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 2,831 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 26 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
Raskin: Winning the social media race against China yielded societal polarization
“You don't want to let your rivals define the nature of the race you're in. Like, we beat China to social media, which means we beat China to sort of a misinformed, polarized society with mental health issues. We, instead, what we want to do is figure out how d…”
Mackey: Intellectuals have historically disliked business and distrusted its motives
“Intellectuals are the ones that don't like business, and intellectuals have never really liked business. I'm not saying all intellectuals, just as a general rule, as Deidre McCloskey calls it, the clerisy. Has always been skeptical about business, and has alwa…”
Dyson: Dyson Institute has higher first-class honors rate than any UK university
“And by the way, we have a higher percentage of first-class honors than any other British university.”
Hoffman would pause AI digital twins for the election year if possible
“Well, if I could wave a wand and essentially, you know, kind of say that nobody could be doing digital twins whatsoever, given the negative consequences, especially because it's a election year, I'd wave the wand because I think that the negative immediate con…”
Duckworth: Grit is not enough without making your situation an ally
“Grit is not enough. You must have your situation as your ally.”
Uhrman: Building a sports team is easier than building a tech startup
“The building of a sports team is a lot easier than the building of a technology team, and the people that are willing to help you do it are vastly larger than those that I experienced when I was building something in tech, because when most businesses are buil…”
Uhrman: 90% of all sports teams do not make money
“The first thing that I learned, which was actually fascinating, was that 90% of all sports teams don't make money.”
Hoffman prefers unproven CEOs with a refounder mindset over proven executives
“If you said, well, I could have a CEO, With maybe who's a little less proven, but has the refounding mindset, you know or I can have a CEO who's proven, but doesn't have the refounding mindset. Personally, I would always opt for the refounding mindset, right?”
Clark: Chinese officials believe the U.S. is decoupling, not de-risking
“The Chinese believe that we really are decoupling, not de-risking, despite the administration and Secretary Raimondo doing a good job of saying that's not true.”
Hoffman: OpenAI's lead comes from unique commitment to scale compute
“Well, I think one of the key things that OpenAI has stayed true to that relatively few of the other players are internalized to the degree to which OpenAI does it, which is a scale compute.”
Hoffman: Scale compute primarily drives AI progress over algorithms or data
“Yes, you know, this algorithm's a little better. Yes, this algorithm's a little worse. Yes, this data set's a little better. Yes, this data set's a little worse, but it's the scale that is primarily driving. And so it drove it in the large language models, hen…”
Hoffman: Scaling AI compute will yield massive progress regardless of AGI
“Whether or not you think AGI is, is high probability, medium probability, low probability, wherever you are in that spectrum, you will be creating really interesting increases in cognitive capability of these systems. Say they can't raise seven trillion or not…”
Hoffman: AI will benefit both tech giants and startups, not disrupt incumbents
“Like it isn't going to be the David and Goliath where David invents his new thing, AI, and it kind of resets the apple carts of the Goliaths that are appropriately bought into AI, which, you know, is intensely Microsoft and Google and, you know, some Amazon an…”
Hoffman: Regulating to limit big tech restricts future economic growth
“It's like the classic dialogue thing is we got to limit the big tech and you're like, well, that's, if you want to really want to limit your economic future.”
Hoffman: AI productivity is not yet reflected in tech company numbers
“I don't think that much AI productivity is currently baked into the numbers. And rigged in the way that people are operating.”
Gavet: Amazon copied Ozon's model of e-commerce pickup points
“I do think that Amazon did copy some of the things that we were doing because we invented pickup points. We had 2000 plus pickup point across Russia because at the time in Russia it was all cash on delivery, and we had to figure out a way for people to Get the…”
Gavet: Priceline tolerated inefficiency to protect acquired companies' entrepreneurial spirit
“We will not sacrifice, ah, the entrepreneurial spirit in the name of synergy.
So we are going, another way of saying that is, we are going to tolerate inefficiency in the name of supporting
Entrepreneurship.
And that I think is the secret sauce.”
Star Trek monetizes via a 30-year licensing waterfall, ignoring quarterly metrics
“What I can tell you is that Star Trek is a waterfall that keeps rolling downstream for 30 years in terms of licensing. So it's not just a matter of saying, okay, you have to decide in this quarter whether you're successful financially. My argument is you have …”
Kawasaki: Sequoia's best investments are unproven teams in unproven markets
“If you talk to someone like Mike Moritz of Sequoia will tell you that the richest vein for Sequoia's investments, and there's no company, no VC that has, you know, created such value as Sequoia. It's two people creating the product that they want to use. They …”
Kawasaki: VCs demanding rigid return projections are usually giving soft rejections
“Many times when, if you face, like, rigid recommendations for, I need your internal rate of return, I need your return on capital, I need this kind of projection. In a sense, the investor is telling you no, and is trying to put these fences up in front of you,…”
Kawasaki: Truly interested VCs overlook flaws and reframe weaknesses as positives
“If an investor is truly interested in your business, they're not going to throw these fences up in front of you. What they're going to be thinking is they do not have a world-class team, but I at Kleiner Perkins or Sequoia, I can tap the greatest talent in the…”
Kawasaki: AI is bigger than PCs, chips, social media, and internet combined
“To me, AI is, is a bigger deal than personal computers, chips, social media, internet, all combined.”
Wallach: Algorithmic decisions today will dictate human trajectory for 300 years
“The decisions that we make right now over the next, gosh, five, 10 years, even five months, which I know is very short term, but even at the algorithmic level, are going to dictate the course of our species, I think, for two to 300 years.”
