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 4,115 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 53 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
Gilbert: Amazon will inevitably surpass Walmart in total global revenue
“If you look at the gap that Amazon closed in total revenue since the time they were founded to Walmart, they're going to catch them.
No doubt about it.”
Gilbert: TSMC may be the key force maintaining geopolitical peace
“We should say that it may be the thing keeping geopolitical tensions at rest. Like it may be the force that nobody wants to destabilize and therefore we have peace. Like, it's not just a company.”
Gilbert: Internet barbell dynamics will squeeze the middle in every industry
“I don't think this is unique to media. I think media was the first to experience this sort of squishing in the middle, but it's gonna happen to everything.”
Boyle: Aerospace and defense startups consolidate finite talent into early holding companies
“These companies usually become holding companies pretty quickly and attract all of the talent. There's finite talent around things like aerospace. There's finite talent around things like defense. So you don't see as many competitors. And as I said, they are h…”
Boyle: Silicon Valley is positive-sum, while Washington D.C. is zero-sum
“Silicon Valley is the most peculiar place in the world, because it's the only place where incentives are aligned with that sort of positive sum mentality. Whereas in places like DC, no one ever turns down talking to the press because it's information trading. …”
Boyle: Every venture capital firm will have an American Dynamism practice
“I think if we do our jobs right and we invest in the companies that we're intending to invest in and we tell the story, right? I think every venture capital firm will have an American dynamism practice.”
Gassner: Outlier success requires pursuing ideas most people expect to fail
“You have to pick something that most people think is going to fail to be an outlier. Otherwise, by definition, you're picking something that most people think is going to work, and therefore a lot of people are picking it, therefore you're not an outlier.”
Yuan: Zoom's unpredictable self-serve online segment is its biggest business challenge
“In our case, actually, I can tell you today, the biggest challenge is our online business, right? It's very profitable. However, it's very hard to predict, right? They come today, next two months, we might leave, they cancel the service. This is not a great bu…”
Gassner: Multi-year lock-in discounts shrink SaaS market size and breed complacency
“Cause I was always optimizing for the longterm value, which is the annual value per customer. So if I had to give the customer terms that would lock them in, I thought that's actually shrinking my market. Cause they'll pay less if they're locked in. That's one…”
Yuan: Startups need seasoned executives only after product-market fit
“Not early stage. You know, for the first four years, no need. But down the road, you already see the market of fate, right, the product of fate. You want to scale your business. At that time, you have to change your philosophy.”
Yuan: SaaS companies mistakenly settle for low marketing ROI instead of 4x returns
“Don't believe that. That's the mistake for all the SaaS companies. It's not one dollar and 50 cents back, not three dollars, it should be four dollars, right? It should optimize.”
Gassner: A company's second product should be radically distinct, not an add-on
“Your new product, if you have a chance, it should be way out here, and maybe have the potential to be bigger.”
Weber: Real Footwear Revenue Is in Daily Trainers, Not Racing Shoes
“I think we were the first one to identify that the real business was in trainers. It wasn't in racing shoes. It wasn't in spikes. It wasn't in marathon racing shoes. The business is in the trainers.”
Weber: Track Officials Ejected Brooks Execs From 2012 Olympic Trials
“They kicked me out, our head of marketing, and our head of sports marketing.”
Rosenthal: Replicating NVIDIA's 15-year CUDA stack is an enormous challenge
“This is 15 years of CUDA and the hardware underneath it and the libraries on top of it that Nvidia has built. To go recreate that and surpass it on your own is such an enormous, enormous bite to bite.”
Low-Friction Technology Accelerates Rapid Platform Scaling But Undermines Competitive Defensibility
“All these things that reduce friction are easily available to lots of people, and so your very ability to spin up quickly and make something happen, and it seems very powerful, may in fact be the very thing that makes it easy for a competitor to catch you.”
Innovators Cannot Out-Invent Competition Forever Without Achieving Structural Strategic Power
“People that are just amazing at innovation, which I have a huge admiration for. That is to say, getting product market fit, think that they can just out invent the competition forever. And that story usually doesn't end well, I don't think. And the things you'…”
Flywheels Signal Strong Product-Market Fit But Tell You Nothing About Power
“So flywheels are a sign of product market fit. And tell you absolutely nothing about power.”
Gerstner (in 2022): Snowflake can reach a $500B valuation by 2029
“I think this company can be worth over five hundred billion dollars over the course of the next five to seven years.”
Gerstner: Venture capital over-earned, but competition will reduce founder dilution
“I might argue the venture market has over-earned for many years, right? And so the market's gonna become more efficient, it's gonna be more competition, with more competition, that means founders are gonna have better access to capital, they're gonna have more…”
Gerstner: Early-stage venture requires hands-on craftsmanship on startup boards
“Early stage venture, those first two to three years is craft building, and we like to partner with founders who are wise enough To put around that early board table, people who have been through the trenches, and so that increases our probability of success an…”
Gerstner: Competition in venture capital will compress average returns while concentrating elite gains
“Like, what do I expect that, you know, will happen over the full arc of time in venture, right? We're going to compete away returns. We've already witnessed it over the course of the last couple years, right? But that just means the returns that go to the prem…”
Gerstner: Seeding investment accounts for every newborn would cost under $20B/year
“It doesn't cost a lot of money, right? In the scheme of things like this is less than twenty billion dollars a year for the federal government.”
Microsoft will not make Activision games Xbox exclusive following the acquisition
“People are worried about with the Activision deal about whether Microsoft would make Activision's games exclusive on Xbox. I don't think they will.”
