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 467 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 15 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: Google's $23B buyout offer for Wiz was not overpriced
“So I don't think, ironically, it's, I don't think it was overpriced. I do think it might have been a good deal for the investors because you avoid so much dilution and risk.”
Lemkin: Wiz must IPO within 18 months after rejecting Google bid
“When the CEOs in, in, in, in the letter to the team says, we're going to go public instead, you got to do it in the next 18 months or so.”
Adams: Paid AI add-ons will commoditize into standard tiers
“I think in the short term, it might allow them to make more money. So, like, I think Microsoft and Google both have add-on packages that you pay for to get access to their AI stuff. I think that's a very short-term thing where it'll just become commoditized, p…”
Vasavada: Premature Unicorn Status Attracts Corporate Recruits Over Builders
“The type of people you recruit when they see that you're a billion dollar business aren't focused on, we have a value advice called burn the boats. They're not focused on burning the boats. They're focused on a stable career and growing within an organization …”
Startups Cannot Finance Pre-Revenue Billion-Dollar AI Compute Runs
“Look, if you're saying what really matters is, like, the driving function here will be the billion dollar compute run to make this model, it'll be very difficult for startups to do that, right? I mean, even in this more modern global venture capital where star…”
ChatGPT's Release Forced Google Onto Red Alert After Delaying Transformers
“Google Brain invents the kind of transformer and publishes it, and it's kind of bouncing around as kind of a research project, and it takes OpenAI developing it, scaling it, and releasing it as ChatGPT for Google to go on red alert and go, oh my god, we should…”
Srinivas: Competing with OpenAI on base models is a terrible arena
“If there are companies that are working on Foundation model competitor to OpenAI. It is definitely like one of the worst arenas to be part of. Almost like I think there are five men standing today sort of thing. Google, and Anthropic, Meta Mistral, and you can…”
Zhang: OpenAI will aggressively compete with Google in web search
“They just hired the search leader from Google. Like, they are gonna go after that space, which is, like, the most lucrative space, and also a space that, you know, should be innovated on.”
Users will replace Google search with ChatGPT for software product discovery
“तो यही भविश्य है लोग खोज के लिए Google पर नहीं जा रहे हैं बलकि चैट GPT पर जा रहे हैं इसलिए हमें वह करने की जरूरत है”
Mathrubootham: Generative engine optimization will replace SEO for software marketing
“Now we have generative engine optimization, right? Like if a lot of people are going to go to ChatGPT and ask about, hey which software should I use? How do we make sure that the AI models are trained to tell customers that Freshworks is a great product? So, s…”
Ryan: AI disruption could displace Google as top search engine within 5 years
“We don't know five years from now if Google's gonna be the number one search engine. There's a chance that's a disruptive technology that allows it to change.”
Seibert: Google delayed Gemini to Q1 due to poor performance
“They've just punted Gemini into Q one, which tells me it's not doing very well.”
LeCun: Users will talk to AI assistants instead of searching Google or Wikipedia
“So people are probably going to use this almost exclusively in the future for their interaction with the digital world. You're not gonna go to Google or Wikipedia. You're just gonna talk to your assistant.”
Seibert: Google is the most vulnerable tech incumbent to AI disruption
“I think Google's by far the most vulnerable.”
Traynor: AI intent-routing will give Apple Google-like dominance over app distribution
“If they become this really nice intermediary layer where you're You don't even pick the app you launch because that is a form of user selection we don't even want in our lives. You just say the thing you want to happen and leave it to Apple to work out what sh…”
Traynor: Google squandered its early AI leadership despite inventing Transformers
“Feels like Google, who kind of owned all this at the start, bear in mind with the original paper on Transformers, feels like they have, like, rescued defeat from the jaw of victories, in a sense.”
Traynor: Google could offer free Android phones funded by intent-layer bidding
“I could totally imagine Google doing a thing where they give away effectively free Android phones, powered by the fact That they now control the intent layer, which is when you say, okay, Google, call me a taxi. Google goes and they get you whatever taxi, whic…”
Meyer: PM success at hypergrowth companies like 2000s Google is false attribution
“If you were at Google during the aughts, or, you know, you think it was because of you. It wasn't because of you know? So how they accomplish extraordinary things At companies that aren't ramping.”
Kleinerman: Data-rich incumbents will win the majority of AI value
“I would bias towards incumbents that have the data. So I would say, think of all the data that a company like Google has. Or that's public data, or not semi-public, but a lot of user data, or think all the private enterprise data that a company like Snowflake …”
Richard Socher: Bing and Google Copied YouChat Months After Its Launch
“We've also seen Bing and Google copy what we have launched late last year with you chat. They've copied us in the sense that we've launched it earlier and then they launched something very similar three to four months after.”
Richard Socher: Google's Ad Revenue Creates an Innovator's Dilemma Against AI
“That kind of big change will be hard for Google too, because they make five hundred million dollars a day with privacy invading advertisements on that page. And so you don't just willy nilly change most of that page and you get rid of the five, six ads that ar…”
Socher: Google Earns $500 Million Daily From Main Search Ads
“They make five hundred million dollars a day with privacy invading advertisements on that page.”
