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 15 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
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.”
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.”
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 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 …”
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 …”
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…”
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…”