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
Geisel: Long-tail search terms like vacation tracking are not competitive
“And if you start going below lead management, go into vacation trackers, time off trackers. It's not that competitive at all. Be very candid.”
Reddy rejects standard advice, building multiple products from day one
“The end goal of any company is multiple products. And we want to start with multiple products.”
WP Engine takes 6-12 months to scope features Rocket.net ships quickly
“Activity logging feature at WP Engine, it'd take six to 12 months for them to even figure out what they want to build, whereas we're built in a modern environment, all modern frameworks, end-to-end test suites, API first, things that just don't exist in our in…”
Salafia: Competitors sign unqualified customers in grow-at-all-costs push
“Our competition is Is a lot like that, like, and that's the feedback we get. It's grow at all costs, hustle, just sign anyone up, even if they don't qualify, whatever, we'll get to it later.”
Pokros: Recruiting scorecards are stupid and merely reinforce preexisting choices
“We firmly Believe that scorecards are stupid. I think that scorecards make you feel like the choice that you made makes you feel better about the choice you made. It only reifies your existing values and your existing choices.”
Prados: Review Wave is strictly 'remote never' and rejects remote work
“We are not remote first. We're remote. We're remote never. I hate that business model.”
Latka: An employer review site for rating employees is a billion-dollar business
“There's a billion dollar business in here. Someone's gotta just build that and go to town.”
Osgood: Small AppSumo Users Have Identical Launch Problems to Large Enterprises
“Yeah, because honestly, the problem, the problems that are That, that user versus the problems that are a larger company user, they're almost identical when you're talking about launching products. Like I actually fundamentally disagree with the idea that they…”
Joe Long claims competitor CompuFloor lost six key staff in 18 months
“So literally, CompuFloor is failing across its entire customer base. They've had three project managers who've left over the last 18 months. Three programmer left. So they've they're struggling.”
Ashkenazi: Fundraising ability is the ultimate determinant of startup success
“I think it's absolutely critical to raise money from external investors, even if you can fund it, or you think that you can fund it, your ability to raise money is the number one thing that will determine your future success.”
Fertel says a 5% monthly churn rate is strong for SaaS
“I mean, pretty much, you know, most SaaS companies, no matter, you know, no matter what you do, a five percent churn is pretty sort of a natural churn. It's considered a strong churn rate.”
Nicolas Vandenberghe: Nations should only exist for soccer tournaments and global taxes
“So my view is that at some stage we should have global taxes you know, we should have no, we should have nation for soccer tournament, that's cool, but not for anything else, not for fight and all that.”
Abel: Legacy software analysts don't use the software they evaluate
“You know, I said it's like a restaurant critic that literally can't eat the food, right? The analyst can't use the software, and they just stand outside the restaurant asking other people, how is your meal? And I'd rather ask the people eating the meal, right?…”
Full Vertical SaaS Enables Easier Expansion Than Single-Wedge Strategy
“No, absolutely not. Because then it's very difficult to expand. Whereas when you come in with a full vertical SAS, then it's easier to expand.”
Schleifer: Raising VC is significantly easier than pre-selling an unbuilt product
“I mean, if you're going to say what are the different approaches, it's a lot easier to go raise money from VC than it is to go and pre-sell customers on a product. That's like, you know, a straight up answer on that one.”
Simons: Raising venture capital actually de-risks a startup for early-stage founders
“I think raising money in my mind is a form of de-risking. A venture. I think some people think that it like increases the risk, but for us, I see it as like a form of de-risking.”
Vandenberg: Drift Refuses Small Customers to Mask Churn Problems
“I see the drift is doing that because they've had the churn problem. So then they're trying to make their numbers look better. So they even refuse to take companies.”
Working 6-8 Hours a Day Won't Launch a Startup
“If you work six hours, seven hours, eight hours a day, you won't get your business up and running.”
Latka: Raising capital turns founders into VC employees
“Raising capital is, in my opinion, is not something to be celebrated. You're diluting yourself and you're becoming more of essentially an employee, right? For your VCs and the board that you're building.”
Ong: MLM is ethical if products deliver value without recruiting
“That's how I decide whether a network marketing model is ethical or not. It's based on whether if they don't recruit other people, do they still get value from the product itself?”
Startups Can Hire a CTO, But Cannot Survive Without a CEO
“So I strongly believe company cannot live without CEO. That's for sure. Most companies cannot live without head of sales and CMOS. But probably you can leave without, you know, a CTO. You can hire a CTO.”
Scalable, law-compliant blockchains will capture the vast majority of crypto value
“Not investing in the only blockchain that prioritizes scale versus trying to build networks and money that operate outside law and regulation is where the vast majority of the kind of value in the crypto or blockchain space will come from.”
Chernis: Paid advertising is dead
“Paid is dead. I mean, there's tons of data about this out now. Freakonomics just did two episodes on this the last couple of weeks in case you guys listen to that podcast.”
