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 263 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
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: 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…”
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.”
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…”
The AI Venture Capital Bubble Will Not Burst in 2026
“Prediction number four is that the AI VC bubble will not burst in 2026. Massive investment will continue without a dramatic crash.”
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…”
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…”
Walling: Google organic SEO traffic will drop 15% to 25% in 2025
“So my fourth prediction for 2025 and the first new one is that search volume For Google organic SEO, and I'm talking about content-based keyword targeting, where you're cranking out an essay, an ultimate guide, a blog post, I think they will slide across the b…”
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.…”
Walling: Twitter (X) will change ownership in 2024
“I think that Twitter might change hands again in 20, 24. That is probably the ultimate prediction.”
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…”
Taber predicts definitive proof of extraterrestrial life will be discovered
“My fifth and final prediction here is that we will discover definitive proof of extraterrestrial life. I don't know what exact form that's going to take, whether it's going to be Mars or some comment or, you know, an asteroid going by, but that's the predictio…”
Volset: COVID-19 lockdowns will not last 18 months to two years
“Realistically, it's not like we're going to be in lockdown for 18 months to two years. Like, that doesn't, that just won't happen. Like, there are too many things that are likely to work out in one way, shape, or form.”
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.”
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 …”
Gall: Shopify ended CartHook's run by blocking off-platform payment processing
“And then it ran into a wall named Shopify. So they did not want checkouts to take Payment processing off of their platform, and they ended Carthook's run.”
Walling: Keap sold to private equity for under 1x ARR multiple
“Infusionsoft, by the way, renamed itself Keep, and they recently sold to private equity for less than one X ARR multiple, because they didn't have, they just stopped growing.”
Walling: Twitter will change hands in 2025
“My first is that Twitter will change hands in twenty-twenty-five. I think either the debt's gonna be called due, someone's gonna do a hostile takeover. The valuation is so low, I just think it is inevitable that Twitter will change hands here at some point, an…”
Vollset claims Australia's social media ban requires ID for internet access
“And the answer is apparently that they're going to require all Australians to provide identification, to go, to access the internet.”
fMRI scans show founders process their businesses like parents process children
“In a study of entrepreneurs' emotional experiences and neurological activation, scientists used functional MRIs while asking entrepreneurs to think about an image of their business. They conducted the same experiment with parents, asking them to think of an im…”
Rob Walling: Tim Vander Castile bootstrapped to $35M ARR and $300M exit
“And he's like, yeah, and then we got our ARR to thirty-five million, and I was like, whoa, and they bootstrapped, and I was like, that's a thing, and they said, then we sold four, and there was an asterisk, it was like, according to public records, because I a…”
Walling: Audible takes a 75% cut on non-exclusive audiobooks
“Now, Audible is brutal. They are, they're a monopoly, and they keep 75% Of each sale. So I get 25% for my audiobook that I wrote, produced, recorded, paid to edit, I own the copyright, and they are literally just a marketplace where I'm listing it, and they're…”
Walling predicts Stripe will finally go public in 2024
“My seventh and final prediction for twenty-twenty-four, I have no inside information. I think Stripe's going to finally go public.”
Walling: Congress will repeal the Section 174 R&D tax changes
“What I'm hearing a lot of people say is that their accounts are telling them to basically file an extension and wait and see if this gets rolled back. Repealed, which I think it will.”
Walling: TinySeed is the only year-long accelerator program
“No one else does a year-long accelerator program, right? And we do that.”
Vollset: Stock market will not be worse off by June 2023
“I don't think the stock market will be worse off.”
Psychometric testing shows introversion strongly predicts remote employee retention
“When we look at the psychometric testing as it applies to remote work, introversion is one of the best success factors that leads to longer retention rates throughout an organization.”
Mailchimp's $12 billion acquisition is the largest bootstrapped exit in history
“This week I'm talking about Mailchimp selling for twelve billion dollars to Intuit. It's the largest exit for a bootstrapped company ever, at least from what I can find.”
Walling: 80% to 90% of VC Goes to Harvard or Stanford Alumni
“There was a study published in, and I forget the exact numbers, but it was like, 80% of venture capital, it might even be 90% of venture capital in any given year goes to people who have attended Harvard or Stanford.”
Walling: 80% to 90% of VC goes to Harvard or Stanford alumni
“In fact, I saw a number somewhere and it was about, it was like 80% or 90% of venture capital goes to someone who graduated from Harvard or Stanford, or at least someone who attended one of those schools.”
Vollset: Clubhouse will survive at least 18 months due to VC funding
“18 months. That's a lifetime. I still think they're around. They raised so much money. I mean, I think they raised, didn't they raise like a hundred million or something insane? So I still think they're, they'll be around. Yeah, I do.”
Moz's revenue growth sank significantly after Rand Fishkin stepped down
“After I stepped down as CEO, the growth rate sank significantly. It was trending a little bit down, like, the last six months I was there, so I wouldn't put the fault entirely on folks after I left, but, you know, the last, oh my gosh, the last seven years cer…”
Taber: Regulators will attempt to break up Big Tech, likely targeting Facebook
“There's going to be a over attempt by a government and I'm going to, you know, kind of lump a couple of them together, like the United States, either the United States federal government, the European union, or even maybe even, I doubt a state government would…”
Taber: Governments will pass new legislation cracking down on gig economy in 2021
“Governments are going to actively crack down on the gig economy and essentially people who are doing side jobs or they're stringing together multiple side jobs in order to either make a living or make extra money on the side, those type of people I think the g…”
Perhack: Mixpanel lacks native integrations and out-of-the-box revenue tracking
“Now the problem with Mixpanel is that it has no native integrations and it has no, Idea of revenue out of the box. So it has a garbage in garbage out problem where unless you are really diligent about what data you're sending into Mixpanel, you are not going t…”
Hewitt: COVID-19 economic recovery could take months, not years like 2008
“That external event will go away and things will come back much more quickly, I think. Out of this, then they did the financial crisis, you know, that was years and this could be months, you know, sometime around the end of the year, maybe.”
Gal: Pipe charges 15% for non-debt SaaS revenue factoring
“Pipe.com is not debt. And it's kind of like factoring, but for SAS and they charge you 15%, which is basically what you would charge people anyway, because you would give them two months free.”
Walling: LLM chats lack attorney-client privilege and can be subpoenaed in discovery
“There is no attorney-client privilege between you and an LLM, and so if later it does become a lawsuit and in Discovery they subpoena your LLM chat, your conversations, they can pull those into Discovery much like they're an email or a private message. And so …”
Walling: Anthropic's API experiences issues at least a couple times monthly
“Anthropics API goes down or slows down or does kooky things. How often? I don't know. A couple times a month, at least. I mean, it's pretty frequent.”