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 1,621 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 27 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
Mars is so private it does not produce financial statements for bankers
“No one knows what their balance sheet looks like, including their bankers. They don't produce financial statements for their bankers.”
Deep operational knowledge enables superior underwriting compared to blunt valuation multiples
“Multiples are kind of a blunt instrument used for valuation when you don't actually deeply know and understand the business, and when you do, you can just underwrite better than everyone else, and you have more margin of safety in the price that you are willin…”
Chocolate sales will not decline despite widespread adoption of GLP-1 weight-loss drugs
“Even if everyone starts taking Ozempic, I don't actually think chocolate sales are gonna fall.”
Sandberg Bet on Mobile Because Zuckerberg's Control Prevented His Firing
“And when they sort of arrived at this plan of, we are going to forego a lot of desktop revenue to basically bet it all on figuring out mobile revenue, she said, well, Mark, nobody can fire you, and only you can fire me, so if you're in, I'm in.”
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…”
Gilbert: TikTok stealing users was a bigger existential threat than Apple's ATT
“The interesting thing is, at this time, the real threat wasn't actually ATT. The biggest of those three threats was TikTok stealing users. The whole ATT thing is about how much money can we make off of an ad because it is so well targeted? That's an optimizati…”
Gilbert: Apple's ATT was net value destructive rather than captured by Apple
“And what ended up actually happening from ATT? It's been value destructive. Overall, because I don't think the amount of money that has shifted away from Facebook has been captured by Apple.”
Gilbert: Microsoft's 1997 Office commitment and investment saved Apple from bankruptcy
“Which, by the way, saved Apple. The company would have been completely out of business because it was so existentially important to anyone using an Apple computer to use Office that if Office, you know, Microsoft decides, oh, we're gonna stop developing Office…”
Gilbert: Microsoft is the only Big Tech giant without federal antitrust probe
“The only one that's not under active antitrust investigation today by the federal government.”
Gilbert: Xbox is culturally significant but insignificant to Microsoft's business
“Xbox has become an important part of our world. But not an important part of Microsoft's business.”
Gilbert: Popular belief that Nadella originated Azure is historically inaccurate
“As the general public is concerned, Steve Ballmer was obsessed with Windows. He built the enterprise business. He left. Satya Nadella came in and launched Azure, and Azure has been great. Like, not exactly. That's not really what happened.”
Gilbert: Microsoft shelved finished Office for iPad project in 2013
“And absolutely, 100% something that happened is all 200 of us worked for multiple years to get these things ready. We had a ship date. Well, we had what we thought was a ship date. Actually, what happened was we were told that actually we're gonna shelve it. A…”
Gilbert: Microsoft would have missed mobile regardless of the DOJ antitrust case
“Even without the whole DOJ thing, Microsoft probably would have visted themselves. Microsoft almost certainly would have missed mobile because there's no chance they would have realized that the business model that Google had Meant that they were gonna win in …”
Microsoft pioneered product-led enterprise growth decades before SaaS startups
“Everyone loves to talk about product-led growth, and how it's this new thing in the late twenty-tens, and how Slack, and Atlassian, and Trello, everyone figured out PLG in this bottoms-up, workforce-adopted way, rather than selling to procurement, or IT, or th…”
Copying proven products delivers better risk-adjusted returns than being first
“So fundamentally what this does for you as a business is it just leads to better risk-adjusted returns. You already know what's going to work before you ship it. Like, you don't really take market risk. So you're not gonna be the first to the market with early…”
Gilbert: Renaissance Technologies operates as a casino house, not an investment firm
“Renaissance Technologies is actually not in the investment business. They are in the gambling business, and in particular, they're the house.”
Hermès destroys imperfect manufactured products to prevent them from entering the market.
“Hermes cares so deeply about their brand that they burn imperfect products so they never see the light of day.”
Eli Lilly claimed rebates account for 75% of insulin's sticker price
“Eli Lilly has publicly claimed that the cost of these discounts and rebates accounted for 75% of the sticker price of insulin.”
Wegovy and Ozempic cost over $1,000 monthly in the United States
“The price of Ozempic to treat diabetes is north of a thousand dollars, and Wegovy for weight loss is north of 1300 dollars per month before insurance, and this is in the U.S.
So expensive, right?
That's a lot of money.
In Canada, of course, Ozempic is 147 doll…”
Early studies show GLP-1 weight loss causes 40% lean muscle loss
“When you're losing weight normally, you lose, like, 25% lean muscle, and these early studies are showing it's something like 40%.”
Gilbert: Spotify lacks operating leverage in music due to record labels
“I think Spotify in their music business has gotten to scale and has no potential to create a high operating leverage business. They're always going to be giving the same percentage of the profits to the record labels who have an unbelievable amount of bargaini…”
Visa's zero-risk information network may be history's best business model
“This information network that doesn't have to take on any of the risk of any of these transactions. It's purely about connecting buyers to sellers and moving information back and forth has proven to be maybe the best business model ever”
Visa's financial profile is superior to any major tech company
“The financial profile of Visa's business is more tech than any of the tech companies. It is what they all wish they could have.”
Nvidia's gross margins will not erode significantly below 65% as shortages subside
“That's gonna go away, but I don't think this very high, you know, 65% plus margin is gonna erode too much.”
Competitive moats erode and margins compress as total addressable markets become massive
“Every moat only works if the castle is sufficiently small. If the prize at the end of the finish line becomes sufficiently large, you're gonna need a bigger moat, and you need to figure out a you know, how to defend the castle harder.”
