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 411 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
Lemkin: Do not hire people who complain about burnout
“Lazy people always say they're burnt out... But the people that complain about burnout, I think deserve a scarlet L burned into their forehead and don't hire them.”
Barrett: Silicon Valley overwhelmingly operates on selling to a bigger sucker
“There's like, build a viable business which you care about things like profit margin, things like this, or you just sell to a bigger sucker. Overwhelmingly, Silicon Valley is based upon the latter of those, and like, the reality is at no point relevant in actu…”
AI Creatives Are the Only Way to Capture Mobile App Attention
“Especially when it comes to mobile apps. AI-generated ad creatives are absolutely necessary. This is the AI-generated creatives is the only way to get people attention, because there is a strong novelty effect to that, and we pay a lot of attention to that.”
Lemkin: The job market for average computer science graduates has been devastated
“There's no need for the most part, for a B tier. B level grade CS engineer. It's been devastated, right?”
Claims That Software Engineering or Design Are Dead Are False
“This is like what people say, oh, engineering is dead or design is dead. All of that I think is a lie because we had never had more need for experienced incredible engineers that are going to push the boundary of what's possible to create with software, to ena…”
Lemkin: Pre-AI B2B SaaS companies are becoming "tragedy apps"
“And it just, I think most of the old SAS companies, the pre AIB to be players have become tragedy apps.”
Lemkin: Figma feels like 'grandpa software' despite top-decile revenue growth
“This is why now Figma feels like grandpa software. That's the thing. It feels like grandpa software. It feels like grandpa software and you don't, the NRR is still high. The company is still growing at top decile rates, but who wants to buy new stuff from gran…”
Lemkin: Clerk Is 'Mind-Numbingly Hard to Use' and Most Frustrating App
“Probably the most frustrating app I've used is clerk, right? For authentication on replica. It's just. Mind-numbingly hard to use.”
Lemkin: Buyers have zero interest in profitable pre-AI B2B SaaS companies
“These B to B companies, pre AI ones at fifty million, a 100,000,200 1,000,800 million, no one wants to buy them. It doesn't matter that you, hooray, you got profitable. Thank you. That means you're not going bankrupt. You have not solved your existential probl…”
Adams: Traditional seat-based SaaS and CRUD GUIs make no sense post-AI
“Most SaaS companies sold seats. These are seats that humans sit in. Those humans use some kind of GUI, some CRUD type tasks to achieve some outcome. None of these things make sense anymore, right? None of these things make sense. There's no seats in a post AI …”
Lemkin: AI agents outperform mid-pack sales reps and SDRs
“Our AI agents are better than a mid pack AE or SDR or BDR better than a mid pack. Not maybe not mid packet owner. But I've been doing this for a while. Better than the mid pack people I've worked over in my career. Not better than the best.”
Lemkin: Half of HubSpot's Partner Agencies Are Obsolete
“And HubSpot hasn't figured this out with his AI training. That's why I'd like basically half of HubSpot's agencies are obsolete.”
Ibarra: AI-native GTM agencies are selling snake oil
“There's no agency that already knows how to do this. There's no, maybe there's a few like ester people at orgs that you can try and steal. But outside of that, I wouldn't, you know, buy the snake oil of, oh, we're an AI native agency and we know how to do GTM …”
Lemkin: Top AI companies have mediocre sales reps who misunderstand their products
“Some of the very best AI companies across the globe, not just any ones we're talking about, the best ones I know have really mediocre sales teams that do not understand the products they're selling. They just don't understand. How AI coding tools work and how …”
Queener: 30 years of SaaS created CRUD databases that don't help workers
“All the software I've associated is garbage because they're crud databases that somebody logs into enters information. Somebody else has a report that measures their performance, but in doing their job and whatever they have to go do, it doesn't help you do yo…”
Lemkin Calls Adobe's $5B AI-Influenced Revenue Metric 'Malarkey'
“Adobe on its last earnings called Adobe is, I mean, it has some AI tools in, in create creative, but it's not ahead of a lot of the competition. I think it said it had five billion of AI influenced revenue. What malarkey.”
