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
Doctorow: There will never be another Facebook
“The big, big upsides are not creating another Facebook because there won't be another Facebook. The big, big upside is creating the thing that happens once Facebook has been torn down.”
Doctorow: Big Tech's calls for regulation are bids for state monopoly
“And, you know, Facebook is positioning itself to become a state monopoly like the Bell system was, as is Google, as is Apple, right? All of these companies, they want to be, when they say, please regulate us, right? When they say, please make rules to tell us …”
Doctorow: Comprehensive content moderation mandates entrench Big Tech monopolies
“If we fix the tech companies, if we say in order to operate a social network, you have to make sure That you are policing hate speech, copyright infringement, terrorism, and every other kind of bad act, then what you're really saying is that you can only have …”
Doctorow: Cambridge Analytica mobilized existing racists rather than converting normal people
“Cambridge Analytica's failure to exploit any of the things that you could actually get super rich from if you could control people's minds tells you that probably what they were doing was finding racists And convincing them that Trump was someone to vote for. …”
Rossmann predicts Harvard will soon be recognized primarily as a luxury good
“Harvard is going to be more obviously recognized as a luxury good, as an expensive purchase that works for the elites. And it's something that if you can afford to get your kids there and you can afford to not focus on hard skills, then great. You've purchased…”
Best: Ad-supported podcast market is small compared to paid audio
“I think that the podcast market that can be supported by advertising is small and sad compared to the audio market that could be supported if we had an effective way to pay for it.”
Halligan: Outbound sales and cold calling are dead and actively harm brands
“I think outbound is largely just dead. I don't think cold calls work at all. In fact, I think they're negative.”
Allred: Lambda School grads are financially $250K ahead of university peers
“By the time the student's graduating from university, the Lambda School student has three years of experience and has paid Lambda School off and is a quarter million dollars ahead, at least, of the university grad.”
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.”
Brockman: Scaling neural nets will unlock qualitatively new behaviors
“And I think that what that's going to unlock is you're going to be able to scale up these models and you're going to see qualitatively different behaviors from what you've seen so far.”
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.”
Jeff Dean: AI models have reached junior engineer capability level
“The models have been getting a lot better at sort of agent-based, longer-running coding tasks, and it seems pretty clear that they are now actually pretty capable, and depending on exactly your definition of junior engineer, it seems pretty spot on, I would sa…”
Dean: Specialized inference hardware will surpass general GPUs and TPUs
“I think, ah, you're gonna see more and more, ah high performance and low energy inference hardware systems, because I think everyone is now realizing that inference is the key to making, you know, these agent-based systems be available to more and more people,…”
Jeff Dean: AI agents can run autonomously for days or weeks
“Probably one thing is people don't quite realize how possible it is to have, you know, agent based systems that can run not just for an hour or two hours on a problem you care about, but for some problem domains and with highly capable models underlying them, …”
Dean: AI startups should target tasks with 1% model success, not 20%
“If they're completely failing, that's probably a good sign. If they're kind of able to do some of it, but not very well, That's maybe not a great sign because that's probably a sign that the capability is starting to be present in those models and with more tr…”
Jeff Dean: AI models will not have good taste in problem selection
“I think models are not necessarily going to be that good at it. So you're going to have people steering a lot of AI assisted computation in order to accomplish great things and more quickly. But that essence of what it is you want your models to do is the key …”
Jeff Dean: There is no impediment to fully automating ML model research
“There's no, ah, you know, real impediment to making that be a much more automated loop, where the model itself decides it's going to explore, or maybe with a nudge from some people, ah, at the various highest level, like, oh, why don't you try some new ideas a…”
Alexandr Wang: Economic diffusion, not model progress, is AI's bottleneck
“I mean, I really think, I think we're at this, like, amazing moment in the world where the bottleneck is not the progress of the AI models. The bottleneck is diffusing that through the rest of the world and helping the world adapt to this amazing technology th…”
Alexandr Wang: Startups leveraging AI agents can easily outcompete incumbents
“And now I actually think with the power of agents and AI broadly speaking, it's much closer to Goliath versus Goliath. Like, I think, but maybe the startup is like a mecha Goliath that is like vastly enhanced by the power of agents and AI, and you know, the la…”
Wang: Billions of people will have tailored personal superintelligences
“We believe that everybody in the world, you know, all the billions of people in the world are going to have a super intelligence that is adapted and tailored to them, that is, enables them to accomplish their goals, knows their context, and ultimately is an ex…”
Wang: AI tools will increase businesses on Meta to billions
“There's two hundred million businesses that are on Metis platforms today. We think that number should go to billions with this explosion of creativity and using AI tools”
Wang: Meta rebuilt frontier AI lab from scratch after Llama 4 stalled
“Lama four wasn't on the trajectory that was needed for Meta. And so I got in there and we kind of did a zero based build of how do you know, build an entire frontier lab you know, in some ways kind of from scratch, obviously using a lot of what we had and move…”
Wang: Current AI models are powerful enough to drive major GDP expansion
“I truly believe these models are already just incredibly powerful. Like, they should be so powerful to fuel, you know many, many points of expansion of GDP growth, and I think it's, like, up to smart people with vision and ambition to make all that happen.”