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 1,218 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 10 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
Park: 50K-View Videos Generated Hundreds of Thousands, 20M-View Video Drove Almost Nothing
“We've had videos where it got 50,000 views and it's converted to, it's literally brought us in hundreds of thousand dollars in revenue, and I remember the saddest time ever was we had one video that got twenty million views, one video, and it almost had a negl…”
Schneider: Major Record Labels Are Switching to Laylo
“All of the major record labels are switching to this right now.”
Al-Abdullah: Harvard study found equity grants do not increase performance
“Harvard did a study where they actually found no market increase in performance when they landed equity to individuals.”
Senra: Elon Musk named Larry Ellison as person he admires most
“In fact, a friend of mine was at dinner with Elon Musk a few months ago in Palm Beach, right before the election, and everybody at dinner, you can imagine, was just lighting Elon up with questions, and he was asked, like, who's his mentor, who he turns to for …”
Top YouTube Creators Get Up to 90% of Viewership From TVs
“Like for example, this might shock some people in the audience, but for a lot of our biggest clients in my company, we're getting 6070, sometimes as high as 90% of our viewership. From TV. So from people watching on TV as their primary device type.”
Schneider: Rupa Health podcast ad sales fully subsidized growth team costs
“We then took that and we went to companies that were in the health space and sold ad placements for the podcast. And also within the newsletter, athletic greens is one of the companies that we worked with. It was subsidizing the entire growth team's cost.”
Isenberg: Consumer AI apps hit $1M MRR via $5 creator CPMs
“Had the founders of in two separate pods Cal AI come and Riz GPT come, come and do an interview. And I asked them how much do they pay per CPM? Like what is successful for them? So they basically acquire, I mean, they're doing like a million dollars a month. M…”
Schiffman: TikTok is the only post-2010 consumer social app to dethrone incumbents
“I think TikTok is the only consumer social product that came out after, you know, the OG ones in the early 2010 that actually succeeded in, I think truly be kind of becoming king in a way that I got a TikTok is great.”
Isenberg: LinkedIn will not suppress posts edited with links after four hours
“What the LinkedIn team told me is that if you post something that gets more than, ah, 150 likes, 200 likes, after four hours, if you put the link at the bottom of the post, you will not be suppressed by the LinkedIn algorithm.”
Choi: Goli awards Teslas, BMWs, and Rolexes to top TikTok affiliates
“Now if you search like goalie creator prizes, they give away, they're giving away like insane prizes to top affiliates. To just basically have a monopoly on all the creators. So for example, they have these like, you know, if you sell 7000 dollars in GMV, you …”
Courtney: One unpolished AJ&Smart sales funnel generated $20M in lifetime revenue
“So this launched in 2020, this one funnel, which I can barely look at, Will has already passed twenty million revenue in it, but in its lifetime, just to be super clear. So in the last four years, actually it started officially in May. So in the last three and…”
Lacy: Most women raising large VC rounds come from media backgrounds
“I think it's the reason that most women who raise large amounts of venture capital do not come from a math background, but come from a media background because it is like the great leveler.”
Chaudry: YouTube search accounts for a surprisingly nominal share of video discovery
“The first is search, and I think probably people over, maybe, maybe think about search too much. It's actually pretty nominal how many people find videos through search.”
Isenberg: MrBeast is raising $150M at a $1.5B valuation for CPG products
“Mr. Beast is raising a hundred and fifty million dollars at I think a 101.5 billion dollar valuation? And he's doing it to double down on his CPG products.”
Masad: Replit Agent begins to struggle after building roughly 10 features
“Let's call it like, you know, 10 features in, the system starts to struggle a little bit.”
Masad: Startups with tens of millions in ARR run entirely on Replit
“We have startups that reached tens of millions in ARR running on Replit using just Replit database and Replit autoscale deployments.”
Josephs: Autopilot planted a fake Nancy Pelosi at a UFC fight
“We literally did send a fake Pelosi to the fight. She was sitting there in the front row with Mike Malak. There's all these pieces of content around her. The New York post already kind of took it up. They created an article about it.”
Isenberg: MrBeast's leaked manual promises exceptional employees will get rich
“He basically says that he's going to make you rich. If you do well and you create, you know, you're exceptional at what you do you will be rich if you work for Mr. Beast, basically is what he's saying. And you'll make more money Than you could ever dream of ma…”
Goli offers Rolexes, Lamborghinis, and Miami condos to top TikTok Shop affiliates
“Their incentive package for affiliates going into Q four is insane. Well, I mean, my incentive package is basically if you generate enough GMV, like the market value of sales there, it's like Rolex, Lamborghini, a condo in Miami, night at Amangiri. Like that's…”
Isenberg: An entrepreneur secured a Star Wars apparel license for only $50,000
“He basically bought the Star Wars license for some, like, apparel line, and he thought it was gonna cost, he's like, you know, Star Wars is huge, right? And he's like, oh my god, it's gonna cost, like, millions of dollars a year, and it ended up costing 50,000…”
Brown: AI tools can build a full Notion clone in seven hours
“It takes six or seven hours if you like really want to go ham to create something that looks a lot like Notion, but with a full database storage and everything fully with AI without writing a single line of code.”
