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 111 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
Google Announced a 40% Reduction in Data Center Cooling Energy in 2016
“Very quickly, July of 20 16, Google announces a 40% reduction in the energy required to cool data centers.”
Waymo Raised $3.2B in March 2020 with Alphabet Majority Ownership
“March of twenty-twenty, they raise 3.2 billion dollars from folks like Silver Lake Canada Pension and Investment Board Mubadala, Andreessen Horowitz, and of course, the biggest check, I think, Alphabet, and I think they're always the biggest check, because Alp…”
Sergey Brin Returned to Google as an Employee for Gemini
“Not to mention, apparently, Sergey Brin is, like, now back as an employee working on Gemini.”
Google Translate Was Google's First Production Language Model
“So this is the first large, I'm using large in quotes here, language model used in production in a product at Google.”
Noam Shazeer and Jeff Dean Are Co-Technical Leads for Gemini
“Once they get Noam back, when they do the deal with Character AI, bring him back into the fold, Noam joins the Gemini team, and Jeff and Noam are the two co-technical leads for Gemini now”
Google Designed and Deployed First TPU in 15 Months
“So, the TPU was designed, verified, built, and deployed into data centers in 15 months.”
Noam Shazeer Created Google's 'Did You Mean' Spelling Correction
“So the first thing that they do with this work is they create the did you mean spelling correction in Google search. ... Gnome created this.”
Geoffrey Hinton Was a Google Summer Intern in His 60s
“He was a summer intern in somewhere around twenty-eleven, twenty-twelve. And mind you, at this point, he's like 60 years old.”
Google's Self-Driving Team Completed the 'Larry 1000' Within 18 Months
“So, they start the project in 2009. Within 18 months, this tiny team, I think they hired, I don't know, it's like a dozen people or something. They've driven thousands of miles autonomously, and they managed to succeed in the full Larry 1000 within 18 months.”
Pichai Decreed Brain-DeepMind Merger and Gemini Standardization in Mid-2023
“Sundar makes these Two decrees mid-twenty-twenty-three. One, we're merging Brain and DeepMind into one team for AI within Google, and two, we're gonna standardize on one model, the future Gemini, and DeepMind slash Brain team. You go build it, and then everybo…”
Google One Has Over 150 Million Paying Subscribers
“What we do know is there are over a hundred and fifty million paying subscribers to the Google One bundle.”
Google Launched Gemini 1.5 with Market-Leading 1M Token Context Window
“February, twenty-twenty-four, they launched Gemini 1.5 with a one million token context window. Much, much larger context window than any other model on the market.”
Google Stock Dropped 8% After Flubbed Bard Keynote
“After the Bard launch and this keynote, Google stock drops eight percent on that day.”
There Are Currently Over Three Billion Active Android Devices Globally
“Over three billion active Android devices now.”
Google Invented and Published the Revolutionary Transformer Architecture in June 2017
“Google invented the Transformer and published the paper in June of 2017.”
Google Seeded Gmail's 2004 Launch With Just 1,000 Invites
“When they launch it on April first, 2004, they send out 1000 seed invites to Gmail.”
Google's Orkut Peaked at 300 Million Users, Dominating Brazil and India
“Launches a social network within Google called Orkut, and it didn't become that big in America, but it got at its peak, I think, three hundred million users. It was the biggest social network in Brazil, the biggest social network in India.”
Global Digital Advertising Spend Did Not Eclipse Television Until 2018
“For listeners, digital advertising, you know, Google's universe would not eclipse TV. Until 2017, 20 18.”
Larry Page Eliminated All Google Engineering Managers in 2001
“In 2001, famously pre-IPO at Google, Larry Page feels like Google is moving a little bit too slow and gets rid of all engineering managers.”
The Original iPhone Relied on Built-In Google Maps and YouTube Apps
“There are two apps that launch in the very first version of the iPhone. Remember, it didn't have an app store. It was not open to third-party developers. There is a YouTube app and a Maps app, both of which are Google services. Now, the apps are written by App…”
Google Has Seven Products with Over Two Billion Users
“Astonishingly, today, Google has 15 products with over half a billion users. Seven of those have over two billion users.”
Rosenthal: Urs Hölzle ran Google's infrastructure from 1999 until 2023
“Urs is now a fellow, but he ran all of Google's infrastructure from 1999 until 2023.”
Rosenthal: Google grew revenue over 5x from 2001 to 2002
“Yep, they more than five X revenue from 2001 to 2002, from the eighty six million to four hundred and forty million in revenue.”
Gilbert: Google's international revenue expanded from 18% initially to half of business
“Year one, because Omid spent the whole year on the plane, 18% of revenue is now international. 2002, it grew to 22%. 2003, it grew to 29%. Today, it's half of Google's business”
Gilbert: Most Google AdSense click revenue goes to website publishers
“Most of the revenue on a click in Google AdSense actually goes to the website publisher, and Google takes the smaller part as their SPF.”
