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 261 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 1 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
Big Tech is now a conventional prestige industry like finance and medicine
“Today, I might argue that big tech has become put itself solidly in that list, right? It is amongst the finance and consulting and legal and medicine. You know, college kids today obsess with getting jobs at Facebook and Google. They study how they interview J…”
Being an investor is the highest-status job in early-stage tech
“The highest status job in the early stage startup world is investor, right? It's the one everyone wants to meet, everyone's talked to, everyone seeks approval to.”
Seibel: Maximizing fundraising leads to lost control and impossible pivots
“Often you lose control of your company. So like when you confront the challenges, suddenly, you know, your board can fire you. Often you find yourself burning tons of money because all the people who gave you money expect you to spend it. Oftentimes you have t…”
Seibel: Hiring more employees to move faster is a founder lie
“It's always about moving fast. That's the lie. It's like, if we had this, we could finally move as fast as like, you know, we could finally build all the things that I want us to build.”
Seibel argues that misconceptions about Y Combinator are deliberately designed attacks
“What are some of the other misconceptions that you saw that were, you know, obviously, I mean, I would argue like obviously designed to try to convince people to not do YC. Like these were like designed attacks on YC.”
Seibel: Investors who only attack competitors are just selling fear
“If you ever see someone making an argument that's 100% ripping something else down and zero percent explaining why their thing is good, if all of your talking points is the alternative is bad, you know, maybe all you're selling is fear because that's all you h…”
Seibel: A fake advisor took 2% equity and failed to raise our round
“I had a fake advisor who literally took.
Two percent of our company.
To help us fail at raising a round that was rescued by our existing inside investors.”
Seibel: Cash is rarely a strategic advantage outside hardware and lending
“So it's like lending and big physical things definitely require a lot of money. It's not obvious to me that there are many other business categories that require a lot of money where cash is the advantage.”
Seibel: Friends and investors are 'idiots' if they wouldn't use your product
“Your friends are idiots and don't know anything, especially if they would never use your product. Investors are close seconds as idiots, especially if they would never use your product, don't invest in your space, aren't good investors, don't invest in a lot o…”
Seibel: Overly pessimistic founders are easier to fix than overly optimistic ones
“I actually think I rather help someone being too pessimistic, strangely, because usually when I try to help introduce realistic expectations, they can adjust. You know, usually we just need to tell them what's reasonable, and suddenly they're like, oh, ok, I g…”
Seibel: Zero-sum players just harvest the excess capital of positive-sum builders
“It's so obvious the society we lived in, we live in today, was built by people who were playing positive some games. So what it really is, is, like, those people created, like, a little bit of excess capital That the zero sum game people are like harvesting. T…”
Seibel: Founders secretly know if they are gambling or building houses
“I don't think people are confused whether they're gambling or building houses. I think that they know whether they're gambling or building houses.”
Seibel: Many wealthy people just extracted money from others and regret it
“There's actually, you know, a large number of rich people who are kind of not in that building society group. You know, they made their money by taking it from others who are dumber than them. They look back and they're really concerned and you kind of can't w…”
Seibel: A startup founder's salary should not allow for personal savings
“If your startup salary is allowing you to save money, it's probably not good, right? You shouldn't be sitting here, like, with Google employee level savings running your startup. However, if your startup salary is giving you the lifestyle that allows you to be…”
Seibel: The best startup founders choose no action 40% of the time
“For the best founders, no action is like, you know, 2030, 40% of the time what they do, maybe more. But for other founders, they don't even know the play exists.”
Seibel: The worst founders cope with setbacks using drugs and alcohol
“The best people, shit goes wrong, and they go take a hike or something. And the worst people think shit goes wrong and they drink and do drugs.”
Seibel: Founders do not need to sacrifice relationships or incur extreme debt
“What I think that this is what's tricky is that I think someone needs to be out there saying that these aren't the things you have to put on the table to win. Yes, when you're working hard, you're gonna probably have to spend less time with your family or frie…”
Seibel: YC Summer 2022 batch will be fully in person
“For the first time since winter, 2020, this new batch, the summer 22 batch will be in person.”
Seibel: Hype cycles harm startups by making hiring and acquisition harder
“In the middle of the hype cycle, hiring is harder. Getting access to customers is harder. Like, 17 of your competitors are gonna all get funded. Like, you know, it's weird because on the surface, the hype cycle looks good, but when you actually get into the di…”
Seibel: Founders want to join established ecosystems, not build new ones
“I think the founders I talked to, they don't want to build a startup ecosystem. They want to be a part of a startup ecosystem.”
Seibel: Anti-SF narratives ignore recent college graduates eager to move there
“I think that a lot of that content marketing is unfortunately written by like people our age, people with kids, people living in San Francisco for like the last two years who were generally pissy about COVID. And it was like less responding to someone who migh…”
Seibel: VCs rarely force high burn; founders naturally push to blitzscale
“I think that's extremely rare for an investor to be demanding you to like burn like crazy. I think that the horrible truth is that founders don't need much of a push.”
Seibel: Technical founders grossly misunderstand value of FAANG jobs
“Technical founders often misunderstand the value they can get out of Fang. And misunderstand is an understatement. They grossly misunderstand what value they can extract from a Fang job and what value they can't extract.”
Seibel: Google's beta release standard is 10x higher than a startup MVP
“Their standard for getting a product into even beta at Google is 10 X what an MVP in a startup is, and they just have to unlearn. It's like, can anyone find this useful? Launch.”
