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
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.”
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.”
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…”
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…”
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.”
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…”
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.”
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…”
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.”
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.”
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…”
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.”
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.”