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 229 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 2 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
YouTube Lost Roughly $1 Billion Annually on $30 Million in Early Revenue
“So after the acquisition, he said it was doing about thirty million in revenue. So they did have revenue. I believe, just to foreshadow our next chapter, that was in the form of programmatic advertising that was on the DoubleClick ad exchange that they were us…”
Google Acquired Android for Just $50 Million in July 2005
“So July, 2005, Google buys Android for fifty million dollars, five, zero million dollars per Android.”
Google Has Been the World's Top Advertising Seller for 18 Straight Years
“So every year, for the last 18 years, Google has been the number one seller of advertising of any kind in the world.”
Google Became the World's Largest Ad Seller in 2007
“This 2007 year, This is when they become the largest seller of advertisements in the world. Not just digital ads. Ads.”
Google Employed Nearly Every Top AI Pioneer Simultaneously in 2015 and 2016
“Between 2015 and 2016, so this next year, this next 12 months after the Alphabet transition, all of the following people were Google employees. Alex Krzyzewski of AlexNet. Dawn of machine learning AI. His PhD advisor, Jeff Hinton, godfather of AI. His collabor…”
Acquiring DoubleClick Was Worth Every Penny Simply to Block Microsoft
“Worth every penny to Google, even for the sole reason of keeping the premier number one player in the display ad space out of Microsoft's hands.”
Consumer Adoption of Web Applications Eroded Microsoft's Strategic Leverage Over Google
“The faster that we get the internet using public to fall in love with and use web applications, the less and less leverage Microsoft has over us.”
Multiplying bid price by click-through rate mathematically maximizes ad revenue
“If your formula for placing ads is a combination of the price that an advertiser is willing to pay per click and the click through rate of the ad,
Well, that's actually the mathematically optimal formula for maximizing your own revenue as Google.”
Gilbert: PageRank Is No Longer Google Search's Primary Differentiator
“PageRank really is the thing that got Google going, but that part of the algorithm isn't really the thing that's the main differentiable asset today.”
Google gave AOL an 85% revenue share to dominate search
“Google will then share back
85 cents on the dollar to AOL for all of that revenue.
AOL wants two things in exchange for turning over their entire business in the search advertising world to Google.
One is, we want warrant coverage, so what they end up getting …”
Rosenthal: Google AdSense surpassed $1M per day in revenue by late 2003
“They launch AdSense. By the end of the year, so just a few months later, it's doing over a million dollars a day in revenue.”
Rosenthal: Google search scaled only because of Urs Hölzle and Jeff Dean
“It's amazing that they attracted them because prospects were not good that all of this would work in scale, and it was only because of these guys that it did.”
Auction-based search exhibits increasing returns to scale as volume grows
“Having marketplace liquidity means you always generate the most revenue per search versus other smaller search engines. So it's not just that unit costs go down, it's that as they scale their revenue per search actually goes up due to the auction system.”
Larry Page's ambition matched Mark Zuckerberg's
“Larry's a different generation and a very different personality than Mark Zuckerberg, but you should think about his ambition and his desire to build a huge world-changing company. At the same level as him.”
Sequoia and Kleiner Perkins aggressively split Google's Series A round
“Famously, Kleiner and Sequoia end up splitting the deal, and Michael Moritz and John Doerr, the two most legendary VCs in the world, they team up, they join forces, they split the deal, and they both join the board of Google at the Series A.”
Rosenthal: Google was first tech company to use dual-class shares
“Google was the first tech company to do this.”
Google shut down Google.com in 1999 to serve Netscape traffic
“In 1999, they shut Google down so that they could serve Netscape's users.”
Gilbert: Google settled Overture's ad auction patent infringement for $360M
“Google did eventually end up owing them three hundred and sixty million dollars for infringing.”
Rosenthal: Google launched in a uniquely narrow historical timing window
“If Larry and Sergey had met and started working on this a few years earlier, it would have been Yahoo! Because the web was just so much smaller. Like, you didn't need a technology-based search engine to understand it. And then if they'd started a few years lat…”
Yahoo invested $10M and powered Google's search backfill in 2000
“In June of 2000, Google signs the deal with Yahoo that they are gonna take over All organic search result backfills on yahoo.com with the Powered by Google branding, and Yahoo is going to invest ten million dollars in Google as part of this deal.”
Google's zany projects reflect Brin while moneymakers reflect Page
“The zany parts of Google are sort of Sergey's DNA, and the really honed products, and products that make the business work are a little bit more Larry's DNA, but to be honest, there's incredible overlap everywhere between the two of them.”
Rosenthal: Google Toolbar was a secretive strategic linchpin for Google
“How important Google toolbar was and how secretive the company was about this really being like the strategic linchpin of what they were doing. ... Or a strategic linchpin.”
Yahoo CEO Terry Semel offered $1B to buy Google in 2001
“As recently as late 2001, just months before, there's a dinner with Terry Semel, who's the CEO of Yahoo.
Kind of big media executive guy, comes in, takes over, is the big media CEO.
