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
Morris Chang told Acquired TSMC's solar and memory diversification was a mistake
“We were sitting down with Morris Chang, and he was talking about TSMC, and he told us that one of the ways that they aired was trying to exit the integrated circuit market, or diversify from that market, and go into solar.
Memories, and there was one other thi…”
Gilbert: Identifying top growth-stage companies is easy, winning allocation is hard
“The, you know, growth stage private companies, you can tell what the good ones are. Most people can't get in. If you can, you should.”
Early-stage VC memos feign analytical precision to justify intuitive founder bets
“You're really just making a founder bet, and then you're trying to support it with all this like structural information that is a very imprecise. You're acting like you know the third or fourth decimal place, when in reality you barely know the first one.”
Gilbert: Coca-Cola would be worse off today without New Coke
“I think Coca-Cola would be worse off today if they didn't go through the new Coke moment, which is crazy to say, but I guess we don't have the counterfactual, but if you just look at the data on the resurgence in Coke afterwards, you couldn't have come up with…”
Gilbert: Undifferentiated retail is a margin race decided by scale
“And so the core insight is that Pronto Markets is effectively just an empty vessel to sell the same products.
In a situation like that, it is a race to the bottom on your margins, and scale will determine the winner.”
Gilbert: Most Trader Joe's products today are processed, packaged foods
“The funny thing is, today, most of what you're buying from them
Is processed, packaged food. It's just story told very well, and like, you know, you go to grab stuff in the freezer, it's a lot of salt, there's a lot of deep fried stuff. You can't make giant fr…”
Gilbert: FOIA records reveal major CPG brands behind Trader Joe's private-label
“Eater, the website, submitted a FOIA request to the US government to the USDA and the FDA. To figure out, via food recalls, who makes Trader Joe's items. And by the Freedom of Information Act, they have to provide that information. And so there's a whole bunch…”
Gilbert: Trader Joe's takes no supplier slotting fees to align incentives
“Trader Joe's has this philosophy of we only make money one way, and that's when someone checks out an item and pays money to us. We don't make money from our suppliers, whereas those other grocery stores, they actually make a lot of money from the suppliers. T…”
Gilbert: Trader Joe's pays its suppliers cash on delivery
“You just have cash as soon as you drop something off at their loading dock. This gives them a huge edge of being a preferred customer for these vendors. That those companies never have any cash flow issue or a waiting issue. As soon as they drop it off, Trader…”
Modern AI Revolution Is Predicated on Google's 2017 Transformer Invention
“The entire AI revolution that we are in right now is predicated by the invention of the transformer out of the Google brain team in 2017.”
DeepMind Is Among the Greatest Tech Acquisitions Ever
“They bought this thing for, we'll talk about the purchase price, but it's worth, what, five hundred billion dollars today? I mean, this is as good as Instagram or YouTube in terms of greatest acquisitions of all time.”
Google Doubled Its Offer to Keep Ilya Sutskever Before OpenAI
“Google came back with a big counter, something like double the offer, and I think it was delivered from Jeff Dean personally, and Ilya said, nope, I'm doing this.”
OpenAI Only Collected $130M of Its Initial $1B Pledge
“The funny thing is, it was later reported that a billion dollars was not actually collected. Only about a hundred and thirty million of it was actually collected to fund this nonprofit.”
Elon Musk Deserves Credit for Early OpenAI Researcher Recruiting
“And I think Elon deserves a lot of credit for having his name and his time attached to OpenA at the beginning. A lot of the big heavy hitter recruiting was Elon throwing his weight behind this.”
Google Operates an Estimated 2 to 3 Million Custom TPUs
“But today, Google, it's estimated, has two to three million TPUs. For reference, Nvidia shipped, people don't know for sure, somewhere around four million GPUs last year.”
OpenAI Originally Planned to Be a B2B API Business Before ChatGPT
“They also just throw up a paywall randomly because they thought that the business was going to be an API business. They thought that the projections were all about how much revenue they were going to do through B to B licensing deals. And then they just realiz…”
Eric Schmidt Proposed Google Acquire Tesla for Self-Driving Tech
“There's what Eric Schmidt wanted, which is crazy. He proposed, oh, let's just go buy Tesla, and that'll be our starting place, and then we'll just put all of our self-driving equipment on all the cars.”
Waymo Reportedly Surpassed Lyft in San Francisco Gross Bookings in January 2025
“This year, in January, they were reportedly doing more in gross bookings than Lyft in San Francisco.”
Waymo Study Shows 91% Reduction in Serious Injury Crashes vs Human Drivers
“The study that Waymo just released last month showed that they have 91% fewer crashes with serious injuries or worse compared to the average human driver, even controlled for the fact that Waymo's right now are only driving on city surface streets.”
Waymo Has Burned $10B to $15B Developing Autonomous Driving
“When you consider this opportunity, they have burned somewhere in the neighborhood of 10 to fifteen billion dollars.”
Unprofitable AI Startups Are Not Self-Sustaining Competition for Google
“None of these AI companies are generating net income, and just because they've raised a huge amount of money, It doesn't mean that will last forever. They'll all burn through their existing cash in a pretty short period of time, and if the spigots ever dry up,…”
Google Cloud Exceeds $50B Run Rate at 30% Growth
“And today, they're over fifty billion dollars in annual revenue run rate. It's growing 30% year over year. They're the fastest growing of the major cloud providers, five X in five years.”
