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
Doctorow: Legally fraught startups with beloved products drive normative legal reform
“If you have a business that is doing something that is legally fraught, but that business is doing something that people love, That you are creating a constituency for a normative shift in how we think about this stuff, and that you are also creating surplus c…”
Doctorow: Copyright should combine European statutory exceptions with US fair use principles
“I think we could combine the European fair dealing approach where they have enumerated exceptions with the American fair use approach where they have principles that are applied to get a kind of best of both worlds where we might say, okay, here are a bunch of…”
Doctorow: Market concentration makes corporate collusion and conspiracies structurally possible
“Those conspiracies are necessarily a function of market concentration, because the collective action problem becomes insoluble when you have too many people who have to be inside the conspiracy.”
Doctorow: Disruptive entrants succeed by bridging users rather than forcing disjoint leaps
“Every industry has an incumbent disrupted by a new entrant, not by making a thing that is totally disjoint from the new entrant, not by asking people to leap the chasm from one to the other, to let go of the vine they're holding on before they've got a secure …”
Hard-tech startups find recruiting and fundraising easier than standard software startups
“While launching the product is easy, turning the product into a really big company is actually really hard. Whereas with Boom, it's exactly the opposite. Building a supersonic jet is, like, incredibly hard, but everything else around it is really easy.”
Alströmer: Most major companies scale using only one or two channels
“Most really big companies didn't use all of those channels. They use one or two channels.”
Roberts: Universal basic income cannot restore the human dignity lost to automation
“The idea that it's high, but you don't have any dignity, or, you know, we give you a check to replace lost income because you've been displaced, say, by technology, that that's just as good is probably not true. Probably not just as good, even though, I mean, …”
Hale: Investors should figure out how non-obvious startups can win
“His job and the way he sees our work at YC is that it's not to figure out what's wrong with the company, but to figure out how it could possibly when. Cause our bets, the ones that when, are the ones that are non-obvious.”
Hale: Great investors imagine billion-dollar paths and pitch them back
“And so we have to, like, work on our imagination, we have to work on our optimism to figure out, Oh, what is the way that whatever story that they're telling me could become a billion dollar company? And then a great investor pitches that back to the founder.”
Kevin Hale: If you must ask if you have PMF, you don't
“If you have to ask the question, you definitely don't have it.”
Hockenmaier: Early big tech growth playbooks mislead startups without product-market fit
“I actually think like the legacy of that growth team, and then like Twitter and LinkedIn and the others that followed is actually maybe problematic when we think about some of the applications of growth later on, because they were applied in this case of like …”
Hockenmaier: High-effect experimentation yields faster learnings than pure testing velocity
“I also think, like, one of the mistakes that companies make a lot is this idea that speed of testing or velocity of testing is the most important thing. It is important to move fast because it is quite hard to have good hypotheses about what's going to work. L…”
Rossmann: Most potential top software engineers are not natural autodidacts
“I'm now certain that like the majority of people who could be a great software engineer at a really competitive and selective company the majority of those people are not by default autodidacts who could just go to a MOOC and get all the information they need.”
Rossmann: Succeeding without a college degree primarily works for the privileged
“To say that you can succeed without a degree is on the face of it true, but it is most true if you come from privilege.”
