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 62 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.”
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”
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.”
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.”
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.”
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.”
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: 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.”
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.”
Ries: Activist Campaigns Repeatedly Attacked Costco Over Governance
“Costco was repeatedly attacked over its decades of life by activist campaigns that have accused them of having bad governance.”
Shane Mac: Convos lets users launch OpenClaw and Hermes agents on mobile
“Convos is an app that allows you to launch OpenClaw and Hermes agents on your phone.”
Mac: Convos provisions email, phone number, and browsing for agents
“It goes and builds everything in the background. So it's provisioning an email address for this, a phone number, web browsing capabilities, everything.”
Shane Mac: Convos is backed by a16z, USV, and Fred Wilson
“Like Andreessen Horowitz, USV, Fred Wilson is on our board and a lot of other, like, really, you know, awesome investors.”
Zapier SDK allows AI agents to make arbitrary API requests
“What the SDK can do, especially when you're using an agent harness, is it can run arbitrary API requests. So whereas the MCP has all the Zapier trigger and action library predefined out of the box, the SDK can say, hey, I have access to Slack's API docs. I can…”
Foster: Zapier integrates with 8,000 different tools
“And then you can have logic that encompasses any of the 8000 different tools we work with.”
Foster: Zapier raised a $1.2M seed round in 2012
“We did a seed round that was 1.2 million in 2012.”
Smith: Chat prompts average 25 words versus 3 to 6 for search
“The average, I think the stat roughly was average of 25 words per prompt and average of three to six for search, something along those lines. So chat is significantly more specific.”
Lieberman: EOS implementers charge up to $15,000 a day for off-sites
“A lot of people hire actual implementers who either run your off-sites, help you with EOS implementation, and they charge a shit ton of money. Like, you know, it could be like 15,000 dollars a day for being at your off-site or with implementation.”
Dan Shipper: OpenAI awarded Every a plaque for processing 10 billion tokens
“Like yesterday I was at Dev Day, OpenAI Dev Day, and I got this like cool plaque that was like, you've processed ten billion tokens through, through OpenAI, which is, it was so cool.”
Tan: OpenAI Was Spun Out of YC Research by Sam Altman
“OpenAI itself was a spin-out from YC research by, ah, Sam Altman.”