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 8,608 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 29 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
MacInnis: Hopes competitor Deel goes to zero due to its 'criminal behavior'
“I was one of the first investors in Deal, if you've heard of them. I, you know, I was able to exit, I was able to exit that position, and then, you know, hopefully that company's going to zero with their criminal behavior, but whatever.”
Benioff calls Microsoft Copilot 'really a terrible product'
“And I'm running aggressive marketing against Microsoft because they have really a terrible product co-pilot that I'm have to position against and market against.”
Kalinowski: OpenAI lacked proper governance around its Department of Defense deal
“And I feel that what happened with the decision-making, the speed of the decision-making, the governance, and the lack of defined guardrails around the announcement of the Department of War deal is not how I thought it should have been done.”
Rabois: I refuse to let colleagues talk to consumer customers
“I refuse to allow colleagues of mine to talk to customers.”
Rabois: Criticizing employees publicly optimizes for the system over the individual
“When you give people feedback negative individually, you're optimizing for the atomic unit, not the system. The reason why to do it in public is it's more important for all the colleagues to understand that there's an issue it's being addressed.”
Rabois: High-performance teams do not have psychological safety
“No, no, I don't believe in that at all. Like high performance machines don't have psychological safety. They're about winning.”
Lemkin: 1.2 humans and 20 AI agents match 10 human GTM reps
“At the end of the day, on 1.2 humans is plus 20 AI agents is doing about what 10 human GTMs is.”
Schulhoff: Guardrail Vendors Fabricate Stats and Fail on Non-English
“I know a number of people working at these companies and I am permitted to say these things, which I will approximately say but they tell me things like, you know, the testing we do is bullshit. They're fabricating statistics. And a lot of the times their mode…”
Chen: Big Tech Could Fire 90% of Staff and Move Faster
“Like I used to work at a bunch of the big tech companies, and I always felt that we could fire 90% of people and we would move faster because the best people wouldn't have all these distractions.”
Vercel replaced a $1M SDR team with a $1,000 AI agent
“That lead agent, which runs full stack on Purcell, will cost us about a thousand dollars to run for the entire year. So if you remember, I told you we had 10 people in the SDR function, so I'm paying well over a million dollars for that from a salary perspecti…”
McCabe: Acquired Zendesk was culturally and strategically dead
“Zendesk had been acquired a couple of years prior. They were strategically, energetically, culturally dead. They were upsetting customers in the market. There's an opportunity there. We're doing service.”
McCabe: Intercom Will Outgrow Every Public Software Company Next Year
“I think we're going to find ourselves being the fastest growing out of all relative to all public software companies.”
Mann: 50% chance of reaching superintelligence in a small handful of years
“I think, like, 50th percentile chance of hitting some kind of super intelligence in just a small handful of years is probably reasonable, and it does sound crazy, but this is the exponential that we're on.”
Mann: Anthropic models have exhibited power-seeking behaviors in lab experiments
“If the model is in a box trying to improve itself, then it could go completely off the rails and have these secret goals, like Resource accumulation and power seeking and resistance to shutdown that you really don't want in a very powerful model. And we've act…”
Martin: Richard Rumelt does not know much about business
“I don't think that he, like most business academics, he doesn't know much about business, right? Like he hasn't gone out and practiced a lot.”
Pfeffer: Bill Gates stole the original code that built Microsoft
“People forget that Bill Gates stole the code on which Microsoft has built.”
Krishnan: No successful company was ever built using 'Jobs to Be Done'
“I think no successful company has ever been built on top of JDBD. And if you pick JDBD, you're probably doomed.”
Ugarte: Microsoft and early rivals lost AI coding lead due to culture
“AI coding has always been competitive from when cursor first, first kind of came to be. And at the time the competitors were Microsoft and others and a handful of maybe 10 or 20 companies. And I think it's notable that none of those competitors are at the fore…”
AI labs rely on autocatalytic progress, not recursive self-improvement
“But if you ask the most sophisticated individuals at the labs, it's not actually RSI that's occurring, which could lead to some sort of runaway winner because they were an epsilon ahead of the others. It's auto catalytic effects, which just means you're using …”
A sudden, fast-takeoff scenario for AI will not happen
“Like the line of reasoning for that case is always everything up until now, then something happens that no one can quite articulate and then fast take off. So I don't believe that that's going to happen.”
AI testing will expose PMs who lack zero-to-one product skills
“In a world where every story gets told, every product story gets told, every feature gets tried, I think a lot of PMs are going to realize they're actually not that good at zero to one. And it's much more fulfilling to work on someone else's good idea than you…”
Startups do not have growth problems, they have product problems
“Well, I, you know, here's the one thing I would say that here's the hopeful point, which is I always say that nobody has a growth problem these days. They have a product problem.”
Ward: Strategic recruiting teams should be among the highest paid company-wide
“And one of them, yeah, if not, I mean, if you think about this impact that they're having that and like the, you know, I feel like there's a supply and demand crisis around really strategic recruiters because of the somewhat transactional nature we've made rec…”
Optimal to operate without product managers where possible
“Wherever possible, it's kind of optimal to not have a product manager and instead have design and engineering going through those kinds of steps and making sure that their muscles are well repped.”
Overhiring PMs infantilizes engineers and designers capable of making decisions
“Hiring so many PMs infantilizers The engineers and the designers who are perfectly capable of making good decisions, but just never had to, because there was always a PM to babysit them.”
