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
Seibel: Gambling exploits human desire for disproportionate wins without work
“Like, I would almost say that it takes advantage of an inherent flaw in our programming. And I think that flaw has something to do with getting disproportionate wins Without the perception of doing disproportionate amount of work.”
Seibel: Financial regulations exist because zero-sum finance harmed ordinary Americans
“And it's funny how many of the financial regulations today come from people in the finance world basically doing zero sum games and like harming normal Americans and harming them so much to the point where they're like, you know what we should do? We should li…”
Seibel: Downturns reveal the tiny group of smart players extracting capital
“When everything's going up, it's easy to think you're the smart person. When things start going down, you start realizing who the real smart people are. And it tends to be a way, way smaller group than you might think. And it turns out that they're taking mone…”
Seibel: Failing at positive-sum games still builds valuable skills
“Cause like our friends who tried and failed to do positive sum games, they almost always learned something or advanced in some way. Like they almost always took something from that game with them that made them better off, even if they didn't win. Whereas like…”
Seibel: In zero-sum games, today's exploiter becomes tomorrow's dummy
“Be careful with the zero sum games because today you're taking money from a dummy and tomorrow you might be the dummy.”
Seibel: Founder setbacks are often unforced errors from poor personal setups
“Like a lot of times founders get punched in the face as almost unforced errors. It's like a result of magical thinking or like other parts of their lives not being set up.”
Seibel: Successful founders must adult much harder than their peers
“And it might turn out that if you want to be a founder of a very successful company, you might have to adult harder than the people around you. In fact, it almost assuredly requires adulting harder than the people around you.”
Seibel: The most successful founders use their homes to recharge performance
“Like at the minimum, your home should be neutral, but I think for the most successful people, the home's actually a plus. Like the home is like where they're making points, where they're winning points.”
Seibel: Unhealthy founder sacrifices made in your twenties fail in your thirties
“You probably can sacrifice these things for five years, like maybe even seven years. The tricky thing is that like the best companies last multiple decades. The tricky things is the shit that you can get away with in your twenties. You can't get away with in y…”
Seibel: 5% to 10% founder salary bumps are almost always worth it
“Just a small incremental five or 10% salary bump can make a huge lifestyle difference, and it's almost always worth it.”
Seibel: Co-founder conflict usually stems from frustration styles, not the debate
“I actually see that most Problems between co-founders, the root cause isn't whatever went wrong, or whatever they're debating. It's actually their style of dealing with their frustration.”
Seibel: Startups often punch themselves out by manufacturing crises over unrealistic expectations
“It's funny because in some ways you're saying sometimes these companies punch themselves out. Right? Like they don't even need external forces. They set a stupid expectation. They don't hit their own unrealistic expectation. Then they feel like something's wro…”
Seibel: Highly admired founders secretly rely on therapy and psychiatric medication
“Most people don't realize how the founders who they are impressed with actually take advantage of therapy, actually take advantage of medication.”
Seibel: YC did not increase standard deal to compete with seed funds
“People were looking at the YC standard deal being like, oh, like YC has to compete. There's so many, New seed funds out there. And I think what's interesting is if you would kind of take it inside baseball for a second, that's really not the reason we did it a…”
Seibel: YC has the budget to fund over 1,400 companies
“The fact that we have budget to fund over 1400 companies with this standard deal.”
Small business owners grasp survival math faster than tech founders
“Like, it's weirdly the kind of concept that, like, the entrepreneur who runs a barber shop will understand before a startup founder will, right?”
Seibel: Good investors can always tell if a pitching startup is dying
“A good investor can always tell whether the company's pitching them is gonna die and about to die or not.”
Seibel: Retention and burn rate matter more for survival than pitch metrics
“Whereas I'd argue when you're running your company, those numbers are important, but there's also your burn rate, your retention, how much your existing customer accounts are expanding, your revenue expansion over time. Those metrics are the ones that can bett…”
Investors judge startups primarily on their preceding six to eighteen months
“So at any given time in your startup, you're being judged on the last six to 18 months. And so if you take this hit, you cut your revenue in half, but you get to default alive. And the result of that is you get to spend the next six to 18 months Building a bet…”
Seibel: Justin.tv faced imminent death with $500K cash and $250K burn
“We had raised about seven or eight million dollars. We had grown to about, I don't know, let's say like thirty million monthly people were watching content. We were making about 750,000 dollars a month in revenue, but we were, we had a million dollars a month …”
Seibel: Justin.tv hit breakeven in two months and generated $1.2M profit
“By October, we were breakeven. By the end of December, we had generated 1.2 million dollars in profit, and we saved the company.”
Seibel: Amazon succeeded by strictly accepting its low-margin reality
“This is one of the dirty little secrets behind Amazon. They've always known that they were in a low margin business, and they've always run their company that way. And I'm sure they were so tempted to look at a Google or a Facebook and say, why don't we do tho…”
Seibel: Founders should believe an investor's no, not their why
“Our saying at YC is, believe the no, don't believe the why.”
Seibel: 60% of Y Combinator companies were previously rejected by YC
“60% of the companies that do YC were rejected at some point in the past.”
Seibel: Investors value business progress far more than pitch deck changes
“If you actually just change the facts of your business, right? Like make progress more often than not. The investor will look at that prognus as a much better signal than any modification you made to your deck or any modification you made to the words in your …”
Seibel: Big tech bonuses beat startup ambitions without an explicit exit plan
“If you're fighting the bonus head to head with no plan, bonus wins most of the time.”
