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 1,341 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 40 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
Whop migrated 800GB of databases to PlanetScale with zero downtime
“And that's how we moved about 800 gigabytes of data with zero downtime from Postgres to PlanetScale.”
O'Shea: Carta report shows 50% of LPs are exiting venture allocations
“Carta actually just put out a report, I covered it in Sorcery, that LPs are committing less to the category, about 50% are not going to be allocating to venture anymore.”
Moore: Certain VC funds use high valuations as a lever to win
“There are definitely certain funds that come to mind that I won't name who have decided the strategy that they're going to employ is to use valuation as a lever to win.”
Peters: Biologic drugs generate roughly $15,000 per patient monthly for life
“TNF alpha immune system modulator, which is like a called a biologic drug. It's a class of biologic drugs that modulate your immune system. They make, they generate like 15 K a month and you are on them for life typically.”
Jacob Peters: 8,000 chemicals in US food supply do not exist in Europe
“8000 chemicals exist in the U.S. Food supply. Jacob Peters: That don't exist in Europe.”
Josephs: Autopilot's Nancy Pelosi tracker outperformed the S&P 500 by 30%
“Like, in 2024, for example Our Pelosi tracker that we track her filings, not the actual days of the trade, obviously, and she was up 54%. She outperformed the SPY by 30%.”
Josephs: Richard Burr sold $1.4M in stocks after publishing reassuring COVID-19 op-ed
“He called up his financial advisor, in his, him and his financial advisor, they liquidated their portfolio, their retirement account, a week after he wrote that op-ed telling the world to kind of stay calm. Sold off 1.4 million dollars of his entire retirement…”
Josephs: Majority of politicians tracked by Autopilot outperform the market
“I haven't checked on him in a while, but the other politicians that we do track, the majority of them do outperform, but this year is going to be an interesting one because of the different market dynamics.”
Josephs: Autopilot is bipartisan and targets more Republicans than Democrats
“We are very bipartisan. We call out more Republicans probably than Democrats, but we just have the Pelosi tracker name.”
Base Power cuts home battery installation times from months to weeks
“So today, if you go buy a home battery it's probably gonna take you two to six months to get that battery on your home. We can get a battery on a home. You know, it varies by permitting requirements from the local municipality, but on the order of two to four …”
Every early-stage VC entering the Midas List since 2015 is an operator
“If you look at the post call, 2015 time frame, the people that make it onto the Midas list, which while an imperfect list is maybe the closest that we have to an objective ranking function of VCs the, you know, sort of the only ones that have made it down to t…”
Garrett: SpaceX launch business operated with negative working capital for years
“SpaceX has been cashflow positive most of the life cycle of the business. The core business, the launch business for years had negative working capital”
Garrett: Databricks and Stripe converted RSUs to single-trigger to delay IPOs
“If you saw recently with Databricks and Stripe, those big massive rounds and tenders were actually to cover the tax bill for the employees after they hit their seven year cliff on the double trigger RSU. So they converted from double trigger to single trigger …”
Mansoor: Kalshi captured 7% of sports handle in its launch week
“I mean, I think we got like something like seven percent of the handle within seven days of launch which is huge. Like it's a testament to how big this could be. And I think we were fourth in handle.”
Mansoor: Most Kalshi revenue comes from recurring daily markets, not mega-events
“Most of our revenue doesn't
Come from these kind of crazy, exciting events. Like the breakdown of revenue right now for this month, for example, like how much was it the Superbowl versus the other things? Like it's actually much smaller than people would think…”
McCormick: SpaceX suffered only ~50% dilution despite raising $10B in equity
“I think they're like 50% dilution over the past 20 years, even though they've raised ten billion dollars of, you know, of equity aside from secondaries.”
Ritter: $500B Stargate project is $100B equity, 75% chips, 25% infrastructure
“Remember, it's equity dollars and debt that's going into this, so five hundred billion is probably a hundred billion of equity, of money going in that is sort of risk money, the rest is building out The infrastructure, 25% of it goes to buildings and cooling s…”
El-Baba: Enterprise AI Deals Close in a Month but Face 12-Month POCs
“We're no longer going through 12 months, 18 months enterprise sales cycle. Sales cycle was a month. You're in the door. But we're gonna evaluate you for 12 months in a POC or POB.”
Tunguz: Microsoft projects compute constraints and aggressive GPU buying through 2025
“Microsoft is still compute constrained. And they project, I think, all the way through twenty-twenty-five, they'll still be needing to buy GPUs aggressively because it just cannot serve service all of the demand.”
Guo: Passes reached multi-millions in revenue after 12 months
“Like, in the multi-millions after our first 12 months.”
Socher: You.com was first to bring LLMs into search
“We're the first to bring LLMs into the search engine space and have some exciting patents some already given some pending on that”
Socher: No one was teaching neural nets for NLP globally in 2014
“No one was teaching neural nets for NLP in the world in 2014 when I graduated, and I thought, man, I'm still not, I can't convince some of these older professors, they're so, like sort of prefer other methods and don't believe in neural nets, so I got to train…”
Socher: OpenAI cited Socher's 2018 paper, crediting it with influencing early GPTs
“That paper was actually cited by OpenAI, and they're still doing research papers. Like, we were told by some of the folks that worked on the first version of GPTs, like one and two, that that actually had influenced them to work more in NLP.”
Josh Wolfe predicts 30% to 50% of VC firms will shut down
“Josh Wolf at Lux Capital wrote his quarterly letter and he predicted that 30 to 50% of venture firms would cease to exist.”
