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 65 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
Shah: OpenAI is the startup most likely to reach $1T valuation
“It, it'd be up there in the top three. I honestly can't think of who else would rank higher in terms of probability of getting to that.”
Shah: LLM capabilities cannot be explained by simple next-token prediction
“It's able to do things. That are not explainable by a simple probabilistic model of auto-suggesting next character, next word, next token, next sentence, right? Like it's gone well beyond that.”
Shah: Prompt-driven text-to-video with director styles will arrive in 2023
“I would not be surprised, let's say by the end of this year, that we have a reasonable way to kind of describe in textual form what we want, who the characters are, what the scene is what kind of stylistic attributes we want. We can point it to, oh, I want thi…”
Shah: AI is an order of magnitude bigger than mobile
“I think it's the single largest opportunity and biggest kind of a tech paradigm shift we've seen since the internet originally came out. Like mobile was big but there was a discrete set of use cases. Like when you put a camera on a phone, when you put a GPS de…”
Shah: I personally bought the Chat.com domain for eight figures
“I did. As of Transfer the domain yesterday, last night.”
Shah: Losing millions on Chat.com is worth the price of AI credibility
“Chat.com for let's say I even break even, let's say I lose a few million dollars. It is worth the price of admission for me just because that pays the cover charge.”
Dharmesh Shah: Big-name press release hires are wrong for early startups.
“If we felt like we ever hired someone that was worthy of a press release, we did it wrong. Right. That's not the kind of person we were looking for because they may have done amazing things at Google, Microsoft, Facebook, pick your company of choice, but the s…”
Dharmesh Shah operates as HubSpot CTO with zero direct reports.
“I have done everything in my In my power to reduce the time I have to spend on things that I'm not good at, right? Which is the things that are kind of non-creative, not a part of that. So I don't have any direct reports, which is unheard of for a company that…”
Dharmesh Shah never met the founders in 80% of his angel deals.
“I've made roughly, I think a little over a hundred investments now across my angel investment. I won't call it a career, but my activities and 80 to 90%. I've never actually talked to the founders or ever met with them. Over Vast majority of my deals, I make t…”
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”
Shah predicts natural language processing will be a bigger mega-trend than mobile
“And all we really need is a translation layer, and so this is a broad-based, in my mind a mega trend to be, which is, In my mind, bigger than mobile.”
Shah: AI shifts software UX from imperative steps to declarative outcomes
“An imperative model is you give step-by-step instructions that says do this and then do this and then do this and then do this. And then I get the thing. What natural language allows us to do is use, ah, what developers would call a declarative model. Instead …”
Shah: GPT-3 and GPT-4 are reasoning engines, not knowledge bases
“GPT three and now four is, is a reasoning engine. And Sam Altman has talked about this. It's not a knowledge base where it's like, and so people kind of latch on to this fact that, oh, the data that it has is from September, 20, 21, then I'm going to teach you…”
Shah: Replacing keyword search with vector embeddings is a massive AI opportunity
“One of the biggest opportunities in AI right now is to do what Pandora did. Okay. Is there an industry where right now we're doing really stupid keyword based matching somehow it was very, very crude. If I can take that same dataset and convert it to vector em…”
Shah: AI pattern matching will quickly uncover inauthentic user posts
“I would bet you money with a large enough sample size the inauthentic posts would be uncovered by the AI like relatively quickly. Like the pattern matching would say, You know, this actually doesn't occur in real life all that often.”
Shah: As HubSpot CTO, I have zero direct reports and no one-on-ones
“I've kind of crafted a role for myself within HubSpot that allows me to do Exactly the things that I want to do and not do any of the things I don't want to do, which is one-on-one meetings. I don't have to manage people. I have no direct reports. I've never f…”
Shah: The odds of Balaji's $1M Bitcoin bet hitting are very low
“If I were a betting person, I would not bet that the odds are what do you think they are? Could happen, but nowhere near the probability that that he's suggesting.”
Dharmesh Shah: The psychic toll of homeownership outweighs the financial benefits.
“Just the decrease in maintenance and wear and tear on one's psyche and soul that ownership, you know, bestows upon you is just not worth it.”
Dharmesh Shah: Economic downturns are net positive for early-stage startups.
“So my position is I lean more towards kind of Paul Graham and the spectrum, which is, I think it's either neutral, that it doesn't matter. It's one of the things you're suggesting towards positive. And the positive elements of being in a kind of downturning ec…”
Shah offers to write a $5M seed check for decentralized LinkedIn
“I will write the five million dollar check for you to go do it as far as a seed round or up to five million if you want to let other people in.”
Shah predicts LinkedIn's utility will asymptotically diminish over time
“Over time, the asymptotic move for LinkedIn is, Like diminishing utility, right? It's like, it's just going to become painful, and then there's a cap on where you can go with it.”
Shah says bootstrapped tech companies risk wasting years surviving in mediocrity
“I think the hardest about bootstrap companies, especially tech companies that have a low kind of capital need, Is they can actually live forever and not go anywhere, right? Because it doesn't take that much stuff. It's like, okay, you've got an AWS instance so…”
Shah: Building LLMs is uniquely capital-intensive for software
“Building large language models as OpenAI is doing is, is like supremely capital intensive, which is rare for a Software company, which is what they are.”
Shah: Average developers can build vector embedding models in a single weekend
“And by the way, the technology exists today that mere mortals in a weekend can actually build a vector embedding model of a given data set. It's not that hard. I mean, it's not like rocket science-y hard.”
