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
Gassner: Veeva Vault has 5x to 10x the potential of Veeva CRM
“The second one is a bit bigger but the second one has also quite a bit more potential. You know, maybe it's a five X or 10 X potential.”
Weber: Bringing one shoe style to market costs $500K to $1M
“Takes a half a million to a million bucks to bring one style to market.”
Weber: Brooks turned its supply chain back on 6-12 weeks before competitors
“We turned our supply chain on at least six to 12 weeks before anybody else did.”
Weber: Brooks reached number one US running shoe position with 21.5% share
“We became the number one running shoe brand in the United States in the last 12 months, last month. 21 and a half percent share in performance running.”
Rosenthal: 89 Other Graphics Chip Startups Were Funded Soon After Nvidia
“Literally 89 other companies get funded within a couple months to go do the same thing.”
Only Nvidia and ATI Survived the 90s Graphics Startup Boom
“When all the VCs funded these 90, you know, Silicon Valley startups to go make graphics cards, three D graphics cards, the only two surviving ones were Nvidia, which went through this hellish journey, and then these Canadian guys that were, like, totally out o…”
Gilbert: AMD's acquisition of Nvidia failed over Huang's CEO demand
“AMD tried to buy Nvidia to make that their graphics line, and it was possible because it's not like the stock was blowing up at this point in time, and it had this sort of few years of reasonable stagnation before we get into late 2006, 2007, and certainly peo…”
Gerstner: Retail aggregators drive a growing share of crossover fund raises
“And if you look at the retail channel, The accredited investor retail channel, through Goldman, through Morgan Stanley, through these other aggregators, as a percentage of the fundraise for Tiger, for Kotu, for Altimeter, it's going up dramatically relative to…”
Gordon-Levitt: Former colleagues found Travis Kalanick inspiring, contradicting his media portrayal
“A lot of people said how much they liked, how inspiring he was, how compelling he was, how much energy he would bring to a room. And that was really fascinating because that's not always evident when you read articles about him or even when you read Mike's boo…”
Eich: Brave pays users 70% of ad revenue via Basic Attention Token
“It also involves something we talked about from the beginning and we prototyped in Bitcoin, and that's the basic attention token system for users who choose to participating in Private ads that are anonymous, but that pay them 70% of the revenue and that let t…”
Eich: Apple Safari beat Firefox on privacy by blocking third-party cookies
“The very first Safari had private windows. It had a third party cookie blocker. Neither of these things were in Firefox at the time. Private windows came in quickly. We never shipped a third party cookie blocker in my time there.”
Eich: DuckDuckGo's keyword search is pretty much still powered by Bing
“DuckDuckGo always had a more private sort of search front end on Bing. It's pretty much Bing still for the keyword search.”
Eich: Every Mozilla executive believed Google would eventually kill them
“I also at Mozilla thought, we're going to get killed by Google. I think every executive thought this at Mozilla.”
Eich: Google only pays browsers for default search status
“Google only pays for default because they're king of the hill and they figure they'll get the traffic anyway.”
Peloton raised its original bike price to $2,245 to signal luxury
“People thought it was, the hardware couldn't be that great if it was 1200 dollars, and they realized that if they raised the price up to 2245 dollars, that then in people's minds, this becomes this, like, jewel, premium, expensive, aspirational, luxury product…”
Top Peloton fitness instructors earn between $500,000 and $1M per year
“My understanding is that the top Peloton instructors make like 500 K to a million.”
Peloton pays $9 per 15 hours of music versus Spotify's $1.20
“I ran the math on what it would cost Spotify to pay the labels for the same amount of music listening time based on the data that we used in the Taylor Swift episode. So, you know, 15 hours across a month. So I was thinking the same as, like, you know, a 30 mi…”
Peloton simultaneously canceled its factory, laid off 2,800, and replaced its CEO
“They lower guidance significantly. They pull the plug on Peloton Output Park. They cancel the plans to build the manufacturing facility in Ohio. They lay off 2800 people. And Barry McCarthy is riding in as the new CEO.”
John Foley and his co-founders control over 57% of Peloton's voting power
“According to Peloton's proxy statement, he controls 39.6, so right around 40% of the voting power of Peloton's stock, and his co-founders own another 18%.”
One Million Spotify Streams Nets Just $400 for an Average Artist
“At least on Spotify and Spotify-like services, it's about .4 cents per stream, and then that cent, that, that, that .4 cents, Gets cut up between the label, rights organization, et cetera, before the artist. And so it's reasonable, this is a crazy thing, but i…”
Big Machine LLC Had Only Five Shareholders Including Scott Swift
“The owners, and you can see this on the Secretary of State website for the state of Tennessee of Big Machine Records LLC, there are only five members in this LLC. One, of course, is the CEO, Scott Borchetta. Another, of course, is... Toby Keith. There are two …”
Swift Forced UMG to Distribute Spotify Equity to Artists Non-Recoupably
“In Taylor's negotiation, as a sticking point in her contract with UMG, she forced their hand to do the best deal of any of the labels by far. It's not public, but people think it's at least the same thing that Warner did, 25%. But non-recoupable, and given the…”
CAA represented roughly 45 of the top 50 highest-grossing directors in 1990
“And frankly, as CAA gained momentum in the eighties and early nineties, they didn't have a lot of choice because of the 50 top grossing directors in the, for example, in 90, CAA represented like 45 of them. So it was impossible. You couldn't say no.”
Coca-Cola approved all 35 commercials CAA presented in their agency shootout
“We got awarded the account And of the 35 commercials we presented, they approved every single one.”
