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
Conde: Facebook reduced clinical trial patient recruitment costs by 96%
“So Facebook, for example, as I mentioned earlier, is using their social network to help us identify and recruit patients for clinical trials. And in fact, they did a pilot project with the Michael J. Fox foundation where they were able to reduce the cost and t…”
Evans: Google and Facebook captured half of print's internet ad revenue
“Internet took about half of the print industry's advertising revenue and growing, but Google and Facebook took half of that.”
Horowitz: Better to be a Facebook janitor than a bad startup's CEO
“Going to a bad startup is kind of miserable, like, I'd actually rather be the janitor at Facebook than CEO of a bad startup.”
Evans: Facebook is the world's largest mobile web browser
“So, 15 to 20% of mobile time spent is actually happening inside Facebook, which makes it the world's largest mobile web browser.”
Evans: Combined GAFA revenues remain smaller than TV and advertising
“Even Google, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon combined there, or GAFA, as the telecoms industry tends to call them add up to less than TV business or advertising and are much, much smaller than mobile or proper, proper industries like cars or clothes.”
Kha: GPs are fired for missing winners while LPs fear bad investments
“A GP can get fired for missing out, you know, the next, you know, Facebook, the next Uber, right? Like, that is error of omission, and like, that's fireable. But LPs on the flip side only get fired if you invest into a mentor. So in some respects, like, the in…”
Bornstein: Meta tailored Llama license thresholds to exclude only two companies
“I do remember that the numbers were like specifically chosen at that time that you could go find it was like two companies in the world. That like fit the definition that they had excluded from their license.”
Masad: Twitter reaches tech elites while YouTube and Meta reach early majority
“Twitter's influence is amazing, but it tends to be elite kind of inside group influence. I think Instagram, Facebook still, YouTube, Is where you get to the early majority.”
Evans: AI integration is driving ad revenue gains at Google and Meta
“Which is, of course, why you see the ad numbers and the, you know, the conversion rates shooting up in the, every quarter from Google and Facebook. Because they're rolling all of this into their ad systems, and their recommendation engines, and their predictio…”
Evans: Big Tech produces more profits than the entire telecoms industry
“You have a pretty safe bet that Google, Meta, Amazon Microsoft, Apple produce more profits than the entire telecoms industry.”
Moore: Meta Acquired AI Agent Startup Manus for Over $2B
“They had a two billion dollar plus acquisition by Meta, also in the course of the list.”
Simpson: Facebook rejected internal crypto initiatives when she worked there
“I tried at Facebook, by the way, same thing.”
Bosworth says Ray-Ban Meta Live AI feature drains battery in 30 minutes
“So you can start a live AI session with your Ray-Ban meted glasses. And for 30 minutes until the battery runs out, It is, it's seeing what you're seeing.”
Bosworth says Meta concluded the mobile phone form factor saturated in 2015
“10 years ago, like, the mobile phone form factor, as amazing as it was, this is 2015, was like, already saturated. Like, that was what it was gonna be.”
Bosworth: AI as Primary Interface Can Solve Wearable Ecosystem Risks
“I actually think the ecosystem risk was one I would have said previously was the biggest one, but AI is now kind of my potential silver bullet there. If AI becomes the major interface, then it kind of comes for free.”
Bosworth: Consumer Adoption Risk Exceeds Hardware Invention Risk for Wearables
“Far bigger than the invention risk I think is the adoption risk.”
Horowitz: Meta's early onboarding drove long-term high product output
“Zuck did an amazing job in the early days for sure at Meta on that where, you know, their onboarding program was so good that they were able to just Keep turning out, you know, massive numbers of very high quality products for a really long time.”
Dixon: VCs stopped funding social platform apps in 2013 due to risk
“I would say around 2013, 12, 13, probably people like us, all the VCs stopped because of platform risk, right?”
Horowitz: Tech companies no longer restrict engineering hiring to elite universities
“I think Facebook, you're on the board of Meta. They used to only hire people from Stanford and MIT, or I think, or Harvard, Stanford, MIT. Like they had like strict rules on them. Nobody has that role anymore. Like that role's gone. Like, I don't know any comp…”
Scott: Meta's Llama 2 will be a key building block for AI software
“I think Lama too is just like Lama going to be an important building block that people are going to want to use to build AI software.”
Kim: Meta's AI creative tools will restore the efficacy of paid ads
“Facebook or Meta is investing heavily on You know, AI side of it, so that all, sometimes all you need to do is just say, hey, like I have this idea, here's like the base creative. And now they're able to like change what, how it looks, add different, you know,…”
Ismail: Tech winners like Apple and Google succeeded by becoming platforms
“Yahoo, BlackBerry, Nokia all failed to become platforms, right? Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon all successfully became platforms, and that business model basically carries you through because now you wire yourself into the infrastructure.”
