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 91 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
Andreessen: Full-stack tech disruptors can become larger than the legacy industries they replace
“Those companies, good news, those companies can get to be gigantic, right? Because if you crack the mother load, like, you know, Netflix has, for example, entertainment, you know, you could, or like Tesla has in cars, you can build a company that's maybe multi…”
Ghodsi: Founders who mis-hire executives owe them maximum offboarding generosity
“I disagree with that. I think from then on, it's you owe them. You're the one that made the mistake of hiring them to be as generous as possible within reason.”
McFedries: Backward-looking AI models will cause repetitive media feedback loops
“It's going to be really hard to be excellent, and because, you know, models effectively are backwards looking, data kind of begets more data. I mean, you're going to have some, like, nasty feedback loops, not entirely dissimilar from, like, what happened to Ne…”
Shum: Opaque AI in medical and military decisions can be deadly
“You might think it's probably harmless to get some kind of Netflix, Netflix recommendation about the movies you to watch. But the political ads on social networks can be problematic. Medical diagnosis, or even military decisions based on AI, you know, can be d…”
Sarandos: Authentically local foreign shows travel globally better than English-language ones
“What we're trying to do is tell these stories that are authentically local, and the win for us is that they actually travel more the more authentic they are. Because there's something inorganic about the English language European television show that forces it…”
Sarandos: Cumulative buzz for top Netflix shows exceeds Game of Thrones
“The cumulative buzz of Orange is the New Black, the cumulative buzz of 13 Reasons Why, the cumulative buzz of Stranger Things is actually much bigger than Game of Thrones.”
Sarandos: Iron Fist is Netflix's worst-reviewed show
“Iron Fist is literally the worst reviewed show on Netflix.”
Hastings: Leaders miss threats by judging current technology instead of potential
“Jeff Bucus, who runs Time Warner, who's, you know, Stanford MBA, he's been in the business, ran HBO for 20 years, you know, a very thoughtful guy, and yet he missed the Netflix thing. And what happens to people is they associate you as you are, not as what you…”
Hastings: Netflix will operate with fewer rules as it grows
“And so that's when I vowed that in starting another company, that at least we wouldn't make that mistake. That as we grew, we would try to have less rules, not more rules.”
Hastings: HBO excels at content but lacks strong technology capabilities
“And if we can combine the two of them better, that protects us against HBO, which is very good at content, but not so good at tech.”
Hastings: Netflix kicked DVD executives out of management meetings to focus on streaming
“We were hybridizing it with streaming, and we were getting more streaming attention and executives, but the discussion was still a lot around DVDs, and then we realized that we had to kick out the DVD executives of the main management meeting.”
Hastings: Netflix spent $5 billion on content and $1 billion on tech in 2017
“Now, for this calendar year, we're spending about five billion on content and one billion on tech.”
Hastings: Netflix went vertical because legacy studios would stop licensing content
“By 2011, 20 12, we were realizing that many of the firms that we were buying from were eventually going to want to run their own streaming service, and that we had, we did not have a reliable supply, and so there's a bit of the burn your boats Cortez model, wh…”
Hastings: Non-tech companies cannot succeed in tech by dabbling on the side
“For a non-tech company to do a little bit of tech on the side, that will never work out. But if they must get good at that area, and they're a good management team, and they put, say, a third of the company to it, they can figure it out, including on the creat…”
Harari: Algorithmic authority's major breakthrough will rely on biometric data
“I think the big breakthrough will come with biometric data. So far, most of these algorithms, whether it's Amazon or Netflix or whatever, they work mainly on the basis of data external to my body. They follow me around in space, see where I go, which places I …”
Milk: A 'Netflix for VR' cannot exist without a back catalog
“You could not start Netflix of the art today because there's no back catalog to license every, every, you know, Netflix starts and they license a hundred something years of cinema and television and they have a catalog. Got it. And you pay for it, access that …”
Cockcroft: Open source from Big Tech makes proprietary software startups harder
“So what you're seeing now is Twitter and Facebook and Netflix and Google and LinkedIn producing the stuff you actually want to use, which has already been tested at volume. And then it's actually much harder to build a proprietary software company because you'…”
Evans: Content and monetization models—not tech—are TV's true lock
“There's always this sort of misperception that you can turn up with technology and disrupt it, but actually the point of Netflix and the reason why the existing model is so strong is it's actually, no, it's the content. That's the lock on all of this stuff, an…”
Evans: Gaming stream viewership is larger than Netflix, HBO, or ESPN
“Watching people play games is now bigger than Netflix, or bigger than HBO, or bigger than ESPN.”
Sarandos: Authentic local TV shows travel globally better than English-dubbed copies
“What we're trying to do is tell these stories that are authentically local, and the win for us is that they actually travel more the more authentic they are. Because there's something inorganic about the English language European television show that forces it…”
Sarandos: Netflix ordered two seasons of House of Cards with zero notes
“House of Cards was our first original show on Netflix. And The deal we made with David Fincher was, I'm gonna give you two seasons of the show, no pilot, and no notes.”
Reed Hastings barred Netflix's revenue-generating DVD team from executive meetings
“DVDs was a hundred percent of our revenue, and the, we had a whole, like, giant team running that business, and one day I said, you guys aren't allowed to come to staff meeting anymore.”
