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 230 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 3 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
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…”
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.”
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: 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.”
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.”
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.”
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?”
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.”
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: 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.”
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: 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.”
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.”
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.”
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: 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…”
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: 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.”
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.”
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.”
Cera: Top-earning business on Pulsia generates around $50 MRR
“So I mean the company with the highest revenue is like around 50 dollars MR.”
Warner: Zapier is actively building marketing motions targeting AI agents
“I just talked with Wade, the founder of Zapier, he's got people in his company now who are mark, who are building marketing motions to sell to agents, and it's phenomenal, and it's going well”
Gil: About 60% of New Jersey childhood ADHD diagnoses lack testing
“So in the state of New Jersey, it's something like 60% of ADHD diagnoses in kids actually have never the kids have never taken any form of test. It's just somebody deciding that they have it.”
Josh Mohrer operates Wave AI entirely as a solo team
“You're talking to the whole team. There have been some people that have come in and out over the course of the now three years to help with some higher end engineering work, some of the marketing stuff, but by and large, I've done all the engineering. I do all…”
Walls: Sam Altman said polite user prompts cost billions
“I think that Sam Altman one time said that even if you add a nice little thing at the end, it costs them all this. They're spending billions just because people are being nice.”
Matze: Zero Published Research On Fine-Tuning LLMs For Voice Sales
“There's literally no research out there on this topic. Zero.”
Apfelbaum: $3.80 ad CAC converts into $3,600-per-year Evai SaaS subscriptions
“We ran an ad asking people if they want the 99 hacks, And that ad cost me three dollars and 80 cents per person, and a large percentage of the people buy the hacks and then buy Evie AI Pro, which is 3600 dollars a year.”
Apfelbaum: AI lets agency handle 100 clients without hiring new staff
“When I started Ajax Union, I used to hire one new employee for every 10 small businesses I would take on. That was a very, very expensive thing. Very expensive thing. Now I could take on a hundred customers, and I don't have to hire anybody. I could take on a …”
Santos: A subscription-only checkout converted better than offering one-off purchases
“Do an A-B test, you know, have a funnel with subscription only and the funnel where you give both choices and then see what the conversion does. And lo and behold, the one with subscription actually increased conversion because it reduced that because again, y…”
Hastings: QuickBooks Lacks Automated Checks and Requires Manual Data Verification
“And the way QuickBooks is set up is it just makes it really easy for you to make those mistakes, because it doesn't have all these checks built in. It's really just sort of a blank slate you can write into, and the only way to verify that the data is correct i…”
Hastings: Bench failure left customers without access to critical financial data
“You think of the companies like Bench going out of business and people have no access to their history of the most critical business data.”
Singla: Web traffic is declining for 80% of websites globally
“80% of the websites in the world, traffic's been going down.”
Singla: LinkedIn accounts for roughly 12% of all ChatGPT citations
“Just as an experiment, you'll see, LinkedIn gets cited almost on 12% of ChatGPT citations.”
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.”
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: 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: 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…”
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…”