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 38 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
Tesla and SpaceX wouldn't exist for 50 years without Elon Musk
“I think Tesla and SpaceX would not have happened and would not have happened at least for another 50 years had he not made those happen.”
Sam Parr: Breaking Up Facebook and Google Would Make Their Founders Richer
“If Facebook and Instagram had to compete with each other it would actually make Zuckerberg richer. Same with YouTube and Google. If they had to compete, it would probably make them better. And thus the owners a little bit more rich.”
DHH: Basecamp would never have created Ruby on Rails with venture funding
“If we had raised, I don't know, twenty million dollars and hired a hundred people, we would just use the same shit as everyone else, and we would never have come up with Ruby on Rails.”
Parr: Taylor Swift would not write hits if in a successful relationship
“Taylor Swift wouldn't write hits if she had a successful, wonderful relationship.”
Shaan Puri: Chamath would have made more money just holding Meta stock
“And if he had just simply like held the meta stock and chilled, he would have financially out far outperformed his own, you know, his own brilliance doing all this different investing action.”
Harris: Suge Knight could have been a top entrepreneur without imploding
“I think Shud was really creative, and he was in the right place at the right time, and he was able to connect the right people, and so in the beginning, Shud, to me, could have been one of our Biggest entrepreneurs. Had he not, ah, imploded, you know”
Luckey: Oculus likely would not have survived without Facebook's billions
“It's a tough business, and I'm not convinced that Oculus would still be around if we hadn't had those resources.”
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.”
Puri: An incorrect Polymarket forecast would have faced harsher backlash than polls
“I think if they were, I think if Polymarket was wrong, the reaction would have been much worse than the fact that the polls were wrong, what the reaction is to the polls, you know?”
Puri: Not pivoting Blab to B2B video cost hundreds of millions
“And instead of looking at those clues and being like, huh, maybe we could do that. We missed that project selection choice. I remember that day. Cause that was a, probably a multi hundred million dollar fork in the road moment, you know, maybe you still had to…”
Parr: Noah Kagan lost $100M in unvested equity when Zuckerberg fired him
“Noah was the 32nd or 30th employee employee... And Zuck goes to his desk and he goes, you're fucking with my company. You're out. And he fires him on month nine. So Noah was three months away from his first invest. And Noah's told me, he goes, had I just made …”
Puri: Facebook might be dead today if it had not acquired Instagram
“And by the way, today, if Facebook had not bought Instagram, Facebook might be dead.”
Sean Puri: OpenAI would not exist without Elon Musk's early AI concerns
“It's clear that opening. I wouldn't have even would not have existed. It would not have been successful had he not genuinely had this fear and concern and belief about what needs to happen with AI long time ago.”
Coogan: Facebook would have died without venture capital
“I think that if Mark Zuckerberg didn't raise venture capital, his company would be dead.”
Luckey: Oculus probably wouldn't exist without the iPhone
“I mean, like, honestly, Oculus owes more to the iPhone than anything else. I mean, like, if the iPhone wouldn't have existed, there wouldn't have been broken iPhones for me to buy, unlock, repair, and sell on eBay. Like, cause I made tens of thousands of dolla…”
Meetup founder Scott Heiferman was constrained by a small market size
“I think if that guy would have worked on something else, it actually would have, he would have been significantly more successful. And some of these guys, it's kind of like they're Lance Armstrong and they're riding the Tour de France in a mountain bike or wit…”
Parr: The Hustle could have charged $30,000 annually for Trends
“Had we made relatively minor changes, like not that different, like it wouldn't have cost us more money. We maybe would have had a few more people. And we are right now we charge 300 dollars a year. There's a world where it wouldn't have had to been that much …”
Puri: People problems prevented me from starting five more companies
“I would have started five more companies if I didn't have people problems.”
French: Live Oak Lake Would Be Worth $3M-$4M Without Direct Bookings
“Maybe three or four million is my guess.”
Jason Fried Believes 37signals Could Not Be Launched Again Today
“Could we launch this again today? No, we couldn't.”