And he sits down with the founders and he says, so guys, I think we're your bi…”
Gilbert: High click-through rates allow relevant advertisers to win auctions with lower bids
“If you're a better advertiser for that
Keyword, then you actually get to pay a lower price.
If people are more natural to click through to your service and transact on your product, you get the privilege of bidding lower prices and still winning the auction.”
Gilbert: Google traffic doubled to 14M daily searchers on Yahoo deal day one
“So traffic doubled to fourteen million searchers per day on day one of this deal.”
Gilbert: Google would have rejected Eric Schmidt if he used a heavy hand
“It was so uniquely googly that there would have been organ rejection if Eric tried to take a heavier hand.”
Rosenthal: No company has done a Dutch auction IPO since Google
“Dutch auction IPO. Not a great idea. Nobody has done it since.”
Gilbert: Indexing the full web would cost hundreds of millions by late 1990s
“Even one year later would have been tens of millions of dollars, and within a couple years would have been hundreds of millions of dollars.”
Gilbert: Paul Buchheit originally coined Google's 'Don't be evil' motto
“Paul Buchheit is awesome, and recently launched a new venture fund, and actually the original coiner of the term, don't be evil, at Google.”
Jeff Dean built Google's first ad test using Amazon affiliate links
“Jeff Dean codes it up so that dynamically, as users are searching, if there's a query that is related at all to Any book in the Amazon library catalog, Google will dynamically generate a text ad saying, go buy this book at Amazon, insert an Amazon affiliate li…”
Jeff Dean built AdWords, AdSense, MapReduce, and Gemini
“He also implemented the first version of AdWords, built AdSense, rewrote the core search pipeline five times, co-invented and implemented Bigtable MapReduce, TensorFlow, and Gemini.”
Google AdSense originated from the prototyping process of Gmail
“And so the thing that led to AdSense Was actually part of the prototyping process of Gmail.”
Google Toolbar lifted user ARPU from $2 to over $10
“The average annual revenue generated by a Google user was two dollars. But with Toolbar, it was 10 plus dollars. Even if you're being conservative. So that difference that somewhere of, you know, eight bucks a user call it, is your budget to play with.”
Great companies deliberately leave their potential profit unextracted
“Every great company has like a stored potential energy of value maximization that it doesn't fully maximize. Like Costco is the extreme example of this, but Google has this too.”
Top VCs gave Google a $100M Series A valuation pre-revenue
“They just...
Paid a hundred million dollar post for a Series A company with no revenue.”
Page and Brin's intense commercial ambition built Google, not accident
“I think there's this perception today that Larry and Sergey were these, like, bumbling academic guys who weren't really business-minded, and Google was a research project, and this all sort of happened by accident that they built the best business of all time.…”
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.”
Gilbert: Pre-Facebook VCs routinely replaced founder CEOs with professional managers
“There wasn't Founders Fund yet. There wasn't A-sixteen Z yet. There wasn't like the notion of founder friendliness. What venture capitalists did is they invested in founders companies and then brought in management to take them to the next level. It's what hap…”
Google Sheets Users Are in the Global Minority Compared to Excel
“Excel is still the main way that spreadsheets are done around the world. I bet a lot of listeners use Google Sheets. We do, too. We love it. Also use Excel, but if you do use Google Sheets, you are in the minority.”
Gilbert: Google monetizes browser traffic better than Microsoft monetized software licenses
“Eventually, Google comes along and creates a browser. They also don't sell that browser, but they monetize all the traffic coming through that browser, and they do it way better than Microsoft does at monetizing selling licenses.”
Gilbert: Apple makes around $20 billion annually from Google default search
“The rumors are that Apple makes something on the order of twenty billion dollars a year today in 2024 from Google as being the front door to Google, sending all of the iPhone search traffic to Google.”
Gilbert: Free ad-supported search makes 3x to 5x more per user than software
“If I could take seven billion people in the world and sell them Windows, or I can take seven billion people in the world and have them use my search engine for free and then make the money from the advertisers, I'm gonna make three to five X more money from th…”
Gilbert: Microsoft used its browser for defense, while Google used Chrome for offense
“Microsoft built a browser, had a bunch of share, and then kind of looked around and said, we don't really know what to do with it. I guess we'll use it for defense? And Google built a browser and said, we know exactly what to do with this, and they used it for…”
Training early large transformer models was financially untenable for anyone except Google
“GPUs and NVIDIA and the transformer made it possible, but to work with the size of models you're talking about spending an amount of money that's certainly for a nonprofit and anybody really except Google was untenable.”
Khosrowshahi: Rides drives more new Eats customers than all external ads combined
“Yeah, we get more new customers from Arise than we do From Google, Meta, Instagram, you know, all of these other channels combined.”
Jeff and MacKenzie Bezos invested $250,000 into Google at seed terms
“So Rahm goes to bath for him, and he convinces Larry and Sergey to take another 250,000 dollars of Jeff and Mackenzie's personal money at the seed price.”
Yakovenko: A Solana transaction uses the energy of two Google searches
“The other thing about Solana is it's very, very energy efficient. So single Solana transaction is about like two or three Google searches. So if you think of it as using a web service, this is a network that, you know, takes as much energy as a regular web ser…”