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 519 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
Many fast-growing AI startups currently operate with negative gross margins
“At least today, you know, there's certainly AI businesses that yes, they're growing really fast, but the margins are quite negative. And so therefore like you have to bet on them raising more venture money until they can like figure that out, whether that's fr…”
Josephs: Marjorie Taylor Greene bought major tech stocks surrounding tariff announcements
“She started buying the day after they paused it. The day before and the day after, on the eighth and ninth. She bought Apple, she bought Qualcomm, she bought Nvidia, AMD, ASML.”
El-Baba: StackBlitz's Bolt.new reached a $20M run rate in two months
“So for example, we just invested in a company called Bolt, or previously the parent organization called StackBlitz... They've gone zero to 20 million in run rate in two months. And we were lucky to lead their series, be there.”
Tunguz: In Q1 2024, Ethereum was world's most profitable software entity
“Ethereum in the first quarter of 24 produced on a percentage basis is the most profitable software company in the world. And on a aggregate dollars basis, six largest producer of cash, it's worth seven snowflakes put together. It's three hundred fifty billion …”
Competitors will catch up to OpenAI's o1 reasoning model within six months
“O1 just came out. We haven't fully benchmarked on our side yet. It's definitely an improvement. And so open AI is ahead of everybody else. It's an improvement in reasoning which is good. We can talk about that later on, but I expect people will catch up within…”
LLM scaling exhibits decreasing returns, requiring 10x compute for sublinear improvements
“If you look at it today, though, we are, the exponential in LLM performance is so far working against us that you need Order of magnitude increases in compute, 10 X increase in compute to have relatively sublinear increases in performance. So you're at decreas…”
Sam D'Amico: Chinese EV makers offer Tesla Model 3 equivalents for $25,000
“China can offer. Like you can get a Tesla model three equivalent vehicle for like 25 K delivered and the vehicle quality is fantastic today.”
Alter: European VC funds beat North American funds in 10-year net IRR
“It's not surprising that when you, again, look at the numbers over a 10 and 15 year time horizon, European VC funds have yielded higher net IRR compared to North American ones.”
Sadeghi: Genetics alone can never predict IQ due to 50% environmental factor
“You can't. From genetics predicts someone's IQ. And actually what a lot of people don't realize is you will never be able to. And the reason for that is because 50% of intelligence is environmental. The other 50% is genetic.”
Oltmann: OpenAI is attempting to build its own chip factories
“OpenAI is currently out in the market now trying to actually build their own chip factories and develop their own chips internally, which is a total shift away from historically what software companies have done.”
Mavrookas: Only 1% of US defense budget allocated to autonomy
“When you look at the budget today, just look at the Department of War's budget, we talked about the request for 1.5 trillion, and where the budget is today, right around a trillion dollars for 26, one percent went towards autonomy.”
Mavrookas: China outbuilds the US 230-to-1 in shipbuilding
“China outbuilds us 230 to one. Our naval fleet is actually shrinking and we have 0.1% of global shipbuilding capacity as a non-existent industry.”
Beck: SolAero, Sinclair, and PSC had zero in-orbit failures prior to acquisition
“Like, you know, Solero Solar, never had a solar panel fail in orbit in 40 years. Doug Sinclair and reaction wheels, same again. PSC, never had a failure, separation system failure.”
Arora: AI Models Can Daisy-Chain Vulnerabilities to Attack Infrastructure
“You've seen that it can find cyber vulnerabilities. It can daisy chain vulnerabilities, attack infrastructure. So it's clear these models are going to be extremely powerful. They already are.”
Monroe-Anderson: Iranian Shaheds Destroyed Billions in Middle East Equipment and Infrastructure
“Shahhead drones, Iranian Shahhead drones have taken out billions of dollars of infrastructure and other weapon systems in the Middle East and you know, against US forces.”
Monroe-Anderson: DJI drones are the most common reconnaissance drones in Ukraine
“What DJI makes, which, you know, they make the best consumer drones in the world, but they also make the most commonly used reconnaissance drones for the battlefield. Like, Ukraine and Russia are using Mavic's, Matrice's, all these DJI products that are incred…”
Monroe-Anderson: Neros Was First with an FPV Drone on Blue UAS List
“We were the first company to have an FPV drone on the blue UAS list, meaning the Department of War could actually just purchase and use it without having to go through a bunch of crazy approvals.”
Hurlston: Chinese Optical Suppliers Have a Significant Presence in US Data Centers
“Between the U.S. Optical component suppliers and how much we supply into the Chinese data centers, very little. We don't supply very much gear into the Chinese data centers, whereas Chinese optical component suppliers, some of our competitors, have a pretty bi…”
Global tech market cap is $10T software, $20T Mag-7, $30T hardware
“10 trillion in software service internet, 20 trillion in Mag-Seven, 30 trillion in non-Mag-Seven compute chips hardware. That's a, I don't think people would realize that we are that compute hardware centric now. 10, 20, 30. Before AI, BCE era, it was probably…”
Desai: Coding agents almost always run on proprietary closed models
“Like, for coding agents, ok, you have Cloud Code, you have Codex, there is a Grok build, many options. Cursor has other options available. So what you find is, in those scenarios, you almost always use See or hear close models, not open source models. Propriet…”
Patel: Nvidia B200 and B300 server pricing increased prior to production
“I think you've already seen server pricing go up like B 200, B 300 that you're buying now versus last year. The price is significantly higher. We've seen next generation hardware receive price increases before they've even started production. Like, here was th…”
Cook: Enterprise open-source LLM spend dropped from 19% to 11%
“Enterprise LLM spend was 19% open source last year, and it's 11% this year. So it's dropped.”
