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 4,115 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 53 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
Calacanis: Andreessen Horowitz's long-term returns won't match Benchmark or Sequoia
“I think in the arc, it will not be comparable to benchmark at Sequoia.”
Boyle: Healthcare, housing, and education costs rose because tech hasn't touched them
“Everything has come down the cost curve, like televisions are less expensive, everything is less expensive in consumer land, except for healthcare, except for housing, and except for education. And it's really because technology has not touched those sectors, …”
Boyle: VC creates jobs while private equity fires people
“Private equity and venture capital as a category could not be more different from what they are doing. Venture capital is creating new things from nothing, and it is creating more jobs, it is Pouring money into companies so that they can grow, expand, and solv…”
Eich: Mozilla became captured by Google and cannot compete on distribution
“When I was thinking about Brave, I realized not only had Mozilla become captured by its search partner and was probably going to die because it couldn't compete, not just on Chrome intrinsic qualities, but on distribution, which really matters at scale.”
Eich: Google is complicit with digital ad fraudsters by collecting fees
“And that Google still gets the fee when this advertising money is stolen by fraudsters makes Google complicit with the fraudsters to some degree. It misaligns the interests again. It's a conflict of interest.”
Taylor Swift's Original Masters Are the Music Industry's Most Overvalued Asset
“There has never been a more overvalued asset in the music industry than the masters for Taylor Swift's original albums at three hundred million today. Not only is she actively devaluing them, but the whole industry is at complete peak for what people are willi…”
Michael Ovitz preferred negotiating with conflicted people to ensure deals closed
“You know, I've always felt, and I still do, I'm really interested in dealing with conflicted people because if you have a conflict, in essence, you want it to work out on both sides. So a lot of times I'll go to someone with a heavy conflict to this day to wor…”
Ovitz: Michael Eisner undercut me at every opportunity at Disney
“When I got to Disney, it was very clear there was a head-to-head conflict, and Michael undercut me every chance he could, and after a couple years, I just didn't want to deal with it anymore”
Bankman-Fried: The two dominant crypto futures exchanges in 2018 were 'shitshows'
“There are only two real players in it, and they're shitshows. But they're still printing money, despite being shitshows.”
Gilbert: 21st Century Fox Is Disney's Worst Major Acquisition
“But certainly it's the worst of the four big acquisitions, five if you include BamTech.”
Streaming's high-volume content firehose fundamentally breaks Disney's historical IP flywheel
“That whole strategy of a fire hose of content is completely orthogonal to the flywheel strategy of only the best content very infrequently.”
Gilbert: Sports leagues will capture all long-term excess broadcasting profits
“So in the long run, if the main reason to subscribe to any given channel ends up being actually about the game content itself and not differentiated by stuff around the game, then the excess profits in the long term Will just be captured by the rights holders …”
Gilbert: Streaming Is Structurally Inferior to the Cable Bundle
“It's structurally a worse business, as you were just mentioning, than the old cable bundle where you just got checks. Consumers can cancel easily. They do so every few months. It's expensive to make The amount of content you need to make, especially now with t…”
Gilbert: Iger Erred by Appointing Chapek for Peacetime
“Ultimately, I kind of think they just chose the wrong guy in Bob Chapek, and I think Iger's mistake in recommending Bob Chapek for the job was thinking that the company was about to enter a peacetime.”
Keeping content exclusively on Disney+ severely limits Disney's downstream IP monetization
“So they do have Disney Plus. It does have a hundred and thirty million people subscribed, but a 130 is not 350. And so your content that you want to drive people to the parks and to merch is only reaching 40% of the people that it could if it were on Netflix, …”
Gilbert: Winning streaming services must offer broad, 'kitchen sink' content catalogs
“If you want to operate a streaming service that gets to scale, and if you're going to operate a streaming service, it has to get to scale since the fixed costs are so high. Then you must have a broad set of content. That is weird. That it must be a broad set o…”
Nintendo's intellectual property rivals Pixar, Marvel, and Lucasfilm combined
“Nintendo is like Pixar, Marvel, and Lucasfilm combined. I mean, they have some of the very best IP in the entire world. They've got three franchises that can stand toe to toe with anything at Disney in Mario, Zelda, and Pokemon.”
Animated IP outperforms live action in flywheel entertainment business models
“The IP that works best for Flywheel Dynamics almost has to be animated, i.e. Not live action, because with live action characters, the characters are too bound up in the actors that play them, and that creates all sorts of problems.”
Ancillary products do not cannibalize core entertainment IP
“The beauty here and the discovery that Disney makes is that when you put the IP into these other ancillary nodes, it doesn't cannibalize the core IP.”
Extensive research uncovered zero evidence that Walt Disney was anti-Semitic
“I turned over every stone I possibly could on this company, and we spent, I don't know, the better part of the year so far researching this, and I found zero evidence of that.”
Passive indexing protects retail investors from their own destructive overactivity
“Passive index investing just lends itself better behaviorally. If you're in one of those funds to just saying, I know the market's up, I know the market's down, but whatever. I own the index. I've made my piece. Whereas if you are either the active manager try…”
Vanguard's mutual structure starves its technology and customer service of reinvestment capital
“Vanguard, the downside of its structure is that there are no excess profits that can be invested for the long term in things like technology and things like customer service.”
Passive indexing reaching 95% of market assets would not break price discovery
“I think even if you had 95% passive, the prices are set by the marginal trader. Right. You don't need very many people in there arguing with their dollars about what something is worth to figure out what it's worth.”
