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 Will Launch a Crypto Coin and Become Bitcoin's Main Competitor
“Now, I will say also that on crypto, I think that there's a high probability that the company that will really succeed in crypto will be Facebook, and the reason is that for them to launch their own coin and for them to distribute that coin and allow developer…”
O'Driscoll: Meta and SpaceX rented compute after failing to build AI assets
“Two companies Have done the same thing, which is buy a load of compute to build proprietary assets, fail to build those assets, and then bring that, and then decide instead to sell that compute to others, and both of them have had a very positive market recept…”
Alex Schultz admits Meta's Llama 4 missed the leading edge
“It's pretty clear Llama was not, like, Llama four wasn't leading edge where Llama three was. So, you know, our big release this year was not a slam dunk, but our big release last year was, and I'm pretty confident our next big release will be again.”
Mostaque: Only 5 or 6 foundation model companies will exist in 3-5 years
“I think that there's only going to be five or six foundation model companies in the world in three years, five years. I think it's going to be us, Nvidia, Google, Microsoft OpenAI, and Meta and Apple probably are the ones that train these models.”
Stebbings: Threads will stall at 5M DAU while Twitter grows
“I would say threads does not work. Maybe it teases along at five million DAU with hardcore small numbers. And I would say Twitter has modest growth to Two 75, 300 with election spikes.”
Foroughi: AppLovin will become the third-largest digital ad marketplace
“Like if you just to size it, that's Facebook, Google one, two, or in whichever order I'd have to check, but that's the third biggest digital marketplace for advertising in terms of scale that will exist.”
Romanow: 40% of venture capital goes directly to Google and Facebook ads
“40% of venture capital dollars that are raised today end up going straight to Google and Facebook ads.”
Accel's returns were not top-tier prior to its Facebook investment
“Excel's returns prior to the Facebook fund weren't the best in the industry, and so some analyst types in the LP community were like, well, you know, should I stay in Excel or not?”
Lemkin: Meta invested $900M in CRED to hire WhatsApp head Kunal Shah
“Zuck also just paid essentially nine hundred million dollars to hire a head for WhatsApp, right? By investing nine hundred million dollars into cred, right?”
O'Driscoll: Zero chance VCs return capital from blocked Manus deal
“The investors who've gotten their capital out, the chances of them having to or being willing to return that capital are zero.”
Lemkin: Google Search, Facebook, and Instagram are stronger than ever
“Fast forward today. These are record growth businesses now, right? Google search. We started the show talking about AI overviews and other things. Google search is a better business than it has ever been as is Facebook and Instagram.”
O'Driscoll: Meta lost $70B on VR after making $100B+ on Instagram
“Yeah, I mean, if you look at the, if you look at the big play scoreboard for that, it's like, bet a billion on Instagram, win a hundred billion plus, maybe four hundred billion. Bet seventy billion on Meta and VRAR, lose it all.”
O'Driscoll: Meta will lay off employees to fund Nvidia hardware purchases
“And that depreciation is going to start hitting, and they're going to be firing people because they need to give it to Jensen.”
O'Driscoll: Meta's free cash flow is near zero after accounting for CapEx
“Their operating margins are still 40%. The free cash flow, when you honestly account for the capex, is almost zero, right?”
Jerry Murdock: Meta rejected Nvidia GPUs to bet on custom ASIC chips
“I mean, look, you know, a lot of people like to criticize meta here and there about being behind the game, but they had the balls to say no to Jensen. Sorry, Jensen. We don't need you. So why did he do that? Because he's betting on a six chips. No question abo…”
Stebbings: Meta acquired Manus for $2.5B at 25x ARR
“The price was two and a half billion dollars. It was a 25 X current ARR. They were at a hundred million of ARR, doing a hundred and twenty-five million run rate, including consumption.”
O'Driscoll: Meta and Google control 70% of all global advertising
“Facebook and Google have 70% of not just all digital advertising, but all advertising.”
Diao: Static Meta ads convert software downloads better than video ads
“Like one example I'll share with you actually is a lot of people really want to use video content for ads these days, but it turns out that for paid social platforms like Meta, static ads still actually do a better job of converting people into downloads or pe…”
Alex Schultz: Meta shifted from a falling brand to a rising brand
“We've actually moved up tremendously in terms of brand sentiment. You think where we were five years ago, and think where we are today, people don't look at this stuff, obviously I do, and we were literally a falling brand, and now we're a rising brand.”
