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 27 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 1 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
Currier: Nvidia and big LLM training companies will eventually go to zero
“So both Nvidia and all of these giant LM companies who are spending all this money on training are going to go to zero eventually.”
Currier: MrBeast relies on weak scale effect and is vulnerable like BuzzFeed
“That's a scale effect. And it's a very weak one. Yeah, no, he's very vulnerable. Just like Buzzfeed was very vulnerable and wasn't going to go anywhere.”
Currier: Unlimited AI processing will run on phone CPUs within four years
“AI is going to be like water. You're going to get free unlimited AI processing on your CPU. On your phone within three to four years. There's no doubt it's going to free”
Currier: Sell Nvidia, buy Google and Microsoft for their distribution
“Oh, I mean, opinion is that I would sell. Yeah. NVIDIA compared to long-term, I would still be a Google and a Microsoft buyer because of the distribution.”
Currier: Zuckerberg's virtual world is still behind 2003 Second Life tech
“What Zuckerberg is trying to do right now with his virtual world is still behind what Corey Andreka and Philip were able to do with the technology in 2003 and four.”
Currier: Speed is the single biggest determinant of founder success
“So the number one thing that it rolls up into is speed. So you could lay out 16 characteristics that you're looking for, but all of those lead to one thing, which is speed. And so if we measure speed when we're meeting with the founders, that's the main thing …”
Currier: Stan Chudnovsky and I have never lost money for investors
“Stan and I have never failed. We've never lost a dime for anyone. We've always made people money for the last 25 years”
Currier: 85% to 90% of all tech returns originate from the Bay Area
“Why is it that sort of 85, 90% of all returns in tech have come from the Bay Area? It's because the mindsets here are slightly different from New York and London and LA and other things.”
Currier: Consumer software window closed in 2014, producing only ten unicorns
“Between 94 and 2013, it was a fantastic time to start companies in the consumer software space and invest in them from seed or series A. In 2014, the window just closed. You can look at the number of unicorns created in two th from 2014 to today, and it's real…”
Currier: Digital world has only four defensibilities: brand, scale, embeddedness, networks
“And it could be a network effect, it could be an embeddedness, it could be a scale, or it could be a brand. Those are the four defensibilities in the digital world that now exist.”
Currier: Pick product naming and language before building features
“Pick the word first. And then figure out what the product does behind the word, because the word has a promise to it.”
Currier: Leaving California to save on taxes is short-sighted
“If I'm, you know, if I'm not good enough to play in the NBA, I shouldn't be in the NBA. Right. But this is the NBA. And so a 13% tax on being able to play in the NBA is nothing.”
Currier: Consumer AI startup window will stay open for 3 to 4 years
“I think that AI has created a whole new set of consumer experiences. I think the window there will be open for three to four years for people. It hasn't even really started.”
Currier: Commercial space startup window will begin closing in 3 to 5 years
“I think the space window is still open for another three to five years. But it'll start to close here soon, because remember, SpaceX started 20 years ago.”
Currier: The concept of a 'self-made man' is complete bullshit
“People talk about beat their chest and say, I'm a self-made man and it's complete bullshit. Like most, most of us are function of a sixth grade friend who put us on a completely different path.”
Currier: Disagreeable people perform better as startup founders
“If you are disagreeable, you end up doing better as a, as an entrepreneur and a founder and as a creator, because you don't have this need to please everyone all the time.”
Currier: Feastables brand will take years and hundreds of millions to build
“And he might end up building a brand around that chocolate. Right. But it'll take years, and it'll take hundreds of millions of dollars, and it's not clear that it'll happen.”
Currier: Monster deal would have failed if an investment banker was involved
“Had I brought, if I had introduced an investment banker into this process, he would never would've Returned my email or walked away.”
Currier: Bay Area culture shifted from creation to excessive money focus
“25 years ago, people who were coming to the Bay Area were coming because they were generative. They were coming because they wanted to create. And then because so much money was made by 2008, 2013, it's changed the tenor a little bit here, and we're ruining th…”
Currier: The TechBio startup window will stay open for 30 years
“I mean, we're just seven, eight years into the tech bio thing, and that's going to go, that window will be open for 30 years. We're going to learn so much about DNA and what's going on there.”
Currier: Bitcoin is purely a meme coin driven by belief network effects
“Bitcoin is just purely a, Bitcoin's a meme coin. We just all believe in it.”
Currier: Five of top seven global companies rely on network effects
“So if you look at the top, you know seven companies in the world in terms of market cap, Five or six of them have network effects at their core. And that was not true. 30 years, 20 years ago.”
Currier: Choose networks, not jobs or industries, when making life choices
“Don't think of yourself as choosing a job or choosing an industry or think of yourself as choosing a network.”
Currier: Startup speed means rapid emotional flexibility, not long hours
“It's about an emotional flexibility that allows you to abandon what you were doing before and do the right thing going forward. It isn't speed on your original idea. It's speed toward success.”
Currier: PGA Tour makes $1.5B more per year when Tiger Woods plays
“If Tiger Woods plays, the PGA makes one and a half billion dollars more per year, and if he's not playing, it's like, These nodes in these networks, and so if you could get Tiger to go over here, and you could get this, and this, and that, if you did the right…”
Currier: Rebranding Emode to Tickle raised buyout offer from $45M to $110M
“We had gotten an offer for forty-five million as a company when we were called Emode, and then six months later, we got an offer for 110.”
Currier: Isolating in an incubator instead of joining Facebook was a mistake
“Our structure of the incubator wasn't super network centric. It was creativity centric. It was isolated a little bit, and that was a mistake. And had I gone and worked at Facebook and learned more about that ecosystem, or had I gone and become a venture guy or…”