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 651 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 5 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
Ben Cera: AGI is already here and skepticism is a skill issue
“To me, AGI is here. To me, it's all possible now. And I know people are skeptical. People know AGI is not here because sometimes this, sometimes that, or that's not what I believe. And I think it's more like a skill issue.”
Ries: Google's Lost AI Opportunity Is a Bigger Debacle Than Kodak
“You know, I think if you do it, if you do the math, that's a bigger corporate debacle from a value creation, value loss perspective than Kodak's inability to commercialize a digital camera, just because the opportunity cost of that is so immense.”
Eric Ries: Vibe coding will cause a Chernobyl-style disaster
“Like this, the vibe coding era is gonna be remembered for a Chernobyl style disaster is my prediction. People are vibe coding software that they do not understand. And it's only a matter of time with all the hype that's being poured into this right now. It is …”
Cheney: Software is almost worthless because anyone can build it with AI
“Software is almost useless. It's almost worthless now because anybody can create it.”
Mohrer: Getting attention is more important than making a good product
“They're good at getting attention, which, by the way, is more important than making a good product.”
Walls: Claude Code Replaces Developers and Designers for $100/Month
“When you realize what it can do, it can replace the work of developers, designers, and an entire team of people for a hundred bucks a month, and you can build anything you want pretty much.”
Hastings: Pilot and competitors relied on large manual staffs using QuickBooks
“So pilots, any of the ones we just talked about, They have hired a very large staff that is just using QuickBooks. So they did not start by building their own QuickBooks replacement. They started using QuickBooks, and they started by hiring a lot of people, an…”
Smith: AEO software tools are defenseless commodities
“Who's unique and special? And the answer is no one. If, because it's impossible to be unique and special, And the reason it's impossible to be unique and special is because these are not hard to build. These are commodity. These are easy to build relatively co…”
Hazarkhani: Autonomous 24-hour digital employees will arrive before 2027
“Yeah, I would be more bullish than that person. I would say that it's actually much sooner.”
Lieberman asserts corporate claims that AI will not eliminate jobs are false
“Well, I mean, my, one thing I would say just specifically to the truism you just said, is I really just think it is, like, Bullshit. And like, basically every executive is like on one hand being like, how can I use AI in my company? On the other hand is saying…”
Tan: Small YC startups routinely hit $20M revenue in 20 months
“We're seeing routinely YC companies with 10 or 20 people get to 10 or twenty million dollars a year in revenue in 10 or 20 months. And that's like literally never happened before in software.”
Tan: YC startups average 10% weekly revenue growth over 12-week batches
“The average rate at which YC companies grow their revenue during the YC batch, which is a 12 week process, is a 10% per week on average. I mean, some of the batches have been growing 15, 20% a week, but it's been at least 10% a week for more than a year.”
Godin: The New York Times bestseller list is an easily gamed fiction
“Bestsellers are a figment to the New York Times imagination. It's an easily gamed system that has no bearing on reality.”
Ries: Anthropic's enterprise AI lead stems from its trust advantage
“I think it's extremely obvious if you look at the data that's been published so far, that part of the reason they have an enterprise advantage is because they have a trust advantage.”
Ries: Developers investing in craftsmanship will run circles around vibe coders
“I think in the long run, people who invest now in craftsmanship, in the understanding of software principles, architectural principles, artistic principles, whatever the thing is, are going to be so much better off. They're going to wind up being like incredib…”
Ben Cera: Polsia loses roughly 50% of users in month two
“So month two last time I checked was also, yeah I don't know how they go to the numbers, though, but anyways yeah, month last time I checked was like, was another 50%.”
Cera: Anthropic and OpenAI narrow their thinking when asked to design
“Unfortunately, Entropic and OpenAI, if you ask them to design stuff, they kind of narrow the thinking.”
Cera: Top Polsia company made $3K–$4K; 10% made at least $1
“Like the max revenue I saw in the company is like a few thousand dollars, like three, three, 4000 dollars, right? There's 10% of companies that made at least a dollar.”
Cheney: Founders have a five-year window to start AI implementation businesses
“I had somebody asked me the other day, how many more years do you think this type of business could be launched and started? And my answer was five.”
Eliason: AI agents will be the internet's biggest consumers within years
“We are entering into a new era of internet commerce and internet like interactions where within a few years, the biggest transactors, the biggest consumers on the internet are going to be AI agents.”
Eliason: Alpha School offers $1M revenue or full tuition refund
“And when I kind of heard about what alpha school was thinking of doing with high school and this new, like high school for founders, where you make a million dollars or you get all your tuition back.”
Wade Foster: Vibe coding is for one-off utilities, not load-bearing SaaS
“I think vibe coding is fantastic for building tools that you can't buy, or these, like smaller utilities, where it's like, hey, this is sort of like a one-off piece of software that I need to use to solve a particular job. Fantastic. We're seeing so much more …”
Wade Foster: Zapier is rolling out AI coding tools to non-engineers
“This week now we are rolling out company-wide. We're getting everybody in every function, not just engineering. So like marketing, sales, accounting, HR, all set up on either cursor, cloud code, or codex. One of the three.”
Cera: AI businesses will succeed by charging for outcomes over tokens
“And so I think I think aligning with the customer on the outcome and charging them on the outcome instead of charging them on like a pure token basis is I think like sort of like the way AI based businesses are gonna make sense.”
