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 107 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
Almabase's pricing model would fail if built entirely in San Francisco
“If I were to build this team entirely in, let's say the San Francisco Bay area, it's never going to work out with that, that kind of price point.”
Mediafly CEO Regrets Not Investing in Sales and Marketing Earlier
“Invest earlier in sales and marketing. You know, I'm a product. I'm a product CEO. I'm a product lover. You know, I love the product. I'm a programmer by background. I would have invested earlier in marketing and sales.”
Today, Delicious would likely use founder secondaries instead of early M&A
“One of the things that has really changed dramatically since that time is that founder secondaries have become completely customary. And so I think that there are many alternative paths in which delicious would have raised another round and where secondary wou…”
Santens: A $1,000 UBI from 1971 indexed to GDP per capita would be $2,300 today
“If we had introduced a thousand dollar a month basic income, no under Nixon in the 71, then right now that would be close to, you know, I think it would be like 2300 dollars a month, somewhere around there right now. That was index GDP per capita.”
Pollaro would wait much longer to raise funding if starting over
“Well, I think, you know, if I were to do it all over again, I might take a different path. I would certainly wait much longer to raise money.”
Annual upfront billing saved Roadmunk from raising an extra $10 million
“So if you were in the valley and you, instead of collecting eighty-twenty, you were collecting fifty-fifty annual and monthly, I ran the numbers. We would have had to have raised two years ago just over ten million dollars, right?”
Sheehan estimates 10% of Birdseed users would immediately pay $40 monthly
“I think if we were to literally flip the switch tomorrow to say, hey, you can sign up for this, you know kind of like Loom, I think about 10% of those businesses would automatically just say, hey, I'd love to spend 40 dollars a month to be able to remove brand…”
Segall sacrificed $2M to $3M in valuation to pick operator investors
“Like we probably could eat out another two to three million dollars on valuation. But we decided not to and I decided to go with the investors for That I wanted based on, you know, what they thought, you know, in the stage that we are in the business”
Avery: Raising venture capital could have accelerated growth much faster
“Maybe take venture capital. I don't know. It's, it was hard. Bootstrapping was fun, but I could have accelerated a lot quicker.”
Groh: Restarting Would Have Been Easier Than Restructuring LinkTrust
“In retrospect, it probably would have been easier just to cancel everything and start over.”
Automation allows Adaptive Intelligence to operate with 35 employees instead of 60
“We've got 35 people here, but we don't have any traffickers. We don't have any really basic campaign analysts. Most of that work is all done programmatically with our algorithms and APIs and things like that. So we'd probably be closer to, like, 60 people if w…”
Coppinger: Atlassian overpaid; I wouldn't pay over 7x revenue for Trello
“I wouldn't have paid more than a seven X multiple of their top line revenue.”
Britton: In Hindsight CrowdTap Probably Should Have Sold in 2012
“In hindsight, we probably should have, I think that, you know, when you have VC investors, they swing for home runs. They're not about singles or doubles.”
Harris: Venture playbook might have scaled Quantum in 5 years instead of 14
“It took us 14 years to get where maybe it would have taken us five had we done it, the had used used the East Coast or the West Coast playbook.”
Modern World of Warcraft Would Be Built on Ethereum, Salovaara Claims
“So, so that's a good example of something that if you would now invent today, World of Warcraft, you would exactly do it on ERC, Ethereum based tokens.”
Latka: Liquidating ICO Ether Early Cost FirstBlood $69 Million in Upside
“If you had, that was in September, if you had waited just six months and liquidated all those shares at the 372,000 shares at the current price, which is almost 200 bucks, you would have basically had seventy four million dollars in cash in your bank.”
Jarvis: Shutting Down Best Camera Better Than a Golden Handcuffs Acquisition
“To me, the outcome was a better outcome to shut it down, learn from it, build into something new, which is now CreativeLive than it would have been, because I would have been ensnailed, or ensnailed, entangled, yeah, entangled in, A little legal dispute, but m…”
Solo founder Cohen says he would prefer having co-founders next time
“Sole founder which I would do differently if there were an option to have co-founders to share the load.”
Shanbhag: Lead gen model would have required VC and sales hires
“You know, I think that it makes, so if we had gone with the lead generation model, I think that we, it would have made sense for us to raise money, scale a sales team, and then grow revenue that way.”
Salman: He wishes he had dropped out of school at 20
“Freaking drop out of the school and go and go.”
Bandarian: President Obama's Mars commitment would not have happened without Elon Musk
“You would never think that a president would say that, and the president wouldn't have said that if it wasn't for Elon.”
WiseWear avoided lower-tier retailers to protect its luxury brand image
“Cause we could have blew out our numbers this year.
but we would have sacrificed the brand.”
Raising capital in 2008 would have caused Ceterus to fail
“If I would have raised money and tried it in 2008 or 2009, it would have been an epic failure because what I would have thought the customer needed Would not have fit the mark.”
