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 853 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
Finn: Physical Intelligence adapted its model to an unseen third-party robot
“We're also able to apply that same recipe to robots at other companies. This is a robot that I've actually never seen in person before. They collected data. They sent the data to us. We fine tuned our model on their data. We actually didn't even know exactly h…”
Finn: Full Pre-Training Mixture Boosts Robot Performance Over 20% in Novel Homes
“And we find that these kind of bars on the right, which are excluding data from static robots in labs and environments and so forth reduces performance significantly. So the performance goes down to less than 60% when you exclude that data when evaluated in no…”
Jumper: A two-day open-source hack created the best protein interaction predictor
“The tweet on the left from Yoshitaka Morawaki came out two days after our code was available. We had predicted the structure of individual proteins, but we considered, we were working on building a system that would predict how proteins came together. But, ah,…”
Chollet: Fine-Tuned OpenAI o3 Reached Human-Level Performance on ARC
“So in particular, in December last year, OpenAI previewed its, ah, all three model, and they used a version of it that was, ah, fine-tuned specifically on Arc, and that showed human-level performance on that benchmark versus time.”
Nadella: LinkedIn merged design, engineering, and product into full stack builders
“Like, you know, at LinkedIn, I think they took multiple of these functions the design function, the front end engineer function, the product function, put them all together and said, we're going to have full stack builders.”
Musk: Neuralink will do first human vision implants in 6-12 months
“And then I think in the next six to 12 months, we'll be doing our first implants for vision, where even if somebody's completely blind we can write directly to the visual cortex.”
Elon Musk: Raw materials are only 1% to 2% of rocket costs
“Actually a rocket, the raw materials of a rocket are only maybe one or two percent of the historical cost of a rocket. So The manufacturing must necessarily be very inefficient.”
Mac Minis are uniquely suited for batch-one local LLM inference
“Mac minis, for example, are a very good fit for some of the LLMs, because it's all, if you're doing batch one inference, this is all super memory bound, so this actually works.”
Thompson: Penicillin was barely used until US WWII industrial scaling
“Like five people have been delivered penicillin in all of human history, 13 years after it was discovered, and the two of them have died. Penicillin has done nothing, and it took a very concerted U.S. Effort to implement penicillin, to grow it in large vats, t…”
Derek Thompson: NIH awards funding to older scientists over younger researchers
“It funds older scientists, much more than younger scientists, even though, I don't have to tell you this, it's often young people who have the most earth-changing ideas, the best paradigm-shifting ideas.”
Thompson: Today's scientists spend 40% of their time on grant paperwork
“A remarkable statistics from the book is that today's scientists now spend 40% of their time filling out paperwork and filing for grants.”
Xu: DoorDash spent millions on pandemic ads promoting competitor platforms
“One was running a national TV campaign where we spent millions of dollars advertising on behalf of the industry, basically saying whether you order on us or any of our peers, just order.”
Xu: Cutting pandemic merchant commissions in half cost DoorDash over $100M
“And the other decision, which we were the only platform to do, we cut our commissions by half, which cost us over a hundred million dollars.”
Field: Designers fiercely rejected Figma's 2016 multiplayer launch
“I remember when we finally launched the GA in October of 2016, I mean, the comments we got were like, if this is the future of design, I'm changing careers. You know, that person commented about it and said, a camel is a horse designed by committee. So it's li…”
Zenefits grew from $20M to $65M before Conrad was ousted as CEO
“And then the next year, our plan was to go from 20 to a hundred. And we ended up going from 20 to 65, and I got fired, ah, basically within a week of the end of the fiscal year.”
Public software firms spend 50% more on sales for less new ARR
“In the public markets, you know, over the last five years, public companies are spending 50% more on, on sales and marketing but they're adding 10% less in new ARR, like with that increase in spend.”
Lieb: Musk said Twitter should make far-left and far-right equally unhappy
“I think Elon explicitly said, when you're using Twitter, you should feel equally bad if you're on the far left or on the far right.”
Hu: Diode demonstrated that OpenAI's o1 can automate PCB system design
“But the thing that they demonstrated now with O-one was actually able to do the system design and component selection, which is crazy. So it would be able to read all the data sheets and select the right components.”
Altman: I wrote OpenAI's early checks before Elon Musk funded scale
“It was definitely helpful that I could just, like, write the early checks for OpenAI, and I think it would have been hard to get somebody else to do that at the very beginning. And then Elon did it a lot at a much higher scale, which I'm very grateful for, and…”
Tan: OpenAI enabled internal model distillation as a developer lock-in strategy
“OpenAI itself has now enabled distillation internal to its own API. So you can use O-one, you can use even GPT-IV or IV-O to distill it down into a much cheaper model that's internal to them, like GPT-IV, IV-O-Mini. And that's sort of their, you know, lock-in …”
Monzo scaled to 500k users with unit economics of -£30 to -£40
“In the early days of Monzo, we were at -30 or -40 pounds per customer per year, and we scaled to half a million customers before we fixed them.”
Caldwell: YC accepts startups with $500K ARR or $1M+ raised
“We have folks that get into YC that have, I don't know, half a million dollars in annual recurring revenue. Also a common one here these days is, oh, I'm too far along because I've already raised some money. We have folks that apply and get accepted to YC that…”
Caldwell: Fast raised $100M and burned it in 10 months
“What did fast do? They raised a hundred million and they burned it in 10 months. They got into a ten million A month burn.”
