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 1,801 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
Shkreli: Drug prices should equal the averted cost of alternative care
“When you do the pricing, I think that the best logical thing to do is pick a price that the alternative care, in other words, a world without this drug, you would forego all those costs for this drug.”
Liemandt: Nonprofits in education cannot scale with better product quality
“Historically, everything in education has been nonprofit. And the problem with nonprofits is nonprofits are non-scalable, which is the better your product, the faster your donations go away, right?”
Galloway: Billionaires are generally high-character people who build allies
“I personally have found that billionaires are generally very high character people because the key to being really successful is to create allies along the way such that you're put in a room of opportunities when you're not physically there.”
Mah: Ideas are worthless is Silicon Valley's worst advice
“I think it's some of the worst advice I've ever heard in Silicon Valley.
So what's your take?
My take is that ideas are really fricking important.
And if you have the wrong idea, you'd be a great team and you're screwed.”
Puri: The best early-stage tech investors judge founders in under ten minutes
“The two best early pickers of startups ever in the history of Silicon Valley, both make their decisions based off of just, do they feel like these people are fierce founders and they can figure that out in less than 10 minutes. And then here you have people th…”
Petersen: VC incentives create herd mentality and cross-firm collusion
“So therefore, the way to avoid getting fired in VC, again, this is not Founders Fund. This is what I like about them, that they're very different. But is it, the way to avoid getting fired is to be, well, to double check everything you do with other VCs. To ma…”
Wilkinson: Angel Investing Is Roulette, Not Poker
“I think of it as roulette. And I think like this period that we're talking about was about me learning how to play poker, right? Poker has way better odds than roulette. If you're good at poker, you can actually win. You've got, you know, a 60% odds. When you …”
Parr: Approachable young women drive the highest ad click-through rates
“It has to be an approachable young woman, and I have found that that gets the most clicks amongst all demographics”
Galloway: VCs launch smear campaigns against critics threatening their profits
“I would say don't never get in between a venture capitalist and their second million, because they will take to Twitter and call you a plagiarist or accuse you of having done terrible things at NYU, which you've never Ever been accused of, much less people hav…”
In media, a smart point of view beats long-term correctness
“It's more important that we have a smart point of view than that we're right in the long term.”
Parr: Three years of focused work can build an eight-figure net worth
“If you're willing to dedicate three years, like you definitely can add eight figures of net worth to your, like, for sure. Like it's easy. It's not easy, but it's simple.”
Puri: Crypto founders fail to deliver because they get rich upfront
“In Ripple, those guys became billionaires before banks ever used their product, which is like a really fucked up incentive, and which is why sometimes shit doesn't actually get built in crypto, because hey, I already got the millions. I could just run away. I …”
Puri: Business Content Creators Are Usually 'B Players' Teaching 'C Players'
“The most successful people, the true icons, you know, they're not creating a ton of content typically. And sometimes they do when they retire, sometimes it's part of their growth strategy, but for the most part, Elon Musk doesn't have a sub stack, right? He's …”
Balaji: Effective altruism misses that people feel guilt if they haven't built
“The effective altruism people miss one very important thing, which is that it is the production by people of goods that actually makes them feel that they deserve things.
Like if you haven't built, you feel guilt.”
Puri: Equity crowdfunding platforms host bottom-of-the-barrel startups
“Crowdfunding is the, you know, bottom of the barrel of companies. Like the best companies, the ones that are hot, that are growing, get picked up by professional investors. And the stuff that you end up seeing on crowdfunding sites, I don't think are the big b…”
Saylor: Converting Corporate Cash to Bitcoin Turns Liabilities Into Assets
“So if you take a company with cash and you invest in Bitcoin, you have invested, you have converted a liability to an asset.”
