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
Algolia required every engineer to execute a marketing hack every single month
“Well, early on at Algolia, we were actually asking every single engineer in the team to do what we called a marketing hack every single month.”
Altman: OpenAI's original goals included never exceeding 120 people
“I believe there were three goals for the For the effort at the time. It was like, figure out how to do unsupervised learning, solve RL, and never get more than a 120 people. Missed on the third one.”
Altman: OpenAI initially focused on robotics and gaming agents over LLMs
“I had no idea that language models were going to be the thing. You know, we started working on robots and agents playing video games and all these other things.”
Friar: OpenAI's capital spending prioritizes compute first, then top talent
“It's compute first and it's not cheap. It's great talent second. And then of course it's all the normal operating expenses of a more traditional company.”
Adding three friends at sign-up boosted Monzo retention by 20%
“Because we had a bank account, but also this Venmo-like functionality built into the product where you could send and receive money, customers who added three friends from their phone book to their Monzo account so they could send and receive money, as they si…”
Caldwell: Addressing YC rejection feedback in future applications is heavily weighted favorably
“Internalizing this feedback And demonstrating that you've addressed it in a future application is heavily weighted in your favor.”
Seibel: Non-technical founders feel borderline useless in early startup stages
“I was the business guy who didn't know how to code and literally I would say there are many moments in the early stage of a company where I felt borderline useless, and certainly I didn't have the power to impact the product anywhere near as much as my other t…”
Seibel: Early YC Advising Failed by Prioritizing Fun Over Hard Feedback
“And I think as an, as a YC partner in the early days, I think I measured my effectiveness based on how much fun founders had talking to me. And only after a couple of batches that I realized that doesn't really do anything. And then when I started having hones…”
Seibel: YC prefers co-founders with preexisting relationships to prevent blowups
“This is why we like teams who known each other for at least a little bit and have some kind of work or personal relationship. Because I always say that like, when you have some kind of non, you know, if you have some kind of base relationship that you might wa…”
Webflow deliberately avoids marketing messaging that portrays developers in a negative light
“At Webflow, we have the same tension between, you know, you want to speed up the designer developer workflows. You don't want to like paint developers in negative light, like avoid developers or I know here it's sort of help developers work on other things.”
Conrad: Rippling employs around 50 former founders as product GMs
“Usually we love hiring former founders to run specific product lines and build them and really run them as general managers. We've been, you know, really successful at recruiting. I think we have now probably around 50 former founders that work at Rip Lane.”
Caldwell: Y Combinator keeps proprietary startup data secret for batch participants
“And there's just a lot of data that we keep secret unless you're in YC and that is like gonna stay that way.”
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.”
Diego Saez-Gil told Pachama investors mission will always precede profits
“I told them before accepting their money, look, okay, now you're convinced that this is a good business. I want to tell you, this is a long-term company. It's mission driven. Always the mission is going to be before profits. And it's going to take time. You kn…”
Pachama assumes carbon markets will expand even without regulatory changes
“Definitely, we are acting as if there's not gonna be any change in regulation, and still this is gonna be a big market.”
Srini: ZeroDown customers earn 0.25% monthly home equity towards purchase
“So you get .25% of the home every month, And over a five-year period, you get 15% of the home. So it becomes easier to buy the home from us at any time you want after a two-year period.”
Srini: ZeroDown's underwriting model bets on customers' earnings in five years
“The biggest thing that we evaluate is, like, is their income, like, healthy? Right? And do they have some savings? Because, like, we help them build the rest of the savings to be able to buy the house from us five years from now. So, so we are basically making…”
Kevin Hale never tells founders he dislikes their ideas at recruiting events
“If you ever meet me or talk to me about your startup and kind of recruiting or at one of these events, ah, I will never tell you that I do not like your idea.”
Hale: Wufoo raised only $118k and returned over 30,000%
“For Wufoo, we only raised a 118,000 dollars for the whole life of the company, and our returns were over 30,000 percent.”
Hale: Y Combinator Accepts Single Founders and Teams Without Ideas
“We do take single founders. We do take people without an idea. We mostly focus on the team.”
Kevin Hale: Wufoo raised only $118,000 over its entire lifetime
“We only raised 118,000 dollars for the whole life of the company. So, so back in 2006 YC was only giving 18,000 dollars, and then we only raised from two angels 50,000 dollars each.”
Kevin Hale: Wufoo had only 10 employees when acquired
“Rufu was a company that only had 10 employees when we got acquired about five and a half years later, and we had done that on purpose, and we had profit sharing.”
Hockenmaier: 90% of growth advising is talking founders out of ideas
“Nine times out of 10, we are talking them out of doing things that they want to do.”
