Referenced throughout the book

The source ledger

Every time-sensitive figure in The Compounding Company, with its source and the date it was last verified.

This page exists because a book cannot keep up with a field that moves quarterly. Rather than fix numbers in print where they age badly, the ones that matter live here and are re-checked.

How to read this

Three categories, and the difference matters

Published research — externally sourced, cited, with a verification date. Trust these to the extent you trust the source.

Practitioner judgement — thresholds and bands derived from engagements, offered as starting points. These are not measured results and should not be quoted as such.

Calibration data — results from the benchmark programme. Currently building; this is the category that will grow.

Foundational

Not time-sensitive.

WorkUsed for
Coase, The Nature of the Firm (1937)The boundary argument in Part VIII
Williamson, The Economic Institutions of Capitalism (1985)Transaction cost structure
Granovetter, The Strength of Weak Ties (1973)Trust propagation
Simon, Administrative Behavior (1947)Bounded rationality in decision capture
Dunbar, The Social Brain Hypothesis (1998)The group-size bound in the supervisor chapter
Page, Brin, Motwani & Winograd, PageRank (1999)Basis for TrustRank
Kamvar, Schlosser & Garcia-Molina, EigenTrust (2003)Reputation propagation
Time-sensitive — verify before quoting

Checked, dated, and expected to move.

ClaimSourceVerified
MCP under neutral governance; Apache 2.0Model Context Protocol donated to the Linux Foundation's Agentic AI Foundation, December 2025Aug 2026
A2A under the same governance bodyAgentic AI Foundation, Linux FoundationAug 2026
Indian IT services moving to performance-based contractingReuters, 20 August 2026Aug 2026
Deflation exposure in application servicesAnalyst estimates vary widely — see note belowAug 2026

On deflation estimates specifically. Published figures range from single digits to a third or more of revenue in exposed service lines, and several major banks have argued publicly that the market reaction overshot. The disagreement is about pass-through — how much of the productivity gain the provider keeps — which is a question about market structure rather than technology. The book states the range and its contested status rather than picking a number.

Practitioner judgement

Starting points, not benchmarks.

The following are the author's judgement from engagements. They are offered as places to begin and are explicitly not measured results. Where the calibration programme produces data, these will be replaced and the change recorded.

FigureWhere it appears
Review-rate bands and confidence thresholdsDesigning the Human in the Loop
No-touch progression targets by workflow varianceNo-Touch Rate; Support
Evaluation cost at one fifth to one third of engineering effortEvals; Budgeting AI as Infrastructure
Three-line budget proportions (35 / 45 / 20)Budgeting AI as Infrastructure
Time-to-launch floor of two to four weeksTime to Launch
Coherence formula and its bandsCoherence, Not Average
The eighty-to-two-hundred-person transition pointIf You Are Under Two Hundred People
ANS-100 dimension weights, ceilings and band boundariesScore Yourself; Appendix A
Corrections

What the data has already changed.

Nothing yet. The calibration programme is in its first cohort.

When a weight changes because the data contradicted it, it will be recorded here with the evidence that forced it — including where it contradicts the chapter that defends the current weighting. That commitment is made in the book's front matter and this is where it gets honoured.

Calibration data, live: 0 consented self-assessed results. The median publishes at a minimum cohort of ten.