Cera: Pulsia AI agents autonomously prioritize and build requested platform features
“There's an agent that's going to report that feature in, like, a sort of, like, a ticketing system, and there's another agent that's a Pulsia platform agent that, like, looks at all the features asked by, like, the thousands of users, And prioritizes features …”
Cera: Pulsia's AI communicates with investors autonomously via email
“And on the, on this specific stunt, AI today is like talking to my, to investors autonomously via email.”
Cera: AI will progress to autonomous agents trading directly with agents
“There's a second phase that's darker, which is like agents selling to agents because now the AIs know what they want. So that gets weird. I haven't really thought through too much, but in that phase of the business, if it's two LLM selling to each other, servi…”
Gil: OpenAI and Anthropic are fastest companies ever to $10B revenue
“OpenAI, Anthropic, and others are the fastest companies to ten billion dollars in revenue basically ever, right?”
Gil: Mega-cap tech distribution lets incumbents win even five years late
“The difference between now and 15 years ago is there's a handful of companies with such large distribution that they're the natural homes to do new things. Because even if they're five years late, they can just cross sell it, right?”
Mohrer: Going vertical-specific with AI note-taking apps is 'totally crazy'
“So I think going vertical specific is like, is, is totally crazy. I mean, all my competitors should go ahead and do that, but I think that it makes more sense to be kind of general for this. Like Uber isn't rides for a specific use case. It's just rides.”
Mohrer: AI puts software abstraction layers and niche SaaS tools at risk
“The notion of abstraction layers, I think are at risk from AI. So what do I mean by that? Whereas I previously like use a SAS tool that does a certain thing to achieve a goal. Now I just asked the AI to build it from scratch. And it's like, I'm not gonna repla…”
Mohrer: Cluelly cloned Wave AI's mobile app and exact $139.99 annual price
“Well, they have a mobile app that looks just like mine. It just does the thing that my app does, and they price it exactly the same. You know, one 39 99 annually is very much alike.”
Traditional SaaS playbook fails for AI without professional services, says Thummala
“The typical way that SaaS-type businesses, like software-style businesses, were built, scaled, and sold in the past 10 years was not going to be the same formula that was going to work in this new age because AI requires a ton more professional services, almos…”
Thummala: AI flipped coding to 80% review and cut raw time 10x
“The time spent on coding was probably 80% generation, 20% review. It's flipped that into 80% review, 20% generation. But the key is, is that the actual amount of like the raw time has dropped by like 10 X when you make that kind of switch.”
AI will soon run PressW projects from sales to completion autonomously
“Technically speaking, I think we are approaching the point where our business could go from one sales call to a finished project. With very, very little human in the loop, basically just prompting a nudge.”
Apfelbaum: Tony Robbins sells an AI course with a GPT that "sucks"
“Tony Robbins just came out with an AI course, and then I join his AI course, and he's not teaching anything that's super valuable in there, and people pay a thousand dollars to learn how to create a custom GPT that, by the way, sucks, so I'm in his community, …”
Santos: Zero-cost AI will create media made entirely for self-consumption
“I'm more of a believer that there's going to be sort of new behaviors that you can't see just yet. And this is one of them, right? Which is if cost near zero, then literally everyone can do it. But if everyone can do it, then of course, you know, the, who's go…”
Santos: OpenAI's Sora is reportedly burning $15 million per day
“This is why it's kind of known that, you know, Sora, you know, OpenAI Sora is literally burning, it's been said to be burning fifteen million dollars per day, right, on the app, essentially with people like playing with the video.”
Foster: Zapier will likely always rely on external LLMs
“I think, you know, we will probably always depend on you know, external LLMs for large parts of this.”
Hastings: Relying on manual labor prevents startups from transitioning to automation
“So once you hire the people to do it, and once you're supporting that, it's very hard to go the other way and come back to the automation.”
Singla: Freshness timestamps boost LLM surfacing probability by 25%
“All LLMs give, there's a 25% probability that your content will get surfaced up better if you map out freshness of content.”
Smith: Startups should ignore SEO until Series A or B
“I think it's hard for early stage companies, which is why I mentioned when a startup asked me what they should do in SEO, I say, don't work on it and wait until you're larger. Wait until you're, you know, series A or later, maybe series B and later, because it…”
Smith: Over 90% of ChatGPT users still use Google
“Similar web I have data showing that the overlap Basically everyone who uses ChatGPT uses Google. Nearly all of them. I think it's like 90, 90% plus or something. So people are not using it instead of search.”
Smith: TechRadar Is Among Most Cited LLM Domains Despite Affiliate Disclosures
“TechRadar is a good example. TechRadar shows up A huge amount. It's one of the most cited domains in LMs. And you'll see a snippet at the top saying we're an affiliate site and it does really well. There's no evidence that a paid for mention does worse than a …”
Smith: Half of newly published internet content is AI-generated
“We just posted an original piece of original research showing that half of the content published on the internet is generated by AI.”
Lieberman says Tenex's top output-based engineer will make $1M next year
“Our clients pay us based on output, and our engineers are paid on output as well. And the reason that is so valuable is we can hire truly the best engineers I've ever worked with, because just as an example, like our best engineer will make a million bucks in …”