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 1,976 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 14 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
Paul Graham directly told YC investors to back Flexport
“PG himself really liked, liked and likes Flexport and was telling investors, you should invest in this company, which kind of controversial. YC partners, I think they're a little better about it now than they used to be, but they would kind of pick, choose fav…”
Flexport hired roughly 900 U.S. software engineers over 12 months
“I think we added 900 software engineers in 12, in like 12 months. Oh wow. And turned out, they're all in the U.S. Or almost all in the U.S., Seattle mostly. It was like very expensive people.”
Flexport is the only top-100 freight forwarder founded after the web browser
“We're the only one founded, only one in the top hundred in the world founded after the web browser was invented.”
China shipping volumes plunged 60% before surging upon U.S. tariff relief
“Volumes from China collapsed, 60% down when, on April ninth, the day the duties hit, stayed down for five weeks, and then as soon as he relaxed, as soon as they, the Trump administration relaxed the duties on China to 30% instead of one 45, it surged to 80% ab…”
Kahneman: Insurance underwriters varied by 50% on identical cases, despite 10% expectations
“So, we asked the executives the following question. Suppose you take two underwriters at random. By what percentage do they differ? I mean, you look at the difference between the premium, divide that by the average premium. What number do you get? And people e…”
Schwab forced succession planning with an asymmetric 5 percent profit-share penalty
“Effective immediately, all manager shares dropped from 50 to 45%. If they appointed an assistant, that person got 10%. If they didn't, the company kept the extra five percent.”
Les Schwab store managers out-earned most 1970s corporate executives
“By the mid-nineteen seventies, some of the store managers were making over a 100,000 dollars annually, more than most corporate executives in the 19 seventies.”
Munger: Imposing artificial hardship on affluent kids only breeds resentment
“One of the only pieces of advice Charlie Munger gave me about parenting over dinner once was the parents that try to artificially impose a different lifestyle on their kids than they are living. And he gave an extreme example of a guy getting, like, chauffeure…”
Pattison fired his lowest-performing car salesperson every month without exception
“Two years later, Jimmy had developed what outsiders would call ruthless, but what he saw as a very necessary policy, crystallized in one brutal rule. Every month, whoever sold the fewest cars got fired. No exceptions. No negotiations. No second chances.”
Nooyi: Sourced Competitor Plant Satellite Photos via FOIA Request
“If you did an FOI, a Freedom of Information request to the Intelligence Department, and ask them to give you satellite photographs of the plant from different altitudes, they can give you a pretty good picture. And I did that, and in a few days, I got the pict…”
Sources confirm Anna Wintour was never personally insulting to staff
“She might come across as cold as some, but despite what you think from the double wears Prada, my sources tell me she was never insulting. She valued clarity, speed, and directness.”
Gil: Protocols to create viruses are already public without AI
“The protocols for cloning and PCR and all this, it's all on the internet. It's all posted by major labs. It's in all the textbooks. Like that's not new knowledge that people can't just go and do right now if they really wanted to.”
Gil: Bay Area represents 25% of global private tech wealth creation
“Traditionally the U.S. Has been about half of that globally. The Bay Area has been about half of that. So, 25% of all private technology wealth creation happens in one place, right? In one city. If you add in New York and L.A., then you're at like 40% of the w…”
Garry Tan: Paul Graham created the first web browser-based application
“He actually basically created the first web browser based program. So he was one of the first people to hook up a web request to an actual program in Unix.”
Garry Tan: About 2.5% of Y Combinator startups become $10B decacorns
“Yeah, about two and a half percent end up becoming Decacorns sooner or later, so.”
Garry Tan: Y Combinator's unicorn hit rate increased from 3.5% to 5.5%
“If anything, I think that the unicorn rate has gone up over time. You know 1015 years ago, I think it was closer to maybe three and a half to four percent, and now we're around five and a half percent. Some batches from You know, maybe 2017, 20 18, or, you kno…”
Garry Tan: San Francisco had zero housing starts last year
“Literally, there were no new housing starts in all of, you know, San Francisco proper for the last year.”
Garry Tan: 5-person YC startups are hitting $12M revenue in 12 months
“We have companies basically
You know, going from zero to six million dollars in revenue in six months.
We have companies going from zero to twelve million dollars a year in revenue in 12 months, right?
And with under a dozen people.
Like, usually five or six p…”
Garry Tan: $4 billion currently funds AI safety organizations and think tanks
“There's something like four billion dollars of money sloshing around think tanks and AI safety organizations”
Garry Tan: AI code generation makes engineers 5 to 10 times faster
“Today, with CodeGen, you know, today, engineers are basically, you know, writing code about five or 10 X faster than they would before.”
Garry Tan: Apple opened RCS messaging in reaction to DOJ pressure
“Apple even today still, you know, they're opening it up a little bit more with RCS, but, you know, it's those are actually in reaction to the work of Jonathan Cantor and the DOJ.”
Buffett: Henry Singleton Had the Best Capital Deployment Record in America
“Warren Buffett once said that Henry Singleton had the best operating and capital deployment record in American business, bar none.”
Singleton Made Teledyne First US TV Maker to Exit Before Japanese Competition
“When American TV manufacturers still dominated the US market, Singleton anticipated the coming Japanese competition and exited the business entirely. This shocked industry observers. Packard Bell had a good market share and solid profits, but Singleton saw the…”
Taylor: GPT-4o Mini is likely cheaper than self-hosting open-source models
“I haven't done the math on it, but it's probably cheaper to use that than to host, self-host any of the open source models.”
