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 397 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
Danny Meyer: USHG ranks investors fifth behind employees, guests, community, and suppliers
“The third stakeholder that gets hospitality is the community in which we do business. And the fourth are the suppliers with whom we do business. And fifth, we're actually going to put our investors fifth.”
Tyra Banks admits a Top Model race-swapping photoshoot was unintentional blackface
“We did one shoot in Hawaii where me thinking that my skin is beautiful and different colors of brown skin is beautiful, we transformed the skin color and the races of all of our girls. Never thought that it was blackface.”
Anagnost: Autodesk built custom AI models using customer data
“We built our own custom AI models off of data that we have from our customers.”
Daunt: Barnes & Noble actively filters AI-generated books from its catalog
“And definitely at the moment exclude and go to great effort to exclude both from our online catalog
Probably happens, we think, with the, with what's in our stores naturally because we're selecting and curating, but online we really need to put in lots of filt…”
Freston: Smuggled three tons of clothes across St. Lawrence Seaway
“I sent three tons of clothes to Montreal and we smuggled them over the St. Lawrence Seaway, which was insane.”
Scaringe: Rivian targets supervised autonomy in 2026, unsupervised in 2027
“Later this year, we'll have a full supervised point to point, which is, which would be very similar to like Tesla's FSD. And that'll roll out to all of our gen two vehicles. And of course R two. Then next year we allow it to go unsupervised. So you can take yo…”
Scaringe: Rivian to deploy 50,000 R2 robotaxis on Uber starting in 2028
“We'll be deploying 50,000 robo-taxi versions of R-II. We start that in twenty-twenty-eight with, like, paid, you know, regular rides, but leading into that, we'll have vehicles on the platform with safety drivers, with people in the front seat”
Thompson: OpenAI deal includes SearchGPT planning sessions and content licensing
“And with OpenAI, we said, hey, here we are, let's talk. And they said, great, let's make a deal. We will pay you for the right to license your content and the right to have RAG. We will include you in sort of planning sessions as we figure out the future of se…”
Levine: Underdog Fantasy will soon launch federally regulated prediction markets nationwide
“Prediction markets are federally regulated now, and we're going to be offering that soon across the country.”
Hoffman: Regulation always massively slows innovation, guiding his investment choices
“One of the reasons why I very rarely invest in kind of regulated businesses and would be normally very cautious about co-founding them is that regulation always massively slows down innovation.”
Amy Errett forced male VCs to consult female partners before investing
“Before I let anyone do the Series A, I actually told them to do that. So I went and I said, listen, you guys may think this is a good idea. You actually don't know. So I want you to go home. And either your wife, your partner, your kids, your cousins, your aun…”
Bret Taylor reveals both OpenAI factions asked him to mediate crisis
“And then when the governance crisis happened and, you know, I got some phone calls from both the outgoing board and, Sam and Greg and others were, you know I'm paraphrasing, but there was some mutual trust that I could help mediate the outcome and there weren'…”
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.”
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.”
Suleyman: Google avoided launching LaMDA to protect its core search business
“We tried really hard to get that launched at the time, but there just wasn't the appetite for taking the kind of risk. It was pretty clear to a lot of people at Google That this was potentially going to unseat Google's existing search business. It's super hard…”
Suleyman: Inflection AI Forbids Using Its Assistant for Romantic Relationships
“One of the things that you and I have talked about a lot and that we're very clear on is that, you know, we don't want to let pie be used for romantic relationships, right?”
Hoffman: I tend to invest in companies tapping the seven deadly sins
“One thing I've been saying for the past 13 years is that I tend to invest in companies that play into one or more of the seven deadly sins.”
Altman: Y Combinator's software model can scale to AI, bio, and energy
“YC was mostly funding software companies, but I had a lot of conviction that we could apply the same thing that made YC work so well for software companies to companies in a lot of the areas that I cared about. AI, synthetic biology, energy.”
Dharmesh Shah: HubSpot designated every employee an insider before its IPO
“The decision we made was we were going to designate every individual employee at HubSpot a designated insider when we went public.”
English's recruiting rule: Make candidates an offer within seven days
“One rule I have for recruiting is, when you first hear someone's name, a clock starts ticking. I have seven days to make her an offer letter.”
Krawcheck: Ellevest freezes hiring if diversity metrics drop below internal benchmarks
“Today, we're two-thirds women at the company. We're 40% people of color. Our engineering team is half women. And any time we move off of those kind of diversity levels, you know, I say, we just stop hiring, and then force everybody to make sure that we continu…”
Cole: Bananas are investing $13M in free YouTube broadcasts this year
“Our broadcast, we invest thirteen million dollars this year, which we're not getting that. Like, it's free on YouTube.”
Krishna: IBM tripled college-level entry hiring year-over-year
“We actually tripled our college level entry hiring this year. Tripled compared to last year.”
