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 3,135 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 48 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
Kowalski: Atomos projects $1.3B exit valuation by 2025
“So based on what we project with a couple of contracts a year, we would exit about 1.3 billion dollars in 2025.”
Clark: Atomos vehicle will reach $500M annual revenue in mid-2020s
“So our full commercial vehicle will be operational in the early to mid-twententies with five hundred million annual revenue.”
Chapman: Somewear's market will end up being enterprise, not consumer
“In my heart of hearts, I feel like your market is going to end up being more in the enterprise than it's going to end up being out on the trail.”
Soininen: Playven could have raised its bridge round at $8M
“We could have, ah, gone to them at eight and we probably should have, ah, we like.”
Candee: On-demand delivery failed by prioritizing immediate over scheduled timing
“What the on-demand economy got wrong was it takes so much scale for it to work. What we realized is people don't always want things ASAP, they want it at a scheduled time.”
Manus: Data shows female founders consistently ask for less venture funding
“But I also, it's very interesting, and this is data, this is not me, this is not my opinion, But interestingly enough, women always ask for less. Women founders always ask for less. It's not a lack of confidence. It is something else, and we're all trying to d…”
Hyatt: Caribu has no technical moat; publisher rights are all that matters
“We all know we can have five developers do it in five months. It's, if she has the publishers... It doesn't matter. She can have a worse product if she owns the publishers.”
Kugel: Amazon has tried to enter tires and failed to figure it out
“And you have companies like Amazon trying to get into tires, and they have not really figured it out.”
Kugel: Tire Agent is raising on a $10M convertible note
“So we're doing a ten million dollar convertible note.”
Hudson: Anchoring high on valuation backfires when pitching VCs
“I think part of the challenge for founders is there is this whole, I'm going to anchor high and get negotiated down to something I can live with.
It doesn't really work that well in venture because as a founder who's raising money, your real competition is no…”
Wang: Boundless CAC is over $400 on a $500 price point
“So as of now, so of 500 dollars our customer acquisition cost is a little over 400 dollars.”
Dickson claims the VC model only works for 10% of startups
“So, I feel like the VC model is broken. I think it's demonstrated that it's broken. It does work for 10%, 12% of companies, but the rest of us have to find our way and figure it out, and I believe in blockchain technology.”
Dickson predicts investors will hug her for tokenizing the cap table
“When my investors understand the token economics and how the cap table will be tokenized to their advantage and their return, they're going to be giving me hugs. They're going to be putting my picture up in their office because I'll be a great return for them.”
Gulati: Raising venture capital too early crushes otherwise healthy businesses
“I've seen so many businesses get crushed under the weight of, like, raising VC too early, right? And businesses that would otherwise be really healthy big businesses that just kind of never got their start because investors were expecting 300% growth year on y…”
Jillian Manus: Courtney Caldwell should be CEO instead of Ty
“I would prefer, Courtney, if you were, had the title of CEO because I think that represents the high tech piece, and because of your background with Oracle, and your ability to understand and be able to communicate the technical pieces of the product I think t…”
Gulati: The biggest consumer tech companies are horizontal UGC platforms
“I just fundamentally believe that the biggest companies in consumer tech are horizontal user-generated content platforms.”
Manus: Software and Data Drive Value in Connected Health Devices
“The big revenue generator is the software. Okay. It's not the device. The device is purchased or licensed, but it's really the software and the data. Okay. That is the true value.”
Host Josh Muccio reveals James Altucher ghosted the show and founders
“We never heard back from him and to our knowledge, neither have any of the founders who pitched him on our show.”
Amado Galoi: USDA subsidies make US agriculture a bad market for agtech
“One of the things we've realized over the past two years is the United States is not a fertile market for agriculture tech. And that's primarily because the USDA gives so many subsidies that it's still cheaper for a farmer to cull their animals because they're…”
Rosenblum: Lunar Wireless Patented Its Pay-Per-App Mobile Technology
“These deals are not super common and like all of the whole process of paying per app is patented. And so all of that is our core technology.”
Smith: 60% of the Top 500 Internet Retailers Lack Mobile Apps
“If you're looking at the IR 500, which is a sampling of the top 500 retailers in the market, 60% of those retailers don't have a mobile app.”
Gulati: ROWViGOR Will Not Become a Venture-Scale Business
“You'll, you'll make a business. It just won't be a disruptive venture-scale business.”
Salhi: CDs remained the most gifted music format in 2016
“And 30%, the highest, the most gifted item today, in 2016, wait for it, is still the CD.”
Agrawal: People will not continue using toilet paper long-term
“There's no, absolute, no way in hell that People are going to continue to use toilet paper moving for the next X number of years. It's just not sustainable.”
Laura Bilizarian: Teamable does not actually need outside venture capital
“I mean, just cause, I mean, just cause I'm on the show, and I wanted to, you know, give you guys a chance to get in, like, I really don't.”
