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 98 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 2 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
Alex Schultz: A one-person startup reaching tens of millions is inevitable
“Instagram was seven people and got to tens of millions of active users. I don't see why there won't be the next Instagram that's one person and gets to tens of millions of active users. In fact, I think it's inevitable.”
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.”
Slonimski: Meta Is Overhyped Due to Worsening Ad Economics
“At the level of the channel, we don't really distinguish if it's Facebook, Instagram, or whatever, and I think it's overhyped as it's getting really tough to get to good user economics there.”
Malik: Apple privacy changes killed Meta ads as a core scaling channel
“I mean, I think especially with all the latest Apple changes, I don't know how anyone is going to make Instagram or Facebook ads efficiently work at scale as like a core growth channel.”
Video Is Good for Time Spent but Bad for Revenue
“Yeah, and so the thing that I think people don't always realize is video, by its nature as a format, is actually really challenging for all the old social networks. It puts a lot of downward pressure on the ads business, because if you watch one video for 10 s…”
Instagram Prioritizes Young People and Creators Above All Other Segments
“And for us, we care about young people, and we care about creators most.”
Adam Mosseri Claims Instagram Is Growing Faster Than Any Major Competitor
“We're growing really fast. I think we're growing the fastest of the big players.”
Masad: 5-to-10-person companies valued in billions will become common
“So wealth inequality will grow insanely a lot. And how so? Because like people look at Instagram or WhatsApp as these outlier companies that were able to achieve massive valuations with like very little, with very little people. And I don't think it's going to…”
Systrom: Early Instagram mistakenly prioritized 'mission hipsters' over top talent
“As a small company, one of our mistakes in Instagram is hiring too many, like, mission hipsters that wore plaid and really liked drinking bourbon. Like, that was stupid. Like, we should have just been hiring the greatest people out there.”
Weil: Instagram Stories would have failed with a timid, experimental rollout
“If instead we'd done the timid thing and put it like in the back of a third tab and like, well, if people find it, we'll do a one percent experiment and maybe it'll work. Like it never would have taken off.”
Devin Finzer: NFTs capture value for creators unlike rent-extracting Web2 social platforms
“I think long run, you know, this does open up the playing field for really anyone to like directly tap into a fan base or people who want to support them. So I think long-term you're talking about kind of brand new business models and the different model than …”
The Dominant VC Narrative in 2012 Was That Consumer Social Was Dead
“And I think you also have to bear in mind that in 2012, the dominant narrative was that social was dead. Facebook and Instagram had run the table like there were no more new opportunities in social anymore.”
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 …”
Ad-Driven Social Platforms Corrupt the Creative Motivations of Young People
“So I really think that that ad model, I'm very concerned for the whole world's creative spirit, especially the Creativity of younger people who've spent their whole lives with YouTube or Instagram or other places like that, other ad-driven platforms as the des…”
Traditional banks lack capability to underwrite individual DTC transactions
“With marketplaces like Amazon, social platforms like Instagram, and e-com platforms like Shopify, the buyer is now individuals, not stores. And factors and banks don't know how to underwrite that scenario, and we do.”
Dudum: The era of building DTC brands on Instagram is over
“The days of, and I hear this a lot, the days of building brands on Instagram, I actually think are far gone.”
Calacanis: Standalone Instagram and YouTube would be worth $150B–$200B
“Because they knew if that was an independent company right now, Instagram would be worth seventy five billion dollars. YouTube, I think, would be worth a hundred billion dollars in the open market right now. Those two companies were bought for 1000000001.6 bil…”
Bouaziz calls PaySpace acquisition Deel's equivalent of Facebook buying Instagram
“Long-term strategy of the company, the quality of the founders, of the people, of the product, and how much it helps from an infrastructure perspective, from a gross margin perspective, from an experience perspective, is probably, it's probably the Instagram t…”
Gibson: Vinted achieves higher user engagement than Instagram
“I am very impressed with what the team at Vinted have been able to do. It's a bit of a weird one, but the level of engagement I see from people who use the app is apps, the unreal, and people, it's like an addiction. I mean, they're using it more than they wou…”
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…”
Stebbings: Social media feeds are like diets and users control them
“I think people demonize social in the way that diet can be demonized. If you go on my TikTok, Instagram, you name it, there's protein recipes, there's inspirational talks from Tony Robbins, and Alain de Botton, and great thinkers there's baby videos, I think b…”
Sean Rad: Tinder launched an Instagram Stories equivalent before Instagram did
“So we created this product called moments. Which was sort of Instagram stories before Instagram stories. You could share a moment, like something you're doing in the real world, and it was an expiring, 24 hour moment, and people could reply to it, and your mat…”
Instagram SMB ads experienced a 60% monthly customer churn rate
“For every 10 customers that tried the product, six of them the next month would go away.”
