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 83 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 1 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: Worrying about security and privacy limits AI agent power
“It turns out that, like, the thing that was hampering the world was being worried about security and privacy and all the things that could go wrong, and when you, like, worry a bit less, you're like, oh my god, these things are unbelievably powerful.”
Friedman: Majority of Software Code Is Probably Already Written by AI Agents
“It's already probably the case that the majority of code being written is written by agents.”
Friedman: Tan replicated years of startup work in two weeks using Claude
“I feel like your real feel the AGI moment, Gary, was like getting Claude Code to build basically an entire startup for you, like replicating years of work of your previous startup in like two weeks, which is like insane.”
Friedman: Future SOTA Benchmarks May Come From Swarms of Cheaper AI Models
“It might be that like the next stuff that like is soda on benchmarks is not the most expensive newest foundation model with the most like GPU training. It's like a swarm of lower cost cheaper models working together just like humans do to solve a problem.”
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…”
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…”
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…”
Friedman: AI is the fastest-improving technology in human history
“It's the fastest any tech has ever improved. I think. Yeah. Certainly faster than processors, certainly faster than the cloud.”
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.”
Friedman: Vast majority of founder AI use cases are not coding
“The vast majority of the use cases people are using it for though is not coding.”
Friedman: FDE model is the dominant structure for AI agent startups
“It's actually become, I think the dominant way that the AI agent startups are organizing themselves.”
Friedman: Universities prohibit students from learning essential future AI tools
“They're quite literally prohibiting the students from learning the tools that they are going to need in the future.”
Friedman: Teaching entrepreneurship as a college course creates a cheap facsimile
“Anytime you try to bottle up entrepreneurship and like teach it as a college course, that's kind of what you end up with is like, basically like a sort of like cheap facsimile of entrepreneurship where like they teach you to like, you know, Follow a particular…”
Friedman: Vertical AI agents risk turning into bespoke consulting businesses
“And so their challenge, like a lot of these agent companies is like, How do you build a general purpose product when every customer like wants, you know, has like slightly different workflows and like preferences has a really interesting thing that I see the v…”
Friedman: AI models will solve debugging limitations within six months
“So like, it definitely feels like we're headed in the direction where this may not be true in, you know, six months.”
Friedman: 25% of YC founders report over 95% AI-generated codebases
“One quarter of the founders said that more than 95% of their code base was AI generated”
Friedman: Diode Failed on GPT-4 but Worked on o1 With Same Prompts
“The other thing I think is interesting about this example is like during the batch before a one came out, diode had tried to do this with GPT four. Oh, and it just flat out didn't work. And then they basically tried the same thing, the same prompts, but fed it…”
Friedman: Sam Altman Says OpenAI o2 and o3 Are Not Far Behind
“Sam was just telling us that like O-two and O-three are not far behind.”
Friedman: 50% of YC startups use Cursor while only 12% use GitHub Copilot
“Yeah, we surveyed the summer 24 founders, and half the batch is using Cursor, compared to only 12% that's using GitHub Copilot.”
Friedman: Global scientific progress is bottlenecked by the supply of analytical minds
“The thing that is holding back the rate of scientific and technological progress is arguably the number of smart people who can actually analyze all the information that we already know about the world.”
Friedman: Google's early success warped founders into obsessing over premature scalability
“I actually think Google is indirectly responsible responsible for basically scaling. Warping the minds of a whole generation of founders and investors and creating the problem that Paul Graham had to solve with this, which is because Google became so famous fo…”
Friedman: People will look back on 'GPT wrapper' as a silly term
“And I think people are going to look back on this term GPT, GPT wrapper, like similarly how we think of like, how we would look at the term database wrapper, which just seems like silly.”
No founder in 20 years of YC built a successful friend-meetup app
“Well, it turns out that there are some structural reasons why this idea is hard, which is why in, like, 20 years of people applying to YC with this idea, nobody has actually pulled it off.”
Founders develop passion for boring industries once the business actually succeeds
“Often an idea grows on founders over time as it starts to work. As I'm going to talk about in a moment, a lot of the best startup ideas are in boring spaces like tax accounting software or something like that, like no one is particularly passionate about, like…”
Most good startup ideas have existing competitors, proving market demand exists
“Counterintuitively, most startup ideas, most good startup ideas have existing competitors. When founders go into spaces with no existing competitors, they often find out that the reason that there are no competitors is because no one wants the product.”
Over 70% of the top 100 YC companies generated their ideas organically
“If you look at the YC top 100 companies, at least 70% of them had their startup ideas organically, rather than by, like, sitting down and explicitly trying to think of a startup idea.”
