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 78 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
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…”
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.”
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.”
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.”
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…”
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.”
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.”
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.”
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.”
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: 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…”
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.”
Huffman: Reddit is crushing Digg and is nearly twice its size
“Well, Reddit is crushing Dig now. I think they're almost twice as large as Dig... In traffic... And uniques per month and page views per month. Or is my understanding, you know, I haven't, I don't have direct access to Reddit numbers anymore, but from what the…”
Ries: Anthropic Founders Left OpenAI Over AI Safety Dispute
“I met the Anthropik team when they first left OpenAI, and they, you know, they left over a dispute With OpenAI over you know, exactly how to pursue the question of AI safety.”
Ries: FTX Implosion Auctioned Anthropic Shares to Unaligned Investors
“Huge chunks of Anthropic stock were sold at auction to any investor who wanted them, including people who are super, super unaligned.”
David: Posties is the first fully open-source social media scheduler
“Posty is the first social media scheduling tool that actually, like, fully open source”
Gil: Minecraft was the first billion-dollar single-person company
“People always say, oh, when's the first billion dollar single person company? That was Minecraft.”
Gil: Patrick Collison's Arc Institute is first major biology institute in decades
“Like Patrick from Stripe started ARC, a biology institute, like one of the first new major biology institutions in decades that's doing really interesting things, right?”
Mohrer: Uber lowered prices every six months as a competitive moat
“Uber was very big about, like, time to cut prices. Like, we were, every six months, we were lowering the price, because that's a moat, you know, makes people, you don't want to get undercut”
Walls: Claude Code fixes errors without requiring developers to use Google
“What's amazing about cloud code is it can see the error and then fix the error and you never have to Google it at all.”
Thummala: MIT report found 95% of AI pilots failed to reach production
“And that's actually why, you know, if you see, like, the MIT report, 95% of things didn't, 95% of, like, AI pilots never made it to production.”
Santos: Women make roughly 70% of Gillette razor purchases
“There's a few products that are like this, like the one I usually tell is like, is Gillette where, you know, usually the woman in the relationship is the one that buys the Gillette. It's like, I think about 70% of the purchases of Gillette are by women. Don't,…”
Warner: Zapier's founder automates employee meeting feedback based on management books
“Wade, the founder, likes the, what is it, the five dysfunctions of an organization, of a team. I forget the name of the book. Anyway, he likes it so much that that, at the end of each internal meeting, Everyone's individual contribution to the meeting gets ana…”
Hastings: QuickBooks Does Not Match Payroll Records with Bank Movements
“From my payroll system, I see that a payroll ran, and then in my bank, I see that the money moved to run that payroll. We match those things together and make sure that they're consistent, and QuickBooks does not do that, but we built that from the ground up i…”
Hastings: QuickBooks is still not fully cloud-based
“QuickBooks is still not even fully cloud, which is very funny.
I think, so a lot of people still use QuickBooks desktop.”
Singla: LLMs now index on-screen text in Instagram and TikTok videos
“So if you see most of Instagram and TikTok they've just become indexable on search, Instagram specifically. So which means LLMs can now actually go through your video and see all the text you have on your video and then prop that video up specifically. So it's…”
Singla: Mercer reached $300M valuation using freelancers to train AI
“If you just recently saw Mercer, which went crazily to, I don't know, two 50, there is two fifty, three hundred million, like two fifty, three hundred million, where they're getting freelancers to Train on AI data sets.”
Ethan Smith: LLMs frequently cite YouTube, TikTok, and LinkedIn, but rarely X
“It generally, so LMs, the classes of domain types of domains that are cited frequently, video and UGC are huge.
Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, I am not seeing X that much.
And then video and YouTube shows up a lot.”
Smith: Search volume is 5x to 10x larger than LLMs
“I think it's five X, at least five X LMs, maybe 10 X, depending on the category. So it's way bigger than AEO.”
Smith: ClearScope will launch the first AI content optimization tool
“I believe by the time this podcast gets published, ClearScope will show the first optimization tool.”
Czech PE group bought Groupon and redesigned its data using Keboola
“Groupon as an original Groupon is now run by Czechs as well. You know, some of our friends and client, and it's our client actually have bought in as a private equity. Yeah. Yeah. I have redesigned the whole coupon and data using Kabula.”
Suster: Upfront Ventures sold Maker Studios to Disney for nearly $1B
“We just agreed to sell Maker Studios to Disney for almost a billion dollars.”
Huffman: Paul Graham asked Reddit to build Hacker News first
“Paul, Paul had approached us before building Hacker News and said, Hey, can you guys make me my own Reddit where people can only upvote and I can have like supreme control over the content? And then we were like, no, that's not, You know, that's not really on …”
Huffman: All travel search sites access the same flight data
“All the travel sites have access to the same data, effectively, including us.”
Chesky: Airbnb was the first to combine host and space photos
“On couch surfing, you saw the photo of the person. On Craigslist, you saw the photo of the place, but on no website did you see both, like, the person and their place. I think that was one really important ingredient that made it really compelling.”
Gebbia: Airbnb sold out of Obama O's cereal at $40 per box
“So we did a limited production run to make it a collectible item, and we actually sold these through the website. It just so happens that We ended up selling out of the Obama hose. Each box sold for 40 dollars.”
Godin: Untrained worker wages remained completely flat from 1960 to 2009
“In my presentation last week, I showed a chart. Hourly wage adjusted for inflation from 1960 to present. For untrained workers, you know, burger flippers. 1960, they made 15 dollars an hour. Now, they make 15 dollars an hour. Zero change in 49 years.”