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 78 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
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, …”
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: 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 …”
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 …”
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 …”
Google achieved profitability within two or three years of its founding
“Google was actually profitable, I think, by year two or year three.”
Calacanis: Google almost bailed out Tesla when it faced bankruptcy
“Google almost bailed out Tesla at the last hour when it almost went bankrupt.”
Lemkin: Replit updated platform to dynamically rotate LLM providers automatically
“Now with Replit, you don't pick your model anymore. It's all dynamic. It's all gone. You don't pick a lot. You don't pick high reasoning. You don't pick short reasoning. You don't pick anything. It just, and it rotates Google and others”
Rory O'Driscoll: Google is spending $90 billion on CapEx this year
“Google is spending ninety billion this year on CapEx.”
Pishevar: Uber's Series D valuation was negotiated up to $17B from $10B
“So that Series D, like a year after the Series C, which Google and TPG did, that was at three billion. This was at seventeen billion, and we started off at 10. So, Emil was able to negotiate from, like, 10, eleven billion valuation to 17, because there was so …”
Google allocated product roadmaps 70/20/10 across incremental, growth, and moonshots
“They used to have this model, they called it the 70, 20, 10 model. And it's actually a pretty fascinating way of thinking about just a product roadmap and the distribution within it. So, 70% of the product Teams were focused on what are things that are known v…”
Lauren Schwartz: Google used double-crediting sales commissions for parental leave
“When I was at Google, there was a double conch policy. So everyone wins and everyone's incentivized around the same thing.”
Jain: Android Grew From Under 1M Total Users To 1M Daily New Users
“We had less than a million total users on Android at the time. It was a phenomenal journey for me to kind of see Android grow from less than a million total users to about a million new users a day.”
Marissa Mayer invested as an angel in Adrian Aoun's startup Wavy
“So one of the angel investors in Wavy was Marissa Mayer. Now, Wavy was a search company, and Marissa at the time ran search at Google.”
Tunguz: Google AdSense was neck-and-neck with Yahoo in early 2005
“Early 2005, we were neck and neck with Yahoo, which was the big competitor trying to run ads on other people's websites.”
Tunguz: Google required product manager candidates to score 3.5 out of 4.0
“I remember at Google, when we were interviewing product managers, we would take these packets and we would have all these different, we were doing structured interviews at the time. It was on a four point O scale. You need to score above a 3.5.”
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.”
Google acquired Invite Media for $81 million
“Before Flatiron, Zatco founded Invite Media, acquired by Google for eighty-one million dollars.”
Twitter Acquired Crashlytics for Nine Figures Before Selling to Google
“Prior to Digits, Wayne and Jeff co-founded Crashlytics, which was acquired by Twitter for a nine-figure sum in January, and then acquired from Twitter by Google in 2017.”
Gmail grew to 200 million users during Todd Jackson's tenure
“And we grew Gmail to over two hundred million users during my time there.”