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 32 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
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…”
Ries: Only 20% of venture-backed founders remain CEO three years post-IPO
“According to Harvard Law School, among venture-backed companies that have the standard best practices set up that you got from your lawyer, ok? Only 20% of founders are still the CEO three years after going public.”
Ries: Novo Nordisk foundation intervention created over $500B in shareholder value
“The trustees of the nonprofit foundation once had to intervene to protect the for-profit from this exact temptation to want to sell it out. And I won't get into the whole story. They did the right thing in this case because they had the legal power to do so. T…”
Ries: Standard corporate charters legally bind boards to accept higher buyout offers
“According to the legal documents, you yourself signed your company's literal charter that you have right now, and this is not some hypothetical future thing you've already put in motion. A rule that says you have a fiduciary duty to say yes in this situation.”
Ries: Shareholder primacy is only 40 years old
“For the vast majority of the time, for hundreds of years, we have had joint stock corporations. Only the last 40 have we had this idea. Before the eighties, it was considered obvious. Our grandparents thought it was obvious. Our great grandparents thought it w…”
Ries: All major AI labs are Public Benefit Corporations
“Most of the best companies today are using this structure. Like all the major AI labs are incorporated as BBC's Anthropic most famously of all.”
Ries: Anthropic rejected a $200M military defense contract
“They turned down a two hundred million dollar contract and bore the wrath of the world's largest army and government.”
Ries: In near future, AI will eliminate middle-management summarization needs
“So it's actually be really easy, you know, not in the not too distant future. It'd be very easy for someone to just be like, summarize for me, everything my company is doing. And You won't need, like, tons of middle managers to do that for you or just, you'll …”
Ries: Mission-aligned founders prioritizing human flourishing will steamroll competitors
“We're gonna have a new wave of founders who take that seriously, who are gonna just, they're gonna steamroll.”
Ries: Standard Silicon Valley incorporation articles compel selling to highest bidder
“Believe it or not, if you got, if you went to a fancy law firm and they filed for you the standard articles of incorporation that are used in Silicon Valley, most governance experts upon reading those documents would say you have a fiduciary duty to say yes.”
Ries: Danish foundation-controlled companies financially outperform conventional public peers
“I was reading a research paper the other day that studied some of these, I think it was in Denmark, foundation controlled companies versus a level matched public companies that are not foundation controlled. And they found the foundation controlled companies o…”
Ries: Foundation-owned companies are 6x more likely to reach age 50
“There's a whole branch of academic research that has shown, for example, companies with that structure like Novo and Zeiss, they are six times more likely to live to year 50 compared to their conventional counterparts.”
Ries: Foundation-owned companies generate superior return on invested capital
“We, they have superior return on invested capital. They make more money for investors.”
Ries: Philip Morris wrote down $900M within three years of buying Vectura
“Philip Morris spent 1.1 billion pounds to buy Vectora. Within three years, they had taken a nine hundred million dollar write down and disposed of the company for peace parts. It doesn't exist anymore”
Ries: Google settled two lawsuits over violating 'Don't be evil'
“Google has been sued twice now for breaking the don't be evil pledge and they've had to settle both lawsuits.”
Ries: Anthropic board members are appointed by non-equity safety trustees
“Anthropic has directors on its for-profit board who are appointed by and are accountable to an outside group of trustees who are AI safety experts who do not have equity in Anthropic. So they do not have a financial incentive in its growth.”
Eric Ries: Lean Startup explicitly embraces vision alongside experimentation
“Lean is opposed to having a vision. You know, if you have, if you were really visionary, you wouldn't do experimentation. Experimentation leads to local maxima and, you know, it, whatever. It's just like, I'm, I read it in somebody's book that, that they're li…”
Ries: Philip Morris receives high ESG scores
“Philip Morris has actually great ESG scores. It's absurd.”
Ries: AI labs launched ChatGPT and Claude Code as small experiments
“These specific products that have taken the world by storm, you can really tell that the AI labs themselves did not know they were going to be as popular as they turned out to be. Obviously, ChatGPT, they had no idea. Cloud code, co-work, like these were small…”
Ries: Costco is protected by a governance fortress
“People used to tell me Costco was an example that wasn't protected so much so that like, I was surprised to learn that it was embodied in a governance fortress.”
Ries: Steve Jobs prioritized skip-level meetings with key culture carriers
“Steve Jobs very famously would host, have skip level meetings. He wanted to meet not with his direct subordinates. He didn't care. He wanted to meet with the torch bearers throughout the organization.”
Eric Ries: Corporate governance questions have become acute for AI companies
“And it turns out that those questions have just become like really acute for AI companies. So, so because of my work on governance, I wound up meeting with and getting to work with some of the top AI companies.”
Ries: IMVU shipped product 50 times a day on average
“We at IMV, we ship product 50 times a day on average at a time when people were like lucky to be doing it monthly if they were really advanced.”
Eric Ries: Lean Startup does not mean being cheap or skipping fundraising
“Top misconceptions about lean startup. And it was like, number one, lean means cheap. So you're doing lean startup. It means you're not raising money. It's like, that's not true.”
Ries: Inbound channels will saturate with AI emails, forcing AI filtering
“All of our communication channels are about to be super saturated with AI generated experimentation, you know, like whether we want it to or not. And so if you think, if you just extrapolate a little bit, if this technology holds the way we think it will, it's…”
Ries: In some European nations, 25% of public companies are foundation-controlled
“In, in, in certain European countries, it's actually like, 20 or 25% of the companies like public companies are all structured that way.”
Ries: PayPal's payment notification email click-through rate is second only to Facebook's
“One of the most successful customer emails of all time is PayPal's You've Got Money. Click here to take the money. It's like, it has a very high click-through rate, maybe second only to Facebook. Someone has tagged you in a photo.”
Ries: Anthropic delayed Long-Term Benefit Trust enactment until Series C
“They didn't actually implement what's called now the long-term benefit trust until their Series C. But they had the right and the intention to do it in all their legal documents from inception.”
Ries: Dario Amodei lacks dual-class founder control shares at Anthropic
“Dario does not have dual class shares the way that Mark Zuckerberg or Larry and Sergey had.”