Best: Market failure causes society to underinvest in cultural creators
“We think there's basically a market failure where all of society would be richer if there was more efficient mechanisms to like allocate more resources to creative people that are making kind of culture writ large”
Best: Writers should offer their best content for free
“And the advice we give people is basically take your best, most accessible, most focused stuff and make that free. Right? Like make your sort of like your very thoughtful essay on a specific topic free, because that's how people are going to share it. That's h…”
Halligan: Modern startups win via 10x better go-to-market, not product
“Today, the way you break out, it's hard to do that on the product side. You get in front of your competition a little bit, wow, they catch up quickly. The way you get ahead of the competition is create a go-to-market experience that's 10 times better than the …”
Hale: Companies over-optimize for serendipitous chance encounters instead of focused execution
“I actually think a lot of companies or organizations, the group over optimize for serendipity. Like they're like, what about that chance moment? But to me, like serendipity, like we were like some random thing happened, all of a sudden we have a great idea. Li…”
Hoover: VCs judge consumer startups on current revenue once monetized
“Ultimately, the challenge is always, especially with consumer kind of focused startup is as soon as you start making money, then VCs will start judging you based on that revenue today. And so strategically, there's some challenges there, which is an unfortunat…”
Fake Facebook accounts hold more influence because users expect authenticity
“Because it's so hard to create fake accounts on Facebook, the accounts that are fake might actually be a little bit more powerful because people don't expect there to be as many fake people on Facebook as they do Twitter, and so they might actually have more o…”
Khosla: Rate of learning matters far more than experience in startups
“Experience doesn't matter. The rate of learning matters. First principles, thinking matters. Pick for the best athlete, not the person who's the most established wide receiver who knows how to run one pattern and one pattern only.”
Khosla: Top executive hires should elevate peers, not just execute functional roles
“Ah, when you hire a VP of marketing, and I've said this to you before, one question, the functional question is, can you do marketing? But that's not the most important question. If he's one of the top five people in the company, The most important question is…”
Khosla: Business plans are irrelevant except for evaluating how founders think
“So I often tell entrepreneurs a business plan is completely irrelevant other than to judge how somebody's thought about a problem, not what they're going to do.”
Khosla: An investor is an employee you cannot fire
“I think an investor is an employee who you can't fire. And that's how you should think about it. Otherwise, all the same principles apply.”
Susskind: Quantum computation could reconstruct matter inside black holes
“With a sufficient kind of technology of quantum computation and so forth, and if we knew the precise rules by which black holes evolve, we could reconstruct from the quantum state of the horizon, we could reconstruct what fell in, what's inside, and so forth. …”
Susskind: Physicists must discover everything and leave preventing misuse to politicians
“It's not, I don't believe it's the physicist's job to decide what should and shouldn't be discovered. From a physicist's point of view, everything should be discovered if possible. It is the job of politicians and other people of that ilk to make sure that thi…”
Susskind: Quantum entanglement and Einstein-Rosen bridges are the exact same phenomenon
“In very recent years, we found out that entanglement and Einstein-Rosen bridges are the same thing. That, in particular, an example would be if you have two black holes. Black holes have all kinds of internal structure to them. They're quantum mechanical objec…”
Werner Vogels: Amazon accepts duplication and technical debt to maximize speed
“At Amazon, moving fast and innovating fast, and having a very long pipeline of experiments, that's the more and most important thing, so you're willing to allow duplication to happen, you're allowed to create technical debt, as long as you know that you have t…”
Werner Vogels: Hierarchy is unnatural; fast-moving companies should remove structure
“There's a very unique culture at Amazon, I think, that works really well for fast-moving companies, and that is to have, to build your teams as independent as possible, to remove as much hierarchy and structure from your organization as that is possible.
Hier…”
Werner Vogels: Engineer-led product development results in pure technology, not actual products
“If you're a heavy technology company, lots of engineering, there's a risk that the engineers get in charge. Yeah? If they get in charge, you do not necessarily build products, you build technology.”
Werner Vogels: Mercenary and missionary startups require fundamentally different tech architectures
“Jeff often makes the distinction between mercenaries and missionaries. Yeah? Mercenaries are the startup founders that are in it for the money. Yeah? And missionaries are the ones that are in it for the love of the product. Yeah? I want to build this product, …”
Collin: Hires rarely solve company problems founders cannot figure out themselves
“The truth is, if with all the knowledge I have about the company, I can't figure out something, I think it's very rare that someone would come and figure it out.”
