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 2,685 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 35 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
Porsche and Nazis Appropriated Jewish Co-Founder Adolf Rosenberger's Stake
“You probably don't know about Adolf Rosenberger, because shortly after they start the company Rosenberger was Jewish, and he gets arrested by the Gestapo. He gets imprisoned. He eventually bribes his way out and escapes to America, but During the war, Porsche …”
Khosrowshahi: Year-over-year Uber ride prices are down as supply outpaces demand
“Now, in this environment, where we are adding supply faster than demand because the supply is really coming into the marketplace, prices in Uber now, year on year, are down.”
Khosrowshahi: Uber eliminated all dual-class super-voting shares for SoftBank deal
“We literally had to, like, get everyone to agree to blow up the high vote shares. I think it's actually the only time when tech, a tech company like, they blew up all of the high votes.”
The Pentagon Ordered Defense Prime Contractors to Consolidate in 1993
“The then Deputy Defense Secretary William Perry calls the CEOs of all the major prime defense contractors to a dinner in Washington. At which he explicitly tells them defense spending is going to shrink massively. Duh, you know that. And he instructs the CEOs …”
Palantir Sold Preloaded Laptops to Comply with Government Cost-Plus Contracts
“Someone told us as we were preparing and researching this episode that Palantir figured out that what they had to do was sell laptops to the government that came preloaded with their software so they could sell a physical thing that had a cost of goods sold as…”
Lasky: A Chinese team winning Worlds created $150M revenue for Riot Games
“I mean, when the Chinese team won Worlds, the Riot guys were like throwing confetti because like when the Chinese win, it's like a hundred and fifty million dollar revenue opportunity in terms of increased, like, you know, unexpected sales of skins.”
Lasky: Roblox extracts a massive 60% aggregate gross tax on its developers
“I think the last time I calculated the total tax, the gross tax was somewhere close to 60%. It was like 57%.”
BYD's Founder Succeeded by Ignoring Munger and Li Lu's EV Advice
“That Charlie and Li Lu Lu Li Li Lu gave the founder advice and he ignored it. And he was right. He's like, don't go in electric cars or whatever it was that he did.”
Tim Ferriss Traded on "Princeton Lecturer" Title After One Guest Class
“He totally hustled this. He like traded on that name for like years before he made it as Tim Ferriss. Cause he just went in for one class. It was one class. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was one day of one course.”
Arthur Andersen made $50 million annually from Enron, its biggest client
“Enron became Anderson's biggest client in the world. They were making fifty million dollars a year from Enron, half of which was audit and tax fees and half of which was consulting fees.”
Gilbert: Skilling deliberately avoided signing off on Fastow's LJM partnership documents
“There are documents that surface that have a variety of signatures on them, but not skillings. He very intentionally was like I'm not actually gonna sign off on this, but it's kind of good for Enron that it happens, so I'm gonna let it keep happening.”
Gilbert: Skilling Negotiated $20M Payout if Not Named Enron CEO by 2000
“He managed to convince Lay that He should get twenty million dollars in cash if he was not made CEO of Enron by the end of 2000.”
Kenneth Lay concealed massive stock dumps by repaying Enron loans with equity
“But the way he repaid them was he took cash loans from Enron. So Enron loaned him cash. What a merry-go-round. And Ken backed his collateral for that cash that he ended up then repaying the loans to Enron with, Was the Enron stock that he originally had taken …”
Enron's CFO didn't track the company's total debt, cash, or maturity schedules
“McMahon learns that not only did Fastow not know how much debt Enron as an organization had, he also didn't know how much cash they had, and he also didn't know the maturity schedule of the debt, so he didn't know And thus, nobody in finance knew the company t…”
Gilbert: Dynegy Term Sheet Included a $60M Cash Bonus for Ken Lay
“As a part of the Dyna-G term sheet, upon completion of the deal, Ken Lay just got sixty million dollars in cash as, like, a bonus.”
Enron's audit committee chair was the dean of Stanford's business school
“The chair of the audit committee of Enron's board during all the years that all this was going on was the dean of Stanford Business School, who was an accounting professor.”
Jeff Skilling founded a new energy trading company in 2020 after prison
“And in twenty-twenty, Jeff Skilling founded a new energy trading company based in Texas called Veld LLC, rumored to be working on the venture with Lou Pie.”
Rosenthal: John Arnold got Enron's largest non-executive bonus of $8M
“Yeah, he got the largest cash bonus that Enron ever gave to anybody who wasn't a senior executive of, I think, eight million dollars.”
Enron left behind approximately $1 trillion in claims across 30,000 creditors
“Enron left behind a trillion dollars of claims to 30,000 creditors.”
In 1980, McKinsey Forecasted Only 900,000 US Cellular Subscribers by 2000
“AT&T, who has been the incumbent for a hundred years on all things telecommunications, commissioned McKinsey and company to predict cell phone. David Rosenthal: It all goes back to McKinsey always. Ben Gilbert: Always. Ben Gilbert: To predict the cell phone us…”
In 2022, Qualcomm Outranked Nvidia as the Largest Fabless Semiconductor Company
“Qualcomm today is the largest fabulous semiconductor company in the world... Bigger than NVIDIA.”
Qualcomm Earns Roughly $20 for Every Smartphone Sold Globally, Including iPhones
“And I, you know, to the point that I think today, Qualcomm makes on average about 20 dollars for every Smartphone sold in the world, including Apple iPhones.”
