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 15,480 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 52 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
Afsahi: Competitors lack B2B fraud data for China, Russia, Middle East
“None of our competitors provide their, any data from regions like China or Russia, Middle East, and we include all of these data in our databases as well.”
Latka: I Know Way More Broke VC-Backed Founders Than Bootstrapped Ones
“I know a lot of, I know way more broke VC back founders than I know broke bootstrap founders.”
Raising venture capital almost killed Cleeng
“How the fundraising almost killed us. That's literally what happened at that moment. We raised money. We were super happy, but actually it turned out not to be the best best choice in our life.”
Sanwal: CB Insights' outfunded competitors all failed or are struggling
“We've been outfunded by numerous competitors. They've all they've all failed or aren't doing very well. So, money is just oxygen. It doesn't buy you the ability to execute, and I think that's really important.”
Jain: Digital ad tech suffers from $200 billion in acquisition waste
“In ad tech, actually, there's a lot of, there's two hundred billion dollars of waste, you know, in reacquisition and wrong acquisition.”
ThriveCart Reached $1B GMV Selling Lifetime Deals Instead of Subscriptions
“The vast majority of their revenue is actually not SaaS. They had a SaaS product, but they sold it entirely one time. It was a lifetime license, and most people would think that's not a very good business, not a very good idea, but because they were monetizing…”
ThriveCart's Acquirer Publicly Announced the $35M Buyout as a Funding Round
“A thirty-five million dollar transaction the fund that acquired it, raised money, acquired Thrivecart as part of the deal, announced as a raise.”
Callens: 89% of top G2 SaaS companies receive negative analytics reviews
“So what we did is we looked at 250 of the top-performing G-two top-performing companies on G-two on the main categories. And we looked at how their end users perceived the analytical feature set. And we actually found out that 89% of all these companies dealt …”
Rule of 40 is now the metric most correlated with SaaS valuation
“But it's now the number one SAS metric as correlated to enterprise value in the next 12 months revenue. A year ago, it was number five. Growth is still number two. But balanced growth with profitability is number one.”
Rubin: B2B win rates fell 15% and deal sizes dropped one-third
“So less than 15% of or win rates dropped by 15%. Average deal values went down by a third, and sales cycles were continued to increase to buy an extra 30%.”
Rubin: Lost Deals Spend Twice as Long in Pipeline as Won Deals
“And the deals that close lost spend twice as long in pipe as deals that close one.”
Surfer SEO dominated search by having 3,000 affiliates write review articles
“Out of these 3000 affiliates Every single one created Surfer SEO review, targeting keyword surfer SEO review, which made us really dominate the SERPs with the message that we wanted, because we, they are our affiliate.”
Hurt: Competitors Alation and Collibra rely on slow on-prem releases
“Cause we're competing here primarily against Alation and Calibra, which are both primarily on-prem. Most of the revenue comes from on-prem and they come out with a couple of releases a year. We come out with over a thousand product releases a year, literally r…”
Hurt: Customer scaled from 12 Collibra users to 31K on Data.world
“Yeah, so that was one where they failed with Calibra and they never got- They never got over 12. Users. And with us, they're at 31,000 users.”
Top SaaS Companies Generate 20%+ Revenue from Existing Customers
“What we see when we look at this across the 40,000 companies in our portfolio is that the highest performing ones, 20% of their revenue or more is from their existing customer base. Unfortunately, most the vast majority have zero or negative.”
Multi-Product SaaS Companies Grow 30% to 50% Faster
“Companies that do this grow at 30, 50% faster rates than those that have a single product.”
Product Add-Ons Increase SaaS Customer Lifetime Value by 18% to 54%
“But companies that do this well have 18 to 54% higher lifetime value when they have at least one add-on.”
Patel: Canva reached $1M MRR roughly 30 days after launching
“They're one of the fastest companies to ever hit a million dollars in MR. I think they did it in 30 days or something like that of launching.”
Patel: Software division generates easily eight figures annual EBITDA
“Our software division can Generate easily eight figures a year in EBITDA, plus we're generating all the leads on the other, not revenue, eight figures in EBITDA, right?”
Siu: Marketers still spend hundreds of thousands monthly on SEO backlinks
“When it comes to links, people are like, oh, SEO's dead, links don't work anymore. I'm telling you, I have a lot of friends, they, they're spending like a couple 100,000 dollars a month on links because it works.”
Talley Invented Hilton's Automated Text Messaging Over 15 Years Ago
“Hotels, and if you ever stayed at Hilton and you get a text message, I invented that over 15 years ago.”
Talley: Phone-number payments are proven safer than plastic cards
“We proved that it's actually much safer to do a transaction through us with a phone number than it is with a piece of plastic.”
