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 583 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
Thompson admits to using fake reviews to launch landing pages
“Yes, I'm going to put fake reviews on here to start, and then I will replace them as I get real ones, I promise.”
To: Local-first architecture is the key moat against Notion and Figma
“First of all, for me, when I make apps, I look at what is the mode? What is something that I can do with my app that Notion cannot do or Figma cannot do? For me, that mode right now is the fact that everything is local.”
Wilkinson: Holding company spends $40k/month on Claude instead of hiring
“So instead of a payroll, we just have a 40,000 dollar a month Claude bill. And it's doing everything.”
Late Checkout rejected a $100M blank check venture funding offer
“This came to me a couple of years ago, we got offered A hundred million dollar blank check to build, to basically scale out late checkout and build, build out a bunch of new products faster, acquire faster, just take our model and just add steroids to it. And …”
Isenberg: Islands drove campus growth by gifting 'sold out' designer merch
“And what we did is we created a Shopify store and on islands is website, and it would be a hundred dollars, a 150 dollars for a sweatshirt, 80 dollars for a hat, 70 dollars for a t-shirt. And it all said sold out. So we use that to give to people on college ca…”
Kevin Rose is actively seeking to invest in AI companionship startups
“I've been desperately trying to invest in this space because I believe companionship and obviously we have an epidemic of kind of this loneliness culture that's going on and that, and this is going to be, you know, whether we like it or not, a solved problem w…”
Isenberg paid Ed Zitron $5,000 for 2013 TechCrunch coverage
“I paid him 5000 dollars to get us into TechCrunch, basically.”
Beshore: Personal portfolio strictly limited to cash and small private acquisitions
“I hold two types of investments. I hold highly illiquid small private investments, right? In these companies that we, that we've acquired and cash and that's it. Like literally I have the, it's the most barbell strategy I've ever seen right now.”
Lavingia: Works zero hours a week at a laptop for Gumroad
“How many hours a week at Gummer do I work in front of a laptop? Zero, basically. I don't, like, I don't type. I generally just respond to messages on, on Slack and Notion, and this is what most CEOs do.”
Lavingia: Gumroad operates with zero full-time employees
“The goal is Gumroad, for example, we have zero full-time employees.”
Nick Saltarelli: Midday Squares accepts $50M valuation cuts for absolute board control
“We fundraise at lower valuations every single round to control the board and have a complete voting control. So we've taken 10, fifty million dollar cuts from the valuation in order to have those provisions in the term sheets.”
Mullenweg: Automattic pays identical salaries regardless of employee geography
“So something we didn't do when we started, but we switched in like, was paying the same salaries regardless of geography, right? It's the same work. It's the same job. You're creating the same value for the company and the and the customers. So you should make…”
Demirors: My 10-year vision is to mint one million new billionaires
“So I think what's been really cool to see and what I'm excited about, like my vision is in the next decade, I want to mint a million new billionaires. Who have a radically different view of what we should value as a society.”
Demirors plans to legally establish a tax-exempt Bitcoin-centric church
“One of the things I'm going to try to do over the next few years is build a church. So when I say a church, it's a religious organization which enjoys certain tax benefits under U.S. Tax code.”
Ross Mike used $24,000 in model costs on two $200 subscriptions
“Like I asked my Astra agent to calculate how much of how much I've been using, like the subscription price, but also like in terms of API price, how much like I've been using in terms of model costs. And in the last week I've spent over 24,000 dollars. Mind yo…”
Carson ships three PRs daily from an autonomous AI grading loop
“Every day I have an automation that looks at these chats and then grades them on a rubric. And so you, and again, just talk to your agent about this. You pick the most important part of your app that you want to self-improve and say, here's how you agent judge…”
Carson spent $20,000 on AI tokens in a single month
“So last month I spent probably 20 grand in, in tokens. Which is just too much. Like, it's not viable.”
Courtney makes €500k from a 1,000-viewer weekly live stream without ads
“I mean, I can just tell you too, like, so I have only one to two, one to 2000 people tuning into me every Tuesday, and that business alone can make four to 500,000 euro with no ads, with nothing else other than me selling like in-person events or like even mer…”
Wilkinson: Non-technical CFO built portfolio tracking tool in one week via Claude
“But anyway, this was built by my CFO. He's never coded in his life. Like when I told him about cloud code and that he should check it out, he's like, I don't know how to code. Like I'm not technical. And literally within like a week, I'm so lucky that he's the…”
Howie Liu runs 30 autonomous cloud code instances in parallel for HyperAgent
“The way I develop on hyper agent is I have like 30 different cloud code instances running in parallel, and each one is coupled up to like a browser, Fully autonomous. It can go and like get other agents to comment on any PRs it creates.”
Liu: Hyperagent drafted an Airtable board memo investors called his best
“Like it's funny, like one of our recent board memos that I wrote and sent out to our entire board and kind of major investor list. Like, you know, a lot of it was researched and crafted by hyper agent, right? Obviously with like my, you know, kind of instincts…”
Schneider is building autonomous agents for end-to-end ad creation and optimization
“Where I'm seeing this head personally is like, I'm going to build these tools. That an agent is going to have, and then it's going to be able to run this process in the background where it's basically has the ability to make new creative. It can publish that c…”
Schneider is churning from SaaS tools that lack API and UI parity
“There's a thing you can do in their UI. I can't do in their API. And I'm literally about the churn because I'm just like, this is critical for me. And now it feels archaic for me to go and interact with your fucking, like UI to do this outcome, like output tha…”
Kevin Rose: Rebooted Digg Is a Reddit Competitor Run by CEO Justin
“We have Justin as a CEO who runs kind of like the day to day and builds out, you know, the Reddit competitor version of dig. And then we have, you know, me that I'm kind of more in the labs area where I'm pushing on the edges of ideas and saying, what might we…”
Finn refuses to hire humans, using Claudebot as his only employee
“And I'm just a one person business. I'm not hiring people. This is my employee. And it was able to get this done, which is really incredible.”
