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 2,271 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 46 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
Evans: Kodak was once the best-selling US digital camera vendor
“What actually happens is, once it starts happening, Kodak go all in on digital cameras. At one point, they were the best-selling digital camera vendor in the USA, and if you look at their annual ports at the time, they think this is going to be great, because …”
Ron Conway email secured Flexport a San Francisco license in six hours
“So I told Ron Conway about this situation and he emailed the late Ed Lee, who was our mayor. And I, Ron was like one of his big donors and friends. And we got the license within six hours.”
Kahneman: Incomes above $70,000 boost life satisfaction but not emotional happiness
“The research I did with Angus Deaton at Princeton, famous economist, we showed that in terms of happiness, in terms of emotional tone, positive and negative, Having a lot of money doesn't make you happier, but being poor makes you miserable. So, that's above a…”
Finkelstein: AI will allow businesses to reach $100M GMV within three years
“I think you're going to have another step function. Like, I think that you will have this incredible hockey stick curve of businesses that grow from zero to a hundred million dollars in GMB inside of three years, instead of, inside of, like, 10 years.”
Hastings admits Netflix relied on creative instinct to greenlight House of Cards
“You know, there's some data, but I would say that's raw. It's instinct that the thing you've got a partial script, you've got some casting, and you have to guess how good is that show going to be. So to figure out what it's going to comp against in terms of yo…”
Hastings: Complete K-12 and university education will be available on phones via AI within a decade
“So in the next 10 years, you'll be able to have a complete K-twelve and probably university education. With AI on a phone or tablet that will be really changed learning.”
Gil: AI Business Models Will Shift to Selling Units of Cognition
“I think in a couple years we'll start thinking about it as we're selling units of cognition, right? We're selling bits of person time or person equivalent to do stuff for us.”
Gil: Over half of biology research in top journals is not reproducible
“If you look at it, about half or more than half of all biology research in top journals is not reproducible.”
Gil: Crash data shows children only need car seats until age two
“If you actually look at crash data, Real data, and people have now reproduced this across multiple countries, multiple time periods, it's the age of two. So for six extra years, we keep people in booster seats and car seats, at least against the data, right?”
Gil: 80% to 90% of AI market cap is in the Bay Area
“If you look at AI, it's like, 80 to 90% of the market cap is all in the Bay Area.”
Tan: 50% of YC companies raise Series A, 25% after year 5
“About half of companies that go through YC will end up raising a series A. That's, you know, much higher than any other pre-seed or seed sort of situation that I know of. But about, A quarter of those who raise the Series A, they do it in year five or later.”
Garry Tan: YC teams staying in SF double their unicorn odds
“One thing we spotted is that the teams that come to San Francisco and then stay in San Francisco or the Bay Area, they actually double their chance of becoming a unicorn.”
Garry Tan: Competitors offering double cash cannot match Y Combinator's success
“There are clones of YC right now that give like twice as much money, for instance, but I don't think that they're going to see this level of success because they're not going to have As earnest people who become as formidable around you.”
Garry Tan: 60% of serial founders who built recent unicorns are YC alumni
“Did you know that 40, you know, of those 40%, 60% of those people, the people who created unicorns the last 10 years are YC alumni.”
Garry Tan: Sub-15-person startups reaching $100M revenue will be common by 2027
“I think we are seeing companies that in the next year or two will get to 50, a hundred million dollars a year in revenue.
really with under, you know, maybe 10 people, maybe 15 people tops.
and so that was relatively rare, and my prediction would be this bec…”
Tan: Social unrest will occur if AI benefits bypass majority of people
“In reaction to, you know, the nature of work changing that would be the outcome that, you know, the majority of people, if not all people, like, see the benefit in some sort of direct way, and if we don't do that, then there will be unrest.”
Tan: Humans will talk directly to superintelligent AI entities
“Like, we're going to have these, you know, basically super intelligent entities that we talk to.”
Garry Tan: Elon Musk proved Twitter didn't need 80% of its staff
“Elon came in and quickly asked, like, 80 or 90% of the people, and it turns out you didn't need 80 or 90% of the people, so.”
Garry Tan: Indistinguishable voice AI is currently actively replacing call center labor
“The speech to text and text to speech, those things are indistinguishable from human beings now, and you can train these things, the evals are good, the prompting is good you know, I, you know, going back to what we were saying earlier, like, what we're seeing…”
Taylor: The craft of software engineering will be completely different by 2027
“And if I look at the actual craft of software engineering that we're doing right now I think it's literally a fact that it'll be completely different two years from now.”
Taylor: AI model market will consolidate into a few massive capex players
“I think we have probably have too many people building models right now. There's already been some consolidation actually of companies being folded into Amazon and Microsoft and others. But I do think it will play out a bit like the cloud infrastructure busine…”
Taylor: ChatGPT will be the primary delivery mechanism for AGI
“Is I do think that, It will be the delivery mechanism for AGI when it's produced, and not just because of the many researchers at OpenAI, but because of the amazing, like, utility it's become from individuals.”
