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 189 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
Stebbings: TBPN is the Clubhouse of our era with near-zero engagement retention
“I think it's Clubhouse of our era. And so they have brilliant channel market fit, which is they crush it on Twitter for very specific clips. When you look at any of their view rates, very little. When you look at their retention on engagement rates, fuck all.”
Jerry Murdock: Twitter would have been far better without VC politics
“Twitter could have been infinitely a more interesting company, but VCs got involved and created politics, and they fired Jack Dorsey early, and I don't know if that was right or wrong, but they created issues, and the company was pretty messed up.”
Stebbings: TBPN Is the Clubhouse of Our Era With Poor Retention
“I think it's Clubhouse of our era, and so they have brilliant channel market fit, which is they crush it on Twitter for very specific clips. When you look at any of their view rates, very little. When you look at their retention on engagement rates, fuck all.”
Torres: Incumbent tech firms must cut headcount by 80% to survive
“If they do what Twitter did, if they reduce themselves to 20%, and build an amazing product, and are willing to break all their pricing models and revenues and change all of that, then they will survive.”
Reid Hoffman: Twitter is substantially worse post-Elon Musk acquisition
“With deep regret, I would say substantially worse.”
Hoffman: Elon Musk's greatest strength and weakness stem from blind conviction
“Elon has a conviction that he, what he believes is true is absolutely true even when all of the evidence is against his belief, right? And so that allows him to do, I can see that we can colonize Mars, and here we go. Right? And that creates, you know, SpaceX,…”
Stebbings: Threads will stall at 5M DAU while Twitter grows
“I would say threads does not work. Maybe it teases along at five million DAU with hardcore small numbers. And I would say Twitter has modest growth to Two 75, 300 with election spikes.”
Urban: Elon Musk will make Twitter successful within five years
“If, again, you put me in a time machine five years from now, my gut is I come out and it, yes, the answer is yes. Just because this guy does things well and sometimes it takes a while, right? And there's going to be a lot of experimentation. It's going to be a…”
Stebbings: Big tech spinouts raising $5M-$7M seeds are my worst investments
“And so they're my single worst investments. Those are my worst ones when they've spun out of any great company and they've raised five to seven. Because they're inherently slower because they're used to the processes of Twitter, of Facebook, the HR, the polici…”
Stebbings: Hot seed rounds raised by executive founders consistently underperformed
“I looked at the seeds, and I looked at those that haven't really worked, and all of those that haven't really worked have often been head of product at Twitter, head of product at Twitch, head of product at amazing company, the hottest of hot seed rounds with …”
Gerstner: The bottom 20-40% of tech and VC workforces dilute results
“I would say the vast majority of organizations, ok, and I'm talking from Facebook and Twitter, all the way down to, ah, GPs. They would be well served, right, to be much smaller, to be essentialists in the people that they have. Because it's very likely that y…”
Boyle: Corporate and Social Pressures Mirror Soviet-Era Censorship
“And we've seen sort of that current that was really in existence under the former Soviet Union move to what we call democratic countries. But instead of that being influenced from kind of the state, it's been influenced from companies and from other people and…”
Cuban claims Uber and Twitter would be more successful outside Silicon Valley
“I think if you take some of the companies, Twitter, or almost any of them, Uber in particular, Lyft, and you move those to Kansas City, Dallas, Pittsburgh, Buffalo, New York, they would have been so much more successful, so much more quickly.”
Carlson-Wee: Companies launching tokens must stop extracting direct network revenue
“The second thing is that if you are launching a token and you're a private company, you should be ready to stop extracting any revenue from your network. So however you were extracting revenue from the network, whether this was advertising or paid subscription…”
Murdock: Flipboard Turned Down ~$1B Acquisition Bids From Twitter and ByteDance
“They had two bidders going for them at the time. And that was very, very interested in them at around, I'll say within 20% of that number, and, ah, one of them was Twitter, and the other one was TikTok, the founder of ByteDance, and founder just, you know, he …”
Mignano: Suno has unlimited upside potential like YouTube or TikTok
“So we believe that Suno has, you know, I'm using this term loosely, but unlimited upside potential. You know, if you look back at the history of media on the internet, and you think about the generational platforms that truly democratized a medium, right? YouT…”
Lemkin: X Revenue Has Shrunk 50% Since Musk's Acquisition
“Twitter's, Twitter's just, growth has fallen off, it's shrunk 50% since he bought it.”
Masad: Venture capitalists have poor information landscapes because they live on Twitter
“Which why I think VCs don't have the best, I think, information landscape, because a lot of them just live on, on Twitter, but the world is much larger than that.”
O'Driscoll: Anthropic is a better standalone AI bet than xAI
“Would I prefer, on a standalone foundation model, lab bet, would you prefer to own Entropic than X.AI plus Cursor plus the Frankenstein of Twitter? Yeah, you would, but at least it's a full-stack story now.”
Zeev: Anti-rich sentiment is rising in America, following Europe
“I find that there is an increasing level of hating the successful, hating the rich. I see it on Twitter. I think in Europe it's even worse, but it's come to America, unfortunately.”
