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 882 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
Rabois: I refuse to let colleagues talk to consumer customers
“I refuse to allow colleagues of mine to talk to customers.”
Cohen: LinkedIn is replacing its APM program with Associate Product Builders
“We used to have our APM program, which this is about it's ending this year. And then starting January, we're going to start having our APB program and they're going to come into LinkedIn. We're going to teach them how to code design and PM at LinkedIn.”
Zhuo: Sundial eliminated PM roles so engineers own product definition
“We have eliminated more roles. For example, we thought we would need a bunch of product managers. It's turned out that actually if you don't have a product manager, I know this might be going against a little bit of the ethos of where, where Leti started, but …”
Shopify Has Banned Traditional KPIs and OKRs
“We rant against KPIs are basically banned as a, and OKRs are banned and all that.”
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…”
Fried: 37signals tracks no OKRs, KPIs, revenue, or customer growth targets
“We don't have financial goals. We don't have OKRs or KPIs. I don't have revenue targets. I don't have growth targets in terms of the number of customers we need to pick up this year versus last year. I don't look at any of those things.”
Mochary: Mochary Method fires anyone who merely meets expectations
“If someone is meeting expectation, we let them go. We've already let all those folks go. So on our team, it's Only outperformers.”
Ugarte: SpaceXAI prioritizes practical AI over chasing superintelligence
“And I think one thing that Somewhat distinguishes SpaceX AI from other AI labs is I think our goal is less to build you know, chase superintelligence or some kind of vague aspirational ideal and the goal is actually very practical, which is to build useful AI,…”
a16z will invest in moatless products if consumer momentum is high
“I think that we would happily take a bet on a product that doesn't have a quote unquote moat or durability story. If it has, you know, a lot of momentum, a lot of craft, a lot of, you know, sort of growing engagement.”
a16z avoids seed-stage startups whose ideas are too small
“I think today we're almost seeing the opposite problem where, you know, an idea that's too small is not something that we want to engage with, and you can talk about how you put a hundred billion dollars to work in the seed productively.”
Verrilli: Whatnot PM managers spend 90%-plus time on IC work
“There's like, I think four or five people across the team who manage other PMs. All of them would spend 90 plus percent of their time doing IC work. I'm still probably 50% of my time doing IC work personally.”
Ambrosino: 100% of current OpenAI product code is written by AI
“Cause if you're using the goalposts from last year, it's like, well, a hundred percent of our product right now is AI written code.”
Wu: Anthropic is prioritizing first-party Claude products over third-party offerings
“I think one of the most important things for Anthropic is to grow the number of users that we're able to reach. One of the ways that we're able to do this is with the cloud subscriptions with our first party products. And so we just very much want to double do…”
Rabois: Operates by taking no days off from work or workouts
“I don't believe in taking days off from workout. I don't believe taking days off from work, period.”
Anthropic ships up to 80 percent of product features without a PRD
“Probably 70, 70%, maybe 6070, 80% of what we ship does not have a PRD.”
Anthropic softens public AI risk warnings because internal beliefs sound extreme
“I think we actually believe in this stuff more strongly than we say externally, so, like, it is just such a Key part of how we think internally that sometimes like we just like re, you know, reword your statements because it's like, people might just think we'…”
Cherny has not edited a single line of code since November
“I have not edited a single line by hand since November.”
Early HubSpot avoided 1-on-1s, giving all feedback in public management meetings
“And I, when we first started HubSpot, I ran it a little bit like Jensen runs Nvidia, where I didn't do one-on-ones and I gave a lot of good and bad feedback publicly in large management team meetings.”
Lemkin: Prospects do not care if sales emails are AI-generated
“And what we learned from sending hundreds of thousands is it doesn't matter. People, we're in an age where people don't really care as long as the email adds value and they know they're going to get an instant response. We've tried both. We've tried to say, He…”
MacInnis: Rippling deliberately understaffs every project to avoid politics and waste
“And so that's the way we work at Rippling. Everyone is constantly asking for more resources. And of course, where we can afford to and where it's appropriate, new resources arrive. But it is really important to me that we feel that we've deliberately understaf…”
MacInnis: Rippling suffered two years of executive disarray from hiring mistakes
“We had a hiring mistake in engineering leadership where the product leader at the time had to sort of run engineering. We subsequently had a mistake in in product hiring. And a lot of us had to sort of pitch in and Parker and I sort of stared at each other thr…”
Lovable classifies LLM costs for freemium users and hackathons as marketing
“If you want to host a lovable hackathon, we will sponsor it and give all of the participants credits away for free. So we give them away as candy and we basically track them over our LLM costs on freemium and giveaways as our marketing costs. And it doesn't go…”
Cohen: LinkedIn introduces formal 'Full Stack Builder' job title internally
“We have a full stack builder title formally inside of the organization and we are gradually putting people in that bucket.”
Abel: Every enterprise deal I have done closed over text, not email
“Every single enterprise deal I have done,
The deal is done.
The deal is closed and pretty much done through text.
It's not on email anymore.”
Field: AI productivity gains have not reduced Figma's engineering hiring demand
“We are nowhere near, at least at Figma, ah, the point where our demand for development, for example, is satiated. Have we seen productivity increases? Yeah. Mild to moderate, but like, that is not something that has made our new head count we want for engineer…”
McCabe refuses to invest in democratic or highly collaborative companies
“There's going to be companies that want to do the highly collaborative, more democratic thing. I won't invest in them, but there's companies that want to do it.”
