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 505 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 8 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
Apax Partners rejected Zeev's early pitch to invest in Facebook
“I, now, now I do have misses from the Apex days where I saw something that I wanted to do, but I knew that there was no way I could get it approved, including Facebook, by the way, in the very early days, you know, I saw it, I could have done it. I brought it …”
O'Driscoll: Serving free ChatGPT users costs more than Google or Facebook
“And the cost to serve a free ChatGPT customer is higher than either Facebook or Google.”
O'Driscoll: Manus is not an obvious product fit for Meta
“It's not obvious why a kind of B to B or individual knowledge worker work tool, which is what Manus is, is an obvious product to roll out, you know, three billion users on Facebook, most of whom don't do knowledge work.”
O'Driscoll: Corporate AI imperatives conflict with leaders skeptical of LLMs
“Once it became a corporate imperative for Meta to be competitive with OpenAI and Anthropic in the LLM space, having a guy running that product, running that project, whose first line is, I don't think this is important. We should do something else. Just causes…”
Lemkin: Mark Zuckerberg is investing heavily in AI out of spite
“It's CO spite about how they were forced to run companies in 20, 21. I think there's versions and I'm a big Sheryl Sandberg fan, but I think Zuck is spiteful. He was forced to run The company in a, in, in a certain way. I know a lot, I mean, Owen from Intercom…”
O'Driscoll: Meta spending $70 billion on AI is inefficient
“Doesn't appear to be the most efficient way to spend seventy billion dollars, as judged from the amount of infighting, but we'll see.”
Bouaziz calls PaySpace acquisition Deel's equivalent of Facebook buying Instagram
“Long-term strategy of the company, the quality of the founders, of the people, of the product, and how much it helps from an infrastructure perspective, from a gross margin perspective, from an experience perspective, is probably, it's probably the Instagram t…”
Taneja: Meta isn't an enterprise company; Mistral leads Western open-source AI
“It's not meta. They're not an enterprise company. It really is in the West. It's really missed, missed trial today.”
Staniszewski: Tech giants pay for AI talent to acquire model architecture know-how
“As I think about meta and others, they are of course paying for the know-how as much as they are paying for the raw talent too, where getting those early people gets you some insight into the models and architecture that you can then bring across and accelerat…”
Alex Schultz: 70% of Meta engagement is un-followed AI recommendations
“So five years ago, we were 100% content shown to you based on people you follow, or accounts you follow. 100%. People don't understand, like, TikTok was tiny, it was the beginning of the pandemic, like, it was very early on, so let's say five and a half years …”
O'Driscoll: Meta has a tenuous link between core ads and LLMs
“They have a very tenuous link between their core business and their AI initiative. They talk about how AI is optimizing their core business, but even I think from the discussions they said, that's much more old school AI than any of the LLM stuff.”
O'Driscoll: Meta's strength stems from core ads, not AI
“This isn't a AI enabled success. This is, I have an awesome existing business, and it kicks off so much money that I'm allowed spend that money on building this great AI vision, and I can probably do that for as long as my existing business kicks off cash.”
Brian Halligan: Direct listings are risky unless you're Google or Facebook
“I think the direct listing is like, you're a little bit scared. You're not going to get those long loneliness. You're not going to properly market it to them. And it's seven percent to the bankers in the grand scheme of things. It's not that much. I think it's…”
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.”
Lemkin: Mature public tech companies are trapped by high margin expectations
“It is almost impossible for most public companies to actually spend the cash there they're generating. So Zuck's got a triple down here because he's getting also a hall pass. The market's saying it's okay to spend everything, right?”
O'Driscoll: Meta is acquiring 49% of Gross and Friedman's NFDG fund
“I believe the terms are that overall, And this is matter will buy 49% of the fund, but each individual LP can put in to sell as much as little as they like, and then it just aggregates.”
Lemkin: ChatGPT mobile downloads rival TikTok, Meta, and X combined
“It was ChatGPT over the last 28 days, 29.5 million downloads. ChatGPT, 29.5 million. Just mobile. That's just its mobile app. TikTok, Facebook, Instagram and X, thirty two million. So ChatGPT mobile downloads just about equal to all the social media guys combi…”
O'Driscoll: Meta will not release a closed-source AI model this year
“Other than that, I see no reason to change the bet they're currently on, which has been the open source bet. So no, in the absence of DC intervention is my call.”
Lemkin: Meta will release a closed-source AI model to stay competitive
“And if releasing a fully closed source model brings, makes them more competitive, I think they will. I think it's more than 35%.”
Green: ByteDance matches Meta in earnings while growing faster
“This is the same size business in terms of earnings grows faster.”
Stebbings: Meta's productization of Llama AI models has been very poor
“I would say that Facebook is the same like Lama and the productization around Lama has been bluntly very, very poor at the moment.”
Pishevar sold all Facebook shares to bet everything on Uber secondary stock
“He allowed me to buy secondary shares from another early person, so I sold all my Facebook shares that had gone public at like, 53 bucks, 58 bucks a share, and I put it all I bet it all, everything I had, I put it all into Uber.”
Stebbings: Meta open-sources Llama because its true value is proprietary data
“Why does Facebook open source Lama? Because the values in the data that they have. A hundred percent.”
