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 32 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 2 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
Amazon and Alibaba will lose top e-commerce positions within 10 years
“I think in 10 years from now, Amazon and Alibaba will not be the biggest e-commerce companies anymore. They will get disrupted by other companies, younger companies, more creative, more agile companies, and I think people will look back at Amazon and Alibaba l…”
Reyes: OpenAI and Anthropic are currently in the Netscape and Yahoo era
“We are probably in like the Yahoo era where we don't actually have, or at least widely recognize The Googles of the world, or like the sort of the thing that comes after. And so today, when I look at OpenAI and Anthropic, there are, I think, more analogies to …”
Mullenweg: Tumblr was mismanaged by Yahoo, AOL, and Verizon
“It had been mismanaged, I think under Yahoo and AWOL and Verizon, and we felt like we could turn it around.”
Former Yahoo executive Marvin Liao predicts the company is 'toast'
“If I'm honest, I think they're probably toast. It's a one point O company in a three point O world. I just, I'm very skeptical. And this isn't anything against Marissa, but I just think it's just, it was such a mess when I left and I probably take some credit …”
Grimm: Defense will never be a venture-style winner-take-all market
“I don't think there will ever be a kind of venture style dynamic of a winner take all. I don't think this is a situation of like Google versus Yahoo where, where one is the obvious dominant winner by 10 X and then there's the other rands. I don't think that's …”
Reses: Yahoo Earned $50 Billion Through Renegotiated Alibaba Deal
“It probably generated fifty billion dollars worth of economics to Yahoo shareholders”
Lanzone: Startup with 10k users demanded $150M Yahoo acquisition
“We just came through this period where I swear to God, a company with only 10,000 registered users wanted me to pay one hundred and fifty million dollars for them. A company with 79,000 users want someone to pay five hundred million dollars for them.”
Wenzel: Delivery fees in quick commerce are an obsolete concept like 90s Yahoo
“Look, I think delivery fees are a little bit of concept of the past, right? It sounds a little bit like Yahoo in the nineties.”
Eric Hippeau: Yahoo must sell itself to better management
“No, Yahoo is not game over, and Yahoo needs, needs probably needs to sell itself to people who can manage it better and Yahoo has an enormous amount of assets namely, it's taken Alibaba, it's taken Yahoo Japan, and its own its own own and operated website whic…”
Reses: Underdog Company Alumni Make Grittier Hires Than Top-Tier Tech Employees
“Anyone who went to Yahoo was grittier than a lot of the people who worked at higher profile companies that were just minting money, and when you came to Yahoo, you had to work a little harder, and so I find places like that are incredible places to go higher, …”
Lanzone: Taking Yahoo public again is the optimal long-term outcome
“Well, I think the ideal is that we're public company again, that we've spent this time as a private company. And now with the market being very, very different than six months ago, let alone the last 13 years, that we have the ability to retrench Off, you know…”
Lanzone: Yahoo reaches 900M MAUs with top ranks across major verticals
“Yahoo is a very different situation. It legitimately has nine hundred million users a month. And those users are coming, you know, in email, we're number two to Gmail. In Yahoo Finance, we're number one by a mile. Yahoo Sports is number two to ESPN. You know, …”
Lanzone: Yahoo is among Apollo's fastest-returning deals ever
“You know, I'm not sure if you've heard this yet, but Yahoo is already one of the fastest returning deals in Apollo history.”
Direct online demand marketing wastes capital for early marketplaces
“When generating early demand, one of the more counterintuitive learnings Is that early marketplace demands are dependent on an existing distribution and offline activities. Like for house, for example, you mentioned early health on Tulia was invaluable. And I …”
Tung: Western tech companies must enter China via local strategic partners
“We think that a way to go to China is not necessarily to do it yourself, but find a strategic partner in the same way that Yahoo found Alibaba, and that's the right model. So it's not an issue of market. It's an issue of entry model in China.”
Currier: Yahoo grew massive primarily due to its brand name over technology
“An example would be, I mean, certainly in naming, you watch a company like Yahoo you know, 20 years ago, they had such an incredible name that was different from every other company's name, and so the press wanted to talk about them all the time. The consumers…”
Ramaswamy: Google Succeeded Early Because AOL and Yahoo Neglected Search
“Yahoo and AOL. Early on. Those were the entry points. AOL didn't know how to do a search. Yahoo didn't think search was important.”
Wang: Disregarding Google at Stanford taught me not to underestimate disruption
“Probably not taking Google more seriously. So I was at Stanford at the time of its founding. I was even a section leader for Marissa Mayer for a computer science class where she was a lecturer. And so I heard about it from her too. And I just thought to myself…”
Lanzone: AOL remains very profitable with strong free cash flow
“This company is also AOL. So we also own AOL, which is still very profitable and does a lot of free cash flow.”
Lanzone: High-performing teams require domain expertise, EQ, ambition, and passion
“And I really, when I'm hiring people, I really hire for four things. The first is I really want domain experts, right? I do not want people who are faking it till they make it. And if you are an expert, you tend to be able to understand what one looks like. An…”
LinkExchange received a $125 million acquisition term sheet from Yahoo
“We received a term sheet from Yahoo for them to acquire my company. It was a hundred and twenty five million dollar acquisition”
Hans Tung: Today's crypto movement mirrors the 1993 Netscape internet boom
“Seeing some of my classmates end up going to Yahoo, end up going to Netscape, end up going to some other internet startups, It's kind of like what you see with crypto today, and you just see, wow, anything's possible”
DFJ made three search engine investments before Google was even funded
“DFJ had already made three investments in search companies prior to Google even being funded. One of those was GoTo, which ended up was Overture, which was acquired by Yahoo, which was, at the time, viewed as an amazing success.”
Josh Koppelman ran Facebook ads targeting Yahoo employees during 2008 takeover
“Josh Koppelman, who had just started First Round Capital, had decided when he saw the news of the takeover attempt, he wanted to see if there's anyone at Yahoo who is sort of loose in the saddle and maybe thinking about joining a startup or starting a company.…”
Yahoo will not survive as an independent company for much longer
“It was Yahoo and still around, not for long though”
LiveBid amassed $100M in inventory before acquisition interest from Amazon and eBay
“And in about a year we're able to amass close to a hundred million dollars in inventory that was, you know, being offered through auction through our website, which at the time was quite a bit, and we then had, had interest from eBay, Yahoo, and Amazon for acq…”
Khan: Alibaba raised $8B to buy back 20% stake from Yahoo
“We bought back the share and then we had to go raise the money, raise the eight billion dollar to buy back that 20% stake.”
Tunguz: Google AdSense was neck-and-neck with Yahoo in early 2005
“Early 2005, we were neck and neck with Yahoo, which was the big competitor trying to run ads on other people's websites.”
Tunguz: How Google used its search index to track Yahoo's ad share
“He and I built a tool using the Google search index to figure out exactly where Yahoo ads were running, where Google ads were running, and basically every day we could tell you exactly what the competitive market share would be.”
SoftBank Owned a Third of Yahoo at Its IPO
“SoftBank then ended up owning, as you'll recall a third of Yahoo at the IPO.”
Yahoo acquired Summly primarily to acquihire its core technical talent
“Yahoo was specifically after the technical people in the company. So, you know, they took the CTO, they took the head of the algorithm, they took Nick.”
Summly's three-week integration into Yahoo News Digest set a company speed record
“Within, I think it was within three weeks of the acquisition being announced, Summly had been included within Yahoo News Digest, which is their mobile app product, and that, I still think, is the record within Yahoo for the quickest integration ever.”