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 47 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
Buchheit: There is literally no such thing as value investing in startups
“There really literally is no such thing as value investing in startups.”
Buchheit: Vast majority of ICOs are scams and going to zero
“As far as I can tell, the vast majority of the ICOs are scams. Or just like, these are companies that, if they were trying to raise from the people in the room, here, maybe they'd be able to raise half a million dollars, but instead they go do an ICO, and they…”
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…”
Buchheit: A giant social network was inevitable even if Facebook never existed
“Even if like Facebook didn't exist, I guarantee someone would have built a giant social network, right? Like Facebook was sitting on top of that exponential change, and they were the ones who were most able to like capture it, that position and hold on to it. …”
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.”
Buchheit: Early search rivals failed because they did not know what they were doing
“When we started really just like pushing all, just crushing all of the other search engines, and then there was like a feeling of inevitability. Like it was pretty clear we were just gonna win because no one else, Like, they just didn't even know what they wer…”
Buchheit: Startups should build deep appeal for a few rather than broad mediocrity
“And so there's like all this history, so it's pretty much impossible to enter a space like that and make a thing that appeals to everyone. And if you try to do that, what you end up making is just like a mediocre product that nobody really loves. And so my phi…”
Buchheit: FriendFeed created the first Like button before Facebook
“We actually created the like button, so like, the very first like button was on friend feed, and then mysteriously appeared on Facebook a number of months later.”
Buchheit: Focus is a startup's ultimate weapon against tech incumbents
“Focus is one of the most important things, because, like, as a startup, it's actually, I think, your most powerful weapon, right? Like, the reason that you're able to take on, like, these big companies or whatever is because they're doing a thousand different …”
Buchheit: Early enterprise startups must target desperate customers
“Like, right, right, like that's the kind of customer you want is like someone who's like desperate, right?
And because they're desperate, they're willing to put up with kind of a shitty product.
Maybe they're willing to spend a lot of time working with you, ri…”
Buchheit: Investors should probe founder conviction, not substitute their own domain judgment
“My belief is that if the founders are actually better than me, then they're gonna have better insights. They're gonna know more than me. So I can kind of outsource that part of the thinking to the founder. And then I just have to figure out, like, does the fou…”
Buchheit: Startup Founders Always Sell Their Companies Too Early
“Founders always sell too early, because you're like, wow, a billion dollars. I make the same mistake. I sell too early.”
Buchheit: Commercial supersonic flights will reach Tokyo in six hours by 2028
“In 10 years, when you wanna go to Tokyo, you're gonna get there in, like, six hours.”
Buchheit funded DoorDash mainly so they would deliver to his house
“When they interviewed here, ah, like actually in the room right over there, I, my like one question for them was like, will you deliver to my house? Because at the time, when they went through YC, there was no food delivery where I lived, and I get hungry. And…”
Buchheit: Too much capital is a huge liability for startups
“Too much money is a huge liability, because when you have a lot of money, you start doing things the right way... Having a giant mountain of money enables the founders to insulate themselves from reality to an unhealthy extent.”
Buchheit: U.S. Healthcare Model Fundamentally Incentivizes Driving Costs Higher
“I mean, I think there's, like, no underlying economic model other than driving the costs higher, fundamentally, right? Make more money by driving costs up.”
Buchheit: Smart Interview Questions Are a Strong Indicator of Startup Caliber
“I was really impressed when I was interviewing with them that they asked, actually, like, really smart questions, which I think is a pretty good indication.”
Buchheit: Startups must build useful products today rather than multi-step plans
“I think you have to have some notion of the big picture, and it doesn't mean you have, like, a detailed step-by-step plan. Like, occasionally I'll run into a startup where they're like, here's our five-step plan for how we become whatever, and, like, It isn't …”
Buchheit wrote the first version of Gmail in a single day
“So the very first version of Gmail I wrote in a day and it wasn't very good but I took, I had previously been working on Google Groups, which was like a Usenet search at the time, now it's something different, but I took the code that I've been working on for …”
Buchheit: Enterprise UX suffers because vendors optimize for buyers over users
“I mean, enterprise kind of has some of the similar thing where you have to make the buyer happy, not the end user, which is, I think, a lot of times why enterprise software is not really lovely to use is because the person using it isn't the person with making…”
Buchheit: Orkut died in the US because it became too slow
“Orkut actually was taking off.
and you can make up a bunch of reasons why maybe it didn't end up being the social network, but it was exploding.
and then it became, it was growing so fast it became unresponsive.