Rosenthal: Early Google Ad Insertion Orders Had to Be Received by Fax
“All ad insertions were done by fax at this time. So Google had to install fax machines at its headquarters to take these insertion orders for these ads that they were selling.”
Stanford received roughly 1% of Google in tech transfer spinoff
“As part of the tech transfer to spin it out of the university, they end up getting like one percent of the company or something like that.”
Google initially monetized search ads using a fixed CPM model
“They're giving advertisers this great product of, hey, we have intent of people searching for these keywords, but Google's just getting paid on a straight CPM basis for what they're selling. They're not participating in the economic value.”
Early Google consumed about half of Stanford's total network bandwidth
“At one point, they're using about half the bandwidth of the entire university to be serving out google.com pages.”
Rosenthal: Google split its search index into 64MB distributed chunks
“Google needed like the entire page to compute all the rankings and find the links, find the backlinks. They needed to architect Google with this huge distributed computing system. So the index was so big that it wouldn't fit on A single machine or a single ser…”
Rosenthal: Early Google server hardware failure rate exceeded 10%
“So I read that industry average server hardware failure rate at the time was around like three to four percent per year. Google's hardware failure was over 10%.”
Gilbert: Half of Google searches were international with zero ad sales
“The other thing that's happening at this exact same time is Eric Schmidt arrives and discovers that 50% of Google's searches are outside the U.S., but they have no international ad sales.”
Jeff Bezos took 25% of Google's $1 million seed round
“And so all in, they end up raising a million dollars, had a ten million dollar post-money valuation, and yes, Jeff Bezos does a quarter of Google's seed round.”
Yahoo's partnership inadvertently saved Google from the dot-com crash
“Google's gonna survive the dot-com crash between the ten million dollar investment from Yahoo plus the revenue from that portal deal.”
Gilbert: Google Monetized Google Earth Through Toolbar Bundling, Not Ads
“They just bundled Google Toolbar with the installs of Google Earth, and then it more than paid for itself. We don't need to do ads.”
Doerr extracted promise from Page and Brin to hire professional CEO
“John Doerr had very begrudgingly extracted a promise from Larry and Sergey to hire a quote-unquote professional CEO.”
Rosenthal: Google's early commercial revenue came from a $20,000 Red Hat deal
“They sold this enterprise search deal to Red Hat for 20,000 dollars.”
Google founders rejected the name 'Whatbox' over adult site associations
“The name is Whatbox.
Whatbox?
Whatbox.
It rolls right off the tongue.
You know, it's a box that you type stuff into, sort of a question.
But they decided that it sounded too close to a porn site, so they decided not to go with it.”
Gmail launched with 1GB of storage when rivals offered 2MB
“Web-based email from Google with one gigabyte of free storage for every single user. Now to put that in context, Yahoo and Hotmail, Yahoo Mail and Hotmail at the time had like two megabytes of free storage per user.”
Rosenthal: Google Hit $1.5B Revenue, $350M Operating Income in 2003
“2003, that explodes to one and a half billion in revenue and almost three hundred and fifty million in operating income.”
Founders insisted on text-only ads to preserve search page speed
“So importantly, Larry and Sergey insisted that, okay, if we have to have ads on here, they need to be text only.
We can't serve images and banner ads like everybody else does, because that'll slow down the page.”
Jeff Bezos's Google seed investment would be worth $20 billion today
“Jeff has never said whether he sold any of his Google shares along the way, but by my math, if he didn't, that stake is worth about twenty billion dollars today.”
AOL Earned $35M in 2002 and $200M in 2003 from Google Deal
“AOL made thirty-five million dollars in 2002, the first half year of the deal alone, and then in 2003 made two hundred million dollars.”
Google was processing 10,000 queries per day by spring 1998
“By spring quarter of that year, Google, google.com, is doing 10,000 queries a day”
Google's 2004 IPO minted 1,000 employee millionaires
“This IPO made half of the 2000 people who worked at Google millionaires.”
Gilbert: Google Used 200 Ranking Signals by 2007
“Later, by 2007, they were using 200 different pieces of information to determine the ranking on a query.”
Gilbert: Google gave partners up to 100% rev share, including 85% to AOL
“Pay massive revenue share to your distribution partners. In some cases, up to a hundred percent of the revenues generated. We'll talk about who the distribution partners are in a second. But even earlier, we heard with that, ah, AOL deal, they were willing to …”
Early Google colocation agreements billed strictly by square footage
“And then they put, like, the RAM in there, and they put hard drives in there, and then they just stuff them in their data center racks. The photos of these early Google quote-unquote server racks are crazy because the way that their agreements worked in the co…”