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 137 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 5 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
Khosla: Process managers prevent startups from becoming truly great companies
“And so, if you have great managers, good process people, they will work against allowing the company to become great. They'll take, take a great idea and turn it into a good one, And execute a decent idea at lower risk that's more reasonable, more sensible.”
Khosla tells Sam Altman his biggest problem with Y Combinator startups
“By the way, this is my single biggest beef with YC. Not enough option pools. Right? Not enough option pools. Not enough focus on recruiting the right co-founders.”
Gil: Market is the singular determinant of startup success, not team
“The singular determinant of startup success is the market. And it's not the strength of the team. And so I think a lot of people talk about how great teams will always figure it out. And I've seen great team after great team in a terrible market just die becau…”
Gil: A prominent Midas List investor tried clawing exit value at Mixer Labs
“The biggest issue we had there is we had a bad investor who, as we were exiting the company, basically tried to claw more value for themselves as part of our exit. And this is sort of a Midas list investor who's very well known now.”
Iorns: Replication studies show most published scientific results are not reproducible
“So the reality is that the results that have been generated show that most published results are not reproducible.”
Mathilde Collin would eliminate subject lines, CC, and BCC from email
“So, you know, I think I would probably wipe out most of the structural features. Cause when you think about, you know, the main things are you have a subject, you have a signature, you literally carbon copy and blind carbon copy. And so I think I would remove …”
Ralston: Y Combinator would not have funded a young Steve Jobs
“I don't think we'd fund a Steve Jobs at YC. Well, that's not good. Yeah. And the reason is, especially when Steve Jobs was starting off, he was an asshole.”
Ralston: Magic Leap raised $2.3B but seems to have almost nothing
“Magic Leap raised 2.3 billion dollars, and they seem to have almost nothing.”
Paul Graham: Working 20 years at big companies indicates poor founder fit
“I think if you have worked for a large company for 20 years, you might not be a founder, unless you were forced to for visa reasons, because if you were the kind of person that would make a good founder, you wouldn't be able to stand working for a large compan…”
Jocko Willink: Every single problem a company faces is a leadership problem
“Every single problem that companies face, every single problem that companies face is a leadership problem. And if you can come up with an example, if someone wants to text me or hit me up on Twitter with an example that's not a leadership problem, like, oh, w…”
McDonnell: Prizing engineering teams is coded bias for certain races and genders
“I think that prizing certain teams at companies, so it used to be sales teams, now it's engineering teams, is I think prizing certain teams is actually a coded way of prizing certain races and genders.”
Gil: Data moats do not exist in most industries
“There are very, very few companies that actually have data moats, and so I think that's often a red herring. I think maybe in genomics right now there may be interesting data moats to be formed, but in most industries data moats don't really exist.”
Buchheit: There is literally no such thing as value investing in startups
“There really literally is no such thing as value investing in startups.”
Buchheit: Vast majority of ICOs are scams and going to zero
“As far as I can tell, the vast majority of the ICOs are scams. Or just like, these are companies that, if they were trying to raise from the people in the room, here, maybe they'd be able to raise half a million dollars, but instead they go do an ICO, and they…”
Altman: Value Investing Fails for Angel Investors Most of the Time
“I think value investing is not a winning strategy when it comes to being an angel investor most of the time.”
Altman: Most investment firms struggle to reject profitable, harmful companies
“If there's a company we look at where we think we'd make a lot of money, but it'd be, we think it might be bad for the world, we won't touch it. Which most other investment firms unfortunately have a hard time with.”
Courtland Allen: Starting a VC-backed company is a bad bet for most people
“It's probably a bad bet to start a VC-funded company for the vast majority of people. You should not go that route.”
Benet: 2013-2014 blockchain thought in New York and Europe far surpassed Silicon Valley
“I think in 2013 and 14, a lot of the blockchain tech was being built in New York and Europe and far ahead of Silicon Valley. And I remember having a lot of conversations with people here in New York and Europe and just the level of thought outside of Silicon V…”
University Entrepreneurship Centers Accept Non-Technical Teams That VCs Would Reject
“Over the past two weeks, I've talked to a number of, kind of, directors of entrepreneur centers, and the constant thing that I'm surprised by is that they know these things that I'm talking about, but they still accept teams that don't abide by these rules. So…”
Zaremba: Universal basic income is the only viable path as automation grows
“So, I believe that we'll have to offer to people a basic income. I super strongly believe that actually that's the only way.”
