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 506 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 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
King: I passed on a $1M-per-month brand after finding founder diligence red flags
“And I was very interested in working with him, helping him, raising for him, investing directly. But then I got into his finances and he was transparent with what's going on in his life. I said, I can't touch this with a 10 foot pole, right?”
King: I only write angel checks expecting the money to go bye-bye
“It's angel investing, and I never expect to make any money. I only write checks that I prepare to say the money go bye-bye.”
King: Retail distribution deals with Walmart and Costco nearly killed our company
“I've been a part of e-commerce brands. I wasn't the founder, but I was a VP where we had a deal with like Walmart and Costco and they almost killed us. Like they just send back the product, you know, type thing.”
Mehta: I do not spend heavy time on companies post-diligence
“So I'm not really interested in investing a lot of time Except during the beginning stage, which is really the due diligence and making a decision on whether the investment is attractive or not.”
Mehta passes on exit-driven founders regardless of attractive deal terms
“If the founders only cared about what is my exit, I want to get rich. And it wasn't so much about the customers or the problem they were solving or their core values didn't align with mine. No matter how attractive the deal looked like, I would just politely d…”
Sahil Mehta recently lost a $100,000 top-up investment in a startup
“I just made an investment some months ago not some months ago. It's the initial investment was earlier. And then I, there was a top up and it was a 100,000 dollars that just poof gone.”
Guha: Thesis splits its seed budget evenly between R&D and go-to-market
“Since we are the seed stage right now, that is split almost 50 50 between R&D and go to market.”
Weisbrot plans to support his parents solely via asset-generated income
“That's why my plan for them has been, I want to be able to earn money that I can then turn into an asset and then the asset generates the income that gives them the money that way.”
Klubeck stopped lending money to his parents in his late twenties
“So I got out of the lending my money, my, I got out of the lending my parents money business in my late twenties.”
Timberlake: Using Contractors Reduces Founder Stress Compared to Full-Time Employees
“Most of my work as contractors, so I don't have to, you know, they get paid for what they do, which is a little bit less of a stress than having the employees that I know that you have.”
Rom Lacritz personally invested roughly $100K cash before Anchor raised venture funding
“So before we raised funds, I probably invested somewhere around a 100,000 dollars. Give or take and then travel and design and building the product and infrastructure and stuff like that. We were three partners. So it's not including, you know, three salaries.…”
Lacritz: Walked Away from Acquisition Deal After Signing Term Sheet
“With a different company, we also got an offer and we signed the term sheet and we kept going. And at some point we did the economics and we backed down while we were advancing to definitive agreements, we decided not to sell the company. It still exists.”
Lacritz: Failing to sell company shares cost around $3 million
“My most expensive mistake was so privately, so it was not selling shares in, in one of my companies when I could, and I lost somewhere around three million dollars.”
Anchor builds employee development plans directly from interview questions
“So the first, so in the interview one of the questions we ask is if you had a coach, what would you want to work with him on and what would you want to improve? And then when, if he starts working at the company, we actually go back to that and said, okay, let…”
Todd: Hiring safe acquaintances has cost him up to $1M or more
“If you want to broadly paint a figure on that, it's cost me hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not a million or more, for sure.”
Live Lingua suffered its worst downturn in 15 years and conducted layoffs
“We actually in live link, well, we had one of the biggest down slumps ever we've had in 15 years, about 60 days ago. Right. So I've had to lay some people off recently to kind of keep us on survival level in order to kind of recover.”
Markevics: Why I turned down an early buyout offer for Seed Communications
“Well, I was approached about a potential acquisition and that was actually the goal. When I started was I'm going to build this thing. And then maybe because we were focused on startups, which I see no slowing down in the startup community, it's growing and pe…”
Markevics: 100% of Seed Communications' client business comes through referrals
“We have had, everything has been referral.”
Weisbrot: An executive assistant is the last hire I would ever make
“That's the last hire that I would ever think of hiring because for me, like all of the energy should go to the clients and not to me.”
Lopicolo: Noble Studios uses three-tiered anchor pricing on all client proposals
“Whenever we do pricing, we do anchor pricing. We always throw up like, look, we could do everything out of this, the, you know, out of the sky, you know, or we could do the very bare minimum. And oftentimes the client wants the middle choice.”
Booth: AINDT trains personnel for SpaceX, Boeing, and Lockheed Martin
“We do training for Lockheed Martin, Boeing, SpaceX, Blue Origin you know manufacturing companies across the country, across the world.”
Booth: Bought a 40-unit hotel to create private NDT student housing
“I bought this 40 unit small hotel out on the town and I closed it down to the public and remodeled it and created the first private student housing complex for non-destructive testing schools.”
Booth: Building industry coalition with Boeing to promote NDT careers
“That's kind of one of my missions now, is I'm trying to build a coalition of, I'm not trying to, I am, I've got some, like, some people from Boeing and a few other large corporations that want to get behind this and, ah, you know, spread the word.”
Myers: Regional Franchise Partners Receive 50% Franchise Fee and 3% Royalties
“And that's the regional developer model where we go out and find partners. And those folks are invested in all of the licenses in their region. And when we get those sold in their region, they too advertise. They get half the franchise fee and three percent of…”
Offering Free Stretches at Pickleball Courts Drives iFlex Studio Memberships
“So a lot of times we take out a table to the pickleball courts and just give free stretches for folks so that they understand what's going on. And let me tell you that builds memberships back at the studio.”
