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
Von Ahn: Core EdTech apps cannot rely on crowdsourced content
“If you're going to decide to teach something, there is a big problem, which is, I don't believe there's an easy way to do a really simple app where in some way kind of you crowdsource the teaching from one side to the other. Like, for example, think of Instagr…”
Consumer startups cannot rely exclusively on mobile apps without a web presence
“Mobile will be a strong component of any consumer facing offering. I don't believe in mobile only. I actually think, and we saw it even at Facebook with Instagram, and we saw it with Path, we saw it with others. You do need to have a landing point on the web a…”
Lovinsky: Instagram's core product insight was tapping into latent consumer vanity
“The product insight is that, you know, vanity is Much bigger market than we realized it was as a, you know, latent demand that kind of tapped into.”
Diao: TikTok ads underperformed compared to Instagram for hardware startup Limitless
“In some of the early experiments that we did, we just found that TikTok actually wasn't as performant as channels like Instagram.”
Gupta: Crypto growth relies on Discord and Reddit over Meta and Search
“Crypto lives and breathes and grows on social. So the people that I will find on Discord or Reddit and Twitter are very different from the people I will find on Meta and Instagram and or Search.”
Krieger: OpenAI effectively balances consumer product with API platform
“I think that they've balanced first party product development and an API that like people, people use at scale as well. And I think that they we had an Instagram principle that was do the simple thing first. And I think they often do the simple thing first.”
Riparbelli: Most online content and Instagram photos are already partially fake
“We're already in a world where, like, most content that we consume today is in some, to some extent, fake, right? Like, most pictures on Instagram have been, like, touched up in some way, shape, or form.”
Index capped social platform valuations at $1B after Instagram sale
“At the time, we thought the peak amount that a social platform would be worth Was a billion dollars because Instagram sold to Facebook for a billion dollars.”
Instagram Is the Most Popular Platform Among Creators Overall
“Instagram is the, it's the most popular in the creator community, as far as we can tell. So the most creators use it.”
Maintaining Platform Cultural Relevance Matters More Than Raw User Count
“I care every bit about, every bit as much about making sure that the, even, maybe even more, that the platform is culturally relevant than the, sort of, the big number of users.”
Schultz Reveals the Primary User Retention Drivers for Meta and eBay
“So for Facebook, it's friending. The whole thing's about friends. For WhatsApp, it's about sending a message to somebody. You know, for Instagram, it's still following. And for eBay, it was placing a bid or buying an item.”
Systrom: Companies never reach stable perfection; founders must choose their suffering
“The myth that things are ever just in the stasis of good is totally BS, and what people need to realize is that, like Ray Dalio likes to say it's, like, not about avoiding suffering, and I'm paraphrasing here, it's about, like, learning to enjoy the suffering,…”
Krieger: Personalizing Instagram's Explore feed resulted in a 2x usage boost
“When we launched Explore and made it personalized rather than just like, most popular photos, like, that was a two X delta in usage.”
Krieger: Day-one Instagram growth relied on filters, not network effects
“In day one of Instagram, you know, there wasn't really a network there. You were there because the filters made your, you know, photos from your iPhone three G. Or three GS look a little better or a lot better”
Sahgal: Social networks are shifting from friend graphs to interest-based communities
“What you're seeing now is the broad social networks are becoming all about communities and all about interests, and they just have different take on it. Like that's where tick tock is. That's what Instagram is becoming pretty quickly. That's what Reddit obviou…”
Weil: Instagram explicitly credited Snapchat when launching Stories
“When we launched stories, the number one thing we made sure to say was like, kudos to Snapchat. You invented this format.”
Jones: Instagram hype cannot replace quality and consistency in hospitality
“Instagram might blow something up quicker, but actually the customer, if it's not good, and it's not consistent, they won't come back, and they will tell people they're not going to come back, and they will, the best way to have a successful restaurant, cafe, …”
Kaba: Instagram improved its user retention rate from 20% to over 50%
“I think we improved our retention from about 20% to maybe over 50% while I”
Kaba: Hundreds of thousands of Instagram users failed to log in daily
“We had a team that was responsible for what I call access churn. Access churn was basically you, Harry, are in Instagram. You sign out for whatever reason, right? Like you just don't want background data. You want privacy. And we started seeing that just a ton…”
Kaba: North Star metrics should be derived from qualitative product magic
“Metrics are always a representation of your strategy, right? And so you shouldn't just choose a metric. I talked to founders about is like, let's talk qualitatively about what is the magic of the product? What makes this product really tick? And how do we know…”
Kaba: Productizing multiple accounts boosts overall platform engagement
“The people who were getting back in and driving this incremental behavior were people who had a second or a third account who were losing access to that account. And so, that actually helped us to understand that there was actually a mindset around, I, Harry, …”
Kevin Systrom specifically targeted Sacca, D'Angelo, and Dorsey for Instagram's angel round
“Instagram came to me, but like Kevin Systrom literally said, I want three angels, you, Adam D'Angelo and Jack Dorsey. And so he pitched me. I literally was not seeking photos. I, it sounds fucking hilarious, but I thought it was spent. I thought it was done. A…”
Schutz: BarkBox Hacked Instagram's Popular Page With 5:15 PM Posts
“At Bark, we found a way to hack Instagram's popular page back when that was a thing. Like, if you posted a funny dog picture at five 15 during the week, We would get every time on the popular page, and we just have explosive growth”
Hundreds of thousands of Instagram users daily lost accounts to forgotten passwords
“Hundreds of thousands of people a day who would never get back into their account because they forgot their password.”
