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 19 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
Founder secondary liquidity enables greater long-term risk-taking
“From my perspective, I think it definitely makes sense because some of these founders, and, you know, myself included, have a lot of their net worth tied up into the company, and people are going after big visions, like, I'm already 12 years into DuckDuckCo, r…”
Digital ad duopoly will persist indefinitely without data monopoly intervention
“I think there needs to be something to be done about the data monopolies that underlie the duopoly. And unless something is done to kind of deconstruct that data monopoly, then this will persist ad infinitum because of the network effects involved.”
Modern tech ad monopolies are stronger than historical tech incumbents
“I think so. The scale of the market, and the way that the kind of advertising auctions and data asymmetry is in place is just much stronger than kind of these previous generations.”
DuckDuckGo evaluates employees on experiment execution rather than direct outcome results
“We don't hold people accountable for results in that way. We hold people accountable for running good experiments, running good projects, running a good postmortem process, which we have for every project.”
Gabriel Weinberg personally drafted Do Not Track legislation in 2019
“We actually spent time, and I personally, drafting a do not track legislation last year, and that's an example of what I think is a very simple but effective mechanism to help address the data monopoly issue, and what that is is, in every browser right now, th…”
Single dominant marketing channels drive most startup growth milestones
“And when you look back at achieving that and like what got you there, it's often one channel really drove the bulk of that. And it just has to do with like effectiveness at any given time. Usually the winning strategy, you often don't have equally effective st…”
Over 90% of consumers express privacy concerns, but only 30% act
“We're seeing 90% plus actual decent education concern rates about basic online privacy things, and about 30% in the U.S. And other major markets are people who have actually tried to take some significant action to protect themselves online.”
Distributed remote work completely negates the Silicon Valley hiring advantage
“Being distributed trumps that completely because your labor pool is the entire world. Which is, there are great people literally everywhere, and if you open yourself up to that possibility and are open to thinking about working with people on different time zo…”
DuckDuckGo became profitable quickly and never spent its venture capital
“We set out to raise money just to give us some buffer, basically. Ended up being that we became profitable pretty quickly and didn't really use any of the money that we ever raised, but it really helped free up the mentality that we could take bigger risks.”
Profitability frees founders to focus on long-term product and growth
“Being profitable really, one opens up a lot of opportunities and takes fundraising risk off the table, but B kind of clears your mind a bit. So like people spend a lot of time focused on budgets and fundraising and all these different things. And when you're p…”
DuckDuckGo has reached approximately 30% brand awareness in major markets
“DuckDuckGo itself has raised its brand awareness to approximately 30% in major markets.”
DuckDuckGo's strict privacy policy prevents the company from tracking standard user metrics
“That said, we're in an interesting position that we can't really track our users. That's our privacy policy. And so we don't have great ways to measure these standard user metrics that other companies do.”
Distributed teams must build formal communication processes at 15 employees
“Now, a lot of those processes get developed as you're a much bigger company and you hear about companies who are 50 to a hundred to a 150 employees kind of breaking down in communication and having to start all over and develop those bigger company processes. …”
DuckDuckGo applies Apple's Directly Responsible Individual framework to every task
“We kind of stole that concept from Apple, this directly responsible individual, but we have gone into it a hundred percent. So everything has an owner from the top objective down to the little task.”
DuckDuckGo conducts postmortems on every project, regardless of success
“So first, we have postmortem for every single project, regardless of if it's successful or not.”
Postmortems on successful projects are often better than on failed ones
“And in fact, postmortems for good projects are often better than bad projects, because on a good project, there's no even tension about, like, blame or anything like that. And people can really open up and say, what could have made this even better?”
Gabriel Weinberg bootstrapped DuckDuckGo for four years before 2011 Series A
“When I started DuckDuckGo, I just had that mentality, and so also bootstrapped that for the first four years, and, you know, really didn't take venture until our series A, which was in 2011, so 11 years into my whole startup career.”