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 22 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
Elon Musk emailed OpenAI saying it had zero percent success chance
“I can say this one because it got publicized in early, not early, a few years into OpenAI, where Elon sent us this really mean email. We'd been working through that for a while and said we had a zero percent chance of success. Like, not 0.10, that we were tota…”
Altman: Almost no top 30 software startup had remote early co-founders
“The data on this is look at the, say, like, 30 most successful software startups of all time, and try to point to a single example where the co-founders were in different locations. It's really, really tough.”
Altman: Chesky asked if candidates would work with one year to live
“He used to ask people before he hired them at Airbnb if they would take the job if they got a medical diagnosis that they had one year left to live.”
Altman: I wrote OpenAI's early checks before Elon Musk funded scale
“It was definitely helpful that I could just, like, write the early checks for OpenAI, and I think it would have been hard to get somebody else to do that at the very beginning. And then Elon did it a lot at a much higher scale, which I'm very grateful for, and…”
Altman: LA produced more billion-dollar startups than New York recently
“In fact, I bet there's more billion plus dollar companies in LA in the last few years than New York, or at least more total market cap.”
Altman: All top 20 most valuable YC companies have co-founders
“That for the top 20 most valuable YC companies all of them have at least two founders.”
Altman: Every billion-dollar accelerator alumni so far came from Y Combinator
“However, all, every billion plus dollar company so far ever to come out and accelerate, I think there's 11, have been part of YC.”
Altman: OpenAI's o3 model cost dropped by 5x in one week
“And also, like last week, O-three cost five times as much as it did this week, and that's gonna keep going.”
Altman: OpenAI's GPT Series Originated From Radford's Unsupervised Sentiment Neuron Discovery
“And at the time, unsupervised learning was just not really working. So he noticed this one really interesting property, which is there was a neuron that was flipping positive or negative with sentiment. And yeah, that led to the GPT series.”
Altman: Unknown 22-year-olds have raised rocket company funding at YC
“I think one of the things that's amazing about Silicon Valley is you actually can raise money. As an unknown twenty-two-year-old to go make a rocket company. It's happened several times at YC.”
Altman: YC's top single company accounts for nearly one-third of portfolio value
“YC has funded, I think around 1600 companies, maybe 1700. Our top five companies represent about two thirds of the value that we've created. And our top one company represents about one third. So this is like a, or nearly one third.”
Altman: AI PhD not required to work at OpenAI
“Everyone thinks they have to be an AI PhD. Not true. Neither of these guys are.”
Altman: Equity crowdfunding primarily multiplies capital from professional investors
“The thing that I still see going most wrong with crowdfunding for startups is it's easy if you're a startup that doesn't need it because you already have very well-known investors. But thus far, when it comes to equity crowdfunding, the crowd has been less wil…”
Altman: ChatGPT is now fifth largest website in the world
“ChatGPT.com didn't exist two and a half years ago to, like, the fifth biggest website in the world.”
Altman: YC is simultaneously advising 3,000 startups via its MOOC
“So right now we're teaching a MOOC, which is kind of the third version of that Stanford class back at Stanford where we are advising 3000 startups at once.”
Altman: Founders Have 12 Months Post-Launch to File Patents
“You have 12 months after you announce something if you want to patent it. And if you miss that window, it's very hard to do.”
Altman: Airbnb took 1,000 days before adoption began trending upward
“In Airbnb's case, it was a thousand days before the graph started taking upward.”
Altman: 41% of founders in YC's latest batch were foreign-born
“In the last batch, 41% of the founders we funded were born outside the US.”
Altman: Airbnb took five months to hire its first employee
“Airbnb spent five months interviewing their first employee before they hired someone. And in their first year they only hired two people.”
Kyle Vogt was the first YC founder with two billion-dollar exits
“So far the only YC founder with two billion plus exits.”