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 2,409 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 14 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
Al-Naji: DeSo raised 5,000 BTC via 44,000 automated transactions before incorporating
“You know, that 5000 Bitcoin I mentioned all that money actually came in before there was any corporate entity set up to do anything. And so essentially the way it worked was the blockchain was running, and if you sent Bitcoin to this treasury wallet the blockc…”
Helwani: ESPN offered me a contract extension and I turned it down
“They even offered me a new contract, unlike what other people are trying to say about me being fired. I was never fired. They offered me a contract and I turned it down.”
Parr: 90% of chiropractic claims are nonsense and school acceptance is 100%
“Now, some chiropractor can help very little, like, but 90%, like, 90% of what chiropractors, what we think they do, you can't adjust your spine and, like, your headache stop. Like, that's just not how your body works. But it's nonsense, right? Also, the accept…”
Puri: Uniswap's market cap exceeds three major global banks combined
“It is it's bigger than Deutsche Bank, Credit Suisse and State Street all combined.”
Puri: Uniswap reached Coinbase-level scale on only $11M in funding
“So I think they've only raised eleven million dollars to date, and they've reached basically the same scale as Coinbase on eleven million dollars.”
Puri: Top-tier seed VC career nets $150M to $200M
“So what they said was they go, yeah, it should be much more than that, but it's hard to say because a lot of it's still illiquid. They go they go, it should look more like a 150 to 200.”
Parr: Happiness Increases With Income Up to $500K-$700K Per Year
“What this study found is, like, Up until like 506 107 100,000 dollars a year. It was definitely still going, going up.”
Shah has zero direct reports at 4,000-employee HubSpot
“We have Over 4000 people at HubSpot. I have zero direct reports. I've never had direct reports in the 15 years”
Rydhan: Neurosity's brain-computer interface triggers desktop actions from thoughts
“This device it can for sure detect when I'm focused, it can detect when I'm calm and different points, and I've programmed it to basically, like, when I have it connected to my computer, I can move my desktop around or, you know, I basically wanted to, like, s…”
UFC Fighters Receive 20% of Revenue Versus 50% in NFL
“Fighters only get 20% of revenue. Every other major sport, NFL, NBA, it's a close to a fifty-fifty. I think it is fifty-fifty split.”
Balaji: Tech is roughly 30 points more diverse than media outlets
“And I put up a prize and he actually went and did this analysis and it shows that actually tech is like 30 points more diverse than the media outlets that constantly give tech shit about this.”
Sanchez: No one on the Forbes 100 got rich just investing in stocks
“If you look at the Forbes, 100 list, there is not one person on there who made their money from just investing in the stock market.”
Wilkinson: First-time founders are raising at $40M valuations with just ideas
“I've seen companies of with a founder, who's a first time founder, With an idea and they're raising it a forty million dollar pre valuation, right?”
Wilkinson: How billionaire-backed Asana crushed his bootstrapped startup Flow
“The story was basically, we started productivity software called Flow. I decided to bootstrap it like Basecamp. And we had a big competitor, Asana. And Asana was run by a billionaire, the co-founder of Facebook. He raised a shitload of money. And originally I …”
Shaan Puri: Foreign spies stole Google machine learning models on USB sticks
“Of course there are people working for China, for Russia, for different countries as foreign agents, and there's actually been like cases of this where guys basically took the, you know, like The machine learning model out on a USB stick out of Google and like…”
BitClout pre-allocated $55,000 to Shaan Puri's unclaimed profile
“And so when I went to the website without ever having used the damn thing, my account had 55,000 dollars sitting in it.”
Shaan Puri: BitClout supports deposits and purchases but lacks withdrawals
“You could transfer money in and you could buy coins, but there's no withdrawals right now. So I can go in and verify. I could claim my 50,000 dollars. What I can't do is put that in my bank account. That's a feature that conveniently is not available and not b…”
Saylor: Corporate cost of capital surged to 25% after March 2020
“The treasury problem is that subsequent to March, 20 20, the cost of capital exploded from eight percent to 25%. And you can see that in the performance of the S&P 500 index, which went from about eight percent a year for a decade to more than 25% in that next…”
Hawk says declining Activision's $500,000 royalty buyout led to his first million
“Right before the release, they called me and said, we want to offer you a buyout of future royalties. I said, what does that mean? They said, we want to offer you half a million dollars, and then you won't get royalties going forward. At that time in my life, …”
Yeung: IM8 doubled marketing spend to $33M while CAC decreased
“If you look at what happened in Q two versus Q one, our CAC was three or five, right? Our average order value is about 230 dollars, right? So and we doubled our marketing spend in Q two, right? We doubled it from about 17 to thirty three million dollars in a q…”
Yeung: Prenetics netted over $100 million from COVID-19 testing
“Yeah, we made over a hundred million dollars net.”
Puri: Dolly Parton's Cash Incentive Dropped High School Dropout Rate to 6%
“She was like, if you both graduate, you both get the money, but if you don't both graduate, you don't get the money. That's awesome. And the dropout rate dropped from 35% of kids not graduating to like six percent.”
Liemandt: Trilogy Was the First AI Product to Sell $1 Billion
“And then we built Trilogy and our claim to fame actually in the nineties, it was the first AI product to sell a billion dollars.”
Liemandt: Trilogy Won 70% of College Recruiting Battles Against Microsoft
“Microsoft would win 90% of college graduates back then. And we against them won 70%.”
