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 35 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
Open-core business models fail against AWS due to Amazon's manageability advantages
“Open core does not work against Amazon because open core, you're building the core open and then manageability, security, reliability. That's your pro pro Amazon is really good at that shit. Like that's the, they know how to do security. So, so it becomes very…”
Cloud giants will turn backend open-source software into a corner case
“So I just think Amazon, Microsoft, and Google are, like, absolutely, like, moving far, far away from the pack in terms of their ability to create infrastructure software. So I feel like from now on it's like their game to write our databases and our message qu…”
Big tech companies will lose massive amounts of money on ML APIs
“I do not think that these numbers are going to be good for these machine learning APIs. And I think those bigger companies are going to lose a massive amount of money over the next several years.”
Socher: Recursive's $410M AWS agreement will likely be its smallest compute deal
“That will probably be one of the smallest compute deals that will happen in, in our future.”
Antitrust locks Big Tech out of M&A, empowering Snowflake and Databricks
“But you look at like Amazon, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, all are under an attack trust and basically impossible for them to acquire. So there's, you don't really have the big chip stacks at the table anymore, which means if you're an acquirer like Snowflake o…”
Delangue: Collective open source can outperform tech giants like Google and Facebook
“We believe that actually if all the other companies than Facebook, Google, Apple, Amazon are actually all contributing to the same open source technology, they can actually end up with something way better than each one of these guys could build.”
Volpi: Google and Azure partner with OSS creators to counter AWS
“And then the other thing that you do As a business is you partner with Google and Azure who, because they're pretty far behind Amazon, they're more than happy to have the original item and to pay you something for the privilege of running your version.”
Volpi: AWS launched DocumentDB to bypass MongoDB's SSPL license
“Mongo took an interesting similar approach. They have something called SSPL. In that case, it says you can take it, but any software that you build around it to run it, you have to open source it. So Amazon will have to open source its entire software base use…”
Cloud incumbents struggle against open-source startups under $100M revenue
“Listen, if you're in the first hundred million dollars Because of revenue, and you're the innovator, and you own the code, I think it's incredibly difficult for these larger incumbents, you know, Google, Amazon, and Microsoft to compete against with you. They …”
Competing with Amazon is the biggest challenge for open source
“The issue, the single biggest issue facing open source business models is not I don't think hosted versus packaged like Red Hat. It's how do you deal with Amazon?”
AWS is nearly certain to reach $100B in annual revenue
“And I think it's a near certainty Amazon's gonna do a hundred billion in revenue in AWS.”
Open source licenses cannot protect startups from Amazon's cloud competition
“Unless there's something proprietary in the open source, which by definition it's sort of already out there and open I think it's very difficult for a license to protect you from Amazon coming up with good enough in a competing service.”
Amazon approached InfluxData for a partnership due to Timestream customer demand
“Last year we did a very unique deal with Amazon. Where they have Amazon's time stream, but their customers kept asking them for influx. And so they approached us.”
Big tech and AI companies are driving a U.S. nuclear revival
“But yeah, in 24, it turns out that big tech companies and AI companies are the ones driving this, Revival of nuclear power with, you know, Microsoft entering into a deal with Constellation to revive Three Mile Island, which was the site of the last nuclear acc…”
$1B to $10B foundation model training costs price out startups
“As the cost to train all these large language models becomes bigger and bigger, Amazon's talking about a billion dollars for a single run or ten billion dollars for a single run. It's beyond the realm of startups to really spend any time there.”
DoorDash aims to offer white-label infrastructure services modeled after AWS
“I think we would like to think of ourselves as an infrastructure company. That's right. Where we build products and services to help us in the things we're trying to do, but ultimately we get them to a stage of maturity and robustness through experimenting on …”
Horowitz: Company culture must support strategy, not copy Jeff Bezos
“Whatever your culture is should support your business strategy. It shouldn't be what you borrowed from Jeff Bezos, because he built a different company than you're building.”
