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 29 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
Most successful people are just harnessed anxiety disorders
“I like to say like most successful people are just an anxiety disorder harnessed for productivity.”
Living in Victoria protects Wilkinson from mimetic status competition
“The people that I'm surrounded with are mostly people who have chosen to live in Victoria because of the lifestyle. Or are completely disconnected from business. And so while I've got a wonderful network of amazing people like you and people in New York and LA…”
Founders should hire imperfect candidates quickly rather than delaying execution
“God, you should have just hired the wrong person first, and then you can learn, you know, you can let them go if it's not a fit, but just get moving. So many people they try and use that saying that carpenters use measure twice, cut once, but they just end up …”
High-dopamine stimulation destroys baseline pleasure and causes misery
“If you eat chocolate cake once a month, it's really pleasurable. If you eat chocolate cake once a week, it's pretty good. If you eat it daily, it's okay. But then your brain starts demanding it hourly. And if you do that, it's just miserable. And I think we al…”
Mimetic desire drives wealthy people to envy instead of appreciation
“And I think that's mimetic desire at its worst. It's envy, and it's driving people to not appreciate what they have, no matter how much they have.”
Entrepreneurs possess an inherent drive to achieve unnecessarily
“I find every entrepreneur has that inherent drive where they have to achieve, and even when it's not really necessary to achieve.”
Holding company founders stay involved from an addiction to being needed
“The way that I've structured my business is that I am ultimately just making decisions around capital allocation, and there's not that many to make a year, and so I should be able, technically, I should be able to remove myself from a lot of that stuff, but I …”
Tiny avoids capital-intensive sectors to focus on predictable businesses
“Now I really focus on businesses where I think that I can predict the outcome where, with reasonable certainty, and I'm not having to compete with the venture folks. So I don't want to get into AI and drones and, you know, vaccines. I don't want to get into ar…”
Later-stage CEOs should have previously run a business double the size
“So what I look for in a later stage company profile is I say, I want to hire someone who's really kind of done this before in a similar or adjacent industry. And they've run a business that's at least double the size.”
Wilkinson uses babysitting and cruise ship tests to evaluate prospective CEOs
“The heuristic that my business partner Chris and I use is, would I let this person babysit my kids, right? Or would I be okay if I got stuck on a cruise ship talking to this person for like three days, right?”
Wilkinson's local news outlet is read by one-in-five Victoria residents
“I started a news business trying to replace the local newspaper here, which now Is read by one in five people in Victoria.”
Losing money on civic placemaking projects is ultimately worth it
“Directionally, I think that sort of thing is worth losing money on. And I think I can crack it over time. And if it results in the city being more interesting or bringing, you know, more interesting people here, it'll benefit the city. It'll benefit me.”
A UCSF study found high-heat saunas showed major remission for depression
“My friend Dr. Rhonda Patrick, she told me about a study that needed funding out of UCSF, Where they have people with treatment-resistant depression, they've tried everything... And they put them in saunas for very, you know, very, very hot sauna session for an…”
Wilkinson refuses to raise another fund to avoid managing outside capital
“Owing people things or letting anyone down, and so I don't know that I'll raise another fund. All of our investors have been wonderful. We've had no issues. People have been very supportive. We've done good deals. They're all probably going to make a lot of mo…”
Wilkinson spent $60,000 on a charity lunch to diligence Bill Ackman
“What I ended up doing is I spent 60,000 dollars bidding on a charity lunch where I'm like, okay, I get to donate charity. I get to meet this interesting guy. And my plan was that if he was an asshole, I would sell all of it as soon as we got out. And if I like…”
Publicly announcing new projects creates social accountability that drives execution
“So it's those kind of, I think a lot of those kind of hacks of like not letting ideas die on the vine, forcing it to become real creating social shame if I don't actually execute on it. And again, that's a double-edged sword as well because you get into consis…”
Wilkinson made hundreds of millions of dollars in a single year
“When I woke up on August first you know, I'd made hundreds of millions of dollars that year taking a company public.”
Overcoming temptation requires environmental self-binding rather than raw willpower
“What you have to do is self-bind. You have to remove that stimulus from your life completely. Can't be in the house. Can't have easy access. You know, don't ask for the dessert menu, et cetera.”
Wilkinson did a month-long digital detox after experiencing severe anhedonia
“I put my phone in a drawer. I went up to, we have a lake house up at Seanigan Lake about 30 minutes away, and I didn't touch my phone, email, music, podcast, anything for about a month”
Wilkinson lost $10 million trying to compete against venture-backed Asana
“And I ended up losing ten million dollars doing that.”
Tiny hired the former president of SodaStream to run AeroPress
“When we bought AeroPress about six months ago we hired the CEO, former president of SodaStream, and, you know, he had scaled that business to over two hundred million.”
Wilkinson has reinvested 80 to 90 percent of his earnings long-term
“I've been taking basically 80 or 90% of every cent I make and reinvesting it for a very long time”
Wilkinson lost almost $1 million on his first restaurant venture
“I lost almost a million dollars, and I hired the wrong people.”
Wilkinson netted over $10 million selling his first business in 2013
“What ended up happening was in 2013, I sold my first business. I was kind of burnt out. And a friend of mine just said, Hey, look, why don't you just sell one, take some money off the table de-risk a little bit. And so I did that. And suddenly I had, you know,…”
Bill Ackman's Pershing Square Holdings is Wilkinson's only public market holding
“So basically Bill is my only public holding. So that's my kind of backup retirement plan. I just keep stocking my money in Pershing and let Bill handle the public investing”
Wilkinson gives his wife his Screen Time passcode to restrict usage
“What I have had to do in my personal life is turn on screen time on my phone and give my wife the passcode, not have ice cream in the house, you know, all those things. Treat myself like a, you know, alcoholic or something when it comes to these stimulus devic…”