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
Buchheit: Top founders like Page and Zuckerberg possess extreme, non-ordinary conviction
“One of the things that really strikes me about both Larry Page and Mark and, you know, a lot of the YC founders like Patrick Collison or founders of Airbnb is they just have a level of conviction that I think ordinary humans just don't have. They believe in th…”
Buchheit: Twitter's incentive structure rewards attacking others and makes users worse people
“The incentive structures are a Twitter. You can score a lot of points by attacking someone, calling someone out, you know, starting a war essentially, but if you put something kind of insightful or kind up, you're not going to get a lot of points, and so if yo…”
Buchheit: Building early Gmail entirely in JavaScript was highly controversial at Google
“Again, with like Gmail early on, one of the most internally controversial decisions that we had made was to build the whole thing in JavaScript. And I had lots and lots of people tell me that it was never going to work, that it had been tried before, that, you…”
Buchheit: Friendster failed by prioritizing an impossible six-degrees-of-separation feature
“Friendster, but they could have been maybe Facebook, but they got fixated on this idea that when you browse through profiles, it had to show you kind of the six degrees of separation between you and this person, and so that feature, it turns out, is sort of co…”
Buchheit: Venture investors are not adventurous enough with biotech and hardware
“You know, I think one of the most frustrating things is that the companies that get the most funding aren't the companies I wish got the most funding. I work with a lot of really interesting, like biotech companies, people working on some really interesting pr…”
Buchheit: FriendFeed created and launched the original social media 'like' button
“FriendFeed actually created the like button. We launched that 10 years ago this month.”
Buchheit: Gmail launched with a core team of only twelve people
“Even by the time we launched core Gmail team was probably only about a dozen people.”
Buchheit: The initial prototype of Gmail was built in a single day
“So the most extreme case of this might be that the very first version of Gmail, arguably, I wrote in a single day. And what I did was I had previously been working on Google Groups, which at the time was a Usenet search product. And I just took the code. So I …”
Buchheit: Early Gmail launch invites sold on eBay for hundreds of dollars
“People were selling the invites on eBay for hundreds of dollars. It became a real currency because people were so excited about getting an invite to the service.”
Buchheit: Google's internal launch milestone for Gmail was 100 happy users
“That was actually sort of our goal for launch. We just had to get a hundred people who were happy. So that was kind of like the milestone for when the product we thought was good enough to take out to the broader news of the world.”