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
Gilbert: AOL Deal Made Google a Major Ad Player Over Overture
“This made Google a major player in the paid listings market almost overnight, and they weren't at all before. Overture dominated this market before.”
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.”
Backlink anchor text describes websites better than self-authored on-page text
“When someone is linking to you, they often do a better job of describing your website than you do on the page yourself. Anybody that's just sort of looking at your website to try to figure out, what's this about? The actual words on your website tend not to do…”
Google Toolbar users averaged seven times more searches
“Once Google toolbar was installed, a user averaged seven times the number of searches. Which makes them seven times more valuable. Which means you could pay a lot of money to get someone to install it.”
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…”
Gilbert: Market Volume Increases Likelihood of Perfect Ad Matching
“Basically, the more volume you have in your market, the more deeply traded the market, the more likely you are to have an ad that has perfect product market fit with the query.”
Ballmer: Microsoft entered search in 2003 with zero native capability
“And we jumped in in 2003, I think we pushed. Now, you'd say five years is a lot, or you could say five years isn't that much. You could say we had no birthright. I mean, it's just a completely separate thing. We had no capability. We had nobody who'd grown up …”
Gilbert: Mobile app updates took two weeks for review in 2012
“And at this point in time, there was approximately a two-week delay between pushing an update and it being reviewed and accepted.”
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, …”
Rosenthal: YouTube Pays 55% on Long-Form and 45% on Shorts to Creators
“Google does not report today, but here is what is unique about YouTube versus every other platform is they pay out 55% of revenue on long form and 45% on shorts directly to creators.”
Ilya Sutskever left Google in 2015 to co-found OpenAI
“So after the dinner, Ilya leaves Google and signs up to become, as we said, co-founder and chief scientist of a new independent AI non-profit research lab backed by Elon and Sam. OpenAI.”
Google built TPUs to offset compute costs while still buying Nvidia hardware
“Even Google at this point in time, this is when they start building their own chips, TPUs, because, you know, they're still buying tons of hardware from NVIDIA, but they're also starting to source their own here.”
John Doerr and Mike Moritz backed Google at a $100M valuation
“I mean, it was crazy when John and Mike Moritz did Google at a hundred million dollar valuation in the Series A, you know, that was earth changing.”
Gilbert: Amazon, Microsoft, and Google hold 40%, 22%, and 10% cloud share
“Amazon's got 35, maybe 40%. Microsoft's got 20 to 22%. Google's somewhere around 10%.”
Ram Shriram wrote Google's first $250,000 check and joined its board
“He invests the first 250,000 dollars in Google, and he joins the board of Google.”
Gilbert: Google went public without raising venture rounds beyond Series A
“Google went public just on that Series A.”
Google's Series A with Kleiner and Sequoia was valued at $100M post-money
“The Series A that would happen shortly thereafter of Google famously split between John Dora Kleiner and Mike Moritz at Sequoia was at a hundred million dollar post-money valuation, which was insane for the Point in time.”
Gerstner: Google desktop search turned negative year-over-year in late 2012
“Google's desktop search, I think, didn't go negative
Until 2012.
Maybe the fall of 2012.
That's when there were fewer people searching on desktop, you know, on a year-over-year basis because people were switching to their mobile devices, okay?”
Rosenthal: Acquired Is Recording at Google's Historic First Office
“This is Google's first office right here. They gave it to us for the day.”
Google Network Yields Just $9 Billion Gross Profit Versus Core's $175 Billion
“Google Network, they pay out 70%, and they only made thirty billion. So if you start thinking about, like, gross profit, it's comparing nine billion dollars to a hundred and seventy-five-ish billion dollars.”
Sergey Brin designed Google's first logo in open-source program GIMP
“So Sergei designs the homepage and makes the first logo using the open source drawing program GIMP.”
Google's iconic mission statement dates back to its first 1999 press release
“And it's this culture that comes up with a mission statement to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. I mean, this was in 1999 in their very first press release after the financing. That has been the mission statement.”
Gilbert: Sundar Pichai joined Google in 2004 to lead Toolbar team
“In 2004, a new PM is hired by Google. They come in and they take over this application's client team that includes Google toolbar. That PM is Sundar Pichai.”