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
Lavingia: Every digital-output job will be replaced by AI prediction
“Basically any job in which your output is digital you know, I see that, that, that will kind of be replaced with basically a computer predicting what that human would be outputting.”
Lavingia: Indie devs can now match YouTube on recommendation systems
“A startup like Gumroad or really an indie developer can now compete with YouTube on YouTube recommendations, which four years ago or even two years ago would not have been the case”
Lavingia: Software engineering is the top job being automated by AI
“People think all of these other jobs are getting automated away, but the number one job that's getting automated away is actually the software engineering job, right? Like why is software engineering such a valuable skill? It's because we've automated the crap…”
Sahil Lavingia: Neural interfaces will 100% eliminate pain and treat depression
“We will, 100% basically be able to, you know, get rid of pain probably, you know, short circuit depression, like, all these sorts of things we will be able to do without needing to know exactly what, you know, we'll know the math, because you can look into thi…”
Lavingia: Physical traits will not matter in human society in 100 years
“Any privilege associated with anything else, height or body mass or, you know, fast switch muscle fibers basically is not going to matter a hundred years from now.”
Lavingia: AI investors may make almost no money over the next decade
“I could a hundred percent see that like 10 years from now, there's no way to make money in AI, right? Like basically nobody made any money on AI. All the returns basically just went to, you know, whoever like basically gets attention so that they can monetize …”
Lavingia: Over 90% of startup value comes from engineer-founded giants
“If you look at startups and you say, okay, 99% of the public value is basically, or 90 plus percent is basically in four or five companies. Right? If you get rid of, like, Google, Amazon, Meta, like, we haven't done shit as an industry, right? In terms of actu…”
Lavingia: Founders cannot understand a technical concept until they write the code
“And the truth is, if you can't write it, you don't actually understand it. So you can pretend that you get it. But the truth is if you read the Bitcoin white paper and you haven't actually implemented it, you don't actually understand it. You don't actually un…”
Sahil Lavingia: Non-technical startup teams will always be defeated by engineers
“Like, I can build Gumroad in a weekend and I can outship basically any, it doesn't matter how awesome your team is, if it doesn't have engineers on it, I will beat them.
Right?
I would just, I will win.”
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: No non-technical founder uninterested in coding has built a $10B company
“I can't think of a single example of someone who is non-technical, doesn't have any interest in knowing how to code, and has built a ten billion dollar company.”
Lavingia: Most computer science degree holders do not know how to code
“Most people with TS degrees don't know how to code, you know.”
Lavingia: Gumroad operates with zero full-time employees
“The goal is Gumroad, for example, we have zero full-time employees.”
Lavingia: If you enjoy holidays, startup founding is probably not for you
“If you are on holiday and you're like, I love being on holiday. I'm sorry to say that, like, you know, doing a startup is probably not for you, right?”
Isenberg: Meta's heavily criticized metaverse investments will actually pay off long-term
“And I think that over the longterm, I actually think that a lot of these metaverse bets are going to play Play in the favor of meta.”
Huber: Persistent high interest rates will bankrupt many real estate syndicators
“And if this keeps up and interest rates stay high for another couple of years, It'll be no different this time, and a lot of people who do what I do and raise money from outside investors will go bankrupt, and the people who invested the money will lose the mo…”
Rief: Feastables might become a billion-dollar brand within a year
“So that right there in a year might be a billion dollar brand alone.”
Rief: Morning Brew has 4.5M daily subscribers and no newsletter will match it
“We have four and a half million subscribers to our daily, and I don't think anyone will get there.”
Rief: Media companies easily hit $30M revenue but rarely reach $100M
“Yeah, so, I mean, so many media companies, it's easy to get to 10, 20, 30, relatively, to get to 10, 20, thirty million, to get to a hundred million of revenue is incredibly hard.”
Rief: Media companies must target B2B or high-income earners
“It's very hard to build a media company if you're not building B to B or you're not building for high income earners.”
Tossell: Not everyone should learn to code
“I don't think anyone should learn or every, I don't think everyone should learn. Sorry, that's going to piss people off.”
Tossell: Prompt engineering will become worthless as AI models abstract it
“I don't think prompt engineering is actually valuable, a valuable thing, because I believe all these models and all these tools will actually, like, abstract that away anyway.”
Tossell: A two-person company will generate hundreds of millions by 2027
“We'll have a company pulling in like hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue, and it'll be like one or two people actually running that, that company.”
David Perell: Modern education ignores 70 to 80 years of learning science
“None of the learning science that has come out in the last 70 to 80 years has actually been implemented.”
Isenberg: Hiring a Write of Passage grad beats Google or Stanford alumni
“When I interview someone that's graduated rite of passage, like to me, that's better than working at Google or graduating Stanford.”