Liemandt: Trilogy ran an exchange program with the Navy SEALs
“We actually trilogy university, you know, there's Harvard business, you know, case studies on it and you can read about it, but we literally had a swap program with the Navy seals. Literally the Navy seals are like, okay, you know, we're going to send a couple…”
Alpha high schooler will publish as lead researcher in Nature journal
“We have a student who's going to be published in nature. She will be the first school student as a lead researcher published in nature.”
Puri: Golf Courses Use 100x More Water Than Data Centers
“Golf courses use a hundred times more water than data centers, but nobody's out here like protesting a golf course.”
Smith: Half of for-profit US assisted living facilities generate 20%+ returns
“There are 31,000 assisted living facilities in the United States. Four out of every five are run as for profits and half of all the operators in the industry are clearing annual returns of 20% or more.”
1,300 cloud cyber platforms launched in five years, while SMBs got zero
“We just happened to ask the question, how many cybersecurity platforms have been created for the cloud in the last five years? And the answer is like, 1300. And then we said, how many have been created for the SMB in the last five years? And the answer was zer…”
Graham Weaver: Alpine Investors' last four funds achieved or track toward 5x MOIC
“About 15 years ago, we set an objective to become the number one performing private equity fund in the world as measured by net MOIC, you know, the return on capital and our last since we set that goal, the four funds we invested after that have all done five …”
Weaver: Apex Scaled to $3B Revenue and $500M Earnings in Six Years
“Three billion of revenue, five hundred million of earnings. And we, I think importantly that, that happened without us putting in any additional money.”
DHH: Basecamp had SaaS project management to itself for a decade
“It certainly served us well for many, many years when we had the entire project management space in SaaS to ourselves, and we were laughing all the way to the bank because clearly someone else must have realized this was a highly profitable, not even niche, bu…”
DHH: Venture capitalists get rich while being right only 10% of the time
“VCs have gotten tremendously rich being right 10% of the time. I mean, isn't that, I mean, that's an incredible stat for me that you're able to build such wealth on being so wrong so often.”
Puri: Zuru Tech bought $80M in LA land for robot-built mansions
“They bought, like, eighty million dollars worth of lots in LA, and he's building, he's basically gonna print these, I say print, just, it's building with a robot. Like, fifty million dollar homes in LA.”
Puri: Zuru generates over $1B in pure annual profit for its founders
“They do, like, over a billion dollars of pure profit a year just into the two brothers' pockets.”
Puri: AI music generator Suno has already reached $300M in ARR
“John Coogan: Three hundred million in ARR now.
[1217] Shaan Puri: Three hundred million.
[1217] Shaan Puri: All right.
[1218] John Coogan: Crazy.
[1219] Shaan Puri: Breaking news.
[1219] Shaan Puri: We got the three hundred million now already.”
Puri: Intercom has $100M and Zendesk has $200M in AI-driven ARR
“Zendesk, where they added AI to their existing thing, and they're like, oh yeah, our, I think Zendesk was at two hundred million or something in ARR off of their AI feature. Intercom is over a hundred million on their AI.”
Coogan: SemiAnalysis Is Launching an Investment Fund and Credit Ratings
“They're also launching a fund allegedly according to the information to invest in both semiconductor stocks and startups, and they're already doing angel investing. And then also they're going to do credit ratings.”
Puri: Legal AI Harvey generates $200M in revenue at $8B valuation
“Now they're an eight billion dollar company. So I might be getting priced out here as it's, as it goes, but I do love the space. So they're about two hundred million in revenue off of just like a thousand customers. I think like half of the like top hundred la…”
Puri: William Hockey self-funded banking platform Column to $200M in revenue
“He actually bought a bank for, I think, sixty million dollars of his own money, and then he started this and he basically uses it as a the underlying bank under Mercury, under Ramp, under Brex, under all these companies, and so he and I think they're doing, th…”
Walls Sees Half of Interviewed Founders Crushing It With iOS Apps
“This is what, when I talk to 12 founders a week, I'm seeing six of them are crushing it with iOS apps.”
Shaan Puri: China produces 10x more annual STEM graduates than the US
“China already has this incredible, like, population advantage where they produce five million graduates in math, computer science, and engineering compared to, I think we have, like, half a million that are in technology, the technology and science fields in t…”
Puri: Musk invested $50M in OpenAI but retained zero ownership
“OpenAI, open source AI that's, you know, a non-profit, and now it's a for-profit closed source company, and he funded fifty million dollars and now owns none of it.”
Confiscating all billionaire wealth wouldn't close California's spending deficit
“But people have done the math, like, even if you tax the billionaires, even if you took all the billionaires' money, it doesn't, like, plug the hole of the California spending.”
China cut the AlphaGo broadcast, triggering a national AI 'Sputnik moment'
“He's actually a pretty young looking guy, but the crazy thing is, as he starts to put the pressure on the Chinese guy,
They cut the feed in China.
No way, really?
How badass is that?
They cut the feed of the broadcast.
They're like, no, we will not show, we wi…”
DeepMind's AlphaFold effectively solved the single protein folding problem
“They end up getting 90% prediction accuracy, and they basically solve the single protein folding question.”
Shaan Puri: Bezos's Project Prometheus raised $6B for manufacturing AI
“Well, yeah, it's the first round of funding, so six billion dollars raised, and they got a hundred people, and they're building AI for, like, the physical world, so it's not just robots, but basically, like, the manufacturing of airplanes and ships and Things …”
Puri: Publishers require 250-page books so buyers perceive physical value
“A 300 page book needed to be 300 pages is really a relic of the publishing industry. So like, if you go talk to publishers, and I've done this, and you want to publish a thinner book, they're like, ooh, but it's not going to sell as well. And they're like, bec…”