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 124 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
LeCun: All of OpenAI and the AI world runs on PyTorch
“ChatGPT was developed on PyTorch. Okay. All OpenAI runs on PyTorch. The entire world, in fact, runs on PyTorch, except Google, because they have their own thing, right?”
LeCun: All Google Transformer Paper Authors Have Left for Startups
“So you look at the original paper from Google about BERT or Transformers, right? The thing that revolutionized NLP, all of them have left. Okay. They're all in startups.”
Duggal: Larry Page reviewed every Google candidate packet, including SAT scores
“Google was famous for the fact that Larry literally looked at every hiring packet, including resume. I, what, 12 years after graduating college had to provide my SAT scores to Google. I had to go find them. I had to provide my college transcript, which everyon…”
Duggal: Google's CS degree rule barred Kevin Systrom from PM roles
“Because of that computer science requirement to be a product manager, people like Kevin Systrom weren't allowed to be product managers at Google, right?”
Pittman: iHeartMedia radio reaches 90% of Americans monthly
“Our radio group alone reaches 90% of Americans every month. Only two companies come close to that, and they don't surpass it. It's Facebook and Google. Everybody else, the biggest TV network in the US reaches about 35% of Americans. Biggest cable network reach…”
Lieb: I was asked to leave my Google team twice
“I didn't get fired from Google. I did get asked to leave the team twice.”
Winters: Pinterest signed up over half the US via Google preview walls
“When people came in from Google, we would let you see a preview of the content, and then we would ask you to sign up to see more of it... As we did that, that was really successful. And we ended up signing up, you know, like over half of the U S up to Pinteres…”
Stebbings: 43% of venture dollars go directly to Facebook, Google, and Amazon
“I think it's 43%, according to Clearbank. I might have to check that, but I believe 43% of venture dollars goes directly back to Facebook, Google, and Amazon, as a fun fact.”
Wang: Google research shows exponential dataset scaling yields continuous model gains
“Google sort of published a bunch of these papers, which showed that each time you can X the size of your data set, you're going to keep getting bang out of your buck in terms of the Performance of your model. So it's not just that it is true that like for each…”
Google paid $1.1 billion for pre-revenue Waze and succeeded
“For example, if you look at a ways where we spent 1.1 billion dollars to buy them, that's been a tremendously successful deal for us. But at the time they had almost no revenue.”
Waze signed an LOI with another acquirer before Google bought them
“Waze had actually signed a letter of intent with another acquirer when we got involved. One of our main competitors was a Waze stockholder and wasn't too keen on us buying them.”
YouTube faced a $1 billion copyright lawsuit when Google acquired it
“YouTube was facing a billion dollar copyright lawsuit. I mean, it had growing infrastructure costs, and it had very little revenue, all three of which Google was able to help out with quite a bit.”
Midha: Kleiner Perkins' highest IRR investment was Juniper Networks, not Google
“When I was actually studying Kleiner Perkins' returns history, when I was at the firm in the year, the nineties and the 2000, I think one of the highest IR investments that Kleiner ended up ever making was not Google. It was not Amazon. It was Juniper networks…”
Elad Gil: Google Spent Hundreds of Millions Buying Firefox Homepage and Toolbars
“Google was spending hundreds of millions of dollars on To acquire customers via things like toolbar distribution. They bought the homepage of Firefox for many years. They basically did whatever they could to push distribution as hard as possible.”
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.”
O'Driscoll: Kleiner and Sequoia paid nearly $100M post-money for pre-revenue Google
“The single most successful venture investment in the last probably 20 years was done in 1999, and it was done at an absurd valuation. That's Google. Kleiner and Sequoia paid almost a hundred posts for a pre-revenue company There was doing a search engine in 19…”
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 …”
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…”
Angelopoulos: Google's Gemma sits on the performance-versus-cost Pareto curve
“Gemma, by the way, is pretty good in terms of efficiency. If you look at arena, you'll see the, on the Pareto curves of like performance versus cost. Gemma's on there.”
O'Driscoll: Only Nvidia and Google outperformed the S&P in last 18 months
“Over the last 18 months since 2025, only two of the Mag seven have outperformed the S&P. It's NVIDIA and Google”
Google will launch a coding agent to compete with Codex
“Google doesn't yet have a product in this category, but I'm sure they're going to come after that.”
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.”
Alex Schultz: Meta spends less on marketing than its tech peers
“Apart from Apple, whose marketing is paid for by the carriers, we have the lowest percentage of operating income that we spend on the stuff, the media that we disclose in the XK”
Casado: Google Subsidizes Language, Code, And Video AI Models, But Not Speech
“Google subsidizes language and code and video, but not speech, right?”
Lemkin: Google stakeholders will do almost anything to keep CEO Sundar Pichai
“So I suspect it's similar at Google, right? I suspect none of the large stakeholders want him to go no matter what, and they will do almost anything to keep him.”
