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 10 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
Apache-licensed open-source cores are hard to defend against AWS exploitation
“I mentioned before there's some exploitive behavior from the cloud service providers, in particular AWS, and so you have to be very careful about your license if you're doing open source. I would not just have a very powerful core that, for example, is with th…”
Major software product failures can be leveraged to build stronger customer trust
“And even when you have egregious product failures, and believe me, when you're building a relational operational database, they can be pretty egregious. Every one of those has the seed of a stronger, more trusting relationship with that customer.”
Cockroach Labs allocated 10% equity across its first 20 startup employees
“What we are trying to do, this is sort of empirically determined, is say that the first 20 employees of the company would have 10% of the equity. And the next 20 employees would have an additional five percent of the equity. And then the next 40 employees woul…”
Early hands-on go-to-market leaders typically only scale with startups for one year
“So that early go-to-market leader that rolls up their sleeves, they probably won't scale very far with you. Maybe a year, and that's actually pretty good.”
Blind startup execution reaches a local maximum without strong visionary conviction
“And the execution, if it's sort of blind, you're going to end up with a sort of local maximum, if even that. Instead, what you need to do is you need to inform all of that effort with a visionary belief in what you're doing. And that's what you bring as a foun…”
Startups beat incumbents by being ten times better in a defined niche
“To beat all of the incumbents that are there, you have to be 10 times better. It's almost impossible to be 10 times better at everything that an involved product category has. But you can be 10 times better if you define a niche in that product category that y…”
Spencer Kimball: Startup ideas are naturally conceived by multiple people simultaneously
“No matter how good your idea is, or how novel it seems, the best ideas arrive by multiple people at the same time.”
Cockroach Labs spent three years building its database before having any customers
“We were building a product before we had customers for about three years, and I was programming.”