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 92 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
Pfeffer: Bill Gates stole the original code that built Microsoft
“People forget that Bill Gates stole the code on which Microsoft has built.”
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.”
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…”
Andreessen: Linus Torvalds conceded AI codes better than top programmers
“The AI coding thing, you know, really hit critical mass and the world's best programmers, right? Including like Linus Torvalds, you know, for the first time over the holiday break, basically said, yeah, AI is now coding better than we can.”
Li: World Labs runs real-time 3D video generation on a single H100
“Just a couple of weeks ago, we rolled out the world's first real-time demoable real-time video generation on a single H 100 GPU.”
Balfour: Cursor overtook GitHub Copilot's market share in under nine months
“And so it's amazing to see something like cursor overtake market share of something like GitHub co-pilot in nine months or less, right? Like that, that's how fast it happened.”
Apple Design Always Reported to Engineering Under Steve Jobs
“That's how it worked at Apple the whole time under Steve. Design always reported to engineering, you know, they're there. Now I think it's structured a little bit differently, but design has always been part of engineering at Apple.”
The Google Hangouts team invented WebRTC, which now powers global communications
“We, the Hangouts team invented WebRTC. Right now, every single communication in the world happens on WebRTC.”
Mohan: Windsurf was the first agentic IDE product on the market
“We were the first identic IDE product out there, right? That's what we landed with.”
Rachitsky: Lovable is the only AI tool with direct visual editing
“No other tool out there lets you generate code from an AI engineer and then actually just, like, change a small element of it. Of every other tool that I'm aware of, you have to, like, ask the agent, do this for me, and then you hope that it does the right thi…”
Perri: A Dutch water company went bankrupt adopting SAFe
“There's actually a great story about a water company in the Netherlands, right? And they decided to adopt safe. And this is, this was on the news like a couple months ago. They decided to adopt safe in their IT teams and start working with it. And they're they…”
Cohen: LinkedIn was the first company with a social feed
“We actually were the first company to have a social feed.”
Pfeffer: Regis McKenna transformed Steve Jobs from an incompetent presenter
“When Steve Jobs began, Steve Jobs couldn't convince you to buy water if you were dying of thirst. He could not give a presentation to save his life. And Regis McKenna and his team took Steve Jobs under their wing and created Steve Jobs, a man who could sell an…”
Lemkin: 14-day trials originated to fit Salesforce monthly sales cycles
“The reason, one of the reasons we have 14 day trials on the internet is in the old days, the Salesforce sales team, when they were S and B focused one to close deals that month. So they forced Salesforce to move from 30 to 40 days. There was no evidence it was…”
Bridgewater was willing to endure 80% attrition to retain top talent
“Bridgewater was willing, To endure. 80% attrition to arrive at the best people.”
Moesta: Over 50% of people switching jobs do not get more money
“Over 50% of the people who got new jobs didn't get more money.”
Cohen: Only about two of over 100 public SaaS companies have sub-100% NRR
“There's over a hundred SAS public companies and something like two of them have NRR less than a hundred percent. Like that's how it goes. And those companies have horrible financials and their values valuations are bad.”
Lemkin: Artisan grew from nothing to $10M in revenue this year
“So we picked a YC company called Artisan. They've gone like from like nothing to ten million this year.”
Rachitsky: More YC founders come from Palantir than from Google
“And when you look at YC founders and they're where they've come from, I think you may be shared in this in your post that there's more YC ex-Palantir founders than there are ex-Google founders in spite of Google being something like 50 times bigger sample size…”
Misra: Avatar video companies use neural rendering, not transformers or diffusion
“So there's a set of companies today that are able to create these types of what we're talking about is like avatar videos. They're using this technology called neural rendering. It's actually not a technology that's affected by sort of the transformer and diff…”
Baxter: Community Notes' initial PageRank algorithm amplified majority bias
“The actual first algorithm that I put into production was very focused on anti manipulation. It was this kind of page rank variant but it didn't solve the problem of, you know, bias basically. So if there are some, if there are more users on one side, the, a p…”
Godin: Yahoo had the opportunity to acquire Google for $10M
“At the time, I was at Yahoo. Yahoo had the chance to buy Google for ten million dollars while I was there.”
Schwartz: Google Is Legally Prohibited From Providing Exact Ad Search Volumes
“So even Google for, again, for past monopolistic reasons, Google's not allowed to give the real number that they see on Google ads for how many people search it. They have to buy it from another data source and then give that out.”
