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
Kuveke: Deel planted a spy in Rippling to steal Slack data
“Apparently what went on is a deal found an ex rippling and found a rippling employee and basically planted them in the company. And then this guy just went into Slack channels and stole all of their like rippling sales and marketing information and Pawned off …”
Robinson: 6sense raised at 50x revenue and did not grow last year
“Six cents is a perfect example. They raised at 50 times revenue in 20, 21 or early 20, 22. And then they did not grow last year.”
Gurski: Flo is the only genuinely monetizable app in its category
“And it's still the single really monetizable app at the market because of the single app which like heavy enough to be monetizable.”
Carta Data: Only 4% of SAFE/Note Seed Bridges Reach Series A
“The percentage of companies that raised a seed round in twenty-twenty and then have raised some sort of bridge capital since then on a safe or a note. Only four percent of companies that fall into that bucket have gotten to a series A. Four percent versus like…”
Van Gaal prefers investing in startup founders under 35 years old
“And we generally prefer founders under the age of 30 to 35.”
Goldsmid: AI Agents Will Only Succeed at Low-Leverage Tasks
“And so I also think that the, are AI agents going to eventually get there for sure, right? But I think they're going to get there for relatively low leverage work. And I think that if they are interacting with a human, I think the human's going to get pretty a…”
Bilbao: LatAm founders must appear Americanized to raise mega venture rounds
“In Latam, as a founder, I feel that if you want to raise like giant funds,
You have to come across as an American or American Mitch.
You know what I mean?
Like somehow us educated, there's this need to feel very American.
Otherwise I don't think that you race.”
Frosst: Meta's Llama is a corporate giveaway for notoriety, not open source
“Lama, Lama three, like the stuff Meta is doing great models, great engineers, really cool stuff. But it's not open source the way Linux is open source. It's not open source the way, you know, I don't know, like Wikipedia's contributions are open source in that…”
Frosst: Large language models are not a clear path to AGI
“I don't think
It's a clear path to AGI.
I don't think we're going to be making digital gods anytime soon.”
Frosst: Creating human-like AGI is not an obvious human need
“It's not obvious to me that we want AGI. I don't wake up in the morning and say, gee, I wish my computer was a person. I wake up in the morning and I say, gee, I wish I could do my work faster. Like, gee, I wish I didn't have to do this boring thing. Gee, I wi…”
Theobald: Claims that AI robots will exceed human intelligence are 'bullshit'
“Even, you know, people see things like chat GPT and AI, and they think, oh, robots are going to be smarter than humans. No, that's bullshit.”
Theobald: Rogue AI exterminating humanity is not going to happen
“If people are worried about artificial intelligence coming alive and fighting against humans to, you know, protect us from ourselves, and then ultimately realizing that we're lost species and killing us all, not going to happen. It could happen that way, but t…”
Ujjainwalla: Knak integrates with Adobe Marketing Cloud better than Adobe does
“We connect better into the Adobe marketing cloud than Adobe does natively.
There are lots of integrations that don't exist through products that Adobe all owns that we do.”
Fishkin: Exited founders who don't compensate employees are bad people
“I think any founder who does well out of their business should make sure that all of their employees are taken care of. And if I can shame you into feeling terrible about taking your ten million dollars and being like, well, it's all mine. Like, yeah, legally …”
Srugo: Ignore Advice to Work On Your Business Instead of In It
“It's almost like, you know, they tell you shouldn't be working in the business. You should be working on the business. And I'm like, no, you should be working in the business as long as humanly possible. You should do whatever's the hardest thing to do that yo…”
McGee: Coding is a commodity and small part of running a startup
“To run a tech company, like really coding is a very small part of what you're doing. And it is in some ways a commodity.”
