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 183 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
Dimon: $5B Mortgage Penalties Led Him to Never Trust the Government Again
“They made us pay five billion dollars on the more, the bad mortgages that Bear Stearns had done, and that's what made me make the statement I wouldn't do it again. I wouldn't, put it this way, I don't know how to say this, I wouldn't really trust the governmen…”
Schultz: No desire or intent to return as Starbucks CEO
“The first thing I want to say is I've made it clear to the Starbucks board, Howard Schultz, and I've made it clear to Loxman, Howard Schultz has no desire or intent to return as CEO of Starbucks.”
Lewis lacked an ending for his SBF book until FTX collapsed
“With Sam Beckman-Fried, I was a year into it, and I did not know what I was gonna do with it until it blew up”
Ballmer: Microsoft Built Surface Because PC OEMs Failed to Rival Mac
“There were no high end PCs that would really compete with Mac. And we, I decided the only way we were going to get there, we couldn't sit there with our OEM model and have it work. If we're going to have high end PCs that appealed to users, because I wanted us…”
Ballmer: Microsoft removed 'teamwork' as an official corporate value
“In Microsoft, I, we got rid of the value called teamwork. I didn't want that one. I said open and respectful and dedicated to making others better. Because teamwork could sound like a treat everybody, nice, nice.”
Ballmer: Intuit Dome bans visiting gear in its 4,000-seat fan section
“There's no suites on the side. We even built a student section right in the middle, i.e. It's standing room only. You must stand. That's what you have to agree to if you're going to sit there or be there. You have to agree to stand. You have to agree to cheer.…”
Ballmer: Clippers Will Use Microsoft-Style Long-Term Grinding to Challenge Lakers
“Our goal is to be long-term grinders on that. And we want to beat them every time on the court. It's okay to have two popular teams. Los Angeles County, for gosh sakes, has the same number of people as the state of Ohio, pretty much. So there's plenty of peopl…”
Chang: TSMC matched Intel in technology and beat it in manufacturing in 2011
“Technology. At that time, we thought we were almost at par with Intel. Almost. In fact, I thought we were, I think I thought we were at par with Intel at that time. Manufacturing. I thought we were better than Intel. And customer trust. We thought that our cus…”
Chang: TSMC rejected IBM co-development deal that UMC accepted and regretted
“So we declined without having to think about it at all. We declined the IBM office. And IBM, in fact, was quite angry, you know. I mean, they thought we're still a small Taiwan backward place, you know. It's a Taiwan company, and they are going to pick IBM. So…”
Zuckerberg: Meta must build AI and hardware platforms to avoid mobile gatekeeper dependence
“We've just been, we've been through too much stuff with the other platforms to fully depend on, on anyone else, and we're a big enough company at this point that, like, we don't have to, right? We can build our own core technology platforms, whether that's gon…”
Zuckerberg: Meta might be twice as profitable if it owned mobile platforms
“You know, we did this calculation or estimate at some point where it's like, how much money do we lose from our core family of apps to the various, like, taxes that the platforms have to, like, when they tell us we can't run the ad business the way that we thi…”
Zuckerberg: Meta scaled AI and Reality Labs knowing investors would hate it
“What we knew was gonna be really painful, you know, to go double down on those things, and build out the AI infrastructure that we needed to, and scale up some of the Reality Lab stuff. And I knew that a lot of the investors would hate it. At least in the shor…”
Zuckerberg: Facebook rebrand to Meta was running toward future, not escaping controversy
“I'm only going to do this when we come up with a brand that is going to be evocative of the future that we're trying to build because we run towards something. We don't run away from things.”
Zuckerberg: Goal for next 10-15 years is building winning open platforms
“Part of my goal for the next 1015 years, the next generation of platforms, is to build the next generation of open platforms and have the open platforms win. And I think that that's going to lead to a much more vibrant tech industry.”
Zuckerberg scaled AI and Reality Labs knowing investors would hate it
“Go double down on those things, and build out the AI infrastructure that we needed to, and scale up some of the Reality Lab stuff, and I knew that a lot of the investors would hate it, at least in the short term, before it's clearly the right thing to do.”
Zuckerberg: Meta aims to build and win open computing platforms
“Part of my goal for the next 1015 years, the next generation of platforms, is to build the next generation of open platforms and have the open platforms win.”
Munger reveals he does not carry fire insurance on any properties
“I carry no fire insurance anywhere.”
Munger reveals he holds roughly 18% China risk in his family portfolio
“So naturally, I'm willing to have some China risk in the Munger portfolio. How much China risk? Well, that's not a scientific subject, but I don't mind whatever it is, 18% or something, whatever, whatever's worked out in the Munger family, it's okay with me.”
Khosrowshahi: Uber will never cap driver onboarding to protect earnings
“No because one of our core philosophies is this is an open platform, and if your background check comes in okay, et cetera, then you can have access to earnings opportunities.”
Khosrowshahi: Uber intends to wire up every single taxi globally
“There are four and a half million taxis in the world who would imagine that Uber will be working with taxis, but we're going to wire up every single taxi in the world.”
Tavel: Benchmark bans memos because they function as pre-sell tools
“So you don't write a memo. And it's because the memo, you know, when you're, a memo really is a vehicle to, you know, obviously give background on a company, all the work you've done, but it is also a little bit a pre-sell before the company comes in to presen…”
Fenton: Benchmark GPs pay standard LP fees and carry on personal commitments
“As an LP. And that's, well, that's crazy. And this is-... But for this, for the super majority of my investment in benchmark, I'm paying limited partner rates and management fees.”
