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 5 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
Friedberg: Early Google benchmarked against millions of Yahoo and Microsoft search results
“At Google in the early days, we would submit millions of search queries to Yahoo and Microsoft search engines to see what the results sets were. And we would compare our results against their results as a way of improving our search engine rankings and our alg…”
Cuban commissioned Goldman Sachs index to short-hedge his Yahoo stock
“I had Goldman Sachs create an index of internet stocks that I thought sucked. And then I shorted that index because we, and we had to follow all the laws and I just had to have that short in place until I was able to do a real caller in the market on my Yahoo …”
Mark Pincus bought Six Degrees patents for $750K and still owns half
“Reid and I bought them because we were worried that if Yahoo at the time had gotten them, or even Friendster, that they would have blocked the whole industry, so we bought them. We paid 750 K, which was a lot then, and we were accused of being patent trolls, a…”
Friar: Markets reward long-term durability over being first to IPO
“In the end, the market is a weighing machine, not a popularity machine. No one remembers who went first, Google or Yahoo, Lyft or Uber”
Early Silicon Valley was a monoculture of elite university and tech alumni
“And in Silicon Valley at the time, you know, it really, there is a very monocultural aspect of, you know, folks from a few schools, you know, folks having worked at a few companies and I had neither, you know, I worked, I went to Waterloo, which is in Canada, …”