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 9 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 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: 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.”
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.”
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…”
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.”