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 25 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
'Product market fit' is an overused tautology
“Product market fit. Which, I mean, if I hear that again, that's where, big data, whatever big data went to, or Synergy I mean, it's such a tautology, you know, it's like, yeah, ok, people want what you've built a product that people want to buy, it's so insigh…”
Safe and calm entrepreneurs rarely profoundly change the world
“Because if you're in that meeting, and the entrepreneur makes you feel safe and calm, and, ah, you know, kind of, ah, very much in the linear mindset, ah, they're not likely to, you know, profoundly change the world.”
Investors should follow top founders rather than set sector theses
“We had to actually follow, in many ways, follow the instincts of the best people of their generation, because they're chasing the things that have the highest rate of change, that are at the intersection of a collision of different sectors and segments”
OpenCore monetization fails on developer tools
“Doing open core on a developer tool is not going to get you very far.”
Premature open source monetization invites competition
“If you try and monetize and constrain adoption, you're just gonna open the door for another company to come in and compete with you”
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.”
Amazon Web Services holds about 90% market share
“You have a company that's gonna, ah, it's on its path to be, and it is, about a 90% market share player.”
Machine learning is a 'game of kings' favoring big tech
“And machine learning is the game of kings.”
Tech startups are experiencing a massive burn rate bubble
“We have a burn rate bubble, meaning companies have lost, they've numbed themselves to the fact that you have to eventually replace the capital that you're burning with operating income”
Startup valuation correction will be a long tail, not a crash
“This is not like, 99 to 2001, where it went like that. I think it's much more of a long tail”
Wins from top unicorns will overwhelm broader ecosystem losses
“The overwhelming positives of a few of the companies in this unicorn ecosystem will overwhelm the losses”
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.”
Solomon Hykes' initial DotCloud idea was catastrophically bad
“And turns out, by the way, his idea was catastrophically bad. Dot cloud, which we don't talk about.”
Benchmark partners are paid equally with no associates or principals
“Each of us are equal partners. We pay each other exactly the same. There's no associates, there's no principals,”
Great entrepreneurs prefer dealing directly with senior VC partners
“The premise of Benchmark was that the great entrepreneurs don't want to talk to that junior associate. They want to talk to the decision-making senior partner.”
Former Facebook CTO Jeff Rothschild called CockroachDB 'the one'
“Jeff had helped me turn down pretty much every database company that ever existed, and he said, this is the one. And, you know, if we were at Facebook, we could do it all over again. This is the product we wish we could use”
Benchmark prefers backing founders on their second or third venture
“I love backing company two and three, and some, and number one, you get lucky sometimes, but, ah, I really love, ah, number two, if the first one was, you know, done with integrity”
60% of traditional enterprise software investment goes to sales
“When we make an investment, it's still somewhat the case that if we put a, for every dollar we put in, something like 60% of that goes into selling the technology.”
Achieving ubiquity is step one for open source software success
“The step one in any open source success story is ubiquity.”
Historically 15% of IT companies suffer catastrophic value loss yearly
“You know, in any given year, about 15% of the companies in the IT world have a catastrophic loss of value, which is 70% of your value evaporates, and it never comes back. So for the last five years, that's been five percent.”
Bitcoin has the strongest network effect among blockchain applications
“What has the strongest form network effect around it? It's Bitcoin.”
Stronger startups become stronger when capital is scarce
“Because I actually think the stronger companies are gonna get stronger when capital is scarce.”
The tech ecosystem is entering a cycle with less promotional BS
“I think we're moving into a cycle where it's gonna be refreshingly you know, I don't wanna say the promoters are gone, it's sort of the nature of industry, but it'll be a lot, there'll be a lot less of that kind of BS, and I think it'll make the whole ecosyste…”