Thompson: E-commerce is a 'rigged slot machine' for paid traffic arbitrage
“All I'm ever trying to do on e-comm. Is I'm not necessarily trying to go build some massive brand. I'm just trying to create like what I would call like a rigged slot machine where I know I can put a dollar in and get a dollar and 30 cents out. And then it's l…”
Rauch: Vercel aims to turn v0 code into editable remote components
“We have the ambition that whatever you vibe code in V zero can actually become what we call remote components. Imagine prompting on a slice of a website. And enabling anyone in your team or organization to do this.”
Pigford: Sold NameSnag for $15,000 in Eight Days
“So I sold it for like 15,000 dollars eight days later and it's a hundred percent could have sold it for more, but like
I'm not, I wasn't building it to sell it.”
Courtney: Effective webinar funnels require 6 to 8 emails before and after
“So we have like for a normal webinar live webinar, you know, we could have up to six to eight emails before the webinar starts and six to eight emails after the webinar starts.”
Denk earns $20,000–$30,000 monthly writing a newsletter five hours a week
“As a side project, I put five hours a week into between 20 and 30,000 dollars a month.”
Senra: Founder listeners give him free equity without requiring his capital
“Then you start building relationships with the founders that listen to your podcast.
And a lot of them want you involved where they don't even want your money.
They just start giving you stock.”
MrBeast Blames Slow Upload Pace on Production, Not a Scarcity Strategy
“A funny conversation I had with Jimmy, Mr. Beast when I first Was talking to him six or seven years ago was like, Hey, like, I think it's really smart that you like focus on scarcity and you focus on like keeping things like scarce for the viewers. So that whe…”
Schneider: Rupa Health attracted healthtech investors using paid Instagram ads on CEO
“I mean, this is like a playbook that we ran when we were at Rupa. We're like, cool. We're going to like grow the Instagram account of the CEO and also like the company. And then use that as a leverage point because all of the people that were in, like, you kno…”
Isenberg's personal brand drives 40% of his holding company's revenue
“I would say without my personal brand, Sales and revenue would be, like, 40% less. So, you know, millions and millions of dollars a year. Yeah, it's actually crazy. Many, many millions of dollars a year.”
Isenberg says he has worked 40-hour weeks for 99% of his career
“I work on average in 20, 24 hot take 40 hours a week. You can get a lot of stuff done in 40 hours per week. I honestly, there 99% of my entire career has been working 40 hours a week.”
Yadegari calls $7 per week app pricing steep and potentially unethical
“So when I think of weekly, usually I go for four dollars or seven dollars a week. I think seven dollars is pretty steep, and you could debate whether it's ethical to price that much for an app like this, because it comes out to close to 30 dollars a month if s…”
Masad: Replit's early-access AI Agent can build apps but remains buggy
“In beta, we have this product called Agent that does all of that for you. So you don't even have to click, and so you just put your idea there. I will emphasize that it is in early access, so it is still quite buggy.”
Fried: I never think about user acquisition when evaluating new product ideas
“How much are you thinking about how am I going to get the first 100,000 people to download this?
Jason Fried: I don't think about that at all.
Jason Fried: For me, it's like is the idea any good?”
Isenberg would fund AI wrappers for profit share, not equity
“Would I invest in something like this? Like absolutely. Just knowing that there's risks and the way I would invest wouldn't be like, I want equity. It would be like, Hey, I want like a profit share of this thing.”
Tiago Forte: Never Adopt Any Technology Tool Newer Than Five Years Old
“I really advocate people not adopt any technology that is newer than five years anyway.”
Torenberg: Turpentine splits revenue 50/50 with top creators like Packy McCormick
“So basically in our network, we have Paki McCormick, we have Noah Smith and Brian Hobart of a few other kind of pretty big newsletter writers for their specific niches who have a few 100,000 subscribers. And we say, Hey, you don't have a podcast today. Let's c…”
Torenberg: Turpentine Will Monetize Proprietary Data Gathered via Industry Lists
“So we are going to create media that helps people do better at their job and identify you know, which companies are doing well, et cetera. We're gonna get in the list game, right? Top companies, top people per sector, get, use these, this media to get all this…”
Torenberg: a16z Offered Series A Weeks After Product Hunt Seed Round
“I remember at Product Hunt, we raised a seed round. We had like two million dollars or something, maybe 1.5 or two million dollars in the seed round. And then a few weeks later, we got a term, a series A term sheet from Andreessen Horowitz. And we didn't even …”
Torenberg is launching a Bookface competitor with VC and SaaS ratings
“One is a VC rating system. One is a service provider rating system. One is a SAS tool rating system or a review site. One is a company review site. I'm going to have individual metrics for, or a company reviews that, yeah, like a glass door competitor, individ…”
Isenberg: Late Checkout rejected a $30M private equity investment offer
“Another big win is someone offered us and not just someone, someone I really, really respect and a top tier investor offered us. Thirty million dollars of private equity capital to scale out late checkout. We didn't take it, but it did feel quite good.”
Smith will never be a CEO again if forced into an office
“And so if they if they want me to return to the office, I would legitimately not be a CEO again.”
Isenberg: Late Checkout declined a $30M VC investment offer
“Last week we had an offer for about thirty million dollars to invest in. Lay check out our holding company and the. You know, one of the top institutional investors, VCs, someone I really respect... But the idea of like giving up control and just having, and m…”