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 340 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 18 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: Growth funds will take a decade to resolve fallen unicorns
“It is stress a little bit on early stage funds, but it's huge stress on growth funds, which did lots of unicorns, hundreds of unicorns. And it's going to take them a decade to figure out what to do with fallen unicorns.”
Bendov: AI will eliminate specialized sales roles like SDRs and CSMs
“The second, I think, is blending of a role. There'll be no more SDRs, CSMs, AEs, BDRs, XDRs, all of these. I see them converging into one role, essentially.”
Bendov: Autonomous AI Will Dwarf Cloud by Capturing Payroll Budgets
“The third wave is autonomous application with AI, that's gonna dwarf everything, that it's gonna be like a much bigger than cloud, because it touches into payroll, right? It comes from a different budget. We're not quite there right, but think about if you go …”
Bendov: Traditional software user interfaces will disappear and be replaced by speech
“If I'm right, it's going away because I'm gonna say it's all going to be like speech. I'm just going to talk. We're going to have a conversation. The apps are going to run in the background and AI will orchestrate. You can see somebody like Microsoft pilot. Th…”
Gross: Zoom During COVID Was the BlackBerry Era of Video Collaboration
“We're going to think about Zoom and hanging out in COVID times. As the BlackBerry era, not the iPhone era, this stuff.”
Fonseca: Incumbents will capture most early GenAI value
“A lot of the value, not all, but a lot of the value in this early platform shift is going to be captured with income by the incumbents. And naturally it's because they already have huge advantages on distribution data and workflows over their upstart competito…”
Cabane: AI outbound advantage will revert to mean within four quarters
“And I also don't think it's going to last super long. There's going to be a reversion to the mean in the next couple quarters as people become desensitized. And so there is a time window to do this right now. There's a significant Benefit, if your competitors …”
Mullenweg: Web will fill with AI spam, but high-quality content survives
“There is a version of AI that the web gets filled with spam and, you know, everything. I think that will happen and it doesn't matter because ultimately what we're looking for is that discernment, that quality.”
Kiela: Companies Will Stop Trying to Build In-House AI Within Years
“Very often they think they can do it in house.
And so I think that belief is probably going to go away in the next couple of years where people realize that this stuff is a little bit more difficult than they,
Initially thought.”
Kiela: Top-Down Enterprise AI Budgets Will Dry Up After Failed Pilots
“That money is temporary and it's going to dry up. And so it's, we're going to have a couple of cool pilots and demos, and then at some point it doesn't work and we will move on to the next hype train.”
Lemkin: Klaviyo Will Eclipse MailChimp and May Pass HubSpot Marketing
“It's gonna eclipse MailChimp, right? And it may even pass HubSpot as a, HubSpot's marketing piece because it's so valuable in e-commerce, right? Because you're so close to revenue.”
Zhou: Domain experts, not AI researchers, will drive top models
“However, I believe that, and this is based on my experience training these models, it's actually the domain experts will be driving the best models out there. It won't be people like me who can actually do all the model training, et cetera.”
Roberge: Startups face irrelevance from AI like 1997 on-premise software
“I think there's a decent chance that whatever you're working on as a startup, as a use case, as a problem, It might be irrelevant. It might be like it's 1997, and you're working on a client server, on premise piece of software, and you're about to get the rug …”
Lemkin: AI Will Probably Only Slightly Improve Business Process Software
“Most of the stuff at Sastr is business process software. It's changing the way businesses do support, or sales, or marketing, or compliance or procurement, and AI probably is just going to make them a smidge better.”
Lemkin: M&A will see $100M-$300M SaaS deals, but billion-dollar deals remain rare
“I think we will see anything good that can be required for a 100,000,200 1,000,300 million that is good, not that it's pre-revenue, will get bought. But I think it will take a while for like billion dollar deals to come back because the multiples are so low.”
