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 1,819 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 120 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
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…”
Bhargava: AI will transform low-margin services industries into software-like margins
“Our thesis somewhat is, well, these unsexy services industries that were breakeven or 15 to 20% EBITDA margins, net income, obviously much lower. They can look like software from a margin profile, because once you take out the repetitive tasks and you take out…”
Bhargava predicts multiple $100B AI-native compounders in public markets by 2035
“And so we think there'll be plenty of these hundred billion dollar AI native compounders in the public markets 10 years from now,”
Bhargava: AI labor displacement will hit foreign outsourcing hubs hardest
“What we're seeing a lot of is you add AI technology to American companies. They're now much more efficient. They don't need to outsource a lot of these more repetitive tasks. So I think the area that will be hit the hardest is probably abroad in places like In…”
Bhargava: Some GC AI roll-ups will reach $100M EBITDA under two years
“Some of the companies in the rollup will hit a hundred million of EBITDA and they're like less than two years old.”
Tusk: VCs who participate in political favor-trading will regret it
“From a long-term American standpoint, I actually think that we're gonna, VC as a sector, for those who participated in this, unless they just made so much money and only just care about how much money they have and nothing else, are gonna really regret it.”
Tusk: AI Will Cause 25 Years of Uncertainty and Job Losses
“In a 25 year span, we'll be able to look and say, oh, AI unlocked all these new industries that we can't conceive of today, and all of these jobs, just like the internet did, just like the automobile did, just like the steam engine did, and everything else. Bu…”
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…”
Clark: Some of the most valuable companies will be in hardware
“I am fairly confident that We are going to produce some of the world's most valuable companies in hardware over the next decade.”
Ulevitch predicts China will sever U.S. battery supply chain in conflict
“If they all come from China, and we ever get into a real conflict with China, whether it's an economic conflict or an actual kinetic conflict, like, They're going to cut us off.”
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.”
Serhant predicts Class B and C NYC offices will convert to residential
“I think what it does, though, is it makes it really, really hard to be class B or class C office, which are all going to turn residential for me.”
Barton: Marketing spend will shift from Meta to AI agents and Shopify
“So that 20% that I'm spending on marketing to, you know, maybe it was meta, is now gonna, like, that profit pool is gonna be more going toward a Shopify or the actual agent players themselves, OpenAI or Gemini.”
Barton: Any US computer-based job will likely be automated
“My view broadly is that any job that exists in the US where you work at a computer at some point will likely can be automated, including my job.”
Barton: AI-driven margin expansion could spark a multi-year stock market run
“Because AI is going to benefit all these companies and the stock market's going to go up. And we might be at the front of a multi-year amazing run in the stock market because these companies revenues are going to grow faster. Their costs are not going to be as…”
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.”
Barton predicts Meta will 3x in market cap in five years
“Like, I think Facebook is going to be, you know, a three X in five years.”
Gil: Marquee companies like Stripe and SpaceX may stay forever private
“There may be a subset of companies that are forever private, because they can afford to be. That may be Stripe, that may be SpaceX, that may be some other companies.”
Gil: 90% of people in the AI wave are in doomed companies
“Definitionally, most startups are going to fail. And this wave is going to be just like every other one. And the place where every founder and investor think they are is in the right companies, right? And the reality is most people aren't, right? 90% of people…”
Siddharth: Solving multimodality, reasoning, tool use, and coding yields ASI
“Turing's the world's leading research accelerator, working with all of these frontier labs to advance them along I would say the four pillars of superintelligence which is multimodality, reasoning, tool use, and coding. If you solve these four things, you will…”
Siddharth: AI will automate $30 trillion of global knowledge work
“This is like, if you look at those four dimensional, if you look at that four dimensional matrix, that's 30 trillion dollars of knowledge work that is going to be automated.”
Siddharth: Custom LLMs will allow investment firms to employ fewer analysts
“I think, like, the best firms are already doing this, ah, to help an investment analyst make better decisions faster, and eventually with significantly fewer people.”
Zach Dell: Solar and Storage Will Dominate Energy for 50 Years Due to Cost
“And the way I would describe the paradigm shift very simply is the last five decades of energy have been defined by coal and then natural gas. And the next five decades of energy will be defined by solar and battery storage. And by the way, it has nothing to d…”
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…”
Allen Control CEO: Electronic warfare cannot stop AI drones; kinetic defense required
“The countermeasures we were investing in as a country, like electronic warfare or like microwave technology. I don't think those are going to be like long-term sustainable for some of the new drones of the future. So we saw that early and started to work on ki…”
Allen Control CEO: Future warfare will be robot-on-robot, replacing human soldiers
“I mean, it's going to robot on robot action. So like these new products are so lethal that it's tough for like people to be on the battlefield of the future. So that's where it's headed. It's not like exactly augmenting soldiers, like some people's vision, but…”
Chaddha: AI is a 100x era creating many $100B companies
“And in the AI era, overall, it's a hundred X opportunity. I've been lucky to be involved in the web era, the mobile, the cloud, the social, the not so good eras. And then the AI, I think those eras were a 10 X opportunity. This is a hundred X opportunity. So t…”
Chaddha: AI and vibe coding will create 3 billion programmers
“Using AI, I think everybody, eight billion people in the world will be programmers because they'll vibe code. That's why this is a hundred X opportunity. It's really a hundred X because hundred X times thirty million is three billion. So there will be three bi…”
Chaddha: Vibe coding companies at $100M revenue will quickly reach $10B
“Let's look at vibe coding. Companies are doing a hundred million in revenue, two hundred million in revenues. They're going to be doing ten billion in revenues. We'll blink and that's what they will be.”
Chaddha: Only 1% to 3% of hyped AI startups will survive
“We could go from all these hyped up companies. Some will keep growing, but maybe that will be one percent, two percent, three percent of the hype companies. But a lot of them are making their lives really, really hard.”
Chaddha: AI startups will capture 90% of VC funding within a year
“I think it's going to be 90% in a year.”
Chaddha: Non-AI startups will take 10x longer to raise capital
“Companies are going to take 10 X the time to raise money if they are not an AI native company.”
Chaddha: AI teammates represent a $3T-$6T opportunity over 5-7 years
“And that market is a massive market because the spend
On knowledge workers globally is 30 trillion, and AI will do 10 to 20% of the work of what humans do to offload them.
That's a three to six trillion dollar opportunity over the next five to seven years”
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: Quantum computers will solve simulations impossible on classical supercomputers
“Our conventional supercomputers suck at predicting the properties of these microscopic things. And that happens to be exactly the set of problems where a quantum computer is perfectly suited and where we will solve problems that can never be solved by any conv…”
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: AI will not dramatically accelerate PsiQuantum's hardware timelines
“So no, I don't think the AI is going to dramatically reduce our timelines. Currently our timelines are mostly determined as far as I can tell by infrastructure, right? We're breaking ground on these sites in Australia and Chicago. These are roughly a hundred m…”