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 43 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
Kalanick: 2017 Would Have Been Different If Uber Partnered With a16z
“If we did it business at Uber, my 2017 would have been a different year.”
Hays: Uber would be worth over $1T if Kalanick remained CEO
“His take, which I totally agree with is it's hard to, if Travis had stayed in the role, It's hard to imagine Uber being worth less than something like a trillion dollars today.”
DiRico: Tropical Storm Barry would have caused Texas flooding regardless
“Tropical Storm Barry, the remnants of which blew into Texas, was going to cause inordinate flooding regardless.”
Tan: San Francisco would still be dying without OpenAI
“Without OpenAI success, SF would be dead and still dying.”
Gerstner: Without Anthropic's revenue, stock market would be down 10-15%
“Had Anthropic not delivered its revenues that it's delivered this year, I think the stock market would be down 10 or 15%.”
The broader economy would be unchanged if AI ecosystem vanished today
“If we stopped capabilities today and half of us in the AI ecosystem vanished off the planet, nothing would change. It's still so early.”
Jeff Yan: Bitcoin would not be Bitcoin if Satoshi raised a Series A
“Bitcoin would not be Bitcoin if he had raised Series A, even if best investors in the world, you know, sickest cap table ever, still, still would, I would say that would not, Bitcoin would not be Bitcoin.”
Palmer Luckey claims SVB collapse would have wiped out half of tech
“If SVB would not have been bailed out by the government in, in, in, You know, like, it wasn't just, like, the government's obligations. They were bailing out well beyond FDIC limits. If they wouldn't have done that, it probably would have wiped out half the te…”
Andreessen: Google could have built a GPT-4-level ChatGPT by 2019
“Google developed the transformer in 2017. And then they basically let it sit on the shelf, right? Cause it was a research project. They didn't productize it. They were very worried about, you know, from people I've talked to, they were very worried about the, …”
Andreessen: Google Could Have Built a GPT-4 Level Chatbot by 2019
“I talked to somebody senior who was there at the time and I asked them, you know, when could you have had chat GPT with GPT four level output if you had just gotten, you know, gone, gone flat out starting in 2017. And they said by 2019.”
Haun: Crypto market structure bill would have prevented past industry blowups
“The irony is if you would have had the market structure bill, you wouldn't have had a lot of the blowups that you had. In the past several years in this industry.”
Handmer: Future Life-Extension Drugs Will Have Been Buildable Since the 1930s
“I think that when we figure out how to drastically increase human lifespans, it will turn out that we would have been able to build these drugs since the 19 thirties.”
Asparouhov: Without SpaceX, the US would lack both ISS crew and cargo access
“If SpaceX does not exist right now, like the United States would neither have like Boeing able to take crew to the ISS, nor would it have Northrop Grumman able to take, you know, basically cargo to the ISS. And so it's like, You know without SpaceX, the astron…”
Garry Tan says Initialized Capital would have failed if YC collapsed.
“I realized that actually if I stayed at initialized and didn't come back and heed the call of Paul and Jessica to write the ship at YC I would be out of a business. I, you know, I had initialized would have been out of business if YC itself was not going in th…”
Coogan: US probably wouldn't have a rocket company without Elon Musk
“If he hadn't worked on that, probably wouldn't have a rocket company in America.”
Coogan: US would be 10 years behind in EVs without Elon Musk
“Like, yeah, GM had the EV-one. There were a couple other companies that were sort of like testing things, but we'd probably be 10 years behind if he hadn't sort of like sheer force of willed that into existence.”
Chesky: If Starting Airbnb Today, I Would Be Vibe Coding
“Said differently, if I were starting Airbnb today, I'd be vibe coding and cloud code.”
Gurman: Jeff Williams Would Have Been CEO if Cook Left Earlier
“You look at the guy who would have been CEO if Tim Cook didn't stay so long. I'm not saying he shouldn't have stayed so long. He's done, obviously, a fantastic job for shareholders and employees and what have you, would have been Jeff Williams.”
Nadella: Microsoft wouldn't have backed OpenAI without natural language focus
“I don't think I would have gone in full on to say, hey, let's go, you know, partner with these guys, build a computer that scales it if it's not natural language”
Whaley: MSCHF probably left $100M on table skipping crypto
“Yeah, probably. Honestly, probably. Probably.”
