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 69 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
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…”
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.”
Walker: Bridged startups now graduate to the next stage at higher rates
“Weirdly, in the last year, there's been a couple quarters where the companies that took a bridge More of them have made it to the next stage and the companies who haven't taken a bridge yet.”
Zach Lloyd: Warp was the first software product to coin agent mode
“And so we moved to this model and we called it agent mode, which everyone has copied that name, by the way, if you look it up on chat GPT, we were the first people to call anything agent mode.”
Mercado Libre's Local Market Share Likely Exceeds Amazon's US Market Share
“The market share that Mercolibre has probably is larger than the market share of Amazon in the US.”
ZayZoon was the first to offer wage access via payroll integration
“Zayzun was first to do this with an actual payroll company using that payroll integration as a way to extend those funds.”
Mikesell: Carbon Robotics will likely IPO within one to two years
“We seem like we're on the path, you know, where we keep doing what we're doing. We'll probably have an IPO in the next. You're too, you know, we'll, we'll, yes, we'll have a billion dollar outcome here that looks more likely every day.”
The Net Average Number of Mobile Apps Consumers Download Annually Is Zero
“The average number of apps that a consumer downloads a year is zero. They delete just as many apps as they download.”
Srugo: Super founders are 6x more likely to build unicorns
“If you actually look at the research, what you'll find is that super founders, these are multi-time founders who've had material success in the past. Super founders are six times more likely than first time founders to create a unicorn.”
Bland AI aired localized Super Bowl TV ads in three regional markets
“So we shot and filmed a four K ready for TV ad. We aired it in, I think Arizona, Las Vegas, and San Francisco. And we had a bunch of influencers ready to go.”
Goel: Accounting department attrition is among highest after sales
“And the attrition in the accounting department is one of the highest After sales because people just need to take health breaks and they just, they are done with this.”
Srugo: Tenex Grew From Zero to $40M ARR in One Year
“So if you look at Tenex growing from zero to forty million ARR in one year, which is insane. It's literally on a track to be like the next whiz.”
Slavin: Spending on the Delta AmEx card equals 1% of US GDP
“The Delta Amex card would be one percent of the GDP of the U.S. Being spent on a airline credit card, they would have said, that's insane. It'll never happen. But it turns out that that is exactly what happened.”
All RSA Innovation Sandbox winners become multi-billion dollar or public companies
“The winners of that competition are all like multi-billion dollar companies, you know, some of the biggest public companies and everything.”
Donzé: Nearly 100% of enterprise document management remains legacy on-premises Java servers
“And this didn't exist because a hundred percent of the document management market was, and still is today almost, On-prem, on-prem traditional Java server, you know, like WebSphere and all that, all of that old school kind of technologies.”
Brigit, Dave, and EarnIn were the only three EWA players in 2017
“The three companies that existed, including us, in some form trying to solve this problem, and we were all doing it differently.
The business models, we never had tips, for example, and our core focus was just only using cash flow data
Including being able to …”
Woollen: Sutter Hill primarily incubates companies rather than investing externally
“They're an interesting firm and that they tend to primarily start companies as opposed to investing in other people's companies.”
Dearsley: No Speech-to-Speech Models Existed in October 2023
“There was not a single like speech to speech model in existence at the time. And there was no research that was far along anything like that.”
Malling: Public was first to offer real-time fractional shares
“We were the first to actually do that real time thing that didn't exist before.”
Malling: Public.com remains the only platform offering fractional bond trading
“Funnily enough, because we're the only ones that still have that, and so obviously that's been a great differentiator for the last couple of years, especially as yields have gone up”
Google search rankings incorporate brand mentions on Reddit and Team Blind
“Google does actually look at these things. Like they don't actually just look at backlinks. They also look at mentions. And so Team Blind and, you know, Reddit, they actually have pretty high authority scores, like the highest, right? Because they've been arou…”
Min: CT scans are the only current tool to visualize soft arterial plaque
“In this particular case, the only technology that's available today that allows you to look at that really bad plaque, which is the very cholesterol fatty filled plaques that are building up silently in the walls of patient's arteries is the CT scan today.”
