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 31,030 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 97 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
Latka: Upfront service fees prevent SaaS churn and boost retention
“This is the counterpoint guys, the VC argument that you shouldn't sell services inside of your SAS. I would always argue the opposite, which is if you touch a SAS sale with a big upfront fee, like five K, they're just not going to turn your net dollar retentio…”
Oates Pays Event Speakers $250 For On-Stage Product Mentions
“Now I would literally text them. I see you're speaking speaking to at this event. Sweet. Trying to get some people to check out Ovation. If it comes up, we'd love you to mention us. I'll send you 250 bucks if you do. I would pay people to mention me on stage. …”
Benson: Early-stage founders must abandon work-life balance and personal relationships
“Forget about your hobbies, you're not gonna be a good friend, son, daughter, mother. You gotta ruthlessly prioritize, identify the things that really matter to you, and only do those things. It's not a good time to have a work-life balance.”
Hauser: Citrix "way overpaid" when it acquired Grasshopper
“We built a great company, but someone way overpaid for it, Citrix.”
Harris: Benchmarking remote global pay to San Francisco rates is anti-competitive
“I think it is anti-competitive, frankly, to say to people in Romania and Morocco and South Africa, you have to compete with people working on the west coast who need to pay a whole lot of stuff in, in terms of rent the one bit of leverage you have, which is yo…”
Hyman: Google and IBM Watson lack data to match Sapia.ai
“It's something that IBM tried to do with Watson for a couple of decades, but couldn't because they didn't have the data. And even though Google has 10,000 PhDs working in NLP, they can't do it either because they don't have the data.”
A first-day IPO stock pop is not a sign of bad pricing
“Yeah, there's gonna, you're gonna read articles that say, like, oh, the pop on day one, like, that just means you, like, did a bad job of pricing your IPO. It's not really true. Like, we had the best advisors, the best people around the table on this. You don'…”
Yampolskiy: SecurityScorecard grows over 50% while competitor BitSight barely grows at 20%
“We're consistently exceeding 50% plus growth rate much faster than our direct competitor. Direct competitor is barely growing at 20% rate. Nathan Latka: Who is your direct competitor? Alex Yampolskiy: Bitsite is our primary direct competitor.”
Assaraf: Coralogix would have shut down under a top US VC
“If our seed round was with like an American top VC, we would have shut down for sure. Like they shut us down. They won't even ask.”
Latka: Bootstrappers will outlast and probably beat VC-backed competitors
“A bootstrapper who only spends what his customers pay him or her is sustainable. They will outlast the VC back competitor every time, and they will probably win every time.”
Frazier calls engineering cushy and comfortable compared to grinding in sales
“Whereas the engineers are all, it's pretty cushy. You know, they get tasks, they get them done. I know they work hard, but it's a little bit just of a different environment to work in. Their environment's a lot more comfortable. Our salespeople are grinding.”
Britton: SaaS companies selling to other SaaS are a house of cards
“I think a big house of cards in SaaS right now is SaaS companies who have a customer base that is other SaaS companies.”
Lunawat: Large PE Funds Do Not Dominate U.S. Residential Market
“Even then, if you look at like the total volume of residential sales across the U S that's still a fraction of the total market. So to say that, you know, larger state private equity funds are kind of dominating the U S home residential market, I think would b…”
Lunawat defends having Adam Neumann on Rumor cap table
“Co-working as a concept was introduced and made global by WeWork. So to have, you know, those insights in terms of how to make a business go global, and how to scale something that fast, I think there are fewer people better positioned to that than the current…”
Gaither: 'Privileged' investor mindset made raising capital difficult
“This is a main reason why it's taken us a long time to get funding is because people have a privileged mindset of how the law works and how the law functions.”
Viktoroff: Many document automation competitors sell software that doesn't work
“We've got a lot of competitors in our space. They're selling a lot of stuff that doesn't work.”
Ong: Investment contract binds founder's future ventures to current equity split
“In our agreement, I made it this way, like, we made it this way, and we agree on it this way, which we agree is fair, is that if, let's say, she leaves this business and she starts another business, then what's gonna happen is that she, like, she went to split…”
Latka: Raising capital validates salesmanship, not the business idea
“Raising capital does not validate an idea. It means you're a good salesperson.”
Franceschetti: Mattress Companies Marketing Proprietary Foam Materials Are Running A Scam
“But again, foam, when you hear all these companies talking about foam and their latest release, it is a scam. And you can just go anywhere and buy it on your own.”
Caldbeck: Early fintech startups were marketing companies relying purely on FICO
“First I think an issue with a lot of the kind of FinTech one point O companies was there actually isn't any technology behind them. They're marketing companies. And so like how, without talking about any one company and specifically like how many of them would…”
Caldbeck claims VCs profit by convincing founders to sacrifice everything
“VCs in general, as a macro point tend to make money by convincing entrepreneurs to give up everything.”
Zach Resnick predicts Bitcoin SV will see petabyte-sized blocks
“And I think we're going to see petabyte blocks over the coming years.”
