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 82 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
Paul Graham: Viaweb was likely the first web application
“Ok, so, what we made was something that is now called a web app. I believe, at the time it was the first one, and, ah, that's why the company was called ViaWeb, because it worked via the web.”
New Story and ICON built the first 3D printer for remote regions
“Our printer that we've designed is a printer that's ready to work in some of the most remote areas in the world, some of the You know, most difficult to work places in the world which is the first of its kind.”
Bromberg: Startup liquidity timelines will revert to moving faster again
“Certainly in the last few years we've seen, ah, the speed to liquidity go down, ah, we think that's gonna revert back and we're gonna see that, that come faster again.”
Bromberg: ICOs raise $10M to $200M via SAFTs
“Token fundraising ICOs, mostly raised on what are called SAFTS, Simple Agreements for Future Tokens... Mostly raised from hedge funds, venture funds, institutions, and again, angels putting money into these ICOs. But they're raising 10 to two hundred million d…”
Slavin: Academic Tenure Arose Under McCarthyism to Protect Free Thought
“Tenure, which there's, there are very good reasons for tenure, and it arose under McCarthyism to protect free thought essentially, which is great.”
Iorns: Diet research shows strong responses only in small subgroups
“All of the research that's been done on diet and dietary interventions, if you actually look at the clinical data, it suggests that
There's a subgroup of people that respond to that dietary intervention very well, but the vast majority don't really at all, and…”
Zaremba: Robots cannot grasp arbitrary objects without custom hand-coded programming
“So it turns out that when it comes to arbitrary objects current robots are unable to just grasp an arbitrary object. For any object, it's possible to hand-code a single solution, so, say, as long as, let's say, in factory, if you have same object like I don't …”
Bartram: 80% of software engineers lack side projects to show
“The reason it's the right decision is that most engineers don't have side projects. Most engineers have been, have, you know, been working at a company, and it's all proprietary code, and there's very little they can show. That's, you know, eight out of 10 eng…”
Zuckerberg: Entire Facebook management team left within a year of rejecting Yahoo offer
“The whole management team was gone within within about a year after that.”
PostHog had the most upvoted Hacker News dev tool launch of 2020
“I pull up the post hoc slide every now and then, and I believe according to the slide, and I think it's true, it was the most upvoted dev tool hacker news post of the year.”
Pollak: Global stablecoin supply is near $200 billion
“There's almost two hundred billion dollars of stablecoins in the market”
Englander: YC W24 was the first batch almost entirely composed of AI
“That really was, that was like the first batch where it was like through and through, just, you know, AI companies pretty much”
Vercel replaces click UI instructions with cURL commands for AI agents
“Bursell, for example, is replacing every occurrence of click with the equivalent curl command that your LLM agent could take on your behalf.”
Palicha: Zepto Raised India's Only Unicorn Round in 2023
“Because it was like the only unicorn round in India for that year.”
Dessaigne: PostHog's sales leader is also the company's CTO
“Did you know the team, the CTO, is also their sales leader? Not a business leader. Their sales leader is also the CTO.”
Koomen: Optimizely started as manual A/B testing consulting before building software
“We actually had this example at Optimizely where we were building software to help companies run A-B tests. But at the earliest stages, we got companies to pay us just to go in and manually build A-B tests. For them. Right. And so we're making money. The first…”
Saez-Gil: Carbon market capital flow is growing 50% year-over-year
“The flow of capital going to carbon markets is growing. 50% year over year since the Paris Agreement.”
Hu: Niantic's employee headcount grew at least 5x year-over-year
“I mean, we, when we joined the company, I mean, from last year to this year, it's like at least five X. It's crazy.”
Alströmer: Airbnb founders posed as hired photographers to hide small team size
“They claimed to be hired photographers for Airbnb, Airbnb and breakfast. So when they met with all the hosts, they said, we want to come by your home and take photos. They didn't say that they were the founders because that made the company sound much smaller.”
Halligan: HubSpot Maintained $250/Month Pricing for First Six Years
“HubSpot was 250 dollars a month for
The first like six years of HubSpot, we didn't change it at all.”
Allred: Lambda School's student body is less than 50% white
“So we're, I think as a school, we're less than half white, which is not the traditional makeup of a code school by any stretch of the imagination.”
Sophisticated bots use natural language technology to reply in comment threads
“Some of the more sophisticated bots might actually interact with real people so they blend, like, chatbot bot technology and, you know, we all have been to those customer service pages where the thing pops up at the bottom and says, hi, can I help you today? T…”
Iorns: Amgen's Migraine Drug Outperformed Market Predictions by 10x
“Actually, Amgen's migraine drug has outperformed its predictions in the market by 10 times”
Schwartz: Ranking on Baidu requires local Chinese web hosting
“In order to rank on Baidu, you actually need Chinese hosting.”
Petersen: Air Freight Is on Average 5x More Expensive Than Ocean Freight
“Air freight on average, about five times more expensive than ocean freight.”
Petersen: The largest global freight forwarder has only 2% market share
“Now, the largest in the world only has two percent market share.”
Bromberg: Startup seed rounds crested $1M for the first time around 2010
“In 2010 after the recession more angels, more seed funds investing smaller and smaller amounts. At the same time, we saw seed rounds crest a million dollars for the first time”
Bernstam: Modern seed rounds exceed Dropbox and Airbnb's Series A rounds
“The seed rounds today, Are bigger than, like, the Series A that Dropbox and Airbnb did with Sequoia, which I think was roughly a mil each.”
Atherton: Forerunner Ventures led Zyper's $4M seed pre-Demo Day
“Forerunner Ventures led our seed pre-demo day, and that was exciting. So we raised four million then”
Allred: His growth hacking book Kickstarter generated $120,000 in sales
“And I emailed everybody who had subscribed to my blog and said, alright, we're launching this Kickstarter, and I'm gonna finish up this book, and the Kickstarter did something like a 120,000 dollars in sales.”
Cheung: Y Combinator has backed hundreds of biotech companies by 2018
“She's also a part-time partner at YC, which means in her free time, she helps all our biotech companies at which, at this point it's like hundreds, I don't know what the exact number is, but hundreds of biotech companies.”
Wessel: WayUp raised $9 million before hiring its first VP
“At that time, we'd only raised nine million dollars, which is still, I know, it sounds like a lot, but that's not enough to ensure that you are going to be You know, around for years and years to come.”