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
Luckey: Anduril beat Boeing, Lockheed, and Northrop for fighter contract
“We were competing against Boeing, Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, and in the end, Andrew beat all of them, which was really really gratifying to, you know, go from starting this company to going toe to toe with the guys who are legends of the fighter commun…”
Luckey: Anduril built optically invisible drones around 2019–2020
“Building drones that are invisible to the human eye at the ranges that you're using them, it's not just like a hypothetical. Andrew did this in like, 2019, 20 20.”
Michael: China is building hypersonic missiles at costs the US cannot match
“So they've developed certain capabilities in certain hypersonic missile categories, ah, at a price that, ah, that we haven't achieved yet, which is why one of my critical technology areas is high, scaled hypersonics at cost.”
Bhargava: Crescendo automates 50-70% of call centers, raising EBITDA margins to 40%
“Someone from GC went and joined full time, and we built out this software that automates 50 to 70% now of what a call center does. So after proving that out in a year and having 10 or so pilot clients, we gave them the money to actually go buy a call center. A…”
AI roll-ups double cash flow and hit 30% EBITDA in one year
“So we're already seeing in many of the case studies that if you look at the first couple of companies they acquired, even if they've only grown revenue, 20%, if they've kept the cost basis flat using AI, but then bringing up people to kind of do 20% more tasks…”
Clark: Cursor reached hundreds of millions in run-rate revenue in 18 months
“I think when we invested, there were a couple tens of thousands of users and you know, low single digits, million air are fast forward to today. I don't think the company publicly publishes revenue, but call it on the Many, many hundreds of millions of run rat…”
Karp: Two-year US fentanyl deaths exceed all military combat deaths since WWII
“In the last two years, more people have died of fentanyl than every single person who's died as a soldier since World War II.”
Average SERHANT agent is 28, compared to 55 industry-wide
“The average real estate agent in the United States is a 55 year old white woman. Like, at Compass, I think it's like 57. At, you know, all the other firms, it might be even a little bit older, our average agent is 28.”
Barton: Cloud provider revenues are 100% dependent on GPU chip supply
“We're at a point where your cloud revenues are 100% dependent upon how many chips you get.”
Barton: OpenAI has 800M WAU with engagement rivaling Instagram
“OpenAI's got, what, like, eight hundred million weekly active users. Spending, like, spending, by my estimates, close to the amount of time every day that is spent on Instagram.”
Lowery: US produces 50,000 drones annually compared to China's 60 million
“China's building, I've heard, sixty million drones per year is not outside of the question of China being able to do, but, ah, and US maybe 50,000 drones in a year. So there's a huge disparity there.”
Lowery: The US military is forced to buy foreign-made computers
“The microprocessors, the computers, you cannot buy an American made computer. You have to go overseas. You have to go to China and military doesn't want to buy A foreign made computer, but there isn't any option, so they have to do by exception”
Steinman: Almost no industrial facilities worldwide have basic cybersecurity protection
“Most data moves over industrial networks unencrypted. Most industrial equipment simply receives any instruction sent to it with the proper protocol and just starts executing it. And so this is a huge problem. There's no security on industrial facilities on alm…”
Steinman: Chinese cyber actors are pre-positioned inside US critical infrastructure
“There are reports to Congress, open testimony by directors of national intelligence that the Chinese and the Russians and the Iranians and the North Koreans, but especially the Chinese, have been prolific in their efforts in the cyber domain to essentially pre…”
Chaddha: Many AI coding companies have negative or 15-20% gross margins
“A lot of these coding companies, they have either negative margins, which has been reported or 15, 20% gross margin.”
Bain and eBay management concluded Google posed no threat to commerce
“I remember sitting in a management meeting at eBay after we got acquired and right after we got acquired and they hired some consulting firms, Bain actually, to analyze the threat posed by Google to commerce. And their conclusion as a management team and with …”
Rabois: Opendoor's SG&A has been bloated and out of control since 2015
“And then the company at a kind of tactical level just has too much of a bloated GNA. It's always had too much of a GNA that was Way out of control since 2015.”
Shadbolt: Useful quantum computing requires roughly one million qubits
“The general consensus is that you need more like a million qubits to do anything commercially impactful with a quantum computer.”
Shadbolt: Semiconductor industry and PsiQuantum use almost no AI in chip design
“We basically don't use AI at all inside the company to design chips. And I think if you go and look at people who are building millions of chips in industry, there's a very small amount of AI, if any, that's being involved in the actual design of those chips t…”
Shadbolt: Australia's chief scientist found PsiQuantum a 'country mile ahead'
“And then at the end of that, I don't know, 18 month process she concludes that we're a country mile ahead of anyone else.”
