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 73 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
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.”
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…”
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.”
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.”
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…”
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…”
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.”
Meta Has Been Building Custom Silicon Chips for Over Five Years
“I think Meta has been building their chips for more than five years, way more than five years.”
Schroepfer: Meta built 10 million square feet of data centers in 10 years
“Built ten million square feet of data center in, like, less than 10 years, and they, they're going on trajectories above that.”
Frequent Profile Picture Updates on Early Facebook Inspired Photo Sharing
“Early Facebook days, before we had photos, people just kept changing their profile picture. Like every day, multiple times a day. I'm like, oh, sounds like people want to share photos. Maybe we should build that.”
Ed Baker Imported Facebook's Growth Organizational Structure to Uber
“Uber was really the first place that we called it growth, right? I was hired by Ed Baker. He brought over the kind of Facebook structure that they had built at Facebook.”
Duboe: Facebook's growth team directly managed the early standalone Messenger app
“I know that one of the things they actually put the growth team on was when they spun out Messenger from the core app. It was the growth team that actually ran the product on that early on.”
Wood: Meta maintains 3B+ users and 67% DAU/MAU engagement ratio
“So daily average users over monthly average users, 67% hasn't changed. Has three billion plus users.”
Ed Baker: Facebook's North Star metric was monthly active users
“Well, so at Facebook, when I was there, the North Star metric was monthly active users.”
Thrive Capital Invested in Instagram Growth Round From $40M Fund
“The ambition of the team, which reached well beyond the forty million fund they had at the time would suggest. And even with that small fund, they were taking big swings, you know, be a big investor in a growth round in Instagram right before Facebook. Bought …”
Peter Thiel invested $500,000 for a 10% ownership stake in Facebook
“Peter ended up investing half a million dollars for like, 10% of the company.”
Peter Thiel wrote his $500K Facebook check while starting Palantir
“I got the call from Peter saying, hey, come on down, and we're starting a company. We'd like you to be one of the first engineers and flew down to have dinner with him about the same time that he wrote the 500,000 dollar check to Facebook.”
Y Combinator classes were only 10 to 15 companies in 2006
“When I started 10 years ago, Google and Facebook were still buying a lot of small companies. YC classes were only 10, 15 companies.”
Shift built ad tech for Facebook apps before direct ads existed
“So what we were doing is we built ad technology to go inside Facebook applications So when you're playing games on Facebook, we were actually serving ads there because you couldn't programmatically serve ads directly on Facebook yet.”
Facebook had 6,000 employees and 100 PMs in spring 2014
“This is about spring of 20 14. And when I joined Facebook, you know, I was, I think, one of a hundred PMs at that point. The company was only 6000 employees and they were still hiring in these kind of generalist pools.”