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 183 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
Gassner: Veeva audits executive team for integrity and energy
“We audit for integrity of the leadership team, because when you're quite well established, that can throw you off. Integrity, integrity issues in the leadership team, so we audit myself and others, and also energy in the leadership team. Because these are thin…”
Weber: Buffett Blocked Running App Acquisitions Due to Lack of EBITDA
“So I wanted to buy every one of those and Warren wanted me to do the multiple on EBITDA and there was no EBITDA. So let's just say it's hard to do acquisitions.”
Gerstner: Altimeter deliberately avoids competing to lead Series A rounds
“First, I don't want to compete in that first round of institutional capital.”
Eich: A Brave vendor shared user data with Experian without consent
“We have a vendor at Brave that has information on people. It shared it with Experian. We didn't know this was happening. I don't know if there's a privacy law that was breached. We believe their privacy policy was breached by their own action or their setting …”
Eich tried to build a WebKit-based browser at Mozilla with Apple engineers
“And I actually talked at one point with Dave Hyatt about doing this. But I couldn't recruit them away from Apple, and I tried to get Hewitt as well, and it would have been a WebKit-based Mozilla browser, but it was too risky. I couldn't get the talent I needed…”
Brave is developing Themis, a zero-knowledge ad verification system on Solana
“So our next generation ad system, which is aiming at Solana is called Themis. It uses a black box accumulator in the browser to build up an authentic, cryptographically secure ad performance set of numbers that can then be put into a zero knowledge proof syste…”
Brave agreed to make Solana default for agnostic multi-chain dApps
“We like Solana. We agreed to make it the default for multi-chain dApps where they don't express a preference for default and the user doesn't.”
Bankman-Fried: I could not describe a blockchain when I entered crypto
“I got one word further, but I couldn't have described a blockchain. I guess it was like, you know, they chained the blocks with the transactions in them, you know? I didn't really know who they was. I don't know if the blockchain does it. Like, I really didn't…”
Bankman-Fried: FTX endorsement deals are for brand building, not customer acquisition
“When you look at sort of the customer acquisition side, I think it's easy to see a lot of the endorsement deals that we've done and think of that as like customer acquisition. It's actually not really how we think of it. It's not the most effective way to acqu…”
McCormick: Not Boring Capital never led a round across 91 investments
“Did you lead a single round? Did you write any term sheets? Were you the biggest check in any one of those 91 investments? Never. And that's all part of the strategy, right?”
McCormick: Not Boring Capital does less diligence than most co-investors
“I wrote in both the public and private memo that like I'm doing probably less diligence than most people on a specific company than most people who are investing in a company will.”
McCormick details the scope of his advisory role with a16z Crypto
“The advisory there is like, you know, working with some of the companies in their portfolio to think about how they tell their story, writing pieces. Like I wrote with Chris in the economists, like they'll introduce me to companies, you know, that they've inve…”
Johns: NZS Capital intentionally holds zero Chinese technology stocks
“We've owned China tech for a long time, but when we put this portfolio together at the end of twenty-nineteen it just looked Sketchy to us, honestly. I don't know what there's a lot for lack of a better word. And so we own zero, zero China tech.”
Canlis shut down its profitable fine-dining business to preserve staff hours
“Pretty quickly we realized that it would be just as risky to do nothing as it would to do something really radical, and if we were gonna live into our values then, you know, every once in a while that really is probably gonna cost you something, and this way i…”
Acquired is 3x to 4x oversubscribed on potential sponsors
“We're probably three or four X oversubscribed on, like, people who really could convert on becoming sponsors if we said, sure, we'll take you.”
Jim Simons personally declined Michael Lewis's pitch for an authorized biography
“Jim Simon's son had a kid in my oldest child's class in high school, and I tried, I approached, I said, look, I can't do it unless you want me to do it. There's no point. And he said like, Dad, just like, no, no, no.”
Gilbert: Acquired operates a strict policy of never working with ad agencies
“Here's, here's a rule. We don't work with agencies. If an agency reaches out and says, we want to place ads on your podcast, we write them a very nice note. If we're able to get to the email and say, oh, we don't work with agencies, but thank you so much for y…”
Dimon invested half his net worth into Bank One stock as incoming CEO
“And I put half my money in the stock at the time. Yeah, you, I tied my, I was going to be the captain of the ship, I was going to go down with the ship, You know, I made it clear to everyone I was here permanently, and it'll be what it is, and so I got to work…”
Dimon: JPMorgan Chase bans side deals and transaction-specific compensation
“So today at JPMorgan Chase, there are no, you know, we do do things, but, and I know some of my partners in the room here, but we all know about it. There are no winks. There are no nods. There are no side deals. There's almost no one paid on a particular thin…”
Dimon: JPMorgan hired 500 venture bankers but admits SVB is still better
“We have a whole campus in Palo Alto now. We've hired 500 innovation bankers. We cover venture capital companies. We're not as good as they are yet. We're gonna get there because we're organized slightly differently”
Ballmer: Microsoft explored acquiring HTC years before buying Nokia
“I'd been trying to buy a hard, I had talked about buying a phone company for years, a number of years before the Nokia deal. I forget what year it was. I flew to Taiwan and we were looking at buying HTC. They were the biggest Windows phone OEM at the time. Nok…”
Ballmer: Microsoft and portfolio dividends roughly cover annual philanthropic giving
“Between Microsoft and the other stuff I own, the dividend checks are pretty close to what we give away. So you can look at the appreciation, but you know, we're just above the dividend checks.”
