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 3,978 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 20 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
Loiacono: Competing PBMs Faked Mandatory Federal Compensation Disclosures in 2023
“23 people needed to start reporting this information, people being pharmacy benefit managers and administrators like ourselves, Had to start reporting this information. And what we realized is people were faking it. They either weren't doing it or they were pr…”
Amazon threatened to boycott Columbia unless they suspended Roy Lee
“An Amazon executive sees this. They send a letter to Columbia saying, essentially, you need to expel this kid, or we're never going to hire you from your school anymore, and it's, like, a very thinly veiled threat. Columbia sees the letter. They loop me into a…”
Wipro cut its HR team by 45% using Ema's AI agents
“For Wipro, for example, they report from thousand people. They have been able to first, you know, reduce the time taken for any of these requests. These are not just questions, requests from five to seven days to like few seconds to minutes. Right. So that's a…”
Anderson: Heavily funded legal AI tools Harvey and Legora are GPT wrappers
“Harvey and Lagora were GPT wrappers when they started, and I think they're basically still GPT wrappers today. I think they know that that's a problem, by the way, that that doesn't provide a very significant moat, and they're trying to become more like system…”
Dheeraj Pandey claims no AI company currently has true multi-tenant architecture
“There is no AI company that's multi-tenant right now. There is no AI company that's multi-tenant.”
Robinson: 6sense will eventually sell below its liquidation preference
“Like what's going to happen to them is the same thing that happened to Infusionsoft. They will eventually sell for less than their preferred because that's the only path unless they can reinvent the, you know, what are they trying to do?”
Pre-seed angel investor refused to fund Overjet without a male CEO
“An investor, this was an angel investor, they have a fund, a pre-seed fund, who basically told me, hey, I really like you. However the chances of you getting funded next are so low that I don't want to put, you know money in because I think the statistics they…”
Loiacono: Traditional PBMs have a 'horrible conflict of interest'
“I felt this was a horrible conflict of interest. The conflict of interest is, think about it, if you're asking someone to manage your benefit plan, and the more expensive the medication, the more money they make, that doesn't sound like a recipe for good outco…”
Loiacono: Smaller Employers Suffer From Shadier, Highly Commissioned Brokers
“The smaller the employer group, usually the shadier the broker. And what I mean by this is they're going to be like, I'm going to get paid on everything and anything. The larger the client, you start to see, I would say some professional behavior here and some…”
Lindgren: One engineer using Endra matches 50-person design team's output
“So the end result they're getting is the same one as if they were to use us, the design team of 50 people, but it, you know, you can do it from one person and you can do it much faster and you can do much better.”
Lindgren: Endra spent $150K on brand and website before having a product
“I think we spent maybe a 150 something, 150 K something. So like building the first web, building the first sort of visuals and motion around the product and like before there is almost anything.”
Teller: Remote work hurts creativity, creates silos, and reduces hard work
“And so far I've seen no evidence that we can be at our creative best when we're remote from each other. I think people work somewhat less hard, but they also work in much more siloed ways.”
Nicolaescu expects AI token costs to rise due to energy constraints
“At the end of the day, tokens represent capacity and we're very constrained on capacity. We don't have enough energy. We don't have enough data centers and the demand is, is exponential. And so if I think about it from that angle, I think actually token costs …”
Kurdin: Companies no longer need product managers to relay information
“Good written culture and no public managers. I was always bearish from the role and now more so. I don't think you need a conduit of information anymore. And, you know, I think engineers should work with customers and yeah, if someone has good design standards…”
Dan Mishin: The vast majority of top AI engineers are in China
“Vast majority of best AI engineers in the world are in China today.”
Granet: Bland AI aims to eventually handle 911 emergency calls
“In the future, something that we want to handle is nine-on-one calls. We want to be the first line of where you call and we want to have that trust.”
Granet: Bland AI fired 50% of customers after Series A, dropping ARR sub-$1M
“We got to two million dollars of revenue by the end of April. We raised our series A from scale venture partners in June. And then immediately afterwards, we turned around and we fired 50% of our customers. And we dropped down to sub a million dollars of reven…”
Kahlow: Salesforce is fundamentally broken because it keeps humans in the loop
“So everything that Salesforce and all of the legacy SaaS providers are doing are building systems around a human. And I think that's what's fundamentally broken is that we actually don't need the humans in the loop anymore.”
Sierra suffered a massive AI agent failure with Gap
“There was a massive hiccup with AI agents that Sierra launched for Gap.”
Rival Litify sold to PE for a small amount and stopped competing
“They sold for a pretty small amount of money to a private equity group, and the company's still around today, and, ah, you know, not trying to be negative about them, but we don't see them come up in deals anymore. I think it's pretty fair to say that we won t…”
Jones: Method Security Shunned User Advisory Boards to Build on Pure Conviction
“Like everyone wants to go build their customer advisory board, talk to users and say like, what do you need? What do you need? We just built to our like opinion about the world that we wanted to build and basically just shut everything else out for quite some …”
Madheswaran: EvenUp relied on offshore labor before layering in AI
“Versus even for the time was kind of done by offshore human labor on two very specific tasks. And they're now layering in AI.”
