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 152 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 7 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
Levine: Consumer distribution is controlled entirely by Facebook, Apple, and Google
“And today, virtually all consumer distribution is controlled by only three companies, Facebook, Apple, and Google.”
Founder vision and instincts matter more than academic pedigree
“And I also, I've just never bought into this kind of elitist way of thinking about like where you went to school You know, where you work, you know, whether you work at Google or, you know, Apple or something, it's more of, you know, what's your idea? What, wh…”
NYC tech ecosystem lacks a mega-scale anchor company
“The negative of what's happened here in the past seven years is you haven't seen the true emergence of a destination company, right? We have incredible companies that are building incredible foundations here. Some have went, went public already. Some will go p…”
Chiu: Apple Watch is a success
“Success. I recently spoke with a realtor who has just bought an Apple Watch, and she was singing his praises on how he's changed her life, and making her less dependent on her phone, and leading to much better client interactions.”
Hornik: Big tech giants are slowly morphing into the same company
“I think that if you look at what Amazon is doing, what Google is doing, what Facebook is doing, they all are slowly but surely, and in many ways Apple, they're all slowly but surely morphing into the same company.”
Kawasaki: Apple Mail feels designed for someone receiving ten emails daily
“When I use Apple Mail, it feels like somebody at Apple who gets 10 emails a day has designed it.”
Kawasaki: Apple changed more major industries than Google
“Yeah, no, I, I'm leaning towards Apple, and it's because Apple has made multiple changes, right? So they changed the face of computing, and they changed the face of phones, and then they invented the face of tablets, and you can't, you know, Google has definit…”
Masad: Apple accepts applications created using Replit at a very high rate
“They're accepting apps made on replet. They're accepting them into the app store. I tweeted about one yesterday. There's the acceptance rate. It's very high.”
Rory O'Driscoll: Apple won't be replaced by an OpenAI phone soon
“I don't think they're going to be replaced by the OpenAI mobile phone anytime soon.”
Green: Apple spends far less on AI CapEx than tech peers
“And, you know, like Apple's spending very little right now, you know, and those other three or four companies are spending insane amounts of money.”
Lemkin: Tim Cook will not step down as Apple CEO this year
“So it's their job, but there's no way it's this year. Unless it's a health issue, there's no way it's going to be this year.”
Feldman: Tech giants achieved chip design success primarily through acquisitions
“Where there's been success, it has frequently been acquired. Apple got into the chip business through buying PA Semi. Amazon got into the chip business through acquiring Annapurna.”
Stebbings: 20VC Invested in a Startup Bypassing Apple App Store Fees
“We invested in a company that does, like, rooting away from Apple, just to, like, it's, and it will be a great company.”
Alex Schultz: Meta spends less on marketing than its tech peers
“Apart from Apple, whose marketing is paid for by the carriers, we have the lowest percentage of operating income that we spend on the stuff, the media that we disclose in the XK”
Lemkin: iPhone and App Store drive 75% of Apple revenue
“25% of the revenue is from the App Store, 40% of its profit, right? And 75% of its revenue is iPhone and App Store.”
O'Driscoll: ChatGPT will be the Apple of AI while alternatives act as Android
“I think ChatGPT will be the Apple-level quality product, but there'll be a whole bunch of Android-type quality products that are out there that will just keep pricing honest if they're commercially available and, you know, universally.”
Osika: Say no to most features to maintain Apple-like quality
“You should say no to as many things as possible and make it more of like an apple feeling. The things you do them superb.”
Moubeche: Apple AirPods generate more revenue than any software company
“I love this graph where you see, like AirPods revenue versus any software company, and you see that just the AirPods are making, like, more revenue than any software currently on the market.”
Arison: Ads represent 15% of Grindr revenue without app store fees
“Ads are about 15% of our revenue in, in total, but obviously on a margin basis, they're even higher percentage, because it's a very profitable part of the business, and we don't have to pay the Apple and Google taxes on that revenue.”
Quattrone: Netscape's 1995 IPO was Morgan Stanley's biggest since Apple in 1980
“And there were a couple of phases to this, you know, Netscape, Netscape came public in 1995. And it was literally the most popular IPO at Morgan Stanley since Apple in 1980.”
Traynor: Action-capable Siri will transform desktop and iOS interaction models
“I think what they'll win is this idea of Siri might finally become useful. Siri is currently not useful because it doesn't really have enough smarts, but I think when Siri can be as conversational as ChatGPT and can take actions on the device, it'll change the…”
Seibert: Apple Silicon prioritizes energy efficiency over pure compute power
“And look at Apple Silicon, right? They've done an amazing job. Like, yes, they're fast, but instead of pushing the bounds on pure compute, they're pushing the bounds on energy efficiency, which for Apple's use case is critical.”
Rouif: App store global distribution enables lean teams without sales staff
“I think there is the App Store story, which is a big part of it. Like, so Apple and Google, like, the App Store and mobile, they're giving you distribution. Yes, they take, like, a cut of it, but Basically, it means they offer, like, a worldwide distribution t…”
Rauch: Apple succeeds by ignoring trends and picking battles
“Like this is something that Apple does remarkably well because they don't react to every trend that emerges. They pick their battles.”
Dash: Apple Privacy Changes Made Buying Massive App Growth Much Tougher
“I think the targeting capabilities after what Apple has done has gotten reduced dramatically, so I think it would be much tougher, but If you spend that much money, maybe it's possible.”