Howie Diamond: Teamable could be a $500M to $1B exit
“Like, I do think it's overvalued, but I do think that this could be one of those opportunities where it's like a half a billion to a billion dollar exit, if not more, based on your hustle, based on, you know, all the things that you've said, based on your attr…”
Bilizarian: Women founders have major competitive advantages, not disadvantages
“I really don't want to get into this narrative of, like, competitive disadvantages, because I think there's so many competitive advantages to being a woman, but to me, words are words, right? Like, I don't, that's great that she called me cocky, but she invest…”
Sonnad: Musk assured free lifetime Supercharging for Model S long-distance travel
“So I brought the idea up with Elon Musk at the shareholders meeting in 2015, and at that point he assured me that Tesla would pay for all of the fuel costs for long distance travel in the Model S forever.”
Chapman: Tesla will ban commercial Supercharger access if Tesloop scales
“If you scale up and you've got a hundred cars on the road to Palm Springs every day, and the other Tesla drivers who are not commercial drivers cannot get a supercharger, I guarantee you Tesla is gonna say, no commercial use, you are not allowed to use our sta…”
Muccio: Tesla will prohibit self-driving tech on third-party ride-sharing services
“They will not permit Tesla's self-driving technology to be used on any ride-sharing service except for their own.”
Sonnad: Tesloop exposes more people to Teslas than Tesla's marketing
“Well, how I see it, at least in the short run, we're really, we're doing Tesla a favor, because when you look at the numbers of Tesla's test drives, and how they're trying to get customers in their cars, we're actually introducing a lot more people into Tesla'…”
Meghan Carreau: Childhood obesity has nothing to do with socioeconomic status
“That's actually a common misconception, though, because there are lots of kids, you know, one out of three kids and one out of five developing OPC-related disease actually has nothing to do with socioeconomic.”
Chapman: Over Half of Founders Have Diagnosable Mental Health Issues
“It's 30% can be diagnosed with clinical depression. 30% can be diagnosed with ADHD. It's about 29% can be diagnosed with, like, problematic anxiety to, like, where a clinician would diagnose you with it. And there's some overlap that still ends up being, like,…”
Diamond: Alpha Bridge is earmarking $1M for founder wellness platform
“So we're earmarking a million dollars from the fund we justify because we feel like we're gonna get into the best deals based on this program.”
Dicko: Skylights will be the top VR entertainment distributor in two years
“And so very, very strongly we are in a position, this is our point, we are in a position to, within the next two years, to become the number one virtual reality entertainment distributor in the world.”
Schwartz: Apple pulled Unglue from the App Store before launching Screen Time
“We actually were the first app that got pulled.”
Candee: Avoid conducting layoffs as long as possible before acting
“I feel like layoffs are something where you avoid them as long as you can, so it's really important to just kind of move forward as fast as possible until things seem more and more inevitable.”
Charles Hudson: Expecting unfunded founders to work full-time excludes diverse talent
“If you, as an investor, expect every founder you meet to be in a position to drop everything and just work on their startup for some arbitrary period of time, as a show of commitment, you're gonna end up excluding people who, for really valid financial reasons…”
Demetrius Gray: The onus is on VCs to fund Black founders
“I just don't have tons of confidence in VC. Like, they have a track record, and their track record speaks for itself. Nobody, it's not a secret, and so the onus is really on them to improve. You know, it's not on me to try to convince a VC that a Black founder…”
Bokoff: Jillian Manus Dominated the Room and Led Investor Pushback
“I'm not sure that it was five people telling me the same thing aggressively as much as I did feel there was a stronger voice in the room and she and I may not have hit it off directly, so.”
Segura: Prenatal care exists primarily to manage maternal blood pressure
“Well, the reason why prenatal care exists as a category is actually to manage blood pressure. Everything else is an extension.”
Banister: Nurse Practitioners Are Just as Good as Medical Doctors
“And these nurse practitioners are just as good as any doctor.”
Hudson: Handholding and Coaching Erase Software Margins in Enablement Startups
“My conclusion has been the technology is actually the least important piece. The most important piece is finding people who have an entrepreneurial mindset, who will go out and hustle and find customers who understand how to do kind of all of the business buil…”
Hudson: Precursor avoids AI infrastructure due to technical complexity and intense competition
“So like, just as a front level, we're just not doing much in AI infra, just, I don't have the technical ability to analyze them, and I haven't found many interesting categories where I don't instantly meet two dozen very credible teams.”
Yin: Multi-product cross-selling rarely succeeds, even for major banks like Chase
“But when you actually look at the data, even like Chase, a big behemoth, most people don't have a bank and a credit card and a mortgage and all the other products with Chase. Most people have maybe one thing with Chase and then other things with other banks, r…”
Borden: Remynt will reach a $1B valuation and IPO
“And I am hundred percent confident That we are going to crush it and be a billion dollar company and be the third publicly traded debt buyer collector. I have no doubt in my mind.”
Telerobotics value lies entirely in software stack, not new hardware
“The really important insight was that all the technology is already here. Like, they're fantastic robots. They're fantastic devices. We don't need to rebuild any of that. The missing piece was a software stack that connected it all. So all of our IP, all of ou…”