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
SpaceX, Anthropic, and OpenAI IPOs will exceed all past tech IPOs combined
“We're going to see three trillion dollar plus IPOs over the coming months. It's never happened before. The value of SpaceX plus Anthropic plus OpenAI will be more than all the other tech IPOs combined ever.”
Lemkin: Four Upcoming Tech Mega-IPOs Will Eclipse All IPOs Since 2000
“SpaceX, Anthropic, OpenAI, we'll add in Databricks, we'll have Arsan, one of the co-founders here in about half an hour after this. That's going to create more market value, more value, and more wealth than every other IPO since 2000.”
Lemkin: A $100B Startup Acquisition Will Occur in the Next 12 Months
“I bet there'll be a hundred billion dollar startup acquired in the next 12 months.”
Lemkin: Anthropic Will Reach $50B in Revenue in Four Years
“Anthropics revenue is like nothing we've ever seen. Okay. It'll be at fifty billion in less than four years or four years plus or minus.”
Queener: 75% of App Software Companies and 50% of Categories Will Disappear
“75% of all applications offer companies that you see today are going to disappear. And 50% of all applications, software categories are going to disappear.”
Benioff: Microsoft's Partnership With OpenAI Will Turn Into Direct Competition
“Microsoft is a company that wants to own it all, control it all. If they see a hot company or a hot startup, they ask themselves, hey, why is that not in our world? And in the case of they, usually they like To either try to feign an acquisition and then based…”
Tavakoli: Existing valuable software monopolies will be broken within 24 months
“I think any industry that is highly valuable, that has a monopoly today, Will not have a monopoly, 12 to 24 months from now, because.”
Lemkin: A Generation of Operations Roles Will Never Be Hired
“I mean, for us there, so there'll be a whole generation of these people that are just never hired. There may be some folks that are laid off. I, and I think more commonly they'll just be slowly managed out and just replaced with agents.”
Lemkin: Idle Capacity Will Be the Biggest Issue With AI Agents
“The biggest issue we're going to have going forward is our agents are going to get so good. They sit idle all day long. They don't have enough work.”
Lemkin: Companies Will Abandon Employee AI Reskilling by Year-End
“To be direct, I think by the end of this year, we're going to give up on reskilling. I think folks are going to stop pretending they can reskill folks that are not going to be able to make the jump to the agentic age.”
Lemkin: AI will eliminate middle-tier tech jobs while elites amass unprecedented wealth
“We're gonna enter this weird world where the best VCs are gonna make money like we've never seen before, right, and the best engineers, and then, you know, the middle is gonna have no jobs.”
Lemkin: Average GTM sales jobs are in terminal decline
“These mid pack jobs, they're just in terminal decline in GTM and you should be aware of it. They're in terminal decline. We won't need the mid now there will be pockets.”
Lemkin: Most SDRs and qualifying BDRs will be eliminated by 2026
“And I really think most SDRs will die next year, but the meat, and I know we throw around these terms differently. The BDR that sort of smarmily qualifies you that that's going to die. Like we just, there's no need for that with these tools.”
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?”
Lemkin: Sales Commission Rates Will Halve by End of 2026
“I actually think what's going to happen because of attribution is commissions are going to have by the end of next year. Because this is how the math is going to work. You're going to get credit for the It's not just PLG. You're going to get credit for Kyle's …”
Lemkin: CROs must manage 50/50 AI and human teams by year-end
“I think this year, To be a RevOps professional imminently in a CRO by the end of this year, you will have to know how to manage a fifty-fifty team. 50% AI, 50% human. Not just tools, but you will have to learn how to manage agents, agents, AIs, whether that's …”
Lemkin: AI Will Outperform 80% of Sales Reps by 2026
“Because your AI, at least by next year, is going to be better than 80% of sales reps. Not the best.”
Ripabelli: 99.9% of OpenAI and Anthropic users will not stay on DeepSeek
“But I think in two months, I think, 99.9% of the people who are using Anthropic and OpenAI today is going to go back to using their products, not DeepSeek's model.”
Ripabelli: In five years, AI agent anthropomorphism will look ridiculous
“I think five years time, like, I think everyone's like, why the fuck did we spend five years talking about algorithms as being like a coworker? It's just like software that does things for us. And sometimes maybe you want to chat with it. That's great. That's …”
Lemkin: S-tier AI agents will quickly replace B-tier and C-tier employees
“My limited experience is that an S-tier agent is better than a C-tier employee. This is what across the contact center is. You usually see that the agents are like in the, they can't do everything, but they're in the top 10% of CSAT because what they do, they …”
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.”
Lemkin: 800 of the 1,000 existing tech unicorns will fail
“We can all laugh about the, that 800 of the thousand unicorns are junk. They're junk of corns. It's going to turn true”
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.”
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.”
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.”
