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 20 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
Lanzone: Startup with 10k users demanded $150M Yahoo acquisition
“We just came through this period where I swear to God, a company with only 10,000 registered users wanted me to pay one hundred and fifty million dollars for them. A company with 79,000 users want someone to pay five hundred million dollars for them.”
Lanzone: Twitter was my 'white whale' company that got away
“For a long time, you know, Twitter was that company for me. It's always been my white whale. I love the product, but I always felt it could have been a lot more than it was. And so I've, I always, you know, look side-eye at Twitter as the one that, that got aw…”
Lanzone: Standard interview questions signal interviewers don't know what they want
“So I think people hide behind standard interview questions if they don't really know what they're looking for.”
Lanzone: Company values are defined by hires and tolerated behavior
“I truly believe your company values are the people you hire. Like that is 90% of it. It's also, you know, what you accept and condone, what you criticize and don't allow it's, it is.”
Lanzone: Rigidly avoiding doubt prevents leaders from taking enough risks
“I think people who are Can, ah, you know, or go by that. They just won't take risk often enough. And I actually think doubt can inform risk.”
Lanzone: Internet company CEOs should have product management or founder backgrounds
“Not all the time, but usually, you know, it's best for a CEO of an internet company to have been out of product, you know, or being a founder is almost the same thing.”
Lanzone offered to return venture capital after 2008 financial crash
“I accepted money and the crash of 2008 happened two weeks later. I offered to give the money back. And they said, no, just go ahead because some of the best companies can be created in times like this.”
Lanzone: Yahoo reaches 900M MAUs with top ranks across major verticals
“Yahoo is a very different situation. It legitimately has nine hundred million users a month. And those users are coming, you know, in email, we're number two to Gmail. In Yahoo Finance, we're number one by a mile. Yahoo Sports is number two to ESPN. You know, …”
Lanzone: Yahoo is among Apollo's fastest-returning deals ever
“You know, I'm not sure if you've heard this yet, but Yahoo is already one of the fastest returning deals in Apollo history.”
Lanzone: Over 10% of US marriages originate from Tinder
“It's over 10% of all marriages come from Tinder, which is different than its reputation, and I've seen it.”
Lanzone: Taking Yahoo public again is the optimal long-term outcome
“Well, I think the ideal is that we're public company again, that we've spent this time as a private company. And now with the market being very, very different than six months ago, let alone the last 13 years, that we have the ability to retrench Off, you know…”
Lanzone: High-performing teams require domain expertise, EQ, ambition, and passion
“And I really, when I'm hiring people, I really hire for four things. The first is I really want domain experts, right? I do not want people who are faking it till they make it. And if you are an expert, you tend to be able to understand what one looks like. An…”
Lanzone: Tinder neglected consumer-facing feature innovation before his arrival
“Tinder hadn't evolved in quite a long time on the consumer front. They'd done a lot on the business model front. But they had not, you know, you being a big subscriber, but on the consumer feature side, not a ton.”
Lanzone: Visionary prototype videos are the easiest tool to unblock velocity
“And so once you have that, it's really easy to get the company unblocked and moving.”
Lanzone: AOL remains very profitable with strong free cash flow
“This company is also AOL. So we also own AOL, which is still very profitable and does a lot of free cash flow.”
Lanzone: Ask Jeeves was called the 'Apple of search' during turnaround
“We were later called the apple of search, believe it or not, by people in the search industry and just being really proud of that turnaround and what we were able to accomplish there.”
Lanzone: Ask Jeeves' Q&A box showed 90% of time, clicked 25%
“It was a question and answer product that was essentially manual. And it showed up at the top of the page, 90% of the time in how we looked at the data. It was only clicked on 25% of the time.”
Lanzone: CBS Interactive funded streaming via CNET revenue 5 years before Disney+
“At CBS Interactive, we ran a portfolio of brands, and we did it by turning around CNET, which was a public company acquired by CBS, and really goosing revenue on CNET to pay for the subscription opportunity that we saw in streaming. And again, this is 20 11, 1…”
Lanzone: Ask Jeeves valuation fell from $10 billion to $100 million
“When I got to ask, there were, it was post nine, 11, there were rolling blackouts in California. People were taking sodas from the machine home at night. They had gone from, you know, a ten billion dollar valuation to a hundred million dollar valuation.”