Verrilli: Top-down leadership and one senior PM beat three junior PMs
“Actually top down is pretty good because folks at the top, generally speaking, can make quick decisions and remove all of this alignment debate. They have probably more macro context than most folks and assuming that they are genuinely in touch with ground tru…”
Ambrosino: Eliminating the product manager role is a terrible idea
“I I've heard a lot of companies be like, we're getting rid of the product role, which I think is by the way, a terrible idea.”
Pincus: Viral apps like BeReal are sinking speedboats outrunning churn
“Viral based companies, and there's been many, you know, be real. There's right. We've seen these, they're sinking speed boats. They're trying to drive faster than they're sinking, right?”
Fadell: Google sidelined Nest due to cultural and business mismatches
“The whole organization was a stepchild for whatever reason, you know, there was cultural mismatch. There was, you know, probably a business mismatch.”
Fadell: Investing at 9- or 10-digit valuations cannot yield venture returns
“Well that doesn't work from a venture perspective. Like with those kinds of, you'd never get the venture returns. You can't invest in things. When the valuations are already nine digits or 10 digits, and you think you're gonna, a small portfolio that's got lik…”
Evans: AI impact equals internet and mobile, but not industrial revolution
“My most controversial opinion is that I think that AI is as big a deal as the internet or mobile and only as big a deal as the internet or mobile.”
Evans: Running Anthropic does not make Dario Amodei a labor expert
“I don't think the fact that you run AI lab suddenly gives you, or rather, and if you're going to use argument from authority, then it should be relevant to the field. So, like, I'm interested in Dario's opinions on where models are going to go in the next six …”
Evans: AI Model Providers Will Lack Pricing Power and Become Commodities
“And so it does sort of seem to me that like, if the chatbot isn't the UX and it needs to be apps and the model companies aren't going to build that. And the models themselves are basically commodities, as, at least as you can see them as users, then why would …”
Shipper: The CLI era for AI agents is over in favor of GUIs
“CLIs are over. We speed ran the CLI era. It was nice while it lasted, but I think it's pretty clear. It's not that CLI, sorry. It's not that CLIs are going to completely go away. Obviously they've been around for the last like, 30 years or 40 years or 50 years…”
Shipper: SaaS stocks will rise majorly, defying fears of a SaaS apocalypse
“I think the SAS apocalypse is dumb and SAS stocks will be up majorly in the next couple of years.”
Shipper: Mass unemployment predicted by AI CEOs is not going to happen
“I think that, like, some AI CEOs are talking about, like, I think that's not gonna happen.”
Ries: Johnson & Johnson covered up asbestos in baby powder for growth
“Again, if you think I'm exaggerating, the product managers at Johnson & Johnson put asbestos in the baby powder. And covered it up because although they said their purpose, their mission statement was patient health, their actual mission had become growth opti…”
Schoening: The SaaSpocalypse is greatly exaggerated
“So I think to some degree, the SaaSpocalypse is greatly exaggerated.”
Schoening: Human intervention in writing code should feel like a bug
“At least on the writing side, every time there is an intervention, a human intervention, it should feel a little bit like a bug.”
Spiegel: Network effects alone can no longer protect software from cloning
“I don't, I think network effects are certainly an important piece of the puzzle for sure. But I don't think they're enough when it comes to these sorts of software you know, software cloning.”
Singhal: Half of PMs are 'information movers' who will become obsolete
“Now what we're essentially saying is the information mover is essentially going to become a dinosaur. And I think about half of the product people that were kind of, that grew into the industry, you know, have that skill and superpower.”
Singhal: Tech diversity and geographic breadth will regress significantly during AI wave
“Sadly, I think that geography and actually diversity is going to take a step back. I think that we were very good about driving more breath. As we grew the industry, we started looking at people who were from different backgrounds to populate it, including dif…”
Rabois: Lack of corporate data creates recruiting alpha in younger talent
“Like one of the reasons why, you know, sometimes it's controversial to say this, but one of the reasons why the net impact of by higher undiscovered talent is you wind up skewing younger. It's not because you need young people. It's that younger people have by…”
Rabois: Conventional PM roles make no sense in the AI era
“Well, I saw this podcast, or listen to this podcast that Peter Fenn did, and he convinced me that the idea of a PM makes no sense, basically, in the future. If you think about decomposing the logic, is what does a PM usually do? They take these inputs from cus…”
Rabois: Consumer interviews give misleading data due to subconscious buying decisions
“Customers don't know what They want, and they're very bad because it's a subconscious decision, especially for consumers. Like what I purchased, what I wear is not a conscious decision. And when you're consciously trying to answer a subconscious decision, you …”
Rabois: Companies should skip failure retrospectives to encourage risk-taking
“I don't want to deter people from taking ambitious shots on goal. And if you overemphasize failures and, you know, really people think they're going to get criticized. This is where the psychological safety maybe has some validity, which is be ambitious, be bo…”
Younis: Huawei is an extension of the Chinese state, not profit-driven
“Huawei's goal is not to grow profits or shareholders. It's a private company. It's really an extension of the state.”
Younis: Chinese EV makers appear superior only because they disregard profits
“So we say, look how amazing these Chinese EV companies are and look how bad the home team is. It's just because the home team is being assessed for being a business. It has to make profits. And because it doesn't, it gets hammered by public investors. The othe…”