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 15 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
Cryptocurrencies can enable a post-capital and post-corporation world
“Now I got involved with cryptocurrencies and Bitcoin early, and then I thought I was Too early, and maybe it wasn't going to happen, and now I'm completely drinking the Kool-Aid, and I'm completely enthralled by just the potential of cryptocurrencies to get us…”
Mark Pincus prefers hiring humble, hungry candidates with 'broken resumes'
“I like to hire people who have what I call broken resumes. So someone who has seen greatness, touched greatness, come close to greatness, but then fallen because things just didn't work out. I find that those people are more humble and curious and more hungry.”
Founders lying about valuation and VCs about control are fundraising's biggest lies
“The two biggest lies around startups are founders saying, I don't care about the valuation and investors saying, you know, we don't care about control.”
Startup success requires testing more ideas weekly than competitors
“In four years, I can't think of how many more I could have tried, and that lesson was burned into me, and I think so much of success today is starting with a winning instinct, but then testing more good ideas, In a week than the rest of the industry does.”
Mark Pincus and Reid Hoffman provided Friendster's initial funding
“Reid Hoffman and I got excited about that. We both kind of at the same time discovered Friendster and put up the original money for Friendster, and both started our own networks, LinkedIn and Tribe.”
Mobile distribution is bigger than ever, but lacks easy viral paths
“The distribution is there bigger than ever, but there are not easy proven paths that people can follow”
Greater success causes leaders and teams to become risk-averse
“The more successful you get, the more risk averse everyone gets”
Zynga purchased its corporate headquarters despite non-obvious deal economics
“The company bought our headquarters, and Bing has been a big proponent of that, and every time that we were making the purchase, the economics were not obvious.”
Strict leadership profiles restrict company diversity and DNA
“As soon as you have a spec for who's the kind of leader person, you're kind of doomed because you're going to kind of be narrowing your DNA and not expanding your DNA.”
Early Zynga succeeded by aligning investors around never selling
“One of the ingredients that I think was really key to making Zynga successful in the early days was alignment. And we had such powerful alignment between the investors, first the CEO and founder vision, and not just vision for the product or company, but the v…”
Mark Pincus pitched Zynga by listing ten reasons not to invest
“I started off by saying to investors, let me tell you the top 10 reasons you're not going to want to back us. And if you still want to talk after that, we will, but then we won't waste time. And 95% of investors thanked me and said, I don't want to meet.”
Zynga withheld financial metrics from investors until late in fundraising
“I refused to share anything about our financials until kind of very, very late in the process, and I just said, you'll have surprise and delight at our financials, but I don't want you to invest because of them.”
Mark Pincus missed investing in Square because he thought he was too busy
“I don't know that it was offered to me, but Square, when Jack Dorsey was walking out in the hallways at a conference with a dongle, and I thought I was too busy.”
Mark Pincus was an early investor in Napster
“In 2002 and 2003, a few of us started getting together and really thinking about the potential for a people web, a web that was about people connections and not page connections and something that in really building off of Napster, which I was a first investor…”
Mark Pincus spent four years stubbornly pursuing a failed iteration of Tribe
“The most failing idea was try. I stubbornly stuck with one iteration on a social network for four years, and I got it so wrong. It's so painful to me to think that I tried one iteration of this, and it was clearly wrong, and I just stuck with it, and I could h…”