Collin: Early sales teams must be evaluated on inputs, not revenue targets
“I think that the input is far more important at this stage than the output, because the truth is,
If they don't hit their target, first, your target could be wrong, and how could you know what your target should be when you are so early?
and two, maybe your p…”
Buchheit: Social networks succeed by serving the network over individual users
“It's almost like the, it's not the end user who you have to please, it's the network. Because they understood that the most important feature of a social network is that your friends are there. And so sometimes there's actually a tension between like what's go…”
Buchheit: Raising massive capital before product-market fit kills startups
“If they get a huge round of funding before they have product market fit, it kills the company. Like it because it's just too hard for the founders to resist That, because actually going out and dealing with the fact that you don't have product market fit is re…”
Buchheit: Building mega-scale companies requires riding exponential shifts, not just working harder
“It, I don't think it's that you're smarter necessarily. It helps to be smart. It isn't that you're harder working. Like there's a limit to how hard you can work. What I think necessarily to get to that point, you're sitting on top of a big exponential change i…”
Gil: Data moats rarely succeed as standalone startup assets outside genomics
“Yeah, the most common miracle that's quoted today is a data moat. People say, well, we'll generate tons of data, and then we'll be differentiated, and that, I think in genomics something like that could work, but outside of that, I actually think I've never se…”
Gil: The most successful startups succeed regardless of their investors
“I think that, ah, the most successful companies in 95% of the cases are successful despite their investors. I shouldn't say despite. I should say irregardless.”
Gil: Founders unable to get warm intros will struggle with hiring and sales
“I think the best way is to get an introduction through a founder that I already know, or somebody else that I already know, so that it's in network. I think if you can't find a way to do that, then you're probably not going to find a way to get customers, you'…”
Migicovsky: Oculus' iterative hardware approach beat Magic Leap's secretive, mega-funded R&D
“Magic Leap raised lots of money and spent just 11 years working on a product, versus Oculus, which raised two million dollars on Kickstarter, shipped a, you know, an early development kit that was not amazing, but they iterated and they got through, and now th…”
Migicovsky: Pivot to building end products if customers won't buy your technology
“If you're in a situation where you're building something that's, like, mind-blowingly cool and revolutionary, but you're finding that customers don't want to buy it, pivot your company so you're actually doing what your customers would have done, and just use …”
Ralston: Seed investors demanding five-year financial projections are inexperienced
“If you run into an investor who is asking for five-year projections at seed, you've run into what we colloquially call a noob. They don't know what they're doing. Who has five year predictions at this point?”
Collison: Quantitative metrics are actively unhelpful before achieving product-market fit
“Generally speaking, I think that sort of pre product market fit metrics are actually relatively unhelpful. I think you sort of, you really want to bias very strongly towards kind of as much sort of inspection and kind of high throughput qualitative feedback as…”
Collison: Startup culture's 'never quit' dogma is wrong; sometimes you should
“In, in startup time we really extol and sort of uphold the virtues of, sort of, you know, determination at all costs, you know, never quit and so on. And, you know, that's clearly not the right answer in that, like, sometimes you should quit.”
Collison: Startup growth curves are under founder control, not cosmic trajectories
“And the, kind of, the growth curve or adoption curve is just, kind of, a function of that go to market apparatus. But basically, it's not some, kind of, cosmic trajectory. It's something, kind of, very much of your creation and under your control.”
Collison: Optimal pre-product-market fit team size is between 2 and 10
“As an empirical matter, it seems that somewhere between kind of, you know, two and 10 depending on exactly what you're building is kind of the optimally responsive size.”
Collison: Startups hitting 10 employees must adopt non-consensus, hierarchical decision-making
“When you hit a certain size, again, maybe, I'm just gonna say 10 people for the sake of simplicity, Maybe it's a bit before, maybe it's a bit after. I think you need to kind of adjust more, more deliberately to this kind of explicit communication model of sort…”
Reinhardt: True product-market fit is unmistakable and creates uncontrollable growth
“Frankly, I think the really big product market fit moments for every company are pretty unmistakable. Like, the Dropbox founders have called it stepping on a landmine. I just, I really don't think you can mistake it. It really happens in a way that you lose co…”