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 6,451 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 59 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
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…”
Lemkin: Venture capital will not become fairer for pre-seed founders
“I don't think venture will get fairer for pre-seed. I don't think venture will get fairer for folks that don't check any boxes.”
Lemkin: Experienced VP candidates joining $2M ARR startups are usually terrible
“If you hire someone that was already a VP of sales here, why are they going to join you at two million? Probably only because they're terrible. It doesn't make any sense. It's illogical. They're probably not good.”
Michael Seibel: Angels write 10% of checks just to avoid saying no
“Category three that people don't talk about. If they ask me, it will be uncomfortable for me to say no, so I will write them a check. I'll tell you that in my experience, this is up to 10% of the time. I am hoping the founder doesn't ask me for money. Because …”
Seibel: Hiring a designer for a startup pitch deck is a mistake
“If you need a designer to build a slide deck, you're doing it wrong. And here's an even deeper, more important point. Your designer has no idea what the most interesting and important points of your pitch are. So if you hand them your pitch to design, they wil…”
Lemkin: SaaS founders should avoid non-performance layoffs given recurring revenue visibility
“They're tough on all of us, and I really think as founders, we should do everything humanly possible to have no non-performance layoffs. I mean, we have recurring revenue. You should be able to predict the next quarter or two. You should be a little embarrasse…”
Mathrubootham: Indian buyers hijack product roadmaps, making global expansion impossible
“It's actually much easier to sell to global customers than selling to Indian customers. You know, Indian customers are notorious for hijacking your product roadmap, and you can never sell outside once you start selling to India.”
Lemkin: How SaaS companies unethically brute-force high Net Retention Rates
“You can brute force high NRR with longer term deals. You can brute force NRR if you threaten customers when they leave with an inability to get their data. You can brute force NRR by having out of bound price increases, 30 or 40% a year.”
Lemkin: Zero percent of truly great, persistent founders with great CTOs fail
“I think that all the metrics on startups that fail, that 90% fail, I think these are Sony baloney metrics. I think, Truly great founders, truly great, that have a great CTO and CTO, or a CTO that can be both, that can build amazing software, that do not quit, …”
Lemkin: Full-stack AE model does not work for most SaaS companies
“He talked about how even Brex, which is, which was still relatively SMB for a long period, how the AE's had to do half of their own deals through outbound, and so he really described, in a way, a full stack AE, right, and people talk about that, and I think th…”
Parker Conrad: Silicon Valley's startup focus orthodoxy is wrong and limiting
“This conventional wisdom is wrong or at least extremely limiting, and there exists a set of companies that could be built that are often not built that break this rule.”
Parker Conrad: Slack sold to Salesforce because Microsoft Teams was bundled free
“That's why Slack is owned by Salesforce now, because, like, Teams is free and the Microsoft bundle.”
Conrad: Deel was until recently a Rippling customer for global HR
“Deal was actually, until very recently, a Rippling customer in the United States. They ran, you know, in fact, their global HR on, on Rippling because they didn't have all of these other systems in place.”
Lemkin: Startups Slowing to Zero Growth Lost Product-Market Fit
“With a few exceptions, I don't have any empathy for startups that had decent growth during 2021 and have slowed to zero. Ok, I don't have any empathy. You really have no customers? Really none? No. What it really means is your product wasn't valuable enough. I…”
Dines: Work-Life Balance Is 'a Stupid Thing for Everyone'
“I don't like balance, work-life balance. This is a stupid thing for everyone. You have to be immersed.”
Dines: Masayoshi Son's 'You Are Not Crazy Enough' Ethos Is Bullshit
“When I heard the Masayoshi-san saying, you are not crazy enough, that's bullshit, guys. I am fucking crazy, and I can be crazy enough, but I am gonna burn billions of dollars. I will overbrown the market with reps, and then they will step each other's toes, an…”
Dines: SoftBank-backed rival built bloated company ruined by COVID
“Our main competitor at that time were trying to catch us, especially with SoftBank money. So they were pouring a lot of money into the, into everything. Sales, marketing, build a blotted company, and COVID hit, and they were fucked.”
Lemkin: All Top US Tech Companies Are Run by Asian/Indian Americans
“All the top US tech companies are run by Asian Americans or Indian Americans. All of them, right? Am I, are there any that aren't? AMD, Microsoft, Google, who am I missing?”
Lemkin: Marc Benioff Is Repeating His Past Mistake by Cutting Sales
“I mean, Mark Benioff in his book wrote his biggest mistake in the last downturns was cutting sales. And what did he just do? Cut sales. So we're all, he's making them, he's making the same mistake three times.”
Lemkin: Employees Joining Unicorns in 2023 Will Make Nothing on Equity
“If as an employee, if you join a company with, in, in, in, in 2023 with a valuation over a billion as an employee, you're gonna make nothing. It doesn't matter what it sells for, you're gonna make nothing.”
Stebbings: Many micro VC funds funded by founders will die
“I think we'll see the death of many of the micro funds, the funds that raised from founders, public market founders who now have had their net worths crushed.”
Lemkin: LPs should quit GPs lacking billion-dollar cash exits by 2022
“If you did not, as a GP, if you've been investing more than six or seven years, and you didn't have multiple billion dollar cash outcomes in 22, at the best, because they were it was just so accelerated, You never will. Like, the LPs should just quit on you.”