Incentives and Legal Fears Kept Google and Meta From Leading LLMs
“Nobody could predict that LLMs would be so useful and powerful before you train one at this scale. And who in the Google org chart had the incentive to invest five hundred million dollars and just to see this without any business benefit for the company? If yo…”
Mostaque: AI-synthesized search results will destroy digital media ad revenue
“I think he is right to be worried. Like, again, you look at Google's announcements yesterday, they were talking about this day after Palm Two, You suddenly look at the new Google page where they've got the language model, and it's just text, and where are the …”
LeCun: Meta and Google lagged OpenAI due to risk, not tech
“It's just that they didn't have the pressure to produce new products, completely new products that had a lot of risk attached to them.”
LeCun: AI assistants will replace Google and Wikipedia for digital navigation
“People are probably going to use this almost exclusively in the future for their interaction with the digital world. You know, you're not going to go to Google or Wikipedia. You're just going to talk to your assistant.”
Delangue: Open Source Accelerated AI Progress by 30 to 50 Years
“Without open science, without open source, without Google sharing their attention is all you need paper, sharing their birth paper the latent diffusion paper. Maybe we would be 3040, 50 years away from where we are today.”
Hankes: Disrupting Google Search Is a Trillion-Dollar Opportunity
“We're not talking about building the next unicorn or decacorn. We're talking about disrupting search or Google. I mean, that's a trillion dollar opportunity.”
Ackman: Missing Out on Big Winners Can Be Worse Than Losing Capital
“Missing Google can be a, you know, as important a mistake, or maybe even a bigger mistake, if you will, than missing You know, the next, like some other making a bad investment that doesn't work, I guess is my fault.”
Full Marketing Channel Attribution and Consistent CAC Metrics Are Impossible
“I agree. I think it's bullshit. I think it's a really, as, like, a, the expectation that it's going to be a consistent metric across channels, and having, like, a full view of everything that could be included in that is, is impossible. Like, it's not, Unlikel…”
Coates: Microsoft's AI Bing launch is an asymmetric attack on Google
“Search is like a non-part of their business, but search is everything to Google. Like if search ads stop working, Google doesn't, is not a thing anymore. And so they are swinging for the fences with a completely novel approach, which might not work, but if it …”
Coates: Shopify's key strategic weakness is lacking top-of-funnel control
“I think one of Shopify's challenges today is that we fundamentally do not control the top of the funnel, right? Like the top of the funnel for shopping on is something else, right? It's a social media site. It's a news site. It's an ad on Google. It's somewher…”
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.”
Stebbings: 45% of Millennials Use TikTok Over Google for Search
“I saw an unbelievable stat, which is like, 45% of millennials use TikTok instead of Google as their primary search engine.”
Stebbings: 45% of millennials use TikTok over Google for search
“I saw an unbelievable stat, which is like, 45% of millennials use TikTok instead of Google as their primary search engine.”
Emil Michael: Uber grew faster than any company in history, including Google
“We grew faster than any company in the world, both geographically And revenue wise, including Google.”
Emil Michael: Uber's acquisition of Otto destroyed its relationship with Google
“I'd say that the deal that Was under my watch. I didn't like it at the time, but I, you know, it got done was Uber acquiring auto, which was the autonomous car division that that gets started out of Google guys. It was, and I didn't like it for different reaso…”
Liaw: Regulatory fear has chilled M&A for Meta, Google, Amazon, and Apple
“I think that probably the bigger challenge is for a lot of the biggest mega cap tech companies, fear of regulation and regulatory authority intervention is probably causing a lot of them to say, this is probably not worth our time, right? So it's kind of a fun…”
Rachitsky: Big Tech PMs often fail when transitioning to startups
“And similarly, if your PM's been a PM at like Google or Facebook, they're just like really good at PMing at Google and Facebook. There's like a very specific way of building product at these big companies, and you shouldn't assume that they're going to be good…”
Gurley: Failing to pursue Google at 25 employees was my biggest mistake
“My biggest mistake was clear because I brought Larry and Sergey in to present when there were 25 employees, and we didn't lay chase.”
Klarna scrapped Google's 20 percent creative time policy for producing nothing
“Google was pushing for a while, 20% of creative time. We implemented 20% of creative time. Nothing happened. We took it away.”
Sonos is suing Google while actively maintaining product partnerships with them
“We're suing Google right now. But at the same time, we still work with them on YouTube Music Service, on Google Assistant, and some of these other areas”
Google CFO Patrick Pichette regularly debated divesting YouTube in early meetings
“When I joined YouTube, every press article was, what a big mistake, and every meeting I had with, Patrick was the CFO at the time, and he had just joined Google, every meeting we had was, should we keep this property, or should we get rid of it?”
Digital ad duopoly will persist indefinitely without data monopoly intervention
“I think there needs to be something to be done about the data monopolies that underlie the duopoly. And unless something is done to kind of deconstruct that data monopoly, then this will persist ad infinitum because of the network effects involved.”
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.”
Steve Ballmer's executive presence won Microsoft the early cloud battle against Google
“But, you know, in the early days of that battle, when they had way better product, Google had a way better product, Balmer would, and Balmer's still CEO at the time, would show up in companies and say, I'm here. Is Larry Page going to come visit? And of course…”
Shah: Platform maturity made consumer startups capital inefficient post-2016
“And so my intuition was a platform maturity of the iPhones, of the app store on iOS, of Facebook, of Google, of Snap and Pinterest kind of hit a ceiling where I felt the cost of acquiring these customers in the LTV, according to it, would make the businesses v…”