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
Hazarkhani says manual typing in an IDE is an outdated practice
“No one on our team actually types letters into an IDE. If I walk through a WeWork and I see someone typing letters in an IDE, they're working in like, 1990, right?”
Shipper: Driving is easier to automate than knowledge work because roads are static
“The difference is that the roads, even though things are complex and dynamic and all that kind of stuff on the road, the roads are the same. Like that's the same roads. You're getting from point A to point B and the way that that works, like you, there's a zil…”
Patel: All our developers use Cursor; non-adopters were let go
“Everyone on our, in our corporation uses cursor. The people who refuse to use cursor and didn't adapt are no longer there.”
Tan: Anthropic's Claude Code team uses AI to write 95% of codebase
“The Claude Code team apparently writes, 95% of their code is written by Claude, which means very directly that each engineer working on Claude Code themselves is doing the work of 20 people.”
Tan: ZIRP-era tech workers are clinging to jobs and denying AI
“A lot of those people started their careers actually during Zerp, so they're actually sort of, you know, hanging on for dear life at both startups and Fang, and those are also, like, funny enough, some of the people who are the biggest AI deniers. Like, they j…”
Tan: ChatGPT is the most astonishing consumer product launch in history
“ChatGPT itself is actually the best and most astonishing consumer launch of any product in the history of products actually.”
Shim: Read.ai tracks head orientation for engagement without facial recognition
“We look at head orientation, so we don't look at your face, we don't do any facial recognition, but we go and we say, if you're looking at the camera straight ahead, and you're talking, your camera's there, and then if you look over this way, and you go to a f…”
Shim: Sales reps accept AI coaching feedback with far less defensiveness
“And they're not defensive because it's the AI telling you. It's not your manager telling you where you're like, okay, is this going to bet my job? This is the AI saying like, make a left turn or right turn. And you're like, okay, totally makes sense. I'm not e…”
Shim: Microsoft Copilot launch drove 15x surge in Teams usage on Read.ai
“We've seen more than a 15 X increase in Microsoft team meetings that we've measured since Microsoft Copilot launched for teams meetings.”
Shim: 1% to 2% of Colombia's entire population uses Read.ai daily
“We have about one to two percent of Columbia's population using read on a daily basis.”
Shim: Detecting AI-generated content will be almost impossible in 1-2 years
“I do believe in about the next year or two, it is going to be almost impossible to figure out, is this AI generated or not?”
Shim: AI out-of-office gap-filling assistants will arrive within 6-12 months
“That I think is going to happen really quickly. Like I'd say the next six to 12 months.”
Dolezal: GymBeam cut support team from 50 to 3 using Keboola and LLMs
“What they did, they had a 50, 50, 50 people team. With the support user support, like content support, and their biggest problem, like people give them reviews in 16 languages everywhere, right? One of their biggest issues was that people would, you know, actu…”
Herold: Hiring for attitude over experience caps company growth at 10 percent
“The days of hiring people for attitude and training for skill, the days of hiring the kind of master all trades or jack of all trades, master of none that gets you seven to 10% growth, but it doesn't get you the hyper growth.”
Herold: Zip2 seed investors deemed Elon Musk 'unbackable' and preferred Kimbal
“And two years later, I was a reference in Elon and their very first round of funding for zip too. They had one employee and I had to explain why to back Kimble must because no one wanted to back Elon cause he was unbackable. He dropped out of aeronautical engi…”
Herold: True entrepreneurs are born with necessary traits, not made
“Entrepreneurs have to be born with the entrepreneurial traits, and then they can be nurtured. But I don't think you can take a person and make them an entrepreneur. You're either entrepreneurial or you're not. And some of that is the craziness. It is the ADD, …”
Prediction: Messenger will replace email and websites within seven years
“Like, the potential of bots and of messenger is still by far 90%, 95% of it is untapped. We think that messenger is gonna become the central hub of communication between businesses and customers, and in a few years, three, five, seven years, it's gonna capture…”
Harbinger asks Apple which guests secure iTunes homepage placement
“I call Apple and I go, hey, who would you like to see me interview? I've got these ideas and who can you, who would you put on the front page of iTunes? And they give me a list out of that list. And then I call those people's PR or have my, I have my people ca…”
Harbinger: North Korea is safe from crime for tourists, but not politically safe
“It's a very safe place for tourists because all the criminals are dead. They're breaking rocks and gulags somewhere. It's not safe politically”
Rob Walling: Drip will never become a billion-dollar business
“So yes, drip, I do want to get it bigger, but drip will never be a billion dollar business. It's not, it's just not designed to do that.”
Allis: Founders should take secondary liquidity to think long term
“I think the value as an entrepreneur of having a million dollars in your bank account, for example, is that it does allow you to think longer term. And to think bigger. And so I do encourage other entrepreneurs if they have the opportunity to take some chips o…”
Huffman: Digg failed by neglecting its community and chasing Twitter
“I think Digg, Digg seems to be catering to the wrong crowd. Either they're, ah, acquiescing to investor pressure or, you know, just trying to change their product too much. Maybe they're trying to compete with Twitter too hard. But what they're not focusing on…”
Huffman: Site speed was Reddit's only reliable traffic driver
“The only consistent thing we could do to drive traffic was make Reddit faster. Because sometimes we'd add a lot of features and traffic would go down. Sometimes we'd stagnate for a month or two and traffic would go up. And we're always just like, who knows, le…”
Huffman: Reddit might not have survived the 2008 recession independently
“Yeah, I, you know, I wish I still owned Reddit now, and had owned it for the last four or five years, but it would have, for everything to have gone right, for us to have the stomach to survive that economy, I mean, who knows, like, Kanye Nast's umbrella helpe…”
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.”
