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
Gamito: Nathan Barry fired him two weeks before ConvertKit equity vested
“I think my equity was supposed to vest and that director position was supposed to vest the next month, like two weeks after that. So it was a very strategic move on his part.”
Antonopoulos: State agencies and corporate banks fund most global terrorism
“The truth is that the vast majority of terrorism is funded by state agencies, intelligence agencies, and large corporate banking consortia.”
Kahlow: 1Mind's AI agent Fiona does the work of 89 SDRs and 19 SEs
“The transcripts, and the number of conversations, and the quality of conversations, the depth, and the content she was talking about, and it would have taken 89 SDRs and 19 sales engineers to do the job that Fiona is doing today.”
Ahrefs saved $400M over three years by avoiding cloud hosting
“We saved like four hundred million in three years by not going to the cloud. We built our own data centers. It's a little painful. We had some down times. We got some flack for it, but like it was the right decision in the end. We scale so much data. This numb…”
Microsoft screws channel partners by cutting renewal commissions to 5%
“Microsoft screws their channel program partners. What do they do? They give them a nice 30% commission on the first year, and a nice five percent commission on the second year when the customer renews.”
Martin: Bootstrapped SaaS Grows 6.7% Faster Than VC-Backed Past $10M ARR
“Another statistic that I saw was SaaS median growth rate over ten million ARR is 24%, so growth goes down obviously a little bit as you're scaling the organization.
However, if you split out venture-backed companies, Bootstrapped actually grows 6.7% faster
Tha…”
Hawkins: Arrowroot Capital forced an unwanted exit on Agilence
“All I know is that they forced our hand and it was not not what we wanted to do.”
Yampolskiy: SecurityScorecard grows over 50% while competitor BitSight barely grows at 20%
“We're consistently exceeding 50% plus growth rate much faster than our direct competitor. Direct competitor is barely growing at 20% rate. Nathan Latka: Who is your direct competitor? Alex Yampolskiy: Bitsite is our primary direct competitor.”
Lunawat: Large PE Funds Do Not Dominate U.S. Residential Market
“Even then, if you look at like the total volume of residential sales across the U S that's still a fraction of the total market. So to say that, you know, larger state private equity funds are kind of dominating the U S home residential market, I think would b…”
Founders fired entire agency staff to instantly rehire them for Penji
“We actually did something very interesting. We fired every single person on Waterfront Media, and then rehired them under Penji.”
Lynn: Majority of created art has outperformed the S&P 500
“At least for the majority of art created, it's outperformed the S&P.”
Competitor Proof ran Facebook ads featuring FOMO's customers and product
“Some of the other things they've done are like made advertised promotional videos with our customers in it, and then put tens of thousands on Facebook ads to promoting these videos. And if you watch the video, it's talking about proof, but in the video is our …”
Santens: One week of Fed liquidity could fund a $2,000 monthly UBI
“We could actually be paying for a 2000 dollar a month fully universal basic income for the amount of money that the, in, in, in the Fed is doing in one week.”
Jonathan Herzog claims SEO disinformation generated 100,000 false headlines post-launch
“Immediately thereafter, a targeted Systematic disinformation campaign was launched, where if you Google my name, Jonathan Herzog, on a computer and hit the news tab, you will see 100,000 of false headlines improperly indexed through SEO manipulation to myself,…”
Malone: The US government built hidden backdoors into Silicon Valley tech companies
“I watched the secretary of Homeland Security show up at a coffee shop in Los Altos and talk to the two founders of Google quietly.
There's trap doors that have been built all over Silicon Valley that we know nothing about.”
Gertler: ShareRoot IPO'd at $10.5M USD valuation on $700 MRR
“We went public in the early days of January of 2016, so two and a half years ago. What was our MRR at the time? MRR was at about 700 dollars when we went public. Market cap at the time was thirteen million Australian. Let's just, for simplicity purposes, call …”
Ricci claims Teens Digest vanished without paying its influencers
“One was Teens Digest, and the other one I think it was MyBikes. They're still around, but they ended up basically just cutting people's earnings in half. One of the first company I mentioned just kind of fell off the face of the earth and didn't pay any of the…”
Most Bitcoin developers are funded by self-interested entities
“I think that primarily this is happening within the Bitcoin world, in, in which the majority of the developers are funded by entities with interest in the outcome.”
Google's Firebase copied Branch's SDK variables and marketing collateral
“They launched a product in last year at Google IO that was a direct replica of branch under the Firebase brand called dynamic links, literally copied all of our marketing collateral. I think the variables of their iOS SDK you reused variables from my header fi…”
GoldenKey claims zero customer acquisition cost for supply and demand
“I, you know, customer acquisition costs on both supply and demand is zero.”