The AI market faces an investor crisis of confidence within 18 months
“I think there's a pretty reasonable chance that there's some falter in the next 12 to 18 months where there's a crisis of confidence among investors where at some point something will come out Where we all observe, oh, maybe GPTs aren't as useful as we thought…”
Any challenger unseating Nvidia's AI dominance requires an unforeseen flank attack
“So I think the bottom line here is it nearly impossible to compete with them head on, and if anybody's gonna unseat NVIDIA in the future of AI and accelerated computing, it's either gonna be from some unknown flank attack that they don't see, or the future wil…”
Phil Knight Essentially Invented Modern Sports Marketing With Steve Prefontaine
“It's Phil, like, basically inventing sports marketing. I mean, there was a sort of nascent idea of athlete sponsorship at the time, but it really, this is the invention of it as we know it today. And all athletic brands are defined by athletes, and this is rea…”
Nike Scrapped Pre-Planned 2018 Campaigns to Run Colin Kaepernick Ads
“And in fact, I know that when they launched this, they actually scrapped their plans for the whole rest of the year for a whole bunch of ad campaigns that were already ready for a different way that they were gonna do the 30th anniversary relaunch of Just Do I…”
Product Is Merely Nike's Monetization Method for Athlete Marketing
“I think the athletes are your most important marketing tool. I think the product is a monetization method for the marketing that you do through athletes.”
The Five Major Defense Primes Acknowledge Stasis and Rotate Contracts
“All these contracts kind of go to all of the contractors. They just rotate around who's the prime on it, and the prime makes the most money, and then it has the most sort of sway, and you don't want to be with a subcontractor, you'd rather be the prime contrac…”
Top Defense Primes Lack Mutual Power But Block New Entrants
“So there really isn't power. Within the industry. But to the extent that you have already become one of these five, then together the five have power versus new entrants.”
Gilbert: Future breakthrough defense innovation won't come from Lockheed's Skunk Works
“It's very likely that the Skunk Works mentality ends up solving more problems for our country, but probably not from the Skunk Works division of Lockheed Martin.”
Gilbert: Gaming revenue historically surpassed Hollywood and TV including arcade coin drops
“I was shocked to learn that the gaming industry has always been larger than TV and Hollywood, if you include the total coin drop in arcades, and I always just thought this was this new phenomenon of like, wow, video games have become so much a part of the fabr…”
High-Value Business Podcasts Forfeit Massive Revenue by Paywalling Feeds
“For the type of podcast that we are, where you have lots of founders and CEOs and hedge fund managers and these sorts of people listening, You could never ask someone to pay you in membership what they are worth to the most valuable advertiser for that slot. A…”
The NFL Is the Single Largest Media Property in the World
“It's that the NFL is the single largest media property by value, and the funny thing is, if you go look at the, because we did this for the Nintendo episode, you go look at the largest media Media properties. They list Mario, they list Pokemon, and they, and t…”
Gilbert: Sarbanes-Oxley shifted corporate fraud from public to private markets
“The result of Sarbanes-Oxley being stay private longer, that it's much more likely that fraud now happens in the private market than the public market, and that is basically what we saw with Theranos, with FTX.”
Gilbert: Enron's Rebecca Mark Sold $83M in Stock Without Charges
“She sold about eighty-three million dollars of stock. She actually got out early enough, and she was sort of cast out by the male executives at the top in a way where she was actually never accused of any wrongdoing and never really a part of the prosecution o…”
Qualcomm's Best Days Are Behind It If It Remains Only Handsets
“I think if they continue to try to run the same playbook in just the handset market that they have been, the best days are behind them because people have caught onto their games a little bit and are gonna, gonna squeeze them from a bunch of different directio…”
Benchmark refuses fund scaling, junior partners, platform teams, and CRM software
“Benchmark famously believes that venture capital doesn't scale. They have zigged when others have zagged. They have not grown their fun size. They haven't tried junior partners. They don't have a platform team. They are not multi-stage. And I've heard they don…”
Backing a repeat entrepreneur in the enterprise sector is near risk-free
“Backing a repeat entrepreneur in the enterprise sector is near risk free.”
Venture investors should aim to quickly become consensus and right
“You want that to be true when you make the investment, but you don't want to be very non-consensus for long. You want to quickly be consensus and right. You just don't want anybody to see it until you make that bet. But like, you don't want to make that bet an…”
Gilbert: Microsoft and Google initially missed the cloud wave via PaaS
“And the unfortunate thing for Microsoft and for Google, who really started at this platform as a service layer, was you basically didn't get the startups because you didn't have a mature platform yet that people were excited to build on and understood how to b…”
Gilbert: AWS generates over 90% gross margins on bandwidth charges
“AWS makes 90 plus percent gross margins on their bandwidth charges.”
Gilbert: Data gravity gives AWS an ML moat over Google's superior models
“What's becoming clearer to me is the machine learning capabilities that Amazon has need to be good, but they actually don't need to be as good as Google's. Because here's sort of the strategy with machine learning. You're gonna use whatever ML is available wit…”
Gilbert: Amazon's 100% ownership of AWS represents history's greatest venture return
“He just gets capital allocation, and that's why I think Amazon is effectively the highest performing venture returns in history. AWS is a venture bet in their portfolio that they own 100% of.”
Gilbert: Amazon's internal entrepreneurship was Seattle startup scene's biggest impediment
“The biggest impediment To the Seattle startup ecosystem was the fact that Amazon facilitated entrepreneurship over and over and over again for people at all stages in their career with all levels of ambition and is really, really impressive, but doesn't really…”