Antos: 30 conversations is the sweet spot to validate startup ideas
“What we found is like again and again, you want to talk to roughly 30 people to like validate an idea or invalidate an idea. 10 is not enough, because you can always find 10 friendlies or 10 unfriendlies. 50 or a hundred is too difficult, too many, right? But …”
Antos: Core product-market fit only reveals itself after 100 sales
“You truly find the, like, core of the product market fit once you sell hundred customers. It doesn't mean, you know, that it's, like, everybody's super happy and everybody's, like, at a huge, you know, deal size. But, like, again, like, around hundred, like, y…”
Antos: Qualitative PMF signals only matter in a startup's earliest days
“I think the qualitative stage of product market fit happens only very, very early. Right. Like that, like you launch it in an event and everybody wants to talk about it. It gives you conviction to take the next steps. But once you become a little bit bigger, o…”
Loiacono: A $10M ARR startup is nothing in consolidated healthcare markets
“Healthcare is highly consolidated. CVS, Cigna, and United Healthcare. Three publicly traded companies, all of which are I'm gonna say Fortune eight, Fortune 10, Fortune 14, respectively, in that range. And so when you're battling with titans, yeah, ten million…”
Loiacono: Traditional PBMs Charge Hundreds of Different Prices for Same Drug
“You know, so if a traditional pharmacy benefit manager, someone we compete with, they'll have hundreds of different prices for the same drug, same day, same pharmacy for different customers.”
Loiacono: Capital Rx won Fortune 500s by operating 70% more efficiently
“So if you read my business plan at the start, it was, we need to operate 70% more efficient than three fortune 15 companies. Now, their purchasing power was higher, but if we operated that at that efficiency, we could beat them head to head and we could do som…”
Loiacono: Screen for mission alignment by awaiting unprompted healthcare grievances from candidates
“Can't ask. You just avoid it. They have to bring it up. And if they bring it up, and the other and to this logic string is, and they shared something personal. Like, I have witnessed how bad healthcare is. Let me tell you why. Odds are, this is personal. They …”
Lindgren: Endra completes 80% to 90% of 400-hour engineering projects in under 10 minutes
“Once I ingest this into Endra, it, it's not perfect, but it comes to, like, 80, 90% of whatever I did before, and I spent 400 hours doing this project. And recredit this from in under 10 minutes.”
Zima: Failing to get outbound response rates indicates a product-market fit issue
“If you're not getting response rates, I think it's probably a good indication that like there's a product market fit
Issue at some level, but like, you gotta be able to describe what you're doing also.”
Broshi: Founders Confuse True PMF With Rapidly Building Enterprise Customizations
“I think that's the part where a lot of people are kind of confusing between product market fit of a product you currently have. Or that you have a great team that can execute very fast and be agile, and you build something else that that might fit whatever the…”
Broshi: Scaling multi-LLM components beats expanding prompt sizes for complex enterprise AI
“So I think we build the product from an architectural standpoint a lot different, where when complexity increases, it's not that we increase the prompt size. We increase the number of components of AI components of LLMs. That we use. So essentially when comple…”
Broshi: Winning an Enterprise Contract Is the Easiest Part of the Engagement
“Winning an enterprise contract is the easiest part of working with an enterprise.”
Broshi: Generative AI leveled tech playing field against Salesforce and Zendesk
“In terms of technology, you had the exact same shot of succeeding as Salesforce or Zendesk, et cetera.”
Broshi: Founders must build only where enterprise budget exists within 12 months
“You want to build something where there's a budget for it right now, or you're very confident that there's going to be a budget for it in next six to 12 months. The thing is, you know, those kind of tech waves, if they haven't started yet, they might start tom…”
Broshi: Enterprise AI transformation will take 5 to 15 years
“There's going to be a huge transformation now in AI. It's not going to take a year. It's not gonna take two years. Enterprise takes time. It's gonna take five, 1015 years.”
