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 17 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
Ten-slide pitch decks let founders superficially change strategy without true focus
“The problem with a ten-page deck is you could go in and Change your whole strategy by changing two slides, you know, like that's not focusing, you know, it's and I feel like that's so easy to just throw a couple of ideas on and not have to really go through th…”
Lightspeed would not have survived or scaled without quadrupling its pricing
“We would not be here today if we didn't times four. There's just no way. That allowed us to build the software that ended up being adopted by All of those users on a large level. And if we had kept the software cheap and had the same number of it, just nothing…”
Cameo achieved net negative churn on the creator supply side
“On the supply side. We had net negative churn. So not only were the, like, our talent cohorts were growing every single month when you looked at our waterfall.”
Garg: Lightspeed assigned an associate to join Eightfold's customer validation calls
“When I went to Lightspeed, right, and I was talking to Peter. So what Peter did was Peter assigned a junior person from the firm saying that, why don't you help Ashu set a few CHRO calls and see what comes out. So as I was building my thesis, Lightspeed was bu…”
Resellers turned $5,000 Lightspeed software deals into $25,000 total hardware installations
“They're making 25% after off the 5000, but they're also selling You know, at the time it was all on-premise. They're selling servers. They're selling computers. They're selling networking. They're selling training. You know, we were selling five, 5000 dollars …”
Partner with adjacent ecosystem players who bundle and monetize surrounding services
“I think the lesson is like, if you're building a product, like who are the adjacent people in the ecosystem that could be selling what you're doing alongside with what they're doing, right? They're, these guys were used to selling software, but they were reall…”
Startup founders must completely discard their job description every single year
“Be willing to throw away that job description every year. You know, be honest with yourself. There's things that you love, the things that you think you're great at, that you add, that add the most value to the business, but be ready to do a real assessment of…”
Startups fail to scale when technical founders remain stuck in coding
“I saw in those early days, a lot of other companies that the founder was still coding after a very long period of time and they didn't scale, you know, like it was the founder was still debugging things in, in the middle of the night, instead of going out to m…”
Dasilva used early Lightspeed profits to buy physical real estate as insurance
“I was buying real estate with our profits and just building it like a real, I felt like if anything happened with a software business, I wanted some assets for the company, you know, so I would buy the company, buy the, buy these buildings and rented to light …”
Lightspeed reached $10M bootstrapped revenue via 400 global software resellers
“After seven years of bootstrapping, cause that was our journey, a seven year of bootstrapping, we got to ten million of annual revenue, which was all software. All of that was driven by 400 resellers around the world, making 25% on times four pricing.”
Snapchat pitched Lightspeed with 50% DAU/MAU, 50% D30 retention, 50% MoM growth
“What I saw was 50% daily active user to monthly active user. Ratio. I saw 50% D-thirty retention. And I saw 50% month-on-month growth on a statistically significant number of users. I can't remember exactly what it was. It was 10 or 20,000 DAUs. And that had b…”
Lightspeed did not transition to the cloud until raising from Accel VC
“It wasn't until like we brought in a VC that we actually transitioned to the cloud. And that was actually, that was a huge part of the transformation that we did with Excel that was huge, hugely successful and allowed us to do everything we're doing now.”
Year one: 43 global resellers traveled to Montreal for Lightspeed training
“When 43 resellers came to Montreal from Saudi Arabia and Australia and Ireland and all over the US and all over Canada to get trained on a one-year-old system so they could resell it around all over the world.”
The original Lightspeed interface was modeled after Apple's iTunes playlists
“What the original version of Lightspeed was almost set up like iTunes now called Apple Music. Now it makes no sense anymore. But back in the day, like iTunes had like playlists on the side and like content on the other side. And we built, you know, the origina…”
Early Mac dealership customers became Lightspeed's global reseller network
“And then when they were good at, when they were really good at the software, after one or two years, they became our international distribution network. They became our resellers and they started to sell Lightspeed in their neighborhoods. And that's where the …”
Dax Dasilva's initial goal was an Apple Design Award, not a $1B company
“My only goal was not to build a company with a public company that's at a billion dollars. I have no finance background. It was not, I had not even a clue what that even meant. All I wanted out of this whole thing was to win an Apple Design Award from Steve Jo…”