Singh: Non-BTC/ETH Top 10 Cryptos Will Be Replaced Within Two Years
“So I personally, my belief is that everyone in the top 10 maybe bar ETH and Bitcoin will be switched out in the next 12 to 24 months.”
Mattermark failed because it raised too much venture capital, says York
“The other reason why Metamark wasn't a successful company is because they fundraise too much.”
Founders fired entire agency staff to instantly rehire them for Penji
“We actually did something very interesting. We fired every single person on Waterfront Media, and then rehired them under Penji.”
Salihefendić claims Basecamp is wrong about equity in bootstrapped startups
“I mean, honestly, like, I think I mean, I was kind of, like, against this, you know, like, the bootstrapping, especially, like, if you, like, hear the base camp guys, like, equity has no value and stuff like that, but it's kind of bullshit, because, like, equi…”
Gomez: Competitors like Contently and Skyword hyperscaled too early without efficiency
“I see these companies, the hyperscale too early, my personal take, and that comes with a cost. They didn't have the efficiency.”
Jackson: User-owned networks will outgrow founder- and investor-owned networks
“My co-founder and I, Gabe, we firmly believe That user owned and controlled networks will grow faster and be more valuable than founder and investor owned networks.”
Jackson: 2020 stock market is biggest bubble of lifetimes, sell equities
“The biggest bubble of lifetimes don't own any stocks.”
Founders cannot build a bootstrapped software company in Western Europe
“You cannot build a product company, especially a bootstrap company from London or anywhere from Europe.”
White: $1.5M raise will fund 22-month runway to reach $2M MRR
“That's kind of what it looks like we should need to take us for a 22 months and grow our revenues to what we think could be an average of about two million MRR.”
Central banks should distribute newly created money directly to individuals
“We can't be creating the money and giving it to banks. We have to create the money and give it to people.”
Wenger advocates taxing all income and capital gains at a flat rate
“Like you could have a flat tax rate. Every dollar is taxed the same way, by the way, independent where it comes from. I would tax every dollar. You get a dollar, whether it's from interest rate, capital gains, work, whatever, just you get a dollar, you pay tax…”
Lynn: Majority of created art has outperformed the S&P 500
“At least for the majority of art created, it's outperformed the S&P.”
Volset: Sam Altman's $10B startup valuation rule makes no sense
“He wrote a piece and I think in January saying how to invest in a startup. And he said, you should never invest in any company that couldn't potentially be a ten billion dollar company. And I'm like, that doesn't make any sense. Like there's a lot of companies…”
Competitor Proof ran Facebook ads featuring FOMO's customers and product
“Some of the other things they've done are like made advertised promotional videos with our customers in it, and then put tens of thousands on Facebook ads to promoting these videos. And if you watch the video, it's talking about proof, but in the video is our …”
Santens: Society should aim for full unemployment via machine automation
“We should be investing in automation, and we should be, we should get out of this I'd say almost like, it's like a trap of full employment, this belief that, that it's best for people to be doing these jobs. I think that we should be aiming for full unemployme…”
Santens: One week of Fed liquidity could fund a $2,000 monthly UBI
“We could actually be paying for a 2000 dollar a month fully universal basic income for the amount of money that the, in, in, in the Fed is doing in one week.”
Jonathan Herzog claims SEO disinformation generated 100,000 false headlines post-launch
“Immediately thereafter, a targeted Systematic disinformation campaign was launched, where if you Google my name, Jonathan Herzog, on a computer and hit the news tab, you will see 100,000 of false headlines improperly indexed through SEO manipulation to myself,…”
Hyper-growth startups rarely build beyond their first 18 months of product scope
“My hypothesis is that, You know, if you need to create a large hyper-growth company, whatever you've built in the first, like, 18 months or something is sort of the extent to which you're going to build in the life cycle of your company.”
De Valk: Matt Mullenweg and Automattic cannot afford to acquire Yoast
“I don't think he can afford us, first of all.”
Jeff Booth: Technology Will Prevent Net Global Job Growth
“There's not going to be net global job gain globally. Right. Through, through what's happening with technology.”
Booth: Further government debt is ineffective as system is past rescue
“It actually doesn't matter because we're already so far past the point of rescue that, that, that, that, that, that more and more debt is going to be ineffective.”
Booth: Governments Should Not Bail Out Companies, Let Them Fail
“Should you bail out these companies across the board? No, you shouldn't. You should let them all fail, and the people with cash will win.”
Booth: The Stock Market Is an Illusion Detached From Fundamentals
“The fed is the market, right? With the stock market is an illusion. Today it's completely detached from reality of fundamentals.”
Booth: WeWork's peak $45B valuation was essentially a Ponzi scheme
“WeWork looks like a really good business when it's valued at forty-five billion dollars, and everybody says, wow, this is great, because more It's a Ponzi scheme. More and more people racing in, and more and more people racing in, and then you take that away a…”