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 60 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
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…”
Lovable is the fastest-growing startup in history
“We as a company are now living in, which is where the fastest growing startup in history.”
Lovable reached $200M ARR with a team of just 100 employees
“We're over two hundred million in AR. At this point, we're a hundred people large.”
At least half of S&P 500 companies have employees using Lovable
“There's, I'd say at least, to best of my knowledge, at least half of S&P. 500 companies have people working in them that are using Lovable to some extent, right?”
Designers will be the next big winners of AI tools
“If I was a betting man, as they say, I'd bet that the next class that wins are designers, because
We're training these tools to be more clear, to be better, to make better technical decisions. I don't think we will train them just yet to be, make better emoti…”
Non-engineers have an AI advantage through positive delusion
“So I think that's the advantage that we have over people that are technical. We just come into this completely unbiased and very positively delusional, which I think you have to have when working with AI tools, you have to come with this delusion that absolute…”
AI startups must recapture product-market fit every three months
“Every three months, I feel like we have to recapture our product market fit and not just recapture on the same technology and with same customers. It's both of those pieces of the equation change every three months.”
Subsidizing free AI usage is more cost-effective than Google search ads
“Honestly, it's more efficient way to do paid marketing almost in a sense because of the cost per eyeball that we get there is quite a bit lower compared to if we were trying to compute it on the Google. So yes and no to your statement, because it actually does…”
Verna: Only 30% to 40% of traditional growth playbooks transfer to AI
“When I'm thinking about the patterns here and what I have to unlearn, I feel like only 30 to 40% of what I've learned in the last 15 to 20 years of being in growth transfers here.”
Relentless public shipping serves as a powerful user resurrection strategy
“And that noise in the market happens by us shipping every day, every other day, multiple times per day, and just talking about it constantly. Interestingly enough, it's actually works with fantastic resurrection strategy because people are like, oh, there's mo…”
Falling dev costs shift software differentiation from utility to emotional design
“And I think that we're actually moving to the new era of software that needs to feel human, that people want to interact with, not just utility of it. Because cost of software is coming down so much to develop that we now can actually invest into emotional fee…”
Lovable classifies LLM costs for freemium users and hackathons as marketing
“If you want to host a lovable hackathon, we will sponsor it and give all of the participants credits away for free. So we give them away as candy and we basically track them over our LLM costs on freemium and giveaways as our marketing costs. And it doesn't go…”
AI startups must build features ahead of upcoming LLM model releases
“The tricky piece here is that it's not enough to just wait for that technology to get better and then start building on top. You have to build beforehand to like make a bet and then that's the LLM to catch up because when that model releases, you already need …”
Lovable's paid retention matches established B2B SaaS benchmarks
“However, what I can say, it's on par with benchmarks of other B to B SaaS products that I've ever worked at. And I worked with Miro, Dropbox, SurveyMonkey, Netlify Amplitude and others.”
Verna: AI software companies operate closer to 40% gross margins, not 80%
“To find an AI company with 80, 90% margin profile is absolutely impossible. Let's be real. We're all sitting somewhere in the 40% or so, which is a lot smaller.”
Osika: The skill of unblocking AI coding tools will soon become obsolete
“And the places where it gets stuck today is currently something that where you can use being very good at understanding and getting unstuck, but in the future, it won't be so important. This is just going to not get stuck.”
Osika: Lovable generated $1M in ARR within its first week post-launch
“Once we launched that, that was the 21st of November, so that's almost three months ago. We just hit like one million ARR in a week, and then it kept growing at that pace. It's still growing at even faster than that pace.”
Rachitsky: Lovable is the only AI tool with direct visual editing
“No other tool out there lets you generate code from an AI engineer and then actually just, like, change a small element of it. Of every other tool that I'm aware of, you have to, like, ask the agent, do this for me, and then you hope that it does the right thi…”
Osika: Perfect AI software creation and integration will arrive within two years
“The last piece of software, how I see that is that it's almost instant to go from what you want to change in a product or what you, what product you want to build. To having it fully working end to end, integrated with any of your existing systems or integrate…”
Vibe coding allows non-technical teams to demo instead of memo
“We, our motto for 25 was demo don't memo, which is like, instead of writing all these documents and talking and sitting on meetings with your engineers, trying to get your vision as a marketer or a sales guy in the office across, go into Lovable and build the …”
AI coding agents falsely claim issues are fixed to be agreeable
“These tools are very obedient and very agreeable. They're gonna lie to you. They're gonna tell you that they fixed the problem, even though they didn't. They're just gonna try to make you feel happy and say, yes, I found what the problem is and I fixed it.”
S&P 500 companies are including Lovable skills in job postings
“There's S&P, 500 companies that are like putting Lovable in, in job descriptions too, like saying, Hey, Lovable scares skills are, you know recommended in the recommended tab, right?”
Modern AI coding tools can fix any bug if given awareness
“Lovable, Cursor, Cloud Code, you name it, all these tools are good enough today to fix any problem they're aware of.”
Elite software engineering will never disappear
“It never goes away. We will need elite engineering more than ever.”
Vibe coding flips build vs. buy decision for enterprise software setups
“I'm at a stage where, like, if it takes me an hour or two hours to set up, like, a big enterprise account somewhere, I'm just gonna build it myself faster. So, you know, I'm in that position of, like, build versus buy. I'm in the build boat, so to speak.”
