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 27 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
Amazon and Alibaba will lose top e-commerce positions within 10 years
“I think in 10 years from now, Amazon and Alibaba will not be the biggest e-commerce companies anymore. They will get disrupted by other companies, younger companies, more creative, more agile companies, and I think people will look back at Amazon and Alibaba l…”
Khan: Waiving pre-IPO lockups for institutional investors has zero company cost
“So that lockup, while it was incredibly valuable to investors who bought that security, had zero cost to the company. So those are very creative transactions. So we give them the no lockup, you know, and they were fine doing the deal, you know, but the cost to…”
Reses: Yahoo Earned $50 Billion Through Renegotiated Alibaba Deal
“It probably generated fifty billion dollars worth of economics to Yahoo shareholders”
Chinese tech giants prioritize early investment in breakout startups over copying them
“What I see happening more recently is not that those companies are copycatting and trying to kill startups. They're trying to identify the startups that have breakout potential and get money into them and invest in them as soon as possible.”
Eric Hippeau: Yahoo must sell itself to better management
“No, Yahoo is not game over, and Yahoo needs, needs probably needs to sell itself to people who can manage it better and Yahoo has an enormous amount of assets namely, it's taken Alibaba, it's taken Yahoo Japan, and its own its own own and operated website whic…”
Only 11 Venture-Backed IPOs Have Surpassed $50B in Market Cap
“There's been 11 fifty billion dollar IPOs ever. Venture backed. 11. Ok? The two largest venture backed IPOs ever, Or Facebook in 2012 and Alibaba in 2014.”
Freise: KKR Passed on an Early Investment Opportunity in Alibaba
“We literally at KKR had the chance to invest in Alibaba a long time ago, and that came on my desk, and I said no.”
Claure: Entry valuation is irrelevant for companies targeting massive addressable markets
“The key is to determine in advance if it's a company where price matters or it doesn't. For some companies with an immense opportunity, think of Alibaba, think of Facebook, think of Google, think of Amazon, whatever. It was worth coming in at almost any price …”
Alibaba and Tencent back rival startups rather than co-investing
“It's unlikely, for example, that both Alibaba and Tencent will come into the same company, and if one backs a company, then you can expect that the other will back a competing company in the space.”
Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent exert more market dominance than US giants
“The top three exert An almost disproportionate influence on the market relative to even Amazon or Google in the US.”
Alibaba's free DingTalk wiped out the Chinese enterprise chat startup market
“Alibaba released DingTalk, which is a free workplace collaboration and chat product. And it's been free and it's basically completely sucked away that market and run away with it. And now really nobody wants to build a chat enterprise chat product anymore beca…”
Tung: Western tech companies must enter China via local strategic partners
“We think that a way to go to China is not necessarily to do it yourself, but find a strategic partner in the same way that Yahoo found Alibaba, and that's the right model. So it's not an issue of market. It's an issue of entry model in China.”
Alibaba is structurally relegated to acting as a glorified trade directory
“They're mostly focused on an East Asian supplier base, and mainly in mainland China. So most of Alibaba's buyer base is in Europe and America, and they're connecting with suppliers in East Asia. What that ends up meaning is that The currency issues, tariff iss…”
Aschebrook began investing by buying stock from Jack Ma's family office
“I just started buying Twitter shares and Alibaba stock from Jack Ma's family office, and then holy shit, it worked.”
Green: Alibaba made $1B in profit when Lead Edge invested
“Alibaba was very cash efficient, actually, when we invested, it was a billion dollars of profit.”
UiPath uses Alibaba's open-source Qwen model for semi-structured documents
“We are using Gwen, which is a fantastic model built by Alibaba, which is totally open source. We are using it into understanding, like a lot of our semi-structured documents”
Khan: Alibaba and Snap IPOs converted nearly 90% of roadshow meetings
“I don't remember the exact numbers, but yeah, both were pretty close to 90%.”
General Atlantic invested $75M in Alibaba but missed a chance for $300M
“We ended up investing seventy-five million into the business at that time, and, you know, I probably had pushed it, could have put three hundred million into it, but I was like, seventy-five million, we don't really know this”
GGV Capital invested in Alibaba in 2003 at a $200M valuation
“GGB was an early investor in Alibaba Group, and back in 2003, the two hundred million dollar valuation.”
ChingCloud and uCloud might remain independent from Chinese tech giants
“There are some cloud services companies like Ching Cloud and uCloud, which are big enough at the moment and have enough customers where they might be able to stay independent.”
Tango reached a $1 billion valuation with 350 million users
“Tango, we were, I was, you know, I helped name that company. It was the first mobile messaging video conferencing app on the iPhone, Android phone, still has three hundred fifty million customers. We had a billion dollar valuation last year by Alibaba investme…”
Alibaba Pitch Framed Company as eBay, Amazon, and PayPal of China
“The story was positioned very simply that, hey, it's the China consumer play, and they are the eBay plus Amazon plus PayPal of China.”
Khan: Alibaba raised $8B to buy back 20% stake from Yahoo
“We bought back the share and then we had to go raise the money, raise the eight billion dollar to buy back that 20% stake.”
Kutcher's early angel portfolio included Skype, Alibaba, and Foursquare
“I invested in Skype and Alibaba and Foursquare and this platform called Brizly, which was like a Twitter client And just started putzing around and finding my way towards interesting companies and interesting people and had some early success, which then led m…”
Hans Tung: Alibaba and JD.com Control Over 90% of Chinese E-Commerce
“I, fortunately we have that perspective being in China where Alibaba with Taobao and Tmall owns 80% of market share in e-commerce and JD has another over 10% market share in e-commerce.”