Mathew: Elon Musk is reserving 30% of the SpaceX IPO for retail
“And so Elon reserving 30% of the SpaceX IPO for retail investors, I think is a really great thing.”
Armstrong: Four billion people worldwide are unbrokered without U.S. investment access
“There's actually about four billion people in the world today who are unbrokered. They don't have access to any high-quality U.S. Investments.”
Armstrong: Coinbase saw strong volume on SpaceX pre-IPO perps
“So we launched with SpaceX, A few weeks ago before they went public, and we saw quite a lot of volume on there.”
Slotowicz: Private jet de-icing bills can reach $24,000 per flight
“We've seen it like, a 24,000 dollar de-ice bill in Aspen. So deicing is something that charter companies will typically pass along to the broker, which will pass along to you.”
Fishner-Wolfson says SpaceX equity creates life-changing wealth for shop-floor workers
“They've really shared equity across the entire company, which is incredible. And to your point, they have lots of people on the shop floor who literally make all of the stuff that matters. So the fact that this is life changing for so many people, I really thi…”
SpaceX's Merlin is the most reliable, highest thrust-to-weight engine ever
“My, probably my proudest development was the Merlin engine, which is currently flying on Falcon nine, the most reliable rocket engine ever developed, and also the highest thrust of weight of any rocket engine ever developed.”
Rangwalla: Memory supply agreements feature guaranteed commitments through 2029–2030
“And now, you know, in the case of memory, for example, you're now hearing Supply agreements, like, guaranteed commitments through 29, twenty-thirty.”
Rangwalla: OpenAI's latest funding round valued it over $800B
“OpenAI's most recent round was 800 plus billion dollars.”
Rangwalla: SpaceX reached a $1.25T valuation in xAI transaction
“SpaceX is most recent, you know, when they did the transaction with XAI was 1.25 trillion dollars.”
Rangwalla: Anthropic's last round was in the high $300B range
“Anthropix last round was, you know, high 300 of billions.”
Rangwalla: Combined OpenAI and Anthropic ARR Exceeds Salesforce and ServiceNow
“And then when you think about both of them combined, let's say they're close to sixty billion dollars. I mean, that is bigger than ServiceNow, that is bigger than Salesforce, that is bigger than any big name SaaS platform that you would think about. And these …”
Adcock: Figure placed the first humanoid robots in White House history
“We got a call asking to be basically the first humanoid group basically ever to put robots in the White House, and so last week we basically had the, you know, first robots in, humanoid robots in history there doing stuff, talking, greeting folks we were basic…”
Adcock: Project Vulcan prevents Figure robots from falling during leg joint failures
“We've been working on a project we call Vulcan here internally. That basically allows us to lose a single or even multiple joints in the legs and still not fall.”
Adcock: Figure-Assisted BMW X3 Is First Car Built by Humanoid Robot
“This is an X-III that we helped basically like we basically helped, the robot helped assemble it, and this was the first car in the world built by a humanoid robot that we're aware of.”
Adcock: NASA JPL tech detects concealed weapons from 20 meters away
“There's a technology that was designed at NASA Jet Propulsion Lab about a decade ago that it can detect weapons underneath clothes and in backpacks and bags from, like 10, 20, you know, five, 10, 20 meters away. And they built it for the Iraq-Afghanistan war t…”
Harrison: China developed $15M to $20M missiles capable of destroying US carriers
“The Chinese have developed missiles that they affectionately refer to as carrier killers, that literally it's, I mean, these still might be fairly expensive missiles, right, these are 15, twenty million dollar missiles, But they can destroy a multi-billion dol…”
Harrison: Anduril took over Microsoft's $22B IVAS contract for EagleEye
“And then a year ago Microsoft basically admitted defeat to some extent, and the government said, we're going to recompete the contract, and Anduril first as a potential partner to Microsoft, and then eventually took over a twenty-two billion dollar IVAS contra…”
Harrison: Anduril is actively working on subterranean warfare technology
“Like several people are working on that, including Anduril, much to the surprise, I don't know if you have heard this story, but there was a story of Palmer talking about subterranean warfare, and the marketing person at Anduril was there, it was like, to the …”
Taneja: Customer Value Fund is VC's first investment-grade product
“We have customer value fund, which is the first investment grade rated product in our industry”
Baszucki: Top 1,000 Roblox developers average $1.3M in earnings
“Our developer creator earned about a billion and a half on the platform, and it goes pretty deep, like top thousand devs are averaging 1.3 million, like real people making a live on living.”
Baszucki: Ketosis shows promise as treatment for bipolar and schizophrenia
“It's part of what our Family Foundation researches is going into ketosis for bipolar and schizophrenia, and we're finding more and more People who tend to have these medical issues. This can be like a partial treatment for them.”
Del Buono: Custodian Firms Disable Self-Service Features Under RIA Platforms
“When you move under the RA platform, those features are disabled to sort of keep you more locked into that ecosystem.”
Del Buono: Secondary SPV Managers Can Sell Stock Without Investor Approval
“I've seen personally in cases where the stocks that are in the entity are sold by the individual managing the entity. And they don't need to seek approval from the people who invest in it, right?”
Bouaziz: Deel operates fully remotely with 7,000 employees in 120 countries
“Deal is a fully remote company. We have 7000 people across a 120 countries.”
Alex Bouaziz denies fleeing to Dubai, confirming his Tel Aviv residency
“First of all, I'm based in Tel Aviv. I've been based in Tel Aviv for quite a while. I do think Dubai is amazing, and the UAE, and if you haven't been, you should visit. Yeah, I know that, that was not exactly accurate, and maybe one day, the guys at TechCrunch…”