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
Horowitz: Internalizing negativity harms CEOs more than racism or systemic barriers
“All the things that you perceive that are happening to you that are bad, you know, be it like the systems against you or somebody undercut you or racism or sexism or this or that or the other is very small compared to like, it means a lot if you believe it, yo…”
Horowitz: Superficial VC advice soundbites from podcasts are 'fucking stupid'
“These little snippets of advice that VCs give, because they watch some fucking podcast, are all fucking stupid, like it's just, there's a lot of depth to these things. You have to know the answer to the next question, and the next question”
Horowitz predicts Adam Neumann's Flow will be a16z's best investment
“And I think it's going to end up being one of the best investments we ever made.”
Horowitz bets the current AI boom is not a financial bubble
“Like these businesses are all work and they're being priced appropriately for how they're growing. So that's not an effect. So the thing that you could say is they're not going to keep growing like that or like, and so forth. And I'm not sure about that. Like …”
Horowitz: LLM scaling is asymptoting because the industry ran out of data
“You have LLMs, which have generalized pretty, you know, like in fascinating ways, but they've kind of also asymptoted in that you know, we have run out of data for the most part.”
Oji Udezue: AI capabilities will eventually surpass thermonuclear weapons in power
“We think of AI and its core capabilities as ordinance level, meaning like at some point we'll think of this as more powerful than the fusion bomb.”
McCabe: AI is superior to humans at things described as personal
“Even if it does make us ask some hard questions of ourselves and think carefully about its impact on humanity, it actually is superior at the things we describe as personal and human relative to humans themselves.”
McCabe: Great Companies Require Clear Hierarchy and Unilateral CEO Decision-Making
“And it's my strong belief that great employees and great companies want and are constructed out of a very clear and strong hierarchy. Where it is the responsibility of the CEO to make brave and hard decisions unilaterally. Yes, using their experts as inputs an…”
Balfour: Much of Google Gemini's MAU comes from accidental flyby user clicks
“If we could take a look inside their metrics, I think what we would see is a bunch of flyby users. In their mouths. Like they're kind of sprinkling the Gemini bucket everywhere. And I'm, I've like literally clicked on it accidentally multiple times. And so my …”
Balfour: Companies willing to fire employees who resist AI achieve best results
“But I would say that less than 10% of companies we see are taking this hard stance, but I would say they are probably the ones that are farthest along getting the most adoption and are seeing the most results of the ones that are taking those hard stances.”
Taylor: Python is a comically bad programming language for AI to generate
“Python is probably the most common generated code just because how much it's in the training data and data scientists love Python and I love Python too. It's such a comically bad thing for AI to generate just because it's one of the most inefficient programmin…”
Mann: It will probably be too late to align models post-superintelligence
“Like once we get to super intelligence, it will be too late to align the models. Probably.”
Shipper: AI will not cause mass unemployment across the workforce
“I hate the headlines that are like, it's going to replace jobs. Or like, it's going to unemployed like two thirds of the workforce. Like, I don't think that's true.”
Shipper: GPT wrappers are unfairly maligned and extremely valuable
“I a hundred percent think GPT wrappers are amazing, and they've been much maligned for absolutely no reason, and people don't understand how absolutely valuable they are.”
Shipper: Klarna CEO's claims about customer support AI were 'bullshit'
“Like, I think that Klarna CEO thing, that was bullshit.”
Shlomo: MVPs are dead because AI ruined user attention spans
“There are some things that I don't believe in is like MVPs first and foremost is like, if you're building something that people will not be able to use or is not good enough, especially these days where it's
It's so much easier to build software, so the attent…”
Shlomo: Use plain JavaScript and JSX instead of TypeScript with LLMs
“There's one controversial take for me working with LLMs is don't use TypeScript. Use plain JavaScript. Use JSX. It's easier for models to write code this way.”
Wilkinson: Things creator has 'won' more than Asana founder Dustin Moskovitz
“I am generally much more in the camp of the things guy has won, not Dustin Moskovitz. Dustin Moskovitz is just playing a different game than the things guy.”
Wilkinson: Leaders should fire an employee immediately upon first considering it
“And the kind of heuristic I have is if I ever think, should I fire this person even once I should fire them immediately. It has always been a signal, at least for me, that when someone's a superstar, I can't imagine firing them.”
Wilkinson: Hire fully formed talent for current needs rather than potential
“So I'd say like the lesson really is hire for what you need. Don't hire just for potential, which is counter to what a lot of people say. A lot of people say hire for potential and coach them into being whatever you need. I just haven't found that. I think you…”
Placek: Owning an exact .com domain no longer matters
“It is, at this point, it doesn't really matter at all. The .com or URL address has become an area code, and whether you're in four one five or six one five, it doesn't really matter to people.”
Baxley: Design achieves peak impact as phase zero of engineering
“In my experience, I think that design is most successful at impacting what ships at the end if design is considered phase zero of the engineering process rather than a byproduct or a part of the product process.”
Mike Krieger estimates Claude Code is over 95% written by AI
“At this point, I would be shocked if it wasn't 95% plus.”
Scott Wu: Programming will become more important as AI gets more powerful
“And so in that lens, I really think that programming is, if anything, is only going to become more and more important as AI gets more powerful.”
