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 174 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
Rosenthal: The First Monday Night Football Broadcast Drew 60 Million U.S. Households
“The first Monday Night Football game that airs that season is watched by sixty million U.S. Households.”
Woodruff fixed underperforming bottlers by buying, standardizing, and reselling them
“And so he changes course for the Coca-Cola company and says, I'm now willing to buy and own and operate bottlers. Oh, not because I want to, but as a way to like force standardization and clean up underperforming bottlers, I'll buy them out, fix them up, and t…”
Google Nerfed LaMDA in AI Test Kitchen to Five-Turn Conversations
“For the version of Lambda chat that is in AI test kitchen, they stop all conversations after five turns. So you can only have five turns of conversation with the chat bot, and then it's just, and we're done for today.”
Sundar Pichai Never Worked in Search or Advertising Before Becoming Google CEO
“Interestingly, he had never worked in search or ads.”
Gilbert: GoTo.com reached $100 million in revenue in its first year
“Goto did a hundred million in revenue in one year.”
Gilbert: Global search is currently a half-trillion-dollar annual revenue market
“Search is currently half a trillion dollar annual revenue market.”
Rosenthal: Sahara Paid $100K Annually for Indian National Cricket Team Sponsorship
“The Indian national team is playing a 105 days per year, and the Sahara group is getting their logo on their white cable knit vests for a 100,000 dollars a year.”
Rosenthal: 400M in India Watched 2007 T20 World Cup Final
“The television audience back home in India for this was four hundred million people.”
IPL Rules Banned Franchises From Carrying Debt or Owning Stadiums
“No debt. No team is allowed to have debt and de facto, no team will own their stadiums.”
Gilbert: India's Total 2008 Ad Market Was Only $2B–$3B
“So the entire total addressable market for advertising, not digital advertising, not mobile advertising, in 2008 in India was two to three billion dollars.”
Rosenthal: 2019 IPL final drew 300M to 400M unique viewers
“The final viewership numbers, best estimates are in three to four hundred million unique viewers that are watching the 2019 IPL final.”
Rosenthal: Kodak was the first invented product brand name
“And Kodak, I believe, was the first invented product brand name.”
TSMC and Aramco are the only non-US West Coast trillion-dollar firms
“They and Saudi Aramco are the only trillion dollar companies in the world that are not located on the west coast of the United States.”
TSMC is spending $12 billion in Arizona for non-leading-edge fabs
“They are spending, I think, twelve billion dollars this year to start a plant in Arizona, which will not be the three nanometer, I don't even think it'll be the five nanometer.”
Hershey was the primary chocolate ration supplier for WWI US troops
“And the American military, as they have seen European armies do, they source chocolate as ration bars for the troops, and Hershey's is the big supplier.”
Gilbert: IKEA founder was the world's eighth wealthiest person
“How its founder became the eighth wealthiest person in the world before shifting his ownership into a foundation”
Rosenthal: Friendster had over 3 million users by late summer 2003
“And by the end of the summer in 2003, Friendster had over three million users.”
Facemash engagement crashed Kirkland House servers and triggered Harvard IT shutdown
“Facemash takes that to such a whole nother level that it actually melts down the servers in Kirkland House, and the IT department at Harvard has to shut off internet within hours of it going live to all of Kirkland House, lest this, like, continue to spread vi…”
Gilbert: Original 'Facebook Guy' Header Image Was J. Geils Band Singer Peter Wolf
“There's a great Quora post about this where there's unmistakably the photo of Peter Wolf that Facebook guy is based on. They just sort of pixelated it and You know, made it duotone instead of the original photograph.”
Facebook Expanded to Over 100 Campuses Within Four Months
“By the end of the semester, they're in over a hundred schools in like, you know, what, three, four months?”
Rosenthal: Facebook daily user additions surged to 70k post-OpenReg
“So over the summer, Facebook was adding, like, five to 10,000 users a day. By late fall after launching open registration, they're now adding 70,000 users a day.”
Rosenthal: Facebook was the sixth most-trafficked website globally in May 2007
“It is the sixth highest trafficked site in the world, and they're announcing to all the developers in attendance, Facebook API, Facebook Graph is now open to you.”
Rosenthal: Microsoft pulled Brian Valentine from Exchange to rescue Vista
“Taking Brian Valentine off of Exchange. Exchange was freaking killing it in the enterprise. And he goes and spends two years getting Vista out the door and then goes to Amazon.”
