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 39 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
Ralston: Y Combinator would not have funded a young Steve Jobs
“I don't think we'd fund a Steve Jobs at YC. Well, that's not good. Yeah. And the reason is, especially when Steve Jobs was starting off, he was an asshole.”
Pomel: Solo engineers using AI do six months of work in days
“We saw like literally, I mean, absolutely excellent developers, like not beginners, but people rebuild whole systems in a couple of days alone that were absolutely amazing. Things that would have been possible, but, you know, done by a team of six, over six mo…”
Ries: Novo Nordisk would have canceled R&D without foundation merger veto
“So we know for sure That if they had not done this, all of the major R&D programs of Nova Nordisk would have been canceled. We know because the company they were going to merge with two years later was bought by Merck, and that's what happened.”
Alströmer: Post-2020 easy capital killed startups that otherwise would have succeeded
“It's very clear that, that what happened in those two years after summer, 20, 20 hurt companies. Like, it was much worse than just, like, more of the same. It hurt companies that otherwise would have been successful, because they would have had a level of disc…”
Patel Thompson rejected pivoting Poppy into a profitable, high-priced boutique agency
“There was also an option to say, let's just make this a nice high-end tech-enabled agency, and folks were like, why didn't you just raise prices and do all that? I could have, I hundred percent could have, and turned it into a nice kind of like side business o…”
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. …”
Graham: Steve Jobs would have forced Y Combinator to fund him
“Oh, I think actually you would fund him, because Steve Jobs would make you fund him.”
Greene: VMware cofounders would have thanked her for not selling to EMC
“My co-founders wanted to sell, and I thought it would be selfish not to, although they would have thanked me had I not”
Emily Weiss: Glossier could 4x revenue in Sephora but rejects wholesale
“We could put ourselves in a Sephora, you know, tomorrow and probably, like,
Forex revenue,
Like but I, I don't know that that would really help us achieve the long-term impact we want in women's lives.”
Benet: Tesla and SpaceX would have failed without Elon Musk's personal wealth
“If Elon hadn't been personally wealthy, both projects would have probably failed.”
Zuckerberg: Better internal expertise might have avoided buying Oculus
“When I look at things like, you know, we bought you know, the Oculus team for a lot of money, right? I actually view that as you know, if we'd done a better job of building up some of the expertise to do some of that stuff internally, then, you know, maybe we …”
Scholl: Boom's underlying technology existed ten years before the company launched
“The technology for supersonic flight existed actually a long time before Boom was founded. Technologically, the company could have been created 10 years earlier, but nobody started it.”
Chollet: Equal investment in genetic algorithms would have yielded exciting results
“If you had thrown the same amount of investment into almost anything else, you would also have seen extremely exciting results, like genetic algorithms, for instance.”
Caldwell: DoorDash and Airbnb would have failed using outsourced dev shops
“But I think if you just look at the facts of the companies we funded, like literally DoorDash or literally Airbnb or any of these folks, they lived and died by their speed of shipping software. And if they, what they did was buy white label software or have so…”
Seibel: Uber would have failed if it initially launched in NYC
“If Uber had launched in New York City, it wouldn't have worked. Because, like, the pain did not, yeah, did not exist in New York City. The pain was so great, great in San Francisco that everyone was willing to use Uber Black.”
Mitchell: Rezi screens tenants better than independent landlords in 90% of cases
“We really try to balance this line between giving a great experience, but also verifying that we're screening, you know, I would say probably 90% of the cases we're Probably screening better than our landlord clients would have if they hadn't used this.”
Benet: IPFS would have died in academia's publish-or-perish model
“Really I think, like, the only option was either, ah, university or Google, and in the university case, it would have been killed in, in the, you know, publish or perish world where, like, hey, this is way too ambitious. Focus on this, like, one little thing, …”
Caldwell: Holding a dot-com peak portfolio long-term still yielded decent returns
“If you would have held and you had a decent portfolio, then you actually, even if you were the dumbest money at the top of the market, you would have done okay.”
Bilgen: Starting in oncology would have made initial commercialization far harder
“Because if we started, I think, on the oncology side, it would have been far more difficult to achieve that initial successful commercialization that gave us more resources to be able to build, you know, new tests and improve the existing tests.”
Field: Figma should have scaled its team faster to launch sooner
“Looking back, we did have the capital. I should have scaled the team faster so we could move faster and get it out quicker.”