Clayton: Being Single Is a Founder's Competitive Advantage
“I'm single, and that's a competitive advantage too.”
Latka: Consumers do not care about privacy if given enough value
“Like if you deliver enough value, people don't care about privacy in my opinion.”
Lewis: Amazon copies and sells every profitable third-party vendor product
“There's basically no vendor who's worked with Amazon that hasn't been screwed over by them. If Amazon finds a product that is making good money, they copy it and they sell it themselves.”
Keynejad: Co-founders must split equity 50-50 to stay fully incentivized
“That's not the right way to do it. If you're doing it that way, then you shouldn't be your co-founder. I mean, like, come on. So you split fifty-fifty. I mean, like, you're going to be doing this for years, hopefully. You're going to make a really big company.…”
Jackson: Distributing network value to contributors over VCs is the fairest model
“The value of the network is then given programmatically to whoever helped us build it, right? Like not some employer, not some, you know, stooge VC, you know, sitting back collecting all the value, right? It's the most fair way to build a two-sided marketplace…”
Criteo's retargeting only lifts client revenue by 0.5%
“And for example, like say retargeting Criteo's whole business. Which they're a multi-billion dollar company. They only increased around about a half percent.”
Adam Neumann should not have stepped down from WeWork
“He shouldn't, he should not have stepped down.”
Elon Musk is the most special person in 200 years
“Elon Musk is the most special person to just apply over the last 200 years. So hands down and no one should ever talk shit about that guy.”
Competitor Proof copied FOMO's entire terms of service word for word
“Proof, like copy pasted our entire terms of service word for word.”
Santens: High inflation functions essentially like a wealth tax on asset owners
“The more inflation that there is, is essentially can be seen as like a wealth tax or something because it disproportionately impacts the, you know, owners of these assets.”
Jonathan Herzog claims opponent Lindsay Boylan's ballot signatures were 80% invalid
“So we actually found about an 80% invalidity rate going line by line because most of them were collected in the Bronx or Queens.”
Latka: Class Warfare Will Increase 10x Without Citizen Bailout Equity
“I think you're going to see, like, if you think what's happened in the past four years politically is bad, I think you're going to see 10 times that in terms of class warfare. If the government continues to bail out companies without giving the average America…”
Pompliano: Government over-rotation on health crisis caused economic crisis
“I think what's happening is an over rotation on the health crisis, which causes the economic crisis.”
Pompliano: COVID-19 mortality rates will be much lower in retrospect
“One of the things that I personally think we're not going to get this for probably three to five years, but we're going to look back three to five years from now. We're going to say the death rates that were originally thought are going to be nowhere near wher…”
Pompliano: Economic value cannot treat every life as equal
“Do you, can you put the same quote unquote dollar amount on a life of somebody at the end of life versus somebody who's 25 years old, right? And I tend to think that it's unlikely that you would put the same value, right? Especially economic output standpoint …”
Pompliano: Crisis bailouts are timed when public desperation allows socialist control
“The whole playbook is during a time of crisis, you wait until the American people's will has been broken. And then once their will has been broken and they absolutely are as desperate as possible, that's when you bail them out. And when you bail them out, it b…”
Pompliano: Taxing billionaires transfers capital to notoriously bad government allocators
“You want to take money from the greatest wealth allocators or capital allocators and give it to the people who are notoriously the worst capital allocators in the world. That sounds like wealth destruction to me, right?”
Russo: SaaS revenue growth requires continuously expanding engineering teams
“If you have a SaaS product, you need to really keep growing your dev team. That's where the money's going to come from.”
Warfield: Extra sleep would come at the detriment of startup progress
“I think sleep would be at the detriment of progress and luckily at a young 40, I don't need much more than I'm getting.”
Schmidt: Users with service contracts qualify as customers even without paying
“The customers where you do have a relationship to and a contract and you do a service.”
Latka calls Leadboxer a less well-designed version of Clearbit
“Basically this is like you know, a not as well designed version of clear bits.”
SuiteCRM matches all Salesforce features without licensing fees
“The alternative is to take a, an open source CRM like SweetCRM that SalesJilish provides. It does everything that Salesforce does, but the code is open.”
Writing code is easy assembly work compared to product management
“You know, the most valuable part of it is the product product division, product management side of it. Writing the code is easy. That's like assembly work. Like, Manufacturing work, right? Almost. It's the knowing what to write and how it's supposed to work. T…”
Gertler: VC liquidation preferences pushing founders to bottom of payout is 'ridiculous'
“As VCs invest, they get the next, they get the top priority of share class. And as you go down that ladder of Priority with VCs, you find that the founders are the second to the bottom, and the team members are at the bottom, and that's ridiculous to me.”
Latka: Feigning personal desperation gets competitors to start acquisition talks
“Email a few of your competitors and say, I really need to sell the business to take care of some personal stuff. Want to chat? Leave it at that. This sounds desperate, but that's the point. Your desperate vibes will get prospective buyers to engage in conversa…”