O'Driscoll: Sequoia missed Facebook because Zuckerberg feared Mike Moritz replacing him
“Part of the reason that Sequoia aren't in Facebook is residual frustration with Mike Moritz for prior, you know, prior situations where they had in fact made a CEO change”
O'Driscoll: Meta took 49% non-voting Scale AI stake for $14 billion
“Facebook slash Meta announced a fascinating transaction whereby they, that definitely is a bit of a head scratcher, whereby they invested fourteen billion into scale AI, took 49% non-voting control, allowed the other investors to literally take that money back…”
Uber, Airbnb, Meta, and Revolut didn't use event tracking early on
“I actually think that if you look at Uber, Airbnb, Meta, they don't use events, or at least not in the early days. We didn't use events at Revolut.”
Dash: TikTok's 2019 Ad Spend on Facebook and Snap Cannibalized Their Users
“The ad targeting at this point in 2019 had gotten so granular You could actually get to, like, a city level, a user demographic level, and TikTok leveraged all of that. And Facebook and Snap all benefited because they saw tons of money coming in in the form of…”
Jordan: TikTok Buys Users at Scale Unlike Early Google or Facebook
“That's not a categorical rule, because TikTok buys users at monstrous scale. But, you know, Google really didn't buy many users, Facebook didn't buy many users, you know, tick, tick, tick, tick.”
Sahgal: Zynga spammed users with notifications until Facebook altered platform rules
“The worst habit I would say is we burnt out so many fucking channels. And what I mean by that is Facebook in the early days opened up notifications for the first time for developers. So you could, as a developer, just send literally hundreds of push notificati…”
Gary Vee says post-iOS 14 ad pullbacks created organic arbitrage on Facebook
“I changed my mind on how big of a platform Facebook is. One of the coolest things for me right now is that I'm back into being obsessed with content on Facebook because the map of supply and demand of attention on it has flipped aggressively with iOS, 14 updat…”
Greylock's $500M Facebook valuation check faced intense internal and external criticism
“Facebook was very controversial, both internally and externally at Greylock when it was announced, because we invested at a five hundred million plus pre and wrote one of the biggest Checks that Gerlach had ever written at that time, and that was considered in…”
Facebook cutting Pinterest off its newsfeed shifted growth from exponential to linear
“I remember early on at Pinterest, there was a time when Facebook acquired Instagram. We were both growing exponentially. Pinterest and Instagram were growing exponentially at the time. They acquired Instagram, and then they shut Pinterest off the newsfeed. So …”
Every digital ad platform update makes user acquisition more expensive
“There's never been a single update in digital advertising that has made buying cheaper. The advertising algorithms on these major platforms like Facebook and Google are getting hyper-efficient, and every update just makes them more expensive.”
Digital advertising CPMs compound at approximately 40% per year
“The second force at play is essentially the market-wide, the CPMs are just compounding. The number we've seen is about 40% a year, and that's just because of a number of factors around the algorithms of new competitors coming into the market.”
Nationwide Insurance Employs More Software Engineers Than Facebook
“Companies like nationwide insurance, They have more engineers than Facebook has”
Loftus: Big Tech Buyer Softening Has Kept Startup Acquisition Prices Moderate
“So I haven't seen a ton of price increase, but I do think that's because in my view, even though you've seen new entrants into the market, There's been softening at the other end of the market from the Google, Facebook, Apple, Amazon end.”
Ries: Facebook bought a VPN app to track competitor usage
“Facebook recently famously was revealed that they bought a VPN company so that they could watch The traffic to emerging apps and figure out who to copy.”
Schuler: Public multiple expansion after high private valuations is extremely rare
“In the old days, the momentum of the growth period of a stock happened in the public markets. They're happening in the private market. So to expect someone to have a huge multiple on the private phase and then go into the public markets and have a huge multipl…”
Chad Byers Predicts Facebook or Amazon Will Hit $1 Trillion First
“So I think it's Facebook. You know, my second answer, although this is kind of cheating, would probably be Amazon. So Facebook or Amazon, I don't think it's Apple. I don't think it's Google. I think it's going to be one of those two.”
Meta plans to launch a $200-a-month AI product called Hatch
“Meta's trying to launch Hatch for 200 dollars a month.”
Rajaram: Zuckerberg refused to anonymize Facebook in Japan and won
“I remember when Facebook had to go into Japan, Japanese cultural norms were that all the Japanese social networks back then were incognito. You couldn't, for some reason, maybe saving face or something. You could not share your real name or your photo. So ever…”
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.”
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 …”
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.”
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.”
Green: ByteDance matches Meta in earnings while growing faster
“This is the same size business in terms of earnings grows faster.”
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…”
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.”
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…”