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: Marine Corps started hundreds of fires at Camp Pendleton last year
“The Marine Corps itself started hundreds of fires on their weapons training range last year alone, just at Camp Pendleton.”
Luckey: Anduril Sentry Towers cover about 35% of US southern border
“We're covering about 35% of the U.S. Southern border now.”
Luckey: Anduril made Fury landing gear heavier so any US machine shop can make it
“Fury's landing gear is a few percent heavier than it could have been, because we could have either made it manufacturable by only two places in the entire United States, or any machine shop in the entire country.”
Stephens: Anduril builds autonomous fighter planes near the Wright brothers' site
“In some ways it's like you're starting with the right flyer and then coming back with fully autonomous fighter plans to be built, you know, less than an hour drive. Away from where the Wright brothers were building the first airplane.”
Stephens: Despite its massive hardware, Anduril is fundamentally a software company
“People will think about us as like a hardware company where we're building all of these big systems, many of which you can probably see in the background of the camera here. But the core of everything that we do is actually software.”
Schimpf: Anduril has 7,000 employees and is still doubling revenue past $1B
“So we're eight years ish in we're at about 7000 employees. We have consistently doubled revenue like every year, right? So even like over a billion, we're still doubling revenue.”
US defense procurement relative to GDP is at an all-time low
“The procurement budget as a percentage of GDP, for example, is I think the lowest it's ever been.”
Luckey: Fury is the US Air Force's first procured autonomous fighter
“This is the first autonomous fighter that the United States air force has ever procured.”
Luckey: Anduril took Fury to first flight in 556 days
“We went from signing a contract with the air force to first flight in 556 days. Which is, as far as I know, the fastest new fighter development program since the end of the Korean War.”
Michael: Department of War closed three critical mineral deals in 45 days
“The three I'm most proud of, ah, in a very recent term, is we've done three deals for critical minerals, ah, to reduce our dependency on China in like, 45 days.”
Tusk: NYC municipal recycling ends up in the same landfill as trash
“As someone who worked in New York City government for a long time, it all goes in the same landfill.”
Clark: Wiz closed six-figure enterprise deals in weeks or months
“And so Wiz was Closing on these like very healthy six figure deals in a matter of weeks or months, which was just unprecedented. You know, normally you have small deals and fast cycles. You can have big deals and slow cycles, which had more or less figured out…”
Clark: SpaceX, Tesla, and Anduril accelerated growth at multi-billion scale
“I was looking at the revenue curves actually of and roll and SpaceX and Tesla the other day, and they are some of the only companies that have actually accelerated growth at scale, which is to say they are growing at a faster rate at multi-billion dollar scale…”
Clark: Starlink generates large majority of SpaceX revenue and cash flow
“Created the opportunity for them to build a Starlink, which is now one of the most powerful internet constellations in the world. And it's actually driving a very, very large majority Of overall free cashflow and revenue for the business.”
O'Shea: Carta data shows concentrated venture funds outperform broad portfolios
“Turns out highly concentrated funds, typically like 20 companies per portfolio. Outperforms spray and pray, but spray and pray looks pretty good.”
Clark: No Thrive portfolio company has laid off engineers due to AI
“My bottoms up answer is I'm an investor in a lot of companies that use AI tools. I cannot think, especially on sort of the coding side and engineering side of a single one that has laid off engineers because of these tools.”
Ulevitch: U.S. defense manufacturing relies critically on Chinese raw materials
“China, their ability to build ships is much, much faster than ours. A lot of the raw materials we need for our own shipbuilding comes from China, the steel and many of the metals. A lot of the things we need for batteries, for motors, for a lot of the ingredie…”
Ulevitch: Defense tech startups are ramping revenue faster than historical precedents
“What we're already seeing in the market is, A, these companies are ramping their revenue faster than companies have in these categories ever before.”
Karp: Most special operations forces in the world use Palantir's Gaia
“Gaia, the product that most special operations use in the world.”
Karp: Palantir delivered Sequoia-level venture returns to ordinary public investors
“We gave venture returns, not just venture returns. We gave venture returns as if you're like, you know, I don't know, you're like Peter Thiel, Sequoia, Coastal returns. To the average person who is willing to do their own work and stand up against kind of trie…”
Karp: Palantir software elevates American factory workers to Japanese engineer capacity
“We can use foundry and ontology to bring out the advantages of American worker and give them the capacity to roughly work like a Japanese engineer.”
Zipline used its Rwanda drone delivery safety records to win US approval
“The whole idea was we're going to go out to Rwanda. We're going to prove out that we can do this. And then we can bring back all of the safety records to the U S and eventually be allowed to fly in the U S which is what has happened now.”
Barton: Melvin Capital fell 50% in two weeks during GameStop squeeze
“Before I worked at Code Two, I was working at Melvin Capital. And so, you know, many of you guys probably heard of Melvin as the hedge fund that was short GameStop. And so I lived through this period where we went from, at the time, probably The best performin…”
Coatue's worst-case financial model for AppLovin showed at least 3x upside
“You literally could not make the discount cash flow analysis, in your worst case scenario, be less than like a three X.”