Poilievre: Canada generates $53 USD per work hour versus $78 in US
“And so today we generate 53 dollars USD for every hour we work as Canadians. The Americans generate 78 dollars.”
Poilievre: Canada receives $15k investment per worker annually versus $28k in US
“In Canada, we get 15,000 dollars of investment per worker per year. In the States, it's 28,000. We're way behind even the OECD average. We get 65 cents of investment per worker For every dollar an OECD average worker gets.”
Poilievre: Ireland's GDP per capita is twice that of Canada
“Now Ireland's per capita GDP is twice Canada's.”
Poilievre: Canada's cold weather makes LNG liquefaction 25% cheaper
“We have an enormous advantage there too, because our cold weather makes it 25% cheaper to liquefy.”
Poilievre: Criminal Code Bans Hate Without Harming Free Speech
“The criminal code already bans incitements to violence and incitement to genocide, other utterances that are designed to instruct a violent or hostile attack against a particular group of people. That is in the criminal code already, and that has not harmed fr…”
Poilievre: 20,000 immigrant doctors and 32,000 immigrant nurses cannot practice in Canada
“So we have, for example 20,000 immigrant doctors, 32,000 immigrant nurses who can't work because they don't have a license in Canada.”
Poilievre: Canadian housing costs doubled after federal government housing programs began
“Like, you know, so they bring in the, a monstrous housing program 10 years ago, and say, well, the government's going to get back into housing, and that's going to make it affordable. Well, and the housing costs double, and an entire generation can't afford a …”
Vanderbilt Intentionally Crashed a Railroad's Stock to Secretly Acquire Controlling Interest
“Though initially dismissed, Vanderbilt quietly joined the Long Island Railroad Board, redirecting business away from the Stonington. Shareholders panicked at the high debt and reduced traffic. Its stock plummeted, allowing Vanderbilt and his allies, including …”
Flatt: Credit Spreads Are the Lowest in History
“Today, Base rates are high. We're back to five. Guess what? Spreads are the lowest they've ever been in history. We just did a thirty-year Brookfield Corporation financing, so we're borrowing money for 30 years, fixed for that time period, and it's a 125 over.”
Modern department store makeup counters originated with Estée Lauder
“Those makeup counters you see in every department store today with the dedicated chairs and beauty experts. That all started because Estee refused to let her first customer try products alone.”
Estée Lauder countered Revlon by running an ad quoting leaked internal memos
“When Revsan's Ethira tried to challenge Clinique later on in the future, Estée authorized an ad in Women's Word Daily that quoted phrases from an upcoming campaign taken directly from his confidential internal memos.”
Wolfe: China graduates 50% of all global AI undergrads
“50% of all AI undergrads in the world today are being graduated by China.”
Parrish: Roaring Twenties tax revenues rose while debt fell despite lower tax rates
“The roaring twenties saw tax revenues remain stable or increase even as tax rates dropped, well, federal debt shrank considerably.”
Parrish: Mellon's personal income surged to $7.8M during the 1929 crash
“In fact, while the market crashed around him, his personal income actually increased from 5.2 million in 1928 to 7.8 million in 1929.”
Almost all Filterbuy senior hires fled miserable PE-backed firms
“Almost every major person that I've hired at management level has come from A company that was owned by a private equity company, and they absolutely hated it, and they were looking for, you know, a different path.”
Drexler: Gap prepared a contingency bankruptcy plan during early turnaround
“We were talking about, it was a year and a half, we were in Carmel, and we're sitting there, we come up with a kind of a bankruptcy plan.”
Drexler: Steve Jobs traded a Gap board seat for Apple board membership
“And he called me one day, and he said, I'll join the Gap Board if you join my board. Deal.”
Drexler advised Steve Jobs to build a prototype Apple Store warehouse
“Well, you know, I designed the first store with him, because he designed an ugly store, and I, we went in, and I told him, get a warehouse. Build a store so we can design it together.”
Zappos reached $1.6 billion in sales on just $10 million in equity
“Tony invested ten million dollars of his own money, but most of it was financed through being very, very creative, figuring out how to get merchants that we ordered from to give us credit and to increase the credit line. We had a, eventually got a line of cred…”
Amazon leadership originally conceived AWS as a low-margin infrastructure business
“They didn't think this was a, this is a high margin business. They thought of it as like, ok, this will be a low margin business too, and we like low margin businesses.”
Lin: DoorDash proactively digitized merchant menus during COVID lockdowns
“They decided, like, these merchants are going to be hurting, and we need to help them, and so they proactively went out and uploaded menus from different merchants onto DoorDash and said, hey, I know you guys are hurting. The only thing you can do is delivery.…”
Interacting with wealthy peers boosts low-income individuals' lifetime earnings by 30%
“If you are in this neighborhood, and even if your family is in that 50,000 dollars a year bucket, but you interact with some of those rich people, aka you have more Economic interconnectedness. This group of people has a 30% higher earnings over the course of …”
Women wearing makeup earn 15% more annually than equally attractive peers
“There was a fascinating study showing that women who wear makeup but have the same
attractiveness pull in a group of people. So everybody, so you were all sevens, let's say, but a seven who wears makeup versus a seven who doesn't wear makeup will earn 15% mo…”