Qualcomm Contractually Forced Apple to Vocally Condemn WiMAX Under Penalty
“Qualcomm asked Apple to speak out against WiMAX, which is a competing technology. They were like, we need you to vocally Speak out that our competitor is a bad piece of technology. They also stipulated that if Apple ever used a competing supplier and keep in m…”
MediaTek Surpassed Qualcomm in Total Semiconductor Unit Shipments
“MediaTek systems are way cheaper than Qualcomm. And I think they actually just surpassed Qualcomm in terms of number of units shipped.”
Fenton: Every partner who has left Benchmark fired themselves
“In the case of everyone who's left this firm, and I've never seen this in the history of investing, you study all these firms, every single partner fired themselves”
Fenton: Benchmark's largest LP commits $25M to $30M per fund
“They're like, 25, thirty million. I could get it wrong. I'd probably piss one of them off if listen to this.”
Tavel: Retired partners are Benchmark's largest limited partners
“Some of our retired partners are our largest LP.”
Fenton: Benchmark committed to his last two deals in under a day
“And the last two or three investments I've made were an example of the following, which is that there's, there was an angel in the ecosystem who saw a deal going down and they said, you know, you probably should talk to benchmark. And when they did, we committ…”
Puttagunta: Entrepreneurs referred 100% of his Benchmark investments
“I was sharing this note internally, which was that I found that a hundred percent of the investments that I've made as a benchmark partner were all sent to us by an entrepreneur, and not necessarily an entrepreneur that we had backed.”
Calacanis: Chamath Palihapitiya invented 'growth hacking' at Facebook
“There is no equivalent of growth. That was, the idea of growth hacking didn't exist as a term until Chamath did what he did.”
Calacanis: Only ~5% of my 350 portfolio founders attended Stanford
“I've invested in 350 companies. Like, maybe five percent of the founders went to Stanford.”
Calacanis: AOL paid $30M for Weblogs Inc with only $200K in revenue
“And when I sold weblogs to AOL, people were like, oh my God, these people are idiots. They gave thirty million dollars to, you know, for weblogs Inc. They've only got 200 K in revenue.”
Kleiner Perkins forced business development partnerships across its portfolio companies
“A core part of this Caretzi model at Kleiner was, we helped facilitate, and some would argue they would do more than help facilitate, they would force these partnerships, biz dev relationships, Upon their portfolio companies.”
Benchmark GPs receive equal carry and free ownership of the management company
“It both means that each of the partners in a given fund have equal carry, but also all of the current GPs own the management company without paying for it. The management company is always just given to whoever the equal current GPs are.”
Benchmark launched its inaugural Fund I demanding a 30% premium carried interest
“Benchmark comes out, the new Benchmark Capital swinging right out of the gate with 30% carry. Premium carry.”
Friendster CEO Tim Koogle blocked Benchmark from investing in Facebook's Series A
“Specifically what happened was Benchmark had invested in Friendster, and so was conflicted out. Now you could argue that was an unavoidable mistake, you know, but like, boy does that hurt. And supposedly, I think it was Bob Kegel who was on the board of Friend…”
Benchmark founding partners stepped down in 2005 with zero tail economics
“David Byrne and Andy Ratcliffe, and they had brought on another GP during that period, Alex Balkansky, in the 2005, 2006 fund they raised then, they all step back and they don't take tail economics, meaning they're out of the management company, no longer form…”
Peter Fenton walked away from Accel's Facebook fund carry to join Benchmark
“He had GP economics, even if they were baby GP economics, in the Facebook fund. And he's walking away from that to join Benchmark.”
Nearly 100% of Benchmark portfolio companies successfully raise a Series B
“The thing that is not squishy at all is, it has to be close to a hundred percent of benchmark companies that raise a Series B.”
Gilbert: Migrating to Linux and HP servers saved Amazon from bankruptcy
“I mean, in 2000, they almost went out of business because they were so tight on cash and they were spending so much on infrastructure that this sort of moved to the open source ecosystem and doing a massive rewrite of all of Amazon.com to run on Linux and run …”
Gilbert: Massive AWS data center investments drove Amazon free cash flow negative
“They just invested so much in building out new data centers for AWS, they actually took Amazon cash flow negative. Their free cash flow is massively negative over the last 12 months because of these continued, unbelievably large investments.”
Miller: 150 VC-funded real estate crowdfunding competitors went out of business
“In 2012, we invented the idea of raising money for real estate on the internet. And within a few years, we had a 150 copycats, a 150 different companies trying to do what we were doing with a billion dollars of venture funding. So then roll forward eight years…”
Amazon followed John Malone's playbook of maximizing cash while minimizing profit
“When you sort of look at their tax strategy, the fact that they're generating all this free cash flow, but somehow never reporting a gap profit, and they're never paying corporate income tax because they have no corporate income, and yet somehow they're a tril…”
Stanford took only 1% of Google versus typical 25-50% university stakes
“Stanford only took one percent of Google when it was a Stanford, you know, graduate research project, when most universities want 25, 50 plus percent of anything that they call it tech transfer.”
Gilbert: AWS is the reason Amazon became profitable
“That's the reason that Amazon became a profitable business.”
Boyle: The best software builders do not go into government
“Software is a revolution that is completely touching every aspect of society, but the people who are building the best forms of software are not going into government.”
Gassner: Veeva's initial prospective customers rejected the idea but later all bought
“I talked to three or four potential customers for our first product, and they all said, we don't need that. You know, that's not interesting. It's not a good thing to do, but I wasn't listening for that. I was listening. Are they emotionally attached to where …”