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
Brian Halligan: Direct listings are risky unless you're Google or Facebook
“I think the direct listing is like, you're a little bit scared. You're not going to get those long loneliness. You're not going to properly market it to them. And it's seven percent to the bankers in the grand scheme of things. It's not that much. I think it's…”
Cognition learned of Windsurf's Google deal at the same time as the public
“We found out, honestly, on Friday, the same time everyone else did, that all of this was happening, and that this was the split, and that it was Google”
O'Driscoll: Google deal implicitly valued Windsurf's residual business at $400M
“If open AI was buying for three billion and Google buying everything for three billion and Google pleasingly is buying everything except the revenue on a hundred million bucks for 2.6 billion. Implicitly it's valuing the revenue and the hundred million and the…”
Flanagan: AI Overviews now appear in over 35% of Google searches
“That's on over, like, 35% of all searches today have some sort of AI overviews experience, and so that's rolling out much more rapidly.”
O'Driscoll: Sundar Pichai won't leave Google, but won't solve AI threat
“So my guess is by far the prior, the most likely outcome is not leave, just continue to manage what you've got reasonably well without ever solving the existential problem.”
O'Driscoll: Non-generational Series A investments can still generate meaningful returns
“The overextrapolation of the only three deals make money, so therefore everything else at series A is burning money is just, I mean, it's true in that you prefer to be in Google, but it's not the only way to make money.”
Hacker: Luis von Ahn initially resisted hiring product managers at Duolingo
“I was the one who pushed for hiring our first product manager. It was actually interesting because Luis at the time, he's like, oh, we don't need product managers. He's, he had seen some of them at Google. His previous company was acquired by Google. So he had…”
Socher: Google's AI struggles stem from ad-model innovator dilemma, not tech
“I think it's never been a question of technical strength for Google. It's just a question of classic innovator's dilemma. You make money by showing ads and lists or blue links. So it's hard to give people just a straightforward, useful answer.”
Stebbings: Google is one of the most unappreciated AI opportunities
“Well, this is why actually I think Google is one of the most, like unappreciated companies right now. When you look at the distribution endpoints that they have to consumers and what they can do with AI, they are by far one of the most exciting opportunities.”
Biilmann: Google has failed to productize generative AI compellingly
“If I look at Google's products, like I now have all these Genesis buttons all over and I never use them. They just haven't managed to productize it in a way that feels super compelling.”
Ramaswamy: Google Paid AOL Over 100% Revenue Share in Early Deal
“If I remember correctly, the, we paid AOL more money than we made. This was like a hundred plus percent ref share.”
Ross: Google spent 10x to 20x more on AI inference than training
“At Google, we always ended up spending 10 to 20 times as much on the inference as training back when I was there.”
Podjarny: Google is terrible at product development except for search
“Google is generally pretty terrible at product on many fronts, but the one product in which they actually do a pretty good job is the search product, and they have all the traffic.”
Podjarny: Google doesn't need to innovate to beat Perplexity, just copy it
“I don't think they have the product jobs, but I think they have the advantage of such, like, incredible distribution and access to the users that they don't actually need to invent what perplexity is doing. They can copy it.”
Kant: Poolside deliberately excluded Google, Microsoft, and Amazon from $500M round
“If look at our capital raise, our last five hundred million dollar round, you'll see that there's none of the big hyperscalers, Google, Microsoft, you know, Amazon were part of the round.”
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…”
Khan: Larry Page called the AOL revenue-share deal Google's most transformative
“Larry said that the most transformative thing Google did was the AOL deal. Because AOL, they gave them a 95% revenue share when AOL search box was powered by Google.”
Cahn: The $250B Cloud Infrastructure Market Equals the Entire SaaS Sector
“This cloud business today is a two hundred and fifty billion dollar business. So the cloud business today is the same size as the SaaS sector. That's the business that Azure, Google and AWS control is the same size as the entire SaaS sector.”
Hartz: Michael Moritz faked a phone call to avoid founders
“I always remember seeing Michael Moritz speak, give a talk about Google in the early 2000, and there were all these founders there, and he puts his phone up to his face and pretends to talk, and then, like, walks out of the building, you know, and so nobody wo…”
Stebbings: Big Tech cloud credits distort AI market valuations
“With the rise of corporate investing with Amazon investing with Google investing with Your largest cloud providers investing. They are no longer purely incentivized by the price of the deal. They're incentivized by the partnership, by the cloud credits. That's…”
Luan: Google's TPU team had under 500 people on a shoestring budget
“I think the TPU team when I was at Google was, like, sub-five hundred people and their budget was a shoestring budget, and yet somehow every generation they taped out quite good chips that were then used to train Gemini and Palm and are used by third parties n…”
US Tech Giants Have Legal Autonomy That Chinese Counterparts Lack
“Google does not work for the US government. Microsoft does not work for the US government. There is, there's ways they're accountable by law, but they have to go through a legal process for that kind of thing. And so, given that legal process doesn't exist wit…”
Srinivas: Click-based advertising is the best business model in 50 years
“Whatever we criticize Google for, the greatest business model, like, in the last 50 years is that click-based advertising. It's just insanely good business model. 80% margins.”
