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 5,759 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 49 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
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…”
Habib: Next-word prediction at scale forces LLMs to develop reasoning
“They are able to do this task extremely well. And the only way to do that is to have gotten better at under, you know, some form of reasoning and some form of knowledge.”
Habib: Senior developers benefit more from GitHub Copilot than junior developers
“One thing that is surprising to me is that the people who say to me they use it the most are some of the people I consider to be better or more senior developers. You might've thought this tool would help juniors more, but I think people who are more accustome…”
Habib: Software engineers will be among the first jobs automated by AGI
“When we do get towards things that look like AGI, I suspect that developers will actually be one of the first jobs to see large fractions of their job be automated, which I think is very counterintuitive but also predicting the future is hard, so.”
Habib: Foundation model barriers are capital and talent, not secret sauce
“Like to me, the barriers to entry of training, one of these models are mostly capital and talent. Like the people needed are still very specialized and very smart and you need lots of money to pay for GPUs. But beyond that, I don't see that much secret sauce, …”
Conformist startup founders mistakenly treat investors as their customers
“You know, one of the things that we say sometimes at YC is that don't make the investor your customer. But a lot of these conformists who are getting into startups, that's what they do. Like they want an idea an investor is going to like, they want to act the …”
Epstein: Avoid ad models unless expecting top-10 global website scale
“You should not use ads as your primary business model unless you expect to be a top 10 site on the internet. Otherwise, it's too hard to monetize and build a huge scale to become a massive company.”
Seibel says 40% of the Summer 2022 batch applied with only ideas
“Literally, 40% of the last batch came in with just an idea. Most of them were working when they applied, were at work, working jobs when they applied.”
Seibel: YC Summer 2022 batch valuations held steady at $15M–$25M caps
“Prices are almost exactly the same as they were during the last batch when it was like VC heaven on earth and money was flowing like crazy. We saw. 15 to 25. Some companies raised at 30. Almost no change from the last batch.”
Caldwell warns that overly friendly industry networkers are often highly exploitative
“A lot of the folks who are most approachable when you are a first timer, or when you're just moving to the area, or you're trying to break into the industry, the friendly people that want to talk to you are often
The most exploitative, and they're the people …”
Seibel: Giving up massive equity early blocks later-stage funding
“And what they didn't tell that founder is that every subsequent investor would say to themselves, huh, this investor put in a relatively small amount of capital, bought so much of the company that the founders are going to get so diluted that they're not going…”
Seibel argues charging $50,000 for priced round legal fees is predatory
“It shouldn't cost 50,000 dollars to a price round. Like you're just ripping off founders, pure and simple ripping off founders.”
Caldwell: Starting a company by pitching VCs invites exploitation
“If your idea for how you start a startup is to first create a pitch deck and go pitch VCs, you're setting yourself up to get screwed. You're setting yourself up to get taken advantage of by people who are gonna have 20 different ways to rip you off, versus if …”
Seibel: VCs often fund repeat founders for internal firm politics
“What I've also seen for second time founders is that oftentimes for an investor, it's more of a catch. It like helps you build your reputation in your firm, or it helps you get the deal approved. And like, so oftentimes there's like internal political reasons …”
Caldwell: Predatory service providers systematically target and exploit struggling startup founders
“We see this a lot with struggling startups. All sorts of people will come out of the woodwork to sell you services or promise they'll connect you with the investors or they'll help you fundraise or you name it. And it's like, it's kind of like moving to Hollyw…”
Seibel: Spending more money does not accelerate product-market fit
“Spending more money allows product market fit to happen faster.”
Caldwell: Effectively no startup gets acqui-hired after running out of runway
“No one gets acquired effectively. Like there's an asterisk next to no one. But the companies, of the companies that attempt, when they're lower on runway, they're, they flew the plane into the side of the mountain. There's no acquisition coming, man.”
Founders carry startup failure forever while venture investors quickly move on
“This is what's so weird about this business is like, who has to live with the rest of their lives that that was their startup. Or that they could have done something different. They weren't able to versus the investors like, yeah, whatever. Cool. And they go, …”
Seibel: VCs Offer to Invest After YC Admission Despite Earlier Rejections
“I think we see this in practice, too, because we will see founders who will pitch to investors, get no's, apply to YC, get into YC, and those same investors will say, now I want to invest in your company, and nothing has changed. No fundamental thing has chang…”
Taggar: Changing product direction based on investor feedback repels good investors
“So if a founder actually, like, actions on your feedback in sort of like a material way, like, it makes you less than like, if you're a good investor, I think it makes you less than likely to want to invest. You don't want to invest in someone who is relying o…”
Seibel: Ignore investor rejection reasons until hearing them across 15 to 25 pitches
“When founders are fundraising, it's like the first thing, the first time they tell me there's a rejection and a why, I ignore it completely. If they've gotten like 15, 20, 25 rejections, I then ask, are the whys consistent? And only if then the whys are consis…”
Seibel: FAANG retention relies on unvested equity being 3x your savings
“If they can keep you spending your entire salary, and if they can keep the money that you haven't vested yet larger than the amount of money that you have in your savings by like two to three X, you never leave.”
Seibel: Big tech warehouses talent defensively to prevent competitor growth
“In many ways, this is a defensive tactic to warehouse talent. Out of the fear that maybe someone else can use you in a way that can hurt the company.”
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.”
Taggar: Every YC Startup Has an Apparent Fatal Flaw
“Literally in any YC batch, I could take every single company and like pick out some like fatal flaw. And like, you know that some of them are going to turn out to be worth like billions of dollars, but you can still do it.”