Donovan: Rule of 40 SaaS valuation premium increased from 1.5x to 2x
“If you were to take all the data that's in the 20, the zero, the under zero to up to 40, and then compare that to the over 40, it was about 1.5 x higher for the people who were over 40 before. And now it's two x higher if you're over 40.”
Donovan: Free cash flow margin explains 40% of SaaS valuation multiples
“40% of the variation in Multiple can be explained by variation in free cash flow margin.”
Martin: Stanford study showed remote workers have 50% lower attrition
“And the craziest study, this is 16,000 subjects out of Stanford over a nine month period, identified that remote workers have an attrition rate that is 50% lower than their on-premise counterparts.”
Martin: GitLab operates with thousands of employees but conducts zero meetings
“Multi-billion dollar company. Public now. Incredibly successful. They don't do meetings at all. I have a couple thousand people. They don't do meetings.”
Danzeisen: Venios maintains zero customer churn rate
“That's so we do have so we don't have a churn rate. Churn rate is zero.”
Senior engineers in New Delhi cost $35K to $40K annually
“Senior engineer at about like four to six years of experience... Roughly 35 to 40,000 dollars a year.”
McNamby: Major POS competitors charge $15k to $25k cancellation fees
“While most companies will say, Hey, by the way, you're going to owe us 15, 20, 25,000 dollars to cancel because that's the profit we would have made on your account.”
Meyer notes high customer attrition is universal across laundry marketplaces
“There's a natural attrition rate. And this is a universal with actually all of our competitors.”
Bauer: Traditional brokerages are profitable, unlike venture-backed real estate startups
“We're not only on the large brokerage end, we're also on the quality brokerage, the full service brokerage end, which means that these companies tend to be better run. They are profitable and they don't rely on the kind of funding that you've seen some of the …”
Yates Claims a 30% Click-Through Rate on Loreca's Newsletter
“No, two, sorry, 30% of everyone clicks through our website reader blog.”
Nassar: Clearbit and Seamless.ai Miss Professional-to-Consumer Links
“You know, rocket reach seamless.ai clear bit. There's several of them that exist out there. And a lot of them use the same kind of waterfall of vendors that exists, but what they're not doing is they're not tying the professional profile with the consumer prof…”
Birdseye De-Anonymizes 50% of Web Traffic Without Exposing Raw Emails
“Right now we're averaging at around 50% of de-anonymized traffic, but for the consumers, we are not giving you their email addresses.”
Britton: Programmatic audience providers frequently deliver survey responses from bots
“When people try to buy an audience to respond to a survey from a programmatic audience provider, what they often find is it's a lot of bots that are answering the questions.”
Fanus Claims JobPaths Is the Largest U.S. DEI Platform by Far
“But a really robust platform the largest D and I platform in the country by far.”
Instantly sends hundreds of thousands of cold emails daily to acquire customers
“And then on the marketing stuff, it's just, we used instantly sending 100,000 of emails every day.”
Latka: Under 6% of Freshworks users adopt more than two products
“Like he told me when I interviewed him, less than six percent of Freshworks total user base uses more than two products.”
Tesla sold 15,000 cars in a day by making staff salespeople
“He sends an email out to everybody in the company saying you're laid off and you're hired again. And your new job is a sales job... In a day, they sold 15,000 cars.”
Chappell: Joel Marion's BioTrust generated over $100M revenue in its first year
“So he was able to attract the best affiliates in the world, and in his first 12 months in business with a supplement company, he did over one hundred million dollars in revenue.”
Olson says a 30% price hike pushed OnStrategy's retention past 100%
“We increased our prices about 30%. We shifted to a quarterly pricing model, matched that up with our, like, our job to be done, which is managing a quarterly process and got paid more for that. So that's really working for us, and that's how we got to more tha…”
Asim: Tyler Technologies built a notification product to compete with eCorte
“The biggest company within this space is is really an elephant named Tyler Tech, a multi-billion dollar primarily government software company based in Texas, and they don't really like us. So they actually built out a product To kind of compete with us, their …”
Metadata account executives converted commissions to equity, saving $1M cash
“All the AEs who are very cash, you know, kind of cash operated, They converted 50 to a hundred percent of their commissions into options, into common options. That got, got them a lot more invested in the business, and got us about a million dollar cash back i…”
Metadata Raised $3M Series A Extension at 2x Valuation Post-Cuts
“And after that, we went back to our Series A investors to tell them about the cuts, and they said, fuck, that's amazing. Here is three million dollar more because you guys are so efficient. So we raised another three million dollar in, in, by the way, twice ev…”