Vanguard represents the most extreme historical example of business counterpositioning
“I think this may be the most extreme example of counterpositioning ever. Bogle did something that was essentially non-economic. There's no economic incentive to create this company in the first place. Their ownership and fee structure was an advantage that can…”
Gilbert: Supercar Speed Is Irrelevant Like Watch Accuracy Post-Quartz
“I think the point I keep kicking around is much like the quartz crisis in the world of watches, speed is no longer relevant. I mean, the F-Eighty goes zero to 60 in 2.2 seconds. This is the supercar. This is the three to five million dollar car. The Tesla Mode…”
Ferrari Is Arguably the Only Legitimate Luxury Brand Founded Post-1950
“I think you could maybe even argue they are the only legitimate luxury brand established in the second half of the 20th century.”
The NFL is the largest single-property media business in the world
“I'm pretty sure the NFL is the largest single media business in the world. Not an aggregate diversified media business, but like, if you consider the league as a single property, then I think it is the largest individual single property in the world.”
Major broadcast TV networks would not exist today without NFL football
“For those networks for the last decade, run the counterfactual of the networks no longer had football. They don't exist anymore. This has been life support for them for a decade.”
Gilbert: Networks will overpay for NFL rights until economics break
“I continue to think that networks are just on this treadmill where they're just going to keep paying more and more and more for NFL rights until is actually non-economic for them to do so, but then they'll be in so deep that it's pretty hard to recover from th…”
Sequoia refused to raise a mulligan fund after the dot-com crash
“We interviewed Doug Leone who was, you know, one of the, I guess, two stewards ago of Sequoia, and he told us that after the dot-com crash for the Sequoia fund that was the dot-com bubble fund, every other venture firm out there, after the bubble popped, were …”
Lewis lacked an ending for his SBF book until FTX collapsed
“With Sam Beckman-Fried, I was a year into it, and I did not know what I was gonna do with it until it blew up”
Gilbert: Media and podcasting outputs scale completely independently of inputs
“In the media business, in podcasting,
You can grow your audience, and thus your revenue, and thus your importance in the world.
All outputs can scale completely independently of your inputs.”
Studies reveal Coca-Cola is the world's number one ocean plastic polluter
“I was looking up studies recently, and the Coca-Cola company is the number one polluter globally of Crap in the ocean. Pepsi's very close behind all the big drink companies.”
Warren Buffett's legendary Coca-Cola investment has actually underperformed the S&P 500
“He would have been better off buying the S&P Over that same time period. Including dividends over that same time period. The S and P 500 is up about 11% annually. So the famous Berkshire Hathaway Coca-Cola investment today is actually underperforming the marke…”
Google TPUs Are Only Scaled AI Chip Deployment Besides Nvidia
“They're a chip company with their Tensor Processing Units, or TPUs, which is the only real scale deployment of AI chips in the world besides Nvidia GPUs.”
Google Is Only Company with Both Frontier Model and AI Silicon
“Somebody put it to me in research that if you don't have a foundational frontier model, Or you don't have an AI chip, you might just be a commodity in the AI market, and Google is the only company that has both.”
The 2011 Google Brain 'Cat Paper' Drove Hundreds of Billions in Revenue
“I think it's not that much of a leap to say that the cat paper led to probably hundreds of billions of dollars of revenue generated by Google and Facebook and ByteDance over the next decade.”
Google's DeepMind Buy Directly Spawned Modern AI Labs
“This company and this purchase of it by Google was the butterfly flapping its wings equivalent moment that directly leads to OpenAI, ChatGPT, Anthropic, and basically everything.”
DeepMind Would Be Worth $500 Billion as an Independent Company
“This is an asset that Google owns today that, again, I think is worth half a trillion dollars if it's independent.”
2017 Began a 5-Year Period of Google Failing on Transformers
“It is fair to say that 2017 begins the five-year period of Google not sufficiently seizing the opportunity that they had created.”
Noam Shazeer Urged Google Leadership to Replace Search with Transformer Models
“Gnome, though, immediately starts advocating to Google leadership. Hey, I think this is going to be so big, the transformer, that we should actually consider just throwing out the search index And the 10 blue links model and go all in on transforming all of Go…”
OpenAI Rushed ChatGPT Launch After Learning of Anthropic's Chatbot Plans
“So, Anthropic was working on what would become Claude, and rumors were out there, and people at OpenAI Got wind of like, oh, hey, Anthropic and Dario are working on a chat interface. We should probably do one too. And if we're gonna do one, we should probably …”
Waymo Can Become a Google-Sized Business if Costs Drop
“You could see a path to a Google-sized opportunity for Waymo as a standalone company just through this analysis, as long as they figure out a way to get costs down to the point where they can run this as a large and profitable business.”
AI Data Center Costs Are Over 50% Chips, Under 6% Power
“I've seen estimates that over half the cost of running an AI data center is the chips and the associated depreciation. The human cost, that R&D is actually a pretty high amount because hiring these AI researchers and all the software engineering Is meaningful.…”
AI Chat Ad Rates Will Be Dramatically Higher Than Search Ads
“So, there should be an ad model that emerges, and ad rates should actually be dramatically higher because you have perfect precision.”
Google's AI Market Share Will Stabilize Between 25% and 50%
“They own 90% of the search market. I don't know what they own of the AI market, but it ain't 90%. Is it 25%? I don't know, but at steady state it probably will be something like 25, maybe up to 50%, but This is going to be a market with several big players in …”