Lemkin: Software app and headcount layoffs are over for market leaders
“It will never be like twenty-twenty-one, but we are over, outside of spot issues, for the leaders, for the public leaders, the successful ones, we're over the app and people layoffs. And hiring, at least, is slowly resuming.”
Lemkin: Another software bubble like 2020 will take 20 years
“It's never gonna be, it's gonna take 20 years to have a bubble, like we saw in 2020, it will happen again, but it's gonna take 20 years”
David Sacks: Seed-stage startup mortality rate will reach roughly 80%
“Well, I would say that the mortality rate on seed right now is very high. You know, I think it's probably going to be like, 80%.”
Lemkin: SaaS Efficiency Mandate Will Be Permanent If Multiples Stay Flat
“And if we end up 24 months into this, and multiples are sort of the same, I think we are in a new, efficient world For the first time in SaaS, we will not go back.”
Lemkin: Companies Cutting Marketing Face a Pipeline Cliff by Year-End
“And I think there will be a rebound in marketing by the end of this year. Everyone that cut marketing to zero in the beginning of this year is going to have no pipeline at the end of this year. That is the looming cliff for so many. Everyone below the public c…”
Lemkin: Massive Early-Stage Bay Area AI Funding Rounds Cannot Last
“These ten million dollar, twenty million dollar rounds in the Bay Area, they can't last, right? Not enough of these companies are gonna go from one to a hundred in two years”
Lemkin: B2B Tech Companies Will Never Bring Large Sales Teams Back to SF
“The other thing that's never coming back is that every B to B company had 500 sales reps in the Bay Area. They're never coming back. We're never renting a hunt, 20 floors of Soma. Soma, if you go, Soma, south of Market, where we had, everyone had 20 floors. It…”
Lemkin: Only forced or highly efficient SaaS companies will IPO within 15 months
“The only folks that are going to IPO for now in the next 12 to 15 months in SaaS are, A handful of folks will be forced to IPO, and they may have, and they may barely pull it off and have really crappy IPOs, or they'll be profitable or very efficient companies…”
Lemkin predicts startup recovery by late 2023 but severe pipeline shortages
“We're cutting too much in marketing. And I'll tell you what I think we should be doing. We're cutting too much and it's going to hurt everybody, not this week or even this quarter, but it's going to hurt everyone's going to not going to have enough pipeline at…”
Lemkin: Tech Boom Employees Will Not Leave to Found Major Startups
“Startups sucked so many human beings into it. Thousands of SDRs, thousands of AEs, thousands of marketing managers and social media strategists that these became just or highly paid ordinary jobs. Highly paid ordinary jobs, and I don't think any of those peopl…”
Lemkin: Public SaaS multiples will rebound 20% to 40% by late 2023
“And so I'm pretty bullish at the end of this year. I'm bullish that multiples will be up somewhere between 20 and 40%, and I believe that will lead to a rush to deploy capital, but for founders, you have to understand that will never lead to a return of 2021.”
Pepper: Growth VCs can no longer underwrite to $10B outcomes
“And I think it's going to fundamentally change how people think about entry points because no longer can you assume, you know, ten billion to generate a venture return in most cases.”
Pepper: Venture investing activity will be dramatically higher by late 2023
“I think the public, I think it's a great time to buy a lot of these names in the public markets. That's not investment advice, but given that, I think we're going to be in a much better place next year. And then in terms of our activity levels, I think dramati…”
Lemkin: Startups Will Never Bring Massive In-Office Sales Teams Back to SF
“We will never have floor after floor after floor of AEs and SDRs. So there's an element of all this that is just, it's never, no matter what happens, the floor of floor of AEs and SF, they can't afford to live there. They don't want to live there. They don't g…”
PLG Attackers Will Dominate B2B Public Markets Within a Decade
“Just like today the public markets in B to B are dominated by the SaaS attackers, I predict in the next decade the PLG attackers will dominate the public markets for the categories that it's in.”
