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 265 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 3 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
Khalaf: Payment cards have wider reach than Google, Facebook, and clean water
“Because if you think about a payment card, it's the most adopted technological product ever invented. More distribution than Google and Facebook combined. More distribution than clean water. And it's still a piece of plastic for many.”
Andreessen: Meta spends roughly $20 billion annually on VR
“Facebook's now in a position where Facebook's, you know, spending, you know, on the order of twenty billion dollars a year on VR, right?”
Andreessen: Boomers are most vulnerable to social media manipulation
“The person most prone to be really screwed around with social media would seem to me to be somebody with no mimetic defenses at all, which is like a boomer, right? And so, you take, like, somebody raised on, like, Walter Cronkite, and you, like, inject them on…”
Olivia Moore: One-shot AI generation tools are gimmicky and unfit for deep work
“In some ways, it's a little bit of a, and I say this lovingly, like, gimmicky product, because you might use it as like a fun thing to send to a friend or to post on Twitter or something, but you're not likely to do deep work in it.”
Horowitz: General management is fake and does not transfer across industries
“General management, the way you describe it, is fake, and I don't think that In my view, like, if you can manage a soup company, you cannot manage, you know, meta.”
Horowitz: Nearly all a16z hardware investments required follow-on rescue funding
“I don't think that we've done anything in hardware where that hasn't been the case. I mean, the one was Oculus, but Oculus got, you know, they sold relatively early to meta.”
Horowitz: Early Facebook growth success hinged on low team turnover
“One of the keys to Facebook at the time's growth team was that they had the exact, not just that they had a growth team, but they had the exact same people on it for years and years and years. The reason was the work they were doing was fairly alchemistic in n…”
Hicks: DoD R&D budget exceeds Alphabet, Apple, Meta, Microsoft combined
“It's more than what Alphabet, Apple, Meta, and Microsoft combined spent on R&D last year.”
Balaji: Facebook is the big tech outlier because Zuckerberg remains founder
“Facebook is the outlier because Zuck is still a founder, and so it can actually do big things like rebranding to Meta. It can take risks, okay?”
Mónica: Anchorage worked with Facebook on Libra for 1.5 years pre-launch
“We've been involved in the initiative even before it was called Libra. So, we've been Talking to Facebook about it for about a year and a half now.”
The two cardinal sins of venture capital investing
“There's kind of two big cardinal sins in this business. One is you miss one of those companies. You don't invest in them. The other is that you invest in it, but you don't own enough of it so that when it gets to be Facebook, it still doesn't meaningfully chan…”
Carlson-Wee: Web2 ad business models create adversarial relationships with users
“Today, yes, Facebook loves its users, but also it wants to put as many ads in front of the users as it possibly can, which actually disrupt the user experience. So it's yeah, it's an odd relationship, I think, that these web two platforms have with their user …”
Wiener: Simply streaming linear TV sports feeds on Facebook fails
“MLB, their idea of broadcasting baseball games with Facebook was to just put the broadcasting And put it on Facebook. And I don't think that that works. Like the people that are on Facebook, they know that the game is on TV. They're just not turning it on. So …”
Jordan: Past investment mistakes stemmed from short-lived Facebook ad arbitrage
“When I made a couple investment mistakes where the paid acquisition looked really good, and actually what they were doing, or they're arbitraging something like Facebook's early mobile attempts, where the people who participate in Facebook mobile ads early Got…”
Gil: Silicon Valley has very few truly strong product organizations
“There's very few, very strong product organizations in Silicon Valley. Google has a great product org. Facebook has a great product org. There's a handful of them.”
Dixon: Most Big Tech talent moving into crypto builds on Ethereum
“At least what I'm seeing is lots of teams leaving GAFA companies, Google, Facebook, et cetera, and getting into this, and like really good teams. People with real, you know, strong engineering and product backgrounds. And I think for me, at least, it's the vas…”
Alex Le: Internet culture flows from 4chan to Reddit to Facebook
“Four Chan, which is another weird place on the internet, is like raw dream space, and we are maybe a level up from that where we're refining that content and making it more interesting, and then it goes off and spreads to Facebook.”
Temkin: Asynchronous social platforms like Facebook function as performance art
“Facebook and sort of asynchronous social experiences end up being performance art. You're trying to craft a persona to get people to React to you”
Conde: Facebook recruitment reduced Parkinson's trial acquisition costs by 96%
“A great data point that I heard recently was a partnership that Facebook made with the Michael J. Fox foundation to find ways to pilot the use of social networks to recruit patients for Parkinson's disease trial using social media. They were able to reduce the…”
O'Reilly: Native content shift undermines Google's core strategic advantage
“It seems to me to the extent that Google says, well, we're going to deliver this service directly with native content, with Google native content, versus bringing it from an ecosystem of outside providers, they're losing touch with one of their key strategic a…”
Evans: Face ID from Google or Facebook would have triggered privacy backlash
“If Google or Facebook had announced that, we'd be having a different, completely different conversation.”
Ehrsam: Ethereum throughput is 20,000x short of running Facebook
“And if you look at what Ethereum is capable of in terms of just throughput of the network, it can't handle more than about twenty-ish transactions a second right now, which means that you're about 20,000 X off being able to run Facebook on the chain.”
Russell: Facebook was a poor steward of Messenger's early developer platform
“My kind of read on this has been that Facebook hasn't been, let's say, the best steward of Messenger as a platform, for instance, for the first six to nine months of it, other than the kind of Bots that Facebook itself specifically highlighted and linked to in…”
Eghbal: Tech giants have replaced academia in funding major software breakthroughs
“You still need people to think about, like, why are we building it this way, or what does the actual system look like? And that role is actually kind of being filled lately by companies like Google or Facebook that have the resources to make big strides the wa…”
Cowen: Social media political activism is mostly ineffective protest theater
“If you compare today to previous historical eras, I think we're going through a kind of protest theater in many ways. People do things on Facebook, Twitter, they think that's effective. I suspect it's not.”
