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 193 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 4 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
Lemkin Calls Adobe's $5B AI-Influenced Revenue Metric 'Malarkey'
“Adobe on its last earnings called Adobe is, I mean, it has some AI tools in, in create creative, but it's not ahead of a lot of the competition. I think it said it had five billion of AI influenced revenue. What malarkey.”
Net Tech Hiring Is Now Negative in Austin and Miami
“SF, almost all the hiring and net hiring in tech is in SF. It's twice New York. And basically after SF in New York, there is no net hiring. It's net negative in Austin. It's net negative in Miami.”
Lemkin: Generic $20-a-Month AI Copilots Are a Failure
“This is why co-pilots are like a failure. No one wants to pay for the office co-pilot. That does a little bit extra for another 20 bucks a month. They want something that does something incredibly powerful and very meaningful with almost instant ROI.”
Lemkin: A B-Plus AI Handles Sales Leads Better Than Humans
“It's better to give a precious lead to an ad to a B plus AI than to give it to someone in sales. That's going to quit, not show up or screw up the deal.”
Cabane: Web front ends will disappear as LLMs query databases directly
“It is not hard to imagine that the front end of the web disappears. Like the idea of having a database of the content and a website, and then rendering that PHP into HTML, and then having a browser interpret the HTML, and then having a human read like the, thi…”
Cabane: ChatGPT will drive 25% to 33% of traffic in nine months
“I believe we're going to a webless world. I believe GPT is going to be like a quarter to a third of the traffic and nine months from now, right?”
Nithrakashyap: Ignore startup advice to say no; say yes to everything
“I know there's this advice that say no to a 95%. I don't believe in that. I think you have to say yes to yes to everything, right? Because if you lose, if you miss a large fortune, 500 customer, it may be a hundred K deal down the road. That's a 20, 30 X lifet…”
Rangan: Traditional search is dead for driving website traffic
“Search is gone. Like, we're not just searching to get the information anymore. AI overviews are actually providing answers, so waiting for search to lead traffic to your website is gone.”
Lemkin: Fire Any Executive Who Is Not Deeply Curious About AI by July
“If anyone on your executive team, or honestly, I know this is tough love, anyone on your team that by June, is not deeply curious, like is not pretending to use chat GPT once a week to get recipes... By June, if not, if July won, I would like just start taking…”
Lemkin: Sales Commission Rates Will Halve by End of 2026
“I actually think what's going to happen because of attribution is commissions are going to have by the end of next year. Because this is how the math is going to work. You're going to get credit for the It's not just PLG. You're going to get credit for Kyle's …”
Lemkin: CROs must manage 50/50 AI and human teams by year-end
“I think this year, To be a RevOps professional imminently in a CRO by the end of this year, you will have to know how to manage a fifty-fifty team. 50% AI, 50% human. Not just tools, but you will have to learn how to manage agents, agents, AIs, whether that's …”
Lemkin: AI Will Outperform 80% of Sales Reps by 2026
“Because your AI, at least by next year, is going to be better than 80% of sales reps. Not the best.”
Lemkin: All $100M+ ARR SaaS Portfolios Have Slowed to 10-20% Growth
“If you talk to VCs here that have been around for a while and you have a quiet conversation, ask them how many folks in your portfolio are north of a hundred million, and now are seeing growth in the 10 or 20% range. All of them. All of them. It didn't used to…”
Benioff: Microsoft Used 'Dark' and 'Horrible' Tactics to Attack Slack
“You can see the horrible things that Microsoft did to Slack before we bought it. And yeah, that was pretty bad and they were running their playbook and did a lot of dark stuff. And it's all got in a written up in an EU complaint, but Slack made before we bough…”
Dean: Synapse moved funds across banks in seemingly illegal ways
“And eventually, Synapse, the software company, the program manager, started to add other banks. And they added two, three banks, and they moved money around between them pretty indiscriminately. In ways that I would say, this is not my real, legally, it's not …”
Frankel: Almost every company sale in my career was a mistake
“I look in the rear view mirror and I go, everything I've sold pretty much has been a mistake. So I'm a contrarian.”
