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
Smith: The llms.txt protocol does not work
“So the intention of LMS.txt is to get more traffic and to send information about, it's not to block, it's to send more information to the LMS so that you get more traffic, but it doesn't work.”
Lieberman: Engineers are seeing greater AI leverage than any other knowledge workers
“And one of the things I've realized working around engineers now is engineers are living in the future. Like they are seeing the greatest leverage of AI relative to all areas of knowledge work.”
Hazarkhani: Software engineering demand is infinite and increases as price drops
“One of the core beliefs is that the demand for software engineering is infinite. It's completely, as price will go down, the demand will increase”
Lieberman: Service businesses will shift away from hourly billing starting in engineering
“We don't charge hourly. Like, we have a fundamental belief that service businesses are going to move away from hourly work, and we think it's starting with engineering.”
Hazarkhani: AI engineers must act as architects delegating to agents
“An AI engineer needs to think like an architect. They have to think as if they're delegating all of their work to other engineers, and when they're delegating their work, how do they do that, right? And not only are they delegating their work to engineers, the…”
Hazarkhani: Voice AI is overblown and impractical in offices
“Frankly, I think that the voice thing's overblown. I think that when you work in an office, it's like unrealistic to talk out loud. I think that the voice thing is like useful if you're an executive driving your Tesla to and from work and you want to speak to …”
Lieberman: Modern AI dev shops use intelligence arbitrage, not labor arbitrage
“It's basically if traditional dev orgs or dev shops are labor arbitrage, we're intelligence arbitraging.”
Hazarkhani says frontier developers consider Cursor outdated compared to CLI tools
“Our engineers would call you a boomer for using cursor. Like, that is like, so yesterday. And so the tools that are, like, the big ones right now are Codex CLI and Claude Code CLI.”
Hazarkhani: Failing to leverage near-free AI agents is a skill issue
“To that I say, basically, if you have a free or near free junior employee and you can't, and you have unlimited versions of this, you could spin up infinite numbers of these near free junior employees. If you can't find a way to generate leverage from that, th…”
Shipper: Claude Code represents the future of programming by eliminating code editors
“Over the summer, I started using cloud code and I was like, wow, this is the future of programming. And they did something really special here, which is they just eliminated the text editor. Like you don't need that. You don't need the code editor. You just ne…”
Shipper: Current AI writing tools fail to interview users first
“And I think no AI tool really is doing that because they're very focused on just give me an answer right now.”
Dan Shipper: Big opportunity will come from unbundling ChatGPT into purpose-built apps
“And I think there's something very similar happening and going to happen with AI is people have to use ChatGPT and like realize that this new sort of workflow is possible. And then there will be a big opportunity to unbundle those workflows into purpose-built …”
Shipper: Software is now content because building apps has become so cheap
“I think that software is now content. It's like so cheap to make that it's sort of like building an app is sort of like writing an essay or tweeting.”
Patel: HubSpot CMO says 13% of signups come from LLMs
“When I was speaking at Inbound, the HubSpot event, I was with Kip. And Kip is the CMO of HubSpot. He ended up talking about how roughly 13% of their signups come from these LLM platforms, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, et cetera.”
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: Scaling laws revealed the path to AGI for OpenAI's leaders
“If you were Greg Brockman or Dario Amadei, ah, at that moment, you started, you know, internally you were talking about the scaling laws, and that the loss function was going down as log linear to the amount of, ah, data and compute you were putting in, and th…”
Tan: Casetext founder Jake Heller pioneered early prompt engineering workflows
“I think of Jake a little bit like the first man on the moon.”
Tan: Founding a startup accelerates your career by 5 to 10 years
“It's better for people to, ah, become founders, learn how to create things for other people, and then either, you know, you manage to get product market fit, and you figure out a moat so that you can be, you know, as big a company as possible. Or even if you d…”
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…”
Tan: Asking AI to iteratively update its own prompt compounds output quality
“Get the script to where I felt really good about it, and then at the last point, I would say, given what we did in this session to improve the prompt, output the next version of the prompt. And so now I've done this about 20 or 30 times, and so now I have a th…”
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.”
Shim: Read.ai adds 50,000 accounts daily as fastest-growing AI note taker
“Yeah, so it's in the millions, and then on a daily basis, we get about a 50,000 new accounts created every single day, so that's a run rate of a million plus on a monthly basis, twelve million annually, so we are the fastest growing meeting note taker in the w…”
Shim: Read.ai hits 80% 30-day retention for active meeting users
“Most recently in this last month, if you use our product in a meeting, and you get the reports we see that the retention is 80% after 30 days”
Shim: Horizontal AI note takers will win over vertical SaaS tools
“There's one meeting note taker to rule them all in the sense of... A hundred percent. Cause it's too niche. You're not going to go in and say, oh, I've got a sales call. I'm going to invite this one. I've got a call with my doctor. I'm going to do this one. I'…”
Howard: Modern AI removes the 10x earning advantage of software coders
“Until 2023, Being really good at coding, whether that was JavaScript, Python, PHP, or anything else, meant you had essentially 10 X or more the earning potential and the ability to build quality solutions than everybody else in the world. And that has been the…”
Rob Howard: AI writing critics miss that most business writing is utilitarian
“People often will complain and criticize about AI writing, but I think what those criticisms miss is that a lot of the writing that needs to get done for businesses to move forward is boring. And it doesn't really matter if it's like poetry or not. Like it jus…”
Dolezal: Data-informed frontline upselling can double a retail business's profit margin
“And this is so, so, so huge impact, you know, because like you can literally double the profit margin just by these simple things.”
