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
The defense tech market will support only one or two next-generation primes
“There's not going to be, like, five Andrels. Like, there's probably going to be an Andrel. There may be, like, a number two. That's probably about it, you know, in that sphere of, like, next generation Defense Prime.”
Garrett: A wave of tech IPOs will begin in 2025 and continue through 2026
“And I think you'll see a wave companies going out starting this year and continuing through next year.”
Garrett: Defense tech value will accrue to a few winner-take-all companies
“It's not like enterprise software where there's going to be hundreds of great companies that go after a multi-trillion dollar TAM in defense tech, multi-trillion dollar TAM, but I think it's gonna be a much smaller number of companies where all the value accru…”
McCormick: Anduril's early round was crowded at a $100M valuation
“But that, like, early story that, like, nobody wanted to touch it was actually, like, a pretty crowded round at a hundred million dollar valuation.”
Ritter: Public AI training data is exhausted; commercial data is next
“Fundamentally, the harvesting of publicly available data has, for the most part, run its course, and Ilya Sutskiver said as much I love, you know, it's an interesting quote by saying, ah, AI data is fossil fuel for AI, and we've run out of it. And I generally …”
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: AI agents will deliver significant enterprise ROI by 2026
“And I think in twenty-twenty-five, going back to your first question, we'll make some pretty material advances there, where the predictability is much better, and that will lead into, I think, twenty-twenty-six, where we'll start to see pretty significant ROI …”
Tunguz: AI inference costs will drop by another 1,000x
“I think you've seen a thousand X reduction in overall inference costs in the last three years. I think we'll probably see another thousand X reduction.”
Tunguz: Small language models will dominate enterprise AI adoption
“So I think we'll start to see particularly the enterprise small language models dominate.”
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 …”
Guo: Passes will reach a billion-dollar valuation just by acquiring creators
“If we're being very blunt, like, I think we will reach, like, a billion dollars doing nothing more except getting new creators, but obviously, like, we have bigger ambitions than that, right?”
Guo: Some Passes creators earn $100K monthly posting neck-up selfies
“A lot of our creators will make money literally just doing, like, a neck up selfies, and they're still making, like, a 100,000 a month.”
Lucy Guo thinks college sports will surpass professional leagues in the future
“And I actually think that in the future, college sports will be bigger than professional leagues.”
Wright: Armada has partnerships with all GPU and CPU providers
“We have partnerships with all the GPU providers. We have partnerships with all the CPU providers. We have partnerships with everybody who provides every component that we have in these galleons.”
Fiedler: Olipop can become a several-billion-dollar business
“We said this can be a several billion dollar business. We absolutely believe it can be a several billion dollar business playing against these slow incumbents.”
Fiedler: All 20 of Coca-Cola's billion-dollar brands are declining year-over-year
“Coca-Cola has 20 brands that do over a billion dollars. Every single one of them is decreasing in sales year over year, and they haven't innovated at all.”
Socher: Only 5% to 10% of enterprise AI seats get utilized
“This comes from a lot of organizations that bought
500 thousand plus seats for their product.
And then after a few months, they look into how many users are actually using it.
And it's like five, 10% in the company actually really use it.
And so, you know, the…”
Socher: AI agents will outnumber human web surfers within years
“I think in the next few years, we're going to see more AI agents surfing the web for people than we'll have people surfing the web.”
Socher: Most workers will become managers of AI agents
“That's what's going to happen when intelligence gets cheaper and cheaper. We'll just be all much more efficient. And most of us have to become managers of AI agents doing work for us.”
Socher: Salesforce Research invented prompt engineering in 2018
“On the research side this was in 2018, we finally culminated all my ideas when we invented prompt engineering, and we didn't quite call it prompt engineering, but the basic idea was there, namely that you can prompt a single model with different questions, and…”
Jeff Morris Jr. predicts 40%+ of non-institutional VCs will fail to raise
“Non-institutional venture funds. I think the majority of them call it, I think that 40% number is, would be on the lower end of people who I think won't be raising additional funds in, in the next cycle.”