Seibel says pre-PMF struggles stem from wrong hires, not missing executives
“More often than not in this pre-product market fit phase, the mistake is that there's the wrong person in the company, not there aren't enough people. The mistake is like, you've got an engineer that no one wants to work with, or no one's measuring any of the …”
Seibel: Startups building HR software must accommodate corporate recruiters
“You aren't going to get rid of all the recruiters. Even though you don't believe they should exist in the world, they are going to exist in the world. Either you're going to accommodate them, Or they will kill you. Like they tend to actually have way more powe…”
Seibel: Technology platforms change faster than fundamental human problems
“The platforms change faster than the human problems.
So like you and I have lived through one, Web one O, Web two O, mobile, and whatever the hell you call it.
Turns out that like, I want to go grocery shopping, but I don't want to go to the grocery store.
…”
Seibel: Portable digital gold like Bitcoin is 10x better than physical gold
“I think the other fun insight here is that like portable online gold Is valuable. Like it is 10 X better than gold. And so as something you might want to have, if you think gold is something that you might want to own, and it seems like the market does like ow…”
Seibel: Stripe deliberately launched as the most expensive payment product
“When the Stripe Finders came to speak at YC, the other detail they added was it was the most expensive product in the market. Like, to make sure people really wanted it, they didn't give it away for free, they didn't price it comparably, they made it more expe…”
Seibel: Comfortable founders often default to abstract, immeasurable global problems
“I think there's a whole set of other people who don't have very many problems in their life. And I think those people kind of reach for like the UN problems or the global problem, right? The problems that like they are told they should care about, but they don…”
Seibel: Co-Founders in Many YC Teams Lack Equal Passion for the Problem
“I would argue that in a lot of the teams that we fund, two, three, four founders, They're not all equally passionate about the problem, right?”
Seibel: 95% of extrinsically motivated startups die within three years
“95% of your friends doing startups are extrinsically motivated, and their startup's gonna die in the next two or three years.”
Seibel: Digitizing paper workflows alone does not guarantee a billion-dollar company
“If something's being undone on paper, There is a business in putting it into the computer, and like, by nature of the fact that it's being done on paper, you could build a billion dollar company and bring it to the computer, and that's actually not true. Like,…”
Seibel: Startups with real marginal costs must charge from day one
“In any situation where you actually have real cost, you should be charging from day one.”
Seibel: Founders should charge uncomfortable prices to find desperate customers
“Charge more than you might feel comfortable so you can identify the people who are most desperate for it.”
Seibel: Uber would have failed if it initially launched in NYC
“If Uber had launched in New York City, it wouldn't have worked. Because, like, the pain did not, yeah, did not exist in New York City. The pain was so great, great in San Francisco that everyone was willing to use Uber Black.”
Seibel: Dependent startups face existential risk from their host platforms
“And so the problem is, is that you're not only competing with other players in your market, you're competing against the platform you're on. If this is a significant revenue opportunity for the platform you're on, they have every incentive to either buy you or…”
Seibel: Solving a startup problem typically takes two years, not months
“So, if you're not thinking that the process of coming up with a solution for this problem is probably more like a two-year process, you're doing it wrong. If you are unsatisfied with significant progress in under two years, you're probably doing it wrong.”
Seibel: Pivoting changes the customer or problem; iterating changes the solution
“So, I define pivot As changing the customer or changing the problem. This should be rare. This should happen infrequently. Many times this means you should start a new company. I defined iterate as changing the solution.”
Seibel: Steve Jobs released a 'shitty MVP' iPhone and iterated every year
“Real Steve Jobs released a shitty MVP that was revolutionary, but still fairly shitty, and every year iterated it. Until you have the thing in your pocket right now, which is pretty damn good. Real Steve Jobs iterates and talks to customers. Fake Steve Jobs ju…”
Seibel: Angel investing is a form of charity, not money-making
“I'll tell you straight away that I'm not doing it to make money. In effect, I feel like where I came from on the East Coast, when people want to give back, they give money to charity and they go to Gallus which I never understood. And strangely, here in the Va…”
Seibel: Write a Check if a Friend's Startup Would Cause Billion-Dollar FOMO
“If one of your friends is starting a company, and you would have FOMO if it would become a billion dollar company, just shut up and write him a check.”
Seibel: Value of founder networking and raising large capital is declining
“Especially in the days now where you can write software with relatively little money that has relatively large impact. Like the value of networking and being able to raise large amounts of money is less and less.”
Hard to Learn Startups From Non-Founders Running University Programs
“It's hard for schools to recruit entrepreneurs to do this work, and so it's really hard to learn how to do a startup from someone who's never done a startup before, and that tends to be the case for the, a lot of people running these programs.”
Silicon Valley Favors Two Startup Years Over an MBA
“And I don't know many people in the Valley who would say that you learn more getting an MBA than you learn two years in the grind at an early stage startup.”
Seibel: Users will retry a startup product even after disliking launch version
“I think a secondary piece of pop culture knowledge is that if people try your product once and they don't like it, they'll never try it again.”
Seibel: Founders cannot eliminate the high-risk, low-information nature of startups
“I think that we have to admit in the startup game, you're going after like a high risk, low information, And high commitment bet. And there aren't moves to change those core things, right? Like, yeah, you can invest in the margin, but it's still going to be hi…”