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 1,359 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 8 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
Ryan Kulp prefers solo Rails apps over higher-revenue software teams
“I would almost favor an app built in rails run by one person than something that's like making more money and has a team because there's so many I'd say in between the lines pattern matching that you can do when certain parameters line up, at least in our in o…”
JJ Englert says no-code accelerates product-market fit and cuts maintenance costs
“It's advantageous to build on no code in many ways, especially in these early days, because the cost to maintain it is lower. The ability to ship is faster, and that gives you the ability to move quicker and to adjust to your customer's needs faster, which hel…”
Andrew Gazdecki argues sales and marketing skills now outweigh product-building ability
“Now it's people that can quickly build with no code that might have some expertise in sales and marketing, which can, in my opinion, is more of an advantage today than being able to build a really good product.”
Amann: Hybrid mobile apps cost more in the long run than native apps
“The hybrid apps we have tried to build have never gone well. On either the updates, the libraries always change, or it actually costs more in the long run to build a hybrid app. So we highly recommend doing native Android, native iPhone.”
Amann: Modern mobile apps and iOS copy Windows Phone's UI design
“If you look at the mobile app landscape in the last six or seven years, we're all starting to copy windows operating system, their phone and the way they organize the horizontal scrolls. So a lot of things that they introduced to the app world, because they ca…”
Digital M&A remains a seller's market despite 2022 rate hikes
“It's, anybody listening, it's definitely still a seller's market. The R word isn't scaring anybody. The Fed raising the rates is not, like, it's just a seller's market still, which is amazing”
Sidhu: Incumbent fitness software platforms are merely tolerated, not liked
“And in, in the fitness industry, there are, there's lots of competition for what we're building, but they've been around for, you know, 1020 years, and none of them are liked, they're all just tolerated”
Keeley: ESW Capital Focuses on Extreme Automation and Headcount Cuts
“So I think Joe Lamont's like an interesting case study of kind of a more different approach where it's a, More hardcore, more like automate everything, rip out the people and do assembly line style.”
Keeley: Acquirers without developer management experience will waste money on software companies
“If you've never managed developers before, you're going to blow a lot of money. I'm trying to wrangle them in and build stuff. So like, you know, content sites or something like that, I think is a little easier, like a small content site to start.”
Gazdecki: Bootstrapping builds wealth while venture capital is a 1% lottery
“If you want to create wealth, bootstrap. If you want to change market raise venture because your odds are, I mean Mike requires venture backed. I know my odds. I got a one percent lottery ticket.”
Gazdecki: Underpricing startups generates bidding wars and seller pricing leverage
“And I even recommend sometimes to price lower than you might expect, because then you'll draw on more buyers. There's no, if you have one buyer, you have no buyers. And so if you can get, you know, a bidding war going with a timeline saying, Hey, I'm looking t…”
LittleThings generated $70M revenue before Facebook algorithm changes destroyed it
“We were doing, you know, 60, seventy million a year in revenue. And then Facebook just dropped the hammer on us one day and kind of destroyed our business, which was my point with like Shopify.”
Speiser handles his own acquisition legal work without using lawyers
“I don't have a lawyer that does any of this. I do all the legal myself. It's not terribly complicated when I could use your forms off your site, and we all agreed to not touch them and mark them up.”
Mark Davis: Entrepreneurs Drive Society More Than Governments or Nonprofits
“We believe entrepreneurs are the people who drive society forward more in many cases, more, more so many cases than nonprofits and government organizations.”
Davis: The idea that VCs know industries better than entrepreneurs is ludicrous
“The idea that VCs know their industries better than the entrepreneurs is almost always ludicrous.”
Davis: Competitors rarely impact startup progress and paying attention is a distraction
“Almost always the competitors have a little impact on your progress as an entrepreneur, right? It's usually distraction, paying attention to them.”
Gazdecki: Top performers want constructive criticism, not total autonomy
“I've always found that a players want to know, they want to know what they're doing wrong more than anything. They want constructive feedback. They want to know how to get better. They want to know where they stand with you. They do not want to be left alone.”
Davis: Startup ideas matter significantly because great execution cannot save flawed concepts
“There are a lot of really smart, competent execute operators executing against really stupid ideas. And they're running into a brick wall and the team thing holds presuming that the team will figure out a bad idea. An idea is bad and innovate and get to a good…”
Davis: Financing structure dictates founder payouts; many pursue VC inappropriately
“How you finance your company is a big determinant of how much money the entrepreneur actually makes. Now that may not be the definition of success. It might be how big the company is, but a lot of entrepreneurs are out there trying to raise venture capital whe…”
Kozinsky: More VC 'fallen angels' will seek soft landings within two years
“There's probably going to be more opportunities like up council and our other businesses. That's the VC fallen angels, the businesses that have raised a lot of capital, but maybe haven't grown into, haven't fully grown into the scale that they should be at. So…”
Lobo: Sales is the most important skill for startup founders
“The most important skill for a founder to have is learning to sell, because you're selling, first you're selling to your family that this thing is worth it. You're selling to co-founders, you're selling to customers, You're selling employees to join you for al…”
Gazdecki: Successful founders figure out sales themselves before hiring reps
“From my experience of doing this, of just successful founders like yourself, they all figured out the sales process on their own, and they did not outsource it. They did not hire for it. They grew into it. You know, if you figure it out, you nail it, and then …”
Gazdecki: CEOs should only delegate every operational role past $10M ARR
“Your goal as a CEO, in my opinion, at least is to, you know, eventually get to a point where you fire yourself from every role and you're basically putting leaders in place that are better than you, but that's, you know, that's when you're well into, you know,…”
Drury: More Shopify stores will close, affecting ecosystem apps
“And I think we're going to see a change in the merchant behavior on Shopify, which will of course have a trickle down effect into the apps. I think we're going to see a lot more stores closing, sadly.”
