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 247 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
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?”
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.”
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…”
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: 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: 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.…”
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.”
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.”
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…”
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.”
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: 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…”
Walling: Startups cannot reliably reach $1M ARR using no-code or vibe-coding
“I do not think you can get to a million in ARR in any repeatable fashion. There's probably one example that someone could bring up, but as a rule, I think this experience is going to be a very common one.”
SaaS is not dead; businesses will not build internal tools with AI.
“No, like we still, I still need team communication software. I need a calendar. I need project management tools. I need an email client. I need a CRM. I need error monitoring. I'm not going to build any of this stuff myself just because I may have some specifi…”
Vollset: LLM Capability Gains Are Approaching an Asymptote
“The data shows which it's really reaching, looks to be reaching some kind of asymptote. Like this asymptote can be very high, but It's still, to me, it seems like each new model that comes out, whether it's from ChatGPT or Google or Grok or whatever, it seems …”
Walling: AI wrapper SaaS apps are unviable without subsidized compute
“I think if you actually had to charge with that really cost, these are unviable businesses is, is my hypothesis.”
Osborn: Early Startup Employees Can No Longer Expect Major Equity Payouts
“It is getting harder and harder for that to actually happen, you know, and the only way, like you said, to join a fang company as an employee, you just make way more money, you don't have to worry about any of this, or you're like startup hopping and increasin…”
Walling: Product Builders Are Not Entrepreneurs Until Managing the Full Business
“I think that folks who are builders, product people, developers, makers, I don't think you're an entrepreneur until you take on the, A full role, a full scope of running a business.”
Gall: Crypto lacks real demand outside gambling
“Because crypto feels like a huge innovation, not much demand outside of, you know, gambling.”
Walling: 90% of tech startups should bootstrap and 1% need venture capital
“Should at least consider venture. They're probably venture ready. And then about nine percent, I think, should consider some type of funding because it just makes it a little easier to get off the ground. And that maybe is angel friends and family. Maybe it's …”
Privacy purists on forums are 'assholes' about bulk email being spam
“There are privacy purists on the internet who say anytime any bulk email is spam, and they're just assholes about it, you know, and we would get this complaint all the time, and we'd have these people who were either, they were so far off in their perception o…”
ChatGPT is a bigger shift than the iPhone, rivaling the internet
“And particularly with ChatGPT, it became very evident to me that this was like probably one of the bigger shifts in terms of a technical capability that would impact startups.
[189] Einar Volset: I think at the very least, the biggest comparative change that I…”
Dismissing AI as an NFT-like hype cycle is fundamentally wrong
“It's completely the wrong approach to think that this is just NFTs and stick your head in the sand. Like that is fundamentally wrong. Like I'll take an argument with anybody who thinks that.”
Einar Vollset says ChatGPT could genuinely hurt Google's search business.
“It's genuinely one of the first things I've seen. I've been like, truly, this could hurt Google, like, you know, not immediately, but something like that really could.”
Vollset: AI startups cannot build moats without proprietary models or data
“I think it'll be hard to have a competitive moat if you don't have your own language, if you don't have your own training sets, if you don't have your own model. I think that would be true.”
Walling: Solo founders cannot successfully build a Drip competitor today
“To build Drip today, years of development as a solo developer, that you cannot get anyone to sign up. So that, those are amazing markets if you have funding or if you have, you know, multiple people working on it.”
Walling: Bootstrappers should avoid B2C subscriptions due to high churn
“Like, I just am so bullish on B to B and really bearish on B to C. Not only because I've owned, I think, two or three products or companies, one was an e-com site, that served consumers, but because every B to C company, specifically a subscription company tha…”
QuickBooks and most Intuit software products are 'pretty crappy'
“I think QuickBooks is a really crappy piece of software, and I think most of what Intuit makes is pretty crappy”
Walling: Steve Jobs was not a great product person early on
“He was not a great product person in the early days. It was Wozniak, and obviously Jobs learned this and did become that over time.”
Norris: Selling an independent brewery to a conglomerate is a cop-out
“What almost always happens is they end up selling to them, and then at the end of that say, oh, you know, it's been a good run, you know, this company's the right fit for us, and all of this kind of s***. It's like, well, that's bulls***. You're selling to the…”
Walling: Forking an enterprise SaaS plan into a separate entity is catastrophic
“To Matthew's question of forking off this higher price plan and making it its own entity. I think that is an absolutely catastrophic idea. I hate it. I hate it with the heat of a thousand burning suns.”
Samuelson: European developers are less whiny than US developers
“I've found developers in Europe especially just seem to Not be so whiny, just to put it blunt”
Netterkorn: VC-backed founders crash companies with undisciplined spending and face no consequences
“I would see founders take when they were scaling a company with venture money was that it was really undisciplined and they were just spending cash all over the place. But at the end of the day, it didn't matter because they would end up like crashing the comp…”
Rob Walling: Bearish on SaaS Lifetime Deals and One-Time Payments
“And it's like one-time payments or lifetime deals, however we want to call them, and I am bearish on them. In general, I wouldn't do them”
Walling: B2C software and one-time sales without traffic flywheels fail
“If you don't have a flywheel of traffic and you're selling one time, I think this is not a good business, and if you're selling B to C and not B to B, I think this is probably not a good business.”
Vollset: Crunchbase lacks a proprietary data moat and is replaceable
“No, I don't think Crunchbase has it, not really. That's more like, I'm in there by myself, and I'm looking at data, and like, yeah, that's a little bit more, sort of, replaceable.”
Hendrickson: AI is close to passing the Turing test for video
“So I think we're pretty close to passing the touring test from video. Like you could still tell AI video for the most part, but a couple of times I've been kind of like, wait, that definitely fooled me on it, which is interesting.”
Walling: Software based purely on usage without subscriptions is not SaaS
“SaaS is subscription software where the majority of the value comes from the software itself. And since this isn't a subscription and it's just usage based, I wouldn't call it SaaS.”
Walling: AI is changing things, but not as much as people claim
“I think AI is changing things, but not as much as most people are making it out.”
Walling: Publishing unedited AI-generated content to the internet is a mistake
“Anyone who's publishing AI content directly
To the internet, I think, is making a mistake.
because even well-trained GPTs or Claude chats still needs massaging.”
Walling: Netflix and Disney+ Are Content Services, Not SaaS
“Netflix, Disney Plus, HBO Max, they are not SaaS because they provide most of their value from their content.”
Walling: Employer-tied healthcare is an outdated relic that shouldn't exist
“And the fact that healthcare is tied to employers is a relic. It's a remnant of, I think, what is it, post-depression era. It shouldn't exist that way. I do not think employers should be involved, or needing to be involved, but that's where we are.”