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 36 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
McCormick: Most fast-growing AI software startups will flatten and fail to IPO
“By choosing to, like, not play in this space, I'm definitely missing a trillion dollar company or two, but I think for the most part, like, I think there's gonna be, like, a lot of these types of things happening, or even, like, these types of curves, where th…”
McCormick: AI will become 'super SaaS' rather than godlike AGI
“I called it super sass in, in that like 20, 25 prediction. And I think it is like, I think it's really amazing and like in no way godlike. And it's just like, I feel like I'm being psyopped whenever people are like, oh my God, this is like, this is, this chang…”
McCormick: Fuse recruited the former number two Iranian nuclear scientist
“The number of two, kind of, nuclear scientists in, in Iran who came over here to, kind of, work on, on our side here, and then just, like, everybody that I met who was, like, you know, working on the machines, like top to bottom, just like an unbelievably cool…”
McCormick: Literary nonfiction and deep journalism are best for early-stage underwriting
“That, like, Jim Simons at Rentac versus, like, Robert Carroll, like, who would be a better earlier stage, early stage investor? And I think it's actually, like, Robert Carroll. Like, I think, like, literary nonfiction done really, really well, or journalism do…”
McCormick: YC 'Request for Startups' Prompts Rarely Lead to Great Companies
“Like when YC puts out the request for startups, I'm like, I can't imagine that anything good is going to be built against these categories starting now because you've read the YC request for startups.”
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.”
McCormick: DeepSeek represents doing the same thing cheaper, not a qualitative leap
“My DeepSeek point is that, like, This, like, crack team that figured out all these algorithms, breakthroughs, and whatever, essentially just figured out how to do the same thing cheaper. Like, there hasn't been any leap that I've seen that I've been like, yeah…”
McCormick: Fuse is already generating revenue by selling radiation
“The big difference I would say with Fuse and anybody else is they're already making revenue and that they're not going straight shot for commercial fusion power, but they're selling radiation kind of on the way up towards or down towards, depending on how you …”
McCormick: Claude's Writing Feedback Is Bad, Regresses Drafts Toward Mediocrity
“I will take my, if I'm, like, stuck in writing an essay, I'll, like, take the draft, I'll put it in Claude and ask for feedback, and, like, the feedback is bad, and it always, like, tries to move me more towards average, and I ignore it, but, like, I just have…”
McCormick: Reducing investment decisions to market maps or one-sentence theses fails
“And like anybody who like boils it down to like a market map or like a one sentence thesis on a company, I think is like just a very tough way to invest.”
McCormick: AI will prove concise answers matter less than immersive storytelling
“I think, like, AI will make us see, like, answers are, like, really not important, but you want to read Robert Caro, because, like, you want to read Thousands and thousands of pages that, like, really make you feel and understand what it was like to be in the …”
McCormick: Backing the right founder is a compression algorithm for research
“I do think, like, and people say this, and it's cheesy, and it's, like, also true, is that the founder really matters, and, like, there's definitely a midwit curve on that that I've written about before, which is, like, You think founders really matter and the…”
McCormick: Much of VC Diligence Is Performative Theater to Justify Deals
“Cause I do think there's like just so much venture theater. Where, like, you just have to do a bunch of stuff because, like, your boss, you know, your GP expects it, or their LPs expect it. Like, there's just a bunch of, like, shit that you have to produce to,…”
McCormick: Earth AI won't need future venture funding if its model works
“If this model goes well, like, They do not need to raise again. Cause they can sell state little, little stakes in their minds and use it to fund.”
McCormick: SpaceX suffered only ~50% dilution despite raising $10B in equity
“I think they're like 50% dilution over the past 20 years, even though they've raised ten billion dollars of, you know, of equity aside from secondaries.”
McCormick: Fuse monetizes pulsed power radiation before reaching fusion energy
“If you go with this one particular architecture, what you're really doing is selling radiation by building these pulse power generators, and you can use that for Radhart Electronics and nuclear arsenal testing and, like, all these things that can, like, genera…”
McCormick: AI could create a winner-take-all dynamic in corporate cards like Ramp
“AI is the reason that a company that might not have been winner-take-all before would be winner-take-all now. Like, I think RAMP is a really interesting example of, like, There might be a winner take all dynamic in corporate cards at some point. If like that s…”
McCormick: Consumer brand equity creates real value in AI despite commoditization
“That is a brand that like, you know, he might be with, like talking to ChatGPT for the rest of his Life, you know, or like some version of it. And so I do think there's real value in brand.”
