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 70 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
Facebook Acquired Onavo to Track Competitor Network Traffic and App Usage
“Well, in 2013, Facebook acquired a small Israeli company called Onavo, and Onavo was exactly what you just said, Ben. A VPN, actually, I think it initially started as, like, a data compression tool, so if you were worried about your data plan, which was Really…”
UK probe found Facebook told Cambridge Analytica to delete data in 2015
“The conclusion was that the quiz was taken by 320,000 people. Since those people had access to friends, the total surface area was the public profile data of eighty-seven million Facebook users. They also found that Facebook had requested that Cambridge Analyt…”
Google Owns Eight Distinct Products With Over One Billion Users
“It is wild that this one company has eight products with over a billion users and started this era with just one search that didn't even have a billion users yet, but search, Android, Chrome, YouTube, Gmail, Maps, Drive, Photos, and then if you count the Play …”
Facebook Avoided First-Day IPO Crash Only Due to Underwriting Bank Intervention
“Facebook shares end the day at 38 dollars and 23 cents, up 23 cents from the IPO price, but only because all of the underwriting banks in the IPO stepped in to buy shares and support the price, which was totally crashing throughout the day.”
Mark Zuckerberg Turned Down a $24 Billion Acquisition Offer From Microsoft
“Less than two years later, he turned down twenty four billion and that they were really good for the money. It's Microsoft.”
WhatsApp Has Surpassed 100 Million Monthly Active Users in the US
“WhatsApp has a hundred million now in the US, which this is sort of a big narrative violation that WhatsApp will never catch on in the US, and iMessage is dominant, and even after that it's, you know, text message. This is crazy. A hundred million people a mon…”
Zuckerberg Negotiated Facebook's $1B Instagram Acquisition Over a Single Weekend
“Not to mention, on top of it all, we're not gonna go into it here because we had a whole episode on Facebook and Instagram, but this was done over two days, over the course of a weekend. Mark didn't do a whole lot of socializing this before pulling the trigger…”
Zuckerberg Rejected Yahoo Acquisition After Terry Semel Lowered $1B Offer
“So Mark actually agrees to the Yahoo deal. Billion dollars. It's gonna be all in stock. Yahoo's gonna buy the company. In the interim between when they shake hands on the deal and while the docs are being drafted, Yahoo announces their quarterly earnings, and …”
Meta Built a Hyperscaler-Sized Data Center Footprint Exclusively for Internal Use
“They now last year spent twenty-eight billion dollars in capex, which you should mostly read as data centers. They operate a Hyper-scaler-sized data center footprint, give or take. You know, you think AWS, Azure, Microsoft, and Google Cloud. Meta is the fourth…”
Zuckerberg: Facebook paused feature development for a year during mobile rewrite
“We basically took, I think it must have been like a year or something, we were just like, look, we're gonna pause feature development of the company, Because it's hard enough to do a rewrite, right? So if you look at, like, the history of the tech industry, th…”
Calacanis: Chamath Palihapitiya invented 'growth hacking' at Facebook
“There is no equivalent of growth. That was, the idea of growth hacking didn't exist as a term until Chamath did what he did.”
Gilbert: Meta CFO Projected $10 Billion Impact From Apple's ATT in 2022
“The CFO kind of casually says in a response to someone, oh, we think that the, Impact from ATT to our ad business will end up costing us on the order of ten billion dollars for twenty-twenty-two.”
Gilbert: In September 2005, Facebook held one-third of US college students at 70% DAU
“By September of o' five, they were at five million users. That was 10 X their user base just a year ago in September of o' four, and almost a third of all U.S. College students Were included in that five million. So by September of oh five, they had a third of…”
Benchmark Passed on Facebook Due to a Conflict With Friendster
“Which is what tied their hands and why they could not pursue an investment in Facebook.”
Facebook Does Not Sell User Data, It Sells Access to Targeting
“In part, you know, you can see why Facebook massively prefers the ad based business model of, we never even expose any information to you, advertiser. You target, and then we just deliver the ads. You never get to know anything about who the users are on our p…”
Facebook's Series A included $3M in secondary for founders
“Three million went to Mark, Dustin, and Sean as a secondary in this deal.”
