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 1,177 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
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: 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…”
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.”
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.”
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.”
Howard Marks claims VCs only invest in white males from Stanford
“VCs typically only invest in white males from Stanford.”
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 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…”
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.”
Herzog: Crypto's financial ecosystem is bigger than the internet
“This is like, you know, it's bigger than the internet in, in terms of, you know, the implication that you can expect from that move.”
Jarvis: Serena Williams Does Not Care About Teaching MasterClass Courses
“I've photographed Serena. I know her. I know she doesn't love teaching. She doesn't care about it. She's a great tennis player. Obviously the best in the world, the history of the sport, but I know also that she, you know, if she could get offset as fast as po…”
Shamia: Five9, inContact, Genesys, Avaya operate in maintenance mode
“You know, five, nine in contact, Genesis, Avaya are the main competitors. Most of them are more maintenance mode than an innovation.”
Marlin: Microsoft acquiring LinkedIn has zero strategic fit
“I contrast that with Microsoft buying LinkedIn, and I should say that I love LinkedIn. I'm one of the first thousand users of LinkedIn. We use it extensively in my company. I think it's a great service, and yet I think it has zero strategic fit with Microsoft …”
Real estate agent fees destroy over 50% of home equity
“If you use an agent to buy and sell a home, you actually destroy over 50% of your home equity and the fees that they charge.”
Walch: Forcing podcast listeners onto proprietary apps for ads will fail
“Really, really, you're going to change how people want to consume it so that they can get more ads. Wow, what a stupid idea that is. So you think people out there are going to go, yes, I want to hear Geico ads. Please let me change how I listen. No, that's not…”
Anyone with $100,000 who wants a Tesla already owns one
“Anybody that has a 100,000 laying around that wants a Tesla already has one.”
Latka: Teachable raising at $30M valuation is the 'stupidest thing'
“And he's right now negotiating an equity round with a pre-money valuation at thirty million dollars, which is like the stupidest. In my opinion, I told him this on the show. I said, that's the stupidest thing I've ever heard.”
Garg: Legacy dental software incumbents lack technical talent to build fast
“They just can't move at the speed at which we can move. They don't have the technical skills or even the people to be able to build software the way we can.”
Wachs: Hardware moat protects Handwrytten from being vibe coded by AI
“That whole moat is I think it's what's going to save us because if we were just a software company, I mean, we could be vibe coded in a weekend.”
Cheah: Open Models Now Match Claude Sonnet and GPT-4o Mini
“So, and the, this growing collection of open models includes some of the best models that are already on par or surpass, let's say, Plot Sonnet or even GPT-A for Mini.”
Beckett: Brex's $5B exit is a great outcome despite $12B peak
“The Brex outcome was a great outcome. Like the reality is that was a great outcome. That was a win. They sold a company for five billion dollars in like eight or 10 years. They crushed it. You know, it's not their fault that they raised a twelve billion dollar…”
Reviews.io beat heavily funded VC-backed rivals by staying closer to their customers
“I had some big competitors in reviews like wealth financed, VC backed companies that were backed to like hundreds of millions. And, but they weren't close to their customers. They weren't there listening to them. And I truly believe that we did well against th…”
McKeefery claims acquirer App Hub did not understand Reviews.io's unique business model
“The company that purchased reviews was a, basically a roll up of Shopify apps. But reviews really wasn't the Shopify app. It wasn't that play. We had a much different playbook. And the company, the people who were heading up that company at the time really did…”
Hamdi: Y Combinator AI startups are often 'fugazi' ChatGPT wrappers
“I think AI right now has a lot of like Y Combinator kind of fugazi with a couple of people and, you know, a chat GPT wrapper.”
High interest rates require SaaS payback periods of 12 to 18 months
“In a world of, ah, higher interest rates, that really we need to be solving backwards from 12 to 18 months.”
Levy: Construction companies are negligent if not using Document Crunch
“It's just candidly negligent to not be using our product if you're in the construction industry.”
Hyrkin: Non-AI SaaS companies cannot get revenue multiples above 5x
“Not six. I mean unless you're AI right now, you're not getting north of five.”
Call Recording Shifted From $7B Valuation to a Commodity Feature
“A lot of services that were premium services, the most prominent example of which would be call transcription and recording, that used to be a whole company worth seven billion dollars, Now that's a feature of most revenue platforms and a commodity feature at …”
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.”
Moore: The TAM for Monolithic BI Platforms Like Domo Collapsed
“We just saw our TAM get completely crushed at RJ Metrics, because on one side, all this money is pouring in to companies that are doing exactly what we are doing, which is making it really, really hard to scale in an economically efficient way, but on the othe…”
Buhrdorf: Founders should never hire a lawyer for company formation
“You know, when you do a formation, people come to me and say, hey, should I use a lawyer to do a formation? I say, absolutely not. Not only will they do it wrong because they don't do 1000 of thousands of these like we do, we make damn sure we do it right, hav…”
Zubarov: Customer success platform Totango is an old, clunky system
“Tatango is rather old system. You know, it's a bit clunky. You know, it's developed like Melbourne 10 years ago.”
Payne: Big tech firms like Cisco and Oracle cannot execute stolen ideas
“I think sometimes entrepreneurs are worried that if they talk to a big company, if they talk to, you know, a Splunk or a Cisco or Oracle or somebody like that, that they're going to steal their ideas. And in my experience, those companies have trouble executin…”
Top Banks Assign C-Teams to $100M IPOs and Drop Them Quickly
“If you are you know, 50, 60, a hundred million dollars in, in revenue, and you're raising a hundred million dollars, those banks are going to give you the C team if you go with them, and they will drop you at the in a second, if they have a different opportuni…”
Kagan: Market leader Sovren is horrible and fails at resume extraction
“Sovereign is horrible, and they are a market leader. And with horrible, I mean, they can't extract data, so they can't read non-Word or PDF resumes.”
Sanwal: Odds that VC alone changes startup trajectory are close to nil
“The odds that a VC alone is going to change the trajectory of your business is close to nil.”
Singh: No company deserves to trade at 30x revenue long-term
“There's no company that deserves to be trading at 30 times revenue for a long period of time.”
Berman: ZoomInfo rarely refreshes the specific data customers actually need
“Last time we used ZoomInfo, because we were ZoomInfo customers we had a very hard time finding up-to-date data, regardless of what they said, because they'll spend their ten million a month, and they'll update data that's completely different from anything tha…”
Bhaskaran stopped studying Jeff Bezos because he 'became a dick'
“I used to follow Bezos before he became a dick, but that's alright.”
Latka: Companies die once acquired by private equity firms
“Once the, once a private equity firm buys a company, it's, it dies.”
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…”