Ghadimi: VIP Motoring investors face zero risk to principal during market downturns
“We also have guarantees in place in case, let's say the market takes a tank. We can always back out and get out of certain deals so that the actual consumer is never actually impacted by this. So their principle is ultimately safe.”
Latka confirms some Heyo investors lost money in the exit
“So it is a 100% true that there were investors that got back less money than what they put in.”
Michael Litt claims Box artificially lowers CAC by filing hosting under COGS
“Historically, actually, and this may be an interesting backtrack is, is Box, right? When they host someone's files for free, right? In my opinion, that's a customer acquisition cost because you're paying for that content, but you know, they file that away as a…”
Rampton: Pixloo patent covered 360-degree photos and was widely infringed
“Yeah, so there was a technology, primarily we owned a patent. Or, I mean, that was probably our biggest asset was we owned a patent where if you take a camera and spin it 360 degrees. We own that patent. So pretty much. Yeah. Any photographer in the world has …”
Public liquid asset returns often match or beat venture capital
“There's all kinds of academic studies that the returns are that are very comparable to the private equity venture in many cases, even better.”
White: Fathom is top three by usage despite lower fundraising rank
“We're one of the top three people by usage in this space, but we're not even, I think in the top five or 10 by fundraising amount.”
Latka says B2B buyer allegiance is dropping and AI churn is rising
“We are seeing less and less allegiance from B to B buyers to any software product. Churn is just generally higher with these AI tools.”
McKeefery and his wife retained 100% equity in Reviews.io until sale
“100%, yeah. I had this, you know, I, there was a few people in the company who would help me along the way, and they got really big earn outs, but it was only really from me saying, hey, I want to make sure you get a big earn out out of this rather than it bei…”
Teens make six figures monthly on TikTok Shop using Arcads AI avatars
“Teens create TikTok shop accounts and they just like create a ton of content on TikTok using Arkad's avatars to promote those supplements brands and say sometimes like do really, really good revenue, like sometimes like six figures a month without any paid ads…”
Singh: Median Public Software Stock Down 21% Since 2018
“The median software company that's public is down 21% over the last six years, from 2018 to now.”
Hyrkin: Debt lender demanded 1% equity monthly and $1M penalty
“And this firm continued to negotiate with us after we had verbally agreed and kept squeezing and adding in more and more and more and more terms to the point where they started to demand they wanted at one point, an additional point in the company for each mon…”
6sense demanded a 3x price increase six months before contract expiration
“It's six months before the contract expires. They're like, we're gonna triple your price and hang up the phone.”
Novoselsky: 65% of B2B Searches Start on Social, Not Google
“Here's the stat that's really alarming, is 65% of the B to B search starts on social, not on Google.”
Founders can multiply $10M QSBS exemptions using multiple irrevocable trusts
“And so for federal taxes, if you want to save more money on federal taxes, what you do is you create a revocable trust and you gift your shares to your children or to your spouse or to your relative, your brother. And each of those trusts that you create gets …”
Chellappa: Big tech hires showed no performance difference compared to startup hires
“I've hired people from Salesforce, Zendesk, I've hired people from big brand companies, and I've seen no difference in performance from somebody who might have just worked for a smaller startup or run their own mom and pop business in the past.”
Lauris: Omnisend wins 80% of competitive sales cases against Mailchimp
“Mailchimp, which is our direct competitor as well, but if we compete against Mailchimp, in 80% of cases we win against them, because we know that we drive way better value for those who sell online.”
SMB SaaS spending growth surpassed enterprise growth in late 2023
“The interesting thing happened Q-three last year. So, around Web Summit last year, we gave a State of the Union on, on SaaS. And we said, it's interesting. The small buyers come back. The small buyers started outperforming the big buyers for the first time in …”
Martin: Nine-Figure VC Competitors Failed to Dislodge Time Doctor
“And we actually were terrified around 20, 21, because we had like seven companies that raised over a hundred million dollars, To come directly after our market, and so far, none of them have really penetrated the market that badly because we already had that e…”
Martin: Remote workers are 35% to 40% more productive than in-office workers
“Remote workers are 35 to 40% more productive than their office workers.”
iContact scraped Constant Contact newsletters to acquire its first 500 customers
“We subscribed to about a 100,000 of their customers' newsletters, and then as soon as we got them, we'd send a reply back offering them half off. That got us our first 500 customers.”
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…”
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?”
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 …”
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.”
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.”
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…”