Wallach: AI leaders wield Oppenheimer-level power to create and destroy
“This is the same level of power and the ability to both create and the ability to destroy that we're dealing with. And what I, that's what I took away from Oppenheimer. I was like, wow, that much power with one individual, one small set of individuals. That's …”
Bassin: Distributed teams offer more control over efficiency and culture
“If you're a distributed organization, you have a little bit more control over, one, maximizing the efficiency. Of the work and maximizing the ability to control your culture.”
Gavet: Startups attempting to compete with ChatGPT will probably fail
“And frankly, if you're an entrepreneur and your dream is to compete with ChatGPT, you're probably not going to succeed because of the compute power and the data sets required to even remotely have a shot at competing. So the only businesses that might compete …”
Hoffman: Founders should seek polarized reactions to early-stage startup ideas
“What you want is some people going, you guys are out of your minds, and some people going, I see it. You want a polarized reaction.”
Princess Reema: Challenges for Saudi women match those in the US
“The challenge for women in my country today is no different than the challenge for women in your country.”
Farquhar: 40% of Atlassian staff live over two hours from an office
“About 40% of our Atlassian employees live more than two hours from an office”
Farquhar: Deliberate team gatherings boost employee connection for 3 to 5 months
“However, when people did get together deliberately, we saw a huge spike of connectedness to each other and to the company. The surprising part was the decay function. I thought a week or two later we'd be back to baseline, but it turned out that the data showe…”
Farquhar: Office attendance should not be about justifying commercial real estate rent
“We don't need to turn up to offices to make people feel good about paying rent.”
Austin Russell predicts widespread deployment of driverless cars is decades away
“Oh, oh, it will. It's just, like, decades, you know, it's not, like, next year, you know?”
Catmull: Steve Jobs developed empathy and a sense of humor during 1991-1995
“I would say from 91 to 95 was a dramatic change in him as a person. He became more empathetic and caring. He paid attention to people. You actually begin to see him having a sense of humor.”
Gelsinger: Silicon supply chains will define geopolitics more than oil for 50 years
“Where silicon and technology supply chains is more important for the next five decades.”
Gelsinger claims only Intel and TSMC can manufacture leading-edge chips at scale
“There's only two companies in the world, we believe, that can be that leading edge technology manufacturer at scale. And, you know, one of those is in Asia. One of them is an American company who's done our R&D here in the US.”
Gelsinger: Intel wants to manufacture chips for Nvidia, AMD, Google, and Amazon
“And frankly, I want to manufacture for NVIDIA, for AMD, for Google, for Amazon. We want to be that supply chain provider because the world needs a Western supply chain at scale.”
Alba: Every early VC said they would ask their wife about Honest
“It's really interesting cause like all of my initial VC meetings, everyone was like, I'm gonna go home and ask my wife if this is something that she likes. Literally every single one of them.”
Fake: Early Flickr explicitly permitted bare midriffs despite alienating Muslim users
“You know, the Muslim community did not like the bare midriff photographs that were all over Flickr, and we had to make a decision, and we came down on the side of the bare midriff. We were like, the bare midriff is okay here, and that is a decision that we are…”
Fake: Investors overlooked Etsy's female-dominated, countercultural marketplace in early rounds
“One of the things that was missed was that it was a principally female marketplace, right? And at the time it was 2005, 2006. There were a few examples of that, but Etsy was also a market that appealed to a certain kind of semi-countercultural group.”
Hoffman: The Silicon Valley myth of the 'neutral' online platform is false
“There's a standard way of thinking about this in Silicon Valley, which argues that large online platforms are inherently objective and do not have values of their own. I think this is incorrect. All platforms are, in fact, value-laden.”
Hoffman: Purely click-driven algorithms inevitably optimize for base human instincts
“For example, on the Facebook side, they say, well, what people click en masse demonstrates their actual preferences, what they actually like, and so we have a democratic platform that promotes what people click on. It's a reflection of actual behavior and pref…”
Vaynerchuk personally approves every single employee firing across global VaynerMedia
“For example, I sign off on every firing in the entire company globally. There's not one person in this company that can be fired without me signing off, because I'm scared that my leaders will do politics and corporate stuff, not human stuff.”
Saujani: Working mothers earn 58 cents for every dollar made by fathers
“We have a motherhood penalty, and what I mean by that is moms make 58 cents and every dollar made by fathers.”
Khosrowshahi: Uber's early scale fostered a confrontational, rule-breaking culture
“The radical scale success of Uber that was unprecedented at the time, I think led to a culture that was highly confident, A culture that was confrontational, a culture that to some extent celebrated breaking the rules, all of which made possible what Uber buil…”
Nocera: School closings and pandemic lockdowns exacerbated income inequality
“And then I had a particular obsession with school closings and lockdowns that they exacerbated income inequality, but nobody was talking about that.”
Nocera: Private Equity No Longer Serves Society and Only Extracts Capital
“Whatever private equity used to do that was useful to society. No, not anymore. They just want to pull money out. And the nursing homes are a horrible, horrible example of that.”
Suleyman: Inflection AI has ensured users cannot prompt hack Pi
“We've really tried hard to make safety our number one priority, and part of the way that we do that is by ensuring that you can't actually prompt hack Pi.”
Khan: NYPD testified it lacks accuracy data for its facial recognition systems
“When we asked the NYPD for its own data on the bias and the accuracy of this technology, when we wanted to look underneath the algorithmic hood at how this system is operating, they told us under oath they don't have any data on how accurate this technology is…”