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 24 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
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.”
Siroker calls Adobe's marketing cloud a poorly integrated 'Franken-suite'
“Adobe you know, has a product that, you know, has been evolved through acquisitions, which turns what they're offering into what our customers tend to describe as a Franken-sweet. It's a bunch of products that don't really integrate well with one another.”
Lemkin: EchoSign's Market Share Fell From 28% to 11% Post-Acquisition
“When we sold, this is why it was stupid to sell, we had 28% market share by revenue, and maybe 40% by transactions, because we were cheaper than DocuSign. It was 11 within two years of me leaving.”
Lemkin: Adobe Sign lost 50% market share after removing viral free conversion
“And when we, almost a week after I left after acquisition, that got ripped out of the product, the whole free thing, the whole free conversion. And because it didn't help anyone there, But then over the next three years, there may be a variety of reasons, mark…”
Deeter: Cloud leaders are superseding FAANG as tech growth drivers
“Our thesis internally is that those horizons and the growth rates of those markets are starting to pull back, and that you see a changing of the guard. And it's really the cloud basket, and we pulled out six names in particular with Microsoft, Twilio, Shopify,…”
Legacy CRM competitors cannot offer freemium due to software complexity
“Like if one of those companies wanted to do freemium, it would fall down on itself because it's hard to stand that darn thing up. It's really hard to use really hard to set up.”
Levie: Mature SaaS companies must shift to teen growth and 30%+ margins
“I think we look. Like probably what most companies are gonna have to look like at some point, which is you're probably growing teens. You're probably generating 30 plus percent operating margin. This is sort of the historical norm for software companies, and y…”
Çilingir: Top reps from Adobe or Salesforce often fail at startups
“Being able to sell this product of Adobe or Salesforce type companies doesn't mean that they can be also successful salespeople in your own organization, because every single product is different.”
Lemkin: It took Adobe five years to fully go live on Salesforce
“Like when I was at Adobe, it took them five years to go live in Salesforce.”
Lemkin: Adobe Acquired SEMrush for $1.9B at Just 3x Forward Sales
“So they buy them for 1.9 billion. It sounds like a lot, but it's only three times the next 12 months sales, even with a huge premium.”
Lemkin: Adobe Required VP Candidates to Hold Equivalent Titles at Peer Companies
“When I was Adobe, the hiring criteria for a VP, it was impossible. It was to hire a VP and to give them that title, right? At whatever level of VP it was, they had to have been a VP at a peer company.”
Halligan: Enterprise SaaS incumbents demonstrate exceptional durability over decades
“These SaaS companies They last. You look at Adobe and Salesforce, both were, I don't know, I haven't looked recently, but three, I call it three or fifty billion. Oracle, you gotta take your hat off to them. It was like, oh, they're gonna die. They're gonna sl…”
Lemkin: Adobe threatened to buy DocuSign or rebuild before acquiring EchoSign
“Adobe did it to me. They said, listen, if you don't sell to us, we're either going to go to try to buy DocuSign or buy this third one that you've never heard of, or we'll rebuild our effort.”
Belsky: Career advancement will hinge on creativity over raw productivity
“And so the big shift here that I just want to, you know, put a capstone on wave number one is that the standout, the success, the promotion is increasingly going from this advantage, this competitive advantage on the productivity side to one that's more around…”
Belsky: Adobe enterprise customers shifted >50% of marketing spend to social
“You look at big company marketing budgets and a lot of our customers have shifted at least if not more than 50% of their marketing spend. Towards social platforms away from a world where everything was destined for video or TV or print or whatever to this new …”
Belsky: Users will converse with documents instead of reading them
“I believe our documents are going to want to talk to us as opposed to us reading through and trying to find things. The documents will say, what do you want to know about me? And you'll just have a conversation.”
Lemkin: A VC offered $10M in secondary not to sell to Adobe
“I sold in 2011, I sold in 2011 to Adobe, and a VC offered me ten million dollars in secondary, ok, to not sell.”
Lemkin: Junior VPs at Adobe had $500K discretionary slush budgets
“I was just a VP at Adobe for a little more than a year, but basically there were, you know, there were, there was unbudgeted discretionary and budgeted... But even I had a 500 K slush budget. Okay. And this was a while ago. So today it might be a million bucks…”
Levie: Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen is world-class at balancing cash cows and growth
“To your point about Adobe, I'd say Chanteneau is, is world-class on, On, you know, sort of take advantage of the cash cow, but still, still make sure you're in growth markets and buying your way or building your way into those markets.”
Blond: EchoSign had zero sales ops staff at its Adobe acquisition
“And echo sign, we were like, ah, gosh, a hundred to a 150 employees or thereabouts when Adobe acquired us. And we didn't have anyone in sales ops.”
Lemkin: Adobe Sign is an approximately $300M ARR business
“And if you fast forward today, even though Adobe Sign has lost market share to DocuSign, a lot of it, which is, which hurts me as a founder, it's still almost a three hundred million dollar AR business, right?”
Lemkin: EchoSign reached $12M ARR by the time Adobe's 2011 acquisition closed
“We sold EchoSign, AdobeSign to Adobe in 11, 20 11. It was ten million at the time we signed the deal. It was twelve million AR when it closed.”