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
Ghatge: Elite Indian sales reps effectively close US software deals
“I think like five years back, the story was very different, but they've learned, they've trained themselves and the really good ones have figured it out. And of course that pool is much smaller than what you'd like it to be. But it's still much cheaper than ha…”
Kaevand: AppSumo brings the wrong customers for long-term SaaS retention
“Yeah, because like if you launch there you get wrong kind of customers. You don't get the kind of customers that are going to be with you like long-term. They don't count towards churn like retention. It's a lifetime plan. It's like only good for like very spe…”
Latka: Founders leak their metrics on my podcast to induce acquisition bids
“I full disclosure have, I won't name them, but I have founders who call on my show specifically because they want a reason to share their numbers live where it looks like I'm beating it out of them, but really they want to share it because they want the market…”
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…”
Salafia: Competitors sign unqualified customers in grow-at-all-costs push
“Our competition is Is a lot like that, like, and that's the feedback we get. It's grow at all costs, hustle, just sign anyone up, even if they don't qualify, whatever, we'll get to it later.”
Carpel: VCs frequently retrade deal terms at the last minute
“I've seen so many times where they say yes to you at first, and then they will retrade you, so your terms get worse at the very, very end, right? So a yes is never a hundred percent.”
Carpel: Founders can use Founderpath debt to buy personal real estate
“Unlock the wealth, take the money, and put that into other things. Again, the S&P 500 a commercial building, buy a house for your mom, buy a house for yourself all permissible and all doable with this product.”
OnStrategy refuses to sell software without mandatory bundled professional services
“There's no question. We don't ask you if you want services. We don't ask you if you want an add-on. If you want to buy from us, it's software and services. That's how we sell it.”
PPC Ad Lab pays affiliate partners 100% of first-month customer revenue
“Right now, there's a launch about to go down in about seven days from now. And check this out. We're paying 100% of month one revenue as a commission.”
Allouche defaulted on Amex to preserve runway, dropping credit to 500
“American Express. Not essential. Got a phone call every day. Sir, are you gonna pay your debt? No. I'm not gonna pay a dollar of my debt. My credit score went down to 500.”
Olson: Startups must let systems break to know what to fix
“Sometimes things have to break and fall over to actually see what you need to fix.”
EstateSpace secured $1M in SBA COVID relief despite mass layoffs
“COVID, it gave us almost a million dollars in free money, so We had a lot of people pre-COVID. We let them all go, but the way that they looked, the SBA looked at that was that, okay, they counted us for the 2018, 2019 time when we had a lot of employees, so w…”
Elfond: 'Fail fast' dogma fails in niche markets where failures are remembered
“In all the startup schools, they'll say, they'll tell you fail fast and learn from it. Great learning when you have a huge industry and you can sell to as many people as you can and you'll never remember the people that you failed with. Not in the smaller indu…”
Benson: Lighter Capital required full 4-year interest on early exit
“They had a term that if we wanted to exit the loan early, like after two years, it was a four-year loan, if we want to pay it off after two years and take our money somewhere else, We had to pay them all the interest as if we had been there for four years”
Benson: Engineering delivers higher long-term ROI than sales but takes longer
“Sales or marketing or anything on the revenue side pays off at a pays off faster, but at a lower ultimate rate engineering resources and actually making the product better, creating that extra feature that wins you extra deals pays off at the highest rate, but…”
Benson: SaaS startups should always take debt before equity once generating revenue
“I think that the rule is debt before equity. If you can get it, it's cheaper. Equity capital is super expensive. You can't get debt until you already have revenue. Once you can get debt, you should get debt. You stack equity on top of it. But even if you just …”
A top expense app's 'smart scanning' was secretly powered by offshore humans
“Or there's another company, a very popular expense company that allows employees to expense receipts. And they would have a feature called a smart scanning feature where you could take a picture of the receipt and then it would extract. But that wasn't a smart…”
Arrigoni: Remote work is a talent strategy, not a cost-saver
“When people say, oh, we're going to save a bunch of money by running a remote company. Not necessarily. Running a remote company could be expensive. It's a talent tech. Strategy. A hundred percent because now the total addressable market of people that you're …”
Hauser: Startups should only use venture debt for proven marketing channels
“My number one takeaway on that is only use it for Things you know are working. Marketing channels you know are working. It's not for testing. It's not for hiring. It's not for growing product. It's none of those things. It is, I know that if I spend a dollar h…”
Pokros: Recruiting scorecards are stupid and merely reinforce preexisting choices
“We firmly Believe that scorecards are stupid. I think that scorecards make you feel like the choice that you made makes you feel better about the choice you made. It only reifies your existing values and your existing choices.”
Miller: Post-exit, Awareness Technologies' revenue will halve to $10M in 2022
“The business will do ten million in revenue this year.”
Miller: Awareness Technologies' new owners defaulted on debt payments in 2022
“They haven't made a bank payment or an interest payment since March, and they might not for quite a while.”
