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 11 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
eBay employees knew never to buy from sellers below 4.8 stars
“Part of it was that every, every employee of eBay knew that you didn't want to buy from somebody that had a 4.8 star or less. Because in order to give someone a negative feedback as a seller, you basically had to buy your, burn your buyer account. You had to b…”
Blackstone interviewed Ancestry CEO Deb Liu entirely on Zoom after $4.7B acquisition
“You're picking a CEO for a company they had just bought for 4.7 billion dollars. Blackstone did the entire interview process in zoom.”
Ancestry digitized the 1950 US Census in nine days using custom AI
“And so for 1950, we wanted to be absolutely prepared, so we built an AI model. We actually created pages, we tested it, we tried all these different things, and then it took nine days to digitize the entire census.”
Ancestry plans to digitize 15 billion new records in 2023 using AI
“And so this past year we had a record year, so five billion pieces of content, you know, digitized. And then this coming year for 2023, we're going to triple that because of the AI work that we're doing, which is bringing on fifteen billion more records.”
Amazon sellers make virtually zero sales outside the Buy Box, notes Liu
“You basically get no sales if you're not in the buy box.”
Flipkart drove early GMV growth by focusing heavily on mobile phone sales
“And so there was a time, and this was back when Flipkart was growing like crazy. They really, really chased GMV. And so they sold a ton of mobile phones because it was a high GMV item.”
The RealReal charges upwards of a 50% take rate for single items
“I think the real, real, they do authentication. And so they charge something like upwards of 50% if you're only selling one bag of something like that.”
Amazon expanded to CDs before clothing because structured metadata simplified inventory integration
“So Amazon did books because there's ISBN. There's like, you know, there's all, it was very structured, very easy to look up categories were already there. But the next thing they did was CDs because music published by large publishers had a very similar catego…”
Early Facebook Marketplace tracked user frequency instead of transactions to measure success
“One of the things we did for Facebook marketplace was we, at first, our first metric wasn't transactions because we couldn't measure them. It was how often people were coming. It was weekly to monthly actives because as a classifieds marketplace, you know, you…”