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 5,121 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 43 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
Yanowitz: Negative CAC is probably the only way to build successful SaaS today
“This idea of like creating a negative CAC SaaS business is Probably the only way to build a successful SaaS business today in my mind.”
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…”
Zuckerberg launched Facebook's Like button after dinners with Kevin Rose
“Facebook introduced the like button about a year later, I'd had multiple dinners with Zuckerberg talking about social voting and things like that.”
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…”
Hamed: Income Share Agreements Are Inferior to Consumer Loans for Lenders
“The capital provider by themselves with just the income share agreement, wasn't getting properly compensated for how much risk they were taking. It was basically a mediocre or crappier version of a consumer loan, but you were getting paid either the same or sl…”
Iverson: Tech design disciplines will increasingly collapse into efficient hybrid roles
“So I think the disciplines are going to collapse more. I mean, economy capitalist society, things are efficient. And so it's gonna find the most efficient way to get things done, which is often like a hybrid PM designer or a hybrid. Designer marketer or a hybr…”
Forte: Productivity Software Has an Inverse Moat From Accumulating Digital Clutter
“In fact, my theory is that not only is there no moat, there's whatever you would call, like, the opposite of a moat. There's actually an incentive for people to leave your product. Why? Because the favorite moment, the favorite experience of people who use suc…”
Kagan: Pair elite fractional advisors with hungry junior internal employees
“We go and look at who did the thing at this company that's ahead of us. And then we pay that person a lot of money per hour. And then we hire a more junior person who cares probably a little bit more about AppSumo. And then they, it's kind of a nice, nice merg…”
Cole: Group coaching models scale fastest and can reach $10M
“Of all the businesses that we've built in the past three years, we've learned that the group coaching model is the fastest to scale, probably most profitable, like probably doing another group coaching program would be low hanging fruit. Cause you can get a gr…”
Cole: The next major publisher will be a single AI-trained author
“So one of mine is I think that the next Simon and Schuster or Penguin Random House or whatever is going to be one individual that builds, I mean, one author, but has like a whole team. So the, an author is being treated like a venture backed startup and the te…”
Karnjanaprakorn: Failing startups will merge with one another to survive
“I think we'll start seeing you know, not just within those businesses, but startups that are kind of failing, merging with other startups that are failing to survive. I think we'll just see a lot of M and a activity and not, it won't be big tech company buying…”
Karnjanaprakorn: Creators will sell fine-tuned AI agents instead of traditional online courses
“So I think the new thing creators do instead of like courses, like asynchronous courses or cohort courses, it's a for 10 dollars a month. Like you can learn from me and I'm constantly updating the model and fine tuning it and you can learn directly from me.”
Isenberg: DoNotPay generates $5M in monthly revenue after raising $10M
“So they've raised ten million dollars and doing at least five million dollars a month in revenue.”
Torenberg: Business Media Companies Should Price Discriminate and Charge Premium Rates
“People in the media, businesses and media creators often don't price discriminate. And especially if you're in business media, if you can attract information, that's extremely valuable to a very small subset of people, you should be charging a ton.”
Ries: Prospects are weak for AI wrappers to train proprietary models
“I do think some of these vertical specialized wrapper companies, they might be able to use their wrapperness Build up customer relationships, collect proprietary data, you know, I don't know, train their own models, build their own new thing. That is theoretic…”
Ries: Facebook buried internal scientific research proving its products cause depression
“Facebook even commissioned the scientific research to find out if their product makes people depressed. And then they found out that it does. And they were like, oh, better bury that. Instead of take it seriously and do something about it.”
Ries: The ESG movement is a total failure due to flawed ratings
“The ESG movement has been a total failure. You know, from my perspective, because Philip Morris has great ESG scores.”
Isenberg: Top writers like Sahil Bloom make $5M a year
“Like, you used to get paid 50,000 dollars to write, and now the greatest writers, Sahil Blooms and the Nick Hubers, are getting paid five million dollars a year to write.”
Pompliano: Very Few One-Person Companies Will Ever Reach $100M in Revenue
“I don't think that we are going to see very many one person companies reach significant scale measured in nine figures of revenue.”
Smith: Founders outside Silicon Valley do not understand true startup intensity
“Most people feel like they understand what working at a startup is and what it's like to work in a tech company. But when, if they haven't been in one in Silicon Valley, they really don't know what it feels like. And they don't really know how to work that har…”
Smith: Founders cannot build a track record remotely
“You don't get a track record remotely and you, and by the way, track record can involve failures, but it has to involve smart failures and also network being in the same places as all these people it's being on podcasts.”
Girdley: Market selection matters far more in business than execution quality
“The thing that matters most in business is not how well I run a business. It is what game am I playing? Like, I would much rather play a really good game and be in a super good business and do that not very good than to be the best at a really hard business be…”
Guest fame is inversely proportional to listener satisfaction on tactical podcasts
“Funny enough, I found that the bigger the name of the guest, Is completely, almost inverse proportional to how well my listeners like the episode. So it doesn't matter. I care more about the content than, you know, the name of the person on the show.”
