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 123 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
Facebook's Safety Team Was Larger Than Instagram's Total Headcount
“The safety and integrity work, we were running too much of our own stuff and not leveraging the much larger teams at Facebook and in the central teams. I think there were more engineers that worked on safety and integrity at the company at the time that then w…”
Mark Zuckerberg Cancels Meetings Missing 24-Hour Advance Prep Memos
“He prepared really well every meeting, so you have to send in advance, like a short note about why, what decision you are expecting from him. If you fail to send his document, 24 hours, you know, by the minute before your meeting gets cancelled.”
LeCun: Meta overhauled News Feed algorithm in 2017 to eliminate propaganda
“The main news feed algorithm was completely changed so that, you know, there was no clickbaits anymore. There was no, like, you know, news Outlets that could like push their content. That was propaganda, basically, you know, much more effort to take down false…”
Schultz: Facebook Stopped Growing in 2007, Prompting Growth Team Creation
“We stopped growing in 22,007, and that's why we created the growth team.”
Schultz: Resurrections and Churn Drove Meta's Scaling, Not New Registrations
“When we implemented it, we thought it was registrations minus a bit of churn. What we didn't realize was that the churn number and the resurrection number were massively bigger than the registration number. And so we hadn't realized how big a lever Reducing ch…”
Schultz: Meta Aims to Make Reels a Major Monetization Engine
“I think that we want to turn reels into a really major monetization engine, not just an engagement engine.”
Pittman: iHeartMedia radio reaches 90% of Americans monthly
“Our radio group alone reaches 90% of Americans every month. Only two companies come close to that, and they don't surpass it. It's Facebook and Google. Everybody else, the biggest TV network in the US reaches about 35% of Americans. Biggest cable network reach…”
Instagram lacked basic registration flow data logging in 2016
“Even at the best companies, like when I joined Instagram, we literally did not have logging for all of the registration flow. It was incredible. We knew how many people started and how many people ended, but we did not know what was happening at every step of …”
Snapchat Stories Became the Dominant Format Across All Social Networks
“And with that one insight, starting from first principles, thinking about how people interact with each other, he has changed the course of all social networks, because you can't find, you know, whether it's Twitter, or LinkedIn, or, you know, obviously, Whats…”
Stebbings: 43% of venture dollars go directly to Facebook, Google, and Amazon
“I think it's 43%, according to Clearbank. I might have to check that, but I believe 43% of venture dollars goes directly back to Facebook, Google, and Amazon, as a fun fact.”
Taussig: Google and Facebook capture ~90% of recent ad growth
“Something like 89 or 90% of growth in advertising dollars
In the last year or so was inside of Google and Facebook.”
Facebook delayed expanding beyond Harvard for 18 months to ensure retention
“They first launched in Harvard, and there was a lot of craze about the app. A lot of schools demanded that Facebook be available in those schools, yet they did not launch it for almost 18 months, and the simple reason being, the one metric they measured was ho…”
Buchheit: Friendster failed by prioritizing an impossible six-degrees-of-separation feature
“Friendster, but they could have been maybe Facebook, but they got fixated on this idea that when you browse through profiles, it had to show you kind of the six degrees of separation between you and this person, and so that feature, it turns out, is sort of co…”
Wincek: Snap broke out without ever buying Facebook app install ads
“They never bought Facebook ads or, like, Facebook app installs to get there, but instead, they had this really viral product and a proprietary channel, which was actually a pretty old-school channel, right? Word of mouth.”
Ben Lerer: Legacy retail and media will heavily acquire DTC startups
“The last few weeks in retail, I mean, just look at the jet and dollar shave acquisitions. You're seeing, these are the first dominoes in what will be a bunch of dominoes falling. I believe in consolidation where the traditional guys in retail, the traditional …”
Only 8% of millennials trust banks for financial guidance
“Another, another kind of ridiculous stat, in my opinion, is also from this Facebook research report, which I'm happy to send you, is that eight percent of millennials trust banks and financial institutions for guidance.”
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…”
Greze: Meta will launch a personal AI assistant inside WhatsApp
“They're going to have a personal assistant that's going to come in WhatsApp. I don't know if they're launching it in a day or in three months, but it's coming.”
Stebbings: Meta moves to absorb excess AI data center capacity
“Meta moves in to absorb the surplus AI data center capacity”
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.”
Alex Schultz: Meta click-to-messaging ads generate over $10 billion annually
“So click to messaging is north of a ten billion dollar business.”
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”
Alex Schultz: WhatsApp business verification revenue exceeds $1 billion annually
“And that's a north of a billion dollar business.”
Alex Schultz: Less than 1% of Meta employees work on growth
“So across our nearly a 100,000 employees, we have less than one percent of the employees in the growth team.”
