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: Desktop users navigate to daily sites by searching Google directly
“Google picks up that vast long tail of, and it probably, in fact, on the desktop internet, Google also picks up the 20 things that you use every day, because that's how you get to them. You just go into Google and you search for Facebook, or you go into Google…”
Google has never disclosed revenue data for Google Play
“They haven't given any statistics at all on Android in nine months and they haven't, they've never given any data on Google Play. I mean, they've given app downloads, but they've never given revenue data”
Evans: Apple views cloud as app backend while Google treats cloud as platform
“WWDC was full of cloud, but it was all about cloud as backend to rich native apps. Whereas I.O. Was all about cloud as cloud.”
Evans: Google Play paid $5B to developers over 12 months
“All that they paid out five billion dollars to developers in the last 12 months and two billion in the previous 12 months.”
Levie: Building custom data centers loses value versus buying cloud compute
“You're probably better off letting Amazon, Microsoft, Google all compete for your dollars than you going and building them out yourself, and then by the time you deploy them, Moore's Law cycle, another Moore's Law cycle has already occurred, and you've lost, y…”
Sinofsky: Non-tech firms cannot compete with tech giants on security
“It also allows IT to focus much less on the deployment and management and scale and reliability and security, which of course, the idea of competing with, you know, the Googles and the Amazons and the Microsofts on security, if you're, you know, an appliance m…”
Evans: iOS extensions enable Google and Facebook to integrate deeper into iOS
“And so the funny thing here is, of course, this is basically giving Google and Facebook a whole list of ways to get the hooks deeper into iOS.”
Evans: TV has replaced music as Big Tech's ecosystem battleground
“Music was an ecosystem battleground, and it's turned into a checkbox commodity feature that you throw into any new product as like something you have to have. You know, you're launching a phone, you're launching this, you're launching, you've got to have a pho…”
Dixon: Major Silicon Valley tech companies are evolving into GE-style conglomerates
“So they, they've become much more like the GEs of technology or something. Conglomerates.”
Evans: Scale, language, and culture block US tech expansion abroad
“Where you have a country that's actually big enough to sustain real scale businesses and has a fundamentally different language and culture, then it's quite hard for Amazon or Google to roll in.”
Evans: Apple moves down the hardware stack while Google moves up
“Apple is moving down the stack and Google's moving up the stack, both of them, of course, into their comfort zone, into a place where it's hard for the other to follow them.”
Auto-Generated Shareable Videos Enable Organic Acquisition Without Paid Ads
“The nice thing is that what happens is every time you use the product, you're going with a group of friends. It's fun to take photos. You generate a video at the end of your experience that then you share to social media. And that means that this type of compa…”
Zuegel: Web2 OAuth restricts developers through centralized platform gatekeeping
“And it doesn't give you all the information that you could possibly want because it's dependent on Google and Facebook and Twitter and so on, ah, to give you the information that they're willing to give, which is pretty limited.”
Stark: Big tech UX talent will solve crypto usability challenges
“Getting the folks that say maybe we're doing You exit, you know, Apple, Google, Facebook, and coming into this world that can really think through these problems and develop compelling user experiences, I think is going to be a big part of it.”
Terry Angelos: Payments Will Recede Into Background as Commerce Verticalizes
“So I think we're going to see a big race toward verticalized commerce. I think when you put together in the U S at least what Amazon's trying to do, Google's trying to do with echo and a few other things, you'll see payments just recede into the background.”
Chan: Entrepreneurs can import Chinese business models before US giants adapt
“Likewise, you know which products, market fits, and business models are doing incredibly well in China, and you can take those models to the U.S. Before the next Facebook or Google figures that out.”
Rampell: Geico spends $100M per year on Google search ads
“Geico spends a hundred million dollars a year buying keywords on Google.”
Rampell: Insurance advertising accounts for a big chunk of Google's value
“Google is now second most valuable company on earth, and a big chunk of their market cap is coming from insurance.”
Mars: Tech giants are building future data centers around deep learning
“Deep learning is absolutely the bet that companies are making, right? So Google has put a lot of resources into deep learning you know, Facebook. We're designing future data centers and future infrastructures around this one technique, and it's primarily becau…”
Pande: Alphabet restructuring places medical subsidiaries alongside core search
“If you look at the alphabet restructuring, it puts Verily and Calico and these other elements that are very much medical centric, much more in the forefront. And search and the core business is just another one of those verticals.”
