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
Marc Benioff offered $95M for iContact before walking away in 2009
“In 2009, Marc Benioff reached out to us and he said, I wanna buy your company. We're gonna buy, pay you ninety-five million. I said, that sounds good, let's do it. He strung us along for a few months finally ended up buying ExactTarget a few years later. Walke…”
Burns: Sell to buyer objectives and personal bonuses, not pain points
“No one's going to care about solving pain points right now, but everybody needs to hit goals, right? And if we can identify their objectives and sell to objectives as opposed to pain, certainly not features, right? Because that doesn't matter. People are going…”
Schwartz: 90% of merchant defaults are orchestrated by debt settlement companies
“Nine out of 10 of those deals that go into defaults are not because the merchant is running into issues. They're going in because they get the debt settlement companies call them and say, basically stop paying. We're going to negotiate for less, right?”
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.”
Miller: Ad Returns Dropped 50% After TZP Outsourced PPC
“And so their returns on the advertising Went from what they were to half of what they used to be.”
SVB Refused to Lend to Miller Because He Lacked VC Backers
“They were one of our banks, but they never lent us money. We flowed all our credit cards through them. And, ah, they would come to us all the time and ask if we wanted to borrow money from them. We'd say, sure. And, you know, we were the only company they had …”
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…”
Anupam Rastogi: Most SaaS Should Be Built Without Venture Capital
“Venture capital is not, For everyone, I'd say, in fact, for a very small percentage of founders and companies, I'd say a lot of SaaS can be built without venture capital and should be built without venture capital.”
Mini Hotel loses a maximum of one customer per month
“We don't have more than one client per month leaving us.”
Hawkins: Agilence sold under 5x ARR but deserved an 8x multiple
“We sold sub five and I think we should have gotten more like eight.”
Maryasin: Fintech infrastructure has no viable low-cost MVP
“For us, what we see is that there is no real MVP in this market. Like if people come to us and say, Hey, I want to be a build.com for my clients. I can't give them like a scrappy little solution that doesn't really work. I have to give them something a lot mor…”
Bhattacharya: Involve.ai can reach $20M ARR without raising more capital
“We don't think we would need to raise another round, at least in the near future to keep growing. And we feel we can get to ten million, even twenty million in ARR very quickly without even raising extra capital.”
Giloff: ShipIt's existing investors refused $600k bridge and advised bankruptcy
“I went to my investors and I was like, Hey guys, we have a problem. We don't have a term sheet anymore. But I made out a plan. I need 600 K to do all the changes I need. I need to close Mexico operation. I need to fire people, pay their money. So I need that a…”
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.”
Kagan: 30% of job candidates are rejected because parsers cannot read resumes
“So what happens is, is that 30% of candidates who apply for a job, they get rejected not based on their skills, Or their resume, but because the technology can't read their resume.”
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.”
Sanwal: Giving early employees C-level titles causes organizational friction later
“If somebody's gonna be a CTO when you're three people, and then you get to 30, and that person no longer is relevant in that role, then you're gonna have to top them, they're gonna look like they took a demotion, it just creates all sorts of agita and anxiety …”
Sanwal: Consensus-driven culture results in a 'shit brown culture'
“If you give everybody input into what the culture's gonna become, you're gonna have a shit brown culture. And so what you got to do is say, nope, this is our culture, and we're going to spike on these two colors, and that's it”
Sanwal: Do not hire candidates with a track record of startup failures
“When you see somebody who's taking a lot of L's, like, you know, hey, I was at a startup, it failed, my prior startup had this problem, and you look at their resume, and it's just like a string of losses, like, don't hire that person.”
Maruthavanan: "Save time" SaaS pitches fail in time-rich, money-poor markets
“So there are some geographies which are time rich, but money poor, and if you sell save time there, it's not going to work. But some geographies which are money rich and time poor, then save time value proposition and messaging is going to work.”
Maruthavanan: Upekkha Threatened to Expel SocialPilot Unless They Raised Prices
“Prasanna, my co-founder, threatened to throw them out of the cohort if they don't increase the pricing. They went ahead and did that, and then they saw that the revenue did not dip, there was a little bit of a churn, and then they become encouraged by that, so…”
Kalyanaraman: Reaching $2M ARR does not prove a repeatable sales motion
“If you're still at two million ARR, trust me, you haven't really created a repeatable sales motion. You've created some validation. It ain't repeatable sales motion yet. You've just had your founders sell stuff, right?”
