors, like the, I think the degree to which we are dependent on China is underappre…”
Thompson: Economic opportunity for AI is massive even without further model improvements
“I think that market is so huge and so large that if the models did not improve at all from where they are right now, the economic opportunity is actually massive.”
Thompson: Consumers refuse to pay for software and ignore productivity
“Consumers don't want to pay. So there's two things to understand about consumers that Silicon Valley has to relearn about every 10 years. Number one, consumers do not want to pay for software. And number two, consumers do not care about being productive.”
Thompson: Apple excels at deterministic hardware, not probabilistic AI
“AI is this probabilistic endeavor. Apple is the king of deterministic products. Like, a physical product, you ship that iPhone, you ship it once, and it's gotta be good.”
Thompson: Severe power constraints benefit NVIDIA due to token efficiency advantage
“If we get to a world where we actually run out of power, that's probably good for NVIDIA, because in a world where we're totally constrained on power, we have to get the best efficiency, the best token efficiency, and I think NVIDIA is still the most token eff…”
Vishria: Software builders must embrace disposable 'sandcastles' or fail
“We used to be building castles. Now we're building sandcastles. They're going to get washed away. And that's, if you don't think of software that way. You have to embrace it because if you were an artisan and you were like, Hey, I built these like perfect foun…”
Vishria: AI product development completely inverts traditional product management
“I think it's actually a complete inversion of how product development used to work to how product development happens now. And product development, you know, it always used to be, so you'd always say like, hey, product managers, you trained, oh, the product ma…”
Vishria: AI agents make database migration trivial for software companies
“So it turns out that now, all of a sudden, database migration, which used to be, like, the, like, number one thing you would not do in software, is, like, kind of trivial.”
Vishria: An architectural blueprint is 80% of software but 2% of hardware
“In software, if you have, like, that kind of, like, logical block diagram of, like, why it works and everything else, you're kind of 80% of the way there, and it's a matter of, like, go-to-market execution. In hardware you're, like, two percent of the way ther…”