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
Maples: Selling Twitter Stock at $1B Valuation Was a Mistake
“And so I sold some of my Twitter stock at a billion dollar valuation. I regret that. I, that was a failure of imagination on my part.”
Velez: 15,000 Nubank customers tweeted at Brazil's Central Bank during 2017 crisis
“Monday morning, there were 15,000 customers on Twitter of the Central Bank of Brazil saying, you cannot do this.”
Huber: A large portion of his tweets are created by his team
“A lot of my tweets are made by my team. They're reposts from either my newsletter or, you know, written from a interview like this or something along those lines.”
Huber: Strong Twitter posts are loosely held beliefs
“So what you see on Twitter is me having very strong beliefs, contrarian beliefs, unique viewpoints, but honestly, they're very loosely held.”
Balfour: Twitter daily active users will stay flat at 250M
“Yeah, I chose, they're flat. I think Twitter's flat, two fifty million.”
Feed Products Like Twitter Are Heavily Dominated by Key Creators
“Feeds are very head heavy in general, and so is text. So basically that's to say that you have to assume that Twitter and other feed products in general tend to have most of the content is consumed by a small number, sorry, most of the content consumed is prod…”
Startups can relaunch products 10 times without the public noticing
“The guys on product hunt or Twitter, They don't, right? And you can relearn, like, 10 times. No one will ever notice.”
Wenger: Twitter is hard to kill because it's a network of networks
“I still believe that there's an opportunity today, even after all the damage that has been done both by the prior regime and by the current one, I still think it's not too late because Twitter is Hard to kill. It's a network of networks.”
Weil: Peter Fenton, David Rosenblatt, and Carl Bass are top board members
“I'll give you three, actually. Peter Fenton, David Rosenblatt, and Carl Bass. Peter and David are on our board at Twitter. Carl's on the board at Planet. Because every single one of them, they are available whenever you need them. They're dedicated. They're ju…”
Mullenweg: The web will become weirder and offer users more control
“So my hope in 20, twice having it over the next five years is that the web is a lot more creative, a lot weirder that people have a lot more control over it versus just being another profile on Twitter or Facebook and more fun.”
Beykpour: Leadership should distill product review feedback into written bullet points
“And so one of the things we've started doing and maybe there are better ways of doing it, but this is just like the way we've adjusted doing it is after the pro after we have the live product review, we have a debrief as a leadership team. 15 minute debrief wh…”
Beykpour: Simple projects at Twitter required dozens of cross-functional team members
“Whereas like, if you bring that out to Twitter scale, most projects, even the simplest projects at Twitter could potentially have dozens of people working on them. And then complex projects have hundreds of people, right?”
Lemkin: Most of my top investments lacked blue-chip tech pedigree
“I would say most of my best investments did not, and those have not seen the same level of pre-seed inflation, but they have seen enough that can break the seed model.”
Chennapragada praises Twitter's product momentum and underlying engineering systems
“I changed my mind, actually, about Twitter. Like, I previously, obviously, still liked the product, like, but I felt like, oh my god, if only this could change, and that could change, and I just feel like they're on a roll. I love the product momentum. Part of…”
Johns: Auto-generating usernames increased Twitter signups by 20% to 30% weekly
“And at the time, that meant, gosh, 20, 30% more signups per week, just from a small team of four people implementing a really hacky solution.”
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.”
Harry Stebbings advises new creators to target a narrow Twitter niche
“I also think like focus on a niche in the early days, like find a hundred people who love it and it could be building cohesion between product design teams and customer support teams and just tweet about that, but make them love you.”
Belsky: Twitter persisted with outdated onboarding even as user motives shifted
“You know, Twitter really persisted with making people build their own timelines, even past the moment where people weren't joining Twitter to follow people. They were just joining Twitter for news, and then they were faced with this prospect of having to culti…”
Mac Conwell achieved a 75% response rate cold-DMing VCs on Twitter
“It was like, 70, 75%, because at the end of the day, in the world of venture, we're all happy to meet each other, because everybody's looking for deal flow, right?”
Chris Sacca's second angel investment was a $25,000 check into Twitter
“My second investment was Twitter, and that one was funny because Evan Williams was, I'd already been working with the company and helping him out, but Evan went and circled up investors for the round, and he's like, hey, I've got you down for 25 K, 25 K, good,…”
Mehta: Checking Twitter before bed triggers inadequacy by advertising others' success
“Worst thing you can do is pull out Twitter, like, before you go to bed, like, there's very few things that are worse in your life, and, like, Twitter is just, like, an advertisement of all the people that have done things that you haven't done.”