Lemkin: A $100B+ Public SaaS Company Threatens Customers With Lawsuits
“Even worse, a number of public SaaS companies you probably know threatened to sue users or threatened legal action. One of them is well over a hundred billion dollars in market cap has repeatedly. You can see it on X. If you search sent messages threatening to…”
Lemkin: Legacy SaaS outbound playbooks fail close to 100% of the time
“Like the best ones are growing faster than ever, but it's not by running the old clicky playbooks. I'm just seeing them fail close to a hundred percent of the time.”
Lemkin: RTO mandates are about supervising mid performers, not collaboration
“It doesn't, you don't need to return to office for high performers. The best people will get it done. They'll get it done from Antarctica or they'll get it done in the office, but the mid performers just don't work from home, right? They barely work. And so th…”
Ripabelli: 99.9% of OpenAI and Anthropic users will not stay on DeepSeek
“But I think in two months, I think, 99.9% of the people who are using Anthropic and OpenAI today is going to go back to using their products, not DeepSeek's model.”
Ripabelli: In five years, AI agent anthropomorphism will look ridiculous
“I think five years time, like, I think everyone's like, why the fuck did we spend five years talking about algorithms as being like a coworker? It's just like software that does things for us. And sometimes maybe you want to chat with it. That's great. That's …”
Lemkin: S-tier AI agents will quickly replace B-tier and C-tier employees
“My limited experience is that an S-tier agent is better than a C-tier employee. This is what across the contact center is. You usually see that the agents are like in the, they can't do everything, but they're in the top 10% of CSAT because what they do, they …”
Mooney: In vertical SaaS, product, sales, and support must replace customer success
“So the like simple framework here is that the product owns success. So this means that It should be so aligned and so good with your verticals needs that it doesn't need translation and it doesn't need somebody to come back in and say, Hey, we noticed you're n…”
Mooney: Mangomint eliminated its customer success team over three years ago
“It's never going to solve your problem to just plug in this new team and think that they can smooth out whatever that is. So I'm all about killing off the CS team. I'm happy to share how we did that. It's been over three years now and it's worked quite well.”
Lemkin: Tech cares less about inclusion than it did two years ago
“I think overall tech cares less about inclusion and being representative than it did two years ago.”
Amin: Autonomous AI SDRs Are a Temporary Dead End
“And unless AI SDRs are able to do that, I think it might be a temporary dead end for now until we get an order or two of magnitude of improvements in LLMs, which could happen very quickly.”
Lemkin: SaaS Growth Slows From Losing Product-Market Fit, Not Macro Downturns
“Because I really think growth slows because you fall out of product market fit. Too many people blame the markets or the VCs or the downturn, but there's no downturn in the US economy.”
Lemkin: VCs give terrible hiring advice due to lack of operating experience
“Why your VCs give you terrible hiring advice. It's very short. You can go find it right now. And it's because most of them haven't been operators or were a long time ago or another category. And if you've never done something, you want the person from wherever…”
Lemkin: Cutting sales headcount in half increases revenue at $50M ARR
“The tactical answer for more kumbaya people is probably cut half your sales team. This always works. Concentrate your leads in tougher times. It may not work at Matt. Maybe it doesn't work at zoom info scale, but even at fifty million, it's going to work.”
Lemkin: SaaS companies must compete in categories where they lose most deals
“You gotta play in categories where you lose most deals to win. This is a weird thing. You gotta play in categories where you lose most deals.”
Lemkin: SaaS growth slowdowns stem from lost product-market fit, not macro
“If growth has slowed, it is not a downturn or macro. It's a little bit of it. It is that you have fallen out of product market fit. If two years ago you were growing a hundred percent and today you're growing. It is not just the market. It is that you do not h…”
Lemkin: 'Founder Mode' Does Not Work For Scaling Inside Sales
“Founder mode does not work for sales. It does not work for inside sales.”