Hockenmaier: Thumbtack defined market liquidity by the percentage of requests reaching quote thresholds
“The main thing was when a consumer got a certain number of quotes from a pro we had, they then believed that we did the job for them. We gave them options. They could go choose their hire rate was much higher there. Their NPS would actually, like, you could wa…”
Rossmann: Make School takes on debt to fund student education upfront
“We get financing to cover our cost of educating students So we're the school that actually goes in debt when students enroll. It's kind of a reversal. So normally, you know, you enroll at a college, you go into debt. When you enroll at our college, we go into …”
Second Measure acquired its first 150 clients with zero outbound sales
“We actually haven't done any outbound sales yet, right? We have a 150 clients. Every single one of them came to us through inbound, right?”
Halligan: Very few HubSpot customers originate from Facebook or Google ads
“Like, if you look at where our customers come from today, they come from search engine optimization. They come from our freemium model. A very small percentage of them comes from ads we do on Facebook and Google.”
Halligan: HubSpot Revenue Splits Evenly Between Content and Freemium
“I look at where our revenue comes in. Half through content and half through freemium, I guess.”
Johnson used technical content strictly as a vehicle for comedy
“Like, I'm actually only talking about that information so that, like, someone will watch me, like, try to be funny.”
Allred: Lambda School will eventually operate as a talent agency
“The future we're going to look a lot like a talent agency basically for software engineers and designers and whatever else.”
Allred: Lambda School is fundamentally a vocational trade school
“So we are, yeah, we are entirely Vocational we're a trade school basically, and we want to help you make as much money as you can.”
Brownlee: YouTube ads are 50% of revenue, while sponsors are 20%
“I'm still at a point where like the YouTube ads are probably 40, 40 to 50%. The, I don't do a whole lot of sponsored stuff. If I did, that number would be much higher, but I think right now sponsored stuff is probably about 20%. So, 4020, and then affiliate st…”
Hale: Wufoo raised only $118,000 total from YC and two angels
“18,000 dollars. YC was 18,000 dollars then, and we raised money from two angels, PB and PG, and it was 50,000 dollars each. And that was it.”
Knoop: Zapier requires employees to acknowledge direct Slack tags within 24 hours
“In Slack, if you tag somebody in a message, like, at tag them specifically, it's kind of the social norm to be, to acknowledge that within 24 hours. So we have some expectations like that, and the reason we have said 24 hours is because we have folks all acros…”
Knoop: Zapier disables Slack notices and actively encourages employees to leave channels
“And very early on, we set the expectation that Slack is not a tool you're expected to keep up with in Zapier. You are free to leave channels. In fact, we encourage it. Kevin Hale: That is fascinating. Mike Knoop: There's a feature in Slack where you can turn o…”
Caldwell sometimes discourages profitable side projects from raising venture capital
“Sometimes what I do is actually discourage someone from doing venture financing if they have a side project working, especially if they're making money, And they never will have, like, they can support themselves on it, and they can basically have the job fore…”
Brex was originally admitted to Y Combinator pitching a VR headset
“I funded them to do a VR headset thing, and I was a credit card company. And they, I was, I interviewed them, I was their group partner, I was their main contact through the whole thing.”
Patel Thompson shared exact bank balances and default dates with all employees
“Even towards the end, our investor update went to everybody. From the most junior folks to my COO I believe in transparency. I believe in educating people on what do the numbers mean. So, Even that very last investor update, every single person saw exactly how…”
Oxford researchers found widespread meme-based disinformation in Brazilian WhatsApp groups
“We looked at WhatsApp in Brazil, for example, and in that study we joined a bunch of different groups Were looking at the kinds of images and the kinds of conversations that were being shared. And there were a lot of memes that were being used to public, to pu…”
Khosla agreed to fund Impossible Foods in first meeting without details
“And we, I think I said yes to him in our very first meeting. We didn't last. I didn't even need to know the details. It was just a vision too big to not attempt.”
Kortina: Venmo's only options before selling to Braintree were shutting down
“Well, one, it was, the options were shut down Venmo forever or sell it.”
Paystack brought on Stripe and Visa for cross-border scaling expertise
“That's one of the reasons why just thinking about that series A, we had to think about companies that have figured out skill. Companies like Stripe, companies like Visa. Like if there's a company, the companies that have thought about moving payments from one …”
Migicovsky: Pebble spent its entire post-YC $250k funding round on inventory
“We raised a bit of money about 250,000 dollars including this kind of large check that we got from, ah, one investor. And I took all that money and invested in inventory, because I thought at the time the biggest constraint on us growing was we didn't have a r…”
Ralston: Y Combinator no longer recommends startups use convertible notes
“And a convertible note is a kind of debt as well, although we don't recommend you use convertible notes anymore.”
Ralston: YC advises founders against priced equity in seed rounds
“We don't recommend you do equity in a seed round. Usually it'll be on some sort of convertible.”
French-Owen: Segment allows individual engineering teams to self-organize without mandated processes
“For us we don't have any set process that teams have to follow at segment kind of individual engineering teams, sort of like what Spotify does are able to self-organize. They're able to run however they want. If they want to do sprints, that's cool. If they wa…”