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 290 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 5 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
Booth: Bitcoin is the only logical peg for a new Bretton Woods
“I think it would be pegged to a digital, I think it would be pegged to Bitcoin. I think that's what, I think that's the most logical thing right now. And every government will say, no, peg it to my digital currency. But it doesn't, but whether it's a digital o…”
Booth: War or revolution is a logical consequence of current wealth disparity
“That's why war revolution is a logical consequence out of where we are right now, because people don't believe it's their fault. They, people don't, they're caught in a system. It's really easy to prey on, on people's vulnerabilities when they can't eat and cr…”
Pysh: The global economy is experiencing a fiat currency default
“So the argument is that we're seeing a default of fiat currency globally is the argument.”
Pysh: Currencies fail once central banks push interest rates to zero
“We break the peg, and then for them to, in order to keep this system afloat, they systematically kept dropping interest rates until they got to zero percent, which is where we are today. So when you look at that 10 year yield chart over this 80 year period of …”
Pysh: US and global debt have already reached unpayable levels
“You're already there. You're already there. It's just what does this all transition to is what it really comes down to.”
Pysh: Stocks will underperform gold and Bitcoin in purchasing power
“The stock market went straight up, but relative to gold, and in my opinion, relative to Bitcoin, those stocks are going to underperform.”
Pysh: Quantitative easing is effectively socialism for the rich
“Quantitative easing, it routes the middle class. It literally guts them, right? It polarizes the wealthy so that they get wealthier. It's effectively socialism for the rich. That's what quantitative easing is period.”
Pysh: Fed Used COVID-19 as Cover for Inevitable Quantitative Easing
“Leading into COVID, they were already expanding the balance sheet through the repo market, and it was only a matter of time before they were going to have to do QE. And so once the COVID hit. It was like, oh yeah, here we go here. It's QE because of COVID. It …”
Pysh: Breaking up Big Tech treats symptoms; unpegged fiat is the root cause
“Well, of course, what they're doing, all these arguments of people that are saying those types of things, they're getting a mop out to clean up the floor because the kitchen sink is flooding. But you have to stop the kitchen sink from running. It's locked in p…”
Pysh: decentralized crypto is most likely successor to global fiat
“The last is the highest probability outcome.”
Yanowitz: China emerges as the geopolitical winner from the COVID-19 pandemic
“China wins.
And that this was not like, this wasn't the case after nine, 11 in the financial crisis.
Like after both of those, the U S stepped up, right?
The U S like had everyone else's back, but this is
A, like we're just feeling it's very de-globalized bec…”
Yanowitz: November 2020 US presidential election could be delayed
“I do wonder if we will have an election in November. I'll say that. I don't know. I w I don't think it's crazy to think that we won't have, what happens is you delay, quote unquote, you delay the election in November.”
Pompliano: Corporations seek bailouts because the government is an idiot investor
“And so I think you know, Mark Cuban and I see eye to eye completely on this, which is the reason why corporations are running to the government is because they believe that the government's the idiot in the room.”
Pompliano: Wall Street capitalists become socialists during crises
“All the capitalists on wall street become socialist in times of crisis.”
Pompliano: US Dollar Will Lose Global Reserve Status in His Lifetime
“And ultimately I think in my lifetime, the U S dollar is not going to be the global reserve currency.”
Pompliano: US shifts to wealth redistribution while China focuses on wealth creation
“Now we're getting more from a capitalist society, switching more to socialist. We're doing more wealth redistribution than wealth creation. And what you're seeing is a lot of wealth creation and not a lot of wealth redistribution happening in China and other c…”
Pompliano: Stock-to-flow models are more accurate for Bitcoin than gold
“What you see is a lot of these stock to flow models and co-integration models, et cetera, that are used in gold. Apply to Bitcoin and are actually more accurate in Bitcoin because one side of the equation is transparently known with 100% certainty and all you …”
Benson: COVID-19 disruption is definitely not a two-year problem
“This is a, this is likely a shorter term bump. Is it a three month problem? Is it an eight month problem? I'm not sure, but it's certainly not a two week problem and it's certainly not a two year problem.”
Malone: Viral web posts should incur financial charges to limit mass misinformation
“After a certain amount of posting, after a certain, if something you do reaches out to a certain number of people, there's some sort of charge attached.”
Malone: The US government built hidden backdoors into Silicon Valley tech companies
“I watched the secretary of Homeland Security show up at a coffee shop in Los Altos and talk to the two founders of Google quietly.
There's trap doors that have been built all over Silicon Valley that we know nothing about.”
Malone: Governments will mandate backdoors in all blockchain technology
“And we're going to build it into blockchain.
I don't know how with all those, all that security and everything else, but they're going to demand it.
Because if you don't control that information or have access to that information, you lose your national sovere…”
Malone: AI will obsolete programmers while original creative writers become extremely rich
“Yeah, if you're writing code, you know, you're about to become a newspaper man. But if you can write a really good play or movie script or novel. You're going to be a very rich person.”
Bootstrapping Is Actually A Code Word For Founder Wealth, Says Matei
“So in my mind a little bit, I think bootstrapped is actually a code word for founder wealth.”