Seibel: Most Startups Die Because They Make Things Nobody Wants
“The depressing fact that most likely everyone's going to die. So like, you're not accounting for like the most common outcomes, like you and your competitors, none of you will make something that people want.”
Seibel: Talking to customers and launching products best de-risk startups
“The thing we keep on saying over and over again is like the two things that ridiculously de-risk your startup, three things, and we'll get to the third one in a second. First one's talking to your customers. The second one's building and launching product. And…”
Seibel: Fully committed teams will always beat equally competent teams hedging bets
“In our world, it's really competitive. And what happens if there's a team that's exactly as competent as you, and they're not hedging? They're always gonna win, you know? They're always gonna beat you.”
Seibel says YC founders make predictable errors following non-founder investor advice
“And what's interesting is that over the years, a lot of YC founders will kind of start following the advice of these people. And they'll make very, very common errors, and you can almost track it back to, like, oh, I kind of understand the type of person who i…”
Seibel says YC advice stems from portfolio data, not personal operating experience
“How much we are learning from the founders that we're working with and how much we are condensing their learnings and delivering it to the next generation of YC founders versus how much we're condensing learnings personally that we got in our own companies.”
Seibel says the best investors point out problems rather than providing solutions
“The best investors point out the problem. They don't give you a solution. They just point out the problem.”
Seibel says founders get more honest feedback from observers without financial stakes
“You can get a lot more honesty out of somebody when they're not financially incentivized to kind of blow smoke up your ass to, you know, to say nice things.”
Seibel: Having Engineers Screen Peers Is Inefficient and Unenjoyable for Them
“Even though engineers are better, At grading other engineers. There are two other facts. One, they don't tend to enjoy doing it. And two, it doesn't tend to be the greatest way to extract value out of a great engineer.”
Seibel: Founders start with the false belief they know what users want
“I think that every founder starts their company with the lie in their head that they know about what their customer wants and they know how to solve the problem. And the more you build before putting your product in front of a user, the more you just let that …”
Seibel: Mishandling crowdfunded money is a reputational one-shot kill
“Like there are a few things in the startup world that kind of are like one shot kill. And, you know, this is one of them. You screw up with enough people's money. It never leaves you. Like you get that permanent Wikipedia page.”
Seibel: Airbnb, Coinbase, and Stripe beat dominant incumbents by being 10x better
“For each of these companies, there was a pre-existing product. Pre-existing competitor, dominant, you might say, but there was an opportunity to make something that was 10 X better than what existed.”
Seibel: Investors initially thought Airbnb, Coinbase, and Stripe were horrible ideas
“Most people, founders and investors thought these ideas were horrible, either because they were too hard to execute or because they just were bad ideas.”
Seibel: Rental marketplaces win by maximizing host supply, not charging listing fees
“If you think about the core insight of this market, it's that hosts are the game. If you can get the most hosts, you win. You have the best inventory. But if you charge them up front to be on your site like you're probably doing it wrong.”
Seibel: Needing a polished MVP means incumbents are doing a good job
“If you can find a small population of people that have enough of a problem that the other folks aren't solving, that they're willing to use something that's pretty bad, that's a very good sign. If the only way you can find any group of users, even 10, even a h…”
Seibel: Founders without domain expertise must build bespoke features to learn
“Just learning the business means you're gonna be building a lot of features that probably are not generally applicable, and that's the cost of learning about this business.”
Seibel: Securing non-priced LOIs proves demand and sales capability to investors
“Generating letters of intent or agreements to pilot shouldn't be very hard if there's a lot of demand for this sort of thing. So being able just to get your customer to sign anything, even if it doesn't have a price on it, is evidence that you can sell to an i…”
Seibel: On-demand car repair startups struggle because frequent break-down customers are price-sensitive
“The population that has the most problem with their cars tends to also be the population that is extremely price sensitive about fixing their cars. And so make sure that you have some insight on how you can be offering the cheapest option. Cause if you're the …”
Seibel: Subsidizing unit economics creates artificial demand that vanishes when prices rise
“If you're into a situation where you're providing a dollar worth of value and you're only getting 75% cents back, you're gonna get a lot of demand. But you're gonna lose a lot of money, and when you actually equalize the demand and the price, you'll lose a lot…”
Seibel: Founders in crowded spaces must know why previous products failed
“Make sure that you're studying those products and you have a strong opinion about why they suck. It's going to help you two reasons. One, it'll help you figure out what to make as a good product. And two, A very common investor question, if you ever want to ra…”
Seibel: Time-bounding startup attempts to at least six months clarifies pivot decisions
“I think the best strategy for this the one that's easiest to execute is to time bound it. So what I would say is like, Hey, we're going to try everything as hard as possible to make this work for this period of time, probably no less than six months. And if we…”
Seibel: Founders should establish demand benchmarks that convince company skeptics before continuing
“Identify a critic in the company. Identify a sign that would either, that would even convince the critic that there's something here. If you can't hit that sign within a period of time, you should move. So, like, don't trust The faith of the optimist, like, tr…”
Seibel: Pitch current product and traction before long-term vision
“So here's how I would probably structure the pitch. Step one, what you're working on now. Step two, the traction. Step three the business model, and then step four, the vision. It's a lot easier to sell me if I know what the hell's going on, and those first th…”