Gilbert: Starbucks had zero publicly traded coffee comps at its 1992 IPO
“I was looking up, I was trying to figure out, you know, your public comps at the time. I think there were zero publicly traded coffee companies, not bean companies, not retailers, not coffee house chains.”
In the late 1960s, every computer user wrote their own software
“There was no package software that you bought. The software that IBM was selling was the operating system to make the machines actually function, and it was the programming languages that you could then Program on, but you weren't clicking around and using Exc…”
All Windows operating systems released prior to Windows 95 were DOS-based
“Until Windows 95, all of the Windows operating systems were DOS based.”
VC Dave Marquardt first met Bill Gates at the Homebrew Computer Club
“So Dave had watched Bill present many years earlier at none other than the Homebrew Computer Club
At Stanford.
Yes!
The very place that is part of the Apple lore with Jobs and Woz showing off the early Apple computer.
Apparently, Bill also went and made a pres…”
Hermès has raised prices approximately 7% annually across its product line.
“By my very back of the envelope calculations, they are raising their prices on average across the entire line, seven percent per year for the last 10 years.”
Historical consensus credits Banting and Best for discovering insulin
“The historical consensus at this point now being that it really was Banting and Best who did all the work.”
Annual global obesity drug sales were under $750 million until 2020
“The annual obesity drug sales were only seven hundred and forty-four million dollars up until twenty-twenty.”
Nvidia split consumer and data center GPU architectures in September 2022
“Up until NVIDIA's current GPU generation, the hopper generation of GPUs for the data center, there was only one GPU architecture at NVIDIA, and that same architecture and those same chips from the same wafers made at TSMC, some of them went to consumer gaming …”
Data center GPUs represent a $30 billion market growing to $50 billion
“Right now, GPUs In the data center are like a thirty billion dollar a year market going to like a fifty billion dollar next year”
Costco has never conducted an employee layoff in its corporate history
“The company has never done a layoff.”
Costco is the world's largest seller of fine wines
“Costco is the largest seller in the world of fine wines. Fine wines are defined as 20 to 300 dollar bottles.”
Costco sells one-third of all jumbo cashews globally
“They sell one third of the jumbo cashews in the entire world.”
The US Branded Athletic Shoe Market Is Valued at $130 Billion
“The branded athletic shoe market in the U.S. Today is a hundred and thirty billion dollars.”
Nike Was Exclusively a Running Shoe Company Prior to Its 1980 IPO
“Okay, so we're approaching 1980, they're about to go public, and they are entirely a running shoe company.”
Nike Held Its IPO the Same Week as Apple in 1980
“So, Nike IPOs, the second week of December in 1980, the same week as Apple.”
Nike Extended Michael Jordan's Endorsement by 7 Years With $18M Guarantee
“They extend the deal for seven more years, I believe at the same five percent royalty on gross sales, but there's the new massive further commitment to making the Jordan sub-brand much more of its own brand. And they up the total guarantee to at least eighteen…”
The Nike+ iPod Was the First Corporate Product to Use 'Plus'
“And this was the first corporate use of plus in a product name.”
Edwin Land and Polaroid Created the U-2 Reconnaissance Camera
“Indeed, the U.S. Did, and that was Dr. Edwin Land and the Polaroid Company, who subcontracted and created all of that.”
The 1960 U-2 Shootdown Was History's First Surface-to-Air Missile Kill
“This was the first time in history that a ground-to-air missile had shot down
An airplane.”
SR-71's First Flight Was Closer to the Wright Brothers Than Today
“The SR-seventy-one first flight was closer to the Wright brothers than today.”
10,000 Workers Kept the F-117 Nighthawk Secret for 21 Years
“For the F-one-seventeen-A, 10,000 people worked on this airplane, the Nighthawk, and kept the secret for 21 years until it was declassified.”
Ek: Starbucks was one of the largest CD retailers in the US
“Starbucks and Howard Schultz was actually one of the biggest retailers of CDs. In the U.S.”
Lasky: Hasbro made an acquisition run at Activision in the late 1990s
“Hasbro made a run at Activision, little known fact, right? In the late nineties, when I was running the studios there, and I remember going to Toy Fair in New York, which I, which is a trip, man.”
Lasky: Rocket Science Games was valued based on its Silicon Graphics workstations
“When I started, companies were being valued on the basis, on the number of silicon graphics workstations that they had available to them. In fact, When I started, companies were being valued on the basis, on the number of silicon graphics workstations that the…”