Pujji: 'Bootstrap giants' sit between VC startups and lifestyle businesses
“And I think there's a big opportunity between the sort of, you know, lifestyle business and the venture funded business. There's a lot of businesses in between that I call bootstrap giants. There are these ambitious but self-funded profitable companies that ca…”
Isenberg: Paper-rich founders face brutal recapitalizations within six to nine months
“There's a bunch of founders that right now that are worth a lot on paper that are going to have crazy headwinds, like within the next six to nine months. Because they're going to have to recap their companies and that the founders are, they're going to realize…”
Nickson: Open source will prevail as AI's winning foundational layer
“I'm a big believer that open source will prevail and that'll be sort of like the winning Foundational layer that AI is going to be built on top of”
Nickson: Prompt engineering is a fleeting trend, soon comparable to Googling
“I actually, I'm not as bullish on the idea of a prompt engineer as most, right? I think it'll be like knowing how to use Google or Excel. It's just like a particular skill that'll be helpful. But no, I think the pro I mean, like one of our main ambitions too, …”
Nickson: Standalone AI tools face major threat from incumbent software integration
“I think the most fierce competition are going to be the incumbents, you know, like a lot of this technology is going to be built into the products that we know and love and use today. Right. So eventually like you know, even, even mid journey, I think they're …”
Nickson: Audiences will crave human creators over purely AI-generated entertainment
“So I think the same thing is going to happen where like, there's going to be these incredible AI generated movies and scripts, but I just don't think there's going to be an as large an appetite as people think of for audiences to consume this. Cause like what …”
Isenberg: Tech hiring freezes drive a boom for product agencies
“It is a good time. It's surprisingly good time to be an agency owner right now because a lot of companies are cutting staff or freezing hiring, but they still need new products and new, new businesses to go out there. So they look at companies like our late ch…”
Isenberg: Incumbents like Amazon hold an unfair AI advantage over startups
“Some of the bigger retailers and e-commerce players like the Amazons of the world have so much more data that they actually have an unfair advantage
If they want to go down this route, because you could get into a situation where, you know, your Carly bot oper…”
Sharma: Every DTC cookware brand I know does over $100M revenue
“Every cookware brand I know is doing over a hundred million dollars in revenue.”
Rogenmoser: AI will enhance over 90% of white-collar workflows within five years
“I'd say over 90%. Maybe 95%.”
Rogenmoser: Proprietary data moats in AI are dubious long-term
“Even the data stuff, which is probably the most like compelling, or at least the moat, the most moat like thing. We're going to hear that. They go, yeah, yeah, that there's a moat there. Like even that I think is dubious long-term. If there's a ton of value, t…”
Rogenmoser: Incumbents must rebuild products from scratch or face disruption
“Like over the next five years, you gotta go back to first principles and think, you know, is this really the best way to do this at all given the new technology? And I think sometimes it will be and like slapping it on. Will work. I think many times it's going…”
Greathouse Fall: Personalized AI will make Google and Meta look like tinkertoys
“So when it has a personal relationship with the person who's running it, that's going to be the next big watershed moment. I think that's what's going to make like Google and Facebook look like tinker toys.”
Isenberg paid Ed Zitron $5,000 for 2013 TechCrunch coverage
“I paid him 5000 dollars to get us into TechCrunch, basically.”
Phan: The US government should ban TikTok and force a sale
“I think they should ban and then force a sale.”
Spartz: In every domain, AI will evolve from tool to boss
“So in every domain, like AI starts off as a tool and then it goes up through the four levels. And so that's the thing to keep an eye on, is like, in, in your industry, if AI is starting off as a tool right now, eventually it'll become an assistant, then it'll …”
Spartz: Top EDM ghost-producer secretly sold one-third AI tracks in 2019
“I was doing AI music like four years ago and the biggest like EDM ghost producing website, which were, which is, they were responsible for like a large percentage of all EDM tracks. And they were selling secretly a third of all of their tracks were AI generate…”
Spartz: A large percentage of future influencers and relationships will be AI
“In a world where all the influencers are, you know, AI, they're not human anymore, or, like, a large percentage of them, rather, are AI influencers. A large percentage of all relationships online become with AIs because the AI can be tailored.”
Postma: VC-Funded Competitors Benefit Indie Hackers by Subsidizing Market Awareness
“If you want to stay small, you're a bootstrapper, you're an indie hacker. It's only good if a competitor builds something like you, because they have the money to create awareness.”
Postma: Shutterstock Could Replace All Its Photographers With AI by 2025
“But I think someone is probably Shutterstock is going to do this really well because they have like the whole database of photos, right? They could literally, I think in two years, put all their photographers out of a job and just have an AI generate the photo…”
Banning congressional stock trading harms Autopilot but helps society
“I honestly hope they get banned. Like they shouldn't be able to, if they get banned, it's bad for our business, but I think it's better for society and it's better for the trustworthiness of our government.”
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.”
Cole: Abandoning your core niche inevitably degrades audience engagement
“In actuality, what the reader cares about is you in the context of the niche that solves a problem for them. And the moment you step out of that niche, Completely. And you start thinking it's just about you and how special you are and how famous you are and ho…”
Isenberg: Ryan Holiday Is More Famous Than Marcus Aurelius or Seneca Today
“Ryan holiday is more famous than Marcus Aurelius and Seneca to most people today, because he's the one who's delivering the mess, the message. About stoicism in a way that people can understand nowadays via TikTok, via Twitter, via Instagram, via his books.”
Lavingia: Engineers and designers are 2-3x cheaper than 6 months ago
“Like engineers are cheaper. They're easier to hire. Designers are cheaper, easier to hire. And that's all I need. I don't actually don't need anything else. Those are the two most valuable, you know, resources on the planet. And now they're, you know, they're …”