Latka regrets not selling Heyo before a failed pivot in 2012
“One, the mark, we missed the maximum. We missed twenty-twelve selling. We should have sold in twenty-twelve. We raised capital, additional capital to try a new concept, which was social selling, which failed, right?”
Smith: I would have bootstrapped Cladwell if I could do it over
“If I could do it over again, I would have started bootstrapping.”
Dumas: I Would Have Refunded Buyers Without $5,000 in Pre-Orders
“I would have refunded and said, hey, there's a better idea out there, and I'm going to spend my time finding that.”
Latka: I wish I had dropped out of college sooner
“I would drop out faster. I would cut all my safety nets faster to force myself into a corner, because I know I work really well when I'm forced in a corner.”
McKeefery only accepted the buyout offer due to his son's medical condition
“Any other time, probably in my career, I probably wouldn't have taken that offer because I really, truly loved what I was doing at reviews.”
Franz Andersen regrets not raising a larger initial round for expert hires
“And I think to raise a bigger round in the beginning, building the dream team, Of everyone that you need to both build a product, but selling it and getting partnerships. That's where you need the real experience. So that's something that I would change.”
Jeremy Bell: Moving to Silicon Valley earlier would have benefited my career
“I probably, when I was younger, would have probably benefited from just going west and getting into the Silicon Valley scene a lot sooner than I did later.”
Arora: Early Capital Access Would Have Made Him a Billionaire
“I wish I had access to some capital so that I could have materialized my 20 in a bay such that I was a billionaire today.”
Daniel CH: Legit Check could reach 95% margins without staff
“Well, it's pretty much, we could operate on 95% margins if we fire everybody and do the authentications ourselves.”
Harris Regrets Declining Gainsight Stock Options In Early Consulting Deal
“You know, the biggest mistake I made in that deal is I should have taken options, but that's, so that is an instance where I got in really early to build.”
Le Cunff: Ness Labs could not exist today without Zapier
“I think Zapier is probably the glue for everything, and I would not be able to have the platform I have today if I didn't have it.”
Martell: Would have kept Spheric Holdings and hired a CEO instead of selling
“That's probably the one decision I would have done differently. Like now that I know what I know about business and assets and scaling teams, I would have kept it hire a CEO because it was a great business.”
Williamson says embracing eight-hour workdays earlier would have prevented burnout
“And frankly, I think I could have avoided all of that and had, you know, an extra year of productivity if I just accepted and realized early on that, you know, it's okay to work an eight hour day.”
Kim: Sendlane burned $500,000 building its failed first sales team
“And I kicked myself because I wish I would have figured that out before a year ago. And I would have saved probably half a million dollars of burn that I spent you know, trying to grow that sales team and losing it.”
Dunn regrets dropping out of school to start a business
“Honestly, I dropped out of school to start a business. I kind of wish I would have stayed in just cause I'm not going to get that time again.”
Cope says delaying the acquisition by a year would have increased valuation
“If I had waited a year, we could have sold for more.”
Dunn: Wishes he had stayed in college instead of dropping out
“Probably would have stayed in college. I dropped out, ah, kind of wish I would have probably stuck with it a few more years, but yeah.”
Bonde: I would trade engineering grad school for an MBA
“If I knew what I know now, I would have traded my grad studies in engineering and computer science for an MBA.”
Nick Mason: Turtl should have invested in customer success sooner
“And I think that if I had one thing that I wish we'd invested in a bit sooner, it would have been that because, you know, it takes time to get up to speed and, you know, it's also a tremendous opportunity for upsell and growing accounts if you're doing that we…”
Bernshteyn regrets trying to be well-rounded and delaying his Silicon Valley move
“I probably wouldn't have been as focused on being well-rounded. I probably wouldn't have ran. I probably would have ran out the Silicon Valley earlier.”
Rubicon Project: In-House Build of nTOGGLE Would Have Taken 1-2 Years
“For us to build that, it would have taken us, you know, another one to two years and we would not have been able to do other things. And as a result, we made the decision that we were going to buy because we can accelerate it.”
Giannoccaro regrets not sharing equity with more early co-founders for speed
“I regretted that I didn't invite more people so we could be, have been much faster in the development because the problem was to find good people.”
Goel: KarmaCircles Has a $500M to $1B TAM If Fully Penetrated
“There are around a hundred million professionals on LinkedIn. Every one of them is part of some company or some business school or some university. So we could actually, if we get them all, we are looking at around half a billion to one billion dollar revenue …”
Knowing startup difficulties early would have caused Brian Verne to quit
“I don't necessarily wish I knew this, because I think we probably would have quit, even during our first startup, but just how difficult, you know, it really is to, you know, build a business, and, you know, to grow it, and to see it scale, and, you know, to d…”