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 706 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
MacInnis: Hopes competitor Deel goes to zero due to its 'criminal behavior'
“I was one of the first investors in Deal, if you've heard of them. I, you know, I was able to exit, I was able to exit that position, and then, you know, hopefully that company's going to zero with their criminal behavior, but whatever.”
Benioff calls Microsoft Copilot 'really a terrible product'
“And I'm running aggressive marketing against Microsoft because they have really a terrible product co-pilot that I'm have to position against and market against.”
Kalinowski: OpenAI lacked proper governance around its Department of Defense deal
“And I feel that what happened with the decision-making, the speed of the decision-making, the governance, and the lack of defined guardrails around the announcement of the Department of War deal is not how I thought it should have been done.”
Chen: Big Tech Could Fire 90% of Staff and Move Faster
“Like I used to work at a bunch of the big tech companies, and I always felt that we could fire 90% of people and we would move faster because the best people wouldn't have all these distractions.”
McCabe: Acquired Zendesk was culturally and strategically dead
“Zendesk had been acquired a couple of years prior. They were strategically, energetically, culturally dead. They were upsetting customers in the market. There's an opportunity there. We're doing service.”
Martin: Richard Rumelt does not know much about business
“I don't think that he, like most business academics, he doesn't know much about business, right? Like he hasn't gone out and practiced a lot.”
Krishnan: No successful company was ever built using 'Jobs to Be Done'
“I think no successful company has ever been built on top of JDBD. And if you pick JDBD, you're probably doomed.”
Ugarte: Microsoft and early rivals lost AI coding lead due to culture
“AI coding has always been competitive from when cursor first, first kind of came to be. And at the time the competitors were Microsoft and others and a handful of maybe 10 or 20 companies. And I think it's notable that none of those competitors are at the fore…”
AI testing will expose PMs who lack zero-to-one product skills
“In a world where every story gets told, every product story gets told, every feature gets tried, I think a lot of PMs are going to realize they're actually not that good at zero to one. And it's much more fulfilling to work on someone else's good idea than you…”
Ward: Strategic recruiting teams should be among the highest paid company-wide
“And one of them, yeah, if not, I mean, if you think about this impact that they're having that and like the, you know, I feel like there's a supply and demand crisis around really strategic recruiters because of the somewhat transactional nature we've made rec…”
Ambrosino: Eliminating the product manager role is a terrible idea
“I I've heard a lot of companies be like, we're getting rid of the product role, which I think is by the way, a terrible idea.”
Pincus: Viral apps like BeReal are sinking speedboats outrunning churn
“Viral based companies, and there's been many, you know, be real. There's right. We've seen these, they're sinking speed boats. They're trying to drive faster than they're sinking, right?”
Fadell: Google sidelined Nest due to cultural and business mismatches
“The whole organization was a stepchild for whatever reason, you know, there was cultural mismatch. There was, you know, probably a business mismatch.”
Fadell: Investing at 9- or 10-digit valuations cannot yield venture returns
“Well that doesn't work from a venture perspective. Like with those kinds of, you'd never get the venture returns. You can't invest in things. When the valuations are already nine digits or 10 digits, and you think you're gonna, a small portfolio that's got lik…”
Evans: AI impact equals internet and mobile, but not industrial revolution
“My most controversial opinion is that I think that AI is as big a deal as the internet or mobile and only as big a deal as the internet or mobile.”
Evans: Running Anthropic does not make Dario Amodei a labor expert
“I don't think the fact that you run AI lab suddenly gives you, or rather, and if you're going to use argument from authority, then it should be relevant to the field. So, like, I'm interested in Dario's opinions on where models are going to go in the next six …”
Shipper: The CLI era for AI agents is over in favor of GUIs
“CLIs are over. We speed ran the CLI era. It was nice while it lasted, but I think it's pretty clear. It's not that CLI, sorry. It's not that CLIs are going to completely go away. Obviously they've been around for the last like, 30 years or 40 years or 50 years…”
Schoening: The SaaSpocalypse is greatly exaggerated
“So I think to some degree, the SaaSpocalypse is greatly exaggerated.”
Rabois: Conventional PM roles make no sense in the AI era
“Well, I saw this podcast, or listen to this podcast that Peter Fenn did, and he convinced me that the idea of a PM makes no sense, basically, in the future. If you think about decomposing the logic, is what does a PM usually do? They take these inputs from cus…”
Younis: Huawei is an extension of the Chinese state, not profit-driven
“Huawei's goal is not to grow profits or shareholders. It's a private company. It's really an extension of the state.”
Younis: Chinese EV makers appear superior only because they disregard profits
“So we say, look how amazing these Chinese EV companies are and look how bad the home team is. It's just because the home team is being assessed for being a business. It has to make profits. And because it doesn't, it gets hammered by public investors. The othe…”
Jenny Wen: The traditional research-and-diverge design process is dead
“This design process that designers have been taught where you go and you go off and you do a bunch of research and discovery, and then you like diverge, you converge, diverge, converge. And it's like this process that we sort of treated as gospel and tried so …”
Patel: Human survival depends on AI to offset demographic decline
“I think that survival of humanity depends on a successful AI, because at some point, if you have, you know, 60% of your population that's in a demographic where you don't have enough people to take care of them, like that, that could cause a lot of human suffe…”
Halligan: Hiring McKinsey consultants into startups 'never works'
“The McKinsey one never works. It never works. It never works.”