So, like, it just, that was kind of why it die…”
Buchheit: Joining a startup is like investing, restricted to one company
“Being a startup employee is actually a lot like being an investor except you can really only do one at a time.”
Buchheit: Wufoo angel investment returned ~44x on SurveyMonkey acquisition
“My investment on that returned, like, 44 X when, ah, SurveyMonkey bought them”
Buchheit: Acquirers rejected Justin.tv because they believed the team lacked talent
“So this company, they actually even tried to do an acquihire several years in, but no one would acquihire them because they thought they didn't have any talent. They couldn't do a talent acquisition because the acquirers thought there was no talent.”
Buchheit: Bret Taylor rewrote Google Maps' JS frontend in one weekend
“Bret is someone that I knew from Google... He rewrote the entire JavaScript front end over a weekend, made it, A third the size and 10 times as fast as what an entire team of developers had been working on for a long time.”
Buchheit: FriendFeed sold to Facebook for about 0.5% equity
“We sold FriendFeed to Facebook for about half a percent of Facebook's equity”
Buchheit: Juicero spent $100M before ever talking to a customer
“Like, they spent a hundred million dollars on their, like, juice bag squeezer. Without ever talking to a customer. Without ever trying to sell someone a bag of juice.”
Buchheit: GM Acquired Cruise for ~$1 Billion, Generating a 50x Return
“GM bought them for like a billion, which was about a 50 extra turn.”
Buchheit: Y Combinator's biotech investments will produce giant exits within a decade
“And we have so many great companies that are, like, in bio, I think we're gonna have some just giant exits, you know, 10 years from now.”
Buchheit: Slow angel investors suffer adverse selection
“If you move slow, you're going to get adverse selection. Like, the companies that you can string along for months, and, you know, give a hundred different meetings, and like, you need to talk to this person, probably aren't going to be the best companies.”
Buchheit: Biotech risk is technical feasibility, not market demand
“The risk on those companies is, is, is most often not market risk. It's not the risk that no one wants a cure for cancer. The risk is that they don't actually have a cure for cancer, right? So, so with those companies, more often, it's one of these things wher…”
Buchheit: Median startup is worth zero and 95% are bad investments
“As a seed investor something you have to keep in mind is that the median startup is ultimately worth about zero dollars and probably 95% of startups are a bad investment.”
Buchheit: 99% of people only change behavior when forced
“99% of people will want to just keep doing the same thing that they do day after day, unless they have no choice. And so like change happens when people are like pushed.”
Buchheit: Wufoo angel investment returned roughly 50x
“Yeah, I think it was maybe, like, 50 X, something like that.”
Buchheit: Patrick Collison personally integrated Stripe code for early customers
“So, like, that was how, like, the very early Stripe installs, Patrick Collison would show up and integrate Stripe into your code.
Right?
He would just show up and do the work.”
Buchheit: Google founders tried to sell for $1M to Yahoo and Excite
“Larry and Sergey were PhD students there. And they actually wanted to continue being PhD students and, like, finish their degree, so they went off and tried to sell Google to one of the big internet companies of the time, so, you know, Yahoo, Xsite, Infoseek. …”
Buchheit: Cisco Bought Meraki for $1.2B, a 73x Return
“And this was, Cisco bought this for 1.2 billion, which was like a 73 extra turn.”
Buchheit: Kyle Vogt built Justin.tv's streaming server in a single weekend
“It turns out it took him maybe like a whole weekend, but he did in fact write their own streaming media server, and this is actually the reason that Justin TV survived it all. Right? Because they, there was no way the business was viable if they were paying so…”
Buchheit: Paul Graham's essays are a top lead source for YC applicants
“To this day, I believe it's like the number one or number two source of leads to people applying to Y Combinator. We ask a question on the application, how did you hear about Y Combinator? And they say, from Paul Graham's essays.”
Buchheit: YC startups usually take a month to clarify their one-liner
“Like, it takes the companies in YC usually about a month to get it right, so every time we meet with them, ah, in regular office hours, or especially we have a thing called group office hours, the very first thing that each company has to do is give me their o…”