LPs no longer accept TVPI multiples and strictly demand DPI
“No longer do you walk into a pitch meeting and show your multiple and invested capital and, or even like TVPI, like you have to like, just show DPI and be really clear what that number is.”
Mega-check foundation model investors have largely avoided write-offs via returned capital
“If you're an AI investor doing very big checks and foundation model up, foundation model layer up, you haven't really had many write offs. You've in your losers, or I wouldn't say losers in the companies that haven't broken out, you've made your money back.”
Aggregate AI hardware capex vastly exceeds actual AI deployment revenue
“Aggregate capex on AI hardware. It's like vastly out exceeding revenue generated by AI companies in the actual deployment of AI.”
Sam D'Amico: Impulse's battery delivers 4-5x more power into the pan
“In our case, we can do that in about a minute because we can push order of magnitude Four to five times more power into the pan than pretty much any other stuff. Because the battery is right there able to give us DC power straight to the coils.”
Sam D'Amico: Impulse cooktops achieve 240V performance on standard 120V outlets
“Typical stoves use, like, 60 amps or something like that. We can run on as little as, like, at 240 volts. We can run on as little as a 120 volt outlet. So you can just plug this thing in with, like, your normal, like, AC power cable and get the same stove perf…”
Sam D'Amico: Impulse's battery stove qualifies for a 30% federal tax credit
“Because this thing has a battery and because that battery is Three kilowatt hours. We get a. 30% tax credit on the product.”
Sam D'Amico: Three to four battery appliances equal a home Tesla Powerwall
“If you have like three or four appliances per home, you've now deployed about a power wall per house. And so once you have a pop, like once you, which is like, let's say, 12 kilowatt hours or something like that, that is like half the energy use of a typical A…”
Sam D'Amico: EV battery cell costs have dropped to $50 per kilowatt-hour
“And now we're looking at like, sell costs of like, 50 dollars a kilowatt hour for reference, like a kilowatt, like a typical Tesla model three pack is like, 60 kilowatt hours or something like that. So it's like, you end up with battery packs that could be lik…”
Avalara and TaxJar abandoned SMB market after acquisitions, says Badangay
“One of them was Avalara, which was, had been acquired by Vista Equity, this private equity group for about 8.4 billion dollars. And then you had Taxjar, which got acquired by Stripe for you know, close to a billion dollars as well. And with these acquisitions,…”
Badangay: Competing tax platforms charge processing fees on dollar volume
“We have competitors that do that. And I think it's actually bonkers. Yes. They usually say, Hey, listen, They charge you not just a plat, they'll charge a platform fee, and then they'll also charge you a process, like basically a stripe processing fee type thi…”
Isford: Data infra teams, not AI teams, drive enterprise LLM adoption
“A lot of those data leaders are now the same people adopting AI and LLMs, and it's not like an AI team, it's just the data infrastructure tech team, right?”
Isford: Together AI Has the Market's Fastest Inference Tech
“They have the author of Flash Attention, Sri Dao, who is brilliant, as their chief scientist. He is, has a proprietary version of the fastest, like, inference technology on the market that's low cost to serve.”
Sadeghi: Nucleus IQ benchmarks against genetic cohorts, rather than predicting IQ
“Nucleus IQ, the function of it is not to predict your IQ score. The way it works is it basically tells you people with similar genetics to you, how they tend to score on an IQ test.”
Noone: Hardware engineers historically lacked code-based CAD automation tools
“And that code allows scripting, automation, scaling, things like equations and database lookups and logic, things that sound obvious to anyone who's done software before. Of course, you'd think that software could write a loop that changes the geometry of a fe…”
Noone: There has not been an engineering software IPO since 1986
“There hasn't been an engineering software IPO since 1986. It's been 40 years of the same major incumbents.”
Noone: Programmatic Design for Manufacturability checks do not exist without human review
“There is no way to programmatically do a DFM check. You know, for a part, there's some software that kind of does it. You're still going to be sending it to your machinist. You're going to send it to the manufacturing engineer.”
Soylent hit $60M revenue before bad hires ruined the company
“Grew to, like, sixty million dollars in, like, a few years in revenue and then just, like, over-raised and, you know, brought in bad team, and it was just, like, a disaster, and then everyone just laughed, and then the company sold for, like, not a great outco…”
EVALI lung injuries were caused by illicit cannabis vapes, not Juul
“There was this thing called EVALI, the e-cigarette and vapor acute lung injury, like fiasco. It was identified by the CDC. And I mean, people died, like there were multiple people that, that, that actually died. And everyone thought it was because of Juul. It …”
Nicotine itself does not cause lung cancer despite common public perception
“The biggest, you know, cognitive dissonance publicly still remains just the idea that like nicotine is what gives you lung cancer, which is just not true. And the government's, you know, acknowledged this, everyone's acknowledged this, but it just, Hasn't, it …”
Suster: 25% of VC funds deployed their entire fund in 2021
“25% of all funds deployed their entire fund in twenty-twenty-one. 25%, one in four. The median time to deploy in twenty-twenty-one was 1.7 years, okay?”
Suster says 20-percent growth software startups currently trade at 4x revenue
“But the twenty-year average is six X. And right now, if you're growing at 20%, you're probably trading at Forex.”
Hunter Walk: Homebrew's 2013 fund ranks in the top one percent
“Like, even if that fund didn't return another dollar, we'd be like a top one percent fund, and fortunately, it's gonna return more dollars.”
Hunter Walk: Midas List inclusion forces confidential disclosures and deal attribution
“Anyone who's on the Midas list no matter what their firm says, they've turned over, you know, information to a third party about their portfolio. And they've decided internally that somebody gets to claim credit for that deal. Whether it's the person who deser…”