Saylor: Companies should convert cash, debt, and equity into Bitcoin
“So the big idea here is you want to fix any company, sweep all the cash flows into Bitcoin, convert the treasury into Bitcoin. Borrow against your future cash flows in dollars. Convert that into Bitcoin. Finance all your fixed assets in dollars. Convert that i…”
Yeung: Meta ad buying is commoditized; creative assets now handle the targeting
“Ad buying is like a commodity, right? Now, yeah, before, a few years ago, you have to be really, really good at ad buying, but now Meta does all of that for you already, right? You don't need to do the targeting. You don't need to do all this stuff, right? All…”
Puri: Scaling experiential businesses requires treating in-person events as content sets
“The content is the business, not the tours. So the tours are just content. Whereas I think what most people do is they say, I'm going to make content to try to get people to book the tour because that's where I get the transactional money. And so that's the re…”
Foster: Pure AI agents guess and waste tokens; deterministic workflows are more reliable
“Agents, agents, they kind of just guess what to do, right? And if they're smart enough, they guess right most of the time, but sometimes the agents guess wrong. And the second thing is agents are using tokens, right? We probably heard token maxing, right? And …”
Foster: Cognitive limits will restrict humans to managing roughly 20 AI agents
“Well, so you could, but the thing is, you're only gonna be able to keep up with, what, 20 agents? Cause it's gonna keep assigning you tasks and more things to do and more things to do. And so there still is like a, there still is like a limit.”
Puri: Entrepreneurs should pick businesses by preferred sales motion, not industry
“I don't need to pick an industry I love, or a product I love. I need to pick a sales motion that I love. Because guess what? Like, if you have a product, Doesn't matter what the niche is. If it's grown via enterprise sales, most of your time is going to be spe…”
Microsoft retail staff make better sales hires than Apple order-takers
“You can work in an Apple store and you are an order taker. Go down the hall to the people at the Microsoft store who have to sell a slate two doors down from a Mac, MacBook Air. Those people know how to sell. The fact that they're not starving is unbelievable.…”
Graham Weaver: PE playbooks fail unless firms install their own operators
“The reason you can make that playbook consistent is because you're putting your own people in to run it. This took me 10 years to figure out, but we would back founders and then say, Hey, we have all these great ideas and the founders would just smile and writ…”
Weaver: Proprietary data and deep interfaces are the only AI app moats
“I think if you can build proprietary data sets, which is harder than it sounds or you can build really deep interfaces with your customers, which is also harder than it sounds. Those are moats you can build, but really, I think sometimes what you're really, yo…”
Graham Weaver: Building businesses yields 100x returns versus 2x from cost-cutting
“Building things is a lot more durable than ripping things apart. Cause you can make like one and a half times your money, or maybe, maybe even two times your money ripping stuff If you're lucky, if you time the exit just right. But if you actually build someth…”
DHH: Surveillance advertising monetizes low-intent traffic by targeting identity over context
“Surveillance Capital flipped it on its head that it did not matter whether intent was there. If we know everything about everyone at all times, all that matters is eyeball time, because now we can pinpoint whether an ad should be shown or not shown on the basi…”
DHH: AI agents make engineers supercharged operators, not detached project managers
“I thought, when I talked to Lex last summer, that it was going to turn everyone into a project manager of the old type. The kind of project manager who's not really doing the things, just telling other people what to do, and then you got this little shh churn,…”
Parr: Tech incumbents, not startups, will capture most AI value creation
“The vast majority of value creation is going to be by big companies just getting bigger. I just think that it's much easier for Salesforce to get more efficient and launch new features than it is a new company, or at least picking those new companies very hard…”
Puri: Adding Operational Systems Before Organic Growth Slows Startups Down
“There's a specific type of person and a specific moment in time when you need a system tool, and that is when you have growth, but you have a growing headache. So the business is growing healthily, but your headache is growing, you know, maybe even more than t…”
Galloway: Investment returns inversely correlate with an industry's sexiness
“Your return on your invested capital is inversely correlated to how sexy and cool an industry sounds.”
