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 66 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
Calacanis: Facebook is on a jihad to kill Snapchat
“I mean, it's not inspired by Snapchat. They're on a jihad to kill Snapchat.”
Weitzman: Meta is completely eating Snapchat's lunch
“I think they're overpaying creators, left, right, and center. And I just think that the lunch is completely eaten by meta at this point.”
Weitzman: Speechify's early hires from Apple and Snapchat failed within three months
“We had two people that we hired from Apple and Snapchat, like very legit people. And they messed up the culture of the company. They would leave at 5:30 p.m. They like didn't live and breathe the company. And in the end, both of them quit after three months.”
Lightspeed Passed on a Snapchat Follow-On Investment at a $13M Valuation
“If we'd invested, I think that if we'd done that round, I think the terms were three on 13 or something like that. It would have been a great outcome for the company and for Lightspeed.”
Luckey: Improving DoD 1% saves lives unlike incremental consumer app work
“You're not going to make the world very different if you make Snapchat one percent better. But if you can make the United States Department of Defense one percent better, you are going to save a lot of lives. You are going to save a lot of money.”
Calacanis: Snapchat will reach a $1B run rate by end of 2017
“They'll be at a billion-dollar run rate by the end of the year, you know, two hundred fifty million a quarter.”
Sean Rad says top tech companies begin as passion projects, not missions
“Evan Spiegel in, in starting Snapchat or Uber and Twitter and all these companies that tend to have an impact on society. Or Facebook, they start out as little passion projects. They don't start out as missions to kind of change the world.”
John Lilly disagrees with Fred Wilson's consumer tech downturn thesis
“I mean, I don't know exactly what Fred's been talking about consumer downturn, but I don't, I think there's plenty of space. So, I think most people didn't think there was space for Snapchat a couple years ago. Now, now people do. You used to look at Musical.l…”
Ryan Holmes Was Extremely Bullish on Snapchat's 10 Billion Daily Views
“Oh man, no, I, I'm hugely bullish on Snapchat. Ten billion views daily. Facebook's at eight billion. Huge audience. Very engaged audience. Recently, this, yesterday, memories coming out. That all of a sudden is, is really interesting seeing your archive of Sna…”
New breakout consumer mobile companies will emerge soon
“And I think you'll see new companies emerge. Is it going to happen this year? Is it going to happen next year? It's going to happen soon. It hasn't happened since Snapchat, right? They're the Snapchat, Tinder are the last big consumer companies to emerge. Thos…”
West Coast tech hubs in NYC risk stifling local giants
“All the big companies from the West Coast have set up product offices here over the past five years, and I think that that might on one hand prevent the emergence of a standalone New York A monster, but it also brings more talent here, and so you've seen what …”
Teare: Series A and B Face Severe Capital Shortage
“There's about five billion dollars available at the seed stage for all the companies every three to five years. There's about one to two billion available at the A and B stage. And then at the growth stage, at the other end, there's more than a hundred billion…”
Solomou: Snapchat is the number one messaging platform for young demographics
“They are huge amongst the younger demographic. It's the number one messaging platform.”
Pishevar: Menlo Ventures passed on Snapchat seed and Series A rounds
“I, so, I brought Snapchat to Menlo. Evan and I hit it off. I really believe that. I was on it in the first 30 days, because my kids were on it, and so they showed it to me, and I was chasing it, and Evan and I hit it off and unfortunately Menlo passed on the, …”
Index passed on Snapchat due to fund concentration limits
“What happened there was we, to my recollection, we had the opportunity to invest, but we had a growth fund, and we were unwilling to put the amount necessary to lock in the round, and so as a result of that, we didn't do the deal.”
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…”
Snapchat created Stories to avoid a 'select all' send button
“And with stories, you know, what we were hearing from the community was they wanted a way to send a snap to everyone. They wanted it to be easier for them to go. Take a snap. Tap everybody on the send to list and blast it off. Now we recognize that if we did t…”
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.”
Vasconcellos passed on Snapchat's seed round due to Facebook conflict concerns
“I'd say the biggest miss I had was not investing at the seed round of Snapchat... Facebook conflicts committee said, oh, and you guys can't invest this because it could potentially be competitive... We said, oh, this whole like disappearing messages thing does…”
Lightspeed Invested in Snapchat's Seed Round at a $4.25M Valuation
“At the seed at four and a quarter pre, and, like, here we are looking at 13, and just thinking, well, you know, that's three times higher.”
Snapchat Raised Seed Capital When Server Costs Exceeded Spiegel's Credit Card
“Frankly, I think the thing that probably changed the most was that they finally had a need for financing. You know, at that first meeting, they ran us through some of the metrics of the business, and it looks tremendous. And we said, well, is there anything we…”
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…”
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.”
