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 2,952 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 17 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
Venture capital only profits due to 1960s tax lobbying by the wealthy
“Venture capital is essentially an asset class that only makes money because rich people in the sixties and seventies lobbied the federal government to get capital gains tax rate applied to this certain type of investing, right?”
Walling: The future of SaaS is still SaaS, not AI agents
“The future of SaaS is not fewer companies. It's a higher bar, and SaaS doesn't need to become something else to survive it. It doesn't turn into agents. It doesn't dissolve into everybody's weekend side project. It stays what it is. The future of SaaS, I belie…”
Intercom Defines AI Support Resolutions Differently Than 98% of the Market
“The way Intercom, for instance, defines an AI resolution is not the way 98% of the market actually defines an AI resolution.”
Ries: LLMs degrade actual capabilities and magnify the Dunning-Kruger effect
“The number one biggest finding, I think, for a use of LLMs is that LLMs cause the Dunning-Kruger effect to be magnified. They convince you that you're more capable than you are at while they degrade your actual capabilities.”
Vollset predicts Anthropic will inevitably add advertisements to Claude
“Not only are they going to do it, but so is Claude. I guarantee it. You know, they might figure out something clever and do the thing, but like, there's no, there's just not a universe unless Claude get bought by Apple or something. That, that Claude aren't go…”
Building a social media audience is terrible advice for SaaS founders.
“There are folks out there who say, if you want to start a SaaS, just build an audience on social media. And that is some of the worst advice that I hear in our space. Don't get me wrong, an audience is helpful. It really is. But it's not worth the time that it…”
Vollset: Windsurf Deal Was a Massive Founder Payday Structured to Screw Employees
“The original deal, which was like a successful, holy crap, that's a big number deal was three billion. The Google aqua hire is 2.4. That's ballpark same number. So like, you got screwed as if this was a soft landing for the founders, but it was a massive payda…”
Walling: SaaS Founders Should Not Waste Time Building an Audience
“Don't grow an audience if you want to build a SaaS. Grow an audience if you want to do books and courses and sell events and do all the stuff I do. But if you're going to do a SaaS, there's so many better ways to spend your time, so many better marketing appro…”
Gall: Building vertical niche SaaS in AI voice is currently the wrong move
“Normally in SaaS, what would you and I recommend to ourselves and to other people? Don't try to be broad for everybody. Find a niche. The niches are big enough. Kill it for one type of customer, then expand. In this, I think it's the exact opposite. So I see a…”
Walling: Google will see its biggest revenue drop ever due to AI
“So my sixth prediction is that Google will see its biggest ever drop in revenue Due to the transition from 10 blue links being the prominent way people search into AI ads, and I think Google's gonna have a bit of time that they're gonna need to figure it out”
Walling: Bootstrapped founders using a freemium model usually lack competence
“Just bootstrappers using freemium in general usually means they don't know what the they're doing. Like that's been my experience.”
Walling: Twitter will be acquired at a deep discount in 2024
“The second prediction I want to touch on is I predicted that Twitter changes hands in twenty-twenty-four, question mark? And I don't know about you, but does it feel like the writing's on the wall? That Twitter is gonna be snapped up by someone at a deep disco…”
Walling: Jason Fried and DHH's advice fails 99.9% of startups
“Jason Fried and DHH are tiny seed mentors. They invested in our first fund. So I'm not throwing shade at them, but I'm saying they often give advice that fits them really well and worked for them that I think it won't work for 999 out of the next thousand star…”
Vollset: Media Outrage Over Twitter Stems From Journalists Losing Privileged Status
“My honest to God view on this, and it may be deeply cynical, is that I think what has happened, the reason why there's so much heat and so much drama around this is because Two journalists, Twitter's very, very important, and they had a very special status und…”
Walling: Basecamp's anti-VC dogmatism harmed new entrepreneurs
“I think they may have long-term done some damage. I think by making it such a religious thing, like they, you know, they used to say like, well, bootstrap will never take funding. Anyone who takes funding is XYZ. They also would say like, we don't split tests.…”
Taber: Google Mandated Minimum Price Floors For Third-Party Developer Security Audits
“The other piece, when I was talking to the three different companies, one of them basically let slip that Google came to them and said, you are required to charge at least this much money. And apparently they get copies of the invoices, which to me seems like …”
Investors avoiding dividend taxes are poor citizens and unwelcome at SparkToro
“If giving the government 12 to 20% of your money is unacceptable to you, first of all, I don't think you're a very good civic person. Right? Like, and second, I don't want you on my balance sheet anyway.”