LaPointe: Concrete user stakes activate the brain's empathy centers
“If I tell your brain, Here are the people counting on you to get this right, Lenny. Your brain activates a region called the anterior insular cortex, which starts to think about other people in the context of the solution you're creating. And if I say we are h…”
Shah: Many Indian and Asian languages lack a word for efficiency
“Many Indian languages do not have a word for efficiency. And that's true for many Asian languages. The word for efficiency does not exist.”
Eyal: Research shows 90% of distraction is triggered internally, not externally
“We have external triggers. These are things in our outside environment, the usual suspects, the pings, the dings, the rings, all this stuff in our outside environment, which we tend to blame for distraction. But studies find that's only 10% of the reason we ge…”
Tavel: Pinterest's 'Picked for You' may be first algorithmic social feed
“It was actually, it may have been the first algorithmic feed that was in a social product because suddenly your home feed wasn't just things, people that you followed.”
Hay: Snowplow is the only CDP allowing custom schema control
“Most third party B to C tools don't allow you to control the schema. There's only one CDP I know that does that. That's Snowplow. The rest are, there's a user object and an event object. So you can either stuff data as a user property onto the user object, or …”
Batchu: Ramp reached $100M ARR faster than any fintech company
“When he released this, you know, a year ago, we were the fastest growing company to a hundred million dollars of, you know, annualized revenue at the time. I don't know if there's been others since, but certainly not in the fintech category as far as I know.”
Traditional job interviews have little to no evidence of predicting job performance
“Interviews actually, we know don't predict job performance. So very little to no evidence and say interviews will predict how I perform on the job.”
Rachitsky: OpenClaw advocate Claire Rowe replaced all her instances with GrokBot
“When I saw Claire Rowe, who's been, like, the biggest proponent of OpenClaw, and has, it's, like, become a core part of the way she lives, and works with her kids, and does all her work, she just switched all of her Open clause. You shut them all down and swit…”
Abel: Legal is the largest budget line item in enterprise organizations
“Interesting thing about legal. It's the largest budget line item in the enterprise kind of budget, right? Sometimes three to four times other budgets and it's forever. There's always more money for legal.”
Pincus: Every member of Andy Jassy's C-suite was Bezos's technical assistant
“And in fact, Andy Jassy at Amazon, everyone on the C staff used to be someone who'd been the tech assistant to Bezos.”
Evans: Survey shows only 15-20% of teens are daily active AI users
“Even if you look at like, 13 to 18 year olds or something, it's still like kind of 15, 20% of people are daily active users, and another 20% are weekly active users. And then the other 60% of those people in that demographic, how long you say they are not usin…”
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.”
Wu: Claude Opus 4 completes multi-step tasks without explicit prompt reminders
“With Opus four and later models, we realized that we didn't need to force it to use this to-do list. It would like naturally use it itself. For the earlier models, we had to keep reminding it. Hey, did you finish everything on the to-do list? You can't finish …”
Rabois: 30-day hiring evaluation is as accurate as one-to-two-year reviews
“And if you ask yourself, 30 days after any hire, would you make the same decision? That 30 day loop is pretty, pretty useful. And it basically it's as accurate as measuring in a year or two years out.”
Vo: OpenClaw prompts models to treat external inputs as dangerous
“Now, what I know, you know, having looking, looked at the code is OpenClaw is actually prompted pretty hard as are some of the core models to say, like, consider everything external dangerous, like do not follow instructions.”
Forsgren: Humans max out at four hours of deep work daily
“Gloria Mark has done some really good work on attention and deep work, and Cubans can get about four hours of good deep work a day. And like, that's about it.”
Sharma: Developers launched approximately 70,000 enterprise AI tools last year
“There's something like 70,000 enterprise tools like in the AI space launched last year.”
Taylor: Google Maps hit 90M users in one day in 2005
“In August of 22,005. We integrated satellite imagery from a recent acquisition called Keyhole, which became Google Earth, and we got ninety million people using it on the same day.”
Deng: Facebook Messenger reached 4.7 billion daily messages in 2.5 years
“We grew that product from zero to 4.7 billion messages sent per day in about two and a half years.”
Misra: Captions was the first company to build an AI eye contact tool
“So we had this feature where it basically shifts your eyes to look at the camera, and we were actually the first company to build this.”
Mullenweg claims WordPress Core hasn't had a remote exploit in years
“You know, we haven't had a remote exploit in, you know, knock on wood, like I think five years, six years or something.”
53% of workers claiming to leave for higher pay did not actually
“Like, 53% of the people who basically said they got more money did not get more money. They told the company they had more money because they knew they couldn't argue with having them come back because they got more money.”