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 2,573 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
Friedman: Cheap AI makes developers rewrite code rather than debug it
“Like it's wild how your coding style changes when actually writing the code becomes a thousand X cheaper. Like as a human, you would never just like blow away something that you'd worked on for a long time and rewrite it from scratch because you had a bug. You…”
Hu: Top 1% engineers will still require deliberate practice despite AI
“I think there's gonna be a generation of software engineers that are, like, good enough because it's so easy to retool there with all these cogent tools. Like, the barrier is so low. You're gonna be good enough engineers. There's gonna be tons of those. But to…”
Friedman: AI coding agents will bullshit founders just like human employees
“The AI agents, incidentally, will do exactly the same thing. They will absolutely, like, The AI agents will bullshit you just like a human employee will if you don't, like, if you're not technical enough to, like, call them out on their bullshit and be like, n…”
Search and autonomous driving are the only AI product data flywheels
“There are probably only two problems where you can work on AI and also build product at the same time. One is like search, and the other is self-driving car.”
Inference-time search gives startups a structural advantage over Google's legacy index
“There's one way of doing these things where we go to each of these domains and like try to build an index of it and put it into specific formats like tables and then have the LLM, like read that. In a structured language of SQL, or you could do the other way w…”
Alströmer: Pre-PMF startups only need founders, computers, and one engineer
“When startups get funded, every single dollar, every single energy effort should go towards trying to find product market fit, which usually is The two founders or the three founders, their computers, their apartment, and maybe one more engineer who's also pro…”
McGrew: AI founders should build with frontier models first, distill later
“Yeah, I would say if you're a founder, the right approach is to start with the very best model you can, because, you know, your startup is only going to be successful if it exploits some, something about AI that realistically is going to be on you know, the fr…”
Conrad: Compound software suites solve organizational problems better than point solutions
“A lot of the sort of deeper problems within organizations can't really be solved by very narrow point solution software products. And that if you can build A whole suite of really seamlessly interoperable applications. You can build much better products for bu…”
Conrad: AI's reading and context ingestion is far more valuable than generation
“And so I think that the fact that these systems can read and their context windows are so large is actually Much more powerful for B to B software than the fact that they can write. Like the generative AI is actually really a misnomer. It's actually the, it's …”
Conrad: Founders should only practice 'founder mode' when critical systems break
“One, I think you need really good executives and you don't want to do the founder mode thing unless something's broken. You know, like you kind of want, cause you can't do it everywhere. Like you need people to help you run the company and like, and so you wan…”
Charging for support incentivizes open-source startups to build overly complex products
“And finally, some open source companies charge for support and services, but I would actually discourage you to follow that monetization path because your incentive becomes to build the most complex product possible so you can charge for support and services. …”
Dev tool founders should reach $1M ARR before hiring their first salesperson
“As a rule of thumb, I would wait to get to about one million AR before hiring your first salesperson.”
Tan: AI startup moats come from proprietary data for domain evals
“You can almost Argue that anything that is consumer and publicly available on the internet, that's going to be in the base model. So then your moat ultimately is for all of the other things that are not already online, whether it's, you know, for case techs be…”
Altman: Most of the world undervalues extreme conviction on one bet
“Most of the world still does not understand the value of, like, a fairly extreme level of conviction on one bet.”
Altman: Level 4 AI innovation can happen using current models creatively
“I had been telling people for a while, I thought that The level two to level three jump was going to happen, but then the level three to level four jump was, level two to level three was going to happen quickly, and then the level three to level four jump was …”
Friedman: Software adopted by YC startups predicts future global tech winners
“One thing that we know from running YC for a long time is that whatever the companies in the batch use is a very good predictor of what Like the best companies in the world are using, and therefore what products will be most successful. A lot of YC's most succ…”
Tan: Foundation model giants won't build vertical applications due to inefficiency
“If you treat OpenAI as the Google of the next 20 years, you want to invest in Google and all the things that Google enabled, like Airbnb. Google could do Airbnb, it probably won't. Just from, like, I don't know, Coase's theorem of the firm, probably. It's just…”
Koomen: Quoting Too High Rarely Scares Off Genuinely Interested Customers
“One of the most surprising things I learned was that when a customer really wants your product, it's hard to scare them away by quoting a price that's too high.”
Seibel: Startups must use tactics that would get corporate employees fired
“And like, if you play the big company game, they will always beat you. You always have to be thinking about, what would you have gotten fired for at the big company? That should be your playbook at the startup.”
Seibel: VC skill is winning competitive deals, not theoretical thesis picking
“The skill is often getting the thing taking off to take your money versus someone else's money, not picking amongst things that haven't launched yet and having feces about why one's going to do better than the other.”
Taggar: AI Co-Pilot Startups Get Paid Easily but Suffer Low Usage
“There's so much interest from potential customers to like want a co-pilot that it's actually quite easy to start getting like inbound leads if you pitch this.
And if it's even easy to get people to pay you money upfront, but what's really hard is to get them t…”
Tan: Embed LLMs in Familiar UIs Rather Than Chat Interfaces
“While in the next five or 10 years I think we will get far more used to using it that way I think the low-hanging fruit right now is just using the large language model
To actually do the sort of knowledge work that a human being could do, and then package it …”
Tan: AI Dev Tools Suffer Churn as Incumbents Add LLM Features
“A bunch of us are funding dev tools companies that sell to AI companies and they're selling tooling, but then they might, you know, they might sell enterprise contract to someone who also upstream has a fortune 100 that said that they'd pay a 100,000 dollars a…”
Tan: Any GPT-4 prompt workflow can be duplicated with custom fine-tuning
“Anything you do with those prompts, you can get your own model to do with a little bit more training.”