Yovanovich advises learning plumbing instead of getting a CS degree
“If I had an eighteen-year-old brother and he asked me what should I do, I would tell him, hey, go become a plumber. You know, don't go and get a CS degree. You learn learn a good trade, you know, because the new generation of millionaires in the US are actuall…”
Andreessen: ChatGPT is almost certainly a better doctor than your human doctor
“Chat GPT is like almost certainly a better doctor than your doctor today, but like chat GPT can't get a license to practice medicine, right? So it can't substitute for a doctor. It can't prescribe medications, right? It can't, you know, perform procedures, rig…”
Lessin says Y Combinator founders pitch investors like 'animals'
“We're a little bit making fun of the fact that YC founders do come out a little bit like animals, right? There's like having met with many of them, I guess not their fault. They're like young kids. They've been holed up in a room coding and that's all they've …”
Lessin: AI empowers incumbents rather than creating great startup opportunities
“AI is a powerful tool. It's incredibly powerful for existing businesses and existing structures. It's not a great startup opportunity.”
Reganti: Vendors Selling 'One-Click AI Agents' Are Pushing Pure Marketing
“I probably will go as far to say that if someone's selling you one click agents, it's pure marketing.
You don't want to buy into that.”
Schulhoff: No meaningful progress made on solving prompt injection or jailbreaking
“And so in, in my professional opinion, there's been no meaningful progress made towards solving adversarial robustness, prompt injection, jailbreaking. In the last couple of years, since the problem was discovered and we're, we, you know, we're often seeing ne…”
Chen: Vibe coding is overhyped and will make codebases unmaintainable
“I definitely think that Vibe coding is overhyped.
I think people don't realize,
How much it's going to make your systems unmaintainable in the long term and decently dump this code into your code bases.”
Abel: Tier 1 enterprise logos are more willing to help startups than VCs claim
“There's this running statement where a lot of VCs will say, don't go after tier one logos, go learn down market or go learn from like logos that don't necessarily carry a lot of weight. The ones that carry all the weight are the ones that are willing to take a…”
Horowitz: Superficial VC advice soundbites from podcasts are 'fucking stupid'
“These little snippets of advice that VCs give, because they watch some fucking podcast, are all fucking stupid, like it's just, there's a lot of depth to these things. You have to know the answer to the next question, and the next question”
Horowitz bets the current AI boom is not a financial bubble
“Like these businesses are all work and they're being priced appropriately for how they're growing. So that's not an effect. So the thing that you could say is they're not going to keep growing like that or like, and so forth. And I'm not sure about that. Like …”
McCabe: AI is superior to humans at things described as personal
“Even if it does make us ask some hard questions of ourselves and think carefully about its impact on humanity, it actually is superior at the things we describe as personal and human relative to humans themselves.”
Balfour: Much of Google Gemini's MAU comes from accidental flyby user clicks
“If we could take a look inside their metrics, I think what we would see is a bunch of flyby users. In their mouths. Like they're kind of sprinkling the Gemini bucket everywhere. And I'm, I've like literally clicked on it accidentally multiple times. And so my …”
Taylor: Python is a comically bad programming language for AI to generate
“Python is probably the most common generated code just because how much it's in the training data and data scientists love Python and I love Python too. It's such a comically bad thing for AI to generate just because it's one of the most inefficient programmin…”
Shipper: GPT wrappers are unfairly maligned and extremely valuable
“I a hundred percent think GPT wrappers are amazing, and they've been much maligned for absolutely no reason, and people don't understand how absolutely valuable they are.”
Shipper: Klarna CEO's claims about customer support AI were 'bullshit'
“Like, I think that Klarna CEO thing, that was bullshit.”
Wilkinson: Things creator has 'won' more than Asana founder Dustin Moskovitz
“I am generally much more in the camp of the things guy has won, not Dustin Moskovitz. Dustin Moskovitz is just playing a different game than the things guy.”
Placek: Owning an exact .com domain no longer matters
“It is, at this point, it doesn't really matter at all. The .com or URL address has become an area code, and whether you're in four one five or six one five, it doesn't really matter to people.”
Scott Wu: Programming will become more important as AI gets more powerful
“And so in that lens, I really think that programming is, if anything, is only going to become more and more important as AI gets more powerful.”
Wu: Base model intelligence is already sufficient for autonomous software engineering
“I think that my hot take here, which I would give is I think the, I think in terms of base intelligence, we're honestly basically already there. And I think a lot of what we see actually, and what we spend our time on is less so, obviously we don't pre-train o…”
Mullenweg: Shopify and Facebook are not true platforms, will rug-pull developers
“And proprietary services can create platforms. You know, Shopify has a third party ecosystem and things like that. But it's never a true platform. And not a true platform. It's when your ecosystem makes more money than the core does. And so many times, whether…”
Coleman: Musk's 'fork in the road' email was a great downsizing approach
“I thought that was a great approach to taking a large company and getting it down to people who are really excited about, you know, working together on, on a mission.”
Tobi Lütke: Building a remote company is vastly harder and not recommended
“A better set of trade-offs for the future is to accept the vast additional difficulty of building a remote company. It's way harder. Like it's, Like, it's not something you should recommend to anyone to do this because you, it's the same as trying to run a wor…”
Verna: Sales-Led Companies Do Not Need Dedicated Growth Teams
“In fact, in the sales led companies, growth teams are not necessarily needed even that much. You might have a growth marketing team, which is really a demand gen team. That is rebranded for growth marketing. So they can charge you a 20 to 30% more in their sal…”
Godin: Claude delivers kindness and humility, while ChatGPT overpromises
“ChatGPT's reputation with me is not good because it regularly over promises and under delivers, and it does it without kindness or humility. Whereas Claude, I don't know how they did it, at least in my experience, brings kindness and humility.”