Hamdy: Companies That Do Not Embrace AI Will Disappear by 2026
“Now you don't embrace AI. You are gone. You are not a company in 20, 26.”
Competitors Vena, Cube, and DataRails face acute churn problems
“So on Vena and Cube and Data Rails. And so their churn problems are like fairly acute and we get people switching from them all the time.”
Mashrabov: Adobe is in huge trouble from AI editing
“I don't want to do click baits for you, but it feels to me that Adobe is in a huge trouble.”
Mashrabov: No startup besides OpenAI and Anthropic can win in foundation models
“I think it's very difficult for me to see Any other company than OpenAI and Anthropic are being competitive in the foundational model space. It's just very, very difficult for a startup to be a foundation model company. I don't want to say anything bad about c…”
Foster: Pure-software AI SOC companies will fail pivoting to services
“I think most of the other AI SOC software companies are going to end up either trying to become services companies, which they're going to fail miserably at because they've never actually built or run services companies. And guess what? It's way harder than yo…”
Espinoza: AI search monitoring tools like Profound are completely useless
“If you look at all the major competitors right now, so Profound or any of these AI Geo tools, they're not doing that. Everyone is just monitoring, which in my opinion is completely useless.”
Salesforce and ServiceNow will resist the MCP movement to protect UI engagement
“We don't just depend on Salesforce's MCP or ServiceNow's MCP. Which, by the way, they won't be very good at. I can tell you that because they don't want to be a data-only company. These large incumbents, they don't want to be a data-only company. They would ra…”
Gong is 'in tatters' because narrow point solutions cannot reach multi-billion scale
“A use case is a focus, but when you look at Gong, for example, it's in tatters. Like, hey, we're just going to do a 10, 15,000 dollar thing, and we just created a two, three hundred million dollar business. But unless you can make a few billion dollars on your…”
Eskildsen: IOI computer science competition contributes more to GDP than the Olympics
“The problem is that no one's heard about it, but it contributes more to GDP than the real Olympics.”
Carlson: Fired Tiger Global Partner Made a Killing Buying Carvana Stock Personally
“Tiger sold out at the bottom of Carvana. This guy went out and just stocked up in his personal life and just made an absolute annihilating killing.”
Carlson: Work-life balance is BS; working maximum cycles achieves PMF faster
“The whole work life balancing is BS. Like if you're building something, there's no work life balance. And the reason why that is, is I think you have to go through a lot of cycles. And so the more like, if you work more, you go through more cycles, fail more, …”
Scott: VCs who pitch value-add rarely deliver real value
“I hate to say it, but I think the venture investors that have to sell their value adder off are not the ones that are the value adder. The ones that are the value adder off are the people who have been builders before. The people who can empathize with the ear…”
Customer interviews fail because they reveal idealized workflows instead of reality
“I'm a very firm believer, and I actually took that from back then, and it's still true today, that you will only understand the problems that you could solve and the potential solutions if you're there. Everyone in product says that you have to speak to your c…”
Ding: Remote 'rockstar' engineers cannot succeed at Merge
“It doesn't matter if you're a rockstar engineer, because you wouldn't be a rockstar engineer at Merge.”
Ding: Delay monetization until your pipeline can reach $1M ARR quickly
“I think you should not collect revenue and not onboard customers until you know that you are going to get a million of revenue as quickly as possible.”
US domestic stablecoin usage is mostly for illicit activities
“The only reason you'd want to use stable coins for domestic transactions is if you were, like, doing something shady, you know? Like, I don't know, like, buying drugs or something.”
Patel: Give SaaS away to monetize massive backend markets
“So why not give away product and not try to focus on product market fit and give it away for free and get them to pay for something that is more valuable. Or something which has a bigger, forget valuable, something that has a bigger market. You now have all th…”
Patel: Giving away average software to sell services beats pursuing PMF
“I think it's easier to build an average product, give it away for free, collect a lot of leads and sell them into something else where people in that space also pay for. And then now you got a cheaper flywheel than spending money on Google ads or trying to do …”
Roy Lee: I recorded myself using Interview Coder during an Amazon interview
“I record myself using it on Amazon.”
Lee: 70,000 viral telemetry data points beats talking to users
“Like, I think one of the biggest benefits of going so viral is now you don't really have to talk to users as much because you can sort of see user data and the quicker you get to see user data, like I'd rather see 70,000 user data points rather than talk to se…”
Roy Lee: Going viral and winning audience mindshare necessarily requires controversy
“To be in the mind of the audience, you must be in the eyes of the audience. And that means necessarily go viral and go viral necessarily means be controversial.”
Founders Must Be Able to Get Out of the Present
“A lot of people say to me, Hey, well, I don't have a natural way to get out of the present. And I'm like, okay, then maybe you shouldn't be thinking of starting a startup.”
Chase, Wells Fargo, and Bank of America each made $2B in overdraft
“Chase, Wells Fargo, and Bank of America at that point in time, again, going back to seven years, were each making two billion annually. That's so give or take six billion, and almost all of that goes to their nibbets. It's almost all Pre-tax profit.”