Taylor: AI will shift intellectual power from deep specialists to cross-domain generalists
“I have a completely personal theory that it will benefit deep generalists in a lot of ways, too, because your ability to understand a fair amount in a lot of domains, and leveraging AI knowing where to prompt the AI to go explore and bringing together those do…”
Taylor: Software engineering supply is not close to being solved by AI
“At some point, we will be we will no longer be supply constrained in software, but we're not anywhere close to it right now, and you're taking something that has always been the scarce resource, which is software engineers, and you're making it not scarce, and…”
Taylor: AI agents will rapidly erode legacy seat-based software pricing models
“AI, I think, will change the landscape of software to be tools of productivity that, to agents that actually accomplish tasks, and I think it will Help some companies who, for whom that's a amplifies their existing value proposition and it will really hurt oth…”
Bret Taylor: Personal AI agents will take a while to become robust
“I think it might be a really hard product to build because when you think about all the different services and people you interact with every day, it's kind of everything. So it's not, it has to generalize a lot to be useful to you. And because of the Personal…”
Poilievre: Liberal re-election will drive investment to US and halt pipeline construction
“I think if we go, if the liberals are reelected, you will see a continued outpour of investment to the United States. You will see that we do not build LNG plants, pipelines, or any other self-reliance projects that will break our dependence on America.”
Poilievre: Canadian government spends $21B on consultants, double from 10 years ago
“For example, the government's now spending twenty-one billion dollars on consultants. That's twice what they were spending 10 years ago.”
Poilievre cites $500 billion net capital outflow to the US over decade
“In the last 10 years, there's been a net outflow of five hundred billion dollars of investment to the U.S. From Canada, and that's partly because our taxes are extremely high.”
Poilievre: Canadian building permits rank second slowest in the OECD
“We have the second slowest building permits in the OECD, and it takes us 17 years to get a mine approved, three times longer to get approval for a housing development in Canada versus the UK or the US.”
Poilievre: Vancouver police arrested the same 40 offenders 6,000 times
“In Vancouver, the police had to arrest the same 40 offenders 6000 times. 40 guys. Each one of these guys was arrested on average once every two days. A 150 times a year for one guy.”
Flatt: US Business Productivity Over Next 20 Years Probably Unprecedented
“But the productivity advances we see over the next 20 years probably will be unprecedented for a period of time. Certainly one, we haven't seen it for a long time, ah, in business, ah, across America.”
Flatt: 401(k)s and Global Retirement Plans Will Open to Alternatives
“For one case in the US are going to open up to alternatives. I think plans around the world will open up to alternatives.”
Wolfe: AI Agents Interacting on Frontends Portend the Death of APIs
“There's another adjacent theme, which I think is also really interesting, which is AI portends the death of APIs. So APIs allow meta with their meta glasses or Ryan to be able to communicate with Uber and, you know, Spotify through the backend, through softwar…”
Wolfe: 30% to 50% of AI inference will occur on-device
“I think that you're going to end up doing a lot of inference on device. Meaning, instead of going, ah, to the cloud and typing a query, like, 30 to 50% of your inference may be on an Apple or an Android device.”
Wolfe: AI Will Cut Software Engineering Hiring by 10% to 30%
“I would suspect that maybe you lose 10 to 30% of the people that you normally would have hired, but the people that are there are still like these 10 X coders, and now they have a machine that's helping them be like 20 to a hundred X.”
Wolfe: DeepSeek release accelerated OpenAI model launch timelines
“The second that DeepSea comes out, it suddenly accelerated the internal strategic decisions from OpenAI of when are we gonna release models.”
Wolfe: AI model developers without proprietary data will struggle
“I think the people that are continuing to develop ever better models, unless they have proprietary data, are going to be sort of screwed.”
Wolfe: Automated 24/7 Machine-Led Scientific Discovery is Inevitable
“So I'm absolutely convinced. Like, high certitude. I don't know exactly which company will do it. We've invested in some. They haven't worked. We'll invest in more. Hopefully they will. But this directional arrow of progress of the idea, by analogy, of machine…”
Wolfe: Everyone will run multiple virtual companies within 20 years
“Like that, in 10 or 20 years, people look back and be like, how did we not see that coming? And look at all the jobs that are being created, because every single person is now creating And has, like, six virtual companies.”
Wolfe: Retail Inflows into Illiquid Private Equity Could Cause a Massive Blow-Up
“There's something here to watch about the flood of retail money that will go into illiquid alts, private equity in particular, and new vehicles that are formed to be able to provide liquidity because of that. And I think that that's both going to be really int…”
Wolfe: Trained AI Avatars of Loved Ones Will Become a Reality
“If there is an AI that is totally trained on my voice, and my likeness, and everything I've ever said, which I have done, that my kids would actually have a dad AI, and maybe they can consult it for questions, or, and is that a good thing, or a bad thing? I do…”
Wolfe: Anduril will be a $30B–$50B public company with software margins
“I deeply believe that Anderil in the next few years will be a 30 to fifty billion dollar publicly traded business doing single-digit mid-billions of revenue with software-like margins that are not like these cost-plus margins, so that is gonna usher in a big w…”
Wolfe: US SOCOM drone operations require legal authorization for strike ratios
“In the Pacific region with SOCOM, and there's a drone operator who's flying the drone, there's another drone operator who's piloting the weapon system, and there's two lawyers. So, they're helping the commander who is effectively given, like, a godshot of, you…”
Wolfe: 38% of US AI researchers are from China
“In our own country, in the United States, 38% of researchers in AI are from China.”
Zappos's most valuable customers also had the highest product return rates
“We then did this analysis and this is the type of analysis I really enjoy doing, like, let's take our best customers, and let's take our worst customers, and look at their return rates, and it turned out our best customers at the highest LTVs return the most”
Codie Sanchez crossed the U.S.-Mexico border illegally hundreds of times
“I mean, I saw, I've crossed, crossed the border hundreds of times illegally, documenting sort of what happens in conflict zones.”
Patrick: Low Omega-3 levels have a comparable mortality impact to smoking
“When you look at smokers with a high omega-three index, they have the same life expectancy as non-smokers with a low omega-three index. In other words, smoking was like having low omega-three, or having a low omega-three index was like smoking.”