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 47 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 1 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
Lemkin: OpenAI and Anthropic Lied About Books and YouTube Training Data
“Open AI, an anthropic, Kind of lied about the books, and they definitely lied about training on YouTube”
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: AI-generated YouTube videos are utterly disruptive to Netflix
“And as of the last 45 days, you can watch an incredible short on YouTube that was entirely AI generated where you can watch Star Wars stories that are better than the crappy last three movies that are AI generated. That's utterly disruptive to Netflix.”
Slonimski: YouTube and Google Demand Gen Can Beat All Discovery Channels
“Google search is, like, overhyped. The whole demand generation piece of Google is underhyped, and YouTube is a huge part of that. We just started entering YouTube with, like, short-term and long-term videos, and it can become huge. It can beat all discovery ch…”
TikTok Creator Payouts Are Unpredictable Lottery Checks Compared to YouTube
“If you're kind of getting these lottery-type checks, I think it gets much more harder to plan. I think that's a common complaint I've heard about how TikTok's payments compare to YouTube's payments, for instance, which are much more predictable.”
Ian Lee: NFT-Powered Spotify and YouTube Alternatives Will Emerge by 2024
“So good example of this is that I think that like NFT powered commerce in Web three, NFT powered digital media and various kind of social media platforms. That I knew or believed were gonna happen in 10 years or so, I think are now possible in the next two to …”
Shishir Mehrotra argues 13-week quarterly planning is an awkward timeframe
“13 weeks is An awkward planning timeframe. It's not long enough that you can really make long-term bets. It's just too short for that, but it's too long for making commitments.”
Google CFO Patrick Pichette regularly debated divesting YouTube in early meetings
“When I joined YouTube, every press article was, what a big mistake, and every meeting I had with, Patrick was the CFO at the time, and he had just joined Google, every meeting we had was, should we keep this property, or should we get rid of it?”
Ad-Driven Social Platforms Corrupt the Creative Motivations of Young People
“So I really think that that ad model, I'm very concerned for the whole world's creative spirit, especially the Creativity of younger people who've spent their whole lives with YouTube or Instagram or other places like that, other ad-driven platforms as the des…”
Sideman: YouTube removed hundreds of thousands of Syrian war documentation videos
“I'll give you an example that happened this month. YouTube decided to take down hundreds of thousands of videos that documented the war in Syria.”
Calacanis: Standalone Instagram and YouTube would be worth $150B–$200B
“Because they knew if that was an independent company right now, Instagram would be worth seventy five billion dollars. YouTube, I think, would be worth a hundred billion dollars in the open market right now. Those two companies were bought for 1000000001.6 bil…”
Swulinski: YouTube reviews are top citation sources for ChatGPT and AEO
“YouTube reviews, because they're long form, and they rank long tail. They'll essentially beep, they're one of the main things that get picked up by the answer engine. So you'll have your website, PR, external sources talking about you, and one of the biggest, …”
Lemkin: Hollywood entertainment employment is in permanent decline
“The permanent decline of Hollywood. Employment. It's permanently in decline. It's not there. It's on, it's in decline because fewer movies and TV shows are being made. TikToks and YouTubes are doing it, and it's in permanent decline because every other country…”
Owner spent millions on an organic YouTube strategy that drove few leads
“We hired people that manage The YouTube experience for like the biggest creators in the entire world. And we were paying millions of dollars for this organic strategy when it was driving like a handful of leads every single month.”
Gupta: YouTube is the most under-leveraged social platform in the world
“YouTube. That's the most under leveraged social platform in the world. Most under leveraged, even though I think it has the highest number of miles.”
Gonto: Organic product placement in YouTube tutorial builds outperforms dedicated sponsorships
“Instead of paying them to highlight us as the main thing, as the main focus of the video, what they would do is they would build an app. They would build any type of app. And as they were building it, they would use Clerc without mentioning it and without talk…”
Cohen: US YouTube connected TV watch time now exceeds Netflix
“One of our very interesting stats I've noticed more recently was, so in the US, more hours are consumed of YouTube on connected TVs than Netflix.”
Isford: YouTube and community strategies fail to drive enterprise discovery
“If you have an amazing YouTube strategy or community strategy, That will bring in lots of passionate folks who want to give your product a try, but it may not actually be the way to get a large enterprise to discover who you are or to learn what you offer.”
Söderström: Spotify designed its free mobile tier to counter-position YouTube
“We licensed a foreground, a background shuffled here where you can play any playlist you want in shuffle mode in the background forever, but you actually can't play on demand in the foreground. So it turns out that Spotify mobile Works exactly where YouTube mo…”
Apple's original iPhone YouTube app only supported half of YouTube's content
“Apple built the first YouTube app on the iPhone, and they just kept doing it. They kept building the YouTube app, so we actually didn't control the YouTube experience on the iPhone, and over time, it had just fallen out of date. Apple developers couldn't keep …”
YouTube chose experience consistency over comprehensiveness, refusing to link out
“We said, okay, consistency matters more than comprehensiveness, and we had our sort of 10 principles of YouTube, and this was one of them, I think it was number two, and we made our decision. We're not going to link out”
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.”
