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 10 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
Standard growth playbooks fail on company-specific retention issues
“The tools that you have are probably good to inform 80% of your decision, but there's going to be a situation in which only you can actually come up with the infrastructure And the tooling to understand your problem. You're not going to be able to solve that p…”
Live video is a feature, not a standalone product category
“And we know today that live video is not what we thought it's going to be three, five years ago. It's actually a great feature on top of existing platform that is being used by celebrity media news more often than the next person.”
Meerkat realized live video was unsustainable three months after raising $14M
“Within three months after raising fourteen million dollars from Greylock and other investors, we were like, guys, there's no broadcaster attention in the average person, in the 99% who are not celebs, media and news. And because of this, we cannot build an ind…”
Broadcaster retention is the only sustainable metric for live video platforms
“The only thing that matters, the only thing that is sustainable is broadcaster retention.”
Meerkat's broadcaster retention only existed among celebrities and media
“And one of the things that we saw that we had the privilege to see with millions of people using Meerkat is that the retention for broadcasters Only existed in the celebs, media, and news type of users.”
Synchronous social apps depend on concurrent graph availability
“In a presence product like House Party, the availability of the graph is really key for the successful of the use case. If people are busy when you're available, you can't match with them, you can't talk to them.”
Twitch succeeded by focusing on broadcaster retention from day one
“There is one platform like this. It's called Twitch. Twitch from the get go focused on broadcaster attention.”
Board meetings should be discussion platforms, not decision-making arenas
“I think, obviously, you don't want to surprise your board in stuff like this during the board meeting. I think board meetings are not for, or rarely, or really when she'd hit the fanart to make decision, most of the time, board should be used as discussion pla…”
Peter Fenton gave Ben Rubin a Benchmark credit card to explore ideas
“Basically, Peter Fenton was, hire who you need to hire, start hacking around, there is Benchmark credit card, and I trust you, and like, obviously, this sounds a little bit unfair, because it sounds super casual, but we had a plan of This is the space we're go…”
Ben Rubin failed to bridge early and late-stage cultures at Houseparty
“Bridging between those two cultures of the people you hire as you're iterating and pivoting a lot and to the people you hired after you started the immense growth, it's hard culture to bridge. And I don't think I've done a good job there”