Doug Pepper: Crypto Is an Unreal Bubble Unlike SaaS Which Will Survive
“I don't think that this is going away or that this is some inner, this is not crypto, which is going through an internet like bubble for 99 and 2000, because it's not real. These businesses are all absolutely fundamentally real and needed. There's just a bit o…”
Lemkin: VC board members know nothing about sales or revenue
“Every single board I've been on, and I try not to be on too many boards I'm the only one that knows anything about sales or revenue. No one. No one. I don't even care where they were. They don't know. I'm always the only one”
Lemkin: SaaS giants like Zendesk and Intercom offer shitty phone support
“Even support companies do shitty support, and I go on, and I play, I go on to all the leaders, the, I, okay, does, do all the leaders in SaaS, do the Zendesk and the intercoms, and do they answer their phone and say, none of them do either, right?”
Lemkin: SaaStr pays Marketo $100k annually but gets no phone support
“We pay Marketo, like, a 100,000 dollars a year. I can't get anybody on the phone, right?”
Makani: Motive shut down a new marketplace business at a $100M run-rate
“We started a new marketplace business. And it was very high potential. It fit our founding narrative. It was the right story. And it actually scaled pretty rapidly to north of a hundred million dollar run rate. In something like 18 months. But we realized actu…”
Çilingir: Growth remains king over capital efficiency and profitability
“At the end of today, even in this, again, macroeconomic environment, where people are starting to look for also profitability or capital efficiency, still, ladies and gentlemen, growth is the king.”
Lemkin: High NRR SaaS companies have lazy customer success teams
“High NRR companies are friggin' lazy, especially their customer success teams.”
Delatorre: Former Oracle salespeople performed poorly at MongoDB
“So at MongoDB, the sales team Oracle people did really poorly for the most part.”
Delatorre: Former Concur and Amex reps perform poorly at TripActions
“And at TripActions, Concur people and Amex people do poorly.”
Delatorre: Startups cannot scale from $20M to $100M on PLG alone
“But you don't get from 20 to a hundred on PLG because, you know, to get from 20 to a hundred, you're probably doing bigger deals, and you're doing bigger deals at bigger companies, and so PLG makes for a great meeting, and you know, I think in a hundred, if yo…”
Lemkin: GitLab is not really a SaaS company
“GitLab just IPO to sixteen billion. It's not really a SaaS company.”
Ghodsi: All proprietary software is vulnerable to disruption by open source
“In fact, I think open source has the potential to replace pretty much any software that's, Any proprietary software that exists on the planet today is, you know, in a really vulnerable state in the sense that it can be disrupted by an open source version, righ…”
Lemkin: Reduced VC collaboration is strictly better for founders
“Without question. And without question, it's better for founders. Without question. Every element of venture that is, and I'm being binary when it's off course more subtle than this, but every much of the collaboration in venture did not benefit founders, righ…”
Lemkin: Multi-billion-dollar VC funds do not care about losing $20M checks
“The funds are so big, and they're raising funds every 12 months, right? In my, we have different portfolios. In my portfolios, when the multi-billion dollar funds have come in and led the A or the C, they're barely invested. They're, and you know what? They do…”
Barrett: High startup valuations are bullshit caused by excess stimulus money
“I just think it's all bullshit. Like, I think the reason the valuations are high is because there's a shit ton of money in the markets, and it has no place to go. Like, there's, we just printed, what, three and a half trillion dollars of stimulus money out of …”
Barrett: High-Funded SaaS Startups Rely on Burning Cash, Not Acquisition Innovations
“Most of the companies rating it as shit tons of money, they, they're not using, like, novel customer acquisition techniques that couldn't have worked 20 years ago. They're just willing to lose more money on it. And then the VCs are willing to allow them to los…”
Barrett: Raising a gigantic VC war chest ruins company culture
“This whole idea of getting a gigantic war chest, I think that's bullshit. Like, I think that it's just a big waste of money and capital, and it just, like, ruins your company's culture.”
Barrett: Most VC Income Comes from Management Fees, Not Carry
“Like, the vast majority of a VCs, of a typical VCs income, will not come from their carry. It'll come from their management fees or some slice of that over the course of their career. They don't give a shit about the outcome or the success of your business by …”
Barrett: Hiring outside VC executives caps internal talent and drives them away
“How many of those same people just brought in some kind of outside executive from their VCs? Yeah, you just fucked your entire company. Because by doing that, you just indicated to every one of your employees, you cannot grow here. That we value skills that yo…”
Barrett: In startup funding rounds, VCs always win and employees rarely win
“Again and again, every single big round we have, the employees get fucked. And there's a whole bunch of reasons for that. It's like the VCs always win. The founders sometimes win. The employees rarely win.”
Barrett: Avoid venture capitalists as long as possible
“I would avoid the VCs as long as possible, because they're the devil. Now, don't get me wrong, sometimes you need to do a deal with the devil, but you're probably gonna get fucked in the process.”
Vidya Peters: Email marketing and database outreach will be redundant by 2026
“I think that email will be completely redundant. This whole idea of a database and having outreach will be a very archaic method.”
Hoffman: 10x hires almost certainly have glaring faults
“If you want to hire a 10 Xer, that person will almost certainly have glaring faults. Anyone that you could hire without glaring faults will be at best good. They will not be great.”
Hoffman: Leaders should delegate functions they are good at, not weak at
“Instead, delegate things that you're good at. This sounds really strange, so let me explain. The things that are the easiest to delegate are the things that you're already good at. You know how to do these things really well. You might already be an expert in …”