Seibel: Microsoft Wins by Copying Startup Innovations Years Later
“A structural advantage with a product that's good enough can win. And man, it really helps when some startups specs the whole product for you. Right? Like Microsoft's move is to not innovate the good enough product. It's to copy it. Maybe five to 10 years late…”
Taggar: FAANG Product Launches Rarely Kill Fast-Growing Startups
“Cause like, if you think about like, we're like scratching our heads, trying to find examples of times that like a fan company launched a product that killed a fast growing, successful startup. So like clearly more often than not, like structural advantage isn…”
Caldwell: If Elon Musk overthought, he would have abandoned his companies
“And if he was an overthinker, he would do, he would rule all the stuff out. All the stuff is like, obviously a bad idea. And anyone in the Midwit territory would rule out all these ideas.”
Seibel: Twitch blocked video to force an ISP into free peering
“What we did is that after 10 minutes of people watching free, free live video, we just put up a big thing that blocked the video that said, your ISP is not doing a free peering relationship with us, so we can no longer serve you video. If you'd like to call to…”
Seibel: Domain-expert investors are often more pessimistic than generalists
“I think sometimes counterintuitively investors who know slightly less about your space can be a little bit more grasses greener, like, optimistic than folks who know more about your space.”
Seibel: Genius is often mistaken for discipline in startup execution
“Too often, genius is mistaken for discipline. It's just like, you know, a lot of people think, oh, this person out executed all their peers because they were smarter, and it's like, that assumes the peers were actually working on the thing they said they were …”
Saez-Gil: A trillion trees could draw down 200 gigatons of carbon
“There is about one billion hectares in the planet that are available for forest restoration without competing with agriculture, In that land, you can plant about a trillion trees, and that trillion trees has the potential to draw down about 200 gigatons of car…”
Doctorow: Reverse-engineering iOS for cross-platform compatibility triggers legal thickets
“So today, if you were to try and do this, like say you were to try and make Android devices first class citizens in on iOS environment, and in order to do so, you wanted to reverse engineer iOS and allow yourself to sideload in apps into iOS and also to suppor…”
Doctorow: Legally fraught startups with beloved products drive normative legal reform
“If you have a business that is doing something that is legally fraught, but that business is doing something that people love, That you are creating a constituency for a normative shift in how we think about this stuff, and that you are also creating surplus c…”
Doctorow: Copyright should combine European statutory exceptions with US fair use principles
“I think we could combine the European fair dealing approach where they have enumerated exceptions with the American fair use approach where they have principles that are applied to get a kind of best of both worlds where we might say, okay, here are a bunch of…”
Doctorow: Facebook allowed non-members to scrape group membership lists
“She discovered that you could enumerate the membership of any Facebook group. Even if you weren't a member of it. And when she reported it to Facebook, they said that is a feature request, not a bug report. We will send it off to the product team. And when she…”
Doctorow: Big Tech and entertainment companies secretly colluded on anti-poaching agreements
“In California, we have no enforceable non-competes, so the big tech companies all got together in secret with the big entertainment companies and agreed that they wouldn't hire each other's employees, top employees.”
Doctorow: Market concentration makes corporate collusion and conspiracies structurally possible
“Those conspiracies are necessarily a function of market concentration, because the collective action problem becomes insoluble when you have too many people who have to be inside the conspiracy.”
Doctorow: Disrupting Big Tech platforms will win public and regulatory backing
“Our willingness to trust that big firms have our interests at heart and that the processes that regulate them Are on the side of the public interest and not the side of the firm's parochial interest. That, that is coming to an end. And so if you want to be whe…”
Doctorow: Ninth Circuit ruled LinkedIn cannot use CFAA to block scrapers
“HiQ was scraping LinkedIn to produce employer analytics. LinkedIn turned a blind eye to it until they launched their own analytics product. Then they tried to block them out and sue them under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. Not only is hiQ won in court and …”
Doctorow: Disruptive entrants succeed by bridging users rather than forcing disjoint leaps
“Every industry has an incumbent disrupted by a new entrant, not by making a thing that is totally disjoint from the new entrant, not by asking people to leap the chasm from one to the other, to let go of the vine they're holding on before they've got a secure …”
Hard-tech startups find recruiting and fundraising easier than standard software startups
“While launching the product is easy, turning the product into a really big company is actually really hard. Whereas with Boom, it's exactly the opposite. Building a supersonic jet is, like, incredibly hard, but everything else around it is really easy.”
Alströmer: Most major companies scale using only one or two channels
“Most really big companies didn't use all of those channels. They use one or two channels.”
Roberts: Universal basic income cannot restore the human dignity lost to automation
“The idea that it's high, but you don't have any dignity, or, you know, we give you a check to replace lost income because you've been displaced, say, by technology, that that's just as good is probably not true. Probably not just as good, even though, I mean, …”
Hale: Investors should figure out how non-obvious startups can win
“His job and the way he sees our work at YC is that it's not to figure out what's wrong with the company, but to figure out how it could possibly when. Cause our bets, the ones that when, are the ones that are non-obvious.”
Hale: Great investors imagine billion-dollar paths and pitch them back
“And so we have to, like, work on our imagination, we have to work on our optimism to figure out, Oh, what is the way that whatever story that they're telling me could become a billion dollar company? And then a great investor pitches that back to the founder.”
Kevin Hale: If you must ask if you have PMF, you don't
“If you have to ask the question, you definitely don't have it.”
Hockenmaier: Early big tech growth playbooks mislead startups without product-market fit
“I actually think like the legacy of that growth team, and then like Twitter and LinkedIn and the others that followed is actually maybe problematic when we think about some of the applications of growth later on, because they were applied in this case of like …”