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 15 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 1 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: Journalist advised Zuckerberg to accept $1B Yahoo acquisition offer
“Facebook got just tons of, you know, it's just like this is the most trivial, stupid, useless, you know, thing that doesn't matter, you know, Facebook, there was almost a deal for Facebook to get bought by Yahoo early on, and I remember a certain very prominen…”
Hirsch: Healthcare platforms must optimize for outcomes, not time spent
“Remember I came from the world of social. Like I was at Facebook and Yahoo where time spent was like the God metric. It was like, oh my God, we just care about as many eyeballs and as much time as we can. And it could actually, it's less about time spent. It's…”
Andreessen: Yahoo price cut gave Zuckerberg cover to reject $1B offer
“Yahoo came back and essentially renegotiated the deal, tried to lower the price. And that gave Mark basically the, you know, I don't know, cover, kind of wherewithal to be able to walk away from the deal.”
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…”
Jeff Jordan: Amazon and Yahoo's free auctions failed against eBay
“Amazon and Yahoo launch auction businesses early in eBay's life and they went for free. So every seller in the world said, I'll list, list my site there. It didn't work cause they hadn't, they couldn't get the buyers to show up there. So eBay, even though we w…”
Benedict Evans: Modern mobile app stores are like Yahoo in 1995
“When you look at an app store today, it's like looking at Yahoo in 95. You know, you can browse a million apps. You could browse a 100,000 websites, but it doesn't scale. And there's no way for you to find the right things that you want to use on that device.”
Amazon and Yahoo failed to compete with early eBay auctions
“Both launched auction businesses to compete with eBay early in the day. And both quickly got a lot of supply because they listed it, there were no listing fees. They required no economics. And no consumers went. Both businesses were DOA, and they abandoned it …”
Andreessen: Netscape Almost Acquired Yahoo for $3M–$5M
“Netscape, we almost bought Yahoo. There was like a bid ass spread between like 3,000,005 million dollars.”
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.”
Dixon: The decentralized web was an underdog to corporate networks in 1993
“And then there was sort of this really kind of unlikely alternative, which was this, at the time, pretty crappy experience in Mosaic and, you know, homebrew websites and Yahoo, and you talk about this, you know, in the book, but like, and I think, I don't know…”
Evans: Mobile app stores remain in a pre-PageRank discovery phase
“We're kind of in a pre-pagerank phase for how people discover and engage stuff online. That's to say an app store now looks a lot like it looks a lot like Yahoo, right, two years ago.”
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.”
Dixon: Yahoo outsourced search because web portals were considered superior businesses
“Search was well known to be a bad business and portals was a good business. So you had to search was a way to get them into your portal where you then show like celebrity gossip and then banner ads. And that's why Yahoo actually outsourced their search to Inkt…”