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 43 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 1 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
Schultz: Snap Cloned TikTok Despite Public Denials
“Faster than Snap, who also cloned and copied TikTok despite everything they've said about that.”
General Catalyst's top early fund expected to return 13x to 15x
“Yeah, that fund is one of our Two or three best funds, and just to tell you what was in it was Livongo was in that, Snap was in that, Circle was in that, Gusto I think I'm missing a few others. It's probably gonna end up being a, you know, 13 to 15 X fund.”
Khan: Snap's finance team questioned acquisition prices that Spiegel underwrote
“So Evan from a day one had a very deep conviction on his product and, you know, like the lenses, acquisitions that we acquired, you know, Evan looked at the product and he knew exactly how people are going to use the product. You know, we finance guys. I'm lik…”
Dash: TikTok's 2019 Ad Spend on Facebook and Snap Cannibalized Their Users
“The ad targeting at this point in 2019 had gotten so granular You could actually get to, like, a city level, a user demographic level, and TikTok leveraged all of that. And Facebook and Snap all benefited because they saw tons of money coming in in the form of…”
Jack Brody predicts Snap will take off in Japan despite LINE
“You know, Japan has been a very interesting market for us. I've always thought that that is a market in which, you know, snap would really take off because there are certain elements to it. It's very visual. It's, you know, it's playful. The lenses that we off…”
Shah: Platform maturity made consumer startups capital inefficient post-2016
“And so my intuition was a platform maturity of the iPhones, of the app store on iOS, of Facebook, of Google, of Snap and Pinterest kind of hit a ceiling where I felt the cost of acquiring these customers in the LTV, according to it, would make the businesses v…”
O'Driscoll: Snap lacks a converging business model and is drifting
“It's just been, they just need to figure out a converging business model, and you know, this, yeah, and they haven't, amazing company at the start, and now it's just drifting around and needs to figure it out.”
Khan: It is a mistake to underestimate Snap co-founder Evan Spiegel
“There's a very few people who know how to build great product, and he's one of them, and he has the skill to, that sometimes when you build a great product, you don't have that install base. He has the install base. So, so I think with Evan, you're getting tha…”
Index Ventures missed investing in Spotify, Snap, Airbnb, and LinkedIn
“One is Spotify, another one is Snap, another one's Airbnb, another one's LinkedIn. Those are the four that we had real opportunity in some fashion or another to manufacture the opportunity for Index to be in the round, and we failed for different reasons.”
Half of Snap hires end up tweaking or changing their role
“About 50% of the people we hire end up changing their role or tweaking it or working on something slightly different because Over time, we realize that there's a better fit within that.”
Brody: New product leaders should embrace vulnerability to learn faster
“I think the most important thing to do when you're starting in a new role or in any role is to be willing to share your insecurities and your vulnerabilities because it then gives you the time and the space to learn and to grow”
Evan Spiegel's future ambitions sometimes obscure present realities
“I would say his ambitions for where he wants things to go can very occasionally get in the way of where things are, and that is the beauty of the fact that he surrounded himself with leaders who are willing to help him see that bigger picture.”
Brody: Hiring specialized product managers early harms early-stage startups
“If you're hiring for too much specialization, you're not going to find somebody who's passionate enough and excited enough to really get their hands dirty and do all the work that's required at that early stage.”
Snap prefers risking user backlash over letting the company die
“You have to choose as an organization. Do you want your customers to hate the products you ship every time you do something drastically different? Or do you want the company to die, right? That's the choice you have in front of you. And so we always choose the…”
Evan Spiegel told Dubugras that authenticity is the most important CEO trait
“I got around being a CEO was from Evan Spiegel from Snap. He told me that the most important thing about being a CEO is being authentic to yourself.”
Snap and Pinterest broke Google and Facebook's acquisition duopoly
“I think Snap and Pinterest have kind of broken through that duopoly, and therefore there's some heterogeneous ways to acquire customers, but not as many as you'd hope.”
Motschwiller: Series A rounds for top consumer decacorns occurred pre-2012
“You look at the series A Funding times of the consumer decacorns that are out there, the Ubers, the Lyfts, the Airbnbs, the Snaps, the Pinterest, the Spotifys, those series A's were all done pre-二零 12.”
Wincek: Snap broke out without ever buying Facebook app install ads
“They never bought Facebook ads or, like, Facebook app installs to get there, but instead, they had this really viral product and a proprietary channel, which was actually a pretty old-school channel, right? Word of mouth.”
Taneja lost Series A deals in Stripe, Samsara, and Snap before Gusto
“I lost a Series A of Stripe. I lost a Series A of Samsara. I lost a Series A of Snap. And the first one I won was a Series A of Gusto.”
