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
Masad: By 2029, a zero-employee company will hit a billion-dollar valuation
“But I could imagine like whatever, five years from now someone running, you know, a billion dollar company with zero employees, where it's like the support is handled by AI. The development is handled by AI.”
Perri: SAFe fails because it ignores product discovery and value connection
“And that's what I think SAFE was trying to do, but it's not working because it's not solving the problems of the product management, and it's not solving that problem of connecting the value Back to the product teams. Instead, it's seen as a role that almost l…”
Shopify Has Banned Traditional KPIs and OKRs
“We rant against KPIs are basically banned as a, and OKRs are banned and all that.”
Claire Vo: Traditional product management is dead or will be soon
“Product management is dead. It, or it will be soon, and so I'm here to talk about what we're all going to do Instead.”
Vo: AI product work takes less time, less thought, and maybe fewer PMs
“I think now product work honestly takes less time, less thought, And maybe less PMs.”
Vo: AI Will Collapse the Product Talent Stack into Unified Roles
“And this is one of my strongly held beliefs about the art of product management, which I've made a career out of, is I think AI will collapse The talent stack. So what I mean is these jobs that have been separate will start to become one”
Vo: AI-Powered 'Triple Threat' Leads Will Replace Traditional Product Triads
“I think you're going to see what I would call an AI-powered triple threat. Basically, one person that can do engineering design product as a lead of a team which includes AI tools, agents, and platforms as part of that team. And I think this is what we're goin…”
Vo: Product experience and strategy are becoming a commodity
“Your experience and your strategy, remember my minivan story, is becoming a commodity.”
Meta argues Apple and Google should handle age verification at OS-level.
“And as a product person, the way that I think this should really work is that instead of everyone entering, you know, teens use on average, 40 apps instead of Instagram and the other 39 apps that teens use trying to verify the age of the person using their app…”
De Montebello: Watching yourself on video hurts public speaking practice
“I'm not very much a fan of actually watching yourself on camera, on video, because again, this is an inner game, not an outer game. So when I watch myself on video, I see the outside, which can be useful for certain things, but the fundamentals are inside”
Yehoshua: Operational dysfunction doesn't prevent commercial success
“What I've seen is when a company isn't well-run, like IT isn't working, marketing is broken, there are not enough people in HR, there's a lot of turnover, all of these things. I've seen that they're not correlated to the company being successful.”
Raviv: Product is usually not the primary growth lever at tech companies
“So product sometimes is on this list. So one of the companies I worked at, like I mentioned, you know, product design product if that department does 10 X impact, then the company will succeed 10 X in the market. But it's, in my career, it mostly hasn't been p…”
Schwartz: Most SaaS Companies Should Avoid Investing in SEO
“I don't think SaaS in general should do SEO”
Schwartz: AI Startups Cannot Unseat Google Purely on Search Product Quality
“I don't think there's a chance, and this is the biggest takeaway, I don't think there's a chance that ChatGPT or Perplexity or Claude or any of these other LLM startups, because they're startups now, even, even OpenAI as a startup with Bing's part, with Micros…”
Fournier: GraphQL rarely works well in practice outside of Facebook
“The impression that I have from sort of listening to people talk about it is that GraphQL is kind of trying to promise front end engineers that they don't really have to like collaborate with back end engineers and they can just sort of build whatever and it'l…”
Fournier: Product managers are far easier to manage than engineers
“PMs are way easier to manage. PMs are awesome to manage. PMs want to, like, they're just so helpful. They're, like, want to do things. They're good communicators. I love managing PMs. I have to say, I just, like, my experience, engineers are such a pain. They …”
Zero-to-one consumer PMs must directly design pixels and interface flows
“If you're a product manager on a standalone app inside of a large, like, you should be designing the hierarchy, the pixels, the flows, everything, like, and then, yeah, it should be cleaned up, prototyped by a technical designer, but that's your idea, and prod…”
Bier: 90-day viral app payouts rival net proceeds of diluted IPO founders
“If you actually look at some of the numbers on like the actual proceeds that some of these founders get after an IPO, after seven rounds of dilution, a lot of them are pretty comparable to what we get from our apps for 90 days of work.”
Bier predicts most new apps won't have social graphs, entrenching incumbents
“Most likely I think most apps will not have social graphs going forward and this will entrench incumbents even more.”
Bier: Apple's iOS 18 contact sync flow is 'egregiously bad'
“I think the person that designed the feature probably have, has never Built an app or done contact sync before because the flow is egregiously bad.”
Martin: Strategy education in business schools generally sucks and is overly theoretical
“The training aspect of it, the knowledge aspect of it, which is what's taught now in strategy in business schools generally sucks. It's gone on a crazy theoretical bent. The strategy academy as a whole has fallen in love with a theory called the resource-based…”
Martin: Major strategy consulting firms do almost no actual strategy work
“The strategy consulting firms, the so-called strategy consulting firms do almost no strategy anymore because it's a little business compared to post-merger integration, digital transformation, and a bunch of other, other other things.”
Martin: Top 50 US business schools refuse to hire faculty questioning RBV
“If you took the other, the 49 other top business schools in America, and if asked the question, do you swear allegiance to the resource-based view of the firm? If you don't answer an enthusiastic yes, you have no chance of being hired. Zero.”
