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 560 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…”
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…”
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.”
Sierra suffered a massive AI agent failure with Gap
“There was a massive hiccup with AI agents that Sierra launched for Gap.”
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.”
Roy Lee: I recorded myself using Interview Coder during an Amazon interview
“I record myself using it on Amazon.”
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.”
Carta Data: Only 4% of SAFE Bridge Startups Reach Series A
“If you took a bridge on a safe or a note after you had already raised price funding, so this is all about priced seeds to price series A, the percentage on the convertible bridges was four percent.”
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 …”
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.”
Hughes: YC internal data proves staying in SF yields higher success rates
“When we graduated from Y Combinator on the last day, they just put up, like, all the data behind, like, companies who stay in SF and companies that leave SF. Even if you go to New York, like, it just, like, the chances of success are just so much higher if you…”
Walker: AI foundation model seed startups reach $160M-$200M post-money valuations
“There's always this cohort of mostly candidly AI infrastructure companies that are building foundational models or building like the tech around foundational models, and they are getting valued at Just astronomical numbers. You know, I call it a 160, 170, 182 …”
Walker: Zero-revenue AI infrastructure startups are raising hundreds of millions
“Then there's this toward, you know, those AI infrastructure companies might be earning zero dollars and they're raising hundreds of millions because they're, they haven't, you know, come out with their new world model yet or whatever it is.”
Kuruvilla: Spangle boosts e-commerce conversion up to 50%
“We have case studies that demonstrate that we can bring up to almost a 50% increase in conversion, 30% increase in revenue per visit.”
Mashrabov: Vertical drama apps beat Netflix on month-one ARPU
“I mean, essentially, they have higher average revenue per paying user in month one. Think about then Netflix.”
Walker: Top-quartile seed valuation barely increases Series A graduation rate
“What it showed is that on a percentage of graduation basis, yes, the highest valued companies graduate to Series A little bit more often than the other companies. But it's not a massive difference. It's within a couple percentage points.”
Eskildsen: Turbopuffer is 100x cheaper than incumbent vector databases
“The innovation of Turbo Puffer is that it is almost a hundred times cheaper than the incumbents at the time to store that coordinate system.”
Noronha: Paul Graham Criticized Gamma's Launch Tweet About Slide-Making
“I actually remember Paul Graham
replied to the tweet and said, making slides is not the most valuable tool in business.
Like, anybody who thinks this is not making a good business.
Like, the way to make a good business is to make a good product.”
Average bank overdraft borrowers paid $69 to borrow $70 for four days
“What we saw Was the average overdraft borrowing was only about 70 dollars, and people were overdrafting twice, so paying about 68, 69 dollars in fees for a matter of four days of borrowing.”
US banks generated $30B annually in overdraft fees around 2018
“The reality is when we started our company, banks, We're making about thirty billion dollars in overdraw fees. Thirty billion dollars.”
Paycheck-to-paycheck Americans pay up to 80% of bank overdraft fees
“And then you start to see who's paying 80% or 75% of those fees, who's paying Is it people who've got 10,000 dollars in their bank account who just made a mistake and didn't transfer money from one place to the other? It's not. It's the hundred plus million Am…”
Kuveke: Ilya Sutskever's SSI raised at a $34B valuation with zero revenue
“Safe super intelligence with this Ilya, the old CTO of open AI's company just raised at a thirty four billion dollar valuation. And what, how much money are they making? Zero.”
Kuveke: Mira Murati raising $2B seed at a $10B valuation
“Mira, the other co-founder of OpenAI is raising a two billion dollar seed round at a ten billion dollar valuation. She's not offering the rules of the engagement are that she has more, more board votes than everyone combined on the board plus one.”
DoorDash Offered Canadian Restaurants 0% Commission to Undercut SkipTheDishes
“Once they started focusing on Canada, they would go and offer restaurants to have what we were doing for 25% commission. They would just do for free.”
Bolt backed out of its Wyre acquisition on the scheduled closing date
“Yes, and basically you always find definitive agreement, and then you have closing conditions that usually take like a year, like we have to transfer our licenses over to them, and meet all these closing conditions, and then we had a closing there's like some …”
Walker: 58% of two-founder startup teams split equity unequally
“Something like 58% of two founder teams split unequally, so not fifty-fifty.”