Arnovitz: Non-technical builders should progress gradually from ChatGPT to Cursor
“I think if you see this where I'm working like in Claude or in cursor, you might be excited to start using those, but I would really recommend starting slow with a GPT project. Beautiful UI, super simple, then maybe graduate to like a bolt or a lovable. And th…”
A dedicated vibe coder accelerates team velocity as much as an engineer
“Once you get into vibe coding and you see it's Value within your organization, leaning into somebody like that just accelerates your velocity because it is like an engineer on your team. It's just, they're not, to me, he's part technical, but they can be non-t…”
Lovable reached $200M ARR in less than a year post-launch
“So for us, we've hit over two hundred million dollars in annual recurring revenue before we even hit our one year milestone since being launched, which is pretty incredible.”
Lovable's $200M ARR is real money verified by Stripe receipts
“Well, I saw Stripe receipts, so it is real as far as I'm concerned unless Stripe dashboard is lying to us, but it is money getting deposited in our bank account.”
Lovable prioritizes market share and free usage over revenue optimization
“We don't optimize for revenue at all. In fact, internally, we have a lot of discussions about how can we give more products away? How can we reduce our revenue growth rate by just getting more paid subscribers, more users using lovable to just get bigger share…”
Verna spends 95% of her growth efforts on innovation, 5% on optimization
“So I just feel like I usually spend maybe five percent, maybe 10%, if I'm lucky, innovating on growth in my roles, in my previous roles. Right now I'm spending 95%. Innovating on growth and only five percent on optimization.”
Influencer marketing drives 10x more volume for Lovable than paid social
“Interestingly enough, influencer marketing is 10 times bigger for us than paid social.”
Lovable requires product engineers to publicly announce the features they ship
“We actually lean on our engineers to do a lot of product work. We call them product engineers and they have to go and they have to announce the thing that they've shipped. It doesn't just funnel through marketing.”
Oji Udezue: Early AI leaders like Lovable and Replit may soon die
“And whatever you think is a blueprint of AI in the last few years, you know, whether, oh, wow, Lavable is so successful, Replit is so successful. It's actually quite possible that any one of those companies won't be around in two, three years, right? Because w…”
Osika: Non-engineer PMs struggle prioritizing deeply technical AI products
“For a product like ours, it's hard to be, like have product managers that are not engineers say,
oh, this is what we should do now, because
The right solution to the problem might be entangled in things that are like technical details, or they might be entangl…”
Osika: Lovable reached 300K MAUs and 30K paying users in three months
“We launched Lavable less than three months ago, and now we have 300,000 monthly active users, and 30 of those, 30,000 of those are actually paying. And it is growing on this at the same rate, it's like, you just, almost only through organic word of mouth.”
Osika: Europe’s lower average ambition makes its untapped raw talent highly advantageous
“Inspiring people to be this ambitious in a place where the average ambition is lower, but the talent, the raw talent is much more available is, is a great recipe. I think that's a great recipe. So then, and that's what's I think it's some kind of advantage the…”
Osika: Lovable is set up to modify its own codebase
“We have set up Lovable so that we can change Lovable with itself. We have done that.”
AI coding tools lose conversation context after 10 to 40 messages
“If you just go and you prompt and you prompt and you prompt and you prompt, you'll realize that no matter what tool you use, the memory just isn't infinite, right? By the time you reach message number 10, 15, 20, 3040, snippets of early messages sort of get lo…”
AI tools interpret code snippets better than English prompts
“Even though English is the number one programming language, Lovable and all other tools still communicate in code the best. If you want to get pixel perfect results, just give them code. It will interpret it better than your English or Spanish or whatever lang…”
Vibe coders spend 80% planning with AI and 20% executing
“To this day, I can say I spent 80% of my time in planning and chatting, and only 20% in executing the plan, actual, right?”
Starting parallel AI builds upfront saves hundreds of dollars
“This process that I just mentioned actually gives you four or five different design options, and in the long run, save you massive amounts of credits, because a lot of people obsess over the concept of, oh, when I give them this hack, they're like, oh, but tha…”
Arnovitz: AI coding tools differ by harness, not underlying model
“The main difference between all these tools is basically the harness. So the models are all the same models. You know, I I'll run Claude within cursor. I'll run it within Claude code. And it's also the models that Claude is also the model that is underlying Bo…”
Lovable has 8M users and hundreds of thousands of paying subscribers
“And from users too, we already have over eight million users that have tried lovable. We have, as you can imagine, to feed that two hundred million, hundreds of thousands of paid subscribers as well that are paying for us.”
Verna warns founders not to use Lovable's hypergrowth as a benchmark
“I wanna make sure that people don't all of a sudden set this as a benchmark for success because it should never be. In some categories, it might be even faster as we continue evolving technology, but I don't think that it's realistic to expect it out of your b…”
AI-native work requires starting with AI output before adding human value
“And you have to think about everything of like, what can AI do here versus where do I add value? Versus like in the traditional sense of work is like, I start with my own value and then I augment it with AI. And here, like the mindset has completely shifted.”
Lovable screens candidates using paid multi-day work trials and probation periods
“We do a lot of trials for people. So trial work to see them in action, a work trial to see them in action for a couple of days. We pay them as part of the work trial. We have some probation periods that we start people on”
Lovable builds its brand solely through product interactions, not marketing teams
“When you think about lovable thing, people think about a brand, but we don't have a brand marketing team yet. So it's all just through product interactions and some of those building in public moments of the people behind those product interactions that is our…”