Dumont: Rebuilding everything post-acquisition is an acquirer's biggest mistake
“I think the biggest mistake is people take over a business and they feel like they have to scrap everything, you know, just get rebuild everything. And in some cases that's not needed. Like you need to continue the momentum that exists and start building the m…”
Good cash-flowing businesses rarely fail, but great companies often do
“Good businesses rarely go out of business. Great companies sometimes go out of business, but good businesses rarely go out of business, so, you know, profitable, cash flowing, pretty easy to manage, has, you know, some kind of growth trajectory versus going ba…”
Chamness: Legacy Fax Software Is Not Dead and Makes Great Businesses
“Fax is not dead, folks and they're great businesses, so.”
Kosarek: Crypto payments may become standard for Shopify transactions in 2022
“And then also we think this could be an interesting year where alternative forms of payments start to take off, right? The crypto wallets And other, you know, any cryptocurrency based payment out there may become more of a norm for a Shopify transaction than i…”
Gazdecki argues the adage that startups are bought not sold is false
“There's a saying, it's not true. It basically means Google shows up to your door and they're like, Hey, here's your check. You got acquired, but you know, a lot of founders don't understand, like you actually have to like sell your business. You have to point …”
Gazdecki argues prioritizing distribution over product is what creates the best product
“Like, that's why I always say distribution over product, because when you are able to sell the product, you can improve the product, and that's how you get the best product, and it's just this big, circular life cycle, man, but it starts with driving revenue.”
Crennan: Many Solid Software Businesses Fail Under VC Growth Expectations
“We talk to these founders who have built this business that is in all senses, a great business. But when you overlay the venture capital trajectory that needs to happen for businesses to be doing actually great by the label of great in the modern world, then t…”
McArdle: SaaS M&A brokers charge hefty fees and fail to deliver
“I don't want to be a broker in five years, because the, especially in, in our space with like SaaS and online businesses, they charge hefty fees. And I'm not sure they deliver.”
Gazdecki: Acquiring a business has a higher success rate than starting one
“It's literally, you have, you know, a 10% chance of success starting a business. I would argue your success, your chances of success when acquiring a business is probably higher because you're skipping over, you know, some of the hardest parts like finding cus…”
Patel: Ramp Ventures will always choose buying over building for speed
“We'll always buy versus build because it gives us speed”
Patel: A SaaS business is not at scale under $10M revenue
“Your company's not a scale unless you're at ten million dollars in revenue. I hate to break it to everybody here. That's the case. It's a fact.”
Patel: Venture capital harms founders who miss top-three market status
“I think the VC game is great. If you think you can win an industry, it's great if you're top three, it's bad for everyone else who doesn't become top three contender in that space, right? So just because the valuations and the and the Illiquidity about the dea…”
Bennett: Side projects can prevent founder burnout on primary ventures
“I do think it, in some ways, it helped us to you know, not be quite as burnt out on, like, one thing, right? It kind of, it reinvigorated us to work on the older thing.”
Gazdecki: $1 in profit beats $100M in seed funding
“One dollar profit is better than a hundred million in seed funding in my opinion.”
Toledano: Product-market fit is a singular event; execution is more important
“Market product fit is super important, but it's a singular event, like in the life of a product. Like after you're done with that, then everything starts, you know, like that's so much more important, you know, in my view now is how you execute.”
Tara Reed: Premium pricing works far better than high-volume low pricing for bootstrappers
“I'm not really that interested in the like low price point, but we've got lots of customers model. I actually prefer premium price points as a business model and sort of learned that in my first two businesses. One where I did a low price .1 where I did a prem…”
Reed: Formal technical due diligence is unhelpful for micro-SaaS acquisitions
“I actually worked with a due diligence company, actually, who, like, went to the code base and did all of that work, and I felt like they It just wasn't all that helpful at the deal sites that I was doing to get that level of, like, there were things that were…”
Founders must burn hotter during an exit than when building a business
“It is the beginning of that end, and it requires you to actually be burning a lot hotter than probably the rest of your experiences. Maybe there's a little, you know, spikes throughout that entrepreneurial journey to building that business, but I promise that,…”
Quality M&A counsel can alter a founder's payout by seven figures
“The difference of just knowing what to do or having the right cancel or not is, Literally in, in some cases you know, seven plus figures of a difference of, you know, what the outcome is for you as a founder.”
Imran: Bootstrapped exits do not prove a founder can return investor capital.
“When you have these bootstrapped exits, You've done well for yourself, but you haven't shown investors you can return their money. So it was really, it took us a while to raise some money.”
Imran: Never build a product before successfully cracking distribution.
“So I don't build the product until we can crack distribution.”
Imran: One paying customer is better validation than 10,000 waitlist signups.
“Even if they spend a dollar, that's better than 10,000 people signing up on a wait list and saying they're gonna spend a dollar, right?”
Imran: Founders nearing an acquisition must accelerate growth to protect leverage
“What I tell my friends and some portfolio companies I've invested in is you're about to sell, push harder than ever. Put the gas on the pedal and go, right? Give them a reason to actually have some real urgency. Show them you're growing, and that gives you lev…”
Gazdecki: 99% of Acquire.com buyers want to retain existing teams
“The majority of buyers that we work with, I'd say 99% of them are gonna wanna, you know, take care of your team just as you have, and if that's a concern as a seller, that's always something to bring up with the buyer and just let them know, and it's a great o…”