Lemkin: Generic $20-a-Month AI Copilots Are a Failure
“This is why co-pilots are like a failure. No one wants to pay for the office co-pilot. That does a little bit extra for another 20 bucks a month. They want something that does something incredibly powerful and very meaningful with almost instant ROI.”
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…”
Rangan: Traditional search is dead for driving website traffic
“Search is gone. Like, we're not just searching to get the information anymore. AI overviews are actually providing answers, so waiting for search to lead traffic to your website is gone.”
Lemkin: Fire Any Executive Who Is Not Deeply Curious About AI by July
“If anyone on your executive team, or honestly, I know this is tough love, anyone on your team that by June, is not deeply curious, like is not pretending to use chat GPT once a week to get recipes... By June, if not, if July won, I would like just start taking…”
Benioff: Microsoft Used 'Dark' and 'Horrible' Tactics to Attack Slack
“You can see the horrible things that Microsoft did to Slack before we bought it. And yeah, that was pretty bad and they were running their playbook and did a lot of dark stuff. And it's all got in a written up in an EU complaint, but Slack made before we bough…”
Dean: Synapse moved funds across banks in seemingly illegal ways
“And eventually, Synapse, the software company, the program manager, started to add other banks. And they added two, three banks, and they moved money around between them pretty indiscriminately. In ways that I would say, this is not my real, legally, it's not …”
Frankel: Almost every company sale in my career was a mistake
“I look in the rear view mirror and I go, everything I've sold pretty much has been a mistake. So I'm a contrarian.”
Lemkin: Legacy SaaS outbound playbooks fail close to 100% of the time
“Like the best ones are growing faster than ever, but it's not by running the old clicky playbooks. I'm just seeing them fail close to a hundred percent of the time.”
Lemkin: Tech cares less about inclusion than it did two years ago
“I think overall tech cares less about inclusion and being representative than it did two years ago.”
Amin: Autonomous AI SDRs Are a Temporary Dead End
“And unless AI SDRs are able to do that, I think it might be a temporary dead end for now until we get an order or two of magnitude of improvements in LLMs, which could happen very quickly.”
Lemkin: SaaS Growth Slows From Losing Product-Market Fit, Not Macro Downturns
“Because I really think growth slows because you fall out of product market fit. Too many people blame the markets or the VCs or the downturn, but there's no downturn in the US economy.”
Lemkin: VCs give terrible hiring advice due to lack of operating experience
“Why your VCs give you terrible hiring advice. It's very short. You can go find it right now. And it's because most of them haven't been operators or were a long time ago or another category. And if you've never done something, you want the person from wherever…”
Lemkin: 'Founder Mode' Does Not Work For Scaling Inside Sales
“Founder mode does not work for sales. It does not work for inside sales.”
Riparbelli: Top AI Growth Tactic Is Announcing Broken Features
“I think the biggest growth tactic right now in AI, right, is just announce a bunch of stuff, that may not actually be ready or work in the products. I think we'll, we'll see how that pans out over time. That's the sort of extreme version of this. I wouldn't ne…”
Lacher: Founders Should Kill Pro-Rata Rights to Eliminate Signaling Risks
“If I was a founder, and I'm speaking against my own interests a little as an investor, being opportunistic, but why the hell would you give someone a paratha right? Because either that investor needs to earn it and really show that they're doing great work, so…”
Stebbings: Europe Has Many Dangerous VCs Who Know Nothing Yet Interfere
“And then there are the really dangerous investors who think they know everything but actually know nothing and want to do a lot. Big cross. Worst of the worst. Europe has a lot of them, sadly.”
Stebbings: Small VC Platform Hires Are Ineffective Compared to Top Firms
“Andreessen have hundreds. They're actually very deep across every segment of hiring, across every segment of B to B customer acquisition. They are a machine. Insight is the same. We have Insight who've done our companies, and it is a machine that they roll in.…”
Levie: Software jobs are easy compared to 90% of other work
“This is like, not like particularly like hard, you know, work of, you know, like, 90% of the jobs that I see.”
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.”
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: 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: 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.”
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: 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.”
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”