Shah: HubSpot is bringing his ChatSpot.ai side project in-house
“And so, but now given the relevance to HubSpot, we're going to transfer that project, chat spot.ai to be a HubSpot staffed core team.”
Shah: I spent $500k on ChatSpot and will transfer it for $1
“So I spent like half a million dollars. Plus like freelance developers and open AI license fees and all the things that need to go into launching a product like that. And I'll end up giving it to HubSpot for a dollar, right?”
Shah: Sam Parr's Hampton could be a $100M revenue business worth $1B+
“Hampton's a cool idea with actual utility. And Sean, you said this in the last thing, like this Could be a hundred million dollar business worth anywhere from three hundred million dollars to a billion plus dollars. And I think you're right.”
Shah: I also bought the Prompt.com domain for seven figures
“But this one, it's not eight figures, it's seven figures. And the domain is prompt.com.”
Shah: Short-term AI 'tourists' are missing out on much larger opportunities
“There's enough real problems to solve where real money can be made. And yes, this technology can now be used in creative ways by lots of people and you should use those. But don't use as an excuse just to kind of be like an AI tourist that comes through, makes…”
Dharmesh Shah: Early-stage recruiting requires non-monetary upside or undervalued talent.
“And so, you know, one of the things a founder has to kind of get good at, it's convincing really smart people to do this irrational thing, which is join you in your startup, right? And if you can't do that, if you can't make that sale, which is the most import…”
Dharmesh Shah: 20-30 HubSpot employees made over $10M from equity.
“Probably somewhere in the 20 to 30 range, if I had to guess, of people that have made that much you know, over 50, maybe even a hundred, like, millionaires in the seven-figure range.”
Dharmesh Shah: People are creatives, completers, or collaborators.
“They're like three kind of vectors of kind of measurement of people. One is that you have the creatives, and these are people that start things. They have ideas. They have a 180 mile, you know, ideas an hour kind of thing if you sit down in a room with them. T…”
Dharmesh Shah: Founder keynotes and earnings calls cannot be delegated.
“There are things that are non delegatable that one of we should probably talk about. It's on my list of things. So one is earnings calls. Another one is getting onto public stages, right? So for instance, we have an annual conference called inbound that, you k…”
Dharmesh Shah: Wordplay could sell for between $2M and $10M.
“Right now that let's say the ad revenue would go down to like 50,000 or something like that, because I haven't turned Google AdSense in a while. That's 600,000 dollars a year. Apply a five X multiple. So somewhere between two and ten million dollars would be m…”
Dharmesh Shah bought over $3M of HubSpot stock during a dip.
“It was over three.
Forgot the exact amount is, but it was millions of dollars.”
Dharmesh Shah lost over $500M during the tech market downturn.
“How does it feel to lose half a billion dollars, is what you're asking me.
Sean Puri: Yeah, and how do you deal with that, and like, yeah, go for it.
Sam Parr: Is that how much you lost, do you think?
Dharmesh Shah: It's more than that, but yeah.”
Dharmesh Shah increased his angel check sizes as market valuations dropped.
“So as the market has dipped my kind of average check size has actually gone up. I've made bigger bets and things because I think valuations are starting to adjust you know, slowly.”
Dharmesh Shah: Most massively successful ideas are derivative rather than brand-new.
“Most ideas that have been super successful are not complete new from old cloth cut, right? They're like, and I don't like the cliche of building on the shoulders of giants, but it's like just about everything that's ever been done is derivative to some degree.…”
Dharmesh Shah: Acquire rare skills that reinforce your existing strengths.
“And this is one of the reasons so my advice here was, as you're picking skills to acquire, acquire skills that are both rare, but also reinforce things that you're already exceptional at that, that will kind of drive that kind of that rarity, and that's what d…”
Dharmesh Shah: Skill is learnable, while talent is merely the learning rate.
“Skill is something that's learnable. That's an easy definition. Talent is the rate at which you could acquire a particular skill.”
Dharmesh Shah: Output quality depends on iteration volume over early perfectionism.
“The quality of the output is almost I won't say always, but frequently a function of the number of iterations, not the quality of the, you know, the people's.”
Shah predicts SaaS companies will increasingly control their own distribution
“Where I think the future of kind of SaaS companies has, is going to be heading, which is more and more of them are going to control their own kind of distribution versus kind of renting audiences from other people.”
Shah and his wife plan to donate over 90 percent of wealth
“The plan, my wife and I have talked about this, the plan is to donate 90 plus percent of it, right? Like, we have one child, we're not going to spoil them, so it's not like we're trying to build a multi-generational dynasty.”
Shah advises assigning an explicit hourly dollar value to your time
“Most people, Don't value their time enough, and don't think about it objectively enough, and it, like anything else, is a resource, but it's finite, but put a number on it, and then ask yourself, like, what are the things I'm doing with my time that are not wo…”
Shah argues physical luxury assets drain mental energy regardless of delegation
“Because atoms, there's a maintenance to atoms, right? Like atoms versus bits. Like if you have it, whether it's a yacht or whatever it is, a plane, Like that takes calories. I could take, I don't care how much you've delegated or whatever. That's something in …”
Shah calls copywriting the most underrated entrepreneurial skill
“I think copywriting overall, Is one of the most underrated skills in entrepreneurship generally. Like if people do not realize the amount of leverage you get by just spending 10, 20, 50 hours, and you can learn a lot of what you need just by, like, reading the…”