Lee: Series A valuations will reset to $20M-$40M pre-money
“Well, Series A's we're going to be back to eight to twelve million dollars, and Series A valuations will be back to 20 to 35, 40 pre. And B's will be back to a hundred pre, instead of four or 500 pre.”
Zach Coelius: Venture fundraising difficulty is returning to 2008 levels
“And 12 months ago, you could have gotten a term sheet a week after you got, you walked in that door. Now it's going to be a much longer, much harder, much more arduous fundraising process, more similar to what we saw two or three years ago. Certainly what we s…”
Lemkin: Low-margin software and fintech businesses will remain out of favor
“It's gonna be a long time until folks are comfortable with lower quality revenue again, and what I mean is fintechs with 20% margins companies, you know, folks with huge, with, even, even folks like Twilio, one of the best companies in the history of, Cloud an…”
Binch: PLG Companies Will See Net Retention Rates of 150% to 300%
“I will submit that PLG product companies are going to start seeing 152 103 hundred percent NRR, because why? Because they're going to start on a lower price point as an entry, and they're going to expand up further beyond that.”
Janz: VC markets may not see 2021-level valuations for a decade
“My guess is that we will not go back maybe never, or maybe not for 10 years to what we've seen in 2020 and 20 21, where there was a lot of craziness, like every round being done in just a couple of days at insane valuations.”
Pepper: SaaS Multiples Will Settle Higher Than May 2022 Levels Within 24 Months
“I happen to be one of the bulls and I'm not calling the bottom. That's not our job to pick the bottom, but my guess is that we do settle out at multiples higher than today over the next. 24 months. And we get back to that being normal as opposed to normal bein…”
Lemkin: B2B SaaS Startups Will Avoid Widespread Layoffs Due to Cash Reserves
“I don't think there's going to be very many layoffs or issues and B to B companies because they're very well funded.”
Pepper: 2022-2023 VC vintages will outperform 2020-2021
“Probably the best fun vintages are going to be 20, 22, 23, as opposed to 20, 21.”
Bedecarre: Apple, Meta, Salesforce, and Slack back in offices by April 2022
“Big tech, you know, that Apple, Salesforce, Facebook, Meta you know, Slack all of these companies are kind of targeting over the next couple months, but by April, they will all be back.”
Box CRO: Microsoft and Salesforce will win enterprise SaaS consolidation waves
“Well, I think that the extra large vendors will benefit big time as they did in the client server era. And so if you think about the number one and the number two cloud investments at the app layer, not the infrastructure layer that organizations are making at…”
Lemkin: Fifty active startup founders will raise nine-figure VC funds
“There's too many founders that are going to raise nine-figure funds while they're running their own startups.
And it used to be a bad sign for the startup, right?
And it used to be like, how could you do anything other than run your own startup?
But it doesn't…”
Lemkin: All Top-Quartile Cloud Companies at $100M ARR Will Hit $1B
“The top quartile, not the top one or two, the top quartile is growing triple digits at a hundred million, and when you think about compounding, assuming those have ARRs approaching north of a hundred, that means they're all gonna hit a billion in revenue.”
Hoffman: Managing vendors is the top skill for the next 20 years
“The number one skill to have over the next 20 years is the ability to select and manage vendors.”
Deeter: Microsoft Azure could challenge AWS for top cloud slot
“At this rate, it is quite possible that Azure competes for AWS for the top slot in the coming years. And we're already seeing signs of that on the enterprise side specifically.”
Deeter: New and fringe investors in venture and debt will suffer the most in downturn
“So I think the, it's safe to assume that the new entrance or the fringe entrance in most cases are going to be the ones most impacted. That applies to venture firms, debt firms, corporate venture firms, et cetera. There, there's even potentially the crossover …”
Deeter: Economic Impact Will Be Worse Than Expected, Extending Into 2021
“I do believe the economic impact from this is going to be unfortunately more significant when than people are digesting yet. And this could take several quarters and well into next year for the overall economy to get started again.”