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
Yuan: No VCs wanted to invest in Zoom when founded in 2011
“I started a company in 2011. First thing I did, I opened up a Wells Fargo bank account. I started, it's very easy for me to raise capital. That's why I opened up a bank account. Unfortunately, it took me for several months. No visits wanted to invest me.”
Yuan: Zoom raised a Series D round anticipating an economic collapse
“After the research meeting from emergency capital, as, at that time, seriously, we had a new plan, or so ever, to raise another round of capital. And the reason why we still went and moved forward to have a serious digs, because I thought the economy will win,…”
Hariharan: Y Combinator requires only one partner's yes vote for admission
“On the early stage, it's only one group partner needs to say yes. Then the company is accepted into the batch”
Uber Killed Ben Gilbert's Ride-Sharing Meta-Search Startup by Cutting API Access
“At one point I started a startup that actually got killed by Uber, not willing to play ball with us and cutting off our API, but it's effectively a meta search for ride sharing to be able to find the fastest, closest ride to you independent of who's actually p…”
Gerstner: Altimeter's first trade in 2008 was buying Priceline at $42
“We launched on November first, 2008. The first trade I made was into Priceline at 42 dollars a share.”
Gerstner: Altimeter held its initial $42 Priceline position to $2,000
“I still owned it when it hit 2000 dollars a share.”
Gerstner: Facebook became Altimeter's largest position when it hit $7 in 2012
“I remember Facebook became our largest investment in 2012 when it went on the cover of Barron's at seven,”
Gerstner: Altimeter tested beta Snowflake on its own data before investing
“Over Christmas I'll replace our data warehouse with this, you know, with Snowflake, which was non-GA at the time, right? It was in beta with a couple companies. Wow. And so we did that, and he's like, this is gonna win. Like, this is the winning arc.”
Gerstner: Altimeter invested in ByteDance at a $10B valuation
“ByteDance we invested in at ten billion dollars, ok? Today it's marked, you know, somewhere between 350,000,000,500 billion, depending on which crossover fund, you know, you look at.”
Koppelman: Super Pumped relied strictly on Mike Isaac's book, not Gurley
“Well, we didn't talk to the people in the show for the show, meaning I told Bill because I'm responsible person in that way. I said to Bill, Mike Isaac sent me his book. We're gonna go tell this story. Anything I may have heard from any conversation that I had…”
CAA took a 5 percent overall cut on the Jurassic Park package
“Well, the creative people at 50, which means we had five.”
Bankman-Fried: Alameda bootstrapped with a few million dollars without outside equity
“We cobbled together a few million dollars and then, you know, sort of like iterated on that capital base over time, although without ever taking external, like, equity or anything like that.”
McCormick: I made 91 investments in Not Boring Capital Fund 1
“Fund when I did fund when I did 91 91 investments and not all of them have investment memos.”
McCormick: Becoming a full-time VC partner would never be attractive
“I've had that other conversation with funds, too, where it's like, hey, you want to come work and, you know, be a full-time partner at this fund? And no, like, we've talked for the past couple of hours about how much fun I'm having doing this particular thing,…”
Bathgate: NZS targets a 30% hit rate on optionality investments
“What we're really playing for in the optionality, half the portfolio is asymmetry. And really it's not about batting average. Like it's okay if we're only right. 30% of the time, which is not intuitive at all for public markets investors.”
Johns: NZS Capital publicly publishes all internal research online
“We do try to write a lot. We put it all on the internet immediately. It is everything that we use internally. Nothing's held back because we know when we put it back, when we put it out there, we're going to get more value back.”
Canlis COVID pivot served 1,200 drive-thru and 300 breakfast customers daily
“But today we served, you know, about 1200 people through the drive-thru. We served about, I don't know, somewhere in the range of 300 people for breakfast. Tonight we'll send a couple hundred dinners out for delivery”
Rosenthal: Acquired will reduce output to eight episodes next year
“We release, for the last three years, we've released 12 episodes. The next year, we're gonna do eight. Eight episodes for the whole year.”
Michael Lewis: I bought Berkshire Hathaway Class A shares in 2008
“I bought it right in the middle of the financial crisis.”
Rosenthal: Acquired episodes must retain 80% relevance after five years
“It must be that, like, if you listen to this, an episode that we make five years after we made it, it's, 80% is relevant. It's still, it will still be an important institution in the world.”
Rosenthal and Gilbert: Acquired operates with no assistants or sales agents
“No, no, no assistance. No, we do everything.
Michael Lewis: You don't sell,
Michael Lewis: You don't have an ad sales.
David Rosenthal: There's no agent.
Michael Lewis: We do all the selling.
Ben Gilbert: We love doing the ad sales ourselves.”
Michael Lewis reveals he is a minority owner of Rajasthan Royals
“I'm a partial owner of the Rajasthan Royals.”
Rosenthal: I write 10,000 to 20,000-word scripts for Acquired episodes
“So I write a script. I write 10 to 20,000 words. In sentence form, word for word.”