AWS's instance-based business model forces customers to pay for unused capacity
“Amazon's core instance-based business model, which is basically predicated on selling me a lot of things that I barely use and forcing me to pay for them.”
Patel: AI model performance is a lagging indicator of prior hardware CapEx
“Ultimately the capex that Microsoft spent in 2024 for OpenAI is what results in 2025 for OpenAI or CoreWeaver or whoever is what results in their models being so good this year. Same with Anthropic and Amazon Google and their models now being so good now is th…”
Meta, Google, and Amazon on track for $200B in AI capex
“The three top companies, MetaGoogle and Amazon, are on track to invest two hundred billion in AI infrastructure this year.”
Azhar: AI adoption will lead traditional companies to operate like Amazon
“I suspect companies start to look a lot more like, or they'll behave more like Amazon does or more like, you know, Facebook when it was Facebook rather than Meta, which is that there's just lots of experimentation on the edges.”
Amazon spiked cloud CapEx 18 months before Google and Microsoft
“Amazon Spiked almost 18 months before Google and Microsoft did, so they must have seen some of these inference workloads coming.”
Foursquare's platform strategy resembles Amazon building AWS
“One analogy I like to use for the team internally is what we've been up to over the last three years is really similar in some sense to Amazon building AWS many moons ago. Right? Realizing they had built up a bunch of infrastructure. Hey, a bunch of customers …”
Volpi: AWS holds an estimated 85% to 90% market share among developers
“If you actually pulled engineers on the street, you'd probably get 85, 90% market share with Amazon. So in my mind, no matter what the government decides on whether they use the Azure cloud or Amazon cloud, Amazon is stratospherically dominant amongst develope…”
The New York Times migrated almost all infrastructure to Google Cloud
“This is like the culmination of a long process that we'done to migrate almost everything we're doing to Google Cloud. I'm still a certain asset running at Amazon. So in general, we're doing all of our data processing on Google's data infrastructure now and mos…”
Bloch: Apple, Amazon, and Google will likely compete in personal health
“And plus, you have Apple, Amazon, and Google that are very likely to be in this market and probably compete directly here.”
Dixon: Non-tech giants will find speech recognition AI very tough
“I think for some applications, like speech, you know speech is going to be, I think, very tough for non, you know, I mean, like Google and Amazon with their, you know, with their, and Apple with their phones and the, you know, the Alexa's and things like that.…”
Braze plans to self-host Elasticsearch on AWS rather than using managed service
“What we're doing is we're going to be running our own Elasticsearch instances ourselves that we can then fully configure and it'll just give us a lot more flexibility.”
Hoffman: Internal data represents under 0.01% of global data for most companies
“Most companies out there, their own data represents, like, point oh one percent of the world. It's, unless you're Google, Facebook, Amazon, Tencent, a couple of others, you have a very small sliver of what's happening in the world.”
Hoffman: Data overhead is the core struggle for non-big-tech AI companies
“So this is the course, the core struggle for almost every single company, except for maybe Google, Facebook, Amazon, Tencent, that has to deal with all these types of issues.”
Big tech uses AI and machine learning as its next feature war
“And three, and this is a belief of me that could be wrong, is that actually the big tech firms, Amazon, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and all the others, they're using AI and machine learning as their next feature war.”
Retail churn is fuzzy and non-deterministic compared to subscription businesses
“And in the world of retail, this concept of churn is really fuzzy. So Netflix knows when their customers quit, you know, because you actually cancel. But a retailer, you know, your big retail brand, Amazon or something, and you had this customer who was orderi…”
Sheynkman: Core corporate data is a competitive advantage and shouldn't be public
“There's certain things that are very proprietary and they should be proprietary, right? And I think that, that some of the data that Federal Express and Amazon and Walmart have, That's their competitive advantage, and why would they ever want to publicize it? …”
Opendoor uses deep learning and crowdsourcing to extract data from home photos
“And so practically speaking, what we do is a combination of deep learning, so we have a couple boxes, and Amazon has running CARES and is kind of turning all these photos into structured data, and also a lot of crowdsourcing.”