Martin: Rumelt's Procter & Gamble case study had zero connection to reality
“He gave a example of Procter and Gamble. I've been consulting at Procter and Gamble. And know everything about Procter & Gamble, basically. And what he said about Procter & Gamble had zero to do with reality, like zero. It was just completely, utterly, absolut…”
Critics erase Livingston from YC history to maintain diversity narratives
“The people that, that sort of don't want me to be part of the narrative are the ones that think that Y Combinator only invests, it's run by white men, only invests in white men. And gosh, if there was a woman on the founding team making choices of who to fund,…”
Zenefits orchestrated a paid smear campaign and legal threats against Parker Conrad
“There was a smear campaign. You know, paid for. By someone still at Zenefits. There were legal threats made to force him to sign an, you know, not, sign this doc, sign this legal document that would allow them to have a non-compete in California so that he cou…”
Crusson: Slack was pretty much destroyed by Microsoft Teams
“At that point, Microsoft launched Teams, and I don't know if you remember this moment where Slack put an ad in the, I think it was the New York Times, copying the Apple versus Microsoft thing from ages before, going, you know, welcome to the game, welcome to t…”
Pfeffer: Attaining power is a self-fulfilling dynamic that erases past transgressions
“Life is not homeostatic at all. That life is actually self-fulfillment. If I believe you're powerful, you will become more powerful. If I believe you have no power, you will wind up with almost no power. And that therefore, it is all forgotten and forgiven.”
Levine: Companies stop fundamentally changing their product once they reach PMF
“So once a company figure out product market feed, they don't change their product anymore. Because this is the value that they create to the customers, and you don't want to change that.”
Duke: Corporate alignment is a stupid myth and shouldn't be expected
“The word alignment is stupid and it shouldn't be used. And I know I'm saying that very harshly, but it's true. It's dumb, because it doesn't exist. Like, you have 10 people in a room, and they're all really different people with different opinions, and they're…”
Agrawal fired Beykpour the night Twitter signed the Musk term sheet
“The day after we get home from the hospital, Parag called me and said that he was letting me go, and that he was taking the team in a different direction. And that night, Twitter signed a term sheet with Elon to sell the company.”
Caldwell: Instagram was a free knockoff of Hipstamatic combined with a social graph
“And so they basically built a pretty legitimate knockoff of the Hipstamatic filters, combining it with a social graph and they launched it and it pretty quickly took off. So of course this is Instagram.”
Claire Vo: Sales-Led Product Models Can Deliver Great Craft and User Experience
“I am a sales led product apologist unabashedly, which is, I think that it is okay to listen to the market and to be commercially oriented in products in ways that probably would make some folks in some types of product organizations Squirm a little bit. And th…”
Shah: Pursuing wealth equality is bad because wealth naturally concentrates
“I have a strong view that we will never, never have equality of wealth. In fact, chasing that is actually a bad idea, but if you let people do well and chase wealth, they'll have enough wealth for everybody else and we could take a lot of people out. And I thi…”
Cagan: Remote work has significantly hurt product velocity and innovation
“The reality is with remote employees, Both velocity and innovation have taken a real hit.”
Cagan: Feature teams do not need product managers and dramatically overpay them
“The truth is they don't need PMs in a feature team. They don't because it's a project management role and he, and they already have plenty of people who can cover that. And furthermore, a lot of times the engineers or the designers say, you know, we'd rather d…”
Cagan: The product owner should not be a dedicated full-time role
“A product owner is at one extreme. And honestly, That is a role in a delivery process that has no business being a dedicated person really doesn't. And most teams I know the senior engineer could do it better anyway.”
Cagan: Product management certifications are completely bogus
“So these certifications, which in my opinion are bogus, but most people don't know.”
Bosworth: Meta Quest 3 is superior to Apple Vision Pro overall
“I was prepared to come to market and say, we have the best value headset. Like if you want to outstanding best possible headset for the money, we've got it. It's the quest three. And I was so thrilled when I tried the AVP next to Mark, we were like, no, no, no…”
Lemkin: Employee failure is 100% the founder's fault
“It is your fault. A hundred percent your fault. If any of your hires fail, don't blame them.”
Lemkin: VC advice to force annual contracts is terrible
“Another related terrible piece of advice VCs give you is switch to annual contracts. This is terrible advice. Terrible advice, Lenny. Terrible advice from people who have never built products and aren't in the field. Going to annual contracts on a spreadsheet …”
Evans: Remote work will triumph over in-person offices in the long term
“I have so much more faith in the opportunity to improve the remote experience. And so I think long-term it's going to triumph.”
Schillace: Crypto lacks meaningful user value even in the best case
“For crypto, I was always like, well, what if it works? Like, then I have to run OPSEC on my personal finances. That sounds dystopian. I don't want that. Like, I can't think of anything as a user that I think actually, like, is valuable here. Even in the best c…”
Schillace: Most Good Product Ideas Originate from Engineering
“I think a lot of the good product ideas, most of the good product ideas actually come up from engineering.”
Larson: Carta gives EM and PM pairs the same performance rating
“The chief product officer Bruchali and I like spend a fair amount of time, like calibrating together and making sure, like, again, there's cases where there's like an exception, right? Cause there's like clear, clear issues happening for someone, but on averag…”
Antin: Middle-range UX research is interesting but lacks business impact
“And then you have this middle range, which is this blobular place where the research questions are sort of middle altitude. And a lot of the core kind of, let's say user understanding questions fall here. And a lot of what research is doing is research in that…”
Antin: Middle-range UX research enables performative customer obsession
“So they yield results, which are interesting, but sometimes hard to operationalize. They trigger the post hoc bias really, really, really well, where like a lot of people can say confidently like, oh, that was kind of obvious. We knew that already. And they fu…”
Antin: Average product managers perform customer centricity without real interest
“The average PM who lives in that land all day, every day. And what they do is not in the Venn. You know, I think those are people who are also like Performing customer centricity and performing user centeredness a lot when they're really not interested.”