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
Shadbolt: Quantum computing companies are far more likely to go to zero
“Yeah, I think that there is a serious prospect that these companies do that, but there is a much greater chance that they go to zero is basically my simple way of putting it.”
Shadbolt: Quantum commercial adoption will precede cryptographic security risks
“You should get like an economic early warning sign essentially where you should see quantum computing companies Doing commercially impactful things, making money, and then eventually scaling towards systems that are big enough to be cryptographically relevant.”
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: OpenAI's Consumer Business Could Reach $200B in Annual Revenue
“We think over time,
The number of users could go up to three to four billion users. We think on the monetization side, over time, it could go from 10 today to 60, 70 dollars per user per year, which is where Meta and Google and other large consumer platforms a…”
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…”
Oetting: Genomic medicine will transform economy and lives almost as much as AI
“I think there's going to be almost as much of a change in, like, the way that our economy and our lives work from genomic medicines as from AI.”
Oetting: AI Productivity Will Substantially Mitigate US Debt in 20–30 Years
“I believe over the next 20 or 30 years it will make a huge difference. Yes. I just think in the short run, there's investments that need to be made to realize that. And I think that, you know, the way that our system deals with that is by adding to the debt.”
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…”
Nolan: AI power demand by 2030 projected to match entire current US grid
“And I, you know, you look at some of these projections of AI power consumption over the next five years, and by 2030, it's predicted to basically consume all the, equivalent to all the power that's on the US grid today.”
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…”
Enterprises will bear direct legal and financial liability for AI agent failures
“So if it hallucinates a refund policy, if it spews Nazi propaganda, if it leaks your customers' data, if it discriminates against the people you're hiring, the enterprises are going to be on the hook.”
Little: Private Capital Will Flee Defense Tech if Anduril and Saronic Fail
“The part that worries me the most is, I want the Andrel, Ceronics, and Sail Drones, though, to do well. Because if they don't do well, private capital will recognize, like they did previously, that this isn't a good market to be in.”
Power: There will not be more SpaceXs or new defense primes
“I don't think there's going to be more SpaceX's. I don't think there's going to be more Andrews, you know, of like new defense primes or neo primes, and I don't think there's going to be more than a handful of large industrials companies.”
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.”
Hadrian plans to acquire or outcompete YC's new hardware startups
“The second thing is, I think it'll generate a bunch of great acquisitions for us. If any of them grow too fast in the category that we're going to enter, we have this phrase internally, which is we're either going to scoop them up, or we're going to bonk them.”
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 will surpass Concur's $1.5B revenue mark through interchange monetization
“If Brex continues on our current run rate, like we're going to eclipse that much, much faster by winning their customers, but monetizing through the interchange, not through generic software revenue.”
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…”
Altman: AI will do tens of millions of US jobs by 2030
“I think AI will be doing tens of millions of jobs in the US by then that are currently being done by a person.”
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.”
McCord: Not enough defense program cuts for startups to win big programs
“When I look at the sort of overall budgetary picture, like there's just not, there's not a enough. Of these big program cuts, I think for all of the amazing new companies building out there to like really get the big program or record wins that they want over …”
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.”
Sadeghi: Genomic sequencing, analysis, and editing will create a trillion-dollar industry
“And when you think about the next 10 years, you know, as I alluded to earlier, sequencing technology is kind of cheaper, analysis is kind of cheaper, understand the genome is going to dramatically increase, and genome editing is going to become much cheaper. A…”
Sharky claims Whop can reach $10B GMV with just 10-20 engineers
“Like, I think we can, 10 X our volume, go up to, I don't know, ten billion plus GMV run rate with 10 to 20 people.”
Sharky predicts AI will end the era of thousand-engineer tech companies
“I think the days of tech companies scaling to thousands of engineers are behind us because what I've found is a smaller, more compact team of very talented people that understand how to break down problems and naturally use AI to go faster.”
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…”
Startups will soon jump directly from seed rounds to Series C
“Like, yes, you'll probably have to raise again, but it'll just be interesting, and I think we'll see multiple examples of, like, a company raised a seed, and then a company raised, like, a Series C.”
Peters: Nearly 85% of US health system revenue comes from drugs and surgery
“In America, close to 85% of health system revenue comes from two sources.
Do you know what those are?
Tell us.
Pharmaceuticals and surgery.”
Peters: The largest consumer health companies will own fintech and underwriting
“What does the biggest health consumer health company in the world look like?
And it's probably some combination of,
Becoming the fintech layer and owning the, you know, insurance and the underwriting, the ability to actually cover and figure out, you know, t…”
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.”
Josephs: About $350M in capital follows Nancy Pelosi's trades on Autopilot
“Since then she has probably three hundred fifty million dollars following her, which is crazy. She's got her own little mini hedge fund.”
Asparouhov: NASA paid SpaceX half of Boeing's price for identical workload
“The entire structure of the contract is kind of insane in that they literally just, you know, gave SpaceX the same workload, but said the price for you doing it is going to be half of Boeing.”
US space startups bypass domestic regulators by obtaining German spectrum licenses
“A lot of space companies will actually go to Germany, because you can actually get a license from the German regulator of spectrum, and that is valid in the United States. That's probably a broken state of the world to be in.”