CAA ran the Coca-Cola advertising account with six people versus McCann's 300
“So we had McCann Erickson had 300 human beings working on the Coke account. We had six.”
CAA lost fewer than six clients over a 25-year period
“As a matter of fact, in a 25 year period, I think we lost under six, five or six clients.”
Ovitz: CAA was first to represent Hoffman, Pacino, and De Niro simultaneously
“So, you know, I, we signed Hoffman, Pacino, and De Niro, which had never been done in history.”
Sony co-founder Akio Morita wanted a studio because Betamax lost to VHS
“Mr. Morita came to see me and wanted to buy, get into owning content because he was upset that Betamax, which was a superior technology to VHS, was losing to VHS. So he wanted to own a studio”
Ovitz: Seagram offered Warner Bros $6B cash standstill after buying 14%
“We had quietly accumulated 14% of the stock through Allen and Company for the Bronfman family. And I met with Steve Ross three weeks before he passed away. He was one of the greatest guys in history of the business. And he gave me three hours of his time where…”
Bankman-Fried: Alameda made about $1M a day on Japan Bitcoin arb
“We still made like a million dollars a day from it during that period.”
Bankman-Fried: No crypto company had ever received an audit by early 2018
“Literally no crypto company has ever gotten audited before of any type. And we've been around for two months. Obviously we don't have an audit.”
Bankman-Fried: Incumbent exchanges clawed back 17% of winning traders' weekly profits
“So each week they would email the customers and be like, congrats. You got 83% of your P&L this week. The other 17% went to bail out people who were underwater. And that was just happening every week.”
Bankman-Fried: FTX ranks third globally by volume and second by open interest
“Today, we are the third biggest by volume. We're the second biggest by open interest and actually pretty close to first, I just realized.”
Bankman-Fried: FTX typically processes $15B in daily global volume
“And I, you know, we have fifteen billion dollars of volume globally in the last day. That, that's about typical for us. You know, that, that's typically where we are.”
Bathgate: Halving Apple App Store take rate costs 5% of gross profit
“What's the gross profit impact if they cut their app store you know, take rate from 30% to 15%, you know, across The board. What is that like? Five percent of gross profits. It's like meaningless to them and it would create so much value for all the, and there…”
Rockefeller's 1902 net worth reached nearly 1% of total US GDP
“That point when he's worth two hundred million in, in 19 oh two, the GDP of the United States at that point was twenty four billion dollars. So even at that point, this is like, you know, there's still a lot of, there's still a decade before a standard oil get…”
Rockefeller and Gates invented modern institutional philanthropy
“And it's, when we say invent philanthropy, they invent the sort of systematic and organizational giving away of money. They don't invent tithing, you know, like that's a biblical concept, but they really do invent modern philanthropy.”
Mauboussin: Tesla's Stock Surge Saved Its Underlying Business Fundamentals
“So I think that it was not too many years ago that, that Tesla was sort of skating on thin ice in terms of finances and so forth. And then as a stock took on a life of its own, the stock went up a lot that allowed them to raise capital and get themselves on mu…”
Mauboussin: The Distribution of Active Manager Alpha Has Consistently Narrowed
“One of the ways we can measure that is to look at the standard deviation of excess returns, right? So alpha, right? So excess returns. So, so you'd imagine and if you'd imagine If you're an active manager, what you want is a big fat bell shaped distribution, r…”
Standard Oil threatened in writing to bankrupt non-compliant Mississippi grocers
“They send out a letter to all the grocers in Mississippi. They say, if you do not buy our oil, we will start a grocery store chain to compete with you and sell goods at cost and put you all out of business. This is in writing sent to all of them.”
Disney fired John Lasseter, Tim Burton, and Brad Bird early on
“I mean, so there's people I mentioned, John Lasseter, Brad Bird, Tim Burton, John Musker, Brenda Chapman, all of them were hired directly by Disney and Disney Animation right out of school, and then Disney fired all of them.”
Disney's live-action film studio hit a 27-of-33 profitability run under Eisner
“All told, 27 of their first 33 movies that they make are profitable, which, in Hollywood, to have a hit rate like that, that's like making 33 venture capital investments and only losing money in six of them.”
Cable operators pay ESPN an average of $9.42 monthly per subscriber
“Nine dollars and 42 cents per month per subscriber that the cable operators pay ESPN.”
ESPN and cable networks drove 60% of Disney's operating income from 2008-2011
“So we're flashing forward, but later on, in the 2008 to 2011 time frame, Disney's cable networks segment, of which analysts believe that three quarters of the cable network segment is ESPN, that segment accounted for 60% of the entire company's operating incom…”
Rosenthal: Bass family was forced to liquidate $2B in Disney shares
“In the days after September 11th, they face a margin call on their other investments. They have to become forced sellers of two billion dollars worth of Disney shares, which puts even further downward pressure on the Disney stock, which has already just fallen…”
Comcast launched a $54B hostile stock bid for Disney in 2004
“Comcast, the Philadelphia based cable company,
Is making a hostile takeover bid to acquire Disney for fifty four billion dollars in Comcast stock.”
Rosenthal: 43% of Disney shareholders withheld support for Eisner in 2004
“At the end of the day, 43% of the shareholder base votes to withhold support for Eisner as CEO, which is a huge number.”
Iger secretly concluded Pixar's leadership needed to replace Disney Animation
“So during his CEO audition process, Bob Iger had completely lost faith that Disney animation can be fixed from within. And secretly he concludes that the only viable path to restore Disney animation to its proper glory is to replace the entire leadership team.…”