Taber: Commercial office real estate will never recover
“I believe that commercial office space, real estate will never recover.”
Rob Walling predicts AI will kill 10% to 20% of SaaS apps.
“I've said on the show, I think it's 10 to 20% of SaaS apps are gonna, gonna eat it. Like, they're gonna have real trouble. And it's some specific Categories and things that AI can specifically just replace or people will build themselves or whatever.”
AI software suffers 20% to 40% monthly churn rates by underdelivering.
“And this is one reason we see AI software with these outrageous churn rates of 20 to 40% per month, because the promise is there, and then you dip your toe in, and it doesn't actually work.”
Rob Walling calls Wash Dry Fold POS the largest known no-code SaaS
“And I believe that given that you're doing a million ARR, that you are probably running the largest no code app that I know of in terms of a SaaS app.”
Walling: AI agents will increase API demand rather than kill SaaS
“So agents aren't going to kill SAS. They need SAS. They actually increase the demand for good APIs, whether it's CLIs, MCPs, however you want to look at it.”
Walling: The real SaaS-pocalypse threatens overpriced incumbents, not bootstrappers
“Like, the real SaaS-pocalypse is the big companies, the big incumbents. They're the ones who have raised their prices so much, maybe a little too much, Because they have to grow every quarter for Wall Street, right? So they have bloat, they have legacy, they h…”
Nick Francis Regrets Raising Venture Capital for Help Scout
“But for me personally, looking back now on a 15 year journey, yeah, I would have done it differently. I wouldn't raise money.”
Nick Francis Admits 37signals Was Right About Bootstrapping Over VC
“Damn Jason and David. They just, they were always right about this stuff, you know. As much as I wanted to stress tests, you know, and really push against their way of thinking about this that we've all been inspired by over the years, I just think that they h…”
Nick Francis: 20% of Per-Seat SaaS Subscriptions Are Unused Waste
“The secret of SAS, per seat SAS particularly, is that 20% of those seats shouldn't be paying for anything because they're not even using the tool, right?”
Vollset: Public SaaS companies report zero AI disruption and no added churn
“Most of the like public SaaS companies are reporting, like, you know, they're coming like, we're not seeing any disruption whatsoever from AI, no additional churn, but in the public markets, the sky is falling.”
Hendrickson: Agentic AI will flood inboxes and render cold email completely useless
“Now that's all agentic. And so the amount of cold email that's going to come through, I think it's going to flood the inboxes and make it basically a useless channel in a lot of ways.”
Ries: AI in-context learning inevitably produces average work
“What they call in context learning is not learning. It's just token prediction does next token guessing. So what happens is it just, it inevitably convinces itself To do average work, because that's what's in the training data.”
Ries: Outsourcing product building to AI slows startups down
“If you just send it off to do the artifacts for you, if you have it make a product that you don't understand how that product is or what it works, if you don't talk to the customers, but you have the machine talk to customers for you, it will not actually acce…”
Ries: Vibe coding will inevitably cause a massive mission-critical disaster
“It's only a matter of time before someone vibe codes their way into a massive mission critical disaster. When they deploy code they think they understand, but they don't.”
Ries: LTSE petition caused SEC to consider ending quarterly reporting
“In fact, if you've noticed, I don't know if you've noticed the headlines in recent months that the SEC is considering eliminating quarterly reporting for the first time in 40 years. That's our petition.”
