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 26 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
Lavingia: Tesla and AngelList would have failed if founders could not code
“Like in the instance that Elon didn't know how to code, Tesla would have died. You know, in the instance of Naval knowing, not knowing how to code, AngelList would have died.”
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.”
Howard Lindzon: Robinhood wouldn't exist if Vanguard hadn't hoarded its technology
“There should be no Robin Hood. There should be no any of this stuff. It should all still be CNBC and Vanguard and Goldman Sachs. They just didn't give their technology. They hoarded the technology.”
Isenberg: AI video editing saves hundreds of thousands of dollars
“This is something that would have cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to make, and using Fable with, ah, to video edit is totally possible.”
If founded today, Duolingo would be a conversational AI tutor
“I think if Duolingo were to start today, it might look something more like this.”
Greg Isenberg: AI reduces plugin development costs from $500K down to $5K
“That I would have never been able to build two years, three years ago, because it probably would have cost me 500 K million dollars, and I wouldn't know if people actually would use the product because it's like a nicer version of something that's popular and …”
Isenberg: An acquirer could have crowdfunded $50M on Twitter to buy Mint
“If you were able to say, I got mint for twenty five million dollars or fifty million dollars
and you went to Twitter, like in other places, like you probably could have raised that money to buy it.”
Torenberg: David Perell should have taken equity instead of selling courses
“He could have, instead of teaching people how to write, he could have gone to people who either, you know, are big on other platforms or just have really valuable service businesses like you know, financial wealth managers or accountants or lawyers or whatever…”
Huber: Without his Twitter audience, his net worth would be 90% lower
“If I didn't have Twitter, we would probably own about 10 self-storage facilities right now instead of 61. My net worth would be about 10% of what it is right now.”
Wilkinson: Moving to San Francisco would have prevented building a profitable business
“I don't think I'd have a profitable at scale business today if I had moved to San Francisco.”
Schneider: AI and Ephemeral Postgres Cut Data Cleaning From Hours to Minutes
“What have used it would have taken me probably five hours historically to like clean the data appropriately. And I smashed that out in like probably 20 to 30 minutes.”
Isenberg: My First Million Succeeded Because of The Hustle Partnership
“My first million wouldn't be where it is today, in my opinion, if it wasn't for its partnership with the hustle.”
Isenberg: Late Checkout lost $3M+ in 2023 revenue by staying lean
“We basically had full utilization of our team the entire year, and we lost at least three million dollars of revenue. If we just would have not listened to this advice, we would have had three plus more million dollars in the bank.”
Self-publishing 'The Art and Business of Online Writing' out-earned traditional deals
“Even if it's self published, art and business of online writing, self published. It's made me way more money than if I would have gotten a publishing deal for it. And everyone in the online writing world references it.”
Sharma: Any pioneer mattress brand would have struggled like Casper did
“If Casper didn't exist, like whoever the next company was that did it, They would have had the hardest time and, you know, ended up in the same position.”
Josh Dorkin says BiggerPockets would have succeeded without his 100-hour weeks
“I would have been fine if I had worked a little less hard, to be honest, but you do have to put the time in.”
Lavingia: Gumroad would have failed if he could not write code
“So if I didn't know how to code, you wouldn't be listening to this today. Gumber would be dead.”
Isenberg: Late Checkout rejected a Twitter buyout, dodging Elon Musk's layoffs
“Twitter, Twitter offered to buy us in, in, in, and, you know, we thought about it in, and I'm happy we didn't because we probably would have gotten fired by Elon cause he fired a lot of people.”
Pal: Holding initial $200 Bitcoin beat his massive 2020 re-entry by 5x
“I went back and looked at if I'd just kept my initial investment at 200 bucks, I would have done, I can't remember them, five times better. Even though the size that I added in March, 2020 was massively larger than the first size.”
Saltarelli: Manufacturing plant returns fail under a five-year horizon
“Do you think that we would have ever built a manufacturing plant if we had a five-year business plan? Absolutely not. You could not make the returns work.”
Isenberg: Tai Lopez NFT would succeed better with 300 mints
“If I was Tai Lopez, I wouldn't have created such a big collection. I think it's like 8600 or something like that. And I would have just focused on like 300. People like his odds of success would have been way higher higher if he just would have taken the club …”
Nikita Bier: TBH Would Have Failed If Launched on First Try
“If we just struck it on the first try, I think it would have crashed and burned really quickly.”
Ohno: NBC should have hired creators over investing in Snapchat
“And I thought it was like, well, why would they just give the money to a public company versus going directly to the creators themselves? The top, top 50 creators in the world, right? Speak different languages and saying, we're going to give you all access rig…”
Rogenmoser: Jasper wouldn't exist without spotting GPT-3 demos on Twitter
“If I hadn't been on Twitter six months before we launched Jasper, I wouldn't have seen GPT three come out. I wouldn't have seen some of the cool demos and I wouldn't have thought, well, I think we could do that for marketing content.”