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 9,656 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
Yaman made under $10M in personal liquidity despite Boxed raising $380M
“Yeah, it was not the case.”
Latka pitches Spiegel a live $5M credit line with no warrants
“My offer, just so you have in the back of your head, we would do a five million dollar line of credit with somebody like you. That's under 60% leverage against your ARR, 50% leverage against your ARR. It's a line of credit. So it can sit there and you pay noth…”
Walker sold secondary Astronomer shares during Series B and C rounds
“I was offered a chance to sell my shares in secondary at our Series B, Series C rounds. You know, that was, this was the Zerp era, and I said yes.”
Latka: AI search plummeted organic clicks by 50% despite soaring impressions
“And now with AI results, we're showing up in more impressions, 190 K a day, but our clicks have gone down by about 50% on average per day.”
Zitoun: Submagic offers a 30% lifetime recurring affiliate commission
“We give 30% revenue on the lifetime value of the customers.”
Yampolskiy: SecurityScorecard Uses Former Jobs Coach to Screen VP Hires
“We actually have a psychologist who interviews, he used to be a coach to Steve Jobs, actually, and Larry Ellison, but he interviews every VP higher and above, and I get a forty-page report on what is a person like, not like, culture, curiosity”
Liwer: Coro Founders Received Equity Top-Ups Across Funding Rounds
“So there were top ops along the way. Because it's important to the investors to make sure that the founders stay very engaged, and that's the way a smart investor thinks.”
Moah: Boomerang issues dividends to employees, investors, and founders
“So we have issued dividends for all our shareholders, employees, Investors. Founders.”
RB2B experiences brutal 10% monthly churn and a nine-month customer LTV
“Like, 10% a month. It's, we just had an agency, like, cancel 80 accounts and put them under one account, so it looks like it's even worse than 10% a month, but like, it's like a nine month LTV.”
Omnisend CEO: Google penalized our experimental fully AI-written website to zero
“We had one experimental branch of website, which was a full AI written. It just got down to zero. No results at all. Like, penalized to zero.”
Founderpath Conditioned Financing on Creating a New Management ESOP Pool
“We basically said, Hey, look, we'll fund the business with a million or million and a half or whatever it is. But at the funding date, we also need to see a board resolution that establishes a new, 1015, whatever it was ESOP pool and a chunk of that ESOP pool …”
Schumacher: SaaS Group funds deals from balance sheet, currently 100% debt
“We have tons of cash. We're just doing every deals, doing deals all hundred percent debt. So we're not, because we're not putting things into SPVs or special purpose vehicle. We're not a PE company. We're really just always, always investing from our own balan…”
Flodesk refuses to entertain acquisition offers to stay independent
“We, you know what, we've been very we've been very disciplined about not entertaining the offers that have come so far just because they haven't made sense for us. Not even, we have, so we've never even gotten to the point where we've had the discussions about…”
Owner.com fires bottom-ranked sales reps even if they near quota
“I move people out of the business that are, like, pretty close to quota. Like, they could be okay performers. I'll still exit them from the business if they're consistently at the bottom of the stack rank.”
Wing Assistant triggered Google conversions using secret chat keywords
“Whenever The word beautiful would show up in the chat window. We would actually trigger a conversion.”
Singh: PAR Acquired Punchh for $500M Using Overvalued Stock
“We went out, we bought a half a billion dollar business called Punch, that's based here in Austin now, and we started using our stock because we thought it was very inflated, and so it was the greatest we ever did, because it built, it gave us tremendous scale…”
Lemlist turned down $20M and $30M investment offers to remain fully bootstrapped
“And then all of that, of course, attracted a lot of investors' attention, where we had a twenty million dollar investment proposal that we turned down before turning down a thirty million dollar investment, simply because we don't need the funds.”
LMS365 rejected $50M term sheets with heavy secondary share sales
“We turned down a number of fifty million dollar term sheets with a lot of secondaries in there, but then it was like, hey, we don't want that valuation.”
Dimitro Okunyev rejected a $10 million buyout offer from a public company
“Yeah, the offer was like quite nice. It was like, ten millions. I don't believe that this is the fair price so far.”
Inflectra pays zero sales commissions, favoring salaries and company-wide quotas
“We don't we don't carry individual quotas. We have a company quota and we, everyone's paid salary. We don't do any commissions. That's one unique feature.”
Adam Sandman owns 100% of Inflectra with no employee equity pool
“No, actually none. It's there's no I'm sole owner.”
Vidas shut down StrategyBox fearing ChatGPT would usurp its core tech
“We also saw we had early access to ChatGPT just because it was a data management platform, and we did AI and machine learning. I had a look at a lot of the functionality that we were building and investing in, and I looked at the capabilities of ChatGPT, and I…”
Gobel Received Tens of Millions in Zenerate Secondary Liquidity Payouts
“The payouts had been in tens of millions of dollars, right?”
