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 37 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 1 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
Alfred Lin: AI will not kill SaaS
“And the simple narrative, as we just talked about, is AI's gonna kill SAS. And I just don't think that that's the case. And the reason why I know that that's not gonna be the case is because I lived it.”
Lin: Top companies will reach $10 trillion valuations within ten years
“Today we have companies that are worth four and a half to five trillion dollars. If you give it another five to 10 years, those companies continue to compound. It will be worth 10 trillion or more.”
Lin: The claim that code is no longer a moat is overstated
“And the very obvious statement is every single line of code that's generated has a marginal cost of zero, so therefore software, the lines of code, is no longer a moat. That's probably overstated.”
Alfred Lin: AI market is not zero-sum because intelligence generates revenue
“Our view is that it's not a zero sum game. And part of that is, there is really no price on intelligence. You, if you're more intelligent, if your system is more intelligent, if your product is more intelligent, is your company more intelligent and makes bette…”
Lin: AI valuation premiums reflect the multi-trillion-dollar services market
“What AI has the potential of doing is looking, is it's looking at the services market, which is measures in tens of trillions of dollars. And that's why the premiums that we're offering seems very high and seems at times ridiculous.”
Lin: Venture Valuations Are Paying 2 to 4 Years Ahead of Fundamentals
“So I think we're paying probably two or three or four years ahead of where most of these companies are. And It is a little reckless.”
Lin: OpenAI at $500 Billion Works If It Can Reach $5 Trillion
“Well, so it's easy to dismiss the 500 Billion and say that you can't make money from five hundred billion, but if we let NVIDIA, which is worth four trillion today, compound at 10% for another decade, it's going to be worth more than 10 trillion. So if OpenAI …”
Annualizing experimental pilot revenue into ARR is a deceptive joke founders use
“Counting pilot revenue and counting it as ARR and annualizing it is kind of a joke, which I think a lot of founders know it's a joke, but they don't have any problems just taking whatever month's revenue is, that's all pilot revenue, and multiplying by 12.”
Lin: AI startups are scaling to $10M ARR faster than ever
“You see companies today going from zero to ten million in ARR in very, very fast, ah, time frames, which we have not seen in the past.”
Lin: OpenAI leverages Oracle's balance sheet and tools for data centers
“Oracle, the last time I checked, still exists. If you think that they're a legacy company, I don't know why OpenAI would want to leverage their balance sheet and their and their tools to be able to run data centers.”
Lin: Sequoia's Most Successful Fund Had a 50% Write-Off Rate
“I work in a business where our most successful fund had a 50% write-off rate.”
Lin: Top engineers shipped 3x more code using AI tools
“The top five to 10% of their engineers shipped three times more than they did last year.”
Lin: In fast tech cycles, experience matters less than innovation
“We're seeing more younger founders get into the game because experience is not as important as just innovation.”
Lin: In two to three years, the 'AI company' label will vanish
“In probably two or three years, we will not call them AI companies. Just the same way that internet companies over time, yeah, there were native internet companies, but over time, every company became an internet company. Every company became a mobile company.”
Lin: Doubling Valuations Halves Fund Shots and Demands Double Conviction
“But if you double the valuation, that means you have half the number of shots that you can deploy. You just have to be twice as good. And so my push for the industry is if you're going to write a check that is twice as large for the, then you need to have twic…”
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.”
Evaluating early-stage startups solely on revenue is a lazy metric
“I think revenue as the metric is is a lazy way of looking at the problem. You have to look at the underlying metrics and don't forget some of the best companies in the world over time have taken time to build before they reach revenue.”
Lin: Sequoia measures success by LP distributions, not AUM
“The thing that we measure is being a net liquidity provider to our LPs. So we believe in alignment of interests, and we think about founders first, then LPs, then Sequoia, then our team, and then ourselves. And when you do that, we actually measure how much we…”
Lin: Airbnb, DoorDash, Snowflake, and Square drove Sequoia's $43B distribution
“Airbnb, DoorDash, Unity, Snowflake I'm sure I'm missing a few others. Mongo, Square.”
Lin: Sequoia's legendary wall threshold rose from $100M to over $1B
“When I first got here, So Sequoia what was required to get onto that wall was a hundred million dollar gain. Today it's a, it's, it is in excess of the billion dollar gain.”
Lin: Sequoia will soon look at $10B+ gains for legendary status
“And I'm sure in a few years we'll be looking at ten billion dollar gains or more.”
Lin: Entrepreneurs should build for the broad web, not Web2 or Web3
“What you really want to do is not be web two or web three. You just want to build for the web if you're an entrepreneur.”
Kalshi called the US election outcome before national media outlets
“They called it before all of the other national media outlets.”
Board members should be shock absorbers in bad times, sparring partners otherwise
“We partner with the founders and we know to be shock observers during bad times and to be sparring partners during good times.”
DoorDash succeeded primarily by relentlessly prioritizing smiling user retention curves
“There were a number of metrics that DoorDash tracked that were all about retention. They were very, very focused on making the retention curves, the cohort curve smile. And I think that was the reason for much of their success.”
AI startup competitive density post-launch is far worse than 15 years ago
“Once you launch and you have any success, 15 competitors show up. And that was true 15 years ago, but it's way worse now. When DoorDash launched, there was a lot of competitors, but today, you know, if you launch an AI company, And it has some semblance of suc…”
Alfred Lin: Sequoia partners make only 1-2 investments per year
“Each partner only makes one or two investments per partner per year.”
Lin: Sequoia required three internal investment memos to approve funding DoorDash
“I had to write three memos for DoorDash investments.”
Lin: Sequoia internally rejected Kalshi four times despite his memos
“I wrote four memos and got four no's for a Kaoshi investment.”
Lin: Airbnb went from 40% growth to losing 80% of revenue
“A company that is used to growing 30, 40% a year went to losing 80% of its revenue.”
Lin: Airbnb raised debt instead of equity in 2020 to avoid dilution
“Obviously we needed to raise money. Do we do it in equity? Do we do it in debt? Equity would be very punitive at that time. We decided to do it in debt.”
Lin recounts how Clay pivoted from general programming to go-to-market tooling
“Clay, I'll just use Clay as an example, where they started out as trying to bring programming to the masses. They built something and there were no, there are not enough users who thought that this was something that they wanted. They didn't know what to do wi…”
Lin: Sequoia spent 2.5 years pursuing Ken Griffin before Citadel deal
“Our partner, Constantine, met Ken at a conference. And went up to Ken and talked to him and struck, developed a relationship. And over time, I think it's over like two and a half years where he kept asking Ken, could we ever invest in Citadel Securities? And I…”
Sequoia evaluates 1,000 companies before making a single investment
“That's pretty consistent to how many companies and how many founders we have to see Before we make one investment on typically we see about a thousand companies before we make one investment.”
Brian Chesky was a great storyteller but needed early operational help
“Brian Chesky doesn't need to be told how to tell a story. He's such a great storyteller. But, you know, international expansion, sort of setting up operations. He may need more help on recruiting, what to look for, et cetera, in the early days.”
Kalshi reduced its event launch turnaround from 18 months to hours
“And so when they first started, it probably took 18 months to launch their first event. And now it takes a matter of hours.”
Zipline originally built an unsticky smartphone-powered toy robot
“Zipline, they started out with this idea of building a mobile platform for robotics where the iPhone was going to be the brains. And what they ended up with was what Keller would say was kind of like a toy and people would play with it. They had fun with it. A…”