Morenstein: 300 live stream viewers are worth more than 300,000 YouTube views
“300 viewers that will watch you when you go live. Every time that 300 viewers is literally worth more than 300,000 views on YouTube. 100,000 percent. Because these 300 people are like, they're all ambassadors. They're sitting here for hours, dude. They didn't …”
Andy Dunn: Would not raise venture capital if building Bonobos again
“No, I w I wouldn't have done it.
If I could go back, I think there's so many
Problems with raising money.”
Andy Dunn: DTC brands should scale into wholesale and raise under $20M
“And I feel like that's the new playbook in DTC is get the brand to scale in DTC. Open up wholesale relationships, thoughtfully, strategically, perhaps some brick and mortar, and raise less than twenty million dollars, certainly at the high end.”
Dunn: Corporations are the only viable funding source for mental healthcare
“We know that psychiatrists and therapists are not going to voluntarily reduce their rates.
We know they're not going to voluntarily join and affiliate with insurance companies that takes down their after tax.
And we know that insurance companies aren't going t…”
Helgeson: Holding companies can successfully decentralize capital allocation to CEOs
“Buffett has a view that basically it's his job to allocate capital and nobody else's. And I think there's a world where you can train your management teams to also be buyers of businesses in their sector and to Smartly allocate capital”
Pal: India is the most obvious economy to long for 20 years
“If you look at the global economy, which is the most obvious global economy in the world that you want to be long off for the next 15 years, 20 years, it is without question India.”
Pal: The majority of the English-speaking internet will soon be Indian
“Soon, the majority of the English speaking internet will be Indian. So, and he explains an apparent and a little bit after that is that the conversations you have online, the highest probability is that they will be Indians. They will not be Americans. They'll…”
Pal: Only tech stocks and crypto beat the Fed balance sheet expansion
“There's only two things that outperformed the Fed balance sheet over the last, since 2008. Only two asset classes. One was technology stocks, and the other was crypto.”
Pal: Breakthrough technologies will reach 4 billion users by 2037
“This is stuff actually happening right now. That's going to go from, you know, a hundred million people to four billion people in the next decade and a half.”
Pal: The Boring Company actually exists to build underground Mars habitats
“I actually think the boring company is not about digging tunnels under Los Angeles. I don't think it gives a shit. I think it's because the only way of inhabiting Mars is underground.”
Pal: 20% of corporate intangible balance-sheet value will be tokenized
“Well, probably 20% of that is going to get tokenized via what you're doing is essentially tokenizing the intangible of brand, culture, and community.”
Pal: ConstitutionDAO raising $40M in a weekend changed politics forever
“40 something million in capital in about a day and a half in a DAO around an idea. I mean, holy shit, that changed politics forever. People just don't know it yet.”
Pal: Zuckerberg knows Meta must change to survive Web3
“Mark Zuckerberg is not stupid. He completely understands what is going on in web three and why they have to change as a business. You know, knowing many people at Meta, they get it because they won't exist otherwise.”
Calacanis: Crypto market downturn will trigger hundreds of lawsuits
“And I think this stress test is gonna result in countless And I mean countless lawsuits. Hundreds of lawsuits.”
Calacanis: Disney's streaming bundle will reach one billion subscribers
“I think that between Disney, Hulu, ESPN plus, they're going to get to a billion subscribers.”
Jin: Play-to-earn economies require net-spending whales to avoid Ponzi structures
“There needs to be another contingent of players, which does exist in most games. It's the whales who are spending more money than they earn out. And that is the only way that the economy of the game can be in balance without necessarily relying on the poncinom…”
Ball: Quantum Computing Will Be Solved Within Our Lifetime
“The field of quantum computing is one of those other areas where we think in terms of fantastical ideas, this is a Jetsons thing, it's not a human thing, but there's increasing consensus that that technological problem will solve within our lifetime, in which …”
Ball: Build Compelling Social Products First, Not Consumer Computing Platforms
“We have this ongoing lesson that trying to build the next big platform in computing, especially on the consumer side, less so on the enterprise side, you shouldn't seek to do it.
And by that, I mean, there's this classic example of we've always known that a qu…”
Ball: Metaverse will exacerbate existing internet harms like disinformation and platform power
“I think we can fairly look at the state of the internet today and identify many problems, mis and disinformation, radicalization, toxicity, harassment, abuse. Data rights, data security, data literacy, platform power, platform regulation. And we can understand…”
Saltarelli: Retail wholesale revenue is as reliable as software recurring revenue
“Retail wholesale revenue is as good as software. It is like clockwork every 20 days. If you have a product that repurchases, meaning that that's the good sign, right? If people are coming back into their grocery habits or any of those, like it's like clockwork…”
Saltarelli: Big CPG won't reproduce manufacturing lines under $300M revenue
“They won't even look at reproducing a manufacturing line internally unless they have proof points of three hundred million dollars a year of revenue.”
Saltarelli: Founders are the scarce asset, not capital or board members
“Founders need to start taking back not control, but conviction that we are the people that are on the front lines doing the stuff. We are the scarce ones. Money's of abundance. Investors are of abundance. Boards are of abundance.”
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.”