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 71 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 3 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
Schultz Reveals the Primary User Retention Drivers for Meta and eBay
“So for Facebook, it's friending. The whole thing's about friends. For WhatsApp, it's about sending a message to somebody. You know, for Instagram, it's still following. And for eBay, it was placing a bid or buying an item.”
Schultz: TikTok Is Focusing Heavily on Messaging and Friend Graphs
“You look at TikTok and what they're doing right now. They're focusing very heavily on messaging. They're focusing very heavily on friend graph.”
Schultz: Facebook Lost Messaging Market Share to WhatsApp During Mobile Transition
“We were actually losing market share because the web was declining. Faster than mobile was growing for us, and then WhatsApp and iMessage and all of these things were coming along, and actually the shift of platforms meant even though we were growing mobile me…”
Schultz: Big Strategic Tech Bets Cannot Be Decided by Data Alone
“In startup mode, you actually have to take a lot more bets without certain data. As a mature company, there are some massive bets you should make. Reels, virtual reality, where it turns out you're going to take a big risk to do that bet, but it's the right thi…”
Schultz: KakaoStory Launched a Stories Feature Before Snapchat
“But by the way, cacao stories launched before Snapchat stories launched.”
Schultz: Meta Is Past the Catch-Up Phase With Reels
“I think we've got a bunch of stuff now where we're starting to innovate. I can't really talk about it, but I think like we, we're in, we're through the catch up phase and now we're in the competing on innovation on this particular format.”
Schultz: Analytics Is Fundamentally an Influence Role
“Analytics is mostly an influence role. You need to analyze stuff and people need to believe you and then take action on what you say.”
Schultz: Changing 'Advertise' to 'Create an Ad' Boosted Growth by 40%
“Instead of advertise, when we translated it to French, we said, create an ad. And in France, we had a much larger rate of advertiser growth, like really much rather a larger rate, like 30, 40%. We were doing an analytics test with a vendor, and they found that…”
Schultz: Meta Jumped From 49th to 4th in PwC Future Potential Rankings
“Pricewaterhouse releases this report every year, and we've gone from, like, 49 to fourth.”
Schultz: Teams Should Change Goals and Metrics Very Infrequently
“You should change your goals and your metrics very infrequently. You should know what their flaws are, you should know what their drawbacks are, but you should aspire to not change them very often.”
Schultz: I Am Always the Only Openly Gay Person on My Boards
“In the senior teams I'm on, in the boards I've served on, like, I'm always the only gay guy.”
Schultz: Coming Out Forces Loved Ones to Mourn Their Envisioned Future
“When you come out, everyone around you has to mourn their version of your future.”
Alex Schultz: Mark Zuckerberg's defining superpower is continuous learning
“He listens in meetings more than he talks by a lot. He asks smart people to give him input before he makes decisions. He goes out and spends an awful lot of time learning. I think his superpower is learning.”
Alex Schultz: WhatsApp is Meta's most successful consumer AI integration
“Oh, the WhatsApp one's really good... It's the most successful integration we've got.”
Schultz: Reels Succeeded Only After Multiple Failed Iterations
“We wouldn't be here if we hadn't iterated two or three times.”
Schultz Says eBay Was Run by Consultants During His Tenure
“And how to put together a very good deck, because it was run by consultants.”
Schultz: Unbundling Messenger Caused an Initial Usage Dip Before Major Growth
“The first countries we did it in were Portugal, I think, and Romania, and we saw a tremendous increase in usage. Initially, there was a dip in usage, and then we saw a rebound and a tremendous increase because people had the expectation they'd get an instant r…”
Schultz Crashed His Car Due to Anxiety Over Layering an Employee
“I had to tell someone I was layering them, and I crashed my car on the way into work because I was so worried about the conversation. I still had the conversation.”
Schultz: Meta Holds Weekly Cross-App Analytics Reviews With Product VPs
“We then do reviews with the VPs, the product group leaders across the company every week, where we show Interesting insights from analytics, like every single week we do this.”
Schultz: Unaddressed Metric Flaws Lead to Goodhart's Law
“There are flaws at every step of the way and if you don't acknowledge and understand the flaws, you will succumb to good arts law, where it's not a good measure anymore.”
Schultz: Facebook Pioneered MAU Metrics When Competitors Tracked Registered Users
“Meta, back when it was Facebook, innovated by moving from activated confirmed registered users to monthly active users. And no one talked about that before. They were still talking about their registered user base back then. That's what MySpace talked about.”
Schultz Recalls Difficulties Being Closeted Early in Career at eBay
“It wasn't, I wasn't out. So it was very hard.”
Schultz Sponsored LGBTQ+ Features and Serves as Meta's Pride ERG Sponsor
“Now obviously I've done lots of stuff with, whether it's the rainbow filter or whether it's same-sex relationships on the product or, you know, other gender options or various things where I've helped sponsor that happening in our product because of the commun…”