Chen: 25% of Facebook developers write deep learning code
“If you look at something like FB Learner Flow, which is Facebook's Automation workflow system for artificial intelligence. They've gotten it so good that 25% of their total software developer universe is writing deep learning. 25%, right?”
Horowitz: Mainstream media attacks tech because it lost gatekeeping power
“Facebook is getting attacked, you know, the internet's getting attacked by the mainstream media. You know, they, they've lost the power, so that's not that surprising, but.”
Benenson: Facebook Reactions Generate Highly Effective Sentiment Training Data
“What's really interesting about Facebook reactions is, you know, you think you're saying, I love this thing, or I'm sad about this, or I'm angry about this, but what you're actually doing in conjunction with that Is giving Facebook really great label data for …”
Unicode Voting Power Concentrated Among US Tech Giants, SAP, and Oman
“No, so of those 12, so of those 12, nine are U.S. Multinational tech companies. Oracle, IBM, Google, Yahoo, Adobe, Facebook, Microsoft, and Symantec. Then of the other three full voting members, one is the German software company SAP, another is the Chinese te…”
Currier: Path Would Be a Major Company Without Mobile Competition
“Had there been no competition like there was for Facebook when they were growing for two years in colleges, path would have been a big company.”
Jordan: Zuckerberg pre-populated Facebook by hacking Harvard house directories
“He hacked the directories in each of the houses, and so he pre-populated everyone on the Harvard campus into Facebook and then let people claim their identities, but you could then friend, it was populated when the first person showed up.”
Jordan: 53% of all historic Facebook sign-ups were active daily in 2006
“53% of everyone who had ever signed up for the service was active the day before, and that, by the way, has only grown as, you know, the, their installed base age, it gets bigger in ages, that number's grown”
Instagram intentionally targeted photographers and designers at launch, says Bailey Richardson
“From my perspective of at least how we grew Instagram, we started out with this core audience of people that were photographers and designers, and that's actually who we went and spoke to when we released the app, and who we promoted right away, because we fel…”
Neistat outlines the rigid content expectations across major social media platforms
“If it's on Snapchat, it needs to be funny or cool or make me look cool. If it's on Instagram, it's gotta be beautiful. If it's on YouTube, it's gotta be meaningful. If it's on Facebook, it has to be something that my friends and peers really want to engage wit…”
Evans: Apple, Google, and Facebook Won Initial Mobile and Messaging Wars
“The smartphone wars are now over, or at least the first smartphone war is over, and Apple and Google both won in different ways, and the kind of the first messaging app wars are now mostly over, and Facebook mostly won in sort of various ways”
Khan: UK Lacks Multi-Billion Exits Needed for Capital Recycling
“We haven't had those major hit after hit of multi-billion dollar exits, whether in the private market or in the public markets, such as the Googles or the Facebook. So that trickle-down effect hasn't happened, and it'll be a while till it happens.”
Markoff: Facebook and Google's growth is built on a Faustian bargain
“The Facebook and Google explosion has been based on this kind of Faustian bargain, where, you know, they give me these wonderful services, and what do I give them? Well, I give them behavioral information about my life.”
Andreessen: All 59 US private tech unicorns combined equal one Facebook
“There's like 59 U.S. Tech companies that are private and are worth more than a billion dollars. If you add them all up, they're worth about one Facebook.”
Evans: Startup failure costs $1M today versus $40M in 2000
“In 2000, if that failed, that was 50 to a hundred people, and 20, 30, forty million dollars gone. Today, exactly the same product. Is a hundred grand, 500 grand, a million dollars, three, four, five people who are out trying to get a good job at Google and Fac…”
Felten: Displacing incumbent cryptocurrencies requires superior utility to overcome network effects
“I think it's the case that if you can convince the community that your new thing is enough better in, along some dimension they really care about, then there will be a space for your currency to get a foothold. Maybe something that existed before falls away, r…”
Madrigal: Facebook currently dominates online media distribution and internet traffic
“Facebook right now has eaten the internet, you know.”
Madrigal: Facebook drives an order of magnitude more traffic than Twitter
“Oh, an order of magnitude.”
Madrigal: Facebook sends The Atlantic more traffic than the entire web combined
“And so we've been able to sort of back into a bunch of different types of experiments, and seeing natural experiments that are running and find that basically Facebook is sending more traffic to us than the entire rest of the internet that we can see combined.”
Madrigal: Repackaging an Atlantic Facebook post boosted traffic to one million readers
“We had a story about tattoos and why, how tattoos work, like, within your body, and it's like a health story, and we sold it once on Facebook and I think on Wednesday, and kind of nothing happened. You know, maybe we're talking a few thousand unique visitors t…”
Dixon: VC regret comes from missing potential mega-outliers, not moderate successes
“If you pass on a company where, okay, that maybe they'll be successful. You don't stay up at night thinking about that. If you pass on the company that there's a one percent chance at the next Google and people are going to talk about this story for the next 3…”
Levine: Facebook and Google Outpace Cisco in Networking Sophistication
“Yeah it's very fair to say. I think they, Facebook and Google, have absolutely pushed the needle on back-end data center infrastructure”
Chan: Calling companies the "Facebook of China" ignores distinct business models
“Business models and monetization, there's a lot of innovation happening out in China, and I think a big mistake that people make is they look at a company and they say, oh, this is the Facebook of China, this is the Yelp of China, this is the Groupon of China,…”