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 19 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
Google's 70% OKR target eventually became a passive-aggressive commitment-avoidance tool
“Google has one really famous thing about OKRs is that you're expected to only hit 70% of your OKRs, which in the early days was really helpful. It was really a symbol of think big. In the later days, it became a passive-aggressive way to avoid commitment.”
Google CFO Patrick Pichette regularly debated divesting YouTube in early meetings
“When I joined YouTube, every press article was, what a big mistake, and every meeting I had with, Patrick was the CFO at the time, and he had just joined Google, every meeting we had was, should we keep this property, or should we get rid of it?”
Shishir Mehrotra's YouTube thesis: online video will replace cable television
“The thesis for YouTube is online video will do to cable what cable did to broadcast.”
Shishir Mehrotra argues 13-week quarterly planning is an awkward timeframe
“13 weeks is An awkward planning timeframe. It's not long enough that you can really make long-term bets. It's just too short for that, but it's too long for making commitments.”
Shishir Mehrotra argues 99% of advice on major decisions should be ignored
“The truth is that 99% of people that you can talk to will give you advice that you should probably ignore, and I think that's really tricky, especially on the very hardest decisions.”
Shishir Mehrotra defines an eigenquestion as one that answers ten others
“In decision-making speak, eigenquestion really represents the most important question of a set, or more precisely, the question when answered, answers 10 other questions as well.”
Shishir Mehrotra says the primary quality of a good decision is sticking
“My view, the number one quality of a good decision is a decision that sticks”
YouTube chose experience consistency over comprehensiveness, refusing to link out
“We said, okay, consistency matters more than comprehensiveness, and we had our sort of 10 principles of YouTube, and this was one of them, I think it was number two, and we made our decision. We're not going to link out”
Apple's original iPhone YouTube app only supported half of YouTube's content
“Apple built the first YouTube app on the iPhone, and they just kept doing it. They kept building the YouTube app, so we actually didn't control the YouTube experience on the iPhone, and over time, it had just fallen out of date. Apple developers couldn't keep …”
Shishir Mehrotra claims 90% of Coda's best ideas originate from internal hackathons
“One of the things we do at Coda is our hackathons are a really big piece of our culture. We do it three or four times a year. I would not be exaggerating to say that 90% of the best ideas in Coda have come out of hackathons.”
Tech insiders called YouTube a dead-end product when Shishir Mehrotra joined
“I mean, joining YouTube at that time, every email I got from everybody, including my parents and phone was, why are you doing this? This is a dead-end product in the dead-end space, even people very close to the industry.”
Shishir Mehrotra says skipping option generation is a major decision-making flaw
“If you look at decision-making processes, one of the biggest mistakes people make is they skip that option stage, and they jump right to, I just need to decide.”
A team's execution capacity is upper-bounded by its leader's availability
“The team's ability to execute is upper bounded by your own personal ability to execute and the nature of how things work. If you're not available either physically, like you're too busy, or mentally, like you're just not mentally available to be able to unders…”
Most executives spend under 25% of time on planned priorities
“If 50% of my time in a week is spent on things that I thought were important at the beginning of the week, that's my high watermark. Sometimes I tell people that, and that seems crazy. Boy, I'll tell you, if you could do this for most executives, I doubt they …”
YouTube set a 2012 target to reach 1 billion daily watch hours
“Basically in 2012, I set a goal for YouTube that we would get to a billion hours a day of watch time by the end of 20 16. It was a four year goal.”
YouTube consumed approximately 20% of global internet bandwidth in 2012
“At the time YouTube accounted for something like 20% of the world's bandwidth. That's at least what the ice piece reported to us.”
Coda reached 25,000 active teams 1.5 years after its 1.0 launch
“We shipped Coda One Dot O last February, so it took a while for us to build the base product for Coda, but we've only been in market for about a year and a half, and it's scaling super well. It just crossed 25,000 teams using Coda, and it's a product that's ki…”
Coda originated while brainstorming a pivot for a co-founder's failing startup
“Starting a company was the last thing on my mind, but I had this friend and ex-colleague, Alex Nye, who is busy starting a company, and thankfully that company wasn't going particularly well, and so in the process of brainstorming for him what he should pivot …”