Prados: Review Wave is strictly 'remote never' and rejects remote work
“We are not remote first. We're remote. We're remote never. I hate that business model.”
Latka: An employer review site for rating employees is a billion-dollar business
“There's a billion dollar business in here. Someone's gotta just build that and go to town.”
Fuller: 65% of supply chain news is sourced from FreightWaves
“65% of supply chain content is originally sourced from FreightWave. So if you're reading Times, you're reading it on the Washington Post, Perhaps you're reading it in Bloomberg. A lot of that data material actually gets originally sourced through our data and …”
Osgood: Small AppSumo Users Have Identical Launch Problems to Large Enterprises
“Yeah, because honestly, the problem, the problems that are That, that user versus the problems that are a larger company user, they're almost identical when you're talking about launching products. Like I actually fundamentally disagree with the idea that they…”
Joe Long claims competitor CompuFloor lost six key staff in 18 months
“So literally, CompuFloor is failing across its entire customer base. They've had three project managers who've left over the last 18 months. Three programmer left. So they've they're struggling.”
Lemkin: Price increase warnings are the only event marketing CTA that converts
“Prices going up. That's the only CTA that works, too. Nothing else works. Prices, discounts don't work. Great speakers, you know, nothing works but prices.”
Lemkin: More Than Half of Founders Are Miserable After Selling
“Some founders are great
Going fishing in Cabo and doing whatever, but others, I would say more than half are miserable after selling their company.”
Corwin: Sustainable hedge funds require at least $500M to $1B AUM
“The minimum you need five hundred million to a billion to make it a long-term business, sustainable business”
Latka: A founder will build a billion-dollar business with one FTE
“Someone's going to build a billion dollar business and have one FTE as the founder and then a network of contractors.”
Hartert: Jotform Aims for $150M ARR While Remaining Fully Bootstrapped
“Probably the first one. Yeah, I mean, that's really kind of been our mantra since day one. That's our CEO's whole, you know, methodology to it, and it's worked great for us.”
Keeley: Embedded fintech can increase vertical SaaS platform valuations 3x to 10x
“We really have a lens on the world that says vertical SaaS platforms are literally worth three to five to 10 times more if this strategy is implemented well with the right technology”
Inflectra pays zero sales commissions, keeping all salespeople on salary
“But we have actually, and one thing, we have no sales commission. So everyone, even salespeople are all on salary, and everything is, is a team bonus that the company makes as a whole.”
Campbell: ProfitWell exec delayed signing employment agreement for a year
“Like we did like FACU didn't sign his employment agreement for like a year because we were like worried that we were going to have to like take the source code.”
Cal.com pays identical engineering salaries globally regardless of an employee location
“In, in engineering, which is like nine percent of our team, we have three pay bands and that's it. We got, I see one, two, and three, like junior, mid and senior. It doesn't matter where the hell you are in the world. It doesn't matter what, like you don't, Ne…”
Chaudhry: BlogVault builds a better product than Automattic
“So Automatic is the company, yes. And we would love to, yeah, we think we have a better product than them.”
Ashkenazi: Fundraising ability is the ultimate determinant of startup success
“I think it's absolutely critical to raise money from external investors, even if you can fund it, or you think that you can fund it, your ability to raise money is the number one thing that will determine your future success.”
Latka: Modest early revenue hurts VC-backed startups more than zero revenue
“It's almost a problem that you have revenue because then people want to harp on you about how low the revenue is when really you should just eliminate the revenue and just focus on user and engagement growth”
Liu in May 2022: FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried is an absolute monster
“Well, I used to work at FTX. I think the founder there, Sam Bakeman Freed is a, is an absolute monster.”
Fertel says a 5% monthly churn rate is strong for SaaS
“I mean, pretty much, you know, most SaaS companies, no matter, you know, no matter what you do, a five percent churn is pretty sort of a natural churn. It's considered a strong churn rate.”
BNPL Network Take Rates Fall Far Below 3% to 5%
“No, it's certainly not three to five percent, right? ... It's much less, right? If you look on the payment space, right? When a merchant is typically paying in the U S somewhere between 1.6 to A critical transaction, right? This cost would include the issuing …”
Milich: Skiff Will Refuse DOJ Backdoor Demands for User Data
“I think definitely not, and there's no legal precedent that we would do that.”
Gig platforms outsource embedded credit to avoid debt bondage reputational risk
“At the end of the day, it's still quite heavily regulated in consumer credit business, meaning the barriers for entry are quite high and you do carry underwriting and default risk, meaning that you need to have a proper treasury collection and credit risk func…”
Nicolas Vandenberghe: Nations should only exist for soccer tournaments and global taxes
“So my view is that at some stage we should have global taxes you know, we should have no, we should have nation for soccer tournament, that's cool, but not for anything else, not for fight and all that.”
Upfront cash is the only real financial risk for acquirers
“Whatever price tag you give, you can divide it between what you pay today, and what you pay tomorrow, and what you pay the day after. And whatever you pay tomorrow and the day after usually has some contingencies, right? If you think about it, like, yeah, I me…”