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 679 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 3 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
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.”
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 …”
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.”
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.”
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: 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…”
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…”
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…”
Bernstein: Google engineers ignored Larry Page and Sergey Brin's unscaled review advice
“The founders, Larry and Sergey, who are some of the smartest people on the planet, they used to run the company by basically walking into a room, asking the team what they did, put it on a whiteboard, and then they would use their superior knowledge and intell…”
Walling: All no-code SaaS apps funded by TinySeed eventually require rewrites
“We've funded a handful, and I don't know the exact numbers, but it's five or less Of no code, code bases. No code apps, I guess I would call them, you know, that are built in air table, bubble, that kind of stuff. And all of them have been rewritten or will ne…”
Maggiulli: Blogging CPMs are 4x higher than YouTube and top other platforms
“If you look at like, you know, per thousand views, what gets paid the most, it's actually bloggers. It's not even close. It's like four X more than YouTube. It's more, it's much more than TikTok and much more than Twitter.”
Maggiulli: Kahneman-Killingsworth research showed $75k plateau applies to unhappiness, not happiness
“Kahneman got with Killingsworth. They went through all the data, and they basically found that the original paper was, the measure wasn't as precise, and so they were actually measuring unhappiness, and so above 75,000 dollars a year, you can't prevent unhappi…”
Wagstaff: Porch's CEO threatened to build a free clone to crush Spectora
“We got a little scared because the CEO told us he would, he'd basically make a free version of what we did. He'd spin it up and, you know, crush us. And so it was more like, we're going to get squashed like, you know, the little cockroach we are at the time.”
Walling: TinySeed wins almost all deals despite competing funds offering higher valuations
“They will match or beat our offers, right? It's like, we make an offer and then they're like, well, obviously I'll give you a higher valuation because they have to. And yet we win almost all those deals.”
TinySeed data shows SaaS startups have low odds of breaking growth plateaus
“The moment you plateau, the odds of you getting past that plateau are actually quite low, at least from the analysis that I did.”
Lars Lofgren claims Google uses multi-channel brand presence for search rankings
“When Google is looking at things to rank and deciding who ranks for what, they do place a lot more emphasis in, okay, is this site, is this brand, is this entity, are they on social? Are they doing stuff in other channels? Is the traffic coming to this website…”
Scaled parasite SEO operations on major news sites generate hundreds of millions
“And they're making a ton of we're talking like tens of millions of dollars a month, hundreds of millions of dollars a year. And when it's fully scaled and fully operational, these are just colossal amounts of money. There's a few companies that kind of special…”
Rob Walling: 80% to 90% of plateauing SaaS companies never recover
“Most companies that I see that do hit a plateau, don't make it out. And I think the number of the graphs that I looked through, it was like, 80, between 80 and 90%. Once they plateaued, they just, they haven't yet made it out.”
Walling: Jason Fried admits luck and timing drove Basecamp's success
“They can do stuff like not market, like not sell, because they're in a luxurious position and good for them. You know, the luck and timing were one and two. Jason Fried told me that for their success. Unless I can replicate luck and timing, I can't. Then I nee…”
Walling: Under 5% of TinySeed's 170 Portfolio Startups Had an Audience
“Less than five percent of all tiny seed funded companies, which is like a 170 now less than five percent had any kind of audience when they started or even have any kind of audience today.”
Walling: Bolt's 97% plunge left option-borrowing employees in debt after Breslow's secondary
“Giving loans to their employees so that employees could buy stock options, and then Bolt lost 97% of its value, and so anyone who took out loans to buy their stock options now owes the company money, sometimes thousands, sometimes tens of thousands of dollars.…”
Jeff Roberts: $500M acquirers routinely ignore a startup's missing global tax compliance
“I talked to a founder Who sold a business for between five hundred million and a billion dollars. So a big acquisition to a publicly traded company. They just disclosed during the acquisition that they had never paid global sales tax, and they didn't know how …”
Asynchronous organizations operate with 50% thinner management than on-premise competitors
“One of the interesting, the most interesting factoids that I found in my research for this book on asynchronous organizations is I found that the managerial level inside of asynchronous organizations is 50% thinner than their on-premise counterparts.”
Vollset: Pre-launch YC companies raise at $12M to $20M pre-money
“Last I heard now, pre-product launch on demo day, it's like 12 to twenty million pre.”
Walling: Toptal founders extracted profits while early noteholders received no equity
“There's actually, isn't it, it's top towel, I believe, where they, Raise money on safe's convertible notes. They never raised another round. They haven't sold. And so all the investors don't technically own the equity and the founder can actually literally leg…”
Gal: CartHook processed $2 billion in volume without being PCI compliant
“At Cardhook, we built a business that processed two billion dollars, and we were never PCI compliant, because we didn't need to be.”