Shadbolt: Quantum has consumed billions and 100k human-years without useful machines
“Quantum computing has already consumed billions and billions and billions of dollars of capital. It has consumed the entire adult life of tens of thousands of our best scientists and researchers. Some total has got to be nearly a 100,000 years of human life. B…”
Vance: SpaceX has lapped Blue Origin for 20 years, taking over rockets
“The difference between SpaceX and something like Blue Origin that started about the same time you know, I think Blue Origin's, like, coming on now, but they've had 20 years where SpaceX has just been lapping them, it's, like, taken over the entire rocket busin…”
Archer reached piloted flight milestones in half the time of competitors
“And don't forget, we've done this in half the time as our competitors have done this. And so we have moved at incredible speeds. And when you look at it, when you kind of zoom in, it looks like we're at the same space, maybe we're ahead. But if you like zoom o…”
Archer is the only major eVTOL manufacturer selling directly to airlines
“We're kind of the only game in town. Our competitor really wants to operate. And so if you want to buy aircraft, we're kind of the only game in town to really do that from.”
McGee: Apple Moved to China for Cheap Labor, Not Tech Competence
“What attracted Apple to move to China in the 2000 was not tech competence. It was just abundant labor, the cost of that labor and an industrial policy that was very welcoming to foreign direct investment.”
McGee: China Lacked Tech Capabilities Until Apple Built Them
“The tech capabilities aren't there. Apple builds them.”
McGee: Chinese Competitors, Not Apple Alone, Killed Nokia
“Market share wise, the iPhone has never been more than 20% of the global market. So who has more than 20% that can actually take on Nokia? It's the Chinese competitors. They have 55% market share, right? So you couple that with Apple, couple that with Samsung,…”
Agrawal: ChatGPT's User Base Is 10x Larger Than All Rivals Combined
“If you took the user count of ChatGPT on one side,
And all the other AI apps on the other side, let's do perplexity, and Claude, and Croc, and Gemini, and you know, long tail of apps that people use. Add them all up, multiplied by 10, it's probably still less …”
Agrawal: AI Semis Generate $200B, While AI Apps Are Only Earning $40B
“Nvidia earned, Nvidia alone at the chip player earned roughly forty billion dollars in data center revenue in Q one last quarter. So analyze that's about a 160. Let's say the total industry is 170, 180, maybe let's say 200. The infra layer is 20, thirty billio…”
Index Ventures preferred holding Nasty Gal at cost over a down round
“Index preferred to hold nasty gal at cost than do a down round.”
Doricko: Rainmaker's Elijah is NATO's only severe icing-capable drone
“The Elijah is the only drone in all of NATO that can fly in severe icing conditions.”
Doricko: China leads the US in cloud seeding engineered nanoparticles
“The Chinese Meteorological Administration, also through these sort of proxies that exist in the Middle East have developed much, much more sophisticated engineered nanoparticles than any United States operation has.”
McCormick: Fuse recruited the former number two Iranian nuclear scientist
“The number of two, kind of, nuclear scientists in, in Iran who came over here to, kind of, work on, on our side here, and then just, like, everybody that I met who was, like, you know, working on the machines, like top to bottom, just like an unbelievably cool…”
Vasavada: Tech billionaires' 'all-cash' mega-mansions are actually financed by margin loans
“So like when you read those stories of like, I'm sure you've, Read a bunch of them of like, blah, blah, blah. Tech billionaire buys fifty million dollar house, a hundred million dollar house, all cash paid. They're not paying in all cash. What they're doing is…”
Power: China built 1,700 vessels last year versus five by the US
“I mean, we're talking about like a quantum shipbuilding of like, I think it's 1700 last year of commercial and military vessels versus five.”
Power: Hadrian is the only US company generating advanced manufacturing training data
“So we're the only company that's actually generating labeled data that you can then train models around for advanced manufacturing in the US.”
Brex is the only next-gen card company owning its financial infrastructure
“The way that we differentiate against our competitors is the fact that we're the only next gen Category-defining company that owns our own financial infrastructure. Vertically integrated, so to speak. And what that means is getting super technical is that we d…”
Lee was expelled from Columbia and blacklisted by Amazon over InterviewCoder
“And after a certain point, I mean, I built this cheating tool. I get kicked out of school. I get blacklists from Amazon.”
Klein: New CS graduates face higher unemployment than art history majors
“And apparently, and this is such a bummer cause I'm a CS major, but new grad CS majors have a larger unemployment rate than art history majors.”
Sadeghi: Study shows over 50% of people accept genetic optimization for IQ
“There was actually a really good study that was done asking couples about genetic optimization, which is, you know, what's their perspective on it. And in the study, it said over 50% of people said genetic optimization for something like IQ is fine. And then I…”
Sadeghi: Embryo selection can dramatically reduce Alzheimer's and cancer risks
“You can still dramatically reduce the baby's risk, for example, for something like Alzheimer's, Which is then strongly associated with longevity or breast cancer or coronary artery disease, which are the top killers in the United States today.”
K2 Space delivers comparable power to Viasat-3 at a 10x lower price
“Viasat-III, one of the most high-powered, sort of, like, satellites ever launched into orbit. I think it was, like, 26 kilowatts of power. Cost 500 plus million dollars to make. You can launch one of them at a time. K-II's satellites are 20 kilowatts apiece. Y…”
Moore: Frontier tech companies are growing 100% at multi-billion-dollar run rates
“I mean, these companies are compounding it over a hundred percent year over year in the billions of run rate. We have never seen that before, right?”
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…”