Parr: Structuring HustleCon as a trade show could have netted tens of millions
“Had I made it like a trade show, I probably could have made tens of millions per event, but I just didn't know what I was doing.”
Ali: Passed on $25K Coinbase Series A worth $200M at IPO
“Biggest miss was Coinbase. My at TinyCo, we had this guy who worked for me named Adam Merber. He was roommates with Fred, the Coinbase co-founder. And so Brian Armstrong and Fred were fundraising for their Series A. They got a term sheet from Andreessen Horowi…”
Puri: CMX would be worth $100M if launched in 2020
“He just, if he started that like two years ago, instead of seven years ago, that would be like a hundred million dollar company right now.”
Noah Kagan admits knowing AppSumo would take ten years would deter him
“Like for me, if you would have told me when I started AppSumo, like, hey, no, you'll be a millionaire, but it's going to take 10 years. I probably wouldn't have started.”
Maples: Ride-hailing networks would have failed before widespread smartphone GPS adoption
“With Lyft GPS has got included for free in smartphones, and we believe that everybody's gonna have smartphones someday, even though in 2010, only 10% did. So you could say, wow, now I can see a world in the future where drivers and riders will be able to locat…”
Parr: If rebuilding his paid community, he would charge far more money
“By the way, if I had to start over, I would have done it differently. I would have charged way more money. Because I've learned the mistakes that you have to add a ton of people to build a big business and a ton of people for certain groups isn't necessarily g…”
Parr: Cronut creator could have made tens of millions licensing the name
“He actually trademarked the name Cronut and he is like a purist. He's like an artist. So he didn't actually want to license it to people, but he easily could have made tens of millions or more by licensing that name to someone.”
DHH: Apple App Store fight pushed me to Linux and custom OS
“If I hadn't had that experience, would I build my own Linux distribution that is now used by tens of thousands of people? Would I have discovered this wonderful new world of the Linux operating system, of Hyperland, of Arch, of mechanical keyboards, and all th…”
Puri: Early Stripe sales job would have yielded over $20M
“My entry level sales type of job would have made me like twenty million dollars if I held. And that was then it's probably doubled since then.”
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…”
Puri: Being consistent and niche-focused would have yielded one million Twitter followers
“I think if I had been more consistent and I had defined my niche, I would be at a million followers instead of 400,000.”
Parr: The Hustle Should Have Spent Far More on Facebook Ads
“Looking back, I should've spent way more, but I didn't, because I was being too cheap.”
Wilkinson: Tiny's acquisition offer for The Hustle would have been lower than HubSpot's
“I think your deal with HubSpot, though, is better than what we would have paid. Well, and it was like, we got to the numbers, and we would have been cheaper than HubSpot.”
Puri: Fake laid-off Twitter employees should have become full-time tech satirists
“They should have just gone all in as personalities. I would have dropped the startup, like six months sabbatical on the startup. I'm just going to see what happens if I fully troll and like, maybe I could be the thing that the community needs.”
Puri: Sam Parr's mastermind was the blueprint for building Milk Road
“Had I not been in a mastermind with you, I wouldn't have seen how you built the hustle and I wouldn't have known. How to build the milk road, a business I didn't know I was planning to create five years later, but that blueprint was etched in my brain from tho…”
Shaan Puri: Joining Stripe as an early employee would have yielded $10M-$30M
“I applied to Stripe, and I applied to a place called Monkey Inferno. Stripe, everybody knows, turned into, like, you know, whatever, a hundred billion dollar company. I would have been, like, employee, I don't know, like, 35, 40 at the time, so it would have b…”
Discord's stock-based acquisition offer for Bebo would have been the most lucrative
“Discord , I think is worth about fifteen billion now. So it would have been by far the best deal.”
Puri missed out on $5 million by selling early Tesla stock
“I bought Tesla stock very early on. I think I bought it under a hundred dollars a share. And I think if you if you adjust for the splits, I think it's now over like 5000 dollars a share. So I think I would have made about five million dollars on a stock buy th…”