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 37 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
Cabane: Web front ends will disappear as LLMs query databases directly
“It is not hard to imagine that the front end of the web disappears. Like the idea of having a database of the content and a website, and then rendering that PHP into HTML, and then having a browser interpret the HTML, and then having a human read like the, thi…”
Cabane: ChatGPT will drive 25% to 33% of traffic in nine months
“I believe we're going to a webless world. I believe GPT is going to be like a quarter to a third of the traffic and nine months from now, right?”
Cabane: The SDR role is disappearing into sales ops and closing positions
“The SDR role is going away. The people will become closers or will evolve into something else. What's that? Something else? Probably sales ops. They will handle the orchestration, the workflows.”
Cabane: Monetization must precede open-source acquisition motions
“Monetization comes first, open source for acquisition comes second. Other way around is, like, super hard, my opinion, huh?”
Cabane: Marketing is splitting into human-touch events and AI agent optimization
“There's really two broad categories, things that are AI proof, right? The AI resilience. So that's going to be like social proof and influencers is going to be like some of the UGC stuff. A lot of that, the webinars, the in-person, the events, the dinners, all…”
Cabane: Companies are building hidden website trees exclusively for AI scraping
“I'm seeing more and more companies build hidden websites, completely hidden to the humans. It's an entire other index, an entire other, like, web tree, right, for the purpose for AI agents to scrape.”
Cabane: AI content workflows match or beat the output of large teams
“And I'm now encouraging CMOs to like have much leaner content teams, and just a few people that can run content workflows at scale, because the output is just as good, if not better.”
Cabane: Brands must spend 25% of marketing budgets on LLM visibility
“Who is spending 25% of the budget and headcount on, like, LM appearance? No one raised their hand. And that doesn't make sense, because that's where we're heading 12 months from now, there is no question.”
Cabane: 30% of tech companies will reduce hiring due to AI
“I'll ask the same question one year from now. My bet is that we're going to see at least 30% of the people when you have a reduced headcount or less hires.”
Cabane: AI workflow beat Reddit's 200-person SDR team in under two months
“We have done this in less than two months, and as of yesterday, I looked up the numbers. We've beaten the SDR team that's been working on that for, like, a couple of years, and there's 200 people.”
Cabane: Marketing has won the war against sales and now owns outbound
“It means marketing has won! That's what it means, right? It means, like, Outbound is now owned by growth and marketing teams, ok? Just embrace it. Like, that war is over, ok?”
Cabane: Deepgram's automated SEO workflow generated 3.5M clicks and replaced 10 people
“They got 3.5 million clicks. Like, how insane is that? So what are we seeing here? We're seeing they have one person to build a workflow, and Marcel told me, took him, like, about a thousand hours. Sure. Ok. And then one human who's there ongoing for, like, co…”
Cabane: Google Ads AI now outperforms manual targeting and bidding
“The learning is, as of six months ago, that has changed, and it is working absolutely. It's making the job seamless. Like, the LLMs now, inside Google Ads, are making targeting better, ok? They're better at showing the right creative. They're better at showing…”
Cabane: Certified human sales reps will become a premium luxury offering
“We're gonna see, like, the certified real human, which can be the new, like Parmigiano-Reggiano of, like, sales. Well, like, hey, like, this is a stamp. This is, like, actually a meat bag that's talking to you, and some people are gonna like that. Some people …”
Cabane: AI outbound email effectiveness will plummet within 12 months
“Overall, email is at risk, because we saw the charts with, like, the cost going down, right? That only means one thing. Everyone here in this room and elsewhere is going after, like, outbound AI-based email. Volumes are gonna go up. People will be desensitized…”
Cabane: Shifting enterprise products to self-serve PLG almost never works
“And so, there's actually a better way of, like, building product-led sign-up motions with separate products to get people engaged, and then push that into a sales motion. And that is a much easier transition than, like, shifting your entire product from an ent…”
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 …”
Cabane: Lower AI CAC makes mid-market channels viable for SMB acquisition
“The fact that we're now capable of doing faster and better quality, example, we can scrape websites, we can scrape random content for extremely cheap and feed that back into AI prompts for outbound or for SEO drives An extremely low CAC on those channels, whic…”
Cabane: Templated email sequences are dead for outbound sales
“The key learning out of this is sequences are dead. If you think that the best way to engage customers is to have a series of pre-written, templated emails that are gonna fire until somebody responses, like, you are in, like, the 2015, 20 18 era. You're, like,…”
Cabane: AI workflows outperform autonomous agents and humans alone on content quality
“Critically, last line here on the slide, the workflows with AIs Currently produce better content than autonomous agents and better content than humans alone. Unless you're ready to pay, like, 10,000 dollars per post.”