Scaringe: Rivian excluded self-driving tech and designs from Volkswagen deal
“One part of our vehicle is software and so that's what we've licensed to Volkswagen, but we didn't license to them our self-driving platform. We didn't license them, our vehicle designs”
Scaringe: Rivian spun out robotics because capital needs exceeded Rivian's capacity
“To build, like, the goal is to build one of the largest robotics companies in the world, and to do that you need A lot of capital, more capital than Rivian was able to invest at this point. And then we also wanted to create like absolute clarity of focus withi…”
Poppi Founders Sold 100% of Company Without Retaining Operational Roles
“What a lot of people don't realize is we sold 100% of the company. A lot of times you'll do a two-step deal where if it was probably, I would say if it was that situation, we would have stayed in our roles and kept going. But you don't sell your company for tw…”
Robins: DraftKings uses AI to set and manage betting lines
“So we want to make sure that we're using AI too, to help set our lines and help manage them”
Masad: Replit made deal with Saudi Arabia for vibe coding curriculum
“We did a deal with the government of Saudi Arabia where they want to put vibe coding as part of their curriculum.”
Thompson: Media CEOs should only comment on industry issues, not politics
“My view is that as the leader of a media organization, if I'm gonna make a public statement on an issue, there's like a pretty limited range. I should make public statements about AI and scraping. Copyright, freedom of speech, right? Freedom of the press, righ…”
Brink: Gensler expects teams and leaders to work five days in-office
“We are open, we are in office, we expect our teams to be working together five days a week, we expect our leaders to be there with their teams five days a week, not working from home, but also being out with clients, also being traveling, also you know, being …”
Estée Lauder began appointing senior executives without founder Bobbi Brown's approval
“Like, I used to interview every single person, like, in the beginning. Every single person. And then, big people were being hired. The head of international, the head of this, and it'd be like, excuse me? Like, this is not the right person. This person doesn't…”
Berman: Employees refusing to voice disagreement in meetings will be fired
“And I'll fire you if you do that here. The way we work is, you say it in the room, you push back, we have the argument Ultimately, I'm either gonna say, shoot, you're right. You're right. We should do it that way. I'm not sure that's interesting. Let's pull so…”
Pohlson details Omaze revenue split: 1/3 charity/VAT, 1/3 prizes, 1/3 ops/profit
“A seven million dollar house can raise, call it thirty three million in sales. A third of that goes to charity and VAT. A third of that goes to the price and costs. In addition to the house, we cover all the taxes for the winter. We give away cash prizes. We h…”
Pohlson: Omaze laid off 180 US employees to focus on the UK
“I mean, it meant like letting go of, you know, a 180 people that were amazing people that a lot of which had been there since the beginning of Omaze and were uber creative and uber resilient and super talented, but it was just the reality of where we were.”
Barrocas: SharkNinja can move all US production outside China by year-end
“By the end of this year, all of our U S production will be able to be made outside of China.”
Welch mandates five days in-office and weekend communication for her startup
“I believe that great things happen with people together in a room, and I run a company myself, it's only 10 people, but we're, I, when we are interviewing, and we're growing right now, we say, this is a five days a week in the office, we're all together, and I…”
Allison: Pacaso initially ignored community resistance in Napa and St. Helena
“When we first started getting feedback, you know, in Napa is where it all started, or St. Helena, actually I just kind of ignored it because I'm like, you know, these people just don't understand. Like, this is actually a great thing for them. These are not re…”
Narayen: Adobe trains AI models only on fully licensed data
“If we create models, one of the things that we have to do is create a model where every piece of data that went into the creation of that model, we can testify to the fact that, you know, we have license to do that.”
Huffman: Reddit moderates user behavior rather than user beliefs
“Separating you know, behavior and beliefs. And so we try to spend a lot more time on behavior than we do on beliefs.”
Weaver: Uncle Nearest entered global spirits awards before selling a single bottle
“I told Kate, our chief business officer, I said submit us into every award competition around the world. We began doing that before we ever put a bottle in the marketplace.”
Weaver: Uncle Nearest aims for generational parity with legacy global spirits
“The moment I came into this industry, the purpose wasn't To build a whiskey company, it was Cement the Legacy of Nearest Green. And once I got in, I understood that wasn't possible unless this brand began to go toe to toe, and it doesn't have to be this genera…”
Wang: Scale AI prioritizes enterprise AI over consumer apps due to privacy
“This is one of the reasons why for the current brand of AI technology, I'm actually much more focused on the B to B and the enterprise applications of the technology, much more so than the consumer applications, because I think in the consumer applications, we…”
Maples: 80% of Exit Profits Came From Startup Pivots
“And I'd noticed that 80% of my exit profits had come from pivots.”
Reid Hoffman invests in nuclear fusion and supports geoengineering projects
“It's one of the reasons I invest in fusion, it's one of the reasons I support some people doing some geoengineering”
Kagan: AppSumo failed every time it tried to force hypergrowth
“Every time we've tried to hyperscale and go beyond, I guess, the organic growth curve of our company we've, we fucked up.”
Kagan: Prior job tenure under a year is a hiring red flag
“When people are like, Hey, I've had a job less than a year. That, that just, even to this day, almost a red flag to be hired at our company.”
Mackey: Whole Foods considered going private with up to $13B in debt
“If you go private, which is an alternative Whole Foods looked at, you're taking on, we'd have been taking on, gosh, probably 1211, 12, thirteen billion dollars in debt under our balance sheet, and if the business turned down, you could go bankrupt.”