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 15 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
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.”
Chesky: Early Startups Should Avoid All-or-Nothing 'Super Bowl' Launches
“And, you know, the kind of thing we tell people whenever we're giving advice is don't go for the Super Bowl launch. Don't go for one single thing. You don't have to worry about exclusive story.”
Tan: Founders Worry Prematurely About Market Size Ceilings
“I think a lot of founders are worried about that early, but my sense is maybe it's premature worry because embedded in that is also the case text pivot that, you know, they got users and an understanding and a useful corpus of data All of which turned into a t…”
Tan: YC board abandoned conglomerate model to return to focused accelerator
“When I came back, like, we explicitly decided as a board and as, like, the sort of steering body of what YC was supposed to be, we said, you know what, like, Alphabet is great, but we're gonna go back to being Google.”
Tan: 18-to-22-year-old founders at YC are up over 100% year-over-year
“Well, even at YC, like, we are seeing the rate of 18 to twenty-two-year-olds at YC is up by more than a hundred percent year on year. The rate of twenty-two-year-olds to twenty-five-year-olds is up about 20%. And then the rate of 25 to thirty-year-olds is actu…”
Chesky: Paul Graham doubted Airbnb's idea but praised founders' resourcefulness
“It, the long story short is we ended up getting in Y Combinator, and I remember on the interview, he brought the cereal, and, you know, Paul Graham said, I remember him saying, like, he wasn't entirely sure of the idea. He said, well, it sounds different, but …”
Chesky: Making 100 people love a product is the hardest startup hurdle
“And the other idea, and this is actually something that Paul Buckeye is one of the speakers at Wycombe as well, he said,
He said, make something that a hundred people love.
And it may take a year, it may take two years for a hundred people to love it, but that…”
Huffman: Paul Graham is an exceptional product thinker lacking social filters
“Paul is, I think he's an exceptionally good product guy. He has a really good eye for what's useful and what isn't. And he's also completely stateless and has no social filter. So it helps that you can go to this guy who will just be like, this is stupid. And …”
Huffman: Startups get tons of press just for joining Y Combinator
“Whether or not you build a good product, you're going to get a ton of press just being a part of Y Combinator.”
Chesky: Founders with existing products get the most value from YC
“My advice is for people to have already kind of figured out, like, so they already have something going. They've already kind of struggled through an idea and figured it out. I think those are the people that are at the best advantage. And then Paul Graham can…”
Airbnb became profitable during its winter 2009 Y Combinator batch
“All of a sudden, we actually became profitable over the course of Y Combinator. You know, our, the revenue we're making was then funding our operations.”
Tan: Cruise co-founder Daniel Kan is in current Y Combinator batch
“Daniel Kahn, for instance, who created, co, co-founder of Cruise Automation, he's in the batch, and I'm pretty excited about it”
Tan: Y Combinator has 15 equal investing partners selecting startups
“We have 15 equal partners on the investing side who like are in, we basically are in there trying to fish.”
Livingston remains fully engaged at Y Combinator as Sam Altman assumes leadership
“Ah, a lot of people ask me that, even though my name was not in the announcement as taking a step back. But no, I'm just as engaged as I've always been, and in fact, ah, with Sam on board doing a lot of the administrative things that I Used to do. I'm excited …”
Livingston: Founders must pivot if users do not return
“I think so. You don't, you wouldn't believe how married founders get to their idea, and it's easy to go into denial on, you know, whether people actually use it, cause like that's the proof, right? If no one is, is coming back to your site, then there's someth…”