Half of private equity firms misrepresent their founder-friendly approach
“Because you meet all these guys and they're like, oh, it's just like a marriage. We're going to be partners. You know, we like to let entrepreneurs run their businesses. And like half of them are telling the truth and half of them are not. The half that are no…”
Ben Congleton: Zendesk Hasn't Evolved Its Chat Product in Four Years
“Our chat is far superior to these bolt on chat products, like say HubSpot or, you know, Zendesk hasn't evolved their chat in like four years since they bought Zopim.”
VC-Backed SaaS Competitors Must Hike Prices to Justify Valuations
“And I think also like, I'm not trying to maximize overall enterprise value. I think those guys have maximized overall enterprise value. They need that because they need to drive cost up significantly to justify their valuation, which I don't need to do.”
Gertler: ShareRoot IPO'd at $10.5M USD valuation on $700 MRR
“We went public in the early days of January of 2016, so two and a half years ago. What was our MRR at the time? MRR was at about 700 dollars when we went public. Market cap at the time was thirteen million Australian. Let's just, for simplicity purposes, call …”
Latka: Selling SaaS lifetime plans is disingenuous and harms personal brand
“I have a big issue when people sell lifetime plans. I think it's cheap. I think it's a marketing tactic, and I think it's totally disingenuous and hurts your personal brand if and when you have to shut the company down or sell it.”
Fatta: Streamy is worth $100M based on technology despite zero revenue
“Oh, because we think we're worth a hundred million bucks because of the technology.”
McKee: Human attention spans haven't changed, only interest spans have shortened
“People's attention spans have not changed since we sat around the fire in caves. Your attention span is determined by your genetics, and the human genome hasn't changed. What has changed is people's interest spans.”
Howard Marks claims VCs only invest in white males from Stanford
“VCs typically only invest in white males from Stanford.”
Howard Marks predicted SaaS models would inevitably transform into ICOs
“You know, for them, the SaaS business is probably the only way a software model is going to work, but it's going to transform itself into the ICO model, which is the blockchain, because it's the logical progression, you know, internet, one point O internet, tw…”
Lemp: Facebook Is World's Largest Monopoly and Threatens Open Internet
“We have the largest monopoly in the world with Facebook, and they're you know, and they will destroy the open internet if we don't stop them”
David Barrett equates celebrating venture capital funding to celebrating bank loans
“Like, to celebrate raising money is to celebrate that you took out a loan.”
Barrett: Top Companies Win via Word-of-Mouth, Which VCs Ignore
“With the exception that no business you cared about was ever built that way. Like every business, every, all the top names in the industry are built through word of mouth. And, but no one talks about that because it's not possible to be funded with capital. An…”
David Barrett says enterprise software sucks compared to mid-market opportunities
“Enterprise sucks, man. It's just like, it's super slow sales cycles. The margins are terrible. It's super competitive. It's whatever. The real opportunity is mid-market and below.”
Wilson: Shopify cannot handle complex high-SKU enterprise architectures
“If you're selling auto parts, And when you're all said and done with child SKUs, you have 750,000 child SKUs and you need to connect it to an ERP system and you need it to ship to your multiple warehouses. You're not getting there with Shopify.”
Latka: YC startups artificially inflate revenue by selling to each other
“The problem is when you go into due diligence with a YC company, their customer list is a bunch of other YC companies. So it's almost like a network marketing scheme where like they all buy each other's products to inflate the thing, but it doesn't make any se…”
Ricci claims Teens Digest vanished without paying its influencers
“One was Teens Digest, and the other one I think it was MyBikes. They're still around, but they ended up basically just cutting people's earnings in half. One of the first company I mentioned just kind of fell off the face of the earth and didn't pay any of the…”
Barrett: User counts and conversion rates are vanity metrics compared to revenue
“Cause I would say like, I think about month, like revenue, obviously in month and month annual growth, but I would say all, everything else is just a vanity metric. Number of users you have, number of customers you have conversion numbers, all those kinds, lik…”
Barrett: Relying only on quantifiable decisions leads to startup failure
“I think the most important decisions are generally not quantified. We're not quantifiable. And so I'd say if you're running your business because you can prove with numbers that your decisions are good, you're going to fail because I mean, someone else out the…”
Most Bitcoin developers are funded by self-interested entities
“I think that primarily this is happening within the Bitcoin world, in, in which the majority of the developers are funded by entities with interest in the outcome.”
Wilcox: Cryptocurrencies remain useful even if mining power is concentrated
“Protecting users, even if there's a concentration of mining power, that's possible. So don't misunderstand and think that we have to have distributed mining in order for it to be useful.”
Engman: Climeon has potential bigger than Apple
“But I came across Kleinman, and I was like, wow, I don't think I can ever create a company with such a potential, because this potential is bigger than Apple, bigger, bigger than all the companies I mentioned.”
Antonopoulos: Open money protocols will lift billions of people out of poverty
“The flow of money around the world will be detected, dictated by protocols and mathematical structures and the internet, and we will have free flow of money around the world. Now, the impact of that is that it's going to empower billions of people and pull the…”
Google's Firebase copied Branch's SDK variables and marketing collateral
“They launched a product in last year at Google IO that was a direct replica of branch under the Firebase brand called dynamic links, literally copied all of our marketing collateral. I think the variables of their iOS SDK you reused variables from my header fi…”