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 10 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
WhatsApp managed 1.5 billion users with just one product manager
“When I joined WhatsApp, it had a billion and a half users, and it really only had about one product manager, about two to three data people working on it.”
WhatsApp user growth in the US has sometimes been flat or negative
“The United States has been a country where WhatsApp has some adoption but has it quite reached a scale of you know, total growth and it's sometimes been flat and sometimes even negative over that course of time.”
Ryan Wiggins helped grow WhatsApp Business to 100 million monthly active users
“Over the four years that I spent at WhatsApp, we were able to found, find huge improvements in things like WhatsApp business, taking a product from zero to a hundred million monthly actives”
Fixing the consumer-to-business chat transition doubled WhatsApp Business retention
“And so one of the things that we started to do before we actually focused on pouring fuel on the fire with acquisition was we fixed that initial transition that the common cluster was going through. That basically doubled retention and was kind of a angle chan…”
WhatsApp's search-bar invite prompt drove 10x more invites than other attempts
“The thing that we found was that an entry point, when you're searching for someone that doesn't have WhatsApp, Was the top entry point. It kind of became 10 X bigger than any other entry point.”
US first growth hires command $150k to $250k cash plus equity
“In the United States, which again is maybe not an assumption that I should have, but in the United States, I think it's a reasonable assumption that a 150 to two 50 cash and then some sizable equity packages is the range that you're looking for.”
Running ad campaigns will continuously become more expensive due to video formats
“Ad platforms are always getting more expensive. They're always more constrained. And if you particularly look at some of the trends that are happening with moving to richer formats like TikTok, it's just more expensive to create basic content. And so I think t…”
Mercury scaled to serve over 100,000 startup customers by May 2023
“And since then, about two years in we've scaled to over a 100,000 startups”