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
Younis: Applied Intuition has never spent any raised venture capital
“Our claim to fame, which is kind of a crazy, you know, reality is we've never spent any money we've ever raised, you know, in the history of the company, which is kind of, it almost sounds like it's made up. It says that the company is almost 10 years old, you…”
Jenny Wen: The traditional research-and-diverge design process is dead
“This design process that designers have been taught where you go and you go off and you do a bunch of research and discovery, and then you like diverge, you converge, diverge, converge. And it's like this process that we sort of treated as gospel and tried so …”
Patel: Human survival depends on AI to offset demographic decline
“I think that survival of humanity depends on a successful AI, because at some point, if you have, you know, 60% of your population that's in a demographic where you don't have enough people to take care of them, like that, that could cause a lot of human suffe…”
Patel: Discard 'criticize in private' and openly critique teams in public
“What do they say? Praise in public and criticize in private. I fundamentally disagree with that notion. I think what you have to do is establish enough trust among the team so that you are comfortable critiquing and debating in public. But when you're in priva…”
Cherny predicts coding will be increasingly solved across all stacks within months
“And over the next few months, I think what we're going to see is just across the industry, it's going to become increasingly solved, you know, for every kind of code base, every tech stack that people work on.”
Cherny: Claude Code boosted Anthropic engineer PR productivity by 200%
“Over the last year, like, since we introduced quad code, we probably, I don't know the exact number, we probably, like, forex the engineering team or something like this, but productivity per engineer has increased 200% in terms of, like, pull requests.”
Cherny: Understanding underlying code layers won't matter in one to two years
“My take is, I think for people that are using that are using quad code, that are using agents to code today, you still have to understand the layer under. But yeah, in a year or two, it's not gonna matter.”
Halligan: Hiring McKinsey consultants into startups 'never works'
“The McKinsey one never works. It never works. It never works.”
Wanting to be liked is not a good trait for a CEO
“Like wanting to be liked, I don't think is a good feature of a CEO and wanting to be the best place to work probably isn't the right way to go.”
Wu: Blindly following customer requests leads to AI product local maxima
“Because the field is changing so much at any point in time, you know, a lot of people are kind of in this local, local maximum. And if you just blindly listen to your customers, they'll, they'll be like, yeah, I want a better vector store. Like I want a better…”
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.”
AI will reward better judgment over raw code output
“People like me, people watching that are like, should I start learning how to code? If you haven't done it yet, I, I'd honestly say no. Like, you're optimizing for the wrong skill set. We won't be rewarded in the world of AI for faster raw output. We will be r…”
Yovanovich advises learning plumbing instead of getting a CS degree
“If I had an eighteen-year-old brother and he asked me what should I do, I would tell him, hey, go become a plumber. You know, don't go and get a CS degree. You learn learn a good trade, you know, because the new generation of millionaires in the US are actuall…”
Andreessen: Global depopulation makes AI necessary to replace missing human workers
“We actually need AI to work because we're going to need, you know, we're going to need machines to do all the jobs that we're not going to have people to do. Because we're literally going to depopulate, we're going to depopulate the planet over the next hundre…”
Andreessen: AI will create widespread hiring booms that swamp job substitution
“Even if AI, like, triples the pace of economic change in the economy, it's going to just translate to, like, a much higher rate of economic growth is going to transfer, translate to a much higher rate of job growth. And, you know, there, there'll be some level…”
Andreessen: ChatGPT is almost certainly a better doctor than your human doctor
“Chat GPT is like almost certainly a better doctor than your doctor today, but like chat GPT can't get a license to practice medicine, right? So it can't substitute for a doctor. It can't prescribe medications, right? It can't, you know, perform procedures, rig…”
Cohen: Routine A/B testing is an enormous waste of time
“You can't AB test the important things and the details are mostly false positives. So it's an enormous waste of time unless you're incredibly sophisticated.”
Arnovitz predicts job titles will collapse as AI makes everyone a builder
“I think titles are going to collapse and responsibilities are going to collapse and everyone's just going to be building.”
Lessin says Y Combinator founders pitch investors like 'animals'
“We're a little bit making fun of the fact that YC founders do come out a little bit like animals, right? There's like having met with many of them, I guess not their fault. They're like young kids. They've been holed up in a room coding and that's all they've …”
Lessin: Seed VCs backing AI companies will lose an 'impossibly large amount'
“I think that the venture capital, the seed venture capitalists who invest in companies that are branded as AI companies are going to lose an impossibly large amount of money in the coming years.”
Lessin: AI empowers incumbents rather than creating great startup opportunities
“AI is a powerful tool. It's incredibly powerful for existing businesses and existing structures. It's not a great startup opportunity.”
Reganti: Vendors Selling 'One-Click AI Agents' Are Pushing Pure Marketing
“I probably will go as far to say that if someone's selling you one click agents, it's pure marketing.
You don't want to buy into that.”
Lemkin: AI agents modeled on top reps beat mid-pack human salespeople
“The bar for good enough for AI GTM, it's not as high as we think. It's just like you know, a facsimile of your best person reproduced as best we can. It's going to beat your mid pack person. It's going to beat the person that literally knows nothing about your…”
Lemkin: Net demand for sales and GTM professionals will hit record highs
“Net net, we're gonna need more sales and go to market professionals than ever. Because the winners are growing so quickly that even if they're more efficient, they will need more human beings than ever.”