Seibel: Twitch would have failed without his three technical co-founders
“I was the single non-technical person on a four-person co-founding team at JustinTV and Twitch, and like I'll just make it plain, without my three other co-founders, none of that shit happens.”
Caldwell: Gmail almost wasn't released due to hardware concerns at Google
“It was hard for him to get Google to release it because they were afraid it was going to take up too much hardware, and so there was all these issues where there's a good, there was a decent chance I think it never would have been released.”
Cutts: AltaVista would have crushed Google if they grasped ranking signals
“I remember when Alta Vista, I was worried they were going to crush us. Cause like, you know, you have a certain number of ranking signals and if they had twigged and caught on fast enough, they even like copied our appearance.”
Alströmer: Airbnb would not be as big today without early online marketing
“Like, had we not done online marketing early on we were certainly not being as big as we are today. So that was critical.”
Cover.com Would Have Cost $5M–$6M After Series B or C
“And I can guarantee you that if we had tried to buy it after our B or C, we'd be looking at like five, six million dollars.”
Pivoting Poppy would have required cutting the team six months earlier
“I think the truth of the matter is, is if we had wanted to pivot, we probably should have done that, you know, six months prior. If I was going to cut the team and leave a good chunk of money in the in the bank to be able to do that I probably needed more time…”
Migicovsky: Pebble might have succeeded by operating as a frugal, hits-driven business
“I don't think we ever Reached escape velocity to a hit with any of our later products, and I think if we had built a more frugal organization, if we were able to build products cheaper, and then launch them and test to see if they were successful, and if they …”
Gootee: PlanGrid would have built faster by hiring developers earlier instead of self-coding
“Probably the best advice I could give though is I'd stop Coding a little bit earlier, and I would start hiring a little bit earlier, because I think there's a lot of me that wanted to passionately write those features, and if I had instead been passionately hi…”
Seibel: Justin.tv survived due to technical founders, low spending, and ego
“Those were the three things that saved our company, made our company work, and strangely, I don't even think, if you take one of those things away, any one of them, we would have died.”
Adhikari: Decades of required effort would have deterred early gravitational wave researchers
“If they, I think if they had known how tough it would be, or that it was going to take fifties, five years to have success, probably no one would have started.”
Bernstam: Scribd and most early batch startups would have failed without YC
“Honestly, we would never have made it without that program. And I think that's true of actually most Of those companies and I, I'd argue probably most of the companies because without that community of, like, like-minded people who are highly motivated and wor…”
Baker: Uber would have kept growing without any paid acquisition
“Uber would have kept growing even if we had never done any paid acquisition, but especially in a competitive market it kind of makes sense to pay up to what the, that rider or that driver is ultimately going to be worth”
Collison: Stripe could have accelerated by a year or two with better discipline
“Yeah, so I don't think I did it especially well, and I think it kind of, you know, fortunately, sort of, you know, it worked out, but I think if I was doing it all over again, I think we could have sort of accelerated ourselves by a year or two if we'd sort of…”
Ravisankar: HackerRank wouldn't exist if US grad schools accepted him
“In hindsight, it's great because I don't think we would have started the company if I had come here.”
Slavin: Early growth focus would have forced Area Code into an all-in Pokémon bet
“And if we'd had to think about growth from the very beginning, man, we would never have done Anything we did, you know, we would, you know, we would have bet it all on, on this idea that we had in 2004 that we went and talked to the Nintendo corporation. We ha…”
Hoover: Product Hunt would not exist without his pre-built audience
“If I didn't have, you know, this first few hundred people willing to sign up that I had built that audience for over several years, I don't think Product Hunt would exist today.”
Field: Figma's founders almost built a profitable meme generator in 2012
“I think it was, for sure, would have been the best one in the market. And I'm, my thesis was right, by the way. Look at the exponential curve of memes since 2012. Yeah we would have made some money there.”
Ravisankar: Interview Street should have focused on 2-3 companies first
“I think we should have focused on, you know what, we're just going to focus on these two companies, mock interviews, right, versus Any tech company anywhere in the world, and we were scrambling for interviewers from Amazon, Google, Microsoft, all over. We shou…”
Altman: If I stayed in school longer I would have studied synthetic biology
“If I had stayed at school longer I would have studied what was at the time called biotechnology and now is called sometimes that sometimes synthetic biology, but that sort of stuff where you're really kind of pushing the edge of what computers and biology can …”