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
Big Four Tech Giants Generate $600B in Annual Operating Cash Flow
“You look at Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and Meta combined, I mean, they're doing six hundred billion of operating cash flow, just cash coming off the company every single year”
Dmitry Gurski: Flo team achieved six startup exits including Google and Facebook
“We had six exits up to this moment. We had exit to Google, exit to Facebook, ah, we started several companies, ah which have has revenue in a 100,000,050 million.”
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.”
Schroepfer: Myspace was larger than Facebook in 2008 and bleeding cash
“My space was bleeding cash and was actually bigger than Meta at the time or Facebook.”
Sim: Meta's acquisition of Kustomer took 16 months due to antitrust regulations
“I sat through the customer thing. It took us 16 months from signing to sell to Meta because of antitrust regulations, right?”
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.”
Hotel Tonight Was Facebook's First Mobile Ads Customer
“I was working with the Facebook product team and was the first customer to use mobile ads on, on Facebook.”
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.”
Schultz: Facebook Pioneered MAU Metrics When Competitors Tracked Registered Users
“Meta, back when it was Facebook, innovated by moving from activated confirmed registered users to monthly active users. And no one talked about that before. They were still talking about their registered user base back then. That's what MySpace talked about.”
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.”
Facebook had 1M Brazil users vs Orkut's 35M in early 2010
“Facebook had something around a million users at that time in Brazil, ah, and our biggest competitor, which was Google's social network, Orkut, had over thirty five million users.”
Levesque: Facebook's key growth metric was daily active engaged users
“For Facebook, it was daily active people engaged on the product”
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 …”
LinkedIn, Facebook, and Roblox took between 8 and 17 years to IPO
“LinkedIn was eight to 10 years to going public. Facebook was 10 to 12. You know, Roblox, 17 years.”
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.”
Facebook Had Under Two Million Users When MySpace Had 80 Million
“MySpace was eighty million users. We were just shy of two, maybe actually less than two million at the time.”
Most consumer apps around 2007 and 2008 plateaued at 50 million MAUs
“When they hit around fifty million MAUs, They realized that most apps in that era, around 2007 and eight, had plateaued at fifty million MAUs.”
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 3,000 employees and under 100 PMs when Angelidou joined
“Gosh, I want to say maybe 3000 people. Yeah. Something like that. And the product team was very, very small. Maybe, I mean, a hundred, no less, less than a hundred.”
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.”
One of Facebook's Best Early Growth Leaders Was a Physicist
“One of the best early growth leaders at Facebook was a physicist. He was trained as an experimental physicist.”