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 197 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 5 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
Meta Devoted Zero Minutes to Core Social Apps at Connect 2024 Keynote
“Meta held a multi-hour keynote at Connect in September, 24. And of those multiple hours, zero minutes were dedicated to their core products of social media apps, their hundred billion dollar business of selling advertisements on these social media products.”
Rosenthal: Yann LeCun required open source and NYU professorship to join Meta
“And Jan says like, well, I'm flattered that you would want me to come work here. That's interesting. But like, I live in New York. I teach at NYU. I don't want to leave. I don't want to quit teaching at NYU. And I'm pretty darn committed to open source and pub…”
Gilbert: Original 'Facebook Guy' Header Image Was J. Geils Band Singer Peter Wolf
“There's a great Quora post about this where there's unmistakably the photo of Peter Wolf that Facebook guy is based on. They just sort of pixelated it and You know, made it duotone instead of the original photograph.”
Gates's Harvard Talk Helped Convince Zuckerberg to Drop Out
“Mark would actually say later that Bill saying that At the event was part of what got him comfortable doing the same thing.”
Rosenthal: Facebook revenue grew from $153M in 2007 to $2B in 2010
“In 2008, the company had done two hundred and eighty million in revenue, up from one 53 the year before in 2007. 2009, they do almost eight hundred million in revenue. He's crushing it. 2010, an even two billion in revenue.”
Rosenthal: Facebook daily user additions surged to 70k post-OpenReg
“So over the summer, Facebook was adding, like, five to 10,000 users a day. By late fall after launching open registration, they're now adding 70,000 users a day.”
Facebook's Ratio of Daily to Monthly Users Reached Nearly 70 Percent
“50% of monthly actives were daily actives in oh eight. Since then, they have basically improved that metric every year. There's been a little bit of variance, but it is now almost 70% today.”
Facebook Newsfeed Initially Updated via Cron Jobs Due to Memory Limits
“Yeah, it was a cron job because they didn't have enough memory to run it in real time.”
Gilbert: Early Facebook high school signups required college student invitations
“You had to log into hs.facebook.com, and it looked mostly the same. It had slightly different features, but there was this weird thing where somebody who was already in college had to invite you. It's not like anyone could sign up for high school Facebook. You…”
Gilbert: WTI loaned Facebook $600,000 with warrants in 2004–2005
“Yeah, and so they basically invented venture debt, and so they make a 300,000 dollar loan, it's like, I think like a revolving credit line, in the fall of 2004, and that comes with warrants, that if the company ever goes public, that they can then exercise The…”
Facebook grew from 100M users in August 2008 to 350M by late 2009
“They go from like just barely getting to a hundred million users in August of 2008 to almost a hundred and fifty million by the end of the year. So 50% growth in the last four months of the year. And then 2009 is just like lights out. They grow 250% in 2009 to…”
Facebook Expanded to Over 100 Campuses Within Four Months
“By the end of the semester, they're in over a hundred schools in like, you know, what, three, four months?”
Meta reports $135 billion revenue and 35% operating margin in 2023
“Their revenue in twenty-twenty-three at the end of the year was a hundred and thirty-five billion dollars, operating income of forty-seven billion dollars, so that's a 35% operating margin.”
Rosenthal: Facebook's senior team churned after rejecting Yahoo's buyout offer
“The whole management team basically churns over the next set of months.”
Rosenthal: Facebook revenue reached $48 million in 2006
“In 2006, with this Microsoft partnership, that jumps to forty eight million dollars in revenue.”
Rosenthal: Facebook generated $9 million in revenue in 2005
“So Facebook had made nine million dollars in revenue in 2005 when they were selling themselves.”
Winklevoss Twins Settled Facebook Dispute for $65M Including Stock
“Eventually, the two twins sue Mark and Facebook. They settle for sixty-five million dollars, forty-five million of which is paid in pre-IPO Facebook stock.”
Rosenthal: Facebook IPO raised $16B at $104B cap, ranking third all-time
“They raise sixteen billion dollars at a one hundred and four billion dollar market cap, making it, I think, the third largest IPO of all time at that point behind Visa and, ironically, General Motors coming out of the bankruptcy during 2008.”
Jim Breyer personally invested $1.1M in Facebook's Series A
“1.1 million dollars of this 12.7 million dollar round was done by Jim Breyer personally.”
Rosenthal: Beacon activity collapsed after Facebook shifted to opt-in
“Ultimately, after a few weeks, they do acquiesce, and they say like, okay, we will turn Beacon off, we'll make it opt-in, as opposed to opt-out, and You can have a way to, like, completely turn off all beacon tracking permanently from your profile. A lot of pe…”
Rosenthal: Facebook had $150M revenue and broke even during 2007 Microsoft deal
“Facebook at this point in time is basically break even and doing one hundred and fifty million in revenue, most of which is Microsoft itself.”
Rosenthal: Facebook reached $153 million in revenue in 2007
“And then the next year in 2007, again, I think almost all of this is Microsoft, that goes to a hundred and fifty three million dollars in revenue.”
Rosenthal: Viacom offered $750 million to buy Facebook in 2006
“Viacom, which owned MTV, thought that that was worth seven hundred and fifty million dollars, which is what they offered to buy the company for in the summer of 2006.”