Levie: AI context windows grew 500x in 18 months
“The token context window was more or less, I think, 4000 tokens. So you kind of give it like a blog post to analyze just in the past, you know, week at Google IO Sundar announced a two million token window model or version of Gemini. So think about that. That'…”
Nikesh Arora Opposed Google's Acquisition of Android
“At Google, I was very stroppy with Eric when they bought Android. And I said, Eric, I used to work in the mobile industry. I thought he hired me for my experience. And we shouldn't be buying Android.”
Siroker: Google Wave, Buzz, and Glass were technology in search of problems
“Google's notorious for building products that are technology in search of problems. Google Wave, Google Buzz, Google Glass, like, all of these products were basically some smart engineer or technologist starting the sentence with, Wouldn't it be cool if, dot, …”
Tomaino: Big tech engineers enter crypto in bull markets, leave in bear
“They always come during bull markets and then leave during bear markets.”
Söderström: Spotify will not build general frontier AI models to compete
“So that's why, you know, there's no point in trying to compete with them for us because we don't even have the same goal. So we're trying to build exactly the things that we don't think they will build. And we would buy the things that they will build or someo…”
PMs From Facebook and Google Often Lack Strong Product Intuition
“I've oftentimes you have PMs from, you know, the Facebooks and Googles of the world that are actually just good at testing. And moving metrics, but their intuition oftentimes isn't actually locked into customer research and actual customers.”
Rabois: Practices that work at Apple cannot work at Google
“Like, nothing that works at Apple would work at Google. Like, everything Google does is completely antithesis of Apple, and so that's why you have to have, like, a philosophy that accommodates successful examples, and then you apply that philosophy to what you…”
Socher: Google generates $500M per day from search advertisements
“They make five hundred million dollars a day With privacy invading advertisements on that page.”
Seibert: Google must go all-in on AI to prevent existential disruption
“They need to go all in on it. I don't think they have a choice. I agree with you. I think it's existential for them because if AI replaces search, their golden goose has been killed. And so it is way more effective to kill your own golden goose than let and wa…”
Eight Sleep reduced Facebook and Google acquisition costs by 75%
“Facebook or Google CAC now is probably, I think it's like, 75% lower than what it used to be two years ago.”
Rauch: Overweighting big-tech resume credentials was a past hiring mistake
“Sometimes I've placed more weight than I should have on this stellar linked list of awesome brands that you worked at. I did X at, let's just name random companies for the sake of it. Apple, Google, Amazon Netflix. And you look at that and you're like, well, f…”
Emad Mostaque: Google Spends $20 Billion per Year on AI
“Google spend twenty billion dollars a year on AI.”
Egan: Early startup sales hires require intellectual range over big-company logos
“I think for a founder who's hiring, I could absolutely see where the big logo hire does not work out. I think, again, what you're looking for there is intellectual range, and that often doesn't just show up from, by the fact that they worked at Microsoft or ca…”
Hanks: Top AI talent remains heavily concentrated in big tech
“If you think about where the best talent in AI is right now, I think it's open AI. And then I think everyone would tell you it is Google and Facebook and Microsoft and Amazon. And maybe there are folks that have kind of dripped their way into the startup ecosy…”
Mostaque: Google's Med-PaLM 2 AI model exceeds doctor performance levels
“Now we have MedPOM-II that exceeds doctor levels. So that was a Google announcement yesterday.”
Mostaque: Google will spend $20 billion annually on AI
“Google will spend twenty billion dollars a year on AI.”
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.”
Hankes: Best AI Talent Remains Heavily Clustered in Big Tech
“If you think about where the best talent in AI is right now, I think it's OpenAI, And then I think you'd, everyone would tell you it is Google and Facebook and Microsoft and Amazon. And maybe there are folks that have kind of dripped their way into the startup…”
Guo: Google, Amazon, and Apple are not leading the AI race
“I think you'd be hard pressed to say that, like, Google or Amazon or Apple is, like, leading the field here.”
De Valk: Google will double down on E-E-A-T to combat AI content
“This is going to create a wave of very, very bad content on the web, and how are we going to surface the really good content? And that's why I expect them to be doubling down on things like the EA team, the things which they've had, expertise, authority, trust…”
Lacher: European family businesses collectively represent Europe's Google
“If you take those family businesses together, I think this is our Google.”
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…”