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 16 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
Adora Cheung: Monthly active users is a poor early-stage startup metric
“A lot of people pick MAU, monthly active user but this is, but this is usually not a great metric because it takes time to understand the impact of movement especially in a startup this early as in your startup. And so many things can happen within a month. An…”
Adora Cheung: Free user feedback is a trap for early-stage startups
“That's a trap because free users will give you different types of feedback The users who are actually paying you. Paid users are just more serious about the product and hopefully will be more serious about giving you feedback.”
Adora Cheung: The 'north star metric' concept misleads early-stage founders
“People have referred to the primary metric as a north star metric, and I actually don't like the term north star because it kind of people have interpreted it as something you just focus on this one metric and then ignore everything else.”
Adora Cheung: Top YC Demo Day startups grow 5% to 10% weekly
“So I actually went back and I looked at the good startups who pitched in recent YC demo days. So these, if you think about these startups, they were three months prior, they were all in the phase that you are probably in today. And it turns out the growth rate…”
Adora Cheung: 1% weekly growth means a startup lacks billion-dollar potential
“If you only manage one percent weekly growth, it's a sign you haven't figured out things yet. It doesn't mean that you have a horrible business. You can run a great small profitable business growing one percent week over week, but it's not a good sign that you…”
Adora Cheung: Good enterprise startups compress sales cycles from months to days
“Like good enterprise startups that time to sale goes from months to hopefully days if not hours.”
Adora Cheung: Acquiring early users through paid channels is cheating growth
“I think in the early days using paid users is actually cheating growth and you should avoid it as much as possible.”
Adora Cheung: Tracking one primary metric outweighs juggling multiple variables
“If there's a way to get 90% of the job done with just one variable, that's better than having a bunch of variables that gets, Let's say, 91% of the job done. In this case, the job to get done is quickly determining how well your startup is doing.”
Adora Cheung: Revenue is always the best primary metric for startups
“Revenue is always the best metric. I pay you a hundred dollars to use your product, your software. I must at least value that a hundred dollars. Active users, ah, using the product once a week, or, ah, once a day, we call that weekly active user or daily activ…”
Adora Cheung: Marketplaces must measure metrics where both sides receive value
“Well, you pick a value that actually represents them both getting value. So in Airbnb's case, it would be nights booked, right?”
Adora Cheung: No single metric tells 100% of a startup's story
“There's no metric that actually tells a story that tells a hundred percent of the story, maybe 90%, but not a hundred percent. And so sometimes founders fool themselves by literally only tracking their primary metric and nothing else.”
Adora Cheung: Early Airbnb founders fixated entirely on missed growth targets
“This is in fact what the Airbnb founders did in the beginning. And if they hit the numbers, great. Ah, if they did not, then that's all they would talk about.”
Cheung: 38 Startup School companies got into core YC batches
“So we had 38 companies who actually got into our core YC program after going through startup school, and so they don't, they, I think for the most part, most of them did a lot of their iteration and talking to users during startup school, and they learn a lot …”
Cheung: Y Combinator has backed hundreds of biotech companies by 2018
“She's also a part-time partner at YC, which means in her free time, she helps all our biotech companies at which, at this point it's like hundreds, I don't know what the exact number is, but hundreds of biotech companies.”
Cheung: YC Startup School offers a 10-week course with weekly advisor meetings
“So, we, ah, it's a 10 week course, and you can either audit the course, or you can actually be part of the, you can apply to be part of the course. And to be part of the course, you get, ah, obviously access to the materials and lectures. You're put into a gro…”