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 14 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
Costolo: AI will replace human-only medical diagnosis within ten years
“Healthcare, we're going to look back 10 years from now and go, oh my god, we let humans who had only seen four cases of this decide what to do next instead of running it through, you know, here are the symptoms and evaluating against terabytes of historical da…”
Costolo: AI recommendations will outperform human judgment when they disagree
“There are going to be lots of cases of, in specific domains of, it did this thing a human would never do, and there will be lots of machine learning examples of, well, the machine thinks we should do X, and the people think we should do Y, but the machines wil…”
Costolo: Veterans understand team alignment better than 95% of Valley managers
“If I had to summarize Ben's management course, it's make sure everybody understands what you understand, and people coming in from the military have that perspective much more deeply ingrained in them than 95% of people who are in management roles in Silicon V…”
Costolo: Twitter partnered with Google to bypass Egypt's Arab Spring shutdown
“Egypt, you know, during the Arab Spring, we sort of started in Tunisia with people organizing protests on Twitter, and they were able to organize protests on Twitter because they were writing under pseudonyms and not, you know, their actual names, so people we…”
Costolo told Twitter's board he would leave peacefully without severance if asked
“I mean, I had the exact same conversation with my board many times, you know, long before the IPO. Like, hey, listen, when it comes time for, don't ever have any conversation behind my back about it. Just come tell me you're not the guy anymore, and I'll, like…”
Costolo: Leaders must correct mistakes quickly rather than try preventing them
“It's not your job as a leader to prevent mistakes from happening. It's your job as leader to correct mistakes as quickly as you can when they happen. If you try to lead by preventing mistakes from happening, nobody's going to friggin' take any chances, and the…”
Costolo: CEOs can operate in wartime and peacetime simultaneously across departments
“Yeah, sometimes you're both at the same time inside the company, right? With, I remember there were times at Twitter where, with the sales team, I could focus on All right, this is really good. This engine's really working. It's going well. Let's focus on, you…”
Costolo: Military veterans ignore media noise like mean Business Insider posts
“I know they're gonna come in, they're gonna be mentally tough, they're gonna work their ass off, and they'll be, like, not distracted by, like, Nonsense, like, oh, there's a bad, mean blog post about us in Business Insider.”
Costolo: Great entrepreneurs succeed because they forget the pain of starting companies
“Entrepreneurs, people who are great entrepreneurs have, like, and have amazing short-term memory loss.”
Costolo: Leading to please your board creates misery and failure
“If you don't have that attitude about it, you're just going to be, you know, then you're just going to be miserable, and you're not going to be able to lead, because you're going to be constantly thinking, well, what would the board be happy if I do, right? An…”
Dick Costolo worked as unpaid technical consultant on HBO's Silicon Valley
“I contacted the HBO folks who were doing the TV show Silicon Valley and said, hey, I want to come work on Silicon Valley, and the CEO of HBO, Richard Pepler, said, well, we need a, like, technical consultant, but, like, we can't, like, pay you to do it. And I …”
Costolo trained in same Second City improv group as Steve Carell
“I remember I got there my first day, and you're doing the Second City Training Center, and Steve Carell and I and Rachel Dratch were all in the same group, so he and I and Rachel know each other from, like, God, 30 years ago now.”