Altman: Most VCs give founders bad advice on employee equity
“And this is one place that your investors will always give you bad advice. I think, not YC, but all other investors give bad advice here, most do.”
Altman: In-House Fundraiser Post-Series B Beats Bankers and Halves Dilution
“Another thing that I think is worth hiring earlier that almost no one does, is a full-time fundraiser. Let's say you hire someone like really, really great, and their full-time job is to raise money for the company. You hire them after your B round, and you sa…”
Altman: Best PR hack is skipping agencies to directly contact 3-4 journalists
“I think the biggest PR hack you can do is to not hire a PR firm. Just pick three or four journalists that you develop really close relationships with, that like you, that understand you, that you get. And then you contact them yourself. They will cover every s…”
Altman: Founders should never hire a professional CEO
“When should the founders think about hiring a professional CEO? Never. You, if you look at the most successful companies in tech they are run by their founders for a very long time sometimes forever.”
Altman: Almost no top 30 software startup had remote early co-founders
“The data on this is look at the, say, like, 30 most successful software startups of all time, and try to point to a single example where the co-founders were in different locations. It's really, really tough.”
Scholl: Boeing is no longer building new or innovative airplanes
“Well, no, they're not even building new airplanes anymore, let alone innovative new airplanes.”
Ries: Traditional corporate governance 'best practices' destroy corporate value
“The thing I didn't really understand is how much evidence we have that these so-called best practices suck. They're like literally value destroying.”
Chollet: Replicating Biologically Plausible Brain Mechanics for AI Is Counter-Productive
“I think it would be counter-productive to just try to, you know, observe it and re-implement it, like and make it biologically plausible.”
Tan: Environmental lobby abuses CEQA to halt innovation and housing
“In California we have CEQA, which is totally abused by the environmental lobby to stop all innovation and building housing, by the way.”
Srinivas: Google rebrands and announces the same AI search features every year
“The same feature is being launched year after year after year with a different name, with a different VP, with a different group of people, but it's the same thing. Except maybe it's getting better, but it's never getting launched to everybody.”
Derek Thompson: California's high-speed rail project is dead
“If you're asking for my personal opinion, This project is dead.”
Google has better consumer product taste than both OpenAI and Anthropic
“Out of the list you mentioned, Google is the only company that actually has the product taste to do this.”
Hu: AI has effectively passed the Turing test for phone calls
“At this point, AI has passed Turing tests and is solving all of these very menial problems over the phone.”
Seibel: Building in Austin, Seattle, or New York is settling
“It's really easy to say, well, you know, I can be in the game in Austin. I can be in the game in Seattle. There are investors there. There are people there. I can be in the game in New York. And I wish that we were more honest that like, yeah, you can play bas…”
Caldwell: Many ex-Facebook employees feel they made money doing evil
“Yeah, like, I know a lot of ex-Facebook people who kind of, like, feel that they did evil, and they made money doing it, and they seem pretty unhappy about it. They're not happy about the work that they did in the universe.”
Susskind: Physicists must discover everything and leave preventing misuse to politicians
“It's not, I don't believe it's the physicist's job to decide what should and shouldn't be discovered. From a physicist's point of view, everything should be discovered if possible. It is the job of politicians and other people of that ilk to make sure that thi…”
Watts: Antidepressant research is often short-term to serve drug manufacturers' interests
“The research into the effect of antidepressant drugs often is very short-term. It looks at them for a very short period of time without much follow-up. So because that serves the purposes of the people making these drugs.”
Hoover: Living in virtual reality worlds will be a good thing
“I think the world where we live in VR is actually a good thing. And I know a lot of people get really scared and nervous about like a future where we all live in like a ready player one or at least like some sort of virtual world like that. I actually think it…”