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 1,995 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 5 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
Lemkin: 1.2 humans and 20 AI agents match 10 human GTM reps
“At the end of the day, on 1.2 humans is plus 20 AI agents is doing about what 10 human GTMs is.”
Schulhoff: Guardrail Vendors Fabricate Stats and Fail on Non-English
“I know a number of people working at these companies and I am permitted to say these things, which I will approximately say but they tell me things like, you know, the testing we do is bullshit. They're fabricating statistics. And a lot of the times their mode…”
Vercel replaced a $1M SDR team with a $1,000 AI agent
“That lead agent, which runs full stack on Purcell, will cost us about a thousand dollars to run for the entire year. So if you remember, I told you we had 10 people in the SDR function, so I'm paying well over a million dollars for that from a salary perspecti…”
Mann: Anthropic models have exhibited power-seeking behaviors in lab experiments
“If the model is in a box trying to improve itself, then it could go completely off the rails and have these secret goals, like Resource accumulation and power seeking and resistance to shutdown that you really don't want in a very powerful model. And we've act…”
Pfeffer: Bill Gates stole the original code that built Microsoft
“People forget that Bill Gates stole the code on which Microsoft has built.”
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…”
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…”
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.”
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.”
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: 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.”
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.”
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.”
Mike Krieger estimates Claude Code is over 95% written by AI
“At this point, I would be shocked if it wasn't 95% plus.”
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 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.”
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.”
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.”
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…”
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.”
Smith: Google tracks post-click dwell time via Chrome and Android for ranking
“Google's tracking everyone through Chrome and Android, and they can actually see what happened after they left Google. And ultimately Google wants you to end your session or find the answer, find what you wanted on that page. So the more you click on, on our U…”
Google team completes two-year product roadmap in three months using AI
“Anecdotally, I talked to a good friend who's an executive at Google and I said, Hey, have you laid anyone off? And he said, No, we didn't. What we instead do is now rip through our roadmap. So two years of roadmap happens in three months. And we're actually, o…”
The majority of AI companion users are women in their 40s and 50s
“The majority of people using companion products are women that are in their forties and fifties, actually.”
Silber: OpenAI engineers see 10x-100x productivity gains while designers have not
“One of the big things that came up was, you know, we see that You know, engineers have 10 or sometimes like hundred extra productivity. But our design team hasn't, right? Because the design process still takes time.”
Verrilli: Hex and AI match two weeks of 2017 Amazon L7 work
“You know, you can pull data now on a hex thread. That is basically what it would take a week, two weeks with an Amazon L seven, you know, a data scientist in 2017.”
Netflix recently acquired Ben Affleck's AI post-production startup, Inner Positive
“So we recently acquired a company, Inner Positive, that was started by Ben Affleck, that built a set of models and capabilities that allow you, after you've shot something, to relight, reframe, reshoot, change dialogue in ways that are very impactful to get hi…”
Segal: AI impacts job sentiment three times more than manager effectiveness
“This finding, this insight around the impact of AI on your identity and on every single other variable around your job is about three times as large as those other effects. So this technology, this era that we're in is having an outlier level outsized impact o…”
Segal: Tech workers advise against junior talent entering industry due to AI
“And perhaps the most significant finding of them all is that people would not recommend junior people, early career people entering into the tech workforce at this moment, given what's happening with AI.”
Segal: No tech role currently has a positive career Net Promoter Score
“What you're seeing here.
Is that no one is a promoter of their role in tech right now.
Not even founders who are by far the happiest, happy-go-lucky people in, in tech right now.
Founders would not recommend their roles.
Neither would people in sales or go to …”
Segal: Tech workers fear overwork from AI far more than job loss
“Losing my job to AI is actually second to last on that list. And instead, what we saw rise up to the top is the expectation to do more for the same Pay.”
Mosseri: Chronological feed tests reduced Instagram usage and user satisfaction
“Because we've done chronological by default and where you can make a default and you see not only does usage go down, overall sentiment goes down. The individual who made that choice might be happy at the moment, but when you just get pummeled with stuff you'r…”
Mosseri: Instagram's controversial video feed redesign was tested on 4% of iOS users
“We had a redesign of feed that went to the video viewer. That was a test to four percent of users on iOS. It was a not, it was not going to roll out.”
Pincus: OMGPOP built Draw Something by copying Words with Friends
“They said, we're going to take this proven game and do everything about it that in as perfect students of what is already working and viral on mobile, and they perfectly copied our turn-based system from Words with Friends, and they made a massive hit.”
Pincus: Zynga held two-hour daily spreadsheet stand-ups up to 50 employees
“We had a stand-up call that would go on for two hours, and I had everyone's name in a spreadsheet, and I had what they were supposed to do yesterday and what they're gonna do today. And I go through name by name and say, okay, did you get that done? Can everyo…”
Jobs told iPhone touchscreen dissenters to get on board or leave
“And guess who wins at the end of the day? Steve jobs, opinion. And he was like, if you're not going to get on board, get out of this room and you can go work on another project, but you're not going to work on this.”
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…”