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 352 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 5 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
Evans: Smartphone camera quality depends on full computational silicon stack
“It's no longer actually the camera module. It's everything. It's the GPU and the CPU and the machine learning software and everything else that's being done in.”
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…”
Chen: High time spent on Google Search indicates poor performance
“And Google is the best example of this, right? In fact, if you spend a lot of time on google.com, you know, refining your searches and clicking around, that means actually the service is doing poorly.”
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.”
Lohman: Big tech RSUs function as value preservation, not high-upside returns
“We think of RSUs at a place like Google is, is value preservation, right? They're in a value preservation mode growth, but not huge returns, and you're giving an employee a share of stock, it's got value, that employee can look at that share and say, at the en…”
Ehrensvärd: Ram Shriram backed Yubico after initial Silicon Valley rejections
“Everyone said no to me when I landed here, because we weren't proven, but I continued, and eventually I got introduced to Ram Sharam, who sits in the board of Google, and he had this Silicon Valley mindset. After 40 minutes, he said, how can I help?”
Ehrensvärd: Yubico acquired Google as a customer through open-source community member
“One of them worked for Google. And that's how we got to Google.”
Jez Humble: DevOps emerged to solve scale challenges pioneered by Amazon and Google
“And I think from a historical point of view, the best way to think about DevOps, it's a bunch of people who had to solve this problem of how do we build large distributed systems that were secure and scalable and be able to change them really rapidly and evolv…”
Evans: Google should make Chrome HDMI sticks for enterprise computing
“That's what I think Google should be doing with Chrome. They should be making HDMI sticks.”
Clark: Google pays $1 million for talent with deep learning intuition
“This is why Google will pay like a million dollars for someone with 10 years of deep learning experiences is that intuition that's built up.”
O'Reilly: Google's rejection of banner ads launched its search dominance
“Larry and Sergey were like, we hate that. We're not going to do that. And it was a moral rejection of that business model that eventually led them down the path of, we want ads to be as effective and as useful as search results. And that was the beginning of G…”
Evans: Founders control all top tech giants except Apple
“And they all, except for Apple, the founders control the company.”
Andreessen: I passed on Google because search was a cost center
“Google just struck me as absurd on its face for two obvious reasons. One is everybody knew search was a low quality user experience. And two is everybody knew that search was a cost center, not a profit center.”
Lee Fan: Visual discovery on Pinterest differs from Google by lacking objective right answers
“In some way, this is different from Google. There's no right or wrong.”
Evans: Google killed radio ads because it clashed with company identity
“They bought a radio advertising company, and they worked out that they could not make radio work without changing what Google was. So they didn't do it.”
Evans: Google is fundamentally about data scale, not advertising
“Google is a company that's around handling vast amounts of data. And everything that Google then does is sort of an expression of that.”
D'Amato: Google was the first company to publicly disclose Chinese cyberattacks
“If you walk through the timeline, you go back and start with Google in 2010, when they're the first company to come out and actually talk about Chinese state-sponsored actors. This is something the government and a lot of people knew about at the time. And it'…”
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 …”
Rogers: Software projects need neutral governance to become industry standards
“Google just gave Kubernetes over to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. And that's like, you know, an up and coming project. It's getting lots of contributors and lots of new adoption. And that was just because, like, for it to be a de facto standard, it ne…”
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…”
Evans: Google bypassed Android OS fragmentation using Google Play Services
“Always been kind of trying to get the handset makers to do operating system updates, and it's never worked. But they sort of got around that part of the fragmentation problem for their own services by putting Google Play services on top of everything.”
Sinofsky: Google pioneered infrastructure design based on continuous hardware failure
“Along comes Google, and they basically pioneered this whole notion that, like, all the disk drives, it's not like they're likely to fail, it's that they will fail. And so it was designing a whole system on the presumption of continuous failure, which was like …”
Fei-Fei Li: Google holds early self-driving advantage in data and algorithms
“Companies like Google, even though they didn't have cars at the beginning, they had algorithms. They started this early, so they now have both data and algorithms.”
Chan: Google Instant Apps mirrors WeChat's strategy of eliminating user friction
“What excites me about instant apps is it really does eliminate friction for the end consumer, and it also reflects to me that Google understands something that WeChat has known for years, and it's critical to the success of official accounts on WeChat, which i…”
Chan: Google's AI launch will spawn viral Tumblr blogs of misinterpretations
“I think that when it does launch, there will be use cases where it goes wrong. Like you can just imagine the photos that they interpret Incorrectly, occasionally, or the suggested phrase that just, you can just imagine a whole Tumblr being created around this.”
Chen: Google powers DeepMind algorithms using commodity x86 PC hardware
“Like if you look at an x-a-t-e-s server in a data center, exactly the servers that Google is using to compute deep mind algorithms, they're PCs.”