Broshi: Insurers Waiting Three Years on AI Will Fall Irreparably Behind
“Unlike cloud, what I think we're going to see is that companies in commoditized industries, such as insurance or banking, where the products are pretty similar, will not have the opportunity to wait for three years and say, hey, let's wait for those things to …”
Broshi: AI Hype Will Die After IPO Drops 40% on Poor ROI
“What's going to happen soon is we're going to see that AI costs are through the roof. Companies aren't seeing ROI. Then a company that IPO is going to drop by 40% because of that. And then the hype cycle Of AI will die. And obviously I do think, and everyone a…”
Broshi: Fewer than five AI support vendors can serve regulated enterprises on-prem
“There aren't a lot of players out there. That can deploy on-prem with a company in a regulated space to have the kind of capability that they would require with the same level of compliance and security and being able to meet their SLA and data requirements. T…”
Broshi: Early-stage startups are killed by copying rivals, not direct competition
“I don't think competition is what kills startups at our stages, right? It's competition makes you do stupid things like copy other players or go toward the second, a different direction.”
Broshi: Enterprise contracts don't require gradually stepping up deal sizes
“I think there is zero connection between getting an enterprise deal and going from 10 K to 50 K to a hundred K to 200 K.”
Broshi: Enterprise buyers asking for more logos actually means missed pain points
“When people, when enterprise tells you, Hey, you need more logos. The reason is probably different. Okay. Now the more logos you have, the easier it is because you have credibility. So they'll start by thinking that you probably have something to offer them, b…”
Teller: X bans employees from discussing who originated an idea
“We've literally don't track whose idea it was.
We don't let people talk about who founded the idea.”
Astro Teller: Innovation alpha comes from efficient discovery, not generating ideas
“Ideas are trivially easy.
We have a thousand ideas a year that many of them just don't even get code names.
Ideas are not the hard part.
Our alpha comes from how efficiently we can discover which ideas are valuable.”
Teller: Google Glass was too early, but the core thesis was right
“Google glass. Turns out we were too, too early there, but increasingly it's looking like we were very right. The whole world has come back around to that. But when we made it, we were trying to figure out, we have a sense that people want to get away from thei…”
Teller: De-risk the hardest element before building supporting infrastructure
“In this extreme situation, we can see that if you built the pedestal, you're half done, but you're really zero percent done at burning down the risk.
[1649] Pablo Srugo: That's right.
[1650] Astro Teller: The point of a testable hypothesis, especially at X, …”
Astro Teller: Standard product-market fit rarely changes complex global systems
“Finding some little thing that people will buy, which in some sense is a product market fit actually doesn't have a very good chance of changing the system. If our real goal is to fix the system, then we have to figure out a much more complex set of things.”
Teller: Narrow product-market fit risks building 'a ladder to the moon'
“And I worry that there's a bunch of product market fit that is so siloed. It's just building a ladder to the moon. You might build a pretty tall ladder, but you're not going to get to the moon.”
Teller: Selling to incumbents can build a billion-dollar company without changing the industry
“You can make a billion dollars a year selling to incumbents, but you're probably not going to change some huge industry if the incumbents who are your main customers don't want the industry to change.”
Nicolaescu: Masking AI errors during enterprise pilots guarantees post-sale disappointment
“I've heard of pilots where you get something and they have AI, but then they have humans that go and correct things that AI got wrong, and then they give you the final thing. And it's like, well, that's not really the AI part. You should be upfront about that …”
Nicolaescu: Top software engineers are now 100x engineers with AI
“Like there used to be the Tenex engineer before. Now I think those Tenex engineers are a hundred X engineers.”
Accrual operates without management, 1-on-1s, or scheduled meetings
“So we don't have management at this company. I think it's technically everybody reports to meet, but we don't do one-on-ones. We don't have scheduled meetings.”
Nicolaescu says AI breaks standard interviews, requiring multi-day work trials
“We do work trials, for example, where we spend like several days with people, typically like a couple of days with every hire that we haven't worked with to work together through real problems. Part of it is I don't know how to interview in the day of AI, beca…”