Barton: Meta GPU recommendation upgrades drove a 15% Instagram usage jump
“And if you look at Instagram time spent, basically it was flat for, I don't know, maybe 18 months to six months ago. And now, you know, you would spend 40 minutes a day, and now that's gone up like 15% in just the past six months, because they basically took t…”
Barton: AI's current impact is slowing hiring rather than immediate firings
“People aren't, there are some example, some extreme examples, but it's not that people are getting fired today or their jobs are being automated today. It's that the hiring's slowing.”
Barton: Google and OpenAI Pay Reddit ~$50M Annually for Training Data
“I think it's ballpark, fifty million dollars. For Google, so Google pays Reddit, fifty million dollars a year to kind of, ah, have trained in the past on it, but B, have updated data, and, ah, ChatGPT does the same thing.”
Gil: Our COVID data scraping prompted White House and UK government calls
“And then a few months later, my chief of staff pulled all the data off of the government websites. And it was very clear the demographics that were actually impacted by COVID. And that had very deep policy implications in terms of what you should be doing soci…”
Gil: US has built no large-scale monuments since Mount Rushmore
“I think the last time we built a large scale monument was Mount Rushmore, which was initiated in the twenties and was built up until the early forties. And then since that time, we really haven't done anything, societally, at least in the U.S.”
Gil: Gil Capital has led multiple funding rounds of $500M+
“So I think we've now led a few rounds that are a half billion plus each.”
Gil: More people die yearly from solar installs than nuclear accidents
“And if you compare that to stats of people dying, installing solar by falling off of roofs, more people per year die from solar installs.”
Siddharth: Turing works with seven of the eight frontier AI labs
“We work with seven out of the eight Frontier Labs. We work with OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, Google, Microsoft, Nvidia, Amazon, anybody that's building a Frontier Foundation model, we are probably working with them already.”
Siddharth: Public internet data for pre-training AI ran out three years ago
“These models ate the internet when they were pre-trained, but the internet data is used up. It was used up like three years ago, right?”
Allison: Joby aircraft allows normal conversation 300 feet away during takeoff
“Basically we could have this conversation when the aircraft is taking off and landing 300 feet away without really raising our voices. And then when it's up and flying, it's basically silent when it's overhead. So if at 1500 feet which is pretty low actually f…”
Ehrenstein: The average American manufacturing worker is in their early 50s
“There has generally been like an aging out of the American industrial base. The modern American manufacturers around like early fifties. And because of that, a lot of folks who actually knew how to do things correctly and well, and took pride in that work are …”
Rabois: Kaz Nejatian cut Shopify's G&A from 14% to 4%
“One of the things he did at Shopify when he got promoted to be COO was cut their GNA as a fraction of revenue from 14% to four percent, and I think they're on target next year to be at one percent.”
Siemiatkowski: Klarna can re-underwrite half its balance sheet in 60 days
“The difference with Kelowna is people owe us on average, 80, a hundred dollars, and it's just outstanding for four weeks, six weeks. So when the recession comes, what we do is we change our underwriting models. We become a little bit more restrictive. And in o…”
Shadbolt: PsiQuantum secured $1B AUD Australian deal for Brisbane quantum computer
“Last year we announced these major deals with the Australian government. So that's about a billion dollar Australian deal for us to build a very large scale quantum computer in Brisbane.”
Shadbolt: PsiQuantum has raised more private capital than any quantum peer
“That's right to my knowledge, yeah.”
Shadbolt: PsiQuantum is one of two companies in DARPA's final quantum phase
“And they have just graduated to the final phase of our program. They're one of two companies to have reached that point.”
Shadbolt: GlobalFoundries is the last remaining US tier-one pure-play foundry
“GF is really the last remaining pure play semiconductor, like tier one semiconductor foundry in the United States. So we offshored huge fractions of our semiconductor industry, as far as like a high volume, 300 millimeter foundry that is making chips for indus…”
Shadbolt: Quantum codebreaking requires a larger system than commercial utility
“As far as we understand still, despite these new architectural results, algorithmic results, you still need a bigger computer to do code breaking than you do to tackle the commercially useful applications that we talked about earlier.”
Shadbolt: PsiQuantum alone produces its optical material on 300mm wafers
“We're the only people in the world who make that on a 300 millimeter wafer.”
Shadbolt: PsiQuantum builds 35-layer superconducting wafers in commercial foundries
“So when I look at those wafers that you've seen in our facility, and I think about the fact that there's 35 layers of stuff on that wafer, that there's a superconducting material inside, and that it was made in a commercial foundry next to regular chips.”
Goldstein: eVTOL is FAA's first new category in 60 years
“This is the first new category that's been created by the FAA in 60 years.”
Goldstein: Aviation manufacturing has not scaled since World War II
“We haven't really scaled aviation since World War II, and so it's going to be challenging to do that, but I think that's really the nut to crack that could determine the size of this”
REGENT seagliders fly above sonar and below long-range radar
“By flying low, you know, we don't touch the water surface. So we're above any sonar detection and we're just over the surface of the water. So we're below long range radar in some cases. So we can actually move around and be very hard to detect. And also becau…”
Wing-in-ground craft are regulated by the Coast Guard, bypassing the FAA
“It turns out like, if you go into U S law, there's a definition of a winging ground effect craft as a vessel. We're like, that's pretty cool. So we can build this flying machine. So we have this high speed mobility. We can service this massive coastal market a…”