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 585 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
Anthropic's rate limits are caused by short-notice compute shortages
“Anthropic has rate limits constantly, and people complain about it a lot, and like the reason is like, there's only so much compute we can get on short notice, so you, like, making your inference more efficient is like the way you can serve more users.”
Truell: Cursor switched to forking VS Code to focus on AI features
“We thought that, you know, VS Code had been developed over the course of 12 years, was one of the earliest TypeScript projects had lots of people on it. Thought, oh yeah, of course, you can kind of spin something up that's just equivalent for the world in, in …”
Truell: Cursor resisted vocal early user demand to target non-programmers
“Of our early user base, if you just kind of followed the gradient of exactly what they wanted, you would get pulled in slightly different directions than we ended up in. You know, we had a really loud segment of users that didn't know how to code at all, and w…”
Legora deliberately paused sales for five months post-funding to build reliability
“After we raised the money during our first board meeting, we sat down and I remembered the look on, on some of our board members' faces when I basically said, we're not gonna sell for the next four to five months.”
Englander: Model ML founders work seven days a week, team works six
“I mean right now we're still working seven days a week, as we said, and we have done for about 18 months. And I think certainly in that initial period that you've got to do that, and I think, you know, our team works six days a week at the moment.”
Finn: Physical Intelligence is building a general-purpose model for all robots
“And in particular, we're trying to develop a general purpose model that can enable any robot to do any task in any environment.”
Srinivas: Perplexity bet LLMs would handle reasoning over unstructured data
“So we bet on the fact that language models can do all the reasoning and parsing and like structuring later, but the more important thing is to start with something more unstructured, and that ended up becoming perplexity.”
Srinivas: Perplexity mandates that engineers use AI tools like Cursor or Copilot
“We made it mandatory to use at least one AI coding tool, and internally at perplexity it happens to be cursor and like a mix, mix of cursor and GitHub Copilot. But yeah, we definitely made it compulsory.”
Ng: Engineering teams should write insecure code for local prototypes
“I routinely go to my teams and say, go ahead, write insecure code, because if this software is only going to run on your laptop, and if you don't plan to maliciously hack your own laptop, It's fine to have insecure code, right? But of course, after it seems to…”
Altman: GPT-5 will lack complete reasoning and real-time video integration
“We won't get all the way here with GPT-V, but eventually we do want one integrated model that can, like, reason really hard when it needs to and generate, like, real-time video when it needs to do that.”
Altman: OpenAI is focused on making ChatGPT the best super-assistant
“We are going to try to make the best super assistant out of ChatGPT that we can. We're going to Add the things that we think we need to add to that but that is, like, one small part of the opportunity in front of us, and it makes us sad when people are like, I…”
Altman: OpenAI had no defensibility strategy for ChatGPT in its early days
“It took us a long time to figure out how to answer the defensibility question for ChatGPT. We had built this thing, and for a long time, the only defensibility was, like, we had the only product out in the market. And then we kind of, like, a brand that starte…”
Altman: Never Looked at Colleges or Big-Tech Resumes for YC Applications
“When I was, like, reading YC applications, I would, like, never look at the resume items. You know, you worked at, like, Google, or went to this college, or I never cared. I would always go right to, like, what's the most impressive stuff you've done, and then…”
Reeves: Gusto rejected 11 VC firms to raise seed solely from angels
“We had, I think, like, over 11 VC firms offer to invest. We actually chose to do the round with no VC firms. It was all angels, so we raised from, you know, twenty-plus CEOs and founders. It was, you know, the CEOs and founders of, you know, PayPal and Stripe …”
Tan: AI researchers say scaling laws have not produced human-like agency
“I think we were hanging out with some AI researchers recently, and they were sort of disappointed that the models are not, you know, but they don't demonstrate as much human-like agency you know, even after all these innovations with, you know, climbing the sc…”
Taggar: YC is skeptical of co-founder pairings lacking common ground
“The kinds of teams we don't get so excited about are where the co-founders would never have met each other in sort of any conceivable universe. It's where there's a huge age difference, or they don't have any sort of mutual interest, or they just doesn't seem …”
Blomfield: Monzo lost £30–£40 per user initially before turning profitable
“Monzo is an online bank in the UK, and for our first half a million customers or so, we were losing money on every customer, 30 or 40 pounds per customer. We scaled to more than half a million of those customers. It costs a lot, but we had a plan to turn it ro…”
Caldwell: YC is designed to fund strangers without warm intros or decks
“The entire YC model was built to not require networking. We don't want warm intros. We don't want pitch decks. We don't want to hop on a quick call. That is not how YC works in our funding decisions. We built a system that is optimized for funding complete str…”
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: 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.”
Gill: Publishers avoid Backtracks because it filters out fraud
“We have people not use us because we detect fraud, we remove things like that”
Cover Paid $750,000 Plus Broker Fees to Acquire Cover.com
“So we paid seven 50 for it, and then there were broker fees.”
Hoover rejected early investor pressure to build a Product Hunt VC fund
“A few different investors and people suggested, Hey, you should start a product hunt fund. You should build a fund on top of product hunt, invest in, use the data in the community and everything to source and find really early stage opportunities. And I was pr…”
Khosla bans junior VCs from taking board seats to protect founders
“So some of the junior people here, when they ask me, hey, at this other firm, people, young people are going on boards, can I be on a board? I say, you haven't earned the right to advise an entrepreneur, so it's unfair to the entrepreneur.”
