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
Oltmann: Margin compression will hit public SaaS companies within three years
“In the span of two to three years, I think what we're really going to start to see is this narrative really catch up with publicly traded companies that already have these like massive user bases.
so I think it'll be interesting to see what happens over the …”
Oltmann: Hadrian boasts 70% gross margins and top 3% SaaS growth
“Hadrian's got like 70% gross margins and they're growing in the top three percent of all SaaS companies”
Mavrookas: Only one percent of the defense budget went toward autonomy
“One percent. One percent went towards autonomy.”
Mavrookas: China controls 57% of global shipbuilding capacity
“China has 57% of total global shipbuilding capacity.”
Lehman: Defense contracting officers often lack awareness of permissible acquisition policies
“I think one thing that could help is using AI to augment the acquisition workforce because we've come across multiple times where there's a lack of awareness about a new regulation, a new policy that tells them they can do something that they're adamant that t…”
Ganesh: Saronic autonomous vessels have recorded accelerations north of 20 Gs
“So a good example of this is like, I think a lot of commercial boats, like you kind of target the human beings to like, take like .4 to .6 G's maybe you know, our boats like We've seen accelerations north of 20 G's before.”
Mavrookas: Only 1% of US defense budget allocated to autonomy
“When you look at the budget today, just look at the Department of War's budget, we talked about the request for 1.5 trillion, and where the budget is today, right around a trillion dollars for 26, one percent went towards autonomy.”
Mavrookas: US lacks logistics ships to resupply troops during wartime
“Cause if we, Don't have tankers. If we don't have roll-on, roll-off vessels, it means we actually don't have the ships to resupply our force if we're actually in a conflict or a war.”
Mavrookas: China built 1,000+ commercial ships in 2024 versus five US ships
“They built over a thousand commercial ships last year, and the United States built five. I think this was 20, 24. Five. Like one, two, three, four, Five large ocean going commercial vessels.”
Mavrookas: Port Alpha's 800-acre footprint makes it largest US shipyard
“Just that footprint alone will make it the largest shipyard in the country.”
Mavrookas: Saronic will bring online 150,000 gross tons of capacity within years
“We're going to bring online a 150,000 gross tons of capacity within a few years.”
Mavrookas: Port Alpha will create over 10,000 jobs in 10 years
“And then Port Alpha, which I mentioned earlier, that's going to be based in Brownsville, Texas, so expanding within Texas, and that site's going to create over 10,000 jobs just in the next 10 years.”
Mavrookas: Saronic's main line has capacity for 2,000 Corsairs per year
“So in just this line we're walking down right now, we can build, we have the capacity to build 2000 Corsairs per year.”
Mavrookas: China outbuilds the US 230-to-1 in shipbuilding
“China outbuilds us 230 to one. Our naval fleet is actually shrinking and we have 0.1% of global shipbuilding capacity as a non-existent industry.”
Mendler: Operators cannot reliably control dynamically maneuvering spacecraft
“All of those use cases where spacecraft are moving dynamically around in new ways in the space environment. They basically just don't have a solution for how to connect and control that spacecraft.”
Beck: Rocket Lab reached space on under $60,000 USD in capital
“And with like, 80, I think we had a total capitalization of under a 100,000 New Zealand dollars, which is like 60,000 US dollars at that point, so.”
Beck: Rocket Lab reached orbit for under $100M with 80 people
“You know, for example, the Electron rocket, I think it was under a hundred million dollars and 80 people put the first rocket into orbit.”
Beck: Iridium acquisition immediately adds profitability to Rocket Lab
“Like, Iridium, you know, adds profitability to the entity straight away. It also buys us time to put up a new constellation.”
Beck: SolAero, Sinclair, and PSC had zero in-orbit failures prior to acquisition
“Like, you know, Solero Solar, never had a solar panel fail in orbit in 40 years. Doug Sinclair and reaction wheels, same again. PSC, never had a failure, separation system failure.”
Beck: Rocket Lab's $800M SDA deal grew past $1B supplying competing primes
“Our SDA contract was a great example where, you know, we won an eight hundred million dollar contract, and there was two other primes that also won contracts, But actually that turned into over a billion dollar contract for us because the primes needed our stu…”
Ben Lamm: AI will enable a real-time digital twin of nature
“My hottest take right now is that I think AI is gonna converge, and, ah, we are going to build a digital twin of nature, and just like we have prediction models for, like, everything from, like, missile defense to, ah, tsunamis and earthquakes, we're gonna hav…”
Lamm: Colossal achieved world-record multiplex gene editing in healthy woolly mice
“We had a hundred percent healthy mice born with exactly the predicted phenotypes with the most multiplex edited delivered at one time ever.”
Lamm: Colossal grew mammoth hair follicles from elephant stem cells
“We actually have a hair follicles growing in, in where we've taken elephant stem cells and created follicles so that we can grow mammoth hair.”
Arora: AI Models Can Daisy-Chain Vulnerabilities to Attack Infrastructure
“You've seen that it can find cyber vulnerabilities. It can daisy chain vulnerabilities, attack infrastructure. So it's clear these models are going to be extremely powerful. They already are.”
Time Between Vulnerability Discovery and Attack Will Compress Tremendously
“So I think what it, what is happening is now it's become apparent to the market that the time from discovery of vulnerability to an attack is going to compress tremendously, which means you have a lot less time To go fix it or find a bad actor in the infrastru…”
10% to 20% of Enterprise Operating Spend May Shift to Tech
“I think in the next 10 years it's highly possible that 10 to 20% of our operating spend moves more towards technology than it already has.”