Hard-tech YC applicants have a 10x higher acceptance rate than others
“Hard tech companies that apply to YC actually have about a 10 x higher acceptance rate than other kinds of applications.”
Friedman: The startup ecosystem offers better macro job security than big tech
“While working at any individual startup may not be as secure as working at a large company, hopefully working for startups in general can be even more secure, because if the startup that you're working at now doesn't work out, there's going to be 20 other star…”
Friedman: BillionToOne Went Public at Over $4 Billion Valuation
“Late last year, they took the company public at a valuation over four billion dollars.”
Friedman: Most genetic abnormalities previously required invasive amniocentesis for detection
“Before Billion to One, most genetic abnormalities could only be detected via amniocentesis, an invasive procedure that is only used in high-risk pregnancies.”
Friedman: Moltbook saw more content in two days than early Reddit
“Like I don't have the Reddit traffic stats, but my guess is like more content was posted on Maltbook in the first two days and was posted on Reddit in like the first two years or something.”
Friedman: AI agents hate using websites and want APIs instead
“And APIs.
They hate using websites.
Yes.
They only, like, they want to use APIs.
They want to write code.”
Friedman: AI model training is becoming a common skill set
“I think we are absolutely going through that right now. Yes. Like where it's going from being a very rare skill set to a more common one.”
Friedman: Over 100 YC startups hiring forward deployed engineers
“I was looking earlier today, and if you look at the YC job board, there's over a hundred YC startups that are hiring for a job with the title for deployed engineer and up from basically zero, three years ago”
Friedman: AI startups act as FDEs translating OpenAI research into adoption
“It's almost like open AI. Is the home product team and the startups are the FTEs out figuring out how to get adoption of the like research that OpenAI is cooking up back at the home office.”
Friedman: AI has inverted SaaS growth, making B2B the hyper-growth sector
“It didn't used to be the case that B to B SaaS companies were the ones that had hyper growth. Like, there were some, like, consumer social companies that got hyper growth, but, like, B to B SaaS used to be this, like, you know, flotting, slow growing, like, ki…”
Friedman: Dropping out of college due to startup FOMO leads to regret
“When college students are thinking about dropping out, and they're making it in a fear, they're making a fear-based decision, they have FOMO about startups happening in San Francisco, maybe their friend dropped out, and they're, like, worried that they're gonn…”
Jared Friedman: The biggest bottleneck for corporate employees is co-founder timing
“And in my experience for people who are your age, who have like already graduated college or working at some company, that's the biggest limiting factor in practice for them actually doing a company is like they and their co-founder both need to be willing to …”
Friedman: Production prompts serve as the core IP for vertical AI companies
“It's like relatively hard to get these prompts for vertical AI agents cause they're kind of like the crown jewels of the IP of these companies.”
Jared Friedman: Evals, not prompts, are the core data asset for AI startups
“Even though we've been saying this for a year or more now, Gary, I think it's still the case that like evals are the true crown jewel Like data asset for all of these companies. Like one reason that power help was willing to open source the prompt is they told…”
Friedman: Windsurf beats Cursor by automatically indexing entire codebases
“Yeah, I think the number one reason that people are switching is that cursor today largely needs to be told what files to look at in your code base. So if you have a large code base, you can tell what to do, but you have to tell it like where to look in the co…”
Friedman: AI accelerates programming for math and physics backgrounds
“I think this vibe coding will enable people who have those kinds of technical minds who come from other technical disciplines like math and physics to become highly productive as programmers much faster than it was in the past.”
Friedman: Altman founded OpenAI believing AGI would accelerate all scientific progress
“I remember back when he was starting open AI, one of the things that really motivated him to do it was he believed that when we actually had AGI basically be better at doing science than humans were, and therefore would accelerate the rate of all scientific pr…”
Friedman: Full OpenAI o1 Model Is a Huge Step Function Above o1-Preview
“Like the full O-one model, which is coming out any day now is a huge step function above even O-one preview, which is what enabled all these incredible results at the hackathon.”
Friedman: AI phone calling startups are booming after failing a year ago
“Like a year ago doing startup ideas where like the AI agent would talk on the phone just like didn't work. We had a bunch of companies that tried and all the companies didn't work. And over the summer it really started working under the trends from the past tw…”
Friedman: No one has four years of LLM experience, empowering young founders
“This is an opportunity where college students are particularly well, like young founders are particularly well positioned to work in it because nobody has like there's no one walking around with like four years of LLM experience. So like everyone is starting f…”