Ries: Anthropic's Long-Term Benefit Trust appoints corporate board directors
“Their company is governed by something called the long-term benefit trust, which is an outside set of trustees that are not like a vague advisory board or like remember the trust And safety counsel that that Facebook famously had and The totally ignored. The L…”
Ries: Every Transformer Paper Coauthor Left Google to Commercialize Elsewhere
“And if you look at the coauthors of that paper has a ton of coauthors, not a single one commercialized the transformer at Google. They all, every single one had to leave and do it elsewhere.”
Ries: Standard Corporate Best Practices Are a Value-Destroying Mess
“And I basically think today's best practices are a value destroying mess.”
Ries: 19th-century corporate charters were voided if companies only pursued shareholder wealth
“And in fact, in the 19th century, to convert a company from a mission of doing any specific thing to just, I'm just going to enrich my shareholders, would have been seen as a crime. And your corporate charter would be voided.”
Eric Ries: Generating code with AI causes skill atrophy and 'dark flow'
“When you're using cloud code to create artifacts, you are actually causing skill atrophy in yourself. You have gone from the flow state of building stuff into what we call dark flow, which is the state you get into when you're using a slot machine.”
Ries: Training AI models on uncompensated human writings is atrocious
“Speaking of someone who's in the training data without any of us being compensated, by the way, which I think is atrocious.”
Cera: Engineering agents cannot vibe-code complex products without modularity
“If you let an engineering agent just vibe code its way into building something complex, it's gonna be hard at one point for it to navigate the code base”
Cera: Polsia is intentionally named 'AI SLOP' spelled backwards
“Well, it's a SLOP backwards, and the whole concept, when I explained it to investors, when I was raising the precede, is like, we're aiming at doing the opposite of SLOP. We're trying to, like, create tools that outputs Beauty that output great things that emp…”
Cera: Polsia charged $1 per task while compute cost $30-$50
“And so, so I would pay, I would, you know, I would charge the customer a dollar a task or something, and then it would cost me 30 dollars, 50 dollars per task.”
Cera: OpenAI is not doing anything with OpenClaw after hiring its creator
“It was paranoia that actually was unfounded because he sold to OpenAI, and, like, they're not really doing anything with it.”
Cera: Polsia shut down cross-agent memory after users weaponized shared skills
“So right now, first of all, we killed all memory files. We were like, you know what? Let's clean up memory because it's a good idea, but like it's got weaponized. So we killed the memory.”
Cheney: Replit could one-shot a full application architecture proposal today
“The very first thing, at least back then today, if I gave it to rep, what I think it could actually one shot it, but back then this was, you know, probably about 18 months ago, maybe even a little bit longer than that.”
Cheney: Replit has handled every software development task thrown at it
“I feel like it's a little bit more accessible to developers, and that's why I just built my processes on top of Replit, and so I'm just so dang good with Replit. I've never run into something that Replit couldn't do, and I've never felt the need to go try othe…”
Eliason: AI agent Felix generated nearly $200K within two months
“And so at this scale where Felix has built, you know, a business that's done almost 200 grand in two months, like now it's starting to make sense to split out some of his capabilities to other agents, but we take a very, very minimal approach to it.”
David: Adopting tech hypes early is a fast way to acquire users
“Every time some hype coming on, I was like, I'm the first one to put it. Might be a hype, might be not. People are going to use it, but this is like a very easy way to attract people in.”
David: Automation reduces SaaS churn because manual users get discouraged
“Mostly because I knew it will decrease my churn. Because when people need to post manually, if they get discouraged, if they don't post, they'll cancel the subscription. But when people are posting with automation, that's a whole different story.”
David: Startups building CLIs for AI agents will win big
“So I, this is, I think, the future, how much it's weird, the futures of all this open Claw and agents and stuff is the CLI. People that are going to build startups with a CLI, Are going to win big.”
Wade Foster: Marketing to AI purchasing agents requires entirely new skills
“The agent is actually choosing what products to buy on behalf of a human. And so you're no longer advertising to the human. You are trying to get the agent to say, pick me. And that is often a very different skill set than marketing to a human.”
Wade Foster: Companies are building plain-text webpages exclusively for AI agents
“Agents care a ton about, like, clean documentation, like, fast webpages, so, you know, it's like, the thing I'm seeing a lot of folks do is serve up a separate version of their webpage that is meant just for the agent, and so that content is, like, plain text.”
Wade Foster: AI agent skills will become cheap commodities like WordPress themes
“I could see skills kind of having, like, a business model like that, where it's like, you could buy, you know, buy one for five bucks, 10 bucks, there would be a bunch of free skills out there. You know, it's, it feels kind of like a very commodity thing at a …”
Cera: Pulsia autonomously creates Sora video ads and manages Meta campaigns
“In the first iteration of, like, the ads feature that I built about two weeks ago, it's a pretty recent feature the AI is autonomously running ads, so, like, the crazy thing is that as a user, you click on a button called Run Ads, there's a single button, you …”