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 14 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
Rauch: Front-End Engineering Is More Important Than Back-End
“I made a asymmetrical bet early on that front-end engineering was going to be more important than back-end engineering and that the language that the browser could run, which still to this date is only JavaScript.”
Rauch: Vercel reached $50M+ revenue and 400 employees in two years
“So we ended 2019 or started 20 20 at one million revenue. We went from one to five to 24 and now we're at 50 plus we went from 40 to 400 people in two years and we're doing thirty billion requests per week”
Rauch: Vercel executives must work hybrid in SF while ICs work remotely
“My new take is leadership in executive positions are in San Francisco but not, not going to come into the office every single day, because I think that can diverge into loss of productivity. So we'll have a hybrid situation going on in SF. But when it comes to…”
Rauch: Argentina's culture of pessimism stifles innovation despite high talent
“The reality is that Argentina as a culture has this pessimism built into it. There's this great quote of like, pessimism makes you sound smart. And frankly, there's a lot of extremely smart, creative people. There's all this, like, cultural intermix in Argenti…”
Rauch: Consuming energy on political debates accomplishes little and wastes potential
“I see patterns of, like, you're getting consumed in this political nonsense. You're spending so much energy. You think it's the most important thing in your life. It's not, and you're probably not really making a difference. You're just, like, getting yourself…”
Rauch defends Meta's targeted advertising model for small businesses
“Like I take the side of Meta on if we are not able to connect small businesses through advertising to the people that are interested in their products, we have a worse world.”
Rauch: Open source is unstoppable due to its composable fractal nature
“So open source has this fractal nature that is unstoppable because you can take anything and layer in more additions and improvements or use it as an implementation detail.”
Rauch: Every 100ms of e-commerce latency causes a 1% conversion drop
“So the wisdom that gets shared in the industry a lot is for each hundred milliseconds. That you slow down an e-commerce experience, you have a one percent drop off in conversion.”
Rauch: Walmart.com and mobile TikTok web run entirely on Next.js
“Like, walmart.com entirely runs on Next.js. Mobile TikTok runs entirely on Next.js on the web.”
Rauch: E-commerce is becoming all about games, drops, and exclusivity
“I think it's a reflection of what e-commerce is becoming. It's all about games and drops and exclusivity and crowds of people.”
Rauch: Vercel tech hits 3M weekly and 200M total downloads
“Well, to speak to community metrics, so our technology gets downloaded three million times a week. We have over two hundred million cumulative downloads.”
Rauch: Real product-market fit comes from organic virality over network pushing
“When we are in powerful networks like Silicon Valley, it's very easy to shove your product down people's throats. It's very easy to convince a startup, your friends, your VCs, et cetera, like, hey, please use my product. But when you see that organic expansion…”
Rauch: MrBeast hosted his 100-million subscriber merchandise drop on Vercel
“Mr. Beast was going to do a drop. Of a t-shirt, I believe it was, when he hit a hundred million subscribers, and he did it on Vercel, and he created this incredible experience that combined games inside the browser, and real-time elements, and the drop, of cou…”