Just Eat Cycled Through Six CEOs in Two Years After Acquiring SkipTheDishes
“We went through six CEOs of Just Eat in two years, well, after we were there.”
Liberty: The term 'vector database' did not exist when Pinecone started
“The term vector database didn't exist. It just didn't exist. We'd, nobody talked about it this way.”
Dabble hit $30M revenue in year two and $75M in year three.
“Our second year was about thirty million dollars. Third full year we'd just completed was about seventy-five million dollars.”
Giannaros: SnapCard was the first crypto wallet with a public API
“And the reason why it got so big was because we were the first crypto wallet that had an API released to the public where you could use the API.”
Wyre coined the industry term 'OnRamp' and built the first widget
“We wrote a blog post on this, and we called it OnRamp and we were like the first OnRamp widget, and today that's a whole category, but we're like the first people that coined that, that term back in 2018”
Only 10% to 15% of employees actively check payroll self-service portals
“Well, in reality, like how many employees actually use a self-service portal to look at their pay stub? It's about 10, 15%.”
Top 1% of athletes capture 99% of all endorsement revenue
“The top one percent athletes make 99% of all the endorsement revenue.”
Mishra: $450B to $500B is spent manually on digital marketing labor
“Marketing is a space, especially digital marketing where 450,000,000,005, five hundred billion dollars is being spent just using human bodies out there.”
Walker: SaaS customer acquisition costs have spiked by up to 4x
“Cost to acquire a customer is more than doubled in a SaaS business, sometimes three or four X.”
Fishman: Most income verification services are handled manually via paper and phone banks
“The majority of income verification services happen manually. So our largest competitor is paper, is phone banks, is emails, is scanners.”
Srugo: All $10B+ mobile-first companies were created between 2008 and 2012
“If you look at the period from 2008 to 2012, that is when all
Of the ten billion dollar plus mobile first companies were created. Uber, Lyft, Postmates, Spotify, Venmo, WhatsApp, they all were created during that time.”
Krátký-Katz: eyeo acquired Blockthrough in late 2023
“And so they ended up acquiring us late last year.”
Amazon's advertising profits now match its AWS profits
“And now I just saw that the, like, if you look at just the profits from the advertisement business is now matching the profits of AWS.”
Srugo: Shopify burned only $3 million of net cash before its IPO
“From the time that they started to the time they went public, they raised a hundred million dollars in total. And when they went public, They had ninety seven million dollars on their balance sheet. So the net cash to use in all that time was just three millio…”
Zima: Looker was growing 100% annually when acquired
“Looker was still growing a hundred percent a year when we got acquired, you know, like the business wasn't going poorly.”
Englander: Fancy expanded from 0 to 15 UK cities in six months
“We went from zero cities to I think 15 cities in about six months.”
Sherman: Mass-market multi-brand retailers operate on sub-5% gross margins
“Retailers Operate on super low gross margins. Like most mass market, multi brand retailer is like sub five percent gross margins.”
Scott: Index investing grew from 1% to 50% of AUM by 2015
“Index investing in 2000 was, you know, one percent of assets under management. You fast forward to 2015, it's approaching 50%, right? So it's almost half of all assets are invested in sort of passive or index-like products”
Robinson: Constant Contact IPO'd at $100M ARR when Mailchimp had $2M ARR
“Constant contact IPO'd with a hundred million ARR when MailChimp was at two million ARR.”
Gurski: Half of 2015's top ten health apps were period trackers
“When we started Floor, there were like dozens, maybe hundreds of popular period trackers, and in top 10 of health and fitness category, five sets were period trackers, and it was the main motivation.”
Wang: Amplitude finished 2016 with over $13M in ARR
“The year ended up being great. We ended up over 13. Million in AR.”
OpenSea was doing $0 per day in volume when integrating Wyre
“We were getting merchants, like, no one had the solution, so we were getting, like, OpenSea, we were getting, like, all these, like, huge platforms that we're literally doing zero dollars a day in volume”