Casey regrets not trimming Meta at $380 before it fell to $90
“The twenty-twenty-two period was rough and, you know, I kinda, my big mistake in twenty-twenty-two was not trimming a lot of stocks at the end of twenty-twenty-one. You know, I looked at Netflix at 6:30 then, and Amazon at one 80, and Facebook at three 80, Fac…”
Andreessen told Reed Hastings in 2004 that Netflix streaming was crazy
“I remember meeting with Reed Hastings in, I think, 2004 and, you know, Netflix was up and running and was very successful doing a DVD rental by mail. And he literally, you know, reads, reads a technical genius in addition to being a business genius. And he sai…”
Andreessen: 'The Social Dilemma' lied about historical bicycle opposition
“There's this Netflix documentary called The Social Dilemma that's kind of, you know, condemns, you know, kind of social media as this kind of unique threat to civilization. And one of the things that one of the guys in that movie says is he's like, you know, s…”
Streaming platforms require driving subscriptions rather than capturing scheduled viewers
“Like, the idea for Netflix is, my job is to make shows that make people want to Subscribe to Netflix, which is very different than keeping people watching, you know what I mean, it's just different bringing people to the show for a specific hour of time.”
Netflix's directive to Shonda Rhimes is to make whatever makes her happy
“I can tell you exactly in specific terms what they ask from us, which is make whatever makes you happy, which has been fantastic.”
Whitman: Quibi must commission all content because no short-form libraries exist
“There is no library to buy for this very high quality short form content. So unlike Netflix or Hulu or other that bought a library, there is no library to buy. So we have to commission that content.”
Sarandos: Brazilian show '3%' achieved U.S. viewership rivaling cable hits
“You show a show like the three percent, which is a show we make in Brazil, in all in Portuguese, with an all Brazilian cast, and the watching on Netflix in the U.S. Would be equivalent to a pretty good sized cable hit.”
Sarandos: Reed Hastings originally pledged Netflix would never make original programming
“When we've made a move into original programming, We were so convinced as a company that we would never do original programming that Reed had said, we'll never do original programming, yet I knew that I was in a safe place to do it.”
Peter Morgan writes every word of The Crown without a writers' room
“Peter Morgan writes every word of the crown. No, no writer's room. He has some research team that helps him, but every word of that show is written by him”
Sarandos: Iron Fist had the biggest launch among Netflix's Marvel series
“And it was the biggest launch of all four.”
Sarandos: Luke Cage defied conventional wisdom and performed globally on Netflix
“African-American superhero, and on and on and on, and it was hugely popular for us all over the world.”
Netflix committed to two seasons of House of Cards without a pilot
“House of Cards was our first original show on Netflix, and the deal we made with David Fincher was, I'm going to give you two seasons of the show, no pilot.”
Sarandos: Adam Sandler movies are among Netflix's top-watched films
“I think it's underrated relative to watching, and some of our top watched movies have been these Sandler movies, which tells you, again, what people's tastes are.”
Sarandos: Content failure is failing dollar efficiency versus alternative investments
“Where we see we have a failure is that relative to what it costs, did enough people watch it that it was a good use of content dollars. So there is an efficiency measure in that way, which is, is it an efficient use of dollars relative to any other way you wou…”
Hastings: Netflix competes for broad leisure time, not just Amazon or HBO
“It's not just competing against Amazon or HBO, it's really this open competition for time.”
Hastings: House of Cards and Orange Is the New Black proved original content model
“Yeah, the first weekend, well, it was all the press leading up to House of Cards, and then the first weekend, and then there was the White House Correspondent Center that year spoofed it, and we had clearly hit a meme that we thought, wow, if we can do more of…”
Hastings: Netflix Replaced All Linear TV Ads With Targeted Online Marketing
“We stopped advertising on linear TV a couple years ago, and all of our advertising is online, because we want to target the show to the person”
Hastings: Netflix will not buy a telecom company
“So do we need to buy a telco? No, because we're not trying to, you know, we work with over 500 ISPs around the world. Ok, so just like Facebook, or Google, or anyone, or an internet company, the last thing, I mean, you know, how well is Google Fiber worked out…”
Stromberg: VR distribution will shift from download stores to subscription models
“Initially where you know when you have sites like Steam and you know, Oculus site and all these will be the first places that you're able to sort of download, but I can see very clearly a time when you will have this sort of Netflix like library to choose from…”
Bilimoria: Game consoles drive over 60% of Netflix streaming hours
“I think more than 60% of streaming hours on Netflix are coming from the major game consoles.”
Evans: Netflix and Amazon match top US media content budgets
“Netflix and Amazon are now top tier content producers. They have equivalent budgets to the other major US entertainment companies.”
Sarandos: Brazilian series '3%' viewership matches a US cable hit
“And you show, show like the three percent, which is a show we make in Brazil, in all in Portuguese, with an all Brazilian cast, and the watching on Netflix in the U.S. Would be equivalent to a pretty good sized cable hit.”
Horowitz: TelevisaUnivision secured a Netflix deal using ElevenLabs AI dubbing
“Well, we've got this great company, 11 Labs. They can help you with it. We put them together. In a couple of months, he was in, you know, France and Poland and all over the world with this incredible technology that had his actors basically acting exactly as t…”
Sandbox VR partnered with Netflix for a Squid Game VR experience
“And that is why we decided to partner with Netflix on Squid Game.”
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.”
Shondaland created a Netflix-backed incubator to retain writers long-term
“We've really created, we were able to create a model in the beginning when we first got there to find a way to hold on to a series of our writers and to make it sort of a creative home for people to stay versus you know, you have to go away and take a deal her…”