Riparbelli: Top AI Growth Tactic Is Announcing Broken Features
“I think the biggest growth tactic right now in AI, right, is just announce a bunch of stuff, that may not actually be ready or work in the products. I think we'll, we'll see how that pans out over time. That's the sort of extreme version of this. I wouldn't ne…”
Stebbings: 78% of the time VC follow-on reserves are misallocated
“When you actually look at the data, and we have probably the most data across, I think almost anyone, we have 2700 GP track records, and when you look across that data set, 78% of the time reserves are misallocated.”
Lacher: Founders Should Kill Pro-Rata Rights to Eliminate Signaling Risks
“If I was a founder, and I'm speaking against my own interests a little as an investor, being opportunistic, but why the hell would you give someone a paratha right? Because either that investor needs to earn it and really show that they're doing great work, so…”
Stebbings: Europe Has Many Dangerous VCs Who Know Nothing Yet Interfere
“And then there are the really dangerous investors who think they know everything but actually know nothing and want to do a lot. Big cross. Worst of the worst. Europe has a lot of them, sadly.”
Stebbings: Small VC Platform Hires Are Ineffective Compared to Top Firms
“Andreessen have hundreds. They're actually very deep across every segment of hiring, across every segment of B to B customer acquisition. They are a machine. Insight is the same. We have Insight who've done our companies, and it is a machine that they roll in.…”
Stebbings: Multi-stage VC employees must chase hype deals to get promoted
“If you are a strategic person in a multi-stage fund, getting into one of these hot deals is what's going to get you the promotion. Doing the slightly off the beaten track, but amazing company that might take three or four years to get to product market fit, or…”
Cabane: The SDR role is disappearing into sales ops and closing positions
“The SDR role is going away. The people will become closers or will evolve into something else. What's that? Something else? Probably sales ops. They will handle the orchestration, the workflows.”
Lemkin: Blended VC rolling internal rates of return are negative
“Everyone is full of shit in venture on Twitter. Oh, I'm all my investments are so great. I'm such a genius. I own point. Oh, one percent of this unicorn. I made so much money, but the real IRRs, when you blend it all together, they're negative.”
Lemkin: 800 of the 1,000 existing tech unicorns will fail
“We can all laugh about the, that 800 of the thousand unicorns are junk. They're junk of corns. It's going to turn true”
Lemkin: Failed hires are always the founder's fault, never the employee's
“It's always your fault when someone doesn't work out... It's you didn't do the work. You didn't figure out if they were the right fit. They never know. You can never know enough about a company before you join. It's impossible.”
Cabane: Monetization must precede open-source acquisition motions
“Monetization comes first, open source for acquisition comes second. Other way around is, like, super hard, my opinion, huh?”
Lemkin: SaaS sales and marketing has not gotten more efficient since 2005
“So far, since I've been involved in SAS since 2005, we have not gotten any more efficient. In sales and marketing, we've gotten more efficient at other things.”
Lemkin: SaaS products that cannot self-renew 80% of deals are failing
“I think if you have humans in a renewal, you're you have failed your customers. You have failed your customers. If you need sales or success or account, it doesn't mean that the margin, you don't need help. I'm not saying you don't need to parachute in on 10% …”
Levie: Software jobs are easy compared to 90% of other work
“This is like, not like particularly like hard, you know, work of, you know, like, 90% of the jobs that I see.”
Roberge: Top AI talent beats mediocre teams with trillions of data records
“So if you had to choose between having an A plus AI tech talent team with millions of records of data, and you were going against a mediocre AI tech talent team with trillions of data that the startup wins. And that starts to make sense with the diminishing re…”
Belsky: AI productivity gains will increase creative hiring, not decrease it
“And I believe that actually, when you get more ingenuity per person that you employ, the people on your creative team, when you get more possibility from each of them, you're gonna actually want to hire more of them. Look no further than engineers. Engineers h…”