Horowitz: Founder hesitation on painful layoffs can destroy the company
“The level of like, you know, I was completely wrong about everything, and now I'm going to fire half of you because I, of the mistakes I made will just cause you to hesitate in a way that could cost you the company itself.”
Horowitz: Top Founders Like Zuckerberg and Musk Understand People Exceptionally Well
“The ones who truly
Don't understand people are, don't actually turn out to be good CEOs. Like they don't get to that level. Like you can, you know, you can make fun of Larry Page or Elon or Zuck or so forth, but they are actually very smart about people.”
Horowitz: AI video is a distinct creative medium, not just efficiency
“It's not like making the old thing more efficient. It's a new medium. It's an actual new thing in the same ways that like movies weren't plays. You know, AI video is not video. The stories that you can tell are completely different because you can do things th…”
Parr: Startups outgrow brute-force execution at $3M revenue or $1M profit
“Honestly, it probably starts at three million in revenue where you're out of the brute force stage. And it depends on your business, but something like A million a year in profit, maybe. Where you're out of the brute force stage, and what happens next is actua…”
Bonforte: Only naive beginners and 20-year veterans succeed in venture capital
“We say freshmen and seniors make all the money in, in the venture business, like in the entrepreneur business. So you either don't know the rules. So you go into your business and you break a bunch of rules without knowing, or you know all the rules and you bu…”
Guidara: Unreasonable hospitality generates better returns than traditional marketing
“Every dollar I ever spent on unreasonable hospitality was far more impactful than any dollar I ever spent on traditional marketing, because when you give them those stories to tell, what do you think they're gonna do? They're gonna tell them over and over and …”
Guidara: Running a $15M restaurant requires similar effort to a $5M restaurant
“It doesn't take that much more work to run a fifteen million dollar a year restaurant than it does a five million dollar a year restaurant.”
RV Parks Hedge Macroeconomic Cycles Better Than Traditional Residential Real Estate
“With a mobile home or an RV park, you don't maintain the units. You just maintain the infrastructure under the ground. It's a hedge against the economy. When the economy's good, the millennials and the boomers are traveling, you got short-term stays. When the …”
Braziel: Small capital bases in claims investing can reliably compound fast
“And then the claims work, I wouldn't say it's free money, but you can almost reliably compound your money on a small base, you know, like a few million bucks or something. You can Reliably compound that at pretty aggressive rates.”
Voss: Intentionally saying falsehoods elicits hidden information through irresistible correction
“The urge to correct is so irresistible that we actually use it as one of our negotiation skills. I'll say something wrong on purpose. Because you will not be able to resist the urge to correct me with the truth. And it's a great way for me to trigger getting h…”
Voss: Handing off to a new negotiator always signals a harder line
“No negotiation team, whether it's business or hostage, hands a negotiator off to another negotiator to be nicer.
Ever.
Business or hostage.
If there's a change in negotiation, negotiators on the other side, it is always to take a harder line.
Always.”
Chris Voss: Pre-planned 'must-haves' and 'giveaways' can be completely wrong
“Well, if they've got proprietary information that would change everything, then your must haves and your giveaways could be completely wrong.”
Voss: Driving for 'no' creates safety while seeking 'yes' creates friction
“Instead of, do you want to talk about what we're here for, which you're driving for yes, because that going for yes creates friction, but going for no creates protection and safety.”
Voss: Relying on leverage caps a negotiator at B-level performance
“I mean, you get yourself to B level negotiator there. You'll never get yourself to A plus on leverage. Cause leverage is the ability to inflict harm. And if you're making deals based on the ability to inflict harm, these are not, those don't go for stable long…”
Koerner: Compounding works whether pursuing a single project or multiple ventures
“Focus is overrated because compounding doesn't care. Like the principle of compounding does not care if we're working on one thing or a dozen things. As long as we stay in the game, whatever that game is for us and keep going, compounding is just going to keep…”