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 16 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
Jacobs: Building proprietary software is unnecessary to create a big business
“And all of the people that said you need your own software in order to build a big business, those people I don't agree with actually.”
Sam Jacobs: If you ask your board what your company is worth, it is worth little
“One of the other lessons, by the way, is if you're asking your board what the company is worth, it's probably not worth very much, and if you want to sell the company, it's probably not worth very much. Companies get, ah, bought, not sold.”
Sam Jacobs: Fixing onboarding drives SaaS retention more than changing pricing or features
“The biggest thing that you can do To drive up retention is not change your price and is not add a new feature. It is fix your onboarding process to drive time to value.”
Pavilion burned $8M of capital between February 2021 and 2023
“From 2021 in February, when we raised the round through Last year, we burned eight million dollars of capital which we'd never done before.”
Pavilion self-signup members churn at 3x the rate of assisted onboarding
“We have a self signup flow. Those people turn at three times the rate that people that have an interaction with a customer success manager or an enrollment manager, right?”
Sam Jacobs: Elephant offered $25M investment in Pavilion at ~$105M valuation
“Roughly eighty million dollars. We're going to put in this amount of money post money valuation. We think it's going to be, we're going to put in twenty five million work. It's going to be worth roughly a hundred and five million dollars.”
Pavilion swung from 30% margins in 2021 to multi-year capital burn
“We had, I think, 30% operating margins. Now remember, a community business in twenty-twenty-one and twenty-twenty, not the same thing because we had no hard physical costs, right? We weren't doing this. Everything was on Zoom. Very high margin on Zoom. Low mar…”
Elephant Ventures offered Pavilion a $25M venture funding round
“I didn't think when I started this business that it would be a venture-backed business, but it turned out three years ago that a company called Elephant Ventures got in touch with me, and they wanted to invest twenty-five million dollars.”
Pavilion grew top-line revenue 15% while cutting headcount in half
“Our top line has grown 15% this year, and we have half the people, ah, that we had a year ago.”
Pavilion maintained 30% operating margins and grew 3x during COVID
“We were a business that during COVID had 30% operating margins and was growing three X from 2019 to 20 20.”
Pavilion achieved cash-flow positive Q1 with 4:1 LTV-to-CAC
“We've generated, we're cash flow positive in January, February, and March. Our unit economics are back to healthy margins. We're four to one LTV to CAC on, ah, both our corporate membership side and our individual membership side.”
Pavilion reduced headcount from 62 to 27 employees
“For Pavilion, that means that we entered twenty-twenty-three with 62 full-time employees. Today, we have 27 full-time employees.”
Pavilion spent $2.5M annually building an internal member hub
“We were building our own member hub internally. It would taking two years and it was about two and a half million dollars a year to spend on the product engineering team.”