Deep vertical software will survive displacement by AI large language models
“If you get within these like deep vertical workflows and very industry specific software will persist and ultimately it's hard to compete with if you're just trying to use large language models or code generators to try and compete. Like I think, I still think…”
Kolicich predicts wave of VC firings over failure to adapt to AI
“And so I think you'll see over the next 10 years, a lot of retirements, a lot of firings, perhaps because people won't make that transition,”
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…”
AI will hit a trough of disillusionment as revenue lags infrastructure buildout
“And that kind of starts to tell you that we make it close to the trough of disillusionment at some point where all this, you know, the infrastructure that was built and the idea is build it and they will come. You know, the people actually don't come. The reve…”
The capped defense budget will yield only tens of new primes
“I think we probably think it's a little overhyped in general, where we think it's real for sure, but it's not going to be an opportunity the size of software or AI or something like that. The defense budget is naturally limited as a percentage of the economy. …”
Sam D'Amico: Impulse will become the grid's key storage power broker
“Once we sell these to a bunch of people, we've then basically backdoored ourselves as like the key storage power broker on the electric grid, because we'll have batteries in everyone's house.”
Sam D'Amico: Every household electrical device will eventually integrate a battery
“Everything will have a battery because batteries would be basically cheap or free effectively. If everything has a battery and you can, they can choose when to charge. And I'm sure you've seen like the iPhone pop up where it's like your iPhone can choose when …”
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.”
Isford: AI Models Will Become Commoditized Over Time
“Because I do think models in general will become commoditized over time, in particular because of the open source growth and adoption.”
Isford: Early-Revenue AI Startups Still Command 100x Multiples
“And so if you're an AI portfolio company you're going to get a better premium. That could change, but we're still seeing, you know, high valuations and high multiples hundred X range for companies that are earlier in revenue.”
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.”
Sadeghi predicts a trillion-dollar platform integrating all personal health data
“I think we're in the age where there will be a trillion dollar consumer healthcare business, and that business is going to be integrated in the entirety of someone's health data on the platform.”
Mark Suster predicts mega tech M&A remains dead regardless of elections
“The FTC has not been looking too kindly on these mega deals. And so I think the mega deals just aren't going to happen for a period of time. I don't know what will happen post November, but even either administration, I'm not convinced they're suddenly going t…”
Radiant microreactors meet NRC radiation limits outside a 35-foot perimeter
“We are down at one megawatt, so enough power for 1000 homes. And we can mass produce these in a factory, deliver them to a site, and with no infrastructure just outside of a 35 foot fence line, you can operate them and be at the NRC public dose limit for a rea…”
O'Shea: NYC Surpassed SF in New Founders Starting Companies Last Quarter
“Someone sent me a data report like a day or two ago that New York finally surpassed San Francisco in the number of new founders that have just started companies in the last quarter.”
The vast majority of important tech companies will be built in SF
“Statistically, there are more people in the Bay Area building companies in a specific, within a specific playbook that have specific expectations and shorthands and heuristics that are more likely to lead to success for a company. And so I can simultaneously b…”
Housel: Expect a significant culling of both VCs and startups
“And the hit rate is probably going to be much lower now, and there's going to be a significant calling of both VCs and startups because The stories got ridiculous”
Power: Hadrian trains workers with no factory experience in 20 to 30 days
“From a workforce and training piece, we can train and onboard them in 20 to 30 days from their Home Depot, their bus driver, literally any background.”
Power: Global reserve currency status will flip in 20-30 years
“We are 20 or 30 years away from the reserve currency flipping, which happens roughly every a 120 years.”
Power: Venture investors will see bruised defense tech returns within two years
“I think we're probably going to see some like bruised brews return profiles in the next two years of, you know, people flooding capital into companies that aren't a platform on a model product company, but the opportunity is still there.”
Power: Hadrian has a 60% chance of failing within 18 months
“And to do the amount of hiring, scaling, and execution that we need to do is like, 40% chance it works, 60% we're having this conversation in like 18 months, and like, company, company no longer works.”
Asparouhov: Post-2012 top Midas List VCs heavily skew toward operators
“And if you look at, you know, sort of top hundred on the Midas list, for VCs, they started their careers sort of pre-thousand-twelve called versus post-thousand-twelve. Pre-thousand-twelve, there was definitely a large number of investors that were pure sort o…”
Aerospace venture opportunity window may be closed for five to seven years
“There's a world now where we don't necessarily invest in aerospace for another, you know, sort of 10 years. And so, you know, sometimes, you know, some of these movements, I think, you know, can sometimes be a bit mistimed where, you know, I think the, you kno…”
Kolicich: Venture capital will shrink over five years unless AI takes off
“I don't think it's gonna, you know, the space is gonna crash or everybody leave overnight, but I think just slowly over the next five years, unless AI really takes off, you'll see a general shrinking of venture capital, I think”