Dimon: JPMorgan spends around $800M annually on cybersecurity
“We spend eight hundred million dollars a year or something on it. We educate people on it.”
Dimon will lead JPMorgan Chase as long as he has energy
“So in my hierarchy of life, the most important thing is my family still is. The second thing is my country, because I think this country is the indispensable nation that brought freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of enterprise. Which we have to te…”
Ballmer: I directly managed engineers to ship Windows 1.0
“I actually managed the engineers. Because the guy who was doing it wasn't being successful and we had to ship the thing.”
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 …”
Chang: TSMC salespeople were instructed to never ignore small customers
“I had always told our salespeople that that we should never be negligent in talking to future customers, even if the customer seems to be a very small one.”
Morris Chang: TSMC used 'business development' because of its Chinese translation
“I decided to use business development in English because it has a good translation in, in Chinese.”
Mark Zuckerberg to appear at Acquired's Chase Center live show
“Mark Zuckerberg and other special guests will be there.”
Schultz: Starbucks uses lowercase employee job titles out of respect
“No, everyone was lowercase from the beginning. Out of respect. Everyone's lowercase.”
Gilbert transitions to venture partner at PSL to focus full-time on Acquired
“And the way it's going to work, I'm transitioning to a venture partner at PSL, at Pioneer Square Labs here in Seattle, so still get to keep my board seats, which I think keeps me sharp for the show, and stay a friend of the family there, so I'm excited to sort…”
Gilbert and Rosenthal to pool investments for growth-stage tech companies
“For companies that we already know well, David and I are going to join our investing forces and invest more in those growth stage market leading tech companies.”
Rosenthal: Kindergarten Ventures led a $10M SPV in Vanta's Series B
“Last year, Kindergarten Ventures, the early stage AngelList fund that I run with my friend Nap, we did a ten million dollar SPV in Fanta's Series B.”
Munger says Berkshire never paid a finder's fee since acquiring See's
“We paid that guy a finder's fee even. We've never paid one since.”
Berkshire Hathaway invested $30 billion into Apple, not hundreds of billions
“We didn't put hundreds of billions, but we put a thirty billion into it.”
Huang spends significant time on Omniverse, a 'zero-billion-dollar' business
“And so we spent about a decade in zero billion dollar markets, and today I spent a lot of time on Omniverse, and Omniverse is a, you know, classic example of a zero billion dollar business.”
NVIDIA partnered with Getty and Shutterstock instead of scraping data
“Instead of scraping the internet we partnered with Getty and Shutterstock to create commercially fair way of applying artificial intelligence sharing to the AI.”
Jensen Huang: NVIDIA is his final job unless he is fired
“Until, until I'm fired, This is my last job.”
Rosenthal: Acquired Keeps YouTube Monetization Turned Off
“So we have monetization turned off for our YouTube channel for us because it's not our primary business model.”
DeMuro Scheduled Top YouTube Uploads To Capture Quarter-End Ad Surges
“And if you go back through my videos throughout 1819, 20, 21, my best stuff was always updated, uploaded like at the last month, the last two weeks of each quarter and the last month of the year. And I never really talked about that, but that was always someth…”
DeMuro: Cars & Bids charges buyers a 4.5% fee capped at $4,500
“We take four and a half percent of the final sale price from the buyer. So there's no fee for the seller. The buyer pays us four and a half percent and we cap it at, A 100,000 dollar car. So 4500 dollars. And so if it's a 200,000 dollar car, we still only take…”
DeMuro: I Pay My Own Way to Automaker Press Events
“I've always made this big holier than thou stance that I don't accept anything from the automakers, including plane trips and hotels. If I'm invited to a press event, I pay my own way and stay in a hotel at my own cost.”
Khosrowshahi: Uber treats a rideshare fulfill rate below 98% as a disaster
“If you look at our ride share service, for example, if our fulfill rate Which is the percentage of the time someone asks for a ride, and then there's a car available, if that's less than, call it, 98%, that's, like, all hands on deck. Like, it's a disaster.”
Gilbert: Acquired Cuts ~20 Minutes of Fluff Per Episode Using Descript
“So the way that we edit is our editor takes the first pass and he's unbelievably good. And that's, we're so lucky to have him. And then he sends us a rough cut, I upload it to Descript, and then we listen, like, and read while we're listening, word for word, s…”
Senra: Founders Podcast is completely a solo operation with no editors
“No, like, I pick the books, I record them, I edit, I'm still a one-person show.”
Senra: Founders Podcast has rejected about 15 acquisition and investment offers
“There's been like something like 15 acquisition or investment offers for founders. I've said no to every single one.”
David Senra: The Founders podcast format was adapted from Jocko Willink
“The format for our founders I got from Jocko. I found his podcast because he was on Tim Ferriss's. His podcast at the very beginning was just him reading books for an hour, hour and a half saying, oh, I like this section. Yeah, and he does it for autobiographi…”