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 22 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
Puri: YC's hit rate increased despite larger batch sizes
“A lot of people now think that they're, you know, maybe they've sort of lost their touch, or the batch size are too big, or the valuation is too high, and actually their hit rate has gone up, even as the batch size has gone up.”
Petersen: YC partners must embrace delusion because most founders fail
“The job of being a YC partner or leader of YC is just super hard. Just like a lot, most of those people are going to fail. So you have to kind of delude, delude yourself. If you really want to say only focus on what could happen, well, it's probably not what's…”
Shaan Puri: Y Combinator Is Probably the Most Successful Tech Startup
“Paul Graham, who created YC, which is, I think probably the most successful tech startup actually, because it created sure all these other tech startups and like I created Dropbox and it created Airbnb. They probably wouldn't like to say created, but like they…”
Sam Parr: Hacker News could be a $100M business without employees
“But if you were just like a normal guy and you had a valued off revenues, I think it would be worth 50 to a hundred million dollars. I bet you it could make eight million dollars a year in revenue. With no employees. And I bet you it's been capable of doing th…”
Mah: Most startups in my Y Combinator batch went bankrupt
“If we look back today, most of the companies from that batch did not make it. Most of them went BK and then people took normal jobs or started new companies and then eventually found success.”
Virgin committed to buying 10 Boom planes the night before YC Demo
“In that extra 24 hours, he ends up getting an email from Virgin the night before Demo Day that says, you're allowed to announce, we'll take the first 10 planes, we've got options on them, and through Virgin Galactic, we'll even help you build it.”
Boom Supersonic holds the record with $5B in YC Demo Day LOIs
“Still to this day, nobody's walked into YC Demo Day with five billion dollars worth of letters, letter of intent.”
Puri: Y Combinator returned 320x in its first decade
“The first 10 years of YC, they basically turned like something like twelve million dollars Into, like, ten billion dollars of value for them, from themselves, because they were writing super small checks early on and getting basically, like, was seven percent?…”
Puri: Startups only succeed when founders manually hand-crank initial momentum
“Startups happen because the founder makes them happen. They take off because the founder makes them take off. And he goes, it's like an engine, right? You can't force something that's never going to work to work. What you can do is if something has the potenti…”
Puri: YC's Biggest Wins Came From Founders Scratching Their Own Itches
“The biggest Successes out of YC have typically been that, right? The Airbnb guys renting out their own apartment to make hay, or Brian Armstrong doing Coinbase because he lived in Argentina and dealt with the currency issues and was interested in Bitcoin. Thes…”
Fried: Y Combinator Only Invited Me to Startup School Once
“I was only invited once cause I was pretty anti raising money.”
Puri: Y Combinator's core thesis was teaching engineers business, not backing MBAs
“Like YC did the same thing. He's like, it's going to be easier for me to take badass engineers and teach them the basics of fundraising and hiring and firing than to take an MBA who knows everything about fundraising and hiring firing, but can't build shit. An…”
Puri: iCracked was one of the few non-technical teams accepted into YC
“They had booted up 28 campuses in 30 days, which I love. They get into YC. They're one of the only non-technical teams to even get into YC.”
Puri: A 'Yelp for VCs' could solve chicken-and-egg data problems via brute-force outreach
“I think the Startup community is so insulated that you could actually overcome the chicken and egg problem through brute force. Cause there's not that many investors and you could find, you can quickly see who's worked with them just by looking at their portfo…”
Ali: If I were MrBeast, I would build Y Combinator for creators
“I would start a Y Combinator for creators and maximize the basically find the next Kim Kardashian, the next Mr. Beast, and support them, and own a piece of them, and be a kingmaker where I'm making other kings.”
Puri: Non-pure software startups scale slowly, opening room for regional clones
“Because a lot of these companies that, that work when they're not purely software based, they're going to scale slowly. They're not going to expand everywhere overnight.”
Foster: Zapier Has Raised Only Around $1M in Primary Capital
“So we did go through YC and we raised about a million and change, but that's all the primary capital we've ever taken.”
Puri: Y Combinator asks how applicants gamed real-world systems
“One of the seven questions is, tell us about a real world system that you've hacked for your benefit, right? Not, not literally hacked, but like any real, any system in the real world that you have sort of gamed in order to do it, because that's a high predict…”
Puri: Stripe founders manually onboarded their first 100 to 200 customers
“As soon as somebody showed any sign of interest, they would say, awesome. Do you have your laptop on you? I can just set you up right now. I'll do it for you. And they would literally brute force get customers on board. The person would open up their laptop an…”
Puri: Y Combinator portfolio companies have created almost $500B in value
“YC, the greatest startup accelerator in the world, bar none, has the greatest track record, created almost half a trillion dollars of value.”
Srinivasan: Initial goal is building a global community of technological progressives
“The way I look at it is the V one goal is to build a community, at least with seven to eight nine, then I'll talk about the V two is to build a community of technological progressives who are,
Like, I mean, sort of like YC's founders, but not just tech founder…”