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 12 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
Uber built its initial Atlanta driver supply by cold-calling Yelp listings
“When we went into the initial market, we got a Yelp list of all the drivers in the city and sort of like called through and trying to get them to sign up with Uber and, you know, got our initial list of drivers that way and launched a few weeks later with some…”
Tavel: Traditional 5-star rating systems like Yelp have lost their signal
“The cliche is that everything on Yelp is three and a half to four stars. And so the signal has kind of gone away.”
Lerner: Incubating zero-to-one products in legacy orgs reduces success
“One of the things that I have seen myself and with companies that I advise is if you're trying to do true zero to one inside of a later stage company and like find your next horizon, trying to do it inside of the sort of legacy product product org vastly reduc…”
Wilkinson: Google Maps blew Yelp out of the water using Android
“Turns out with Google, having Android and Google Maps, they can just ask every single person on earth how the restaurant was that they went to last night, because they know that they'd visited it via Google Maps, and suddenly Google Maps has better data and bl…”
Strategic Minority Investments Function as Slow-Motion M&A
“I view it as what I call slow motion M&A, and the idea is you're acquiring a piece of the company during the investment, and during that process, you're doing the normal diligence that you would if you were going ahead and making an investment.”
Yelp Only Makes Venture Investments in Startups It Intends to Acquire
“We wouldn't have made the investment had we not been interested in a Acquiring the company, but this really allowed us to test a lot of our theories related to the product experience and also just integration of the technologies and basically making sure every…”
Unattached VCs Build Credibility and Value During M&A Negotiations
“If the VCs can kind of step in as a more seasoned, maybe less emotionally attached person, Player at the table to really help get to those truths and understanding earlier, it can be really beneficial for the shareholders of the company that's being acquired b…”
Acquired Team Enthusiasm for an Acquirer Only Diminishes After Closing
“If you don't genuinely see that alignment and enthusiasm, it won't be as great as it is before you write them the check, right? So you have to make sure that it's Truly and sincerely there, because it will probably only diminish.”
Running Three to Five Concurrent Acquisition Dialogues Yields Better Outcomes
“You can get three to five meaningful dialogues going on at the same time, and that's almost certain to lead to a better outcome for you and your investors than just having the dialogue with one company.”
Partnerships Replace Speculative M&A Valuation Models With Actual Operational Data
“And the models that you build during M&A inherently have a lot of made-up numbers in them, but once you have worked with someone in a partnership, you're replacing a lot of the guesswork with real actual numbers based on a live implementation, which helps in a…”
Lemkin: Yelp's valuation is down 47% this year to $1.2 billion
“Yelp's down to 1.2 billion dollar valuation. I mean, Jeremy's young, but it's been what? 20 something years, right? And it's down 47% this year to almost just over a billion.”
Yelp sold Eat24 to Grubhub for double its acquisition price
“Now we bought a company called eat 24 is a food delivery startup. And so I kind of got dropped in to be had a product for that subsidiary helped grow that business. This wasn't our original intent, but we actually sold it to Grubhub just about two years later …”