Carter: Passing on CoreWeave cost Castle Island a 50x Fund I return
“I did it personally actually brought it to the fund and we didn't do it because it was seen as outside of scope, which was a catastrophic mistake, obviously worst mistake of my career by far. Like, I just ran the math, I did the numbers on it, and. It was our …”
Ford Would Be a $100 Billion Company With a Nadella-Caliber CEO
“If Ford had a Satya, that, that is a hundred billion dollar company.”
Hays: Meta's metaverse budget could have launched a Starlink competitor
“Meta could have probably almost launched a Starlink competitor with how much they spent on the metaverse.”
Hays: Apple could have captured 10% to 20% of $100B audio market
“They probably, it's a hundred billion dollar annual revenue opportunity, and Apple could have probably gotten 20% of that, or 10, 10% of that at least, so it wouldn't have been as big as AirPods.”
Coogan: PayPal Could Have Reached $1T Valuation Under Original Founders
“Like I could have been running something that I think PayPal's peak market cap is like a hundred billion could easily be a trillion if they were still there.”
Coogan: PayPal Would Be Worth $1 Trillion If Musk or Thiel Stayed
“Run the counterfactual where Peter or Elon is running PayPal. It's a FinTech giant worth a trillion dollars, like no doubt.”
Donald Trump Could Have Quickly Built a $100M ARR Substack
“Yeah, and Trump could have thrown up a sub stack and gotten to nine figures of ARR very, very quickly. But he wouldn't, it would have taken much longer to become a billionaire that way.”
Bowery Farming Should Have Targeted Exotic Fruits Instead of Commodity Lettuce
“I think that that is, What they absolutely should have done. I think there's a bunch of interesting angles to do like exotic fruits that are almost like desserts.”
Slack Active Users Would Still Be Growing Under Stewart Butterfield
“If Stuart was running slack, you have to imagine he would, that chart would still be going.”
Meta should have used a talent licensing contract to acquire Manus
“It would have been, it probably would have been easier to do something like what grok and Nvidia did or like the windsurf Google thing where like, You're bringing people over with this contract, and then, like, yes, China blocks it, but it's, like, what are th…”
Espiritu: Making YouTube videos had higher ROI than filming Magnolia TV show
“If I take those 45 days and just calculate, let's say I was making call even just 15 more videos, it would have been not only more money straight up, but more sort of brand value to the business to just make the YouTube videos.”
Palmer Luckey claims learning software programming would have delayed Oculus significantly
“I was only able to accomplish what I accomplished because I focused on what I was good at, which was optomechanics, a little bit of electrical, and then the product integration of all of these different components. I didn't have time to learn to program. If I …”
Parekh Says He Would Have Failed If Startups Used LeetCode
“The truth is, a lot of these companies did not have lead code style problems, and if they did, I would have bombed interviews, you know, because I don't practice lead code as much.”
Srinivas: Launching Perplexity around GPT-4 would have been too late
“You want to build at the right moment where, like, kind of, like, how we built perplexity around the GPT 3.5 time, not GPT four time. It would have been too late then.”
Mohnot: Circle stock would have surged during Stripe's Bridge acquisition hype
“And I bet if circle was public at that point, they would have gotten a huge bump for no particular reason.”
Handmer: Moore's Law Prevented Far Worse Economic Stagnation Since the 1970s
“I think if we had not seen the emergence of Moore's law and improved computing capacity, we would have been in much more dire straits as far as economic stagnation goes.”
Lessin: Meta Smart Glasses Would Not Sell Without Ray-Ban Branding
“If meta had released not Ray bands, right. Then like, they wouldn't be as cool, even if they were exactly the same and they probably wouldn't have sold as well.”
Hays: Apple acquiring Sonos would have been great for consumers
“It's funny because it would have been great for consumers in so many ways if Apple had acquired Sonos. Because Apple is the best in the world at making it seamless to set up a device.”
Hays: AI wearable startups should have targeted children, not adults
“A lot of the wearable companies would have done better going for the kids market because kids don't have phones already. Parents want them off devices. So if you give them an audio native device, it makes sense.”
Hays: Anthropic Would Be Finished If Caught Trading Against Enterprise Clients
“The only thing is if it came out that anthropic Was effectively day trading against the companies that they want to sell their models to. It would be basically over.”
Dr. Drew: Prioritizing sleep earlier would have prevented my career achievements
“I wish I'd paid more attention to sleep, but if I had, I couldn't have done most of what I did.”