Brands failing to match Amazon's two-hour delivery will eventually go bankrupt
“And if you don't fix it, if you don't solve it, if you're not able to at least get parity to Amazon's value proposition of two-hour delivery, you will go bankrupt.”
Lemkin: Customer AI agents will eliminate the need for underlying CRMs
“In CX and support if I'm talking to an agent on someone's website as a potential customer and that agent keeps me forever, I might not need, there may be no need for the CRM or CX system or SFA that undermined it. Used to underlie that interaction because the …”
Bialecki: Future software engineering will be agent-driven with asynchronous human escalation
“I think this is the future of how software is going to get built, where very much when you do a normal product review with actual like humans, with people, like you meet and you discuss the key product decisions and you harden what you're after. We can now do …”
Bialecki: Most businesses will deploy their own AI agent by year-end
“By the end of this year, I think most businesses are gonna have their own agent. They deploy either on their website or behind a phone number or through email or to chat with your Claude that you can just access.”
Lemkin: Competitors' AI agents will steal customers from incumbent SaaS vendors
“Agents will steal your customers. Not your humans, not the great sales rep, not a moment in time, not your competitor going down at the end of the month or for a weekend. Your competitor's agents will steal you, steal your customers.”
O'Driscoll: OpenAI and Anthropic Revenues Won't Match AI CapEx Until 2031-2032
“The stunning thing is it takes until 2031 or 2032 before
The revenue from those two companies surpasses the total capex.”
O'Driscoll: Foundation model makers will probably continue capturing the delta value
“The truth is they are the apex predator of this distribution. They are the guys who have taken the value, the delta value, and probably will continue to do so under those forecasts.”
O'Driscoll: AI apps will create massive public market outcomes within 15 years.
“But then I still think there are going to be over the next 1015 years, just as Microsoft dominated the client server and PC age and was the operating system, but there were hundreds of client server apps companies that achieved successful and great outcomes in…”
O'Driscoll: OpenAI, Anthropic, and Gemini will capture oligopolistic foundation model profits.
“There's no doubt that a two-way or a three-way dominance of the foundation model category will be between OpenAI and Tropic and Gemini with maybe some other players. They will dominate that. They probably will have, you know, oligopolistic profits.”
Lemkin: Software Vendors with Agent-Unfriendly APIs Will Lose Customers
“If your API is not agent friendly, it is a crying shame because you will lose customers when the agent says, I don't want to, I don't, I want to use a different vendor, right?”
Lemkin: AI Agents Will Collapse Into Fewer Consolidated Knowledge Repositories
“The agents are collapsing into each other. We may well have fewer agents doing more, going deeper. In essence, mono repos all sharing a body of knowledge.”
Lemkin: AI will cause sales teams to shrink by roughly half
“I personally think net net, it means we'll have sales teams about half the size we used to.”
Blond: AI Will Make Software Development 5x Faster Within Three Years
“We can build software today. Let's call it five X faster than we could three years ago before all of the coding assistance. Well, if that's true faster, yeah, maybe more than probably more, it's reasonable to believe that in three years from now we can build f…”
Lemkin: Tech Industry Needs 100x More Forward Deployed Engineers
“We're going to need, I think Aaron Levy said on a tweet today or the other day, we're going to need a hundred times more FDs than we thought, because there's going to be a hundred times more workflows out there and they all need humans to deploy them. They don…”
Lemkin: Commercial AI SDR Tools Cannot Match Custom Internal Agents
“There's no way any AISDR tool is going to have that level of context. That's it. In theory, they could, you know, here's an interesting thing. In theory, of course they could, right? This is just LLMs and some data. But in practice, they're never going to be a…”
Lemkin: SaaS Usage Will Drop As Customers Build Internal AI Agents
“Folks that are seeing how we're using them, our agents, in some cases are going to see it going down as we replace just some of the use cases with our own agents doing it themselves.”
Masad: Every company will have an internal AI 'Oracle' for strategy
“I think every company will have an Oracle internally, especially once we get to, like, the one billion contact link, and you put all the contacts of the company inside there, and the CEO can go to the Oracle, like, oh, Oracle, tell me how do I run this company…”
Masad: Major AI agent capability jump coming in Q3/Q4
“I think we're now probably on a, like a bit of a, the start of a downturn in terms of people perception of agents. And I think later by like Q three and four, we're going to see another major capabilities jump and the tools will get a lot better. And I think w…”
High-Power ICs Replacing Executive VPs as Ultimate Career Status Symbol
“And I do think that is going to be the next flex Of our careers, not to go up the leadership ladders going to those fancy VP titles and actually becoming this high power IC that is capable to accomplish of what it used to take dozens of people to do.”
Tech Entering Era of Enterprise-Scale Solopreneurs and Mom-and-Pop SaaS
“I really truly believe that we're going to be entering the era of solopreneurs and running companies that are almost mid-market, potentially even enterprise size-like, as well as the really long tail of really small
What I would almost call mom and pop sass of…”