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 7 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
Naficy: Venture capitalists heavily discount pregnant founders compared to young men
“They do write you down a little bit if you're a mom and you're pregnant and you're starting a company, versus if you're a young, twenty-eight-year-old Entrepreneur starting a company. There's significantly different ways in which you're treated, actually, as a…”
Naficy: Startups should budget as if they only have half their capital
“Things are always more expensive than you think they are, and they're always going to take more time to prove out, and you're going to need more optimizations and more loops to correct things than you think you will. That's why we just say, roughly speaking, i…”
Naficy: Uniform pricing paralyzed customers until Minted introduced artificial price differentiation
“Making prices all equal for different kinds of paper and realizing the analysis paralysis people went through, you like almost had to give them a reason to make a decision just by changing the price.”
Naficy: Millennial grooms' involvement forced Minted to adopt less feminine designs
“Millennial men like to be involved in the wedding decision with the millennial woman. They're more involved dads, and they're more involved husbands, actually, it turns out. So, we learned that our designs were too feminine in weddings, and you wouldn't necess…”
Naficy originally planned Minted as a bootstrapped lifestyle business without VCs
“This time I was, I said to myself, let's not bring in all the VCs at the beginning. I know what I'm doing this time. So I chose no co-founder this time, no VC at this time. Let's figure out how to build perhaps a sustainable lifestyle business, cash flow busin…”
Naficy: Minted recorded zero sales during its first month after launch
“I opened the doors. There's not a sale for an entire month. Nobody wants the branded stationery products that we'd spent most of our two and a half million Launching, because again, being conservative, I'd said, I know, I'll do an eve.com, I'll put all these b…”
Naficy: Minted closed its venture round two weeks before Lehman collapsed
“And we raised our venture around two weeks before Lehman failed because this investor of mine had said to me, I feel something really bad is going to happen. You should go raise. So we just went out August. Who's in town? Anybody? Is anyone in town in August? …”