Manageable's uncapped note has mandatory conversion at $300k raised
“We don't have a cap. We just have mandatory conversion which is if we, when we get to 300,000, then we have a mandatory conversion. Either 300,000 or December 31st 25 is our minimum... If I, if we raise 300,000 dollars, then that man, then that creates a conve…”
Bhattacharya: 70% of Involve.ai's coding is generated by AI
“70% of our coding is now done with AI.”
Kumar self-funded $800k into Juggle before acquiring a single customer
“If I can say close to 800,000 dollars.”
Node.ai's initial ideal customer profile is MBA students
“Our initial ICP will be actually MBA students.”
A VC investor demanded an exit one year after funding Cleeng
“One of the investors, the one that came in actually in 18 we are facing a few challenges in in 19, and they tell us, look guys we'd like to do an exit at the time where we started to spend like crazy.”
CB Insights has reached ~$100M ARR without a PR firm
“We're kind of in that hundred million ARR category, and we don't have a PR firm still”
Hurt: Data.world made zero revenue until 2018 after raising $50M
“At Data. World we didn't even make a dollar of revenue until we had raised over fifty million dollars. And we didn't break a dollar of revenue until 2018.”
Patel: NP Digital Acquired AnswerThePublic for $8.6M at $1M–$1.2M EBITDA
“Answer the public. We recently bought this company for 8.6 million, funny enough, from FE International that had a booth. And they were only doing one, 1.2 million in EBITDA, so we overpaid for it.”
DealPad mandates executive sponsor access before conducting discovery or demos
“I won't let my team sell into a company. If we get past qualification, we do not sit discovery unless we get exec sponsor access. It's one of our conditions. If you want a demo, if you want to go through discovery with us, we need to have exec sponsors on that…”
SweetCX minority shareholders waived equity to boost founder payout in acquisition
“What we actually did, interestingly enough, is a couple of my shareholders said that they would waive their shares so that we could then pump those up a little bit. And the two founders who did most of the work, my CTO and myself, we get a little bit of a bump…”
QuestionPro demanded an asset deal for immediate year-one tax write-downs
“Because he wanted an asset deal, because he can write a hundred percent of the cost of the company down and immediately in year one.”
Berman: Always require upfront credit card details before offering SaaS trials
“I'm not a big fan of the free trial with no credit card. So the way that I always launch our SAS is Tapleo everything before is you get in there, you have to put in your credit card in order to see the SAS. And then there's a free trial after. So I go by numbe…”
BoltCode founders have not discussed equity split prior to launch
“We really haven't discussed equity yet, because like I said, I'm getting most of the funding to the table, and most of the tech is mine. The other co-founder just handles operations, so we haven't really discussed it yet.”
Amit RG turned down Y Combinator after raising from Sequoia
“We also got selected by Combinator, but we decided to not go ahead with it. Because this thing happened like one week before YC, YC was all remote. I'm a big YC fan, but it didn't make sense, you know, to dilute so much when we were already getting, they wante…”
Pang left QCC because his co-founders refused to raise capital
“Well, I want I wanted the company at least to raise another round of money to compete effectively, and it was profitable, and I made the we launched a very, very, very profitable advertising campaign across social media and Other media channels that, that actu…”
Indicio's early angel investor attempted a takeover to become CEO
“But he had his own plan upon becoming the CEO of the company and Trying to push us into, to take more of his money and.”
JobPaths Measures Success by Training Engagement Rather Than Job Placements
“We are gauging our success rate mainly by the number of users that are taking our training classes or building resumes.”
Fanus Admits JobPaths Cannot Track Specific Job Placement Figures
“This is the problem with why I cannot answer that question, because each community has their own programs. They are running their own data. They're connecting with their own employers. They're just using my software. You're grading me as if I'm Indeed. I'm not…”
Earner prioritizes monthly active usage over net dollar retention
“We're not actively measuring all the dollar retention figures. Like we're focusing more on just kind of what we built so far. We're looking a lot more into monthly active users and what different features within our app our customers use.”
Zomentum's Series A valuation landed slightly below $100 million
“I'm slightly lower than that, but in that negotiation ballpark. Yes.”
Kaevand refuses to raise outside funding for Instantly acquisitions
“I like these things like acquiring, like, different companies. It might be cool, like at some point, but I wouldn't raise money for it to do it. Maybe it's like a stupid business wise, but just for like our, Like the way we built this company and we like worki…”
Dayton: Blind competing term sheet price drove a higher valuation and earnout
“And they didn't know all the terms. They just knew the price. Right. So, so they had much better terms and they bumped up the price and, you know, structured a two year earn out so that I could get all the money I wanted for the company.”