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
Chen: Truly important tech news reaches founders without daily Twitter monitoring
“So every now and then, if something is important enough, like maybe there's some big new product is actually really cool, or there's some really, really interesting new research paper. It'll be like big enough that even though I'm not monitoring Twitter every …”
Stebbings Personally DM'd His First 50,000 Twitter Followers to Drive Subscriptions
“For the first 50,000 Twitter followers I got, I personally DM'd everyone, and I suggested that they follow our newsletter as well.”
Maples: Floodgate returned 300x on Twitter, 205x on Lyft, 94x on Twitch
“Twitter was a little over 300 X and gets all the credit for Lyft, that was like about two, 205 X what else? Applied. Applied is probably encroaching on a hundred X in the first check. Twitch got close, but not quite there. It got to 94 X.”
Siroker: Back founders excited about smaller problems rather than social trends
“In some ways, actually, you kind of want to choose founders who are excited about smaller problems, because it tells you that they're not just falling in love with what they saw on Twitter or social media, that there's actually something they care about.”
Huber: Twitter persona is deliberately more extreme than his actual views
“I'm a lot more nuanced. I'm a lot more moderate on so many different opinions, but look, that is not how you build a brand.”
Balfour: Twitter is the most vulnerable incumbent tech platform right now
“Well, I mean, it's hard to not say Twitter right now from a vulnerability perspective.”
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…”
Wenger: TikTok, Twitter, and Facebook must be user-programmable
“I don't feel different about TikTok than I feel about Twitter or Facebook for that matter. These systems need to become programmable. If they're not programmable, we're being programmed by them.”
Wenger: Twitter's blue checkmark system erred by mixing identity with status
“Because the blue checkmark, it completely confounded two things. It confounded the identity thing with the importance thing, and the importance thing, I think, was complete BS, always. Like who's supposed to say who's important, who's not important. It should …”
Lemkin: VCs boasting about high deal volume on Twitter are dishonest
“I do think it's harder to find good deals, and I think it is true, and I think people are a little bit full of it on the Twitter, right, and on the social media”
Kuusi: Twitter adds very little value to building a company
“I've noticed Twitter adds very little value in company building, unfortunately.”
Shah: Large VCs are too slow for seed deals despite Twitter claims
“And also like these funds are really big and slow. So they're not going to be able to like move and prosecute the things in the same way that they say on Twitter.”
US State Department asked Twitter to reschedule maintenance during Arab Spring
“Someone from the State Department reached out, and this is a public story, so I'm not saying anything that can't be said. Someone from the State Department reached out and said, wait, wait, you can't go down at, you know, two a.m. Pacific. That's the middle of…”
Wolfe Herd: Vocal Twitter critics rarely represent a product's majority user base
“Usually the most vocal people are not the masses. So you get like the Twitter people who are like, you screwed this up and you have to do this way and you need to do it that way. But then when you actually run the deeper analysis, there's like three people tha…”
Bijan Sabet's Twitter Series B Catapulted Spark Capital Into Top Tier
“As I was joining Spark, Bijan Sabat at Spark led Twitter series B and that investment catapulted us into the upper echelon of VC firms.”
Gary Vee invested his entire 20s savings into Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr
“Saving my money in my twenties And then deciding to spend all of it in a one year period on Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr based on at that .10 years of very hard work, diligence of saving and not wasting my money and looking for the opportunity to strike.”
Twitter Auto-Generated Username Test Increased Weekly Signups by 70,000
“And what ended up happening is we started to get 70,000 more signups per week because the solution we implemented was a good enough solution to work. And at the time that meant like, gosh, 20, 30% more signups per week, just from a small team of four people im…”
First Round passed on Twitter over a $20M valuation limit
“Yeah, I think we might have been fortunate back in those days to have made a really poor investment decision, missed one of our biggest of all time, with Twitter. When we were all early users, we had an opportunity to invest at first round, and didn't, primari…”
Stone spent six months unwittingly hurting morale upon returning to Twitter
“I kind of barged in like a bull in a china shop. I was advised that, you know, you're under a magnifying glass. You should really you know, be careful. And I thought to myself, oh yeah, I know what that's like. Don't worry about me. Yeah. We've been in under a…”
Best: Engagement algorithms cannot solve clickbait through additional moderation rules
“If your underlying algorithm is maximizing for engagement, you're not going to be able to, like, turn up the, like, don't make bad content dial in the algorithm and have, like, a permanent fix for that.”
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…”
Meir: Disagreeing with Twitter consensus usually means you are right
“So first I would say if people on Twitter would disagree with you, you're probably right.”
Kutcher sources deals by asking Twitter followers for home screen screenshots
“And I've actually like solicited my entire Twitter audience at times. Like, Hey, can you send me a snapshot of your home screen? I'd like to see what you're using, you know? And then I just run pattern recognition across thousands or hundreds of home screens. …”
Vlad Magdalin: Users will build full software products on Webflow within five years
“So I can imagine five years from now, people building the next, not just MVPs, but entire software products on top of Webflow, like the next Airbnb, whatever that idea is, the next Twitter, the next product hunt, all of it.”
Major Social Platforms Intimidate Everyday People From Sharing Creative Work
“Today's dominant platforms, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, they don't really offer a path for folks like that. Folks like that feel like, oh, I'm embarrassed. I'm not going to post my thing on Instagram. Like, no one's going to like it.”