Shipper: AI-assisted development still requires underlying coding knowledge
“We're not at a point yet where the people that work at every could do what they do if they didn't know how to code.”
Deng tests exclusively for growth mindset in final-round hiring interviews
“Whenever I go to, it seems like chat GBT or Uber, when I'm always the final interview for someone in my org,
And I partner with recruiting and developing that the rubric.
I always insist on doing the last interview and I do not product sense.
I don't do design…”
Anthropic's Claude Code team uses Claude to write and review itself
“The team that works in the most futuristic way is the Claude code team, because they're using Claude code to build Claude code in a very self-improving kind of way. And, you know, early on in that project, they would do very line by line pull request reviews, …”
Revolut product owners act as direct line managers for their cross-functional teams
“We have these fully cross-functional teams meaning they are stuffed with all necessary functions, engineers, data analysts, designers operation managers, and so on. And we also operate in metrics. So everyone has a line manager and the functional manager. So p…”
Zlokazov: Revolut leadership deep-dives code-level into 7 to 10 core projects
“How we did differently at Revolut is to go very deep into details we take maybe seven or 10 projects which are most impactful for customers right now, and we go super deep into them, like really, really deep, Sitting with engineers, like check, like reading co…”
Truell: Every magic moment in Cursor involves a custom in-house model
“At this point, every magic moment in Cursor involves a custom model in some way.”
Mohan: Windsurf aims to cannibalize its product every 6–12 months
“One of the goals that I tell everyone at our company is we should be cannibalizing the existing state of our product every six to 12 months. Every six to 12 months, it should make our existing product look silly. It should almost make the form factor of existi…”
Weil: OpenAI will not build industry-specific vertical AI products
“There are immense opportunities in every industry and every vertical in the world to go build AI based products that improve upon the state of the art. And there's just no way we could ever do that ourselves. We don't want to, we couldn't, if we did want to.”
Captions engineers must ship a marketable feature every week
“Our engineering goal is every engineer should ship
A marketable product every week.”
Misra intentionally avoids reading books because audio and video are the future
“I have to say here that I actually don't read books. It's actually something that I decided on purpose where I decided I don't want to build my skill in reading and I want to build it in listening and watching instead, because I think that's the future.”
Mullenweg plans to hand WordPress to a single successor, not committee
“If or when I'm gone, I don't want to pass it to a committee. I want to pass it to someone else who can, you know, have a role similar to mine, and really sort of, ah, try to be a steward.”
Tobi Lütke: Shopify operates without KPIs or traditional Silicon Valley OKRs
“So it's true that we don't have KPIs and we don't have like at least okay us in the sort of Silicon Valley sense, but we are extremely data informed.”
Linear rejects middle-manager reporting features that worsen IC workflows
“It's customization features requested by middle managers in order to make reporting a little bit easier. At the cost of making IC workflows worse, right? Like, it's like, if it fits that description, we're just saying no. There's no debate because we've alread…”
Linear does almost no project time estimation to hit engineering deadlines
“We do almost no estimating in order to hit deadlines. What we do, right, is we ship as early as we can.”
Rachitsky: Much of Airbnb's flow was guesswork, not tested optimization
“What made me realize this back in the day was thinking at Airbnb, especially thinking about people looking at our flow and being like, this is, they got it all figured out. We're just going to copy what they've done. Cause they're so thoughtful and have tested…”
Salesforce is rebalancing its workforce, replacing support engineers with account executives
“Well, I can tell you about like my own company and what I'm telling my own employees, which is that, yeah, we're gonna have to rebalance some of our workforce because you can see it in the numbers I just gave you, which is we need less support engineers becaus…”
Shopify executes company reorgs in two weeks without formal change management
“So if you're doing something monumental, like, I don't know, you're doing like a reorg or something, right? You can do it the slow way. Let's like sit down and plan and roll it out. And it's probably like six months in most companies. Shopify, this is like a w…”
Shopify randomly deletes all recurring internal meetings with over two people annually
“Once a year at a random time, we will delete All recurring meetings that have more than two people, so not one-on-ones, and are internal people only, so not interviews or external partner meetings. And then we have a two-week moratorium where you're not allowe…”
Thawar eliminated scheduled one-on-ones while managing 120 direct reports at Xtreme Labs
“I did two things famously. One, I had a lot of direct reports and two, I did not do any scheduled one-on-ones because you can't have a 120 direct reports and do scheduled one-on-ones cause you're never doing anything but one-on-ones. So I said, I'm going to be…”
Shopify Enforces a Strict 'No Wizard' Onboarding Product Principle
“We have very specific no wizard principle, but I think that sometimes the tension is Wizards do serve a, can serve a purpose in certain circumstances, and so we've, but we've avoided doing that, but we've always worked to try to make the principles of what a w…”
Meta uses machine learning classifiers to identify teens lying about their age.
“We're building classifiers to try to predict how old people are based on Not just the age that they've stated but, you know, based on who they're talking to, what kind of content they're looking at, what the age of the people they're connected to is, do we thi…”
Nikita Bier: TBH only manually seeded its first hundred users
“You need to get enough intensity of adoption and density for a social network to start to get the flywheel spinning, but the app should grow by itself after that. And people think we would just went to like from school to school following every kid on it. Like…”