Chan: Incumbent social platforms will expand into e-commerce to drive ad revenue
“I think a lot of these large Platforms are all going to figure out they want to dabble into commerce, and there's so many benefits if they do that. It actually drives their advertising engines, because now that you have a commerce layer, the supply generally i…”
Karen X Cheng Predicts AI Platform Consolidation via Startup Acquisitions
“Most companies will have different strengths, and then they'll continue to be able to differentiate by sort of specializing in that, but I do imagine that some of these companies are gonna buy other companies, and then so they'll like, you know, kind of have m…”
Karen X Cheng: Video Virality Shifted From Tech Press to Algorithms
“So back in, like, 2000, like, 12, up until around 2016, you could make videos go viral just by coming up with something clever that would be a good headline, cold emailing, like, 300 reporters, getting them to write about it, and then it would almost guarantee…”
Sivak: Video Games Compete Directly With Netflix, Facebook, and TikTok
“You're competing with everyone. You know, you're competing with Netflix, you're competing with you know, with Facebook and TikTok.”
Jordan: Tech's biggest winners initially look like non-obvious niche ideas
“Most of the huge winners are lightning strikes. Facebook was the second or third social network, but you know, no one was thinking social networks when they talk about a trillion dollar company. EBay was Collectibles online, weird Facebook, hot or not, you kno…”
Zuegel: OAuth is centralized, janky, and limited by tech monopolies
“OAuth as a tool that people can use as you're building a little side project. You don't want to have to build a whole complicated login system. You plug in OAuth. This is a huge step forward, but it is not really sufficient for everything. It's Centralized. It…”
Jesse Walden: Open source creates structural asymmetry favoring large tech firms
“Also, also just, like, raw engineering power, like, Facebook has hundreds of engineers to deploy something like MySQL, you know, and then the weekend hacker has to do it themselves, and it's just, like, there's an asymmetry in terms of, like, how you leverage …”
Jordan: Facebook has completely saturated its US user growth
“Facebook Hasn't had any users in the U.S. Forever because they have them all.”
Dixon: Org design drives Google and Facebook product success
“Facebook and Google, they obviously are hiring great people, but I think it's also the way they empower those people and design the organization that makes them great product organizations.”
Shankar: Post-Oculus acquisition VR forecasts were wildly hyper-inflated
“Back when Facebook bought Oculus, that's when expectations of VR started to get wildly away from reality. Oh, by 2016, there's gonna be 20, fifty million headsets out there. There might be a hundred million headsets by 2017. Some analysts definitely blew a lot…”
Evans: Founders control all top tech giants except Apple
“And they all, except for Apple, the founders control the company.”
Sinofsky: Facebook operates WhatsApp, Instagram, and Oculus as independent entities
“You know, between WhatsApp and Instagram, Oculus, and so on, that are run as very distinct entities, and they don't overlay some grand strategy about what's going to go where, and who's going to do what, when, and tie all the pieces together.”
Evans: Facebook transformed its core product five times by following user behavior
“Facebook has been like five different things over the length of its life. You know, there was a time when it was all about filling in information on your home profile. You know, who goes to a Facebook profile now? Right. And that's in a sense been directed by …”
Russell: Current BCI tech will allow seamless thought-controlled computer actions
“And now with this current generation, it seems like between Elon, Facebook, probably something from Google that We're actually going to start to see these things that kind of invisibly actually just let you think something and have some kind of action show up …”
Wennmachers: Audiences easily detect fake or over-curated social media content
“And then Facebook and Twitter and Snapchat and whatever else there is that they just demand authenticity because it's so easily detectable if it's someone else doing the writing or if these photos are too curated.”
Jordan: Early PayPal and Facebook social commerce partnerships failed to gain traction
“PayPal did a few deals in back at the beginning of the decade with the Facebook and, you know, felt like, okay, there you have money there. You have social graph. We have social commerce, right? Well, it just, it hasn't worked that way.”
Beshara: True social commerce requires participatory collective purchasing, not just social graphs
“I think it will be much more nuanced, but much more powerful than just, oh, add your social graph to your credit card transaction. It's much more participatory of collectively, socially.”
Wroblewski: Copying big tech design without internal data is dangerous
“So you just run a dangerous game when you say, oh, Google did this. Facebook did this. Snapchat did this. Because you're not in there. You don't know why they're doing it. You don't have the data. And without that information, you're just kind of guessing that…”
Currier's Pre-Facebook Social Network Reached 30 Million Users
“We had thirty million people before Facebook ever launched.”
Three College Social Networks Existed Before Facebook Launched at Harvard
“Look, there was three college social networks that came before Facebook, but it was the first one started at Harvard.”
Hariharan: Connecting 10 friends in 14 days drove early Facebook retention
“If someone was connected to 10 friends in 14 days, they were much likely to return to Facebook.”
Hariharan: Facebook's DAU/MAU ratio rose to 57% in its first 18 months
“The one metric that he really focused on in the first two years was Retention, and the way he measured retention was daily actives by monthly actives, and if you see their chart in the first 18 months, it kept going from 52% to 55% to 57%.”
Khanna: Average Facebook user's international friends rose to 15-16%
“If you look at the number of, for example, international friends that people have on Facebook, it used to be only, you know, four or five percent of an average person's friends were from another country, and now it's risen to like 15 or 16%.”
Evans: Messaging platforms are push channels, unlike the pull-based web
“Facebook, those are push channels, whereas the web is a pull channel.”