Fishkin: Roughly 90% of venture-backed startup founders come from family wealth
“Like the whole idea behind venture capital is we are going to take a bunch of mostly already wealthy people because that's who starts venture backed startups, right? The overwhelming majority, I think something like 90% come from family wealth.”
Vollset: SaaS PE Acquirers Now Require $2M Minimum ARR
“Yeah, there's a reason my book is, and Discretion Capital focuses on, like, two to 20. It's because, like, right now, yeah, it's probably more like two million than it is like one million.”
Vollset: Public SaaS Price-to-Revenue Multiples Are Below Industrials
“Despite growing significantly faster and being, you know, significantly higher profits, the sort of price to revenue multiples of SaaS companies is actually less than industrials now”
Ries: Costco's Kirkland brand is larger than Coca-Cola or Procter & Gamble
“Costco is so big that its house brand, Kirkland Signature, if that was a standalone company, it would be bigger than United Airlines, Procter & Gamble, or Coca-Cola.”
Walling: Almost no TinySeed startups have built MCP or CLI integrations
“How few, even tiny seed startups that are like, bleeding edge, Almost none of them have MCP and CLI, and the ones that do have two users, three users, is not, we are not nearly as far as Twitter would have you believe, right? We're like, oh, everyone's buildin…”
Vollset: Private equity drives 70% of $2M–$20M ARR SaaS acquisitions
“The fact of the matter is, like, in this revenue range, about 70% of the deals are done by private equity, either directly, like, they are buying it because they want to use what, build it around it, which is basically what's called a platform acquisition, or …”
Tailwind Website Traffic Dropped 40%, Significantly Hurting Revenue
“Traffic is already down by like 40%, which means revenue is down by a lot because our website is the distribution for our product.”
Every successful no-code or AI vibe-coded startup inevitably requires a rewrite
“Every company that I've invested in or otherwise had visibility into that has been no code or has been poorly coded, I will say, I'm just going to assume that AI vibe coding is poorly coded and hard to maintain long term. That may or may not be correct. But wh…”
Walling: Bootstrapped Paperbell hit millions in ARR while $10M-backed Practice died
“Cause you're still alive doing millions a year in ARR, and they're now under, out of business, even though they had such a head start with ten million in the bank.”
Roeder: Bootstrapped Paperbell had far more revenue than $10M-backed competitor Practice
“We did not end up acquiring practice and it wasn't, it didn't really end up being a serious conversation, and they ended up just shutting down. And I, you know, I did find out that they weren't that large, that we were definitely far ahead of them as far as re…”
DocsBot cut the support burden in half for Castos's 4,000 customers
“It's cut our customer support burden in half at Castos, and we have 4000 customers, so that's like a lot of customers. Every day it diverts handfuls of conversations from our support team.”
Missive drives 30% of new user growth via in-house affiliate program
“Till to that day, it drives a lot of revenue. Maybe 30% of the growth now of the new users come from the athlete program.”
Competitor paid developer $2,000 to clone OutboundSync from a demo video
“Even a year ago, somebody did try to kind of, like, smother us in the crib when they requested a demo of App on Sync, took the recording, sent it to a developer, and said, rebuild this for me for 2000 bucks.”
Walling: Non-technical founders inevitably struggle most with code maintainability and security
“And the ones that don't, the 10, 15% that don't, Code maintainability, code velocity, security, just all this stuff is there, is always their number one issue, inevitably.”
Walling: Basecamp Generates Tens of Millions Annually in Net Profit
“Basecamp throws off tens of millions of dollars a year in net profit. And for all intents, it's basically Jason Fried and DHH. Those dudes are raking an eight million, I'm sorry, 8,000,008 figures a year of net profit.”
Walling: 90% to 95% of SaaS Plateaus Aren't Caused by Tapped-Out Markets
“In most cases, and this is again, 90, 90, 95% plus of plateaus that I see, or have nothing to do with market size, or I've tapped out a market. It's really a one in 51 in a hundred, where it's like, oh no, we really have tapped out the market, and you actually…”
Wagstaff: PE firm's retrade reduced Spectora valuation to $70M
“It effectively reduced the price, I think, by about five, but it was like by ten million. So I think it ended up being an effective kind of seventy million dollar valuation when you factor in the earn out and a call option, which is they wanted to reserve the …”
Pieri: Most B2B software deals are championed by managers or directors
“Most B to B software purchases Are championed by one person and likely they're a manager or a director level. They're not going to be a VP. They're not gonna be a C level and they're not gonna be like an intern or someone low.”
Pieri: Zoom struggled against competitors until 2019
“Of companies like zoom, where zoom for many, many years was not doing very well. Zoom was positioned as this video chat solution for businesses. And up until 2019, they were not doing so hot. They're getting beat by all the other people.”