Facebook Had 425M Mobile Users but Zero Meaningful Mobile Revenue Pre-IPO
“We had more than four hundred and twenty five million monthly active users who used Facebook mobile products in December 2011. We anticipate that the rate of growth in mobile users will continue to exceed the growth rate of our overall MAUs for the foreseeable…”
The Failure of Facebook Beacon Directly Led to the Growth Team
“Chamath Palihapitiya... This was Chamath's big thing before Growth. And actually, the epic failure here of Beacon leads directly to growth, as we shall see in a sec.”
Meta's US and Canada Revenue Per User Grew from $11 to $227
“The second insane thing, at IPO, the US and Canada market had an average revenue per user of 11 dollars. That number is now 227 dollars.”
Facebook Surpassed Google in Daily Page Views in November 2005
“By November of 2005, they were getting two hundred and thirty million page views daily, which means that they had passed Google in page views.”
Rosenthal: Microsoft invested $240M in Facebook at a $15B valuation
“And the big kicker, Microsoft is going to invest two hundred and forty million dollars in Facebook at a 15 billion dollar valuation.”
Gilbert: Facebook July 2018 Drop Wiped $119B, Setting a Historic Record
“The company announces in their July, 20 18 earnings call that they're gonna be more focused on user privacy, and that revenue may slow as they make this intense focus. They dropped 19% in one day. They wiped out a hundred and nineteen billion dollars in market…”
Seventy Percent of Early Facebook Signups Became Daily Active Users
“70% of people who ever signed up were active that day. There are not user engagement retention metrics better than that in the world.”
Gilbert: Early Facebook prioritized raw intelligence over industry experience in hiring
“The other thing that was basically true is they were not really interested in recruiting industry veterans, especially on the technical side. And Mark says this in early talks, that he was just prioritizing raw intelligence over experience.”
Meta's Reality Labs Segment Has Accumulated $60 Billion in Operating Losses
“So based on their spend already, since they started reporting Reality Labs as a separate segment in 2019, they've spent right around sixty billion dollars. That is in operating losses for the segment.”
Gilbert: Facebook Settled with FTC for $5B with 20-Year Oversight
“The whole settlement here was not specifically about Cambridge Analytica. There were a bunch of other things that are privacy related, but the number is five billion dollars. And David, there is one thing that it comes with, and that is a 20 year window that t…”
Rosenthal: Facebook testing showed the Like button increased comment volume
“And so, ultimately, they started running some tests with, like, small user groups and specific geographies, and they found that it actually often boosted engagement of comments.”
Accel led Facebook's 2005 Series A with $12.7M at $98M post-money
“Excel comes in, leads a series A. 12.7 million dollars at a ninety eight million dollar post-money valuation.”
Zuckerberg: Open Compute saved Meta billions by standardizing supply chains
“So now you have, like, all these other, you know, cloud service platforms that, you know, basically use, Open compute, and because of that, the supply chain is standard around, standardized around our designs, which means that it's, like, way more supply, way …”
Sequoia invested in Instagram 48 hours before the Facebook acquisition
“It's also funny that Sequoia claims Instagram was one of their investments where it sold 48 hours after they invested.”
Rosenthal: Facebook bid on IPL digital rights in 2017 and lost
“And in 2017, Facebook bid on the digital rights and lost.”
Rosenthal: Facebook invested $5.7B for 10% of Reliance Jio
“Facebook invested 5.7 billion dollars for a 10% stake in this new subsidiary of Reliance.”
Gilbert: Mobile in-feed ads proved far more valuable than desktop sidebar ads
“Because the ads are front and center, the value per ad is actually higher. So they ended up creating a much, much more valuable ad unit than they ever had on desktop purely because of this incredible attention on them when you're scrolling in feed on mobile.”
Rosenthal: Facebook Shipped Zuckerberg's Entire 2005 Roadmap Within Two Years
“And the wild thing is, they do accomplish all of this in the next two years.”
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…”
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.”
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…”
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.”
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…”