Robinson: Jolie hit $50M run rate in 36 months with 3 employees
“Those guys got the showerhead business, Jolie, to fifty million run rate in 36 months with three people. They just hired their fourth full-time employee.”
Robinson: Jolie generates $19M ARR on replacement filters with 95% margins
“They send a 99 dollar filter every year to people who buy the shower head that does not get canceled as 93% gross churn. Nineteen million ARR with like 95% margin of filters, right?”
Isenberg: Lenny Rachitsky makes $5M annually from his blog and newsletter
“Lenny Richardsky didn't have a blog and newsletter and now he's making five million dollars a year with his blog and newsletter.”
Schneider: Wind energy is now cheaper than natural gas
“It's already cheaper than natural gas and natural gas. It looks like can't go cheaper. So what's going to naturally happen in the market and solar still getting cheaper.”
Isenberg: Niche creators with 5,000 to 10,000 followers generate millions annually
“Like, I know guys, girls, whatever, who have five, 10,000 followers are making millions of dollars a year from that from that group.”
Schneider: Record labels start pursuing artists at 300K Spotify monthly listeners
“There's this threshold right around 300,000 that labels will approach you. So 303 100,000 monthly listeners on Spotify a month and labels start to look at you because you're at a dollar amount where they realize that they can make money off of you, especially …”
Cole: Top Lit RPG books generate $250,000 per month
“There are lit RPG books right now doing like a quarter million a month.”
Jason Calacanis invested in three Swell AI competitors that will all fail
“Jason Calacanis has invested in like three companies that are like exact competitors of us. And we're just laughing because I was like how many tap bats can you get with this? It's not going to work.”
Yanowitz: Health and longevity figures becoming major celebrities is historically unprecedented
“Look at Huberman, Peter Atiyah, like Brian Johnson, like these weird, like health folks are celebrities now. That's never happened in the history of the U.S. Or the world.”
Yanowitz: Meme-coin-backed startup hits $500k/day revenue in two months
“I talked to a company earlier this week that's doing 500 K a day in revenue. They have 40,000 users. They launched a couple months ago and they built on the back of this like meme coin community.”
Siu: Friend's performance agency generates $30M profit on $80M revenue
“So one of my friends, his pay for performance agency does eighty million dollars a year, thirty million in profit, and they have like 30 employees.”
Siu: AI co-pilots make software developers 4x to 8x more effective
“With AI co-pilots and everything, like developers are becoming four to eight, eight X more effective.”
Lieberman: DTC founder earns $40K monthly from software affiliate Google Doc
“There's an entrepreneur I know, and I don't know if he wants people to know this, so I'm not going to say who it is, who built a popular direct to consumer company, sold this company, and he has found a way, he has manually built his stack. So he created a Goo…”
Torenberg: Rappers prefer traditional label deals for upfront advance cash
“Most artists or at least rappers actually prefer the deals that the record labels gave them because they got more money up front. And they were able to do anything they wanted with that money.”
Ries: Leading AI firms are not backed by legacy SaaS and social VCs
“So you see like a number of the leading AI firms are not funded by the leading venture firms from the SaaS or social media eras.”
Ries: AI founders tend to be older and more sophisticated
“And you also see just, it's a difference in the kind of founders that are doing this.
They tend to be older.
They tend to be a little bit more sophisticated.”
Pompliano: Bay Area Times pioneered the visual newsletter format
“We have Bay Area times. It is a newsletter focused on business, tech, and finance. We pioneered something called a visual newsletter.”
Pompliano: Joe Rogan generates $50M revenue per employee on a two-person team
“Joe Rogan's got two employees himself and one other person, and they have a hundred million dollar deal with Spotify. They do fifty million dollars per employee.”
Smith: OpenAI has reached $1 billion in enterprise revenue
“There's the reason that OpenAI has a billion dollars in enterprise revenue today. Out of nowhere, quote unquote, out of nowhere.”
Major podcast video clipping agencies suffer from extremely high client churn
“We looked at buying some of the bigger clip, clip agencies. And what we learned was their churn is so, so high.”
Andy Ellwood claims over 70% of founders he knows grew up religious
“If I'm, if I go through my Rolodex of founders, the number of founders that I know who grew up with some amount of religion in their life, Pretty high. Like, it's north of 70%. Like, they grew up believing in something that they couldn't see, and so they're pr…”
Lawler: Has not seen remote work operate productively at scale
“I haven't seen remote work. I haven't been on a company, at a company that's super productive at scale with remote work. So I'm building a remote company also, to be clear.”
Lieberman: YouTube Shorts generate $0.06 RPMs compared to $7.00 for long-form
“With the shorts, I shared my long form videos get about seven, a seven dollar RPM, seven dollars per thousand views. Shorts for me right now, and I've looked, and this is kind of what other people are getting as well. Six cents per thousand views is what I get…”
Sharma: Most current mattress brands drop ship on demand without owning inventory
“I think most mattress companies now that exist on the market, they don't actually have inventory that they own. They're all drop shipping on demand.”
Isenberg: AI can cut a $300K customer service budget to $25K
“We were talking to this company that spends 300,000 dollars a month on customer service reps. And what we modeled out is that using AI, you can actually get that to 25,000 dollars a month.”