Nicole Quinn: Lightspeed requires a 33% DAU/MAU ratio for social apps
“So we like to think about DAU divided by MAU. If you're A social media app , then we want it to be over a third. If it can be over 50%, then it really is a daily use case, and that's exactly what we saw from Snapchat back in the day, but we definitely need for…”
Lasky: Benchmark held no champagne celebration following Snapchat's IPO
“I came back from New York after the Snapchat IPO. I was in New York for the pricing and to see the stock open on, on the New York stock exchange floor. And I flew back from, it was on a Thursday on, came back on, on Monday to the partners meeting. And our cele…”
Snapchat Was the Last Breakout Consumer Tech Company, Says Feng
“The last breakout iconic consumer company that's proven today is Snapchat, and that launched in 2011, so it's been almost six years since we had that level of success on the consumer side”
Justin Kan: Snapchat Is the Most Compelling Product of the Past Decade
“Their product teams are like pretty good and they've Really built a, what I think is the most compelling product I've seen in the last 10 years.”
Mary Meeker: Evan Spiegel views the iPhone purely as a camera
“Mary Meeker told me the story about Evan Spiegel from Snapchat about how he just sees the iPhone as a camera. He doesn't even look at it as a phone. He's like, you're holding a camera. You know, that really carries through in the product vision for Snapchat.”
Every consumer brand will eventually need a presence on Snapchat
“In my opinion, that's where every single brand will have to be. Because you have to be where your users are.”
Lightspeed's Snapchat Investment Originated From a Partner's Daughter Using the App
“I think it was at light speed, I think, where one of the partner's daughters was on Snapchat permanently, and he was asking her what it was, and that stemmed their investment.”
Speechify has never succeeded in running profitable ads on Snapchat
“One, we try to run ads on Snap all the time. We never succeed.”
Solomou: Snapchat will remain an innovative hub for Gen Z over 5-10 years
“I believe Snap is an interesting place over the next five to 10 years. Whether it can compete with the TikToks, and the Metas, and at this scale, I mean, these players are Huge. And we've seen what they've done in AI. We've seen what they're doing in e-commerc…”
Wu: Moving Snapchat Discover next to stories completely changed its fate
“We moved Discover one screen to the left, essentially, to be on the same screen as where you see your friends' stories, And that completely changed the fate of Discover.”
Snapchat Stories remain more raw and authentic than rival platforms
“While stories has, you know, been successful on other platforms, the way stories are used on Snapchat is still fundamentally different. It's still more raw, authentic in the moment content. There's less of this need to be, you know, pretty or perfect.”
Snapchat and Pinterest ad channels cannot scale like Meta or Google
“Snapchat, Pinterest, those work, but those are hard to scale. Like you don't get large scale, similar to Facebook and Google.”
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.”
20VC Abandoned 100,000 Snapchat Followers Due to Declining Engagement
“I invested heavily in Snapchat stories when they were big for business. We gained a 100,000 plus fans there, but with the reducing popularity of the platform for business, The audience declined, and it was no longer worth the investment for me over other platf…”
Belsky: Snapchat consistently rethinks its first-mile onboarding for new cohorts
“You know, Snapchat, I think, is probably one example. Of a company that I feel has consistently rethought their first mile experience for a different cohort of new customers.”
75% of Snapchat's Early Users Were High School and College Women
“When we met Snapchat, one of the things that really caught our attention was that 75% of the user base were young women in high school and college”
Snapchat's Monthly Burn Rate Exceeded $1M Within a Year of Seed
“Burn, within a year from our investment, Burn was in excess of a million dollars a month”
Snapchat Had 50% MoM Growth and 50% 90-Day Retention in 2012
“But I remember seeing 50% month on month growth. 50% DAU to MAU ratios, which suggests very high engagement, and 50% retention after 90 days, which again suggests high engagement, high retention, high growth.”
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.”
Consumer Social Apps Lack Context Without an Active Friend Network
“If you start using Snapchat without having other friends who use Snapchat, you lose all context. You don't sort of understand what it's for.”
Snapchat Had 90,000 DAUs on 180,000 Installs When Lightspeed Invested
“So when we met them in, you know, March, April of 2012, they had about 90,000 daily active users off of a base of 180,000 installs.”
Eggers: Snapchat had under 100,000 users when Lightspeed made seed investment
“They still had less, less than a, about a 100,000 users when we invested and they'd gone up from 10,002 months before. Really good engagement, and so we made the seed investment.”