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
Twitter's board failed to find a better CEO than Jack Dorsey
“There was a committee of the board that was trying to find somebody else, and they weren't able to find anyone better than Jack.”
Twitter suffered shrinking users, brain drain, and zero profit before 2017
“The company was not doing well. I mean, sort of ethically, it was the company itself was shrinking. It was a, there was a brain drain and there was also the user base was shrinking. There wasn't revenue or profit. And nobody felt like Twitter was a special pla…”
UK VCs are excessively risk-averse compared to US investors
“I do feel in general, there's kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy happening there where VCs don't really want to take that much of a risk. And so contrary to what it's like in the States, I feel like they often will offer something like a hundred or 200,000 in …”
Founders shouldn't start a company without a 10-year commitment
“Unless you want to work on something for 10 years, at least, I don't think you should make a start about it, because it just means you don't have what it's going to take when everything's going really badly, and you're not going to want to see it through.”
Suppressing personal identity at work creates a soulless company culture
“I think it would be kind of soulless if everyone just said, I'm going to bring half myself to work and it's going to be the political side and I'm not going to share any of this or that.”
Stone spent six months unwittingly hurting morale upon returning to Twitter
“I kind of barged in like a bull in a china shop. I was advised that, you know, you're under a magnifying glass. You should really you know, be careful. And I thought to myself, oh yeah, I know what that's like. Don't worry about me. Yeah. We've been in under a…”
Stone's angel investment in Square yielded a 1,000x return
“Oh, that would probably be square because it's something like a thousand X return or something.”
Prioritizing great collaborators over venture safety consistently pays off
“When I found somebody that I enjoyed working with and liked as a person, I stayed with them, no matter how risky it was, and that was paying off.”
Stone put 'Seinfeld of the internet' on early Twitter homepage
“When we were doing Twitter, somebody early on said, Twitter is the Seinfeld of the internet. It's a website about nothing, and the first thing I thought was, wow, Seinfeld's a hit show, and I put it as a testimonial on the rotating testimonials I put on the we…”
Trusting your future self creates a safety net for taking risks
“Future biz will get current biz out of whatever jam he's getting himself into. And I guess it was kind of an excuse to do crazy things because I did sort of say out loud that, well, no matter what I do here, if it doesn't work, my future self will figure out h…”
Dorsey and Stone established Twitter's purpose as serving the public conversation
“What I did when I came in is, is Jack and I hammered out a purpose statement for Twitter. The answer to the question, why do we exist? Because before that, if we asked around at the company, you know, what's the purpose of Twitter's existence? People would say…”
Stone resumed self-managing investments after advisors sold an early holding
“I made one error of judgment because when I started to get some wealth, I hired advisors, and I thought, well, the advisors know what they're doing, so I'll let them be in charge of my investments too. And then their thinking was, okay, well, this is X would s…”