Eich: Google Chrome Changed in 2018 to Auto-Sign In Users for Ad Tracking
“In 2018 September, Google said, gosh darn it, people aren't signing into the browser enough. We're going to just do it whenever you sign in to Gmail or YouTube in a tab. We'll just sign you in across all the tabs and we'll track you.”
Eich: JavaScript's mutable design ensured survival but sacrificed security integrity
“JavaScript's mutability was a huge boon. It probably wouldn't have survived without it, but it also means there's no
Security property called integrity.”
Eich: Ten on-chain microtransactions provide enough entropy to fingerprint a user
“So for our system with users getting ad revenue share and publishers then getting creators on YouTube, getting, you know, tips or recurring donations, just 10 of those or so could fingerprint you as a user, right? If there are a few bits each, that's enough bi…”
Eich: Browser extensions have fundamentally weaker security than native apps
“The extension is just weaker. Both in terms of its powers, but also its security model. If it's doing its own secure store for a private key, it's just in a weaker footing than a native app by design.”
Eich: Virtualizing credit cards natively in browsers can deconstruct Amazon
“And if we virtualize the credit card, then we can actually put e-commerce in the browser. We can deconstruct Amazon. Every site, without having to change its merchant JavaScript, which is not going to happen easily, can have an option where you can use somethi…”
Everything linear dies while everything on demand wins across media categories
“His quote is everything linear dies, everything on demand wins. And it's so true. Like, you know, the being able this element of being able to access Best in the world content on your schedule when you want it.”
No venture-backed consumer hardware startup has survived standalone in a decade
“In the last 10 plus years, there has not been a breakout consumer hardware piece of technology that is, that survives as a standalone company, and you look back at Fitbit and GoPro and Jambox. I even wanna call out, this one's gonna be a serious callback, but …”
John Foley sold $96M of Peloton stock near its 2021 peak
“John Foley sold ninety six million dollars of Peloton stock in 2021 when the price was really high and he was talking about what a strong future the company still had in front of it.”
Ithaca Holdings Sold Taylor Swift's Catalog to Shamrock for $300 Million
“Big Machine, the operating company, all the other masters of other artists, they have everything that stays with Ithaca Holdings. They sell only the Taylor masters to a private equity firm for about three hundred million dollars. So about the same price that t…”
Shamrock Capital Will Never Recoup Its $300M Taylor Swift Masters Investment
“I think Shamrock and the Disney family are gonna be left holding the bag on this investment that they'll never recoup”
CAA never pitched unpackaged ideas or individual clients to movie studios
“And we would never sell any idea or client unpackaged or naked to a studio ever, ever. So anything we did was pre-packaged where we controlled all the elements and our clients controlled their own destiny.”
CAA packaged 350 films and treated traditional studios strictly as distributors
“Or any of the 350 films that we packaged, Tootsie, Rain Man, go down a forever list, you had a choice. You'd, you'd buy the package, or we'd sell it to somebody else, because we viewed the studios as distribution entities.”
Matsushita gave Michael Ovitz $120 million to distribute among deal consultants
“They gave me a hundred and twenty million dollars to pass out to all of the consultants. And I passed out money to everybody generously, because we had Washington lobbyists, we had PR people.”
Ovitz: Tech investing is the same packaging playbook as Hollywood agency representation
“All of the training I had as an agent has led me to a career in the digital world that's fantastic because what am I doing? I'm packaging. I'm putting young founders together with money and distribution, and nothing different than I did for 35 years. It's all …”
Bankman-Fried: The largest crypto exchange bled $1M daily from broken risk engines
“The biggest exchange at the time was bleeding each day about a million dollars of customer assets to a risk engine that didn't work.”
Bankman-Fried: FTX hired for composure under pressure rather than prior experience
“Experience is very much not what we hire for. Right. In fact, sometimes we're almost like, you know, I wouldn't quite say we're anti-selecting for it, but, like, we like flexibility, and we like, you know, much more than, like, I don't know, we can teach thing…”
Bankman-Fried: Becoming the second largest crypto exchange would be a 'C' grade
“I think the plausible C is we just kind of don't really grow, you know, like you kind of look back at us like, you know, in a year and you're like, where is F, or in five years, you know, where is FTX now? And the answer is like, you know, they're like, you kn…”
McCormick: I likely would have written a positive sponsored post on Theranos
“One of the tests that I always run for myself, and I probably actually would have failed this test, is if Theranos had come to me on a sponsored post, you know, however many years ago, chances are, frankly, I would have written something positive on Theranos b…”
McCormick: Independent creator-investors lose value when joining traditional venture firms
“As soon as I go in-house somewhere, Like I lose half of my value or, you know, X percent of my value as soon as I go in-house somewhere. And that is kind of one, even though, you know, I do do sponsored posts and all of that, there is like this independent voi…”
Bathgate: TSMC surpassed Intel because vertical integration forced impossible multi-front technological battles
“Intel has to fight TSMC on process technology, which, like, in itself is one of the hardest things, you know, any technology companies had to do over the last 20 years, and that's why Intel has been surpassed by TSMC, right?”
Bathgate: Escalating Moore's Law complexity favors horizontal semis over vertical integration
“The needs of Moore's law are just so difficult that like, it's hard enough to just do one of these things well and doing multiple of them well makes it makes it harder.”
Bathgate: A TSMC fab shutdown sets Western tech progress back five years
“If for some reason, you know, China moved to seize Taiwan or however, you know, it went into play and all of a sudden TSMC's fabs were shut down, then you really, the Western world would be, you know, set back at least five years, if not 10, just in terms of l…”
Johns: Major technological shifts require vertical integration rather than horizontal efficiency
“When technology changes, like, I just didn't have a concept for the smartphone. So technology was about to change quite a bit. And in that change, you really want to be vertically integrated because you're not pushing efficiency. You're pushing sort of product…”