Hackathons should avoid cash prizes to deter mercenary hunters
“Our, also our guiding principle was we're not going to do prizes. Because what happens with hackathons when you do prizes, you have a professional hackathon hunters and they go and just swoop in, you know, they take the prize there and they go off.”
Dolezal: Solo founder built $10M ARR vibe-coding business in past year
“I have literally next to me, I, like, I have two friends who built businesses over last year.
One of them is now ten million ARR.
Ten million.
One person.
Vibe coding app, and the second one is, is, is doing three million, you know, and just like, time is now,…”
Herold: Ivy League student founders should accept 2.8 GPAs, not drop out
“If you're at Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, and Yale, you stay in school, you finish, but I want you to not go after a four point O be okay with getting a 2.8 for the first time in your life.”
Herold: Startup title inflation gives C-level titles to unqualified young employees
“20 years ago to get a C level title, you had to be a major player at a major company. And about 10 years ago, we started giving away titles as well as equity, as well as compensation to Gen Y who are asking for big titles. And we've had title creep in a big wa…”
Herold: 'Hire for attitude, train for skill' yields only modest growth
“If you hire for attitude and train for skill, you get seven percent growth, but if you hire for attitude and proven skill set, That's where you get the incremental growth. A true a player has done the job before.”
Herold: A true power COO works to make the CEO iconic
“The true power COO wants to make the CEO iconic.”
Herold: 40-person entrepreneurial startups suffer from C-suite title creep
“Nowadays we've had title creep where like to have a CMO or a CRO or a CT, like God, those were titles reserved for the fortune 100 or the fortune 500. We've had a lot of title creep down into these entrepreneurial companies where you've got 40 employees and yo…”
Yang: Emerging markets skip websites and go straight to messenger bots
“There are some countries where Telegram is the number one communication channel, and people need a way to be represented there, so bots come into that space and they start to actually take on the role of websites, because people are not building websites, they…”
Existing customers are the best source for early startup hires
“The best place to start is in your customers, because you have a lot of people in your customer list who understand they're very early in their journey, and it would probably be a smart idea to go work for a company for a year, and to, because you're going to …”
Consulting.com spends $30,000 per day on Facebook advertising
“Some time, most of the time, 30 grand a day.”
Traffic from Tai Lopez generated $4M to $6M in revenue
“Thai alone I don't want to give specific numbers just because it's private for him, but it's in between In between four and six million just from Ty's traffic.”
Harbinger: Technical knowledge is a commodity compared to high-value networks
“Knowledge is essentially a commodity, even at the highest levels. I mean, some of it's esoteric, some of it's harder to gain than others, and some of it's gained through experience. But at the end of the day, there's always going to be a larger pool of those p…”
Harbinger: Unwritten social rules allow interrupting someone mid-sentence to introduce yourself
“We have this sort of weird societal unwritten rule that introductions kind of always trump anything else that's going on in a conversation, because If you don't introduce yourself, it's weird, and if you don't know who you're talking to, it's also weird. So yo…”
Harbinger: 99% of the pickup artist industry is cynical internet marketing
“Once you meet those guys in real life and you find out that 99% of what they do is internet marketing and they don't really care about helping people, it pisses you off.”
Harbinger: Bad Podcasting Harms Authors Rather Than Helping Their Book Sales
“If you're an author and you start a podcast and you freaking suck at it, like a lot of them do, all the editing in the world is not going to make you more interesting, unfortunately, and there's a lot of authors that are not that interesting other than when th…”
Harbinger: Tim Ferriss works at least 40 hours a week
“The guy who wrote the four hour work week works at least 40 hours a week, I would say.”
Harbinger: Those claiming abundant passive income are coasting, broke, or lying
“People who tell you they're doing that are either not making that much money, they've made money, then they're costing on it, or they're full of crap, and usually it's some mix of those three things.”
Harbinger: Obtaining North Korean visas for Americans is easy and completely legal
“It's easy for me to get an American, a visa to North Korea. It's a snap. It's a snap, and it's completely legal.”
Godin: Launching platforms solely to interview famous guests is 'bogus'
“The new guest blogging is Start something online and then try to interview, ah, Andrew or Seth or Tim because then you'll get some of their, ah, attention. That's bogus. I mean, what we need are people who have something to say on their own as opposed to peopl…”
Ferriss: Improving physical performance is the best way to improve cognitive performance
“The best way to improve cognitive performance is to improve physical performance, because of course the brain is an organ like any other.”
Altucher: Radical Openness and Honesty Drive Entrepreneurial Success
“So too often when you're an entrepreneur, you're always thinking, well, what do I need to look like? Or what do I need to, what mask or disguise do I need to wear to sell this client or this investor? And being open is often the key to success. Being honest, b…”