Caruana D: First Government Contract Paid $70,000 for 28 Days' Work
“My first contract was 70,000 dollars, so it almost replaced my full-time income where I was working 40 hours a week and it was just for 28 days of work.”
Caruana D: Secured multiple government contracts generating $500K in six months
“I went on to land multiple contracts simultaneously, and before I knew it, I was like reeling in like half a million in like, you know, six months.”
Cecil Robles's portfolio of businesses generates over $10M in gross annual revenue
“I would say as far as gross income per year as a whole, our businesses are over ten million dollars.”
Cecil Robles lost over eight figures misstructuring his first business sale
“I had built up a company. It was, you know, doing close to eight figures. And it was you know, a nice revenue for my family and I, it was a nice income. Plus, you know yeah, I mean, it was just a great, it was a great business. And I decided to sell it because…”
Cecil Robles targets equity in 100 companies valued over nine figures
“My five year plan is I want to own a piece of a hundred companies. And, you know, I I'm not going to put it, I'm not going to throw a number out on what that number looks like for me, but you know, it's north of nine figures. I'll tell you that.”
Rossi: Abstains from psychedelics and alcohol to maintain clear consciousness
“I don't do drugs. I don't drink. And part of not doing psychedelics is really always being able to have that connection to my soul and not debase my consciousness in any way.”
Weisbrot: Transitioned Consulting Business to No Contracts and 100% Upfront Payment
“I used to do consulting and I had something similar at first where like the clients wanted contracts and they wanted to pay 30% upfront and this and that. And then I changed my model where I stopped going to clients and I started having people who trusted me, …”
Bimani: BPS Security Needs Roughly $18M Revenue for Founder to Step Back
“It would roughly take about eighteen million dollars for me to get there, to be able to put a really good team in place for me to step back.”
Bramlett: Supplement Business Has Maintained Eight-Figure Revenue Since 2020, Peaking at $18M
“Our revenue has bounced from two and a half million, the highest to 18. And we've consistently been in that eight figure range since 2020.”
Bramlett Sells 50,000 to 80,000 Supplement Units Monthly
“I probably do 50 to 80,000 units of Product between all my lines in a month, but there's people who easily do 200 to 500,000 units a month.”
Weisbrot: Referral partners receive commissions for the lifetime of the client relationship
“The relationships that I've built with people is that if money comes in, I get a commission for the life of the relationship. And if someone refers, then they're going to get a commission for the life of all the relationship when I'm getting a commission.”
Weisbrot: Learned to Never Take Outside Investors or Build a Team
“I learned a lot about how to not do business and how to not invest in companies and why I should never have investors and why I should never have a team.”
Web Street Distributes Two-Thirds of Profits to Passive Investors
“It's a two third, one third split. So because you're not actively running these businesses, right? You don't own, you have no say in what's done in the businesses. You, the investors receive two thirds of the profit every quarter. And when these businesses are…”
Web Street Returns Capital with Interest if Deals Miss 90-Day Window
“What we do if we raise money and the operators aren't able to find a business that they want to purchase within 90 days, so they have a 90 day acquisition period, then the funds are simply just returned to investors. And we, we've done that. We would much rath…”
Web Street Has Raised $40M to Acquire 40 Digital Assets
“We have 17 active portfolios or funds. That's about 40 assets. So like I said, some of them are one, some of them are two. None of them are really more than three. That's about, let's see, we've raised, I think just over forty million dollars in the last three…”
Web Street Lists First Portfolio Assets for Sale, Awaiting First Exits
“So we actually, we started just about three years ago and we have our first assets for sale now. None of them have actually exited, but we have them Some that are actively for sale as recently as this month.”
Saxena will consider selling BetterCommerce once it reaches 30 to 50 customers
“I want to build it to a good state, potentially sell it to about 40, 50 customers. And that's when I would start considering, or maybe more than 30 customers, I would start considering doing that.”
Weisbrot: Practicing unfiltered blunt honesty immediately filters out incompatible people
“I call it blunt honesty and people, when they meet me, like I have no filter in that regard, but maybe that's not a great thing, but I will be bluntly honest with people. I don't know. And some people really like it and some people don't like it. So people kno…”
Preisinger: Selling WriterGirl at the expense of its culture means failure
“I don't have an intention to sell it at this point, but that I said if I sold it and walked away with bags of money and the culture that I worked so hard on, which was creating an environment where people can thrive, where every single one of them knows that t…”
Mercer trains his team to push back against his own directives
“And I have spent years working with my team to make sure that they know I could be wrong. And if they think I am wrong, they need to push back because I might very well, cause I present certain all the time.”
Weisbrot: Launched a startup to compete with Slack's chat deletion pricing model
“Well, that's one of the reasons why I started the company to compete with Slack because their whole pricing model was, hey, we're going to delete all of your chat history if you don't pay us five dollars per user per month.”
Cohen: His fractional CTO firm generated nearly $500,000 in six months
“My fractional CTO business. I must have generated something like close to 500 K and in the first six months, right? Not the first six months, the last six months. The first six months I made no money because I was, you know, small contracts here and there unti…”