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…”
Dash: Threads rigged the platform in favor of established Instagram creators
“And I think the challenge here with threads was, on day one, if you're completely porting over the graph, it's very hard for someone to suddenly say, hey, now I'm gonna, I wanna start from zero and become really large on threads. Because already the game is ri…”
Market Success Drives Team Morale More Than Internal Communication
“Over the long run, the thing that's going to get people the most rallied, the most excited, the most motivated, the most effective is doing good work and being successful.”
Reels Is Approaching 50% of Total Time Spent on Instagram
“Reels is, I don't know, maybe pushing 50% of time spent in the app at this point. Not quite there.”
Instagram's Five-Year Growth Was Driven Entirely by Stories and DMs
“All of the growth has been in, in stories and in DMs over the last five years or so. And to the degree there is growth in feed, it's all in video, it's not in photos in a lot of ways.”
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…”
Prior Facebook and Instagram Video Products Hurt User Connection
“And so the fact that video, growing video has massively grown sends, which is a pure friend-to-friend interaction, even not even, even if you take out the real shares, because they start conversation, I might send you a funny, you know, football clip, and then…”
Mark Zuckerberg Pushed to Launch Threads as a Standalone App
“Like, for instance, on Threads, he was the one who was like, you guys should just try to build a separate app. And we were really trying to figure out a way to do it in the main app, because it seemed like It would be much more likely to succeed, and he was by…”
Instagram Users Share More Media in DMs Than Feed or Stories
“If you take out all the text, there are more photos and videos shared in DMs than there are shared in stories. And there's way more shared in stories than there is in feed.”
Threads Would Not Have Succeeded Without Instagram Graph Bootstrapping
“And I think that's, it is no way it would have been as successful if you had to bootstrap the graph from scratch.”
Mosseri Reallocated Instagram's Entire Stories Team to Messaging
“Actually, at one point, a couple years ago, I think I put the entire stories team on messaging.”
Adam Mosseri Admits the Instagram App Is Currently Too Complicated
“The app is too complicated. I mean, let's be serious. They are, the, I think it's gotten more simple over the last 12 months or so. We consolidated some of the design patterns and primitives, removed some of the tabs, but we still have more to do.”
Paik: TikTok could not exist before Twitter due to bandwidth constraints
“There's a very clear reason why the order of founding went from Twitter first, to Instagram, to Snapchat, to TikTok. And it is because mobile as infrastructure and bandwidth in its earliest stages, supported the lowest packet size, text. And then next compress…”
Weil: Effective organizations alternate leadership tiers between instigators and harmonizers
“You want alternating skills, just like you were saying, you want alternating skills, and he kind of classified people into, like, you know, are they kind of I'm trying to remember the word he used I don't remember, he had a provocative word for it, but basical…”
Weil: Directly plopping Snapchat Stories into Instagram would have failed
“But I think if you had just taken stories and like plopped it in the middle of Instagram, it wouldn't have worked.”
Mignano: BeReal's format is too easily copied by Meta's Instagram
“Yes, a hundred percent. I think it is a worry. And admittedly, I think it is a worry for B-Real. I think B-Real is a great product. The reality is I don't think their format is, is, is something that Instagram can't copy easily, right? It is a photo at a speci…”
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 …”
Instagram retention rose from 20% to over 50% under Bangaly Kaba
“I think we improved our retention from about 20% to maybe over 50% while I was there.”
Kevin Systrom sought only Sacca, Adam D'Angelo, and Jack Dorsey for Instagram
“Instagram came to me. Kevin Systrom literally said, I want three angels, you, Adam D'Angelo, and Jack Dorsey.”
Instagram Stories Is Restricted by the Platform's Highlight-Reel Culture
“Stories on Instagram, the culture of Instagram is still, look at how great my life is. You know, it's still highlight real type, you know, use case and culture, and that then propagates into stories.”
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…”
Schneider: True Ventures passed on Instagram before its pivot
“So for example, we looked at Instagram really early and it was literally a different product with a different name and we passed on it and then they later pivoted to Instagram. But by then it was too late for us to invest.”
Tisch: Digital ad channels on Instagram and Snapchat mature instantly without arbitrage opportunities
“When you see Instagram and Snapchat open up their advertising products, they're basically mature on day one.”
Major Social Platforms Intimidate Everyday People From Sharing Creative Work
“Today's dominant platforms, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, they don't really offer a path for folks like that. Folks like that feel like, oh, I'm embarrassed. I'm not going to post my thing on Instagram. Like, no one's going to like it.”