Instagram found retention required seeing distinct content from known contacts
“So for at Instagram, for example, you know, what we found was that people, after they join, after they see some amount of really interesting, visually distinct content in their feed from people they know, they want more.”
Lazerow passed on early angel investments in Instagram and Uber in 2011
“So, my biggest misses were really as a personal investor, you know, sitting in a hotel room in 2011 with Kevin Systrom and Travis from Uber and, you know, having the opportunity, but not raising my hand and saying like, hey, I'd love to invest, right?”
Snapchat Became the Third Most Popular App in Norway in 2012
“In fact, it had become the number three most, most popular app in Norway at that time, so ahead of Instagram, ahead of Facebook, and so forth.”
Young Women Are the Primary Early Adopters for Social Platforms
“Whether it be Facebook or Instagram or Pinterest or Vine or Tumblr back in the day or TikTok, you know, it's always been young women who've been that first set of early adopters”
Top Social Platforms Were All Founded by People in Their Early Twenties
“If you look at Snap, if you look at Vine, if you look at Facebook, if you look at Instagram, if you look at Tumblr, they were all started by people who were, you know, in their early twenties.”
Greylock recruited three key engineers for Instagram within four days
“And to give you an example, when we were talking to Kevin Systrom about investing in Instagram, and they were 13 employees, and they said, well, what's their major pain point in terms of how they operated? We said, okay, great. Because we have this network of …”
Ohanian: Dispo cracked what a generation wants in an anti-Instagram app
“Dispo has cracked what A generation is looking for as a kind of anti Instagram or anti photo sharing device, because there's nothing wrong with saving those memories. But like I said, they've watched what it's created in the toxicity and the bullying, and even…”
E-commerce spent a decade optimizing discovery but neglected transaction innovation
“Consumers have spent the last 10 years optimizing for discovery. We've put a lot of money into advertising, you know, Google and the Facebook business models and Instagram and getting people to click and go Go visit a site and look at a product, but there hasn…”
OfferUp Matches Instagram With 22-Minute Daily User Engagement
“The startup offer up the mobile Craigslist company up in Seattle. They get 22 minute average daily session times. 22 minutes. That's as much as A news app. That's as much as Instagram. That's as much as a media service.”
Media Outlets Compete With All Time-Occupying Content, Including Instagram
“Anything that takes our subscribers time that they find valuable from Instagram to The Economist is in some ways competitive, right? I mean, I think that is actually the bar for anyone in the media business.”
Hartman: Ephemerality is a design pattern lowering friction to post
“On the ephemerality side, I think that that actually, think about that not as a feature, but as a design pattern. What has ended up happening is that it lowered the friction to post. So I know that it's not going to everybody, and I know that it's going to dis…”
Diao: Answers AI co-founder drove massive growth by becoming a TikTok persona
“One of the co-founders in the company became essentially a TikTok Instagram persona, right? Who can create these videos kind of on demand for the company as well and drive very, very similar amounts of views and traction and growth for the company.”
O'Driscoll: Thrive Capital doubled its Instagram investment in just days
“Thrive invested in Instagram, and like, literally four or five days later, it sold for a two X, right?”
Krieger: Instagram allocated roughly 95% to product and 5% to API
“On Instagram. It was easy. It was like, 95% product, five percent API, and it was, you know, that's all we really needed to do.”
Tenev: Robinhood was the top App Store app during GameStop surge
“Robinhood was the number one app in the app store. And my feeling at the time was, you know, everyone was sort of like, Wow, you should be really happy. You're the number one app in the app store ahead of Instagram and TikTok. Not just financial app, but every…”
Mosseri Rebuilt Instagram's Leadership Team Across Nine Functions in Year One
“So my first year, I had to hire a head of design, engineering, product management, data science, research, HR, communications, marketing, and a COO.”
Meta Will Build an Instagram-Threads Social Graph Sync Option
“We will build over time, I think, a graph sync option. So if you want Just to have the same graph, you can, and we can make sure that stays in sync for you.”
Less Than One Percent of Instagram Users Used the Activity Feed
“It was what, it was probably a small, it was a, it was less than one percent of the users who used it, but that's still, you know, millions of people.”
Krieger: Instagram's seed funding was contingent on finding a technical co-founder
“You know, with Instagram, Kevin had some basically initial like seed funding contingent on finding a technical co-founder.”
Krieger: Instagram's UI broke at launch when posts exceeded 30 likes
“The second something got more than 30 likes on a post, it totally broke the UI on launch because we didn't summarize it.”
Stebbings: Instagram Content Performs Best on Sunday Evenings
“Instagram tends to hit best Sunday evening in particular.”
Instagram grew 50% year-over-year during Bangaly Kaba's early tenure
“We grew basically 50% year over year for the first couple years while I was there.”
Instagram's growth team was built as a full-stack product group
“When I helped build the growth team and Instagram, we were engineers, data science, product managers, growth marketers is like full stack, basically product group, but the engineers were growth focused engineers.”
Instagram grew from 440M to 1B MAUs in 2.5 years
“Bengali led the product growth and consumer product orgs at Instacart, and before Instacart, was head of growth at Instagram, where he built and led the product team that helped grow Instagram from four hundred and forty million to one billion monthly actives …”