Pande: Digital health startups could be acquired by pharma or tech giants
“I could see a Pfizer buying Omada, you know, and maybe coupling with a drug or maybe not. I could see Google buying a company like Omada. I could see Freenome being bought either by a therapeutics company that wants a diagnostic, or by, let's say, a sequencing…”
Precision agriculture needs Amazon, Google, and Tinder-style analytics
“So in terms of analytics then, we need to make Amazon recommendations to farmers for things like irrigation scheduling or the application of inputs, fertilizers, pesticides, water. We need Google search for crop disease. We need Tinder for pests.”
Evans: Tech leadership has recentered on the Bay Area, Apple, and Google
“Today, it's all about the San Francisco Bay Area. It's about Apple and Google, because everything is shifted back to software.”
Mo: Major chipmakers use vLLM as an internal benchmark
“And additionally, VLM also work closely with all the hardware vendors. So that means across like NVIDIA, AMD, Google, and Amazon, Intel, and a lot more, their newest chip will make sure VLM can run on them. And then a lot of cases they use VLM as a benchmark t…”
Kim: Five of top 10 iOS productivity apps are Google, ChatGPT #1
“If you go to app store today, top five out of top 10 productivity apps are all Google. It's insane. And Chachi B is number one.”
Tenev: Google's internal prediction market accurately forecast product launches
“Google had an internal prediction market where people would speculate on which products would actually ship on their ship dates, and it was a much more accurate .”
Balaji Srinivasan: US newspaper revenue collapsed post-2008 as tech advertising spiked
“This shows that essentially newspaper revenue rose to like, seventy billion dollars in the year 2000. And then right after the financial crisis, it just suddenly collapsed over the course of like four or five years and Google went vertical and Facebook went ve…”
Andreessen: Yahoo Almost Bought Google Early On at Low Price
“Yahoo almost bought Google. And there was a very, you know low price deal at the time.”
Immerman: Google approaches $200B annual search revenue with double-digit growth
“They're approaching two hundred billion of revenue annually. They're still growing double digits, highly profitable.”
Immerman: Google controls 90% of the search market
“They control 90% of the market, but their grip is slipping.”
Masad: Self-taught Replit user landed software engineering role at Google
“We've had someone who learned to code on Replit primarily on their own, became a very productive community member, and applied to work at Replit. And we thought they're very talented, but at the time there wasn't like a really good fit for them. And so they st…”
Neumann: Google's corporate campus was the original inspiration for WeWork
“Google was inspiration for us that we work. Our point was, well, why can't small businesses have this great campus, have this great energy?”
Naous: Major tech companies built proprietary internal operational analytics tools
“So Facebook has Scuba. Google has Dremel, Rasta, and a whole bunch of others. Airbnb built Superset. Uber built Aries DB.”
McCullough: Pre-IPO Google kept its massive profitability secret from the market
“Everyone had been conditioned to think that while the internet was fun, it was probably a niche, and you were never going to be able to build a truly great company on top of it. And then all of a sudden, because they kept it secret for so long, I remember peop…”
Steven B. Johnson: Google's Self-Driving Patent Includes 'Bad Events Table'
“The original patent that Google filed for the self-driving car projects. Included in it is this thing they call the bad events table.”
Ehrensvärd: Google cut support costs by 92% using hardware security keys
“Google published a report not long ago where they said that they were able to cut down support to 92% compared to a phone app.”
Ehrensvärd: Mozilla and Microsoft are adding native hardware security key support
“Google was the first. Mozilla is coming on board. Microsoft is coming on board.”
Chokshi: Google was approximately the 15th search engine to launch
“Google was like the 15th search company to come around before it hit success, and that is kind of relevant to think about.”
Sinofsky: Google built and deployed machine learning for Photos within a year
“It was literally less than a year, I think, that that whole project lasted.”
Evans: Big four tech platforms expanded headcount 10x in a decade
“Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, as being together about 10 times the size in terms of the number of people that they were 1012 years ago.”
Russell: Apple's iOS app platformization mirrors Facebook and Google developer strategies
“Frankly, it sounded a lot like what Facebook and Google have been showing off taking apps that people use every day and introducing ways for developers to kind of become part of that experience.”
Casado: Modern applications have evolved into complex distributed networks
“The application has evolved into a network. I really believe that. So an application used to be like, I'm running Pac-Man, but that's no longer the case now. Like, think about like one query to Google, man. Like, you're literally touching hundreds of compute n…”
Standage: Humans adapt their language to help search algorithms understand queries
“We already do, when we type questions into Google, we miss out the stop words, and we know that we're just basically helping them.”
Google entered quantum computing by acquiring UC Santa Barbara's research team
“Easter last year, 2014, was when everything changed. Everything changed. It was when Google disclosed the fact that they were so heavily involved. They went and bought the University of California, Santa Barbara team.”
Dixon: Google originally attempted to sell itself for $1 million
“They were trying to sell the company. And they tried to sell it for a million.”