Neoclouds Will Offer Google TPUs in the Coming Months
“I think within a year it might happen. There are rumors already that some NeoClouds in the coming months are gonna have TPUs.”
Page and Brin Would Rather Risk Bankruptcy Than Lose at AI
“Larry and Sergey control the company. They have been quoted repeatedly saying that they would rather go bankrupt than lose at AI.”
Google Maps Generates an Estimated Five to Ten Billion Dollars Annually
“They don't break out revenue, but estimates are that Maps does well over five billion in revenue, maybe even ten billion in revenue.”
Social Media Ultimately Pivoted to Resemble Either Private Messaging or YouTube
“All of social ended up pivoting to either look like messaging or like YouTube anyway. YouTube is kind of the winning paradigm in quote unquote social media and UGC media.”
Brand Reputation Risk Meaningfully Delayed Google's Consumer AI Development
“The Google name meant something. And still does, by the way, which I think held them back in AI for a while. They know the Google name means something, so they are reticent to throw their name on it until they got kind of shoved off the cliff.”
Google Glass and Meta Ray-Bans Share Features, but Google Ignored Fashion
“Meta Ray-Bans and Google Glass are the same thing, feature-wise. The gestures on the side, the fact that it could take a photo, I mean, Google Glass was a little more advanced, it could run these, like, very basic text-based apps, but I'm sure when Meta launch…”
Google Cannot Successfully Build Pure Consumer Experiences Lacking Deep Technical Innovation
“It's a Google-y thing that this genius technology is the product itself, and if you try to Craft some cool idea that you have that is not just directly translating tech breakthrough. It's not gonna be the type of product that succeeds at Google. They don't kno…”
Alphabet generates more net income than any other U.S. company
“Google, and I should say Alphabet today, generates more net income or profit than any other U.S. Company. More than Apple, Microsoft, Exxon Mobil, JPMorgan Chase, Berkshire Hathaway.”
Epic has zero customer churn among its major hospital clients
“They have the majority of the U.S.'s major hospital systems using their software and of their over 600 customers, they have never lost a single one.”
Cerner merged 36 entities together before Oracle acquired it
“By the way, earlier when I said 24 different companies merged together to create Cerner, I forgot that this chart that I'm looking at predates when Cerner then bought Siemens. So then there's another 12 companies that had merged together to become Siemens that…”
Epic operates with minimal middle management and zero divisional budgets
“So, because of that high level of trust, there's very few middle managers. You understand the system that everybody else works within, and you don't have to corral chaos. Most of the people they're hiring are right out of school, so they've been there for a lo…”
Epic screened candidates using a test written by the founder's 7th-grade son
“And for 18 years, listeners, that was how they tested to determine if someone should work at Epic.”
Epic is far harder to integrate with than other enterprise software
“But the result of this is that it's been much harder to integrate with Epic as an application developer than you would be used to in any other software category.”
Government subsidies reward reliable enterprise software vendors over innovative ones
“It also is interesting because it basically rewards the most reliable software, not necessarily the most innovative software. You end up not taking any risk in situations like this because you're not going to get rewarded unless you actually stand the system u…”
90% of US medical students currently train on Epic's software
“And I think now, 90% of med school students train on Epic.”
Public markets would value Epic Systems near $100 billion
“My guess is if this is public, which it never will be, investors would value it somewhere in the hundred billion dollar neighborhood, giving Judy's shares a value of about fifty billion dollars and making her the wealthiest self-made woman in the world and one…”
Zero-tolerance industries require single-vendor integrated software suites over modular solutions
“And so in a situation where you can't make any mistakes, the single vendor playbook is the right playbook, even if it's going to take 47 years to build the dominant company. You should have to write a lot of software, and it all has to work together really wel…”
Gilbert: MLB's lack of a salary cap drives large-market World Series dominance
“They've never successfully implemented a salary cap in baseball, and so, guess who's in the World Series? The New York team and the L.A. Team.”
Gilbert: IPL franchises operate at 60% to 65% EBITDA margins
“So I think the team net income right now is about fifty million dollars On a pre-tax basis. But there's no depreciation in other, I mean, they're not material anyway. So you got a business that is doing eighty million dollars top line and fifty-ish million on …”
Gilbert: Americans will not care about IPL without domestic US cricket first
“And, frankly, Americans are just not gonna start caring about IPL cricket. They need to start caring about US-based cricket.”
Gilbert: Rolex Submariner is powerful enough to be its own standalone franchise
“If you separated Submariner from Rolex, Submariner may actually be a bigger deal. Submariner is its own whole franchise.”
Gilbert: Rolex manufacturing and engineering quality surpasses any industry
“They're going to absurd lengths to make these things the highest quality engineered and produced products in the entire industry or in any other industry too.”
Modest annual price hikes establish a price floor and guarantee Rolex appreciation
“Well, they raise prices slowly every year. It's a modest price increase every year that kind of sets the floor. And frankly, if they do it over enough decades, Everybody just believes forever that these things are gonna appreciate, because it's almost like the…”
Gilbert: Rolex Could Profitably Operate 1,500 Monobrand Stores
“Rolex has 1500 authorized dealer locations, and if all 1500 of those were Rolex stores, they would absolutely do a great job paying rent.”
Rolex possesses zero direct customer contact data due to its dealer model
“They, like, don't have their customer's email address or names or addresses because that data belongs to the authorized dealer. Rolex doesn't actually know who's buying their product or who likes their product, which is kind of crazy for a modern company of th…”