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 1,199 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
Zuora CIO Chakkarapani refuses to pay vendors for enterprise POCs
“I would never pay because we need some skin in the game from the vendor who's supporting us.”
Mayya: Why I refuse to move to the United States
“I don't think that's wise for any economy, and activism doesn't create new capital, right, and you don't have disposable income, people's lives don't get better, so they've forgotten what made them successful, so I would not go to the US for these reasons. I'm…”
Building highways and the Ayodhya temple share a unified civilizational agenda
“In the end, I'm trying to rebuild a civilization. I'm not building just an economy. The economy is a part of it, but the overall purpose is rebuilding the civilization. So building a highway and rebuilding the Ayodhya temple are a part of the same agenda, and …”
Mumbai Angels Refused Exotel Clawback Relief After Pivot, Says Shivku
“One of them was that there'll be a clawback if it hit 500 customers. After about three 50 customers, we shifted to enterprises. Naturally, The number of enterprise customers is not as important an enterprise as the revenue itself, right? So, so we didn't actua…”
Jain: Observe AI's only Indian customer ghosted a $500K contract
“We've ever, we only ever, ever sold to one Indian customer, and that's because it came from an investor, a mutual investor, a great brand in India public, they recently went public, so all, all amazing things. They were a customer very large customer, got it l…”
Jain: Observe AI stopped selling its legacy product to force a pivot
“We almost like, yeah, we stopped selling. We incentivize all of our sellers and marketing team to just focus on newer products. We still get demand for our older product, but we've also transformed that to agents. So now we are selling agents.”
Krishnan: Prediction of a 10x AI-driven startup surge was wrong
“One prediction on way on which I, I'm just, I turned out to be wrong was I would have expected this kind of productivity gains to come all the way on the stack along the stack. Like I would have expected that, for example, the number of let's say good venture …”
Sarin: Client Associates Is Not Investing In AI Due To Market Haziness
“Not participating because I think it's very hazy at this point in time.”
Sarin: As A Wealth Firm Founder, I Closed My Personal Demat Account
“And I closed my DMAT account and for long, I don't even have a DMAT account.”
Saxena: Founders who cannot demo their own product are unfundable
“I will never back a founder who can't do a sales demo themselves. If you have to rely on your AE and SE to do a demo, I wouldn't, as a VC, I wouldn't fund you.”
Nair: Tinyfish engineer Cursor usage fell from 83% to single digits
“My company used to have around 83% of the company engineers were cursor, today it is like less than single digit.”
Jindal: Arize uses Cursor over BigQuery to eliminate internal data analysts
“Even in my current company all our systems data, like Salesforce, HubSpot, and everything even Gong data, we actually put into BigQuery, you know, every data, and then we have we have cursor sitting on top of BigQuery, and if anything I want, I just ask cursor…”
Rajagopal: FirstClub will reject retail media revenue and ban product-level ads
“In our platform, for example, it is going to be a zero PLA platform. No product level ads at all.”
Ashu Garg is actively buying Salesforce, Snowflake, and ServiceNow stock
“And so I am bullish that they will also capture some share of this value. And so I, I'm a buyer of Salesforce and I'm a buyer of Salesforce stock. I'm a buyer of Snowflake stock and I'm a buyer of ServiceNow stock.”
Bikhchandani: Info Edge will never exercise a board veto unless illegal
“There is no way we're going to exercise a veto on the board, even though we have the right to do it as per the agreement, because, you know, ultimately you have to let it be the founder's call. See, unless there's something that's blatantly wrong or illegal yo…”
Rayapati: Atomicwork actively discourages candidates from joining after giving them offers
“After we give an offer, we typically discourage people from joining us, you know.”
Rayapati: Atomicwork capped engineering pods at three people plus AI tooling
“So we had this typical eight to 10 people thing. So recently we broke that and said no pod can be more than three people. One really senior engineer, one senior engineer, one junior. That's it. Everybody else has to be in AI.”
Swaroop: Accel Atoms reviewed 900 AI applications, finding only one viable investment
“In for example, Axel Atoms, when we opened the first time AI cohort we got some 900 applications from AI, and I think 500 of them were marketing AI companies, which had already happened in the US in terms of actual original, very different ideas. Maybe there w…”
Bajaj: Founders frequently lower their valuations to include Z47 in rounds
“Generally, we are not the highest price payers... Often what happens is our peer group is paying much more. And then we will tell the founder, we are not in at that price and believe it or not, the price actually comes down. It doesn't come to our price or it …”
Bajaj: Z47 never joins competitive rounds, strictly choosing to preempt or pass
“We are never market participants. We are never participants in market rounds. Very, actually never. We are always, so we have this concept of P to P. Okay. There should be only two answers to a deal situation. Preempt or PWC, which is pass with conviction. The…”
Sharma: Indian Overconfidence Caused UPI To Lag Brazil's PIX Globally
“And that required us to open up the protocol in a very structured way. We didn't do that. You know, we are doing that now. But Brazilians with Pix did that I think in July or August of and so we got a little cocky and overconfident about our own momentum in th…”
Stellaris has led rounds where existing investors refused to reinvest
“There are multiple companies in our portfolio, which had existing investors in the company. They decided not to Put more money behind those companies and despite their signaling, we have actually come and led the rounds in those companies also.”
Allebest: We tell every hire that Chess.com will never be their highest-paying job
“One thing we tell people who work at chess.com, every single person who gets hired,
They hear the same thing, which is chess.com will never be your highest paying job. We're just economically not set up for it.”
Policybazaar Would Invest In Hospitals Despite A 90% Risk Of Failure
“Like today, when we are going in to say that we want to make a minority investment in hospitals, a lot of people think we're taking a risk. If there's a 90% chance of failure, we would still like to do it.”