Werner Vogels: Major investments must materially move the Amazon balance sheet
“Then at Amazon you have to rule that if you do that, If it's going to be successful, it needs to be successful in a way that has significant impact on the Amazon balance sheet. Now, it's not that we're interested in another, let's say, ah, that sounds coy, but…”
Front managers have full access to direct reports' personal company inboxes
“So if you are a manager, you have access to your direct reports inboxes.”
Mixpanel operated without a forgot password feature for 18 months
“For like, I don't know, maybe like, 18 months of Mixpanel, like, we didn't even have forgot about password, because we were just so ruthlessly trying to prioritize, like, things that really, would really matter to customers. And it turned out we didn't get ver…”
Wessel: Direct reports to WayUp CEO must be Type A
“If you're working for me there's a few things that you have to have in personality type that I won't I wouldn't hire you to work for me directly. And it's fine to work for someone else, but I'm not gonna hire you to work not for me if you don't, for example, i…”
Buchheit funded DoorDash mainly so they would deliver to his house
“When they interviewed here, ah, like actually in the room right over there, I, my like one question for them was like, will you deliver to my house? Because at the time, when they went through YC, there was no food delivery where I lived, and I get hungry. And…”
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…”
Sam Altman: Only criterion for investing is potential to reach $10 billion
“I will consider anything that I believe could be a ten billion dollar company. And that is such a tight criteria. I have no other rules. So I am willing to look at any stage. I'm willing to look at any sector. I am willing to look at any business model.”
Chaudhary: ClassDojo monetizes via $10/month parent subscriptions, not school districts
“If we could just create value for parents, enough value that, like, there's something that they want to pay for. That could be interesting, and if it could be, like, relatively affordable on, you know, the order of 10 bucks, let's say. Like, a month, like, tha…”
Sidor: OpenAI sacrifices code modularity for brevity to reduce bugs
“We sometimes actually kind of sacrifice good engineering habits, good, good kind of code modularity to make our code shorter and simpler and kind of having less, essentially less lines where you can make bugs.”
McCarthy crowdsourced live coaching for her blind dates via Mechanical Turk
“I went on a series of blind dates with people that I met on the internet, and then I sort of discreetly streamed the Video of the date to the web. And then I paid people through the service called Amazon Mechanical Turk, small amounts of money to watch the dat…”
Benet: Protocol Labs uses token models to fund protocol-layer development
“That kind of funding model allows people to remain very close to the actual protocol layer and to think deeply about the protocol itself and its concerns without having to think about a product or a service on top. So this is precisely what protocol apps' busi…”
Altman: Most of his best hires lacked prior experience
“Most of the best hires that I've ever made in my entire life have never done that thing before.”
Altman: YC will not fund companies without founder vesting
“We pretty much won't fund a company now where the founders don't have vested equity vested equity, because it's just that bad.”
Musk: I gave SpaceX less than 10% chance of success when starting
“When starting SpaceX, I thought the odds of success were less than 10%. And I just accepted that actually probably I would just lose, lose everything.”
Musk: 80% of my time is spent on engineering and design
“Actually almost almost all my time, like, 80% of it is spent on engineering and design. Engineering and design, so it's developing next generation product that's 80% of it.”
Wang: Meta will soon release its own developer harness
“Today the easiest way is to use open code. We have, like, onboarding on the website, and then soon we'll have a harness of our own, and ultimately, I think we want great models that plug into all of the available harnesses and empower as much, you know sort of…”
Scholl: Boom's board ordered him to shut down with seven days cash
“There was a moment where we got down to seven days of cash and the board told me to shut the company down.”
Huang: NVIDIA engineers use autonomous coding agents like Claude Code and Cursor
“We've got cloud code autonomously running in sandboxes all over NVIDIA, and that's really fantastic, and some people use codex, some people use cloud code, some people use cursor, some people use cognition, and we let kind of a thousand flowers bloom, let peop…”
Huang: NVIDIA offered its full engineering workforce to OpenClaw's creator
“And we contacted Peter and we said, Hey, you know, all of the videos engineers are your engineers. That's what I told Peter. You've got this battleship outside your house. You know, break down the problem as you desire, and we'll contribute as you wish.”
Chou: Ploy spent $750K on tokens building 'Ploy Slurper'
“We spent about I think like 750,000 dollars worth of tokens to create what's called the ploy slurper.”
Chou: Ploy will use a CLI rather than MCP for agent integration
“I think we're going to do a CLI with skills. So an MCP would be really good if we had more constrained sort of things. However, I think with the number of things that you can do employ, I think the CLI is going to be the way we do it.”
Tan: AI puts me on track to write 5M lines of code
“I mean, by my measure with gBrain and gStack and just like the code I'm releasing open source, I'm actually on, on track to do like four or five million lines of logical logical lines of code.”
Franceschi: Synthetic Customer Models Only Work When Deep Knowledge Already Exists
“We did a lot of exploration with like synthetic customers and building customer world models and things like that. And those are really valuable once you know a lot about the customer, but when you don't know enough yet, I think there's this like very basic th…”
Koomen: YC improved AI pitch skills using office hour transcripts
“One of the cool things that happened in the last month or two was that a couple of the other partners took a meeting that they had with a group office hours they had with a bunch of the companies in the spring batch and just went through and had every founder …”