Caldwell: Brian Armstrong's original Coinbase YC pitch wasn't about buying Bitcoin
“Another thing I want to note is even Brian and his YC application Didn't really believe in his own idea because what he basically applied to YC with was the P to P transfer parts. It wasn't buying Bitcoin and holding it. It was the idea that he could build som…”
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…”
Pachama's ML model predicts New England forest carbon under 1.5% error
“And we demonstrated, this is the work of, ah, Elias, who is the PhD that works with us, ah, for four years he was working on this and he demonstrated in New England, less than 1.5% error at predicting how much carbon is there in a forest, comparing...”
Saez-Gil: Less than 2% of $80B carbon market funds forestry
“According to the World Bank last year, over eighty billion dollars went into carbon market initiatives around the world. And yet, when you look at the percentage of that funding that is going to forest conservation and restoration is less than two percent.”
Saez-Gil: New airline regulations demand 160M tons of carbon offsets annually
“All the airlines starting in twenty-twenty-one will have to offset their emissions. This is by regulations, right? Mm-hmm. It's called the Corsia Framework. Yeah. We are talking about a 160 million tons per year that are gonna be demanded by the market.”
Agroforestry can produce higher yields than traditional monoculture agriculture
“It turns out, according to the data I read, that agriculture inside of a forest can actually produce more yield than traditional, you know, monoculture agriculture.”
Cutts: HUD has over 8,000 employees and zero IT staff under 30
“HUD, Housing and Urban Development, has 8000 plus employees. According to the statistics, the number of IT experts, like, there's a job classification, 2210, blah blah blah, we'll just say IT people. The number of IT people under 30 at HUD is zero.”
Betts-Lacroix: Mint scaled by scraping bank websites using voluntarily submitted credentials
“So a friend of mine, Aaron Patzer, created something called Mint and ended up taking a bunch of eyeballs from big banks and other financial companies by hacking, essentially going, doing adversarial interoperability with their websites by scraping, which is so…”
Rossmann: Up to 75% of elite university students have wealthy parents
“Anywhere from 60 to 75% of the students who go to schools like Stanford and MIT come from the top 20% of families by income, and oftentimes you get up to a quarter of the student body that's from the one percent of families by income.”
Rossmann: Make School is the only surviving young dropout startup from its YC batch
“My co-founder and I are the only young founders in our batch whose company is still alive. So when you look at it from that perspective, you look today, what are the companies from my YC batch that still exist and are still successful? There is, there are zero…”
Best: Podcast ad rates per download will drop significantly
“I suspect as I kind of hinted before that there's a lot of podcast advertising that's in a little bit of like an emperor's new clothes state where like too much is it's overpriced. And because there's just not metrics there, it's just like waiting for like som…”
Gill: Chinese professors quit to make millions podcasting
“There's been, ah, basically professors that have quit their teaching positions to be full-time podcasters because they quite literally make millions of dollars podcasting.”
Allred: Lambda School may launch a nursing school by late 2019
“So you know, we're not working on it right, right now, but don't be surprised if you hear by the end of this year, an announcement that Lambda nursing is going live and we're launching a nursing school”
Fines: The Narrative That YC Lacks Women and Black People is False
“This misconception of there are no women at YC. There are no black people at YC. There's no, you know, there's all these things, and it's like when I'm working around with all these different people, it's like, it's definitely very diverse, and we're doing eve…”
Susskind: Classical computers can never simulate 100 entangled qubits
“Classical computers can never be built big enough to explore more than 400, more than actually more than Probably a hundred qubits. A hundred qubits doesn't seem like very much. No classical computer can do the calculation of following what a hundred qubits do…”
Buchheit: FriendFeed created the first Like button before Facebook
“We actually created the like button, so like, the very first like button was on friend feed, and then mysteriously appeared on Facebook a number of months later.”
Akinlade in 2018: Nigeria's population will exceed the US in five years
“Like in the next five years, I think Nigeria is going to be even more than the US.”
Hua: Proposed rules allow cannabis delivery into locally banned California cities
“And in that this iteration, there was a proposed reg on allowing delivery operators to deliver anywhere into the state, even in prohibited areas, which is in contention with the chiefs of police, the league of cities that California definitely prides itself on…”
Ning: Compliance forced dispensaries to video-record destroying millions in cannabis
“Well, because for compliance, you have to record yourself disposing of the product, whether you burn it or smash it or whatever. There's videos of dispensaries just like as evidence, just like damaging all their products and just basically having this huge dem…”
Schwartz: Paid ad budgets will suffer substantial cuts under GDPR
“The other big advantage is that paid budgets are now going to take a huge hit. Because of GDPR, we've gone to this nightmare scenario where you don't know if your paid budgets are working because you can't track users until users Agree to be tracked.”
Flexport surpassed FedEx to become the 17th largest global freight forwarder
“We are now, we last month we passed FedEx and panel Pina, which are, we're now number 17. Oh, out of about 20,000 freight forwarders in the world in four years.”
Zeevi: Modern daily sugar consumption equals annual sugar intake in 1700
“The annual consumption in 1700 is the daily consumption today.”
Zeevi: Specific bacterial genomic region correlates with being 15 pounds thinner
“People who have this region in their, the genome of their microbiome are about 15 pounds thinner than people who don't have this region.”
Zeevi: Gut microbes metabolize red meat carnitine into atherosclerosis-causing TMAO
“They looked at carnitine, which is a compound that is found in red meat. This carnitine is metabolized by the microbiome to form TMA. It's a compound. TMA is then oxidized in the liver to form TMAO, and TMAO causes a reduce in reverse cholesterol transport and…”