Stone put 'Seinfeld of the internet' on early Twitter homepage
“When we were doing Twitter, somebody early on said, Twitter is the Seinfeld of the internet. It's a website about nothing, and the first thing I thought was, wow, Seinfeld's a hit show, and I put it as a testimonial on the rotating testimonials I put on the we…”
Trusting your future self creates a safety net for taking risks
“Future biz will get current biz out of whatever jam he's getting himself into. And I guess it was kind of an excuse to do crazy things because I did sort of say out loud that, well, no matter what I do here, if it doesn't work, my future self will figure out h…”
Arlan Hamilton deleted Twitter from her phone due to targeted harassment
“I mean, I had to delete my Twitter app from my phone recently, because I was getting not just trolls who didn't know me, but people who did, who make it their life's goal every day to put me down and to take away from what I'm doing, even though it's so obviou…”
Sharing contrarian opinions on Twitter yields positive user engagement
“There's being mean on Twitter or attacking someone on Twitter, and I think that's very different from taking a principled political stand or just sharing maybe a contrarian opinion. My experience has been, when I do things like that, which I do often. I will g…”
Being good at Twitter is a competitive advantage for startup founders
“Being good at Twitter is a competitive advantage even though it sounds kind of silly. So, you know, a lot of organic growth flows through the conversations taking place on Twitter, and that's largely because that early core customer of a collaboration startup …”
Belsky: Twitter's early onboarding failed newer user cohorts seeking news
“The newest customers of Twitter, it seems just want the news. You know, they just want to see what's going on. And so in some ways, Twitter's onboarding was like the perfect onboarding for maybe a hundred and fifty million people. And then the newest cohort of…”
Elad Gil: Twitter's Valuation Grew Over 10x Following Its Acquisition of MixerLabs
“When I sold my last startup, or my second to last startup to Twitter, we sold in part because we were really excited about Twitter, and we thought we could have a lot of impact there, and I thought my team would be really happy there. But we also sold in part …”
Twitter fell from SeatGeek's top acquisition channel to tenth
“For us, for example, the channel that was our very biggest driver back in 2013, Twitter, mobile acquisition has become probably number 10 on the list right now.”
Twitter embedded SF executives overseas for years during global expansion
“So one of the things I did when we opened international offices was I would send a couple of my folks from my leadership team in San Francisco to open the office and stay there for a One to two years as we built that office out and brought in local leaders and…”
Thau: Abundant capital makes growing companies lazy in prioritization
“Focus and prioritization becomes a big challenge, and I think when you grow very quickly and you are fortunate enough to raise a lot of capital, it can sometimes make you lazy in how you make those hard decisions.”
Openwave could have built Skype or Twitter by diversifying beyond telecom carriers
“If we had taken the time to think carefully about who our customer base should be, you know, we could have built technologies like Skype, like Twitter as opposed to just continuing to build technology, selling to Orange or Singular or Nextel or AT&T, the custo…”
Rowghani: Twitter grew from zero to $2B revenue during his tenure
“And when I left about five years later, we went from no revenue to two billion dollars in revenue.”
Network-connected software is the next major evolution in B2B enterprise
“The thing we saw very early on was in the consumer world, we were all moving to networks. This idea that cloud was going to be about the same applications as we had on our desktop, but delivered through the browser was breaking down and we saw a whole new gene…”
Mark Suster Is the Best VC at Social Media Branding
“You know who I always love is Mark Schuster. He's like, so when we first, first started getting going in, in Twitter, 2008, nine, he was crushing it then. He's now crushing it on Snapchat and doing really interesting stuff.”
Startup org structures break at 30, 75, 150, and 500 employees
“What worked at 30 broke again at, you know, 75, which broke again at 150, which broke again at like 500. So, you're in this kind of constant reorganization of teams and reorganization of principles and alignment and kind of priorities.”
Giphy powers the native GIF buttons inside Twitter, Facebook, and Slack
“We actually power that button. We power the gift button inside of Twitter. We power the gift button in Facebook. We power gifts in Slack.”
No other platform matches Twitter's viral retweet distribution model
“This is a very unique distribution platform where things like retweets and things like that can take a piece of content or information and spread it in a way that no other platform, you know, could do or at the time, certainly, and even today, I don't think ot…”
Twitter had under 250,000 daily active users when Spark Capital invested
“There was less than 250,000 daily active users.”
Elman: Twitter Should Let Users Follow Broad Topics Instead of Accounts
“Most people cannot figure out how to get their Twitter tuned. I call it tuning your Twitter feed in the same way that I have. And so I really think what they can do to make Twitter much, much easier is help people tune it much more broadly.”
Seibert: Crashlytics team tripled at Twitter with only one employee resignation
“Our team had not only has tripled, but only one person has left in that time.”
Seibert: Acquired founders should negotiate 6-to-9-month reporting commitments
“What I would have done in retrospect is sought some commitment to continue to report to that person for X period of time. I don't think it's fair or actually good to say, Hey, I want to indefinitely report to this person. You want to move around as the company…”
Crowdfunding will achieve mass market adoption through simpler second-generation tools
“And our hypothesis is, is that crowdfunding will have a very similar narrative arc to blogging to where, you know, 1213 years ago, blogging was this thing that had a lot of hand waving, had a lot of it was on the tips of you know, journalist tongues of the, yo…”
Going public resets a startup's progress to zero for the founders
“Any company that goes public, it's, it, for the founders, the entrepreneurs, the leaders in that company, for the entire company, it's kind of like it all starts over again. It resets to zero. Now you've got to prove the world that prove the world wrong all ov…”
Shillo: AI messaging will enable direct transactions in Twitter and Messenger
“This technology will, through artificial intelligence, will allow those companies to be able to communicate on those platforms using, ah, transactional cards, which will be really exciting. So you could actually transact right there in Twitter and Facebook Mes…”
Teli: Firm Twitter accounts are ineffective compared to personal VC branding
“A lot of them, so what I see a lot of is like VCs where the firm has a Twitter account, and I don't think that's very effective. Because I think for entrepreneurs, right, your relationship is with the investor, the specific person that you're going to be worki…”
Twitter and Square have no operational or business conflicts
“The good news is the companies are not conflicting in any way, so there's no chance of him having some kind of awkward situation where he feels he's on the fence because he sort of has two different companies to deliver value to.”
Betaworks used Twitter network analysis to identify Product Hunt's Ryan Hoover
“I remember when we first started talking to Ryan from product time, one of the things that we had done was this network analysis with our data. I had sat down with our data scientists and started mapping out the networks of this on Twitter. Because it's so pub…”