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
Prospective 2012 buyers cut DiscoverOrg's acquisition offer in half after diligence
“These guys retraded me right at the end. They said, oh, come down to San Francisco, have lunch with us. So I came down to San Francisco, and they were like, yeah, you know, there's some things in diligence we didn't like, and so we're gonna cut the deal in hal…”
The DOJ held RainKing's antitrust review to the final decision deadline
“When we made the acquisition of Rain King, we actually, you have to get antitrust approval. And so we went, and the regular, the regulators didn't love the ranking acquisition because they felt very similar, two very similar companies, and so we actually went …”
Passing on ZoomInfo at $240M was right because the company wasn't ready
“A year earlier, I had an opportunity to buy Zoom Info for two hundred and forty million dollars and I passed. And that might feel like a bad decision. Like, oh, that was dumb. He had to pay eight hundred million dollars one year later. It wasn't a bad decision…”
SmartSuite operates with zero employees and two co-founders using agency contractors
“We have no employees in place. I have two co-founders We hired teams of people inside of companies. I think we have five different main companies that we work with from a development perspective.”
WhatConverts Converts 70% of Free Trial Users Into Paying Customers
“And in one area that has really helped is of companies that start with us, 70% that start with a free trial, they become customers.”
Abel: Legacy software analysts don't use the software they evaluate
“You know, I said it's like a restaurant critic that literally can't eat the food, right? The analyst can't use the software, and they just stand outside the restaurant asking other people, how is your meal? And I'd rather ask the people eating the meal, right?…”
Total India and SE Asia MarTech market is only $150M to $200M
“So the challenge for us is that the Indian market is actually quite small, even though the customer base is very large companies don't pay a lot of money yet. So the email market plus the martech business put together would probably be just about 150 odd milli…”
Burnside predicts LendingPoint will reach $120M in net profit in 2022
“We're making money. We'll, we'll make a hundred plus this year. A hundred million net. Yeah. A hundred, a 120.”
Latka predicts a SaaS company will soon IPO with under 10 employees
“Greg, I say one day, I think very soon there's going to be someone that takes a company public with less than 10 FTEs, a SaaS company.”
Solomon: Founders selling for $150M often walk away with only $300k
“I've seen a lot of people sell for one hundred and fifty million bucks and walk away with like 300 grand.”
Medina: Goldman Sachs tells companies $200M ARR is new IPO baseline
“200 is a new 100. So you can't, it's no longer a hundred... That's what Goldman is telling everybody.”
Isilay: Cognism net retention is around 85% and moving toward 90%
“So our net retention our net retention is around 85% right now, and it's moving towards it, 90%.”
Jackson: Token Projects Raise Less Capital Than Traditional Equity Startups
“I think, so what's interesting is token projects on, on par kind of raise less money Then equity projects because the community is doing more of the work. Right. And getting more of the ownership.”
Crashlytics intentionally broke developer builds to force viral team adoption
“And when a developer, sorry, when a developer started using it, they actually put it in their app and we broke their build in the nicest way possible so that every other engineer on their team would find out about Crashlytics and then start using it.”
Full Vertical SaaS Enables Easier Expansion Than Single-Wedge Strategy
“No, absolutely not. Because then it's very difficult to expand. Whereas when you come in with a full vertical SAS, then it's easier to expand.”
Marinelli: Installation Friction Prevents IoT From Becoming a Commodity
“IoT isn't that commodity that we think it is, especially because of installation time, setup time, and so on. So if you really nail down the hardware part, you can go to go to market more easily, and you can just have like more successful customers that are pa…”
Austin claims micro-SMB SaaS churn is driven by poor entrepreneurial skills
“I realized that a lot of our churn was because of micro SMB, you know, entrepreneurs not being good entrepreneurs. So we had to fix the mindset of the customer coming into the gate about business, not really about our product.”
Ross Buhrdorf: SMBs prefer major commercial banks over fintechs for primary deposits
“Our customers don't want us to take deposits. They don't, you know, the, we're embedded fintech, so we have You know, a FBO account, or think of it as like a Venmo account. We have a holding account. That's what our customers want. They don't, they want Chase.…”
Schleifer: Raising VC is significantly easier than pre-selling an unbuilt product
“I mean, if you're going to say what are the different approaches, it's a lot easier to go raise money from VC than it is to go and pre-sell customers on a product. That's like, you know, a straight up answer on that one.”
Simons: Raising venture capital actually de-risks a startup for early-stage founders
“I think raising money in my mind is a form of de-risking. A venture. I think some people think that it like increases the risk, but for us, I see it as like a form of de-risking.”
CrawlQ netted only $110k from $650k in gross AppSumo sales
“So a 110 K is a net net that came to us after all the commissions from Epsom.”
Miles: Salad is the world's fourth largest supercomputer
“We're now the world's fourth largest supercomputer.”