Lemkin: Interconnected AI hive minds will put human GTM roles at risk
“When AI really is the hive mind, when it can share all of the data across all of your agents and knows everything that happens, then Humans are at risk in GTM. They're going to be so much better when they're the hive mind”
MacInnis: Silicon Valley's 'never quit' ethos is bullshit designed to serve VCs
“We talk in Silicon Valley about never quit, but that is complete absolute venture capital bullshit. The incentive of venture capitalist is to put money into your company and milk you dry. They never get their money back. There is no way for them to take that i…”
MacInnis: Executives must publicly call out every single product bug to managers
“Every time you see a bug, every time you see a bug, not most of the time, every time you go and you drop it at the feet of the product manager or the engineering manager, every time. In public, preferably.”
MacInnis: Managers must preserve CEO operational intensity rather than buffering their teams
“Your job is not to be one of those buffers. Your job is to preserve that intensity at its highest possible level and let the buffering happen somewhere else.”
MacInnis: 'Chill' is the most pejorative label for a product manager
“Don't work for a chill boss. Don't be a chill boss. It's the most pejorative label I could give you. Chill boss or chill PM. Don't be chill. Chill doesn't accomplish shit. Be intense, be good, be respectful, be intense. Don't be chill.”
Schulhoff: No meaningful progress made on solving prompt injection or jailbreaking
“And so in, in my professional opinion, there's been no meaningful progress made towards solving adversarial robustness, prompt injection, jailbreaking. In the last couple of years, since the problem was discovered and we're, we, you know, we're often seeing ne…”
Schulhoff: AI security sector faces market correction within six to twelve months
“When it comes to AI security, the AI security industry in particular, I think we're going to see a market correction in the next Year, maybe in the next six months where companies realize that these guardrails don't work.”
Schulhoff: AI guardrails do not work and cause false overconfidence
“Guardrails don't work. They just don't work. They really don't work. And they're quite likely to make you overconfident in your security posture, which is which is a really big, big problem.”
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.”
Surge AI Surpassed $1B in Revenue With Under 100 Employees
“Yeah, so we hit over a billion of revenue last year with under a hundred people.”
Chen: AI Efficiency Will Enable $100 Billion Revenue-Per-Employee Ratios
“And I think we're going to see companies with even crazier ratios, like a hundred billion per employee in the next few years. AI is just going to get better and better and make things more efficient. So that ratio just becomes inevitable.”
Chen: Frontier AI Labs Game Benchmarks via Prompt Tweaking and Test Leaks
“Sometimes, yeah, these benchmarks, they accidentally leak in certain ways, or the frontier labs will tweak the way they evaluate their models on these benchmarks. Like they'll tweak their system prompt. Or they'll tweak the number of times they run their model…”
Chen: LMSYS Chatbot Arena rewards bolding, emojis, and length over accuracy
“The easiest way to climb Alamarina, it's adding crazy boating. It's doubling the number of emojis. It's tripling the length of your model responses. Even if your model starts hallucinating and getting the answer completely wrong.”
Chen: Vibe coding is overhyped and will make codebases unmaintainable
“I definitely think that Vibe coding is overhyped.
I think people don't realize,
How much it's going to make your systems unmaintainable in the long term and decently dump this code into your code bases.”
Cohen: LinkedIn is replacing its APM program with Associate Product Builders
“We used to have our APM program, which this is about it's ending this year. And then starting January, we're going to start having our APB program and they're going to come into LinkedIn. We're going to teach them how to code design and PM at LinkedIn.”
Cohen: Tech companies will need fewer specialized roles than before
“I think there are system builders that empower full stack builders and then you have people who are specialized, but I don't think we need as many specialized people as we did in the past.”
Abel: The mid-market does not exist in B2B sales
“So I say the mid-market doesn't exist, because what is a mid-market hire? It's either low end enterprise or upper end SMB. And if you bleed those two games, you're going to lose. They're so distinctly different.”
Abel: Tier 1 market leaders are early adopters to defend top ranking
“Early adopters are those logos because they have to continue to stay at the number one spot. So they'll take tons of, you know swings to continue to stay in the number one, staying in the number one spots, the hardest part, right?”
Abel: Tier 1 enterprise logos are more willing to help startups than VCs claim
“There's this running statement where a lot of VCs will say, don't go after tier one logos, go learn down market or go learn from like logos that don't necessarily carry a lot of weight. The ones that carry all the weight are the ones that are willing to take a…”
Abel: Selling services is the fastest way for software startups to enter enterprises
“Selling them as service, even though the technology is powering it on the back end, is the fastest way to get your foot in the door. It's what they know how to buy.”
Prasanna: AI will make teams rewrite entire apps instead of refactoring
“And I think that you're gonna see instead of us, for example, refactoring a, an app to have a different UI or to evolve into its new version, we're just gonna rewrite that app from scratch.”
Prasanna: Code quality has nothing to do with product success
“A lot of engineers think that code quality is important to building a successful product. The two have nothing to do with each other.”
Meta paid $14B for a 49% non-voting stake in Scale AI
“The transaction was Meta invested a little bit over fourteen billion dollars to get 49% of the company non-voting stock. Didn't take a new board seat.”
Zhuo: Sundial eliminated PM roles so engineers own product definition
“We have eliminated more roles. For example, we thought we would need a bunch of product managers. It's turned out that actually if you don't have a product manager, I know this might be going against a little bit of the ethos of where, where Leti started, but …”