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
Reinhardt: Reaching product-market fit through multi-year iterative grinds is extremely rare
“My feeling is that that's extremely rare and that, again, this is a really dangerous place to be because you can stay in this iterative mode for years. And it is unlikely that the iterations are going to get you to a good place. So I remember very clearly earl…”
Reinhardt: Finding initial product-market fit is not a repeatable process
“The problem with the first product
And product market fit is that you can move the product and you can move the market because it's fit between these two things.
And so what's unclear and they move in some crazy multidimensional space.
And so what's the issue …”
Reinhardt: Waiting until $10M in revenue to hire experienced executives is disastrous
“So we went from literally zero management experience, aside from what had been picked up along the way, growing from zero to 50 people, to having someone who really knew it, or two people who really knew what they were doing. That was hugely impactful, and we …”
Seibel: Startups should almost always launch with a price, not for free
“So strangely, starting with a higher price or a price is almost always better than starting free. Almost always better.”
Seibel: Founders should ignore product feedback from investors and friends
“The kind of community of startup people and or investors usually don't have the problem that you're solving. So if you're using investors as a trigger for, am I solving the right problem? Or like, Do they find this useful? It's almost never the case. I'm almos…”
Paul Graham: Startup Outcomes Are Fundamentally Indeterminate and Luck-Driven
“The outcomes of startups are hard to predict.
I think to some degree they're actually indeterminate.
There's a huge amount of luck involved, you know and so I think even if Y Combinator were as good at picking startups as you could possibly get.”
Paul Graham: Trustworthy people cannot reliably evaluate trustworthiness in others
“Intelligent people can judge other intelligent people, But trustworthy people cannot judge other trustworthy people. In fact, trustworthy people are often fooled by untrustworthy people.”
Paul Graham: Startups must do unscalable things early on to grow big
“And what do things that don't scale means is do those things early on anyway, because, you know, if you don't do them, you'll never be big. And so you got nothing to lose.”
Paul Graham: Determination is far more important for founders than intelligence
“And actually it turns out it's not that important to be smart. It's much, much more important to be determined.”
Graham: Better to have 10% of Robert Morris than average full-time founders
“Ok, so the way you deal with different commitment levels is you ask yourself would I rather have 30% of this person or a hundred percent of some other person? And in my case, I would rather have, like, 10% of Robert Morris's brain than a hundred percent of alm…”
Graham: Launch as soon as one person can do something new
“Launch as soon as you have a quantum of utility, which means as soon as you're, there's one person in the world who is glad that you launched, because now they can do something that they couldn't do.”
Limit industry veterans to one per team to prevent anti-innovation coalitions
“About 20%. We try to hire one out of every five or six people From the industry. We think we need that expertise. My principle is five or six people. Cause like most teams should have five or six people on it. And I want one person in the room has done it befo…”
Entrepreneurial sales seeks conditional 'yes' answers to inform product roadmaps
“What entrepreneurial sales is very different than regular sales. You want to get to know as fast as you can. So you stop wasting your time and get to the next Yes. You want to get to know within five minutes ideally. Yeah. That's great if someone hangs up on y…”
Altman: In Silicon Valley, starting a hard startup is easier than an easy one
“In fact, I think in 2018, at least in Silicon Valley, it's easier to start a hard startup than it is to start an easy startup.”
Altman: The best businesses have competitive moats but pretend they do not
“All of the really great businesses I know have an answer to this question. And in fact, the better they are, the more they pretend not to.”
Zeevi: Identical foods cause vastly different glucose spikes across individuals
“So two people eating the same loaf of white bread, one would really spike their glucose and one would really stay flat. And that's true even if you normalize the responses to the responses to glucose. So you have just to see if, so, so, so even foods are not c…”
Zeevi: Fecal transplants work for depleted microbiomes but may fail in healthy guts
“Fecal transplants have been used, they, their claim to fame is by treating Clostridium difficile infections... You indeed transplant stool into these people, and that transplant works mainly because their microbiome is so depleted and it's like, you know, cult…”
Gil: Pricing power provides capital leverage to drive startup growth
“If you can get away with charging more, then it means that you have a product that people truly want, which means that you can grow faster in part because people truly want your product, and in part because the capital leverage that Mark talks about is actuall…”
Jocko Willink: Teams excel with two solid leaders regardless of formal rank
“If you had two good leaders in a SEAL platoon, the SEAL platoon was going to do awesome. And it didn't matter where they were. If they happen to be the platoon commander, great. If it happened to be the platoon chief, great. If it happened to be the leading pe…”
Jocko Willink: A weak manager provides an opportunity to operate with autonomy
“People ask me, what do you do when you have a weak leader? I'm like, I'm happy. If my leader's weak, I'm stoked. I'm going, hey boss, you know, I got this. Hey, thanks for your support. We're going to keep over. We're going to be over here doing what we do. I'…”
Preskill: Quantum entanglement is what holds space-time geometry together
“So it's really the entanglement which holds space together, which keeps it from falling apart into little pieces.”
Garg: ICOs are essentially a gambling use case
“In some sense ICOs are kind of the gaming use case, right? It's kind of like a gambling, it's a gambling use case, right? And like, that's actually kind of what's happening is people are just gambling as real money.”
Xie: Privacy coins must have mandatory default privacy to work
“So I essentially think that it needs to be mandatory privacy if you're going to actually have a privacy coin. If it's ever if it's ever optional, you get looked at if you're starting to use a privacy feature, like why are you using this privacy feature? Do you…”
Mobile game studios must reserve at least $5 million for user acquisition
“If you're gonna spend money on
Customer acquisition reserve at least five million dollars. That was like a year or two ago, I know.”