Market Will Separate AI Winners and Losers Within Two Years
“I think two years from now, that will become less apparent. I think the market will have figured out its fair shares of failures and successes, and the market will get more discerning, which is what typically happens at that point in time in the cycle. It usua…”
Foroughi: Frontier AI labs will not become dominant operating systems
“And if we ever got into advertising with some of the chatbots or large language models, you'd say, would one of these frontier labs become an operating system? It doesn't look like they're going that way. So like, even there, you're going to have fragmentation…”
Monroe-Anderson: Intercepting jet-powered Shahed drones requires 400 km/h speeds
“So, 300 is actually a pretty good spot for taking out, like, typical Shawhead drones. To go after jet-powered Shawhead drones, we need to be closer to, like, 400 miles 400 kilometers an hour, So that would be kind of the ideal end state.”
Monroe-Anderson: Iranian Shaheds Destroyed Billions in Middle East Equipment and Infrastructure
“Shahhead drones, Iranian Shahhead drones have taken out billions of dollars of infrastructure and other weapon systems in the Middle East and you know, against US forces.”
Monroe-Anderson: China produces tens to hundreds of millions of drones annually
“China has been the biggest beneficiary because they've been supplying both sides of the war and probably making, I mean, tens of millions of drones per year easily, maybe in the hundreds of millions.”
Monroe-Anderson: DJI drones are the most common reconnaissance drones in Ukraine
“What DJI makes, which, you know, they make the best consumer drones in the world, but they also make the most commonly used reconnaissance drones for the battlefield. Like, Ukraine and Russia are using Mavic's, Matrice's, all these DJI products that are incred…”
Monroe-Anderson: Neros Was First with an FPV Drone on Blue UAS List
“We were the first company to have an FPV drone on the blue UAS list, meaning the Department of War could actually just purchase and use it without having to go through a bunch of crazy approvals.”
Lopez: Base Power batteries offer 40 kWh capacity, triple traditional home units
“So it's a 40 kilowatt hour system and 20 kilowatts on the inverter. This is like three times larger than what you would find in a traditional home battery.”
Lopez: Base Power aims to produce 4,000 home batteries weekly by year-end
“We're not there yet, but we'll be able to produce about 4000 of these units per week towards the end of the year, and so, like, that's like one every few minutes, which is very, very quick, and so,”
Fox: AssemblyAI processes four times YouTube's daily audio volume on peak weeks
“And so now, you know, on a given week, on a peak week, there'll be something like over a hundred and twenty million conversations, voice conversations going through our platform, over two million hours of voice, which as of December of this past year was four,…”
Fox: AssemblyAI used Claude to rebuild and migrate its entire website
“Like, you know, the most recent example is we had Cloud rebuild our whole website off of Webflow and just deployed on Vercel.”
Fox: Customers abandon fine-tuned open-source voice models due to maintenance burdens
“We've seen some customers maybe six months ago or a year ago, they'll take an open source model and fine tune it or something. And then, you know, they're now like, okay, this is like, shit, this is like really behind and it's like nightmare to maintain and I …”
Fox: Voice will augment, not replace, screens over the next couple years
“And so I don't think that means that computers are just going to be like a screen and you just talk to it, because actually we'd get tired of talking, but I think it's going to be a dimension that's added to everything, and so that over the next couple years w…”
Hurlston: Fiber optics demand is creating an industry manufacturing bottleneck
“So there's a bottleneck that's developing. I think you talked about it with Tony. And as these fiber optics becomes more and more prevalent in data center, it's creating an ever tighter noose around the industry because there's only so much we can do so quickl…”
Hurlston: Existing Data Centers Will Shift to Optics Regardless of Buildouts
“What's interesting about the optical industry is if there are no more data center build outs, if you don't see this crazy rate of construction that we've seen over the past three or four years, still you're going to have a shift within the existing properties …”
Hurlston: Server Copper Wiring Will Move to Optical Within 12 Months
“That run in the back of the servers, and in the next 12 months, we'll see some of those copper wires move to optical.”
Hurlston: Chinese Optical Suppliers Have a Significant Presence in US Data Centers
“Between the U.S. Optical component suppliers and how much we supply into the Chinese data centers, very little. We don't supply very much gear into the Chinese data centers, whereas Chinese optical component suppliers, some of our competitors, have a pretty bi…”
Wu: Cognition writes roughly 95% of its code using Devin
“Obviously we use a ton of Devon to build Devon. In fact, we almost exclusively use Devon to build Devon at this point, like, 95% of the code or something's written by Devon.”
Wu: Cognition's shipped code increased roughly 7x in six months
“Even in the last six months, I think the number for us was like, our total amount of code shipped is roughly seven X in that time. And so it's like the number of PRs we've shipped, the amount of code”
Wu: Devin customer usage grew 11x to 12x in six months
“Our customers in the last six months or so, I've also grown their usage in something in the range of like, 11 to 12 acts, and of Devin.”
Cognition Had $70M–$80M ARR and 35–40 People When Buying Windsurf
“Cognition at the time was all of 35 or 40 people and we had a meaningful business with, you know, real traction. We were doing in the range of 70 or eighty million of revenue run rate at the time but it was a very small team. Windsurf, on the other hand becaus…”
Wu: Cognition Offered to Play Thiel's Firm in Poker for 1% Equity
“Since you're such a big fan of poker, you know, we can just play a heads-up poker match for that, and we can have the winner decide whose terms we actually sign. It would have been for, in retrospect, it would have been for, like, one percent of the company or…”