Podjarny: Apple categorizes talent into foundational rock stars and high-growth superstars
“Apple has the whole rock star versus superstar approach, right? It sort of talks about some people want to be rock stars. They want to be, you know, amazing at one thing, and they want to get better and better at it. They're your rocks. They're sort of your fo…”
Coates: Platform ecosystems fail if third-party apps cannot match first-party quality
“One is you need you need an app platform that allows apps to be built that are of equal quality to the core features of the platform. That is absolutely critical. And like, look at iOS. IOS is like a great example of this. Like when I open up a first party app…”
Hugo Barra: Lobby 7's technology powered Apple's early Siri assistant
“Our company ran out of money, and we ended up getting, you know, actually hired by a big software company called Nuance, which was actually good because it actually gave us the runway to build and prove that vision that we had, and in the end our tech became t…”
Eric Schmidt used Apple board seat to prepare Google for mobile
“Now, back then, and this is kind of incredible, Google CEO Eric Schmidt sat on Apple's board of directors, which is a crazy thing to think these days, and it was basically like having a crystal ball. You know, Eric knew that over multiple generations, you know…”
Bill Campbell coached Steve Jobs and Google founders simultaneously
“They call them the coach, the trillion dollar coach, because he would, as you know, coach Steve Jobs, who no one in the world thought was coachable, and then he would coach Larry Page and Eric Schmidt and Sergey at Google on two of the most important companies…”
Fadell: Apple scrapped two and a half iPhone versions before shipping
“That was what we did on the iPhone. We had two and a half versions really of the iPhone before it shipped, because we kept revving it, getting to a certain point, throwing it away, trying again, getting a certain point, throwing it away because we make constra…”
Levie: Box centralizes software design like Apple while keeping engineering autonomous
“So for design, as an example, we probably more have the Apple ethos. So our software design is extremely centralized and that ensures that everything we put out in the market, we believe is going to have the same look and feel the same great user experience. C…”
Partovi believes Apple's iLike acquisition would have succeeded if he remained passive
“I keep thinking back that if I had just done nothing, things would probably have been fine.”
Steve Jobs offered to acquire iLike for $50 million in 2008
“Basically, we had raised money two years earlier for fifty million dollars, and he offered to acquire the company Four or fifty million dollars, so basically no change in valuation since our pre-launch, you know, fundraise,”
Shear: Apple requires high-fidelity demos to secure internal project funding
“The way you pitch for resources for a new Apple product. A lot of the time is a full fidelity demo. And you actually make a full touch and feel high fidelity demo of the experience that the customer is going to have. And then the vice president of the area who…”
DuckDuckGo applies Apple's Directly Responsible Individual framework to every task
“We kind of stole that concept from Apple, this directly responsible individual, but we have gone into it a hundred percent. So everything has an owner from the top objective down to the little task.”
Generational tech giants become distribution channels rather than relying on them
“Yeah, honestly, the biggest and best companies ever, you know, generational businesses today, the Cisco's, Facebook's, Apple's, Amazon's of the world, they don't rely on those channels very much. Like, in fact, they do become those channels.”
Apple's M&A Strategy Focused Entirely on Talent Over Revenue Streams
“We were very much focused on finding great teams. It was never about acquiring revenue streams. It was finding great people who wanted to come to Cupertino.”
Kevin Rose's free fasting app reached #1 and logged 700k fasts
“Yeah. So, you know, it was just a simple little free app and we were able to quickly kind of shoot up in the rankings inside of the app store for the word fasting. So now if you go into the app store and Apple and type in fasting, we're kind of the number one …”
Desai: Building massive startups requires VCs with sustained high risk tolerance
“If a founder's scope of ambition is to generate billions of dollars of revenues and indeed build the next Apple. Then it can be even more frustrating to partner with the VC who's more conservative and looking for predictable doubles or triples because hitting …”
Uretsky: Massive business scale requires intersecting necessity with customer love
“Really what gave them this gigantic market cap of being the largest company in the world was the fact that they found this intersection of need and love, right? Everybody in the modern day world needs a cell phone. They made a product that is absolutely loved,…”
Apple asked Headspace to offer free SOS meditations on Apple Watch
“When Apple released the Apple watch, they came to us and asked us if we would consider putting our SOS meditations, you know, these short form two minute meditations for when you've, you're having some kind of crisis and just really need to sort of very quickl…”
Chad Byers: Susa Ventures Avoids Investing Based on Brand Defensibility
“I think in our opinion, we'd rather see one of those other three than just a strong brand. So I think, you know, a good example of this is in the commerce space. There's some companies I think where their most defensible aspect is brand. There's examples of ma…”
Automotive startup Pearl's 70-person team includes 53 former Apple employees
“I think there are 53 people from Apple, 70 total people now that, that built and managed and delivered iPhones, iPads, Apple Watch and iPods”
Athos founders rejected signed job offers at Apple to launch startup
“Chris and I had already signed job offers to join. I was going to join Apple. Chris was going to be joining analog devices. Idea was like, let's just like make some money and work on this on the side so that, you know, we can make a better prototype and figure…”
Jason Calacanis: Smartphone supply chain advances are driving drone convergence
“Drones, three-D printing, and virtual reality and machine learning and the on-demand economy, these, like, sort of trends are all starting to merge and sort of build off each other, and really build off the back of smartphones, whether it's the sensors in the …”