Miles: Salad's compute costs one-fifth of AWS spot instances
“The cost of our compute is around one fifth, again, per teraflop per hour of an AWS spot instance.”
Urban: Wunderkind can increase client business by 20% within a year
“If someone uses our full series, we can increase the business by 20%. And that's like a real number. It's like within a year, like we can increase almost any business within 20%.”
Urban: Wunderkind's SaaS and advertising divisions will each reach $1B revenue
“These are ultimately these are going to be both billion dollar revenue businesses.”
Yampolskiy: BitSight generates ~$100M ARR, growing at barely 20%
“Those guys are going to do about a hundred million in ARR, and they're growing kind of barely at 20%.”
Yampolskiy: SecurityScorecard beats BitSight 70% of the time in bake-offs
“Well, look, we beat them. We beat them. 70% of the time in a big off.”
SecurityScorecard: Valuation will triple or quadruple within 18 to 24 months
“We believe that within the next. 18 to 24 months, again, we're going to triple or quadruple evaluation of a company or more.”
David Yang: Yva.ai can predict employee resignations before decisions are made
“This technology can predict employees' resignation even before employees actually decided to resign.”
Mehrguth: 50% of LinkedIn Industry Targeting Data Is Inaccurate
“So like 99.9% of people who advertise on LinkedIn use the industries to target. You know, I'm talking about when you're running a LinkedIn ad and it's like industry computer software. What I found is 50% of that data is incorrect. And so most of our clients co…”
Assaraf: Salesforce, Confluent, and Snowflake will enter observability
“I actually mentioned that Salesforce, I think, will get in our space some way, somehow, and I think I'm fluent. We'll also step into the observability space. I think also Snowflake will get there because it's just that makes no sense for companies that control…”
Latka: Raising VC traps founders by blocking smaller lucrative acquisitions
“You're going to raise two million out of 10 pre. Whatever your buddies that you, but you take your buddy, your old boss's money, whatever. Great. Great for you. Then you're going to keep growing revenue and you're going to get a six million dollar acquisition …”
Derek Steer: $500M mega-rounds are defensive plays to declare category winners
“Once you get into rounds that are this, as big as like this five train round, you know, five hundred million bucks. Part of that investment is defensive where you were essentially declaring yourselves the winner of the space and like excluding other folks from…”
Fuller: Media monetizes early, but SaaS builds self-sustaining momentum
“It's easier to monetize media, frankly, than it is SaaS. I don't know that a lot of people realize that. But the great thing about SaaS is it, like once you get that engine going, it's, it has its own set of momentum, which doesn't require you to put as much i…”
Arora: Intervue is looking to raise north of $6M
“We are looking to raise around north of six million in the coming days.”
Ultian: State licensing infrastructure market opportunity will close in eight months
“If we can get out there ahead of that change, if we can be the provider for the states themselves to be able to grant licenses, that puts us in a pretty unassailable position, and that opportunity will exist for the next six to eight months.”
Vandenberg: Chili Piper Will Hit $1B Valuation at $20M ARR
“I would say that if we meet our plan by the end of the year, getting the twenty million, we'd be there.”
Vandenberg: Drift Refuses Small Customers to Mask Churn Problems
“I see the drift is doing that because they've had the churn problem. So then they're trying to make their numbers look better. So they even refuse to take companies.”
Vandenberg: Chili Piper Will Hit $100 Per Share, Making Employees Millionaires
“We have a 150 pipers. We promised them all that we're going to get our share price to a hundred dollars a piece so that they're all millionaires every single one of them.”
Mehta: Net retention is the primary valuation driver in SaaS
“The number one valuation driver in SAS is net retention.”
O'Shull: Derive is the only fleet software writing to vehicle ECUs
“And that's really the secret sauce in the enterprise fleet management space. Nobody's doing that. Everybody's reading from the ECU to do telematics and all that kind of stuff. Nobody is really writing back to it.”
Svizovich: Referizer Will Go Public Within Five Years
“A hundred employees to get a rich financial freedom in five years when you go public.”
Working 6-8 Hours a Day Won't Launch a Startup
“If you work six hours, seven hours, eight hours a day, you won't get your business up and running.”
JazzHR Customers Stay for Roughly 10 Years on Average
“To bring in a customer who's going to stay with us for 10 years-ish on average, it's more, with that, through that lens, it's more than worth the investment.”
Mortensen: Scaling AI before solving accuracy risks polluting training data
“The worst thing that can happen right now is that I start to pollute my data set because I think I have everything solved. So we are extremely protective about that data set.”
Rubin: Debt is always cheaper than equity for successful startups
“That's always cheaper than equity. If you think you're going to be successful, that is always cheaper.”
Capchase debt financing saves Blackthorn over $18M compared to equity dilution
“I think I did some rough math. I think over the next two and a half to three years, we're going to pay them upwards of two million. Whereas if we did a dilutive round now at exit, that dilution would be minimum, twenty million, like bare minimum.”