Harries: Organic LinkedIn is today's most underappreciated tech growth channel
“The most underappreciated growth channel I see is organic LinkedIn. On Twitter, you're competing against the best writers in the world. You're competing against Harry Stebbings running shorts. Yeah, Bill Ackman. Like, it's really tough. On LinkedIn, you're com…”
O'Driscoll: Bret Taylor Forced Elon Musk to Complete $44B Twitter Acquisition
“For the second time in the last five years, he totally wanted as board chairman of Twitter, where he jammed that down Elon's throat for forty four billion dollars despite his opposition, and he won here today because he unraveled the mess and set it all up for…”
Harries: Organic LinkedIn is today's most underappreciated growth channel
“The most underappreciated growth channel I see is organic LinkedIn. On Twitter, you're competing against the best writers in the world. You're competing against Harry Stebbings running a short. Bill Ackman. Like, it's really tough. On LinkedIn, you're competin…”
Maples: Elon Musk won't be able to mass-fire federal workers
“Like, I don't think that Elon is going to be able to do what he did with, say, Twitter, and fire a bunch of people and, you know, change all the rules.”
Maguire: Freedom of speech did not exist before Elon Musk bought Twitter
“I don't think we had freedom of speech before Elon bought Twitter.”
Asparouhov: Brian Singerman pulled me aside six times over controversial tweets
“Oh, a multitude of times. I mean, I probably had at least, you know, sort of six, you know you know Singerman, you know, sort of one-on-ones where he has to be like telling what the fuck.”
Lemieux: AI will unbloat tech teams and redistribute engineers to critical sectors
“I think companies are going to unbloat and we're going to distribute programmers, right? Like there's, we've got a global, you know, lack of procreation happening. We're going to have less and less people who can build technology where we need it. Like we need…”
Seibert: Twitter's biggest past internal issue was leadership indecision
“And this was one of the biggest challenges Twitter faced internally back in the day was just complete indecision from leadership.”
Seibert: Elon Musk moving fast at Twitter beats standing still
“Agree or disagree with some of Elon's decisions, but he is moving quickly in a direction. That is way better than sort of standing still.”
Lemkin: Seed market has no downturn and is more vibrant than ever
“There's no downturn in seed whatsoever. No matter what, Twitter's wrong. Twitter, seed is more vibrant than ever, and we can talk about why, and seed is also split up more than ever.”
Wenger: Musk has the personal wealth to absorb Twitter's debt
“Yeah, no, I mean, look, I mean, that's tough noogies for you, but you're still one of the world's richest people, and you still could basically give any debt provider an out, and you could still basically just take a bunch of your wealth and sort of say, look,…”
Harrison: Andreessen Horowitz actively recruits individuals with large Twitter followings
“I think it's one of the reasons why you know, anybody with a Reasonably sized Twitter following probably gets a at least job interest, if not a job offer from Andreessen, right? Like they recognize that sort of micro celebrity appeal of being able to hire anyb…”
Lanzone: Twitter was my 'white whale' company that got away
“For a long time, you know, Twitter was that company for me. It's always been my white whale. I love the product, but I always felt it could have been a lot more than it was. And so I've, I always, you know, look side-eye at Twitter as the one that, that got aw…”
Eugene Wei: Twitter tweetstorms are the optimal status tactic for VCs
“Now I feel like the new meta for investors is to build a personal brand on Twitter. And the way you do that is the tweet storms. That's a classic example of a optimal status seeking tactic within Twitter that has been adopted by the universe of players.”
Twitter's board failed to find a better CEO than Jack Dorsey
“There was a committee of the board that was trying to find somebody else, and they weren't able to find anyone better than Jack.”
Twitter suffered shrinking users, brain drain, and zero profit before 2017
“The company was not doing well. I mean, sort of ethically, it was the company itself was shrinking. It was a, there was a brain drain and there was also the user base was shrinking. There wasn't revenue or profit. And nobody felt like Twitter was a special pla…”
Twitter would not exist as a company without co-founder Evan Williams
“Evan basically made the company what it is. Without Evan, there would be no Twitter as a company.”
Mather: Social media platforms are an unbelievable negative for news consumption
“I think these platforms are a unbelievable negative for how people consume news for all the obvious reasons”
First Round lost Twitter and Dropbox seed deals over valuation limits
“First round offered Twitter their first term sheet months before Union Square led their round. We offered Dropbox their first term sheet, and I'd say we lost both of those due to sticking to price.”
Kopelman passed on Twitter at $5M and $20M pre-money valuations
“So, we offered Twitter a term sheet at a five million pre-money valuation. We were an investor in Odeo, Eb Prior companies. So I think I was user Twitter user number 275. We were right there. We offered five. Fred came in at 20 a few months later, and to make …”
Buchheit: Twitter's incentive structure rewards attacking others and makes users worse people
“The incentive structures are a Twitter. You can score a lot of points by attacking someone, calling someone out, you know, starting a war essentially, but if you put something kind of insightful or kind up, you're not going to get a lot of points, and so if yo…”
Uber, Airbnb, and Twitter Could Be Profitable by Cutting Spend 10%
“Today, Uber or Airbnb want to be profitable, or Twitter wants to be massively profitable. If they were to cut their spending 10, 20%, all of a sudden those companies look massively profitable. The only reason they're losing money is because they've chosen to c…”
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.”
Facebook and Twitter monopolies make scaling new mobile consumer apps nearly impossible
“But the truth is it's going to be really hard to scale another consumer app in the mobile shop. I mean, it's just mature. It's a mature market. And the big players that have a monopoly like Facebook and Twitter are not opening their platforms anymore.”
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 …”
Foody: Twitter perception of Mercor breach was far worse than internal reality
“There was this broad perception on Twitter that was much more exaggerated than what actually happened within the business.”