Chan: Chinese Tech Companies Are Distinct Products, Not Clones
“You will see companies that look like the Facebook of China, look like the Google of China, look like the YouTube of China, but they're different. And that's why it's not just Chinese Twitter.”
Strange: Millennials trust tech giants more than traditional banks
“There's definitely a lot around the millennial generation and how, you know, they hate going to their banks more than they hate going to the dentist. They would actually trust Apple, Google, name your tech Institute more than banks.”
Evans: Google's Core Search Product Is Completely Unchallenged
“Their kind of core search product is, I think, completely unchallenged, really. Their kind of, their position is completely stable.”
Sinha: Google hosted 20,000 daily video calls for 40,000 employees
“When we were at Google, I think we left right around the same time, but when we were at Google, we were around 40,000 people. Every single day, they would do 20,000 video calls. The average person used video one to two times a day”
Hariharan: U.S. tech giants dominate India without local equivalents like Alibaba
“You don't have an Alibaba yet in India. You don't have the buy, the Google of India is Google. The Facebook of India is Facebook.”
Burbidge: Nearly 80% of millennials trust tech giants over banks
“Certainly more than 50, I think it was close to 80% of millennials trust the brands, you know, Facebook or Google. Or Apple, I think was the top of the pile, much more than their banks.”
Burbidge: Fintech startups will sell to big tech, not banks
“Your exit opportunities aside from staying independent and maybe going public or whatever is potentially on the buyout side. You may not be selling to a bank, you might be selling to Facebook, you might be selling to Amazon, you might be selling to Google as t…”
Shanahan: Google Search will increasingly move from keyword queries to natural language
“I think Google will expect us to do that less and less as time goes by, and expect the interactions to be in more and more natural language.”
Evans: Mobile OS platforms integrate services much deeper than PC OSs
“Unlike, say, a web browser on a, either a Windows or a Mac, where the web browser was the platform and the Windows or the Mac computer wasn't really where you were building internet services. Whereas on a smartphone, not only are you building in the web browse…”
Levine: Future data centers will mirror hyperscale cloud architectures, not legacy hardware
“A lot of the new data center architectures Are more going to look like Facebook, Google, and Amazon, and less like older, you know, sort of Wall, I call them Wall Street data centers.”
Andreessen: PageRank is only one of 900 factors in Google search
“It's one of, like, PageRank is, like, one of, like, 900 factors now that go into a Google search result. The other 899 happened after they left Stanford.”
Boneh: Big tech security teams possess the authority to delay product launches
“In big companies like Microsoft, Apple, Google security teams in fact are involved in the process from the design phase, which is really important. And then if a product is about to ship out and a security, the security team discovers a big vulnerability, they…”
Cheney: Mobile tech lacks indoor contextual intelligence despite 80% indoor time
“There's a missing link there where there's still no layer of context in physical and indoor environments, which is where we spend, what, 80% of our time?”
Evans: Apple and Google approach context-aware computing from opposite directions
“Apple and Google are both kind of climbing the mountain. This is a thing I'm probably saying too often, but they're kind of climbing the mountain from the opposite side. So, on the one hand, you have all of these sensors, and you have beacons, which of course …”
Apple and Google are killing the ten blue links
“I think what Apple and Google are both doing is killing the list of 10 links. The 10 blue links.”
Benedict Evans: Apple Watch strategy enhances iPhone, unlike Google's cloud approach
“I mean, I think, you know, to Stephen's point about platform, this is clearly, you know, and again, this is what speaks to the, again, a sort of thing I talk about a lot, which is kind of a difference between Apple and Google, which is for Google, there's a wh…”
Janeway: Google stands out for its exceptional culture of integrating acquisitions
“I'm very, I have to say, I'm extraordinarily impressed by Google's style of being able to acquire and support and create space. Now, if you're as rich as Google is, you can afford to do that, but it's a cultural phenomenon.”
Chris Dixon: Ad tech startups must sell quickly during M&A consolidation waves
“My advice was always, when that happens, you gotta, like, It's like musical chairs. And if you don't get a seat, you know, you're probably screwed because now these guys are all part of, you now have your direct competitor is now part of Google and part of Fac…”
Nguyen: MapReduce Was Intentionally Designed for Reliability Over Speed
“Interestingly, a lot of people may not realize that MapReduce was designed to be slow.”
Nguyen: Big Data Is Defined by Learning Thresholds, Not Volume
“So I like something that Peter Norvig, the director of research at Google said when he referred to big data, he says, big data is not just quantitatively different, but it's qualitatively different. In other words, there's something that happens when you have …”
Evans: Apple is less of a competitor to Facebook and Amazon than Google
“Apple is less of a competitor to both Facebook and Amazon than Google is.”
Masters: Startups cannot match Google or Facebook compensation to recruit top talent
“And I think that's the only way that if you're a startup, that's the only way that you're going to, you know, you're not going to be able to pay as much as Google or Facebook at this point. And that's the only way to attract people. Probably.”