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 16 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
Weil: Instagram Stories would have failed with a timid, experimental rollout
“If instead we'd done the timid thing and put it like in the back of a third tab and like, well, if people find it, we'll do a one percent experiment and maybe it'll work. Like it never would have taken off.”
Weil: Directly plopping Snapchat Stories into Instagram would have failed
“But I think if you had just taken stories and like plopped it in the middle of Instagram, it wouldn't have worked.”
US State Department asked Twitter to reschedule maintenance during Arab Spring
“Someone from the State Department reached out, and this is a public story, so I'm not saying anything that can't be said. Someone from the State Department reached out and said, wait, wait, you can't go down at, you know, two a.m. Pacific. That's the middle of…”
Weil: Effective organizations alternate leadership tiers between instigators and harmonizers
“You want alternating skills, just like you were saying, you want alternating skills, and he kind of classified people into, like, you know, are they kind of I'm trying to remember the word he used I don't remember, he had a provocative word for it, but basical…”
Weil passed on investing in former colleagues who built successful startups
“There are a couple of companies that I chose not to invest in because they were founded by people whose work that I just, that, that I worked with and for whatever reason in that environment weren't amazing. And so I made the assumption that that was them, not…”
Weil: Venture capital industry is fifty-fifty on hard work versus hype
“Less hype, more hard work for founders. I think the industry's kind of fifty-fifty there, you know. Some people are in, like, hustling every single day for the right things and helping their portfolio companies, and others are not.”
Weil: Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom is the best product editor
“He's the best editor I've ever seen.”
Weil: Instagram explicitly credited Snapchat when launching Stories
“When we launched stories, the number one thing we made sure to say was like, kudos to Snapchat. You invented this format.”
Kevin Weil: A/B testing is orthogonal to product boldness
“Testing doesn't mean timidity. You can always use the fact that you're testing something and you can run an AB test to test something, 99% and have a one percent hold back. You don't have to test one percent in Australia, right? Testing gives you data. You can…”
Kevin Weil: Qualitative feedback gets lost in large-scale data
“It's really important to have lots of data because data tells you important things. There's no excuse for not knowing data, but I actually really think anecdotal feedback is valuable because a lot of times the anecdotes can get lost in the in the data itself, …”
Weil: Rigid product strategies require product-market fit; early startups pivot frequently
“Like you invest in the early stages in companies and they're going to pivot three times before they find anything. So laying out a strategy and sticking to something, it assumes that you have some degree of product market fit.”
Weil: Scaling leaders must consistently repeat core priorities over presenting new ideas
“And in actuality, especially as your organization grows, it's really important to just say the same things over and over again. And so you got to make sure that those are the right things that you're sticking to the points that really fundamentally matter that…”
Kevin Weil: Scribble rejects investments requiring stacked assumptions for 100x outcome
“So our litmus test is what do you have to believe for this company to be a hundred X their current size or current valuation? And if in the, if it's sort of like, well, you have to believe that this thing, this one thing goes really well, then you can build a …”
Weil: Ron Conway and Benchmark succeeded with opposite investing philosophies
“In the same way you can look at like what Ron Conway has done and what Benchmark has done. They've both been massively successful and their investing philosophies could not be more different.”
Weil: Peter Fenton, David Rosenblatt, and Carl Bass are top board members
“I'll give you three, actually. Peter Fenton, David Rosenblatt, and Carl Bass. Peter and David are on our board at Twitter. Carl's on the board at Planet. Because every single one of them, they are available whenever you need them. They're dedicated. They're ju…”