Chang: TSMC historically used six-month probations rather than layoffs
“Well, we never did that, you know. I mean, the worst we would do was to put them on, place them on probation for six months, and quite often, you know, at the end of the six months, everybody would go back to the, to his or his or her old job, and some of them…”
Chang: TSMC R&D could not develop two nodes concurrently in 2010
“The point is that back then, R&D did not have enough resources to do two notes at the same time. Later we did. Later we did.”
Chang: TSMC did not include Apple in 28nm capex expansion
“Because when we figured a very big market for 28 and therefore when we planned to increase vastly our capital spending, we didn't have Apple in mind. We didn't include Apple. Apple came strictly as a present surprise.”
Zuckerberg: Meta deliberately stacks its management team with technical leaders
“I think one of the things that I've always been pretty careful about is I actually, like, want, like, the, a lot of the people on our management team, it's like, You know, split. It's mostly people running either of these big product groups who come up through…”
Schultz: Childhood trauma led to strict zero-debt rule at Starbucks
“No, it was totally my childhood. My parents were always in debt. Bill collectors were always calling. And no, there was, we never had any debt the entire time. Never.”
Gilbert: Acquired will release the same or fewer episodes after going full-time
“People ask, what's gonna be different for Acquired when you go full-time? Are you doing way more episodes? No, absolutely not. We're gonna make the same number or fewer of even better episodes.”
Gilbert: Acquired will sell interview sponsorships without guaranteed release dates
“The way we're thinking about it for next year and some early conversations, seems like this is gonna work, is you get the next three interviews We promise you they're going to be world-class, and we have no idea when they will come out. And they're probably go…”
Munger says Warren Buffett refused to buy Carrefour's stake in Costco
“I tried to get Warren to buy out the French. When they left, careful. And Warren wouldn't do it. Warren doesn't like retailing.”
Huang personally delivered the first DGX supercomputer to OpenAI
“DGX, the first version that we built was used internally, and I delivered the first one to OpenAI”
Architectural compatibility is NVIDIA's only non-negotiable operating rule
“And so, that's the only unnegotiable rule in our company. Everything else is negotiable.”
DeMuro: Solo YouTube Business Ran At Roughly 90 Percent Net Margins
“Except for travel. There were a few things. I was paying an editor. My best friend, like read, reads my emails, so I pay her. And there was some travel, but the, it was, the expenses were, yeah, I mean, I was, we were probably 90% net.”
DeMuro: Chernin Group Invested Roughly $37 Million In Cars & Bids
“They threw in like thirty seven million or something like that. And some of that was secondary. And then there was additional that they kind of threw on our balance sheet to help us grow.”
Ek: Podcaster ad monetization is a huge priority for Spotify
“One of the big things right now is obviously this is a huge thing, perhaps even more so than music for us to offer monetization to a lot of these podcasters that perhaps unlike yourself can't sell ads.”
Ek: Spotify invested globally in reggaeton after seeing diaspora cluster breakouts
“And so, many years ago, we kind of started seeing them breaking out their natural clusters and becoming a pretty big thing, and it was, for me at that time, it was just pretty obvious that if we invested in that genre on a global basis, we thought that that wo…”
Ek: Spotify aims to win creators via flexibility, not exclusivity
“Our goal is to be the best partner of creators. No, not the only partner, but just the best and win by basically not forcing the creator to do something, but just offering a really good way for creators to work low friction, but also lots of potential to custo…”
Ek: Spotify willingly releases products before execution is crisp
“We're actually one of these companies that happily will release something out that's not great. It's probably have the right strategy, but execution isn't super crisp and perfect.”
Rosenthal: Acquired regrets lending its podcast platform to Sam Bankman-Fried
“We lent our platform to Sam and to FTX, and yeah, I do feel bad about that. I don't think there's any way we could have known at the time, and I don't want to stop having interesting people and companies on the show, you know, up and coming companies, so.”
Acquired hosts invested nearly $10 million in Vanta via an SPV
“One of our couple biggest sponsors and partners on the show this year, we, and kind of through kindergarten and you too, invested almost ten million dollars in the company this year.”
Thompson: Roughly 70% of Stratechery Subscribers Pay Annually
“I think my audience at this point is like 70% annual subscriptions.”
Thompson: Rude Stratechery subscribers get full refunds and permanent bans
“In fact, if someone comes back and if they are just over the top rude or disrespectful or insinuating things about me, I will not just cancel their subscription. I will refund them their entire purchase and say, please just never come back.”
Tavel: Benchmark GPs make only one or two startup commitments annually
“Each of us make one or two of these commitments a year.”
Fenton: He proposed cutting Benchmark's fund size in half
“I'm the person that the last discussion of, like, we were going to do it the same size fund. I'm like, why don't we cut it in half? And people thought, well, then people, others will say we're becoming irrelevant.”
Puttagunta: Benchmark lacks formal programs but lets partners hire principals and EIRs
“I would say that we don't have associates, but
One of us may hire an associate.
We don't have principals.
We have a principal.
We have EIRs.
We have venture partners.
It's just, you're trying to figure stuff out.”
Howard Marks: Oaktree avoids lone wolves and single-year individual performance pay
“We don't want the lone wolf. We don't want the you eat what you kill kind of person. And we don't pay people on the basis of their one year's quantitative performance as an individual, and we don't want people to work that way.”
Gassner: Veeva raised $7M total and never spent its Emergence Capital Series A
“Angel investors, I think that was three million, and Emergence was four million. We never actually used the Emergence four million, but I thought we might at the time, and we got to him within about a 100,000 of using it, and then we went public.”