E-commerce platforms should not reinvent standard search UI unless habit-forming
“As a consumer, you need to feel comfortable, especially in something that's not habit forming, right? Like people learn to use Snap over time, and I found Snap to be utterly unintuitive at the beginning, but it was habit forming, and they did teach people a ne…”
Khan: Alibaba and Snap IPOs converted nearly 90% of roadshow meetings
“I don't remember the exact numbers, but yeah, both were pretty close to 90%.”
Khan: Snap should have built direct response advertising earlier
“If I were to go back, I would do the exact same thing, but probably start investing in bringing small businesses, building DR business much earlier, you know, so that, you know, it would smooth out the growth rate.”
Snapchat Stories took months to gain user adoption after launching
“When stories released, it wasn't immediate, you know, overnight success. This is something that took months for the community to adopt and start to use and kind of get that flywheel, you know, moving and get people comfortable with what this new thing was.”
Brody: Publicly rewarding risk-taking is the best way to build psychological safety
“There's no better way to create a culture of psychological safety than to make sure that you are rewarding people when they're taking risks, and you're doing that in a way that's public so other people see that it's okay.”
Snap shut down its internal games initiative in 2022
“This last year we had to wind down our games effort.”
Snap prototypes unshippable internal concepts in hours, not months
“That's probably our most active use of a prototype is, you know, our design team or design engineers will come together, come up with the concept. They'll build it in a way that we could never ship it. But they can get it done in, you know, a few hours rather …”
Brody: Frequent candid feedback leads underperformers to improve or self-select out
“What I've found is that by doing that, you know, the number of times I've had to Let somebody go is actually relatively small, and it's not because I don't take performance management seriously, but it's because through these series of conversations, that pers…”
Jack Brody: Repeatable product innovation requires workplace diversity and varied experiences
“What is the best way to create an environment where you have a bunch of, you know, unique ideas coming together? And that's where the importance of having a really diverse workplace comes in, because you are much more likely to get different ideas merging toge…”
Brody: Future of AR lies in creating real-world practical utility
“I think that the future of augmented reality is going to be around creating more and more utility and through the way of understanding the environment around you.”
Brody: Product idea quality is limited by initial volume of ideas generated
“The idea we pursue is only as good as the number of ideas we've had to choose from.”
Jordan: Startups must separate experimental marketing budgets from core spend
“I love the companies that have a, they segregate an experimental budget from their core, core acquisition budget, just to, because if you bundle them together, it, It's a barrier against experimentation. If you're constantly optimizing Google and Facebook, but…”
Chennapragada: Unsung product heroes are team members who endure company volatility
“The unsung heroes are the ones that actually stuck with, kind of, the ups and downs, and actually make the company emerge. So, like, look at companies that did go through the up and down. I think Snap comes to mind, by the way, like, even though maybe Evan is …”
Rachitsky: Snap and Twitter hired first PMs specifically for monetization
“Snap and Twitter, from what I understand, both hired their first PM to explore monetization on the platform.”
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.”
Snap grew annualized revenue from zero to $1.6B in four years
“January one, 2015. Q four of 2018, so four years later, our annualized revenue was 1.6 billion.”
Will Wu: Snap acquired Crash Club's studio after one intro call
“I confirmed my suspicion. I immediately flew over to them, like, the next day to Brisbane, Australia, to pitch them on essentially Snap buying their game studio. And we had, we made it happen incredibly quickly.”
Brody: Snap requires cross-discipline interview panels when hiring product managers
“I think once you get into the interview stage, you know, I think one thing that is really important when we're doing our hiring is making sure that the panel of the folks interviewing this person are diverse and, you know, not just from a Ethnicity standpoint …”
First Snap Spectacles generated little revenue and missed 'iPhone moment'
“So I would say that the first version of Spectacles, you know, obviously it wasn't an iPhone moment. It's not something that has generated an enormous amount of revenue for the company, but it is absolutely helped us hone in on where to take these things in th…”
Snap saw accelerated global adoption after rebuilding its Android app
“So we rebuilt it from scratch. And, you know, because of that, we saw a huge acceleration in adoption across the world.”
Jack Brody holds the shortest internship in Snap history
“I hold the shortest internship ever in Snap history, and that might extend well beyond into tech history of some sorts.”
Snap completely rewrote its Android app from scratch in 2018
“In, in 2018, you know, we took on this project to Basically rewrite the entire Android app from scratch.”
Bobby Murphy Built Snap's AR Roadmap Starting in 2012
“From the very beginning, from, I think, maybe a couple of months in, was thinking about the, you know, the breakthroughs that had been happening in computer vision and the implications for what that could build, and he had been working on, you know, a lot of t…”