AJ Tennant: Sales skills are entirely learnable, not innate personality traits
“I fundamentally believe they can be learned. You know, I think a lot of people would say it's innate, you know, you, you're born with it, it's that your personality, someone that's outgoing, but my philosophy is that pretty much humans can learn anything if th…”
Facebook's intense feedback culture was a great school for employee calibration
“No, I think it's actually was a great school because what it does is it really pushes you to calibrate and think about, okay, how do you what type of feedback do you lean into and which one you don't?”
Carter: Spending Under $10,000 Monthly on Facebook Ads Is Inefficient
“Like they're spending 5000 dollars a month, 10,000 dollars a month on Facebook. That's just not enough to get an efficient outcome.”
Hudack: 99% of Facebook users opening the "dive bar" did so by accident
“I think something like 75% of Facebook users opened the dive bar, and so, There was an argument to be made that it was a great surface to ship into. The thing is that like, 99% of those people opened it by accident.”
Sean Rad: Facebook retains users by hacking desires to sell ads
“Facebook and social media is really good at retaining users and almost against your free will and hacking your desires and keeping you there. And they do that because they make money through advertising. And the more time they have with you, the more ads they …”
Uber manually onboarded its first million drivers without major digital ad spend
“For probably the first million drivers that we onboarded, a lot of our processes were manual, right? So we weren't doing a lot of like paid spend on Facebook. We were doing a little bit on Craigslist. We weren't doing a ton on Google, but it was really the ope…”
Nejatian: Mark Zuckerberg and Meta are incredibly underappreciated
“Meta and Mark are both underappreciated. Like, incredibly underappreciated.”
Nejatian: Hiring leaders from Meta works out exceptionally well
“I have found that hiring people from Meta Generally has worked out very well for most people because just as a training program is just exceptionally good.”
Nejatian: Critics are realizing they were wrong to mock Meta's AR/VR bet
“The incredible bet they're taking on AR VR which I think people mocked and are starting to realize they were wrong about mocking.”
Revolut belongs in the top 0.01% alongside SpaceX and Meta
“I think what a lot of people forget is that Revolut is like that company that's at the 0.01%. You know, it's like a SpaceX, Facebook Meta. I think all these companies are very similar.”
Mark Zuckerberg Is One of Tech's Best Meta-Strategists
“So one, Zuckerberg is one of the best meta strategists And I don't, I deliberately pun on meta, but meta strategists, like, kind of like, what is the game we're playing, you know, of any technology leader on the planet? Like, I learned from him on this, he's s…”
Schroepfer: Meta's 2013 thesis predicted computing moving to AR, VR, AI
“Our analysis was, no, it's gonna both be more integrated into my real world, you know, smart glasses and immersive in VR, and it's gonna be smarter. It's gonna be AI.”
Levie: Zuckerberg is one of the best entrepreneurs of our time
“I think my read on this is you have you know, one of the best entrepreneurs of our time that has basically all of the right underlying resources for AI. So lots of compute, incredible engineers, you know, billions of users, i.e. Lots of data.”
Stebbings: Mark Zuckerberg is underrated; I aggressively buy Meta stock
“I think that Zuck is probably consistently the most underrated CEO. I'm like the biggest buyer of Meta stock that there could be.”
Hulme: Mark Zuckerberg will own 14% of world's H100s by year-end
“He'll have 350,000 H-one hundreds by the end of this year. That is 14% of the world's H-one hundreds, and he's going to open source the result.”
Narayanan Almost Got Fired at Facebook for Presenting Uncomfortable Data
“And it ended up being that the senior leadership that did not like what I was saying and I almost got fired for it. And, but that's when I think people like Harvey and Alex at Facebook actually backed me up.”
Instagram Acquisition Forced Facebook to Switch Metrics From MAU to DAU
“When Instagram came along to Facebook, we still had the MEU as our goal. And so when we had the MEU as a goal, I mean basically Kevin's system was like, what? We are now in the mobile world. People use the phones all the time. We should be doing we do DAUs. We…”
Tomaino: Big tech engineers enter crypto in bull markets, leave in bear
“They always come during bull markets and then leave during bear markets.”
PMs From Facebook and Google Often Lack Strong Product Intuition
“I've oftentimes you have PMs from, you know, the Facebooks and Googles of the world that are actually just good at testing. And moving metrics, but their intuition oftentimes isn't actually locked into customer research and actual customers.”
Eight Sleep reduced Facebook and Google acquisition costs by 75%
“Facebook or Google CAC now is probably, I think it's like, 75% lower than what it used to be two years ago.”
Auren Hoffman: Employee Retention Rates Do Not Reflect Company Performance
“Just because everyone's leaving, like in Facebook's case, where so many of the first 25 people left early doesn't mean that's a bad company. It turned out to be an amazing company. Just because everyone's staying doesn't mean it's a good company.”
Lanng: Meta's open-source model matched ChatGPT-3.5 locally within 9 months
“But nine months later, I was running on my laptop a model that was as powerful as ChatGPT three and a half that was released as open source by Facebook.”
Dash: Facebook is an execution machine, not a copy machine
“No. I think they're an execution machine.”
Dash: Threads rigged the platform in favor of established Instagram creators
“And I think the challenge here with threads was, on day one, if you're completely porting over the graph, it's very hard for someone to suddenly say, hey, now I'm gonna, I wanna start from zero and become really large on threads. Because already the game is ri…”
Suchit Dash: Connecting users around content vectors holds untapped potential
“And I think people, and actually oftentimes products, take sometimes lazy approaches to say, well, we need people to connect, so let's just make sure to put in a You know, a Facebook connection in here, or an address book connection in here, and actually more …”