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 34 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
Tech companies must operate as professional sports teams rather than families
“As I've said to our employee base here, and as we said to the employees at Netflix, we are not a family. We are a professional sports team, and you will want to work here because you will be afforded the opportunity to work with some of the most talented peopl…”
Lemkin: AI-generated YouTube videos are utterly disruptive to Netflix
“And as of the last 45 days, you can watch an incredible short on YouTube that was entirely AI generated where you can watch Star Wars stories that are better than the crappy last three movies that are AI generated. That's utterly disruptive to Netflix.”
O'Driscoll: Hollywood opposes Netflix acquisition due to monopsony buyer power
“It's monopsony power, right? If Netflix becomes the biggest single buyer of content, Then if you're making content, which is what Hollywood does, making, right, you have to sell to, you know, the media buyer for Netflix becomes the most important person in you…”
Omaze's Subscriber Retention Rates Rival Netflix and Spotify
“It's right up there with the top consumer subscription companies in the world. I mean, it's comparable to Netflix, Spotify.”
Ackman: Pershing Square Lost $400 Million Exiting Netflix Position
“So we took about a billion dollar position in Netflix after the stock fell about 50%. And then, you know, we're a long term investor, but we learned information within a few months of the initial investment, i.e. The next quarter's results at Colt, caused us t…”
Daniel Ek's pattern recognition skills match Reed Hastings as a generational talent
“Daniel was using my pattern recognition skills as exceptional in his own way as Reed was exceptional in his way. Kind of, you know, one in twenty-five million.”
Best: Consumers pay more for single Substack writers than Netflix subscriptions
“People are willing to pay more to subscribe to one writer on Substack than they'll pay for, like, Netflix, because this sort of relationship that they've built up over time reading somebody has so much value to them.”
Midha: Late-entrant platforms will disrupt and displace incumbent VC firms
“I think that venture capital is going to go the way of past financiers of creative mediums where usually you have, you know, the early folks end up being pretty comfy execs because they took a risk on the industry and on early creatives when there weren't too …”
Rachleff: Netflix, Google, and Apple lack network effects
“There's no network effect to Netflix. There's no network effect to Google. There's no network effect to a lot of the, to Apple products, but you love them, and if you love them, you're going to tell all of your friends about them, and that's what defines viral…”
Lemkin: ChatGPT reached 800M users in 17 months
“ChatGPT is the fastest, even though Sam Lesson said he's not sure it's important, it's the fastest Gain of users in, in the history of the world. Zero to eight hundred million in 17 months. Okay. That's, it took Netflix 15 times longer. It took TikTok five tim…”
Snowflake had zero customers when Chris Degnan joined, despite Netflix rumors
“There was some insinuation that Netflix was a customer. They were not. There was zero customers when I showed up.”
Cohen: US YouTube connected TV watch time now exceeds Netflix
“One of our very interesting stats I've noticed more recently was, so in the US, more hours are consumed of YouTube on connected TVs than Netflix.”
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…”
Cohen: Netflix, Heineken, and Adobe signed with Navan during COVID lockdowns
“Our biggest customers would sign up with us, like, customers like Netflix, Heineken, Adobe, sign with us on these times where people were not traveling because, again, change management, The easy thing to do at that time.”
Catalog titles drove 70% of Netflix DVD rentals versus 10% for Blockbuster
“90% of what Blockbuster rents is new release. 30% of what Netflix rents Disney release and 70% is catalog.”
Reed Hastings originally intended to only fund Netflix as its chairman
“Well, his original vision was to be retired and to fund the company and be its chairman. And the performance kind of got sideways and he came in off the sidelines. And replace Mark Randolph as a CEO.”