Scrolling Twitter for 20 Minutes Leaves Users Feeling Worse
“Whereas, I know me personally, if I spend 20 minutes scrolling through Twitter, I come out of the end of that experience just feeling worse, worse about myself, worse about the world. I do feel all the more compelled to look at Twitter again, because it's very…”
Thau: Facebook lacks Twitter's strong brand persona
“Even a product like Facebook is one of the most impressive companies and products of all time. It doesn't really have as much of a brand persona as a Twitter does, and I think it's because of all those little, little things.”
Thau: No competitor has come close to disrupting Twitter's core use case
“And it's amazing to me that over all these years, they still own that use case. No one's even come close to disrupting them for the Twitter use case.”
Goldberg: VCs should accept business plans sent via Twitter DMs
“And if people DM you or try to DM you or at you on Twitter and want to send you a business plan, say yes. You know, it's not that hard.”
Armstrong: Scaling YouTube or Twitter was harder than scaling Bitcoin or Ethereum
“I don't think, like, Bitcoin or Ethereum is on the order of magnitude of that heart of a problem. Like, I think scaling YouTube was probably way harder, or scaling Twitter or something like that was probably way harder than the kind of things we need to do to …”
USV's 2004 Fund Had Four Investments Each Return the Full Fund
“We made investments in Zynga, Twitter, Indeed, and Etsy within about a six month period. In our 2004 fund, each of those returned the fund.”
Hyatt: Spark's Biggest Wins Like Twitter Were Impossible to Model Initially
“If you look at all of our big wins from Oculus to Twitter to Tumblr to Cruise, like all of these companies were, at the day that we invested, were very hard to actually model the exact market size of that company,”
Digital Publications Waste Great Reporters on Trending Twitter Stories
“So many other publications are having their great reporters spend their time on less than great stories. Again, on these stories that are real-time, regurgitation, written because, you know, they're trending on Twitter, and God forbid a publication doesn't hav…”
Elman reveals he was kicked out of Twitter during product restructuring
“And then, you know, I honestly got kicked out of Twitter. You know, I in some of the turmoil of Twitter, they were restructuring the product team and asked me not to go to work the next day.”
Hoover doubts a single person can run Twitter and Square simultaneously
“I don't know how he can do it. I don't know. I just don't know how anyone can run two companies, especially two massive prominent companies as a single person.”
Twitter Provides Smarter Sports Analysis Than Mainstream ESPN Commentary
“There's a lot of great content on Twitter, and about Pro football and sports in general, and as someone who's very into Twitter, it's easy for me to curate you know, a timeline or lists of people who have smart things to say about football beyond the kind of b…”
O'Driscoll: Real social media engagement remains on X rather than Threads
“As three inveterate Twitter junkies here, we know what the action is, and it ain't on threads, okay?”
Jerry Murdock: Twitter had 30 employees and zero revenue when Insight invested
“When I invested in Twitter in 2009 there was 30 something people, no revenue.”
ElevenLabs co-founder Mati Staniszewski avoids Twitter in favor of in-person keynotes
“The way we think about it at 11 Labs, it's like, what channels really naturally resonate with the founders, and do they get really excited by? And so for us, Matty is fantastic in person, at large speaking events, at Fireside Chats, and so that's what he reall…”
Chen: Optimizing ML models for clicks creates negative content feedback loops
“Once you optimize for clicks, the most click-baity content starts rising up to the top. You get lots of racy content, lots of girls in bikinis, lots of listicles about 10 horrifying skin diseases, and so on.”
Aschebrook began investing by buying stock from Jack Ma's family office
“I just started buying Twitter shares and Alibaba stock from Jack Ma's family office, and then holy shit, it worked.”
Yamashita: Dylan Field mapped design Twitter graphs to recruit early users
“One of the first things he did was he took design Twitter, he visualized it as a graph, and then figured out which people designers are following the most, and then went to those designers to get feedback on Figma and get them excited about Figma. And that was…”
Gupta: Crypto growth relies on Discord and Reddit over Meta and Search
“Crypto lives and breathes and grows on social. So the people that I will find on Discord or Reddit and Twitter are very different from the people I will find on Meta and Instagram and or Search.”
Garcia: Stock surges are cheap dopamine; true satisfaction requires difficult battles
“There's superficial happiness and there's deep happiness. There's cheap dopamine and there's expensive dopamine. You know, stock goes up, cheap dopamine, you know, like jump on Twitter, read that you're smart, you know you know, cheap dopamine. Then there's li…”
Benioff: I Would Not Have Enjoyed Owning Twitter
“And I guess in a lot of ways I'm happy I didn't because I don't think I could, I would have enjoyed that part of it at all.”
Cahn Used Personalized Cameo Videos to Get Founders' Attention Early On
“One thing I used to do is I went through this phase where every time I met a founder that I really liked, I would go through their Twitter. I'd figure out something they really liked, let's say some TV show, and then I'd go in cameo and I would find the actres…”
Seibert: Tech companies are locking down data, reversing 20 years of open APIs
“You're seeing Reddit, Twitter, et cetera, shut off APIs, put in more strict rate limits, et cetera. And so the whole world is starting to lock down data, which was counter to the trends over the past 20 years, when everything was being pushed more and more ope…”
Seibert: Designing software features for the average user is a mistake
“So the product managers who were super data-driven started designing and building features for the average user, because that's what the data told them. And they actually believed that there was something such as an average Twitter user. It's such a huge mista…”