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 2,034 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 41 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: Majority of CS Candidates Refuse to Talk to Customers
“I interviewed almost 40 CS people last year. The majority of them are not willing to talk to customers anymore.”
Mullenweg: Automattic Hired 1,200 Remote Workers During COVID and Productivity Suffered
“Our culture suffered. Like we were not as productive during COVID. People thought, oh, this must be, I had other CEOs. This must be great. You just, you're, you must be running at full speed. I'm like, no, I hired 1200 people the past year that have, the past …”
Lemkin: SaaS CAC did not decrease despite efficiency drives
“No one's CAC went down the last year, even though they got more efficient, no one's CAC went down despite the a hundred SAS tools we bought, despite all of these things we didn't get.”
Lemkin: Venture Appetite for Moderate SaaS Growth Is Effectively Zero
“And there isn't any venture appetite for pretty good growth. There just isn't any, there's none, there's zero, absolutely none. There's no appetite in general.”
Zhou: Public training data for LLMs is running out
“Yeah, I think even just zooming back out at a technical level, I think actually public data is running out for all, all of what LLMs can take advantage of.”
Product Marketing Backgrounds Correlate Best With Head of Marketing Success
“And what we found is both from a commonality standpoint as well as a correlation with tenure and success, it's product marketing.”
Revenue Growth Overtook Efficiency as the Top Valuation Driver in Q2 2023
“What you can see through kind of most of 22 last year was that efficiency went to the top. That's how companies were valued. And of course, now look at the very last point on the far right. Q two, 20, 23, it's flipped again and on top revenue growth.”
Roberge: Non-VC startups generate more wealth than VC-backed startups
“More wealth is generated in startups in non-VC backed startups than VC backed startups.”
Lemkin: Most VC firms underperform the NASDAQ
“It is a brutal, terrible industry where if you actually saw the numbers, most VC firms underperformed NASDAQ.”
Zinman: monday.com Saw Lowest Ad Bids in History During Tech Downturn
“Because right now, ah, we, not only we kept doing it, but we actually scaled it, ah, and right now we have, like, the lowest bids, ah, that we ever saw, as a company, because everybody pulled back, A lot of companies reduce spend, and we're more aggressive tha…”
Lemkin: Selling B2B SaaS Is No Harder Than Two Quarters Ago
“Your customers are not doing worse than they were two or three quarters ago. It is not worse. It is not harder to sell, sales automation tools, or sales analytics, or marketing analytics, or customer success tools.”
Mathrubootham: 2011 Hacker News response cemented Freshdesk as Zendesk alternative
“We responded to the website, we exposed what was happening, and the whole internet community, we were on Hacker News, For 30 hours at the top post, and for three days on the top page, the entire community supported us, and from that point onwards, like Freshde…”
Benioff dismissed early Zendesk threats to Salesforce to avoid fear-based leadership
“I did a year at Salesforce in the middle of all that, and I was mentioning Zendesk. I was like, hey, there's these guys called Zendesk, and they might be a problem for, like, our customer service business and I got the kind of uh-oh moment where, like, oh, and…”
PLG Leaders Like Asana Do Not Have Lower Sales And Marketing Costs
“If you look at the PLG leaders in SAS and cloud, they're wonderful companies. But the Asana's and the others that they're their cost of sales to marketing isn't lower than the folks that are purely sales led.”
Lemkin: Public SMB SaaS companies exclude their smallest customers from NRR reporting
“Almost all public companies that sell the SMBs, like exclude their smallest customers from NRR.”
Zinman: Monday.com's SMB retention proved more stable than enterprise during the downturn
“In the last, You know, 12 months since the economy changed is that we actually found that our SMB budget was more stable than our enterprise segment. So the SMBs NRR, yeah, was actually more stable.”
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…”
Lemkin: Stressed SaaS startups are seeing CSAT plunge while NRR rises
“This is something I hadn't seen ever in my history of SAS, but I see it all over the place now is CSAT and NPS down, but NRR up. This is reaction to stress.”
Lemkin: No single-product SMB SaaS company has ever exceeded 100% NRR
“There may be an exception or two out there, but from my knowledge, for folks that sell to SMBs, I do not believe anyone got past a hundred that is single product, right? And HubSpot's the biggest example. HubSpot was stuck at 85% through 40 or fifty million, a…”
Specht: Outlier AI deals can still raise at 100x ARR
“And then selective AI deals, the outliers, Still, still play on 20, 21 levels. Typically if they show very high growth, and they race then on a, can race on something like a hundred XAR if it's like a very, you know, sought after and competitive process.”
Brex tracked customer spending on Amex by snooping linked bank accounts
“We could sort of cheat at Brex in that we could see the payments that were flowing to other cards. We linked to folks' bank accounts and we could see how much they were paying us and we could see how much they were paying American Express.”
Lemkin: Palantir Flipped from 18% to 70% Software Revenue Year Before IPO
“Palantir was like 18% software until the year before their IPO, and they flipped to like 70 in one year.”