Scott Wu: Devin will author over 50% of Cognition's code by year-end
“I think by the end of this year, we expect it to be more than half.”
Wu: There will be far more software engineers in a few years
“And so if anything, I think there's going to be, I think there's going to be way more product, way more programmers and way more engineers, you know, a few years from now than there are today.”
Wu: Base model intelligence is already sufficient for autonomous software engineering
“I think that my hot take here, which I would give is I think the, I think in terms of base intelligence, we're honestly basically already there. And I think a lot of what we see actually, and what we spend our time on is less so, obviously we don't pre-train o…”
Truell: Long-term demand for software engineers will increase despite AI
“I think long into the future, yes, there will actually be more demand for engineers.”
Mohan: Niche vertical SaaS products will get competed down significantly
“These very, very verticalized niche products. I think are going to get, they're going to get competed down a ton.”
Mohan: Higher AI developer ROI will cause tech-focused companies to hire more engineers
“The right calculus that JP Morgan Chase or any of these companies will make is the ROI of building technology has actually gone up. So the opportunity costs of not investing more into technology has gone up, which means that you should just invest even more. A…”
Rachitsky: X is making billions of dollars and becoming really profitable
“I just saw a story that they're, like, making billions of dollars. Like, he's actually turned it around. It's actually becoming a really profitable company.”
Mullenweg: Meta's Llama isn't truly open source due to user restrictions
“However, there's a clause in it that says, if you're above a certain threshold of monthly active users, I forget what it is, like, it's big, it's like seven hundred fifty million, so it's pretty high. You need a license from them. And so that does not give you…”
Mullenweg: Shopify and Facebook are not true platforms, will rug-pull developers
“And proprietary services can create platforms. You know, Shopify has a third party ecosystem and things like that. But it's never a true platform. And not a true platform. It's when your ecosystem makes more money than the core does. And so many times, whether…”
Mullenweg claims WP Engine broke WordPress undo feature to save money
“So to save money, they were actually turning off features like revisions. So a cool part about WordPress that actually one of my favorite features is every change to every single post or page is saved forever, just like Wikipedia. So if you make a mistake, you…”
Mullenweg: Silver Lake failed to sell WP Engine over IP concerns
“Last year, they tried to sell the company. So private equity usually holds things for like five to seven years. So they were kind of five years into this. They tried to shop it around and sell it. They weren't able to find a buyer. They said, well, they don't …”
Mullenweg claims WP Engine called itself 'WordPress Engine' in client meetings
“They would refer to themselves as WordPress engine and client meetings and other things.”
Mullenweg clarifies he has always personally owned and controlled WordPress.org
“WordPress.org has always been me personally.”
Mullenweg details the complex commercial and non-commercial WordPress trademark licenses
“And so kind of the compromise is that the foundation would kind of, ah, own the trademark and license it out for non-commercial purposes. I had a license to run WordPress.org, you know, because obviously I need that, and then Automatic would retain the commerc…”
Mullenweg claims no board-governed open source project matches WordPress's success
“And there are other open source projects that have this structure. None of them have been successful as WordPress.”
Mullenweg acknowledges judge reversed Advanced Custom Fields plugin repository takeover
“This is controversial and actually the, they actually got a preliminary injection. So the judge said reverse this. So this has all been reversed by the way.”
Coleman: Musk's 'fork in the road' email was a great downsizing approach
“I thought that was a great approach to taking a large company and getting it down to people who are really excited about, you know, working together on, on a mission.”
Levine: Founders should shut down and restart if investors reject pivot funding
“If you are unable to convince your existing investors to re to reinvest in the company in order to build the new part of the journey, the new the new journey, then you know what? Shut down the company and restart a new company that is doing exactly that. And t…”
Tobi Lütke: Building a remote company is vastly harder and not recommended
“A better set of trade-offs for the future is to accept the vast additional difficulty of building a remote company. It's way harder. Like it's, Like, it's not something you should recommend to anyone to do this because you, it's the same as trying to run a wor…”
Verna: Sales-Led Companies Do Not Need Dedicated Growth Teams
“In fact, in the sales led companies, growth teams are not necessarily needed even that much. You might have a growth marketing team, which is really a demand gen team. That is rebranded for growth marketing. So they can charge you a 20 to 30% more in their sal…”
Verna: Full-time jobs are not the best way to monetize professional skills
“Full-time jobs are not the best way to monetize the skills that you have. It's one of the packages that everybody should evaluate and take advantage of, but too many people blindly default to that package and don't explore other options that are both available…”
Clowes: AI will entrench dominant enterprise SaaS incumbents over startups
“The most likely outcome is that the currently dominant companies are going to get more dominant. But I don't think this idea that it would just cause a spring up of a whole bunch of new, new apps that will more easily challenge the incumbents makes any particu…”
Godin: Claude delivers kindness and humility, while ChatGPT overpromises
“ChatGPT's reputation with me is not good because it regularly over promises and under delivers, and it does it without kindness or humility. Whereas Claude, I don't know how they did it, at least in my experience, brings kindness and humility.”
Godin: Traditional truck buyers will not adopt the Tesla Cybertruck
“So now, if you bring people in that category who are inherently skeptical of change, and inherently skeptical of design trickery, something that is nothing but change and design trickery, No, they're not going to adopt it. You could have sold an enormous numbe…”