Brundage: Reducing AI existential risk by 0.1% preserves massive expected value
“Reducing the probability of existential risk is super important, even if AI is you know, decades or centuries away, and even if we can only, you know, decrease the probability, you know, of that happening by, like.1% or whatever in expectation, that's, like, a…”
Brundage: AGI accountability may be easier than thought if corrigibility stabilizes feedback
“Corrigibility, what he calls corrigibility, and what others have called corrigibility, might actually be, like, a stable basin of attraction, in the sense that if a system, you know is designed in such a way that it's able to, like, take critical feedback, and…”
Altman: Screwing up the first five to seven hires is almost fatal
“We, we've noticed that it is almost impossible to, you can make a lot of mistakes as a company, but if you screw up the first five, seven hires, it's almost impossible to get through that.”
Schacht: Parent educational product spending collapses during elementary and middle school
“Once you send your kid off to school full-time, parents remain involved in some respects. I think reading is one of the main ones. They still think, feel like it's their job to make sure they're reading regularly to their child and helping to reinforce, you kn…”
Watts: Psilocybin therapy relies on the mind's internal homeostatic healing
“With psilocybin it's completely different because the expert is themselves. They are the expert because what's happening, the healing power of this is something in the unconscious mind, their own unconscious mind is writing itself. There's a homeostatic princi…”
Bromberg: In Well-Built Token Networks, No Value Accrues to the Company
“If the network's built well, we would argue that no value actually accrues to the company itself. The purpose of the token is to remove the centralized party. And so the company itself, the LLC or the corporation shouldn't get transaction fees. They shouldn't …”
Buchheit: Great startup ideas must initially appear bad to big companies
“Oftentimes the bad ideas, I mean, the good ideas look bad. And the reason for this is that if the idea were obviously good, like, the opportunity wouldn't exist. Big companies are not that dumb. They're capable of executing. They have lots of resources. They h…”
Buchheit: If dissuaded by a startup's high valuation, invest more
“Any time I've been, like, excited about something, but then it's like, ah, the price is so high, eh, you know, I'll invest in something else. I've always regretted it. Like, so now, actually, in my head, I kind of turn around the rule. I'm like, if I'm dissuad…”
Buchheit: Great startup ideas are either implausibly ambitious or look frivolous
“Implausibly ambitious or frivolous ideas, and the reason that we're kind of at these two extremes is that if the idea is in the middle, as I mentioned at the start, probably there's like a big company somewhere working on it, or a hundred other startups, and s…”
Buchheit: Founders with perfect resumes often sell early out of fear
“I'm very nervous about people who've always gotten perfect grades. They got into all the right things. They did all the right clubs. The people who have the perfect resume. The people who didn't fuck up. Because these are people who've never failed. And startu…”
Buchheit: Startup success can be predicted by iteration speed
“You can almost define, predict the, I think success of a startup just based on how quickly they're able to iterate. And the really great companies just like iterate really quickly. The ones who, you know, do a release every two years fail. Do zero.”
Caldwell: Conditional Commitments Are a 'Cheap Shot' Founders Despise
“So one thing that we hear a lot of, especially for folks that haven't done much of this, is they say, okay, I'm in, once you go find the rest of the round. And this is the cheapest of cheap shots that you can possibly do because what you're actually saying is,…”
Seibel: Grade-A investors wire money fast and shut the hell up
“An A investor, grade A investor gives you money quickly, signs the paperwork quickly, shuts the hell up. That's an A investor. There are very, very few A plus investors in the world. There are very, very many less than A investors.”
Seibel: The most hyped YC Demo Day startups rarely perform best
“The most hyped investment on Demo Day is often not the best one. Very, very often. I think what's interesting is that the crowd on Demo Day is just not as smart as it appears”
Seibel: It is extremely rare for an investor to have truly big impact
“So I would say that it's extremely rare that an investor can have truly big impact.”
Seibel: YC believes a founder's ability to network simply does not matter
“I think investors believe that having the skill to network to an investor is an important characteristic of a good founder, and I think, ah, kind of YC's core position from the beginning is that it's not.”
Nathoo: Lawyers frequently make errors on SAFE conversion cap tables
“The cap tables that we see, and we've now seen thousands of cap tables, it's surprising how many times the lawyers actually get the conversions wrong.”
Altman: Startup investing resembles addictive slot machines with rare 1000x returns
“Most of the time you lose one extra money, but occasionally you do get to make a hundred or a thousand X, and that for the same reason slot machines are so satisfying, is incredibly addictive.”
Altman: 80% of investors outsource 80% of decisions to other investors
“I would say 80% of investors outsource 80% of their decision making to what other people think about an investment opportunity, but the problem is everyone does that, and so there's this weird schooling effect where a company gets hot for no discernible reason…”
Altman: Open network access is among the top secrets of YC's success
“This idea that we're available and we're open I think this was in the two or three most important secrets of YC. This was something that we did that was really different. Other people hadn't done it before.”
Altman: It is easier today to start a hard company than an easy company
“Speaking of the really big companies, I think, I don't know if this was always true, I suspect it may have been, but I think today, it is easier to start a hard company than an easy company.”
Altman: The Best Companies Start with a TAM of Nearly Zero
“Yeah, I think, ah, you know, the most interesting companies start with a TAM of nearly zero, and it's like, ah, very bad investors are the ones that are super focused on the TAM of today. Very good investors are focused on the TAM of 10 years from now.”