Lemkin: Late-Stage VC Growth Rounds Are Capped at $500M Valuations
“If you're only air quotes only going to be worth two billion, how even no matter where you are, how can anyone afford to invest a higher than a five hundred million dollar valuation? Think about it. Just to make four X, even three X with some dilution risk, th…”
Lemkin: VCs Intentionally Skipped Diligence During 2021 Peak
“The pace of investing was fast, so fast and furious that people intentionally did not do the diligence, ok? It was an intentional choice”
Lemkin: Thoma Bravo's latest fund is still at negative IRR
“Tomo Bravo is incredible, but their last fund is, is, it's J curve S, but it's still negative IRR.”
Lerman: Group tours almost doubled onboarding conversion rates at Roam
“Well, Sam, it turned out that the percentage of people That chose to go on to the next step in our process went not quite, but almost doubled with the group tours.”
Blond: Zenefits generated less total revenue after massively overhiring sales reps
“And so the actual result of hiring a bunch more SDRs and AEs wasn't that we had incrementally more revenue, but sort of less efficient revenue on a per rep basis. We actually had less revenue. We closed less revenue by hiring all of these people because it was…”
Lemkin: VCs demand top-tier growth and top-quartile efficiency even at $1M ARR
“VCs unfortunately are looking for the trifecta. They're looking for top tier growth, but also some sort of top quartile capital efficiency. And even at, you know, even at a million in revenue, maybe not You know, 10 K in MRR, but even at a million in error, th…”
Lemkin: 90% of Growth Stage Investors Are Mostly Out of the Market
“I would say 90% of growth investors are mostly out of market, like they're not actively investing, but some are, some want to, some either want bargains, which I'm not sure exist, right, or they're making a bullish bet”
Stebbings: LPs penalize VC managers who missed chances to return DPI
“On the re-ups, from what I understand, and I speak to a lot of LPs, if you had the chance to produce DPI last year, and you didn't, you're in the bad books.”
Lemkin: Top venture LPs reported an average 90% IRR in 2021
“Top LPs last year reported, had 90% average IRR. So they got drunk on this too, and they fueled it, and they took this stuff seriously.”
Atlassian Refuses to Negotiate Software Pricing With Any Enterprise Customer
“And to this day, 20 years later, and we have some of the biggest companies in the world, we have one set list price and it's all on our website. We do not negotiate pricing with any single customer. Every customer gets the best price.”
Blond: 2022 SaaS slowdown not driven by budget cuts on new sales
“I am not seeing much influence on a company's ability to sell their product, to acquire new customers. And I am not hearing, you know, one of the biggest Problems today in our business is that potential customers are cutting budget, and they're not able to buy…”
Zach Coelius: Hedge fund reneged on a $50M term sheet before closing
“We went out to all the VC firms, hedge funds, the usual late stage check writers, and a hedge fund came in. They're gonna put in fifty million dollars at a four hundred million dollar post... It's supposed to close on a Friday. On Thursday, the hedge fund's li…”
Lemkin: Crossover funds and $1B+ late-stage tech rounds are completely frozen
“Crossover ventures it is, they're investing zero percent in the private market. All that money's gone at the top, okay? Then there's different types of growth, late growth and growth. Anything north of a billion is frozen.”
Lemkin: Brex and Ramp have 20-30% margins while Payhawk has 70%
“Brex is amazing in the US. Ramp is amazing, but those are like, 30%, 20% gross margin products. These guys, and probably others, are 70%.”
Schuck: ZoomInfo Drives 10x LTV to CAC on $20k-$50k Lands
“It's a lot of science that goes into the way that we generate the leads, we route the leads, and then we close new business, and that drives a 10 X LTV to CAC, a sub-thirty day sales cycle, often deals are closed same day, and these are not like, you know, two…”
Bedecarre: BLS data shows only 5.5% of businesses reduced office footprints
“Only 5.5% of businesses have reduced their square feet relative to how many employees they have in the country.”
Upwork CEO: CX team is 95% freelancers with under 5% attrition
“It's 95% freelancers, and yet our attrition rate on the team is less than five percent.”
A Treasure Data VP tried to fire CEO Kazuki Ohta over pivot
“One VP were not convinced of this direction. So he came to the board and trying to fire me.”
82% of enterprises decide on software in six months or less
“82% of enterprises, a thousand employees or more, are saying, I don't need more than six months to make a decision.”
67% of buyers only engage sales after making a purchase decision
“Perhaps more startling, 67% of companies usually engage a salesperson after they've already made a decision.”
Lemkin: Top VCs read every cold email and decide within a week
“Every single one of them said they read every single cold email they get, and every single one of them invests in one week.”
Campbell: Pre-expiration warning emails increase SaaS cancellations by 10% to 20%
“Right now, most people sending emails before the point of failure, it increases active cancellations by 10 to 20%. And we've seen that pretty unequivocally.”
Kellogg: Net Dollar Retention Shows Almost Zero Correlation With SaaS Multiples
“The R squared is only .O six between net dollar retention and enterprise value to next 12 months revenue.”
Liu: Microsoft Lists is a direct attempt to replicate Airtable
“Microsoft has a product called list that is. In many ways, like a direct, you know, kind of attempt to replicate air table. We think we have a lot of product advantages over that product, but you know, it's a much more direct play against air table. Google has…”
Steele: Women receive 65% of peer recognition from other women
“We know that men and women are both recognized by their peers about the same frequency. But we know that men are recognized about 50% from colleagues who are women and 50% from colleagues that are male. So that seems pretty cool, right? You kind of have a good…”