Diaz: Velocity is the only true sustainable competitive advantage
“More opportunities, resources, and tooling reduces the barrier to entry. Increases competition, resulting in velocity being the only true sustainable advantage.”
Western European and Nordic Buyers Pay 20% Higher SaaS Prices
“Companies in the Nordics and Western Europe are willing to pay 20% higher prices for the exact same product relative to the U.S. So, go increase your price by 20% in Western Europe and watch your conversion rates stay the same.”
Patel: Agency service churn is typically much lower than software churn
“Churn in our space is typically much lower than software churn.”
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.”
Singh: Sensor data underwrites restaurants better than bank tax returns
“I always said, I could underwrite a restaurant better than a bank. I don't need your tax returns. Just put a sensor in your restaurant, and I'll track the traffic and be able to lend you better than any bank could, and a bank can't do that, and in a similar se…”
Monetization and retention offer significantly higher revenue impact than acquisition
“We gather data on what they're spending time on, and we basically found that you know, there's way more impact on spending a bit more time on monetization, a bit more time on retention, compared to spending time on acquisition.”
Donovan: Rule of 40 had zero correlation with SaaS multiples before Q2 2022
“So if you just use rule of 40 where you composite, you smoosh growth and efficiency together, until Q two of last year, there was actually no correlation. So, like, I would have called total BS on using rule of 40 by itself before Q two of last year. It just w…”
Martin: Remote work projected to reach 62% of US workforce by 2030
“So by 2027, it's projected to be 50% of the U.S. Workforce, and actually by 2030, we're projected to be at 62%, dependent upon the data set that you take a look at.”
Martin: Remote workers are on average 13% more productive than on-premise peers
“On average, remote workers are 13% more productive than their on premise counterparts.”
Allouche tanked his credit score to 250 to fund Metadata
“I maxed out all of my credit cards. American Express would call me daily. I would pick up my phone and tell them I'm not paying you anything. When I have money, I'm paying you all of it. Right now, you can keep calling me. Not paying you any of that. And third…”
Suski: Offering 7-Day Free Trial Did Not Increase Surfer's Conversion Rate
“And then we thought, yeah, maybe it's a good idea to let people try Surfer without, you know, paying up front 15, 59 dollars just for, like, a credit card details. We'll charge them after seven days. That's probably going to make the conversion much higher. An…”
Suski: SEO in competitive niches is impractical for early bootstrapped startups
“Our niche was highly competitive, so we were to compete with Ahrefs, SEMrush, HubSpot, big domains, big players, so if that's the case, you will need to wait for results for a long time, like a year or so, and you'll need to invest a lot of money, and if you a…”
Suski: Startups should wait until $1M+ profit before investing in SEO
“If you're profitable over one million dollar a year, you do invest in SEO, so we just waited for some 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…”
Manonia KH considers granting parents 60% equity in BoltCode
“Yes, I am looking at giving them around 60% of equity.”
SaaS double-digit multiple expansion triggers at $60M to $70M revenue
“I think the kind of like the trigger is in the 60, 70 range where people can look at that and say, like, can we get this to 203 104 hundred, really, right? And that's a linear argument. I mean, it's still a pretty, Pretty big lift, but it's a linear argument, …”
Bhaskaran stopped studying Jeff Bezos because he 'became a dick'
“I used to follow Bezos before he became a dick, but that's alright.”
Pang says Chinese founders treat investors as debt, not equity
“A lot of founders in China grew up being under a different, very different regime. Their mentality is that let me grow it and let me take control of it. The investors are just, you know, capital money. They're debt. They're not equity.”
Messer: 5% of global B2B economy passes through Collective[i] daily
“We usually just disclosed about five percent of the globe's B to B economy is passing through us every day.”
Latka: Companies die once acquired by private equity firms
“Once the, once a private equity firm buys a company, it's, it dies.”
Cutting R&D preserves software revenue growth better than cutting marketing
“So when the lever you can pull is R and D expense, right. And you feel like you're just going to, the pace of innovation will just slow down a little bit. Then you can actually keep your revenue growth, but then drop your OPEX growth, right? The second that yo…”
Dubin: Viewst Turned Down a $20M Cash-and-Equity Acquisition Offer
“It's not, it wasn't like 12 twenty million, like cash upfront. So it was partially cash and partially like equity in the new company, like actually unicorn.”