Carta Data: Smallest Seed Rounds Graduate to Series A Less Frequently
“The general gist of it was that if you raise a small seed round, that is less highly correlated with your ability to raise an A round. So it looks to be that the smallest, and there's a bell curve here where, you know, at the smallest seed rounds tend to make …”
Loiacono: US drug spend surged from $110B in 2000 to $1T today
“If we went back to 2000, the year 2000, The total drug spend in the United States was like a hundred and ten billion dollars. We fast forward to today. It's a trillion.”
Teller: X shut down its nuclear fusion project after 1,000 plasma shots
“We closed this down about a year and a half ago. We had a fusion project. We ran it. We did build something the size of a house. We did almost a thousand plasma shots. We convinced ourself it was not going to change the world. And we closed the project down”
Walker: Current Series A Rounds Average $14M–$15M at $75M Post-Money
“Like, you're talking 14, fifteen million dollars raised. You're talking seventy-five million or so post-money valuations on that.”
Walker: Seed-to-Series A 12-Month Graduation Rate Has Rebounded to 10%
“You've got the companies that raised about a year ago. So Q one of 20, 25 or so, how many of them have gotten to series A so far? It's something like 10 to 11%, which in a year is actually pretty good. It's much better than it was in 20, 22 or 23, where it was…”
Walker: Median Seed Company on Carta Has Four Non-Founder Employees
“We're seeing like the median seed stage company on Carta has four employees, not counting the founders.”
Haroun: Law firm rates increased 18% year-over-year since AI emerged
“The rates actually have gone up 18% year over year since AI came out.”
Haroun: Tech companies using AI tools are hiring more developers, not fewer
“Everyone in the Valley or really any tech company at this point is now using
Maybe previously cursor increasingly clod or whatever the mechanism is right to no longer write any code manually, but we're not hiring fewer developers.
We're hiring way more.”
d’Sa: Most Voice AI Platforms Like Vapi Run on LiveKit
“So VAPI and like land and retail and some of these, most of them actually are built on top of LiveKit. And so they use our infrastructure for all of the transport.”
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.”
Walker: Seed deal volume will decline in 2025 despite higher invested capital
“When you look at the data, yes, there's more capital being invested, but the number of rounds at seed stage for us this year is actually going to go down.”
Walker: Lowest-quartile seed startups reach Series A half as often
“The companies that didn't had a big, big change were the lowest valued companies. So the lowest quartile, if you were raising a seed round and it's in the zero to call it 25th percentile of valuation, so on the very low end, those companies made it to series A…”
Walker: SAFEs Dominate All Startup Fundraising Rounds Under $4 Million
“Like safes are the dominant way to get money into a business. Now, anything under four million dollars is dominated by safes. Where it used to be, you'd start on safes and then you'd raise a seed, but if you're raising two and a half, three, four million dolla…”
Walker: Series A startup headcount dropped from 25 to 16-17 employees
“Series A, 20, 21, you had 25 people working for the company, full-time equity holding employees working for the company. Now you probably have 17. 16.”
Walker: AI/ML engineer pay rose up to 40% in 18 months
“Actually, AI ML engineers over the last 18 months on Carta, their pay packages have risen between 25 and 40%.”
Walker: Almost no seed-stage secondary transactions include startup employees
“While we're seeing, call it close to double the amount of founders taking something out at seed, like almost none of them have employee participation.”
Walker: Only 20% of seed startups reach Series A within two years
“The latest data has it at 20% of companies got from seed to A in two years or less.”
Snowden leaks accelerated VDI demand and created Nutanix's killer use case
“And after Snowden, basically, There was a big push towards virtualizing desktops. Like, okay, no machine leaves the premises. Everything is actually on the inside, and it became a great use case for us to say, let's virtualize the windows, desktops, in an envi…”
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.”
Walker: AI seed-stage valuations are 40% to 50% higher than non-AI
“We're showing a chart right now that shows seed stage valuations for AI companies being 40 to 50% higher.”
Walker: Median Series A ARR rose from $1M in 2021 to $3M in 2024
“So it used to be in 20, 21, that the median amount of CAT or median amount of ARR for a Series A company is like just above one million bucks. In 20, 24, that was nearly three million dollars. And on the top quartile, so 75th percentile ARR used to be in 21, a…”