Fenton: Benchmark took equity in Tinder without investing cash
“There have been examples and we're, we don't, there's some awkwardness to talking about it publicly. One of the ones is probably a good example is Tinder. And, you know, Barry Diller said, what do you want? And it's like, well, we want equity in Tinder.”
Fenton: Benchmark will not expand to eight partners or launch a growth fund
“Now that doesn't mean we're going to have eight partners
And a growth fund.
And then there's some hard lines where you just say, but this is, you know, getting closer to people who are embody our values, but at a different stage in their career, that's okay wi…”
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…”
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.”
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…”
Acquired invests in almost all of its private company podcast sponsors
“Not our public company sponsors, but almost all of our private company sponsors, we invested them.”
Dimon: JPMorgan stress tests fat tails beyond Fed requirements like 8% rates
“And so I always look at what I call the fat tails, and manage that we can handle all the fat tails, and not the stress test the Fed gives us, but all the fat tails.
Markets down 50%, interest rates up to eight percent, credit spreads back to worst ever.
Of cou…”
Dimon: JPMorgan Would Still Rescue the Financial System, but With Legal Protections
“If the government called me up, they did it again. If they called me again and said, we need your help to save our country, well of course I'm gonna, I'm a patriot that way. I just, I would just try to come up with some ways to avoid the punishment by the next…”
Ballmer: Azure started as PaaS to prioritize Windows developers
“We say we're going to build platform as a service because it's a Windows platform. Infrastructure as a service, a little bit if you think about it, you're sort of by nature accepting everybody's infrastructure. It's by nature, multi quote, multi-platform. You …”
Chang: TSMC fixed R&D spending at 8% of revenue through recessions
“So I almost just literally picked a number out ahead.
We've been running six or seven percent already.
So I said, oh, let's pick eight percent.
Okay.
Yeah.
Eight percent, regardless of
Whether there's a recession or not.
And it's just eight percent of revenue…”
Chang: I did not foresee how big smartphones would become for 28nm
“No, I didn't. Maybe the business development guy, I mean, that was another interesting story. Yeah, maybe he knew. Maybe he, or at least, I now hope and I, of course, hoped at that time, too, that he had a more detailed visibility than I did”
Chang: TSMC funded Apple ramp via debt and filled half their requested volume
“What we first did our financial planning and we decided not to cut dividend. We decided not to sell new stock. We decided to just borrow. And I mean, this was also with consultation with Goldman Sachs, you know, we chose following. How much? I looked at the nu…”
Zuckerberg: Meta open-sourced infrastructure because Google already held proprietary compute advantage
“Google was the first of the great companies that built this distributed computing infrastructure. So they came first. They were like, all right, let's keep this proprietary because it's a big advantage for us. And then we're like, all right, we need that too. …”
Zuckerberg: Designing custom clothes helps him prepare for Meta's wearable hardware
“I started working with people to design some of my own clothes. And so I figured, you know, look, we're gonna design eyewear, we're gonna design other stuff that people wear, let's get good at this.”
Gilbert and Rosenthal deeply regret interviewing Sam Bankman-Fried on Acquired
“We totally regret doing it.”
Munger says Berkshire Hathaway never sells a halfway decent business
“If it's a problem business we've never been able to fix, we'll sell it. But if it's a halfway decent business, we never sell anything.”
Lasky: Startups should never launch games on consoles before finding product-market fit
“I would not counsel any of my portfolio companies to launch on the console because the hoops that you have to jump through for approvals, for manufacturing, et cetera, for just in general are dire, and they're not the kind of thing that I would sort of put in …”
Lasky: Pushing Discord to build a game store was my failure
“It's like we tried this at Discord. Right? And we tried to start a game store. This was obviously my failure, because I pushed them very hard toward becoming a platform-based publisher, because I thought, hey man, this is a great way to leverage this audience.”
Lasky: thatgamecompany rejected an Apple Arcade deal over strict exclusivity demands
“Apple wanted us in the arcade. We couldn't do it because we want it to be cross-platform, right? And they wanted exclusives.”
Robbins: 100 Thieves built esports primarily as marketing for content and apparel
“No, I think, I actually think if you like for a hundred thieves, you know, which is an e-sports organization that has three pillars of it, which is, you know, content and immediate side. It has an apparel side, which is also a thriving business and then the e-…”
Acquired hosts have invested in five of their podcast sponsors
“Most of them now, a very large percentage of our sponsors, we've invested in. What, five of them? I think five, yeah. Vanta, we should talk about Vanta in a big way. Modern Treasury, Vouch, Mystery, Standard Metrics, we've invested in.”
Thompson Explored Building a Substack Equivalent Before It Launched
“I actually thought about building a sub stack a few years before they launched. I actually had a team together and it ended up falling apart, but my big hesitation was always, I just wasn't sure if it would be venture scale.”
Puttagunta: Benchmark does not do outcome scenario analysis on investments
“There's no sort of, like, outcome scenario analysis here that says, like, here's the 10% upside, bull case, bear case. These are all things that, you know, those of us that came from other places had all done.”
Calacanis: I premeditated character arcs on All-In and created 'Sultan of Science'
“In all honesty, I did craft with All In. I was very premeditated in creating some character. I've never really talked about this. But I crafted some character kind of arcs. I, The fights are all real. Trust me, there's nothing scripted about that. But I did sa…”