Ries: Tobacco companies make about $6,000 in profit per customer death
“Data says that tobacco companies make about 6000 dollars per death.”
Walling: AI is by far the worst at SaaS product management
“And of the core four, I think AI is by far, far the worst at product. It's just not good.”
Walling: 'Zero to One' and venture books do not help bootstrappers
“This is the same reason I cringe when people talk about reading zero to one and then trying to apply that to bootstrapping, or that that's a big motivational entrepreneurial book when they're starting, when they want to start a million dollar SaaS company. It'…”
Vollset: SaaS founders frequently leave 60% to 80% of exit value behind
“It's not unusual that I hear about situations where I'm like, okay, well, yeah, but you left like you left like 60 or 70 or 80% of the value of the company on the table because you didn't know what was going on here. Like you didn't understand like the univers…”
Vollset: VCs only care about unsolicited, high-priced strategic acquisitions
“The only kind of M&A that I am interested in as an adventure capitalist is if a strategic comes to you and begs to buy it and is gaga for it and will pay a crazy price. That is the only kind of M&A venture capitalist will care about”
Vollset: Break-even SaaS with teams are worth more than solo-founder profitable SaaS
“So it's much more valuable to you as an acquirer if those two founders have sat down and actually put like a team in place and like made themselves a little bit of a less of a key person risk for the acquirer. And that's why like it's, yeah, you might've been …”
Walling: Only 4% of 210 TinySeed startups use social media marketing
“Of the 210 companies That Tiny Seed has invested in, it's like, I think it's just over four percent have any type of social media marketing or any type of audience. The other 96%, they just market, they do SEO, they do cold outbound, they do advertise, you kno…”
Vollset: Apple can win consumer AI interface without owning frontier models
“And I feel like that's actually where Apple could come in, and without, even without necessarily owning, like, a fantastic foundation model, Could come in and just be like the interface by which normal people interact with AI day in and day out. For sure, I th…”
Vollset: Autonomous AI agents cannot be truly useful without major security trade-offs
“You're almost never gonna get, like, a hundred percent security, because it's not helpful, unless it sees what I see. And if it doesn't see what I see, then it's just like, yeah, ok, like, can you do some web research for me? I'm like, yeah, that's, So can cha…”
Walling: Under 5% of TinySeed's 210 SaaS companies built an audience
“Across TinySeeds, 210 companies, there were like four percent of those, maybe five, I think it was just under five percent, that had any type of audience Or have ever built any type of audience, and yet we have dozens of companies doing six, I mean, sorry, doi…”
Walling would choose C-Corp structure for startups targeting $10M–$40M exits
“So all that to say, today, if I were starting a startup, knowing what I know now, knowing that everyone sells, having seen folks, some folks qualify for QSBS and other folks not because they started an LLC or an S Corp, I personally would do the C Corp, and I …”
Walling: Profitability is a drain on growth in SaaS
“If you're profitable, you're not investing in growth. You're putting cash in the bank, and so you're not going to be growing as fast, almost inevitably. And so to take two businesses at the same ARR and say they're going to be growing the same amount, while on…”
Cohen: Hyper-narrow ICP positioning attracts a 100x larger adjacent market
“If I'm very specific about what I am, then my ideal customer will definitely buy, which is already a reason to do it, but like a hundred times larger market than that. We'll see that specificity as a reason to buy your set of trade-offs, even though they're no…”
Cohen: VC-backed companies refuse human support due to gross margin compression
“So the fact that we had great human support is something like no VC wants you to have that because that's expensive and it comes out of your gross margin. Maybe it means you're not, you're quote unquote, not a software company because your gross margin is less…”
Cohen: Studies show AI does not make software engineers 10x more productive
“Like in coding, it's not, right? Like all the studies in, in real engineering departments is not that AI makes them 10 times better. The only people who claim that are the people selling AI products, the users of it. You know, there might be individuals claimi…”