McCormick: Nuclear reactor markets will ultimately be decided by brand power
“I think like nuclear ends up coming down, will end up coming down to like brand, like who got something working early on and like, you know, nobody ever got fired for buying like reactor company X that is good enough and cheap enough and whatever else and safe…”
Packy: Deep tech execution inherently creates uncopyable marketing content
“For these companies, there's just, like, actually an opportunity to just show off what you're doing, and, like, that in itself is differentiated because it's so hard to do. That like just actually getting the thing done, like kind of creates all of this unbeli…”
McCormick: Not Boring focuses on hardware-software vertical integrators beating incumbents
“Doing kind of this barbell where it's mostly these vertically integrated companies, I've written a bunch about these, we can talk about them but kind of thesis being companies that use both kind of hardware and software, build vertically integrated systems It …”
McCormick: Founder magnetism and fear of disappointing them drives peak performance
“It all comes down to people and like the team that you build and like what you get out of your people in the end. So if you have this like magnetism Or, like, there's almost, like, people have a fear of disappointing you and, like, they really want to, like, d…”
McCormick made a recent investment decision solely over a three-hour coffee
“It's one of the most recent decisions I made. It was, like, over a three-hour coffee. I didn't write a single word. You know, I met the guy and read the deck and loved him and invested.”
McCormick: Startups requiring compounding miracles to succeed never work out
“I can see like if this happens and then this happens and then this happens and then that happens and like things go just right here, like this could be a really big company and like it never works. Like you can't like, you know, there's the compounding miracle…”
McCormick: Low-conviction smaller checks account for most Not Boring failures
“A lot of my smaller checks are the ones that have failed already. It's the ones where I'm like, I don't like fully, but like, maybe like if it does, it'd be like really huge and like, it's a pretty cheap price.”
McCormick: Vertical integrators take integration risk over science risk to outperform incumbents
“There's a lot of like deep tech that I think you're taking science risk. And like, I think with vertical integrators, you're taking integration risk where there's like five different kind of like cutting edge-ish, but proven technologies that you're trying to …”
McCormick: Anduril hit $28B valuation after doubling revenue
“Mandel just raised it a two X step up again, and they're at twenty eight billion and They're not that far off now. They're like a quarter of the way to the big defense prime's kind of market caps and continuing to grow really fast and like what doubled revenue…”
McCormick: Electricity is not getting cheaper due to rising transmission costs
“Electricity is not getting cheaper though, because transmission ends up getting more and more and more expensive over time. So like getting it from point A to point B, there's like long delays on the interconnect queue. It takes forever to build transmission. …”
McCormick: Fuse aims to become the SpaceX of the NNSA
“His whole thing is they want to be the NNSA, the National Nuclear Safety Administration's I think that's the right acronym. They want to be the NNSA's SpaceX essentially, like you know, like SpaceX was to NASA, they want to be to the NNSA.”
McCormick: Supersonic Private and Commercial Flight Will Emerge Within 10 to 15 Years
“I think there's a path where we wake up in 1015 years, and, like, first it's supersonic private planes, and then supersonic commercial planes, and, like, that is a long path to kind of get there, but, like, the technology is there, and actually, like, just bat…”
McCormick: Series B and C capital is easy once category leadership is clear
“But I think actually the B and then the C, like, once they get to a certain point and do some of those things, and it becomes clear to others that, like, if anybody wins this category, it's going to be this company, then capital, I think, actually becomes, lik…”
McCormick: Commoditizing intelligence shifts economic value to higher stack layers
“When something becomes commoditized, we're like, it could be answers or intelligence or whatever, like there will be value at the next layer of the stack. And like, that's just how the world works.”
McCormick: As AI and hard tech commoditize, brand becomes the differentiator
“I think as everything becomes like easier to make from AI to SMRs, like brand ends up playing a big role.”
McCormick: Not Boring Capital manages about $50 million in total AUM
“Oh, like, 50 total AUM now, yeah.”
McCormick: Ramp filmed its Saquon Barkley Super Bowl ad in four days
“We got word that we got a super bowl slot and we've been like spending the whole past day trying to coordinate with Saquon and his people to get this thing done. And they filmed it in like You know, they did the whole thing in, like, three or four days.”
McCormick: Base Power rents batteries and monetizes by trading power
“They're a retail electric provider, so they like are your power company when you install the battery. They, because of that, they don't have to sell it to you. They just rent you the battery essentially, and they, and you pay for the install cost, but then the…”