Gupta: Kraken, Spotify, and Google achieved initial growth without marketing
“The first phase of growth was purely product-led, where marketing did not exist? And this is true for Kraken, true for Spotify, true for Google, because the first phase of growth was either reality, network effects, or just a brilliant product in a category an…”
Ramaswamy: Google Succeeded Early Because AOL and Yahoo Neglected Search
“Yahoo and AOL. Early on. Those were the entry points. AOL didn't know how to do a search. Yahoo didn't think search was important.”
Ross: Google announced first zero-day exploit found by an LLM
“Google just announced recently the first zero day exploit found by an LLM that was previously unknown.”
Arison: Ads represent 15% of Grindr revenue without app store fees
“Ads are about 15% of our revenue in, in total, but obviously on a margin basis, they're even higher percentage, because it's a very profitable part of the business, and we don't have to pay the Apple and Google taxes on that revenue.”
Mollick: Google used his wife's prompt as a fine-tuning benchmark
“Google used her prompt as the gold standard to measure their fine tuned models against.”
Shazeer: B2C Products Proved Far Larger Than B2B Enterprise Search at Google
“I remember when I joined Google, there were, like, a lot of people working on this enterprise search appliance, which, you know, it was okay. Like, I think maybe somebody had this conventional wisdom that, like B to B is the only way to make money. But, like, …”
Eric Schmidt used Apple board seat to prepare Google for mobile
“Now, back then, and this is kind of incredible, Google CEO Eric Schmidt sat on Apple's board of directors, which is a crazy thing to think these days, and it was basically like having a crystal ball. You know, Eric knew that over multiple generations, you know…”
Bill Campbell coached Steve Jobs and Google founders simultaneously
“They call them the coach, the trillion dollar coach, because he would, as you know, coach Steve Jobs, who no one in the world thought was coachable, and then he would coach Larry Page and Eric Schmidt and Sergey at Google on two of the most important companies…”
Google's strict code ownership culture hinders cross-team growth efforts
“A good friend of mine was working at growth at Google, and they really have a totally different culture about this at Google, where it's really hard to go and change anyone else's code if you're not in that department or you're not in that team.”
Friedberg: Applied Semantics founder Gil Elbaz was top-five Google IPO shareholder
“Applied Semantics, which was acquired by Google in 2003 or 2002, which became AdSense. The founders got equity in Google, and I think still may own a lot of it. And the founder ended up being one of the top five holders of Google stock when Google's IPO happen…”
Friedberg: Google created over 95% of its value post-IPO
“Google has accrued 95% of its value since it went public more than that.”
Early Google shared board decks company-wide with zero leaks for four years
“Google taught me that when they would share confidential information, they would share the board deck with the entire company on Fridays. Literally, they'd gather the entire company and show them the same slides they had shown the board on Wednesday. And that …”
CapitalG operates independently despite Alphabet being its sole limited partner
“We're an independent growth fund backed by Google and Alphabet. So the GPs, we have investment decisions. We operate entirely separate from Google and Alphabet, but Alphabet is our single LP.”
Gil: Google gave Android independent hiring autonomy post-acquisition
“Android actually had its own hiring practices, which at the time was Anthema at Google, and it was set up so that they could really run their team very independently, hire independently, make decisions independently, and that was a very explicit choice so that…”
Vassallo: Women played crucial roles in building Google's early business model
“You know, she talks about company like Google, you know, we only ever think of Larry and Sergey, but there were incredibly important and influential women who helped lead that company in the early days and helped build out the business model that made Google w…”
Google and Amazon drone efforts focus primarily on internal package delivery
“Thus far, Google and Amazon have mostly been focused on how do we deliver packages with drones?”
Buchheit: Gmail launched with a core team of only twelve people
“Even by the time we launched core Gmail team was probably only about a dozen people.”
Wolfe: Planet operates history's largest Earth-imaging satellite constellation
“They would end up buying Google satellite imagery, which was something Google acquired called Skybox, and they now have the largest constellation of Earth imaging satellites in history up in space.”
McCloskey hired StyleSeat's first engineer via equity-only Craigslist ad
“I found my first engineer by posting an ad on Craigslist and saying, I'm stealth company seeks engineer to build first version of product for equity, only no money. And believe it or not, that actually resulted in a fantastic engineer from Google who had made …”
Andy Rubin founded Android as an EIR at Redpoint's offices
“Famously, we had Andy Rubin as a IR here, and he actually founded Android out of our Menlo Park offices, and eventually helped them sell that into Google.”
Turck: Google will deploy image processing AI at massive scale
“If you do something like image processing, which is something that deep learning is particularly great at you know, you need to think of a business model and a way of penetrating the markets that somehow does, doesn't put you in a direct collision course with …”