YouTube faced a $1 billion copyright lawsuit when Google acquired it
“YouTube was facing a billion dollar copyright lawsuit. I mean, it had growing infrastructure costs, and it had very little revenue, all three of which Google was able to help out with quite a bit.”
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 …”
ElevenLabs hired the creator behind their top YouTube search result
“We've actually just hired our first in-house creator, whose only job is to create TikToks, YouTube videos, Instagram shorts, YouTube shorts for 11 Labs, and the way we actually hired this guy is, if you typed in 11 Labs on YouTube, he had the most viewed video…”
Slonimski: Organic Growth Opportunities Lie in Discord, Reddit, and YouTube
“With the rest, I believe the current opportunities lie within communities. Building those communities where the users are. Discord, Reddit, YouTube following.”
Stebbings: Avoiding video podcasting on YouTube was a major strategic mistake
“A good example for me, say, would be I was very much a fan of not doing video. We don't do YouTube. No, we are constrained on audio because we do a lot of shows, but they're very, very good. People don't feel as comfortable on video. The constraint of channel …”
Krieger: Google Gemini benefits significantly from training on YouTube video data
“It's actually clear to me that Gemini benefits from that. Like whenever they have like a good, like video understanding demo, for example, I'm like, well, I, Somebody has like probably the largest repository of video in the world and can likely train on a lot …”
Stebbings: Waiting eight years to launch on YouTube was my biggest failure
“My biggest fail, honestly, is, and this is terrible, is we waited eight years to do YouTube, and that is criminal.”
Shulman: YouTube is More Engaging Than Spotify Based on Ad ARPU
“Like YouTube is more engaging than Spotify as measured by the amount of, you know, the ARPU for ads, for example, right?”
Ohanian: YouTube heavily relies on MrBeast for platform insights
“It's crazy how much YouTube leans on him for insights.”
Hartz dismissed and missed an early investment opportunity in YouTube
“I think of when I was stepping down as CEO of Zoom, Keith and Roloff held a lunch for me in the city, in San Francisco. What was the name of that place? And Keith was talking about this YouTube thing. I was just kind of Burnout of like, you know, it was like a…”
Stebbings: Delaying 20VC's YouTube launch for six years was my biggest mistake
“The biggest strategic mistake that I made was I waited six years to go to video. I thought that actually people felt much less comfortable on video. I felt that they would close up more and we didn't do YouTube for six years as a result.”
Arora: Top tech companies achieve product-market fit for unexpected reasons
“Very rarely is it that your first incarnation of your product has perfect product market fit. That's very rare. You really, you know, if you look at the largest companies today, they were all created for a different reason and they ended up getting product mar…”
Gonto: Dedicated YouTube sponsorship video for Clerc generated zero growth
“We went to find a really known YouTuber and we paid them to do an entire video about us, an entire video about Clark. When we did that, that had literally no effect. That didn't work at all.”
Cohen: Long-form video generates far more investor revenue than short-form TikToks
“You know, it's the long form content where the money is as an investor. You know, you're not going to make much unless you're a very highly influential influencer on TikTok. You're not making much at the moment. YouTube, the big YouTube creators, they make mon…”
YouTube Is the Best Platform for Sustained Creator Revenue Payouts
“YouTube is the best at You know, doing sustained, consistent payouts with their ref share program, because long form video is, I think, a lot more conducive to that.”
Braun Discovered Ariana Grande via a YouTube Cover of Justin Bieber
“She sang a cover of Justin's called die in your arms. I saw it on YouTube and I was like, why is Nickelodeon not signing this girl?”
20VC Abandoned 100,000 Snapchat Followers Due to Declining Engagement
“I invested heavily in Snapchat stories when they were big for business. We gained a 100,000 plus fans there, but with the reducing popularity of the platform for business, The audience declined, and it was no longer worth the investment for me over other platf…”
YouTube set a 2012 target to reach 1 billion daily watch hours
“Basically in 2012, I set a goal for YouTube that we would get to a billion hours a day of watch time by the end of 20 16. It was a four year goal.”
YouTube consumed approximately 20% of global internet bandwidth in 2012
“At the time YouTube accounted for something like 20% of the world's bandwidth. That's at least what the ice piece reported to us.”
Tech insiders called YouTube a dead-end product when Shishir Mehrotra joined
“I mean, joining YouTube at that time, every email I got from everybody, including my parents and phone was, why are you doing this? This is a dead-end product in the dead-end space, even people very close to the industry.”
Yamashita: Shishir Mehrotra excels at intentionally designing organizational culture
“He's such an incredible systems thinker. He just knows how to run an organization, and he obsesses over rituals and basically kind of designs. I think a lot of times, you know, you think about building a product and designing a product, but he also thinks abou…”
Stebbings: Not starting 20VC on YouTube ten years ago was a major regret
“But I should have, when we started 10 years ago, if I'd just done YouTube, way better. That's a big regret for me.”
Seibert: Twitter, Slack, and YouTube originated as completely different products
“Twitter was a podcasting startup. Slack was a game. YouTube was a dating website.”
Lumi's YouTube series paid for itself within months via B2B acquisitions
“It was a matter of months for us. I mean, we, you know, my personal project, the Shipping Things YouTube show, started last March, and by early summer, like June, we could point to specific customers who discovered us via that content, had onboarded, and were …”