Reed Hastings forced a $30M to $50M feature film spend that failed
“In this particular quarter, we had, I don't know, 30 or fifty million dollars to spend. And Reed Really wanted Ted to invest it in, in in feature film content, and which Ted thought was a really stupid idea and argued about it for weeks, and finally, you know,…”
Venture funding must rely less on exclusive operator networks
“I hope that venture funding becomes less of a closed circle, and actually that these networks become less important, and that access to this life-changing financial tool is democratized for many more people who didn't have the incredible luck That Jana and I h…”
Helmer: The specific economic powers behind Apple, Amazon, Google, and Netflix
“So Facebook, obviously, network economies. Apple is, they're a variety. Brand switching costs, scale. Amazon is primarily scale. Netflix is primarily scale. Google is probably network economies.”
Helmer: Netflix leverages cross-market content sharing for global scale power
“For Netflix, on the other hand, if they go into another market, if there is sharing across markets, and I suspect there is, say you go into India and the Indian audience likes, say, 20% of your catalog in the U.S. Is something that Indians like to watch. That'…”
Reed Hastings barred DVD executives from staff meetings during Netflix's streaming pivot
“Kind of the example that I use, the parallel example, is Reed Hastings when he switched the business from CDs to streaming, which, or DVDs to streaming, sorry. You know, he had no streaming revenue, and, you know, the DVD business was, not only was the entire …”
Feldman: AI inference speed will unlock new industries like broadband did
“If you remember Blockbuster, right. First, I mean, let's look at the history of that. You're exactly right. First, we used to drive to Blockbuster to get a DVD, right, or a video. Then Netflix was mailing them to us, right? And then we got broadband. And there…”
Tunguz: Web2 cloud infrastructure and application layers both have $2.1T market cap
“So in web two, if you take the top three clouds and you look at their market cap, so AWS, GCP, and Azure, it's about a 2.1 trillion dollar market cap just for the cloud businesses. And then if you take the top 100 publicly traded cloud companies, both on B to …”
Liquid Death shifted its marketing from a Netflix to an HBO model
“We've Kind of dramatically changed our approach to content and not to slander either of these two companies. It's just two different strategies. Moving more from the Netflix approach to the HBO approach”
Jay Hoag funded Netflix post-dot-com bust when capital markets completely froze
“I remember when Netflix was actually going down after After the dot-com bust, we were running out of money, even though we were going, we're doubling every year, but the world is in meltdown. You couldn't get capital from anybody. And he stepped up in a moment…”
Netflix doubled annually for five years after switching to a subscription model
“And then eventually we found product market fit as a subscription model, as it turned out, not as an a la carte business. And once we stumbled into the subscription model, the business literally started doubling each year. And for gosh, five or six years, it j…”
Messerschmidt: Netflix culture deck values were actively lived by employees
“These weren't just values that were thrown up on a wall or mentioned it in all hands once or twice. They really embodied what it was like to work there.”
Netflix and Amazon employees adopted x.ai without any sales contact.
“On the thousands and thousands of people that have adopted the single-use case version of Amy, I never talked to the New York Times, or Netflix, or Amazon, or Salesforce, but those companies, they just have employees in pain, and since there's no integration, …”
Massive subscription businesses require broad market demand over niches
“The only way to build really big subscription businesses, Netflix or internet internet access companies is to have very large market demand. So you have to sell into very large markets as opposed to niches.”
Miura-Ko: Netflix Succeeded by Framing Business Around Home Media Delivery
“When Netflix came out, they didn't say we are a better version of Blockbuster. Instead, they said we deliver media to your home.”
Tomasz Tunguz: Web2 cloud infra and top 100 apps share equal market caps
“So in web two, if you take the top three clouds and you look at their market cap, so AWS, GCP, and Azure, It's about a 2.1 trillion dollar market cap just for the cloud businesses. And then if you take the top 100 publicly traded cloud companies, both on B to …”
Klarna restructured into eight-person cross-functional teams inspired by Netflix and Amazon
“At the end, around 16 and 17, I got a new management team in place. Niklas had left, and the marriage quarrel were gone. And so we were finally able to sit down seriously and talk through how do we think we create a culture and a setup that works. And we decid…”