Hudack: 99% of people in Spain used WhatsApp when Facebook acquired it
“When Facebook bought WhatsApp, I think 99% of people in Spain had WhatsApp. It was some of the most incredible market penetration ever.”
Mark Zuckerberg Wrote Facebook's S-1 in One Sitting on a Phone
“I mean, I think he wrote his S one in one sitting on a mobile phone.”
Hoffman: 22 of Facebook's first 25 employees left within four years
“I think 22 out of the first 25 people at Facebook left after, within the first three or four years.”
Kleinerman: Meta's Llama 2 license restricts competitor training and massive-scale deployment
“For example, LAMA II is very significant as a development in the industry. But they were very clear. Thou shall not use LAMA-II for training other models. Thou shall not use LAMA-II for, I think it's seven hundred million user use cases.”
Schultz: Facebook Lost Messaging Market Share to WhatsApp During Mobile Transition
“We were actually losing market share because the web was declining. Faster than mobile was growing for us, and then WhatsApp and iMessage and all of these things were coming along, and actually the shift of platforms meant even though we were growing mobile me…”
Schultz: Meta Jumped From 49th to 4th in PwC Future Potential Rankings
“Pricewaterhouse releases this report every year, and we've gone from, like, 49 to fourth.”
Facebook Had Nine Employees When Accel Offered a $100 Million Valuation
“Facebook at this time was nine people. It was a nine person company. They were in a hundred different colleges and it was called the Facebook, not, it wasn't yet Facebook. And we met the day they got their term sheet from Excel you know, for the a hundred mill…”
Coinbase public status unlocked deals with BlackRock and Meta
“We've been able to close deals with, you know, BlackRock, the largest asset manager in the world, and, you know, Meta, formerly Facebook, like we're now, especially with our Coinbase cloud business and things like that, we're now able to power things with Fort…”
Facebook allowed its growth teams to modify other departments' codebases
“So it really worked at Facebook pretty well because there was a culture that other teams were allowed to touch other people's code.”
Facebook's active advertiser base grew hundreds of percent in one year
“And lo and behold, it did, and we were able to massively increase the number of active advertisers, like, from almost no growth to multiple hundred percent growth year on year after one year.”
Ed Baker: Facebook and Uber growth leaders reported directly to CEO
“And in both of those cases, they had separate growth teams where the growth leader reported directly to the CEO. And these teams were structured cross-functionally.”
Reframing invites as announcements enabled Facebook to surpass Mixi in Japan
“Japan went from one of our slowest growing countries to one of our fastest growing countries. Shortly after that, we surpassed our local competitor in Japan.”
Casey Winters: Facebook Open Graph changes temporarily killed Pinterest's viral user acquisition
“When Facebook changed the way the open graph worked, all of a sudden we stopped getting any new users.”
Top Social Platforms Were All Founded by People in Their Early Twenties
“If you look at Snap, if you look at Vine, if you look at Facebook, if you look at Instagram, if you look at Tumblr, they were all started by people who were, you know, in their early twenties.”
Palihapitiya: Facebook's early growth team underestimated ultimate scale by 10x
“When we were trying to project the impact of some of the things that we did, we were frankly off by an order of magnitude. We thought success would be getting the product to a hundred million users plus. And lo and behold, the product now touches three billion…”
Schuler: Facebook went public overpriced and took years to recover
“If you're overvalued, and they really kind of force the issue out, you can see problems like Facebook experienced, you know, when they went out overpriced problems in the market, and it took them a couple of years of performing well before they straightened it…”
Maltz: Facebook successfully transitioned from desktop to mobile revenue post-IPO
“When the company went public on basically desktop revenues and, you know, the market massively changed to mobile and Facebook had done so much investing around mobile in their platform and in their technology and in their advertising that they made this incred…”
Giphy powers the native GIF buttons inside Twitter, Facebook, and Slack
“We actually power that button. We power the gift button inside of Twitter. We power the gift button in Facebook. We power gifts in Slack.”
Early Facebook reached 90% college penetration within weeks
“One thing was really unique about Facebook, and it was there from really the early days, and that was the rate at which they got to full penetration in these schools. It would take a couple weeks for them to get 90% plus penetration in a school.”
Facebook generated $80 million in revenue within three years of its launch
“Three years after Launching in a dorm room, Facebook was making about eighty million dollars and quickly jumped to over three hundred million dollars and then took off.”
Major tech companies scaled without traditional sales or marketing
“There's a bunch of companies like PayPal, Airbnb, Facebook, Hotmail, Twitter, LinkedIn, Dropbox, WhatsApp, Quora, Reddit. A bunch of companies who've gotten really big, really fast, without doing any traditional sales or marketing.”
Major telcos will launch mobile payments to compete with Facebook and Snapchat
“I think there are much more other big players offering similar services in the next few months, including a lot of the big telcos, because they're not really interested just to let the Facebooks and Snapchats taking away this interesting interaction to the end…”