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 106 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
Wennmachers: Silicon Valley founders go from college dorms to corporate kombucha
“We need so much of that because a lot of the folks here, they are running large companies, but like, they've never run a thing. They're out of a dorm into their new dorm with kombucha and massage tables.”
No mainstream media publisher accepted Marc Andreessen's 'It's Time to Build'
“Wrote It's Time to Build. Like, you caved for a minute and said, like, all right, we'll place it. Maybe we'll place it. Yeah. And nobody took it. Nobody.”
Diane Greene was ousted from Google over an innocent satellite contract
“Diane Greene was ousted from Google for like a very innocent contract who'd look at pictures, I mean, satellites, right?”
Wenmachers: Never trust a PR agency that promises specific press outcomes
“And don't trust an agency ever that will promise you a headline or a story or any kind of outcome.”
Wenmachers: PR agencies should never re-pitch for lost client business
“If the agency actually wants to repitch the business, you should fire them again. Because it's just a stupid ass decision. Replace the revenue, learn from why is the account gone, and then move the hell on.”
Wennmachers: When a company makes a mistake, apologize fully without nibbling
“When you eat shit, don't nibble. So if you, if you're going to own it, which if you actually screwed up, you should.”
Wennmachers: Lying to the media during a crisis permanently destroys credibility
“I actually like to know really what happened, because once you lie to the media, you're basically fucked.”
Wennmachers: A company in crisis gets only one media turnaround story
“There may be a 150 stories that are all very, very critical, rightly or wrongly, no matter what. There's one turnaround story. It's just, you only get one of those.”
Wennmachers: PR agencies should be benchmarked on network, not domain knowledge
“Well, the whole fricking point is that they can help translate this very wonky thing that you do to an audience that will then write it down, have to write it down in plain English to an even broader audience, right? So you don't want to benchmark them on how …”
Becoming a CEO is more learnable than developing product genius
“Product genius is kind of binary, you have it or you don't, right? And it's more, becoming a CEO is more learnable than developing product genius.”
Silicon Valley offers 30 times more startup opportunities than Europe
“And for everyone here, there's just 30 or more in Silicon Valley.”
a16z strategically targeted all marketing communications at founders instead of LPs
“The thing that we all decided is like, we're just going to aim all of our communications at the entrepreneurs versus the LPs. Because we have their numbers, we, we're not a column, and you guys got great introductions to people, but it all needs to be very ent…”
a16z LPs complained about a Bio/Health blog post titled 'fuck cancer'
“We got one, we did one incredibly controversial block, it turns out. Like, a few LPs really hated the headline, and it was it was in the BioNHealth team, and it said, fuck cancer”
Top software engineers prefer Elon Musk over legacy auto executives
“A genius software engineer is not going to, they're going to want to work for Elon Musk. Like you can say about Elon Musk, whatever you want, but like a suave, well manicured executive from the car industry is like not really, like an, a talent magnet for soft…”
a16z built partner brands so founders wouldn't only demand Marc Andreessen
“I do think we needed to even out the brand a little bit because like, otherwise any entrepreneur with leverage was going to go like, well, I want him to be on my board. Right. And that was just going to get success. It'll be worse with every other GP. So that …”
Most executive business books are fancy resumes rather than practical guides
“Most books, like whoever the guy was from this and that, GE, whatever, they were all kind of fancy resumes and victory labs. They weren't really. Where you could learn something, particularly for our audience, that, like, it's so rough and tumble to be in a st…”
Margit Wennmachers: Media coverage falsely portrays Silicon Valley as mostly weirdos
“The weirdos, like, the weirder the better, right? Like, and it, it's gotten to an extreme where it's like, this is actually not reflecting Silicon Valley. It's just the, a slice of it.”
Wennmachers: A TED Talk is not a personal brand
“Like, you can make anybody do a TED talk if you really, really are hell-bent on doing it. But like, that's not an actual marketing campaign. That, that's not a personal brand.”
Mainstream media now reacts at the end of social news cycles
“They used to set the tone, and now they're at the very end. At the very end of all the stuff that's been said on Twitter, or Reddit, or, it eventually spills out, and then media is like, oh, what is this thing? But like, it's at the very end, right? And that, …”
Wenmachers: No global PR agency is equally excellent across all offices
“I have not seen an agency that is equally excellent in every office that they have.”
Wenmachers: Public relations teams should never report to quantitative CMOs
“If the CMO is a quant person, I think definitely PR should not report into the CMO because it's just a different animal.”
Wenmachers: Denying PR direct CEO access drastically reduces talent quality
“When a CEO refuses to do that, the Caliber of talent they can get just drops 10 notches.”
Wenmachers: Self-publishing lacks the credibility of independent third-party media
“You can do that, but you will never be as credible as an independent source of information.”
Wennmachers: Virgin uniquely maintains brand consistency across diverse industries
“By the way, it's the only business, I think, that has a brand that's consistent across very different businesses.”