Cabane: Restricting ad platform AI with segmented budgets hurts campaign performance
“In the tests that we've done the more you handcuff the system and restrict the AI, the fewer optimizations it can make on your behalf and the worse off you will be.”
Cabane: Full AI SDR agents from YC startups produce mediocre results
“For example, like all of the YC companies that are doing like AI agents that does the entire SDR for you, like the output of that is like, eh, it's not great. It's okay, but it's not great, ok? What we're seeing working, however, is like very specialized LLMs …”
Cabane: AI is inefficient for enterprise deals and sales remains human-led
“Are we seeing AI be efficient in enterprise deals? And the answer is not yet. Okay. Enterprise deals are complex. They are long. There's lots of potential buyers, lots of information and AI just isn't efficient there for now. There's just too much context, too…”
Cabane: Automated outbound shows 8x lower marginal cost than SDR teams
“What you have here is the difference between the average cost per contact email between the automated outbound team and the SDR team. So you have a two and a 2.4 X difference. And then the Marginal cost. That's very important, because As Excel was pointing out…”
Cabane: Companies adopt PLG to transfer qualification costs to users
“The question is who's doing the qualification? Who's bearing the cost? And then in the PLG outbound model, the user is bearing the cost, right? And in the sales that model, like you, the company is bearing the cost, which is why we're all seeing this shift fro…”
Cabane: Founders should master PLG or outbound before combining them
“Honestly, you should start somewhere, not on both sides, is my opinion. And so PLG four cells led, PLG two cells led, is probably the new thing we're seeing right now. I think that's the major shift we're seeing right now with AI empowered outbound.”
Cabane: Reddit set goal of getting 10% of US advertisers by year-end
“And this is my latest advisory client, Reddit, a fairly well-known social platform, and they gave me a goal. Get 10% of the U.S. Advertisers to advertise on Reddit by the end of the year, starting from pretty much zero, which is a pretty big goal, ok?”
Cabane: Modular multi-agent prompts outperform monolithic prompts for content creation
“That is a much better way To create content, then have a huge prompt that tries to do everything, because it tends to fail when you do that. And so we try to break it down, we store the data in Airtable, and then we feedback the data from Airtable into the fin…”
Cabane: Marketing teams need composable AI stacks with independent databases
“You cannot invest all of your models In one big platform, you do want to be able to, like, compose with different technologies, have an independent database, and so you can switch and replace parts of your workflow.”
Cabane: Reducing check volume and challenging burn rates amid tech uncertainty
“One, I've reduced the number of checks, because I have a hard time building conviction on what is going to be the successful technology platform two years from now. It's becoming extremely hard to read. It's always been a difficult job. It's harder. And second…”
Cabane: Boards worldwide will demand AI outbound and SEO cost reductions
“Why are you not building the outbound automation infrastructure, the SEO infrastructure at a fraction of the cost that what is, yes, that pressure will start to disseminate and go around all the boards around the world for sure. A hundred percent.”
Cabane: LinkedIn removed intent data ahead of a major AI product launch
“You've got to wonder what they're doing, especially because they've removed their intent data product three weeks ago, right? So you've got to wonder, is it because they don't care, or is it because they're going to announce something big? I think the latter.”
Cabane: Startup boards have shifted from growth at all costs to low CAC
“And obviously you've been aware that this is like a clear shift in what the boards and founders are asking us. And it's no longer like growth at all costs. It's low CAC at all costs for better or worse.”
Cabane: Intent signal outbound drove 3x-4x higher revenue per contact
“When you outbound a prospect with an intent signal, one of those, versus not, the dollars per contact were three times to four times higher.”
Cabane: Top SaaS companies achieve $1.05 CAC versus $1.80 for peers
“The best companies, so the top companies, have a significantly Lower CAC than the rest. Now, that might sound obvious, but when you look at the data here at the bottom of this slide, you're seeing it is, like, one dollar and five cents versus one dollar 80”
Cabane: Ramp's outbound sales emails are fully automated without humans
“And those are automated, right? Fully automated. There's no human involved in sending this.”
Cabane: Hypergrowth Partners invests advisory time for common equity instead of capital
“When I say an advisory collective it means we are somewhat like a VC fund, but we don't give out capital. We invest our time. In exchange for common stock equity. And we have about 30 senior leaders around the world working together.”