Tan: Chat interfaces are the wrong UX model for AI software
“I mean, this is why I think the chat interface is wrong. Like I actually think there is value accrued to really great UX, like good copy, good you know, interaction design, information hierarchy you know, being able to approach a product and say like, this is …”
Blomfield: A +50 NPS is the minimum baseline for new consumer companies
“If your net promoter score, your MPS, is not extremely high as a new consumer company, you're toast. You pretty much have to re-engineer the product to make it something that people love. The reason is it correlates extremely well with word of mouth referral. …”
Seibel: Building in Austin, Seattle, or New York is settling
“It's really easy to say, well, you know, I can be in the game in Austin. I can be in the game in Seattle. There are investors there. There are people there. I can be in the game in New York. And I wish that we were more honest that like, yeah, you can play bas…”
Habib: Next-word prediction at scale forces LLMs to develop reasoning
“They are able to do this task extremely well. And the only way to do that is to have gotten better at under, you know, some form of reasoning and some form of knowledge.”
Habib: Senior developers benefit more from GitHub Copilot than junior developers
“One thing that is surprising to me is that the people who say to me they use it the most are some of the people I consider to be better or more senior developers. You might've thought this tool would help juniors more, but I think people who are more accustome…”
Conformist startup founders mistakenly treat investors as their customers
“You know, one of the things that we say sometimes at YC is that don't make the investor your customer. But a lot of these conformists who are getting into startups, that's what they do. Like they want an idea an investor is going to like, they want to act the …”
Epstein: Avoid ad models unless expecting top-10 global website scale
“You should not use ads as your primary business model unless you expect to be a top 10 site on the internet. Otherwise, it's too hard to monetize and build a huge scale to become a massive company.”
Caldwell warns that overly friendly industry networkers are often highly exploitative
“A lot of the folks who are most approachable when you are a first timer, or when you're just moving to the area, or you're trying to break into the industry, the friendly people that want to talk to you are often
The most exploitative, and they're the people …”
Seibel: Giving up massive equity early blocks later-stage funding
“And what they didn't tell that founder is that every subsequent investor would say to themselves, huh, this investor put in a relatively small amount of capital, bought so much of the company that the founders are going to get so diluted that they're not going…”
Seibel argues charging $50,000 for priced round legal fees is predatory
“It shouldn't cost 50,000 dollars to a price round. Like you're just ripping off founders, pure and simple ripping off founders.”
Caldwell: Starting a company by pitching VCs invites exploitation
“If your idea for how you start a startup is to first create a pitch deck and go pitch VCs, you're setting yourself up to get screwed. You're setting yourself up to get taken advantage of by people who are gonna have 20 different ways to rip you off, versus if …”
Seibel: VCs often fund repeat founders for internal firm politics
“What I've also seen for second time founders is that oftentimes for an investor, it's more of a catch. It like helps you build your reputation in your firm, or it helps you get the deal approved. And like, so oftentimes there's like internal political reasons …”
Caldwell: Predatory service providers systematically target and exploit struggling startup founders
“We see this a lot with struggling startups. All sorts of people will come out of the woodwork to sell you services or promise they'll connect you with the investors or they'll help you fundraise or you name it. And it's like, it's kind of like moving to Hollyw…”
Seibel: Spending more money does not accelerate product-market fit
“Spending more money allows product market fit to happen faster.”
Caldwell: Effectively no startup gets acqui-hired after running out of runway
“No one gets acquired effectively. Like there's an asterisk next to no one. But the companies, of the companies that attempt, when they're lower on runway, they're, they flew the plane into the side of the mountain. There's no acquisition coming, man.”
Founders carry startup failure forever while venture investors quickly move on
“This is what's so weird about this business is like, who has to live with the rest of their lives that that was their startup. Or that they could have done something different. They weren't able to versus the investors like, yeah, whatever. Cool. And they go, …”
Taggar: Changing product direction based on investor feedback repels good investors
“So if a founder actually, like, actions on your feedback in sort of like a material way, like, it makes you less than like, if you're a good investor, I think it makes you less than likely to want to invest. You don't want to invest in someone who is relying o…”
Seibel: FAANG retention relies on unvested equity being 3x your savings
“If they can keep you spending your entire salary, and if they can keep the money that you haven't vested yet larger than the amount of money that you have in your savings by like two to three X, you never leave.”
Seibel: Big tech warehouses talent defensively to prevent competitor growth
“In many ways, this is a defensive tactic to warehouse talent. Out of the fear that maybe someone else can use you in a way that can hurt the company.”
Taggar: Every YC Startup Has an Apparent Fatal Flaw
“Literally in any YC batch, I could take every single company and like pick out some like fatal flaw. And like, you know that some of them are going to turn out to be worth like billions of dollars, but you can still do it.”
Seibel: Microsoft Wins by Copying Startup Innovations Years Later
“A structural advantage with a product that's good enough can win. And man, it really helps when some startups specs the whole product for you. Right? Like Microsoft's move is to not innovate the good enough product. It's to copy it. Maybe five to 10 years late…”
Caldwell: If Elon Musk overthought, he would have abandoned his companies
“And if he was an overthinker, he would do, he would rule all the stuff out. All the stuff is like, obviously a bad idea. And anyone in the Midwit territory would rule out all these ideas.”
Seibel: Domain-expert investors are often more pessimistic than generalists
“I think sometimes counterintuitively investors who know slightly less about your space can be a little bit more grasses greener, like, optimistic than folks who know more about your space.”
Seibel: Genius is often mistaken for discipline in startup execution
“Too often, genius is mistaken for discipline. It's just like, you know, a lot of people think, oh, this person out executed all their peers because they were smarter, and it's like, that assumes the peers were actually working on the thing they said they were …”