Wennmachers: Agency Executives Seeking Personal Press Risk Alienating Paying Clients
“My belief was, you don't ever want to be in the news and have your client going, like, what is she spending her time Time on while I'm paying, right?”
Wennmachers: Avoiding PR leaves your company's narrative to competitors
“One potential big downside of not doing any PR, regardless of what market you're in, is that You don't define you, but then someone else does. Either the competition, or someone who just doesn't know your story, or your version of the story. And that, I think,…”
Wennmachers: Avoiding PR to hide from competitors is just an excuse
“I think a lot of people sort of say like, I don't want to PR yet because I don't want to tip off my competition. I think that's sort of excuse for, I don't know how to do PR. It also is not that convincing because if your shit isn't three times as good or 10 t…”
Wennmachers: Press releases are a waste of time and money
“They're a waste of money, waste of time. No one reads them.”
Wennmachers: Flat PR Retainers Cause Misaligned Incentives for Agencies
“The flat retainer sounds great because you know what you're doing, but there's no incentive on the agency's part to actually earn that retainer every month. It's kind of misaligned.”
Wennmachers: PR success cannot be measured in spreadsheets
“If you are trying to see the success of it in a spreadsheet, don't bother because you will never, ever be happy.”
Wennmachers: Top PR talent requires direct access to the CEO
“Maybe not at the very early stage, but if you're a successful company, and we should all plan for that, you're not going to get great talent Unless they have direct access to the CEO.”
Margit Wennmachers: Most leaders insincerely claim they want crises to improve companies
“I think most people say, yeah, of course we want to make the company better all the time, but they don't need it.”
Margit Wennmachers: Successful apologies require doing it once, completely, and personally
“When the actual moment is you, as Judy said, you want to do it once, but You want to tell it all, and you want to tell it yourself, right? Those are sort of the three rules, and then you have an opportunity to move on.”
Margit Wennmachers: The top-down PR strategy embodied by Steve Jobs is over
“This very sort of top down, you know, one channel out going to the masses that Steve Jobs embodied, I think to a large degree is over because we just have too many channels, too many constituents, and you know, there's Twitter, there's, you know, that is just …”
Margit Wennmachers: Crisis teams fail with too many lawyers and PR people
“Because I think in many cases you kind of have a crisis team, but you don't always have all the right people on the team, right? You often, sometimes you have too many lawyers or too many PR people or too many people who tell you what you want to hear, right?”
Ben Horowitz passed on TransferWise twice before investing
“And then Ben passed on the deal, I think twice, maybe? But finally corrected this ridiculous mistake, and now we are an investor in TransferWise, and very happily so.”
Andreessen Horowitz may eventually open a European office
“Eventually, we might get to a place where we have an office here, hopefully run by folks that are in this community.”
Silicon Valley maintains far higher risk tolerance than Europe
“And I don't want to speak for the UK, but like in Germany, if there's a bankruptcy on your resume, that ain't very good. So the risk tolerance, I just think is just so much greater in Silicon Valley still.”
Wennmachers: Venture capital firms have no products, only people and ideas
“We don't have products. We have people and ideas. That's it.”
Traditional VCs historically avoided public press coverage until IPOs
“Usually the VCs would want to talk to the press, and some of them had been clients, at the IPO time. So they wanted to basically have no risk. But then when the company goes public, it's like, hey, I did that, right?”
a16z raised its first $300M fund in three months during 2009 downturn
“And then I think, if I remember correctly, you had done it in three months, which at the time seemed very spectacular because there was no money.”
Wennmachers: Top five Silicon Valley VC firms never changed historically
“It felt like, to me, when I was at the out, on the outcast side, it felt like, to me, the top five firms never changed. Like, never, ever changed, right?”
Practical timeless content creates far more VC value than bubble commentary
“The ones that have depth that the entrepreneurs can like take something from and that is somewhat timeless, way more important than are we in a bubble or are we not in a bubble?”
Wennmachers: Executive personal branding upsides outweigh downsides ten to one
“Like, there are some downsides to it, but the upside beats the downside, like, 10 to one or whatever the right number is.”
Wenmachers: Early-stage PR aids hiring and fundraising, not customer acquisition
“And if it's early stage, PR can be very helpful because it makes everything else easier. Right. So it makes hiring easier. It makes fundraising easier. It makes everything easier, but there's almost never a direct correlation where it's like, I did this, the i…”
Wenmachers: PR agencies should be managed by dedicated team members, not CEOs
“An agency is ideally managed not by the founder, because as a CEO, you have lots of things to do, right? Like, you're growing a company, you're probably managing engineering still. Like, there's a lot of things to do. So ideally, you have someone with a lot of…”
Wenmachers: Apple has historically operated without hiring external PR agencies
“I mean, like, yeah, I don't think Apple has really used PR agencies. There are models where you don't have an agency at all.”
Wenmachers: In-house PR teams must maintain direct contact with journalists
“And at the same time, I think it's really important for internal folks to be talking to the press, because you kind of lose touch. What is even a good story? What are they thinking? Like, what, what's kind of in the water? And not knowing that at all is just r…”