Rosenthal: Pre-JOBS Act SEC Rules Mandated Reporting at 500 Shareholders
“Well, back then, once a company crossed 500 shareholders, the SEC actually mandated by law that you had to start reporting quarterly like a public company.”
Rosenthal: Facebook mobile hit 53% of revenue in Q4 2013 while desktop shrank
“Facebook announces that mobile advertising is now 53% of revenue, and total ad revenue for the company grew 76% year over year in the fourth quarter, which of course is the most important quarter of the year, which means, I did all the math on that, that means…”
Rosenthal: Facebook bought facebook.com domain for $200,000 in 2005
“I believe they bought it for 200,000 dollars, which actually was a good chunk of that venture money that they raised.”
Rosenthal: Mark Zuckerberg expanded Facebook to Columbia specifically to test head-to-head competition
“And he specifically chooses Columbia because, Ben, as you said, there was an existing competitor there. And he's like, I want to see how Facebook competes. And like, I want to know right away, can we displace it?”
Facebook Captured Over Half of Harvard Undergrads in Two Weeks
“Within two weeks, over half of the entire undergraduate population is active on Facebook.”
Rosenthal: Bret Taylor and Paul Buchheit invented the Like button
“Brett Taylor and Paul Buchite invented the like button.”
Rosenthal: Meta's app heads and AI leadership all report to Chris Cox
“There's still all the individual products in the family of apps. Those all have their own heads, and they all roll up to Chris Cox, who has had a product for the whole company, and AI, too, actually, reports to him.”
Rosenthal: Naomi Gleit is Meta's longest-tenured employee besides Zuckerberg
“Naomi, Naomi is now Meta's longest tenured employee besides Mark and runs a ton of stuff at the company.”
Facebook Handled No Native Ad Targeting When Sheryl Sandberg Joined
“And when she comes on board, like you referenced this earlier, Ben, there's Basically no ad targeting that's happening natively on Facebook. Like there probably is targeting that's happening through the third party Microsoft advertising network, but none of th…”
Gilbert: Facebook Photos Was Built by One Engineer in Two Weeks
“Which, by the way, photos got written by like one guy in two weeks.”
Rosenthal: Microsoft pursued Facebook in 2007 after missing search to Google
“Microsoft, perhaps obvious now in retrospect to everybody, really just wants to buy the company. But Mark's, of course, not gonna do that after the whole Yahoo experience, etc. Microsoft is also happy, though, to just keep the partnership going and expand it, …”
Segmenting by School Solved Friendster's Server-Crashing n-Squared Problem
“Friendsters out there trying to compute second degree friends of friends, which is this crazy hard computer science problem, especially as the global number of people growing, it's an n squared problem. And Facebook is over here, or the Facebook at the time, i…”
Rosenthal: Sean Parker ensured all 2004 summer housemates received Facebook equity
“The other thing that Sean does, by all accounts, is he makes sure that everyone in the house that summer gets equity in the company.”
Rosenthal: App install ads drove early native mobile revenue for Facebook
“A very large percentage of the inventory that they were selling, and especially the revenue of these native mobile ads in the beginning, was actually for app install ads that game developers and other folks were buying on Facebook.”
Rosenthal: Meta reached ~$175B market cap after Q4 2013 earnings
“After the QFOR, 2013 earnings announcement, the stock pops way, way, way up to, like, a 175 billion-ish market cap, so up 75% from IPO, you know, what is that, year and a half earlier.”
Rosenthal: Facebook received 30,000 angry support emails on day one of News Feed
“They get 30,000 angry emails to support on the first day from users who are really upset about this.”
Meta Erased $232 Billion in Market Capitalization in a Single Day
“The market cap went from nine hundred billion to seven hundred billion. The actual number is they lost two hundred and thirty-two billion in market cap, the new largest in history, surpassing their previous record.”
Rosenthal: Facebook reached 20M users and grew 100K daily at F8 launch
“So, at Effie, they announced that the Facebook user base is now over twenty million, and it is growing by over a 100,000 users a day, so growth is accelerating.”
Rosenthal: Mark Zuckerberg and Eduardo Saverin split initial Facebook ownership 66/33
“Eduardo invests a thousand dollars in infrastructure for the site. Mark invests another thousand dollars, so together there's 2000 dollars of investment in the facebook.com, and the deal they strike is that Mark gets two-thirds of the company, and Eduardo gets…”
Gilbert: Facebook's Early Differentiator Was Authentic University-Verified Identity
“And that's what makes it different than all these other social networks. Myspace existed. Friendster existed. But anyone could sign up for these. And in part, that meant that they had more explosive growth, because there was no governor on the growth. And we'l…”
Zuckerberg: Meta owns four apps with at least one billion users
“We went through a period where it's like, we had Facebook and a handful of small apps, and now we have, like, you know, four apps that have a billion people or more using them”
Gilbert: Zynga drove over 10% of Facebook's revenue at IPO
“It was like north of 10% of Facebook's revenue at IPO was from Wazinga.”
Zuckerberg: Meta has spent 10 years developing holographic AR glasses
“This is like some huge project. We've been working on it for 10 years.”
Gilbert: Microsoft invested $240M in Facebook at $15B valuation in 2007
“So the terms of the deal are, in October, 2007, Microsoft invests two hundred and forty million dollars for 1.6% of Facebook. So for those trying to do the math at home, that is a fifteen billion dollar valuation on the deal. Microsoft will get the exclusive r…”