Yashish Dahiya Never Read Policybazaar's Statutory Financials Before PB Fintech's IPO
“I had never looked at our financials before we went public. I started looking at them and started making sure our financials and our MIS were saying the same thing.”
Mobius exited most Chinese positions due to state-owned enterprise policies
“So that's the reason why we really exited most of the positions in China, but we're still looking at China. We think China still has great opportunities going forward.”
Parekh: Tata Group doesn't pressure BigBasket for rapid quick commerce leadership
“They're not you know, let me put it this way very fussed about what is the rate of growth and how soon will you become number one? And why shouldn't you be the largest in quick commerce and all of that? I think that their focus is build a good brand. Let's mak…”
Ferrari: Bending Spoons triggers CEO search if survey gets multiple no votes
“As a company, we run a survey, my direct reports, a small selection of senior colleagues and one partner from each of our institutional investors. They fill out a survey, an anonymous survey. There's only one question and it's, well, technically it's two. One …”
Ferrari: Bending Spoons does not filter M&A targets primarily by PMF strength
“No, we don't really try to buy the product companies with the best product market fit. We do assign value to it, but ultimately something is only good to us if the price is appealing relative to the value we can let's say generate or the, you know, the value w…”
Ahluwalia: Second-time founders fail at the same rate as first-time founders
“In our portfolio we see equal number of second-time founder companies not working out, and these are like super second-time founders built fifty million ARR companies. Right. Right. Their company's not working out as equal to first.”
Churchill drops seed GPs who scale fund sizes past $125M to $150M
“And if you quote, scale beyond that size, you likely won't be part of our portfolio anymore. We think, you know, especially seed and pre-seed is sort of a boutique business, and we don't think it should scale to hundreds of millions of dollars. So if you end u…”
Sachdeva: Top ShareChat Live Gifters from Tier-2 Cities Spend ₹5L+ Monthly
“So you will find somebody out of, Lucknow, Raipur, who's the top gifter or micropayment, customer on a live product. Spending north of five lakh a month.”
Titan Capital Seeks Superlative Products Dominating Small Total Addressable Markets
“We look for a very small TAM But a product which is absolutely superlative, that at least within that small TAM, whatever you've built has the ability to dominate the market.”
Sinha testified as Rajat Gupta's character witness despite his family's objections
“In fact, I, Rajat asked me if I was going to be a character witness in his case. I said, yes. And I must tell you that my own family members told me that you are doing what you are doing. I had to appear as a witness.”
Shah: Titan Capital focuses partner bandwidth on bottom 50% of portfolio
“Our thesis is to focus on, to be frank bottom 50% companies in portfolio.”
During a company crisis, Avlesh Singh personally called every prospective female hire
“All the women hires in my team during that period, no matter who they were, the hiring wasn't complete until I had spoken to her and clearly told them that this is what it is. This is what it actually was. This is what we did. And here is why you don't need to…”
Chadha gave written-off personal loans to founders to make payroll
“Personally, for instance, when founders are really struggling unable to make payroll or things like that, you know we've given them a short term loan that effectively we had written off, right?”
WhiteHat Jr had 20-30 marketing interns posting social content without oversight
“Marketing, like there was a bunch of 20, 30 interns doing whatever they wanted, because there was no oversight on them at all, right?”
Ghorpade: All 25+ Exfinity Portfolio Companies Focus on Indo-US Corridor
“All of them because enterprise tech by nature, and we always say that we work in the Indo-US corridor because companies can actually test their products in India. They can actually achieve scale in India. They can maybe learn from Indian corporations. They can…”
Nexus convinced Gluster to pause sales for nine months to rebuild product
“You know, we had a company many years ago, Gluster, and we invested in the company and it was clear the product was not really, it was good technology, but not a good product. So we told the founder that we are okay if we stop selling the product for that. And…”
Meesho deliberately hides its brand to let resellers build their own identities
“We do not put Misho's name in front of the end consumer, right? We want this lady to create a home brand, because with that brand comes our identity, with that identity comes respect and confidence, which is a very core part of the gratification that you get f…”
Prime Venture Partners is very unlikely to raise a $300M fund
“Well, you know we have a philosophy that says in early stage and with the approach we have, right, there's only, we're limited by our bandwidth, right, so as it is, as you said, you know, 25 companies, and you said only, I was saying, wow, we're 25 companies t…”
Khattar: AdvantEdge Never Invests on Projections; 90% of Portfolio Misses Targets
“We've never made an investment based on projections, and I think nine out of 10 times nine out of 10 of our portfolio companies have not, never really hit the targets and numbers that they sought out to achieve.”
Khan: Passed on OYO after meeting a sleeping 17-year-old Ritesh Agarwal
“So I think OYO was a company I had met Ritesh, and I didn't end up investing. In, in my defense, you know, he was 17 years old, and when I met him, he was sleeping.”
Khan: Orios avoids second-time founders due to their high valuation demands
“No, no, we prefer only first time entrepreneurs. We can't afford the valuation of the second time entrepreneurs. They're just too high.”
Gupta repeatedly discourages prospective founders to test their genuine commitment
“Like many entrepreneurs or people who want to be an entrepreneur come to me, I discourage them. And when they come after three, four times, then I know that they really want to do it.”
Afore Capital passed on Ramp's first round over its $25M valuation
“And then I believe like a year later, they came to us and they said, Hey, we're starting this new company called ramp. Obviously we loved them. We thought very highly of them. And the idea was interesting as well, but given the repeat founders their first roun…”
Afore Capital created a non-core bucket to back pricier repeat founders
“So now we added what we call a non-core bucket, right? These are investments that we would have loved to make them core, but for whatever reason, it's out of spec. It generally is because of deal terms. It's out of spec, and it's usually repeat founders, right…”