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 396 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
Evans: 3,000 to 3,500 tech companies are founded in the US each year
“The US tech industry in total, there's like three, maybe three and a half thousand companies founded every year.”
Evans: Amazon ad revenue makes it a top-four global media owner
“And they did, I think, thirty one billion dollars last year, and they've done like 36, thirty seven billion dollars in the last 12 months which gets them to being like a top three, top four media owner. Globally. It's like Alphabet, Meta, ByteDance and then I …”
Sequoia Invested $150M in FTX Without a Board Seat
“Silicon Valley people kind of raise an eyebrow that Sequoia put a hundred and fifty million into this thing without taking a board seat, although those same Silicon Valley people would probably have done the same if they could have got into it, and they were n…”
Evans: Gaming Console Install Base Is Only 175M to 200M Units
“You know, the install base of a games console is sort of 20 or 30 minutes, is, is, is like a hundred and seventy-five million units, maybe two hundred million units, if you include Nintendo.”
Evans: Google Docs never displaced Office for analysts and lawyers
“Google Docs never unseated office or word for financial analysts or lawyers who actually needed those very, very specific sets of features.”
Evans: Generative AI will expand to video and precise creative workflows
“It's probably, I feel like there's a whole second wave of what you can do with this stuff. And it will get to video, and it will get much more specific and precise and controllable, and it will answer a lot of sort of make me 20 options of X and Y and Z that h…”
Evans: DTC neobanks see greater adoption in the UK than US
“DTC banking has happened a lot more in the UK than in the US, for example so-called neobanks.”
Evans: a16z invested $300M-$400M in Adam Neumann, its largest check ever
“And Andreessen Horowitz has given him, I think, the largest check they've ever written at a So three or four hundred million dollars to back this.”
Evans: No one at WeWork was charged or convicted of wrongdoing
“There's a whole bunch of argument about how the company was run, how what the ethics were, what's known as a whole bunch of accusations. Nobody's actually been convicted or even charged with anything.”
Evans: Specialized vertical software on iPads captured restaurants, not Big Tech
“That didn't get eaten by Google, or Amazon, or Apple. It's a generic iPad in a case, and then there's However many software companies, a bunch of software companies that go and solve, this is what restaurants need.”
Evans: Google pays roughly $15B for default search in Safari and Mozilla
“And so Google is paying something like fifteen billion dollars to be the default search engine in Mozilla and Safari and whatever else is out there, basically Mozilla and Safari.”
Evans: Meta has sold roughly 15 million VR headsets
“Facebook probably sold fifteen million. So there's maybe ten million people using one.”
Evans: Amazon holds 40% of e-commerce but tiny share of US retail
“It's got 40% of e-commerce and like a tiny percentage of US retail, but it has this large market share.”
Evans: Amazon ad revenue hit $31 billion, matching YouTube's scale
“And so Amazon did thirty-one billion dollars of advertising last year, which makes it roughly the same size as YouTube.”
Evans: Shein is the biggest US fast-fashion brand without physical stores
“Obviously, Shein at the Extreme doesn't have any stores, and it's the biggest fast fashion brand in the USA.”
Evans: Shein adds more SKUs every day than Zara carries in total
“Whereas Sheehan added something over 50,000 in the last seven days alone. And they add sort of seven, 8000 every single day. So they add more every day than Zara has in total.”
Evans: Winning VR/AR platforms will be open ecosystems like iPhone
“The ones that will win will be ones that are open platforms in the way that the iPhone was an open platform. And I do mean deliberately to say the iPhone is an open platform. It has millions of apps and billions of downloads. It's an open platform. That's what…”
WPP launches Every Mile to compete directly against Shopify
“WPP, which is one of the world's biggest advertising networks, has just launched basically a managed Shopify competitor. Which they call Every Mile, and which has a bunch of people with tech industry backgrounds involved.”
UK will mandate smart TV home screen placement for public broadcasters
“The government is going to kind of basically adjust that rule to encompass must carry placement on the front screen of a smart TV in the same way that there is must carry first, first screen placement on the linear EPG.”
UK youth watch more Netflix than all BBC content combined
“UK to 16 to 34 are watching more Netflix and all BBC content combined.”
Evans: Google employees internally nicknamed early Hulu 'Clown Co'
“Google people nicknamed it Clown Co because they thought it was obvious it was going to fail because it was, you know, a private equity firm and two giant old media companies.”
Apple's privacy fetish means its Apple TV team lacks viewer data
“There's a story in the information this week, that Apple isn't collecting that, so that Apple's programming team have no idea what people are watching, because of the sort of fetish that Apple have for privacy, particularly Eddie Q, who apparently wouldn't let…”
Top US streamers individually outspend all major European broadcasters combined
“Fifteen billion dollars a year, which is what Netflix, for the sake of argument, what Netflix spends, and close to what Amazon spends. It's also what Disney spend, if you exclude sport. That's more than production budgets for the top, all broadcasters in the t…”
Evans: Twitter has huge cultural significance but zero net income
“So and Twiktok is the same, it's like it has this huge cultural significance, but like it's a shitty business and doesn't, it doesn't make any money you have five billion dollars of revenue and no net income”
Evans: Google handed home security to ADT to avoid physical installations
“And a much more recent example is Google handing off its home security product line to ADT. And the theory was that you could turn home security from these boxes that, you know, somebody in a pickup truck comes with a ladder and spends all afternoon putting bo…”
Evans: Germany is doubling its defense budget after decades of military underfunding
“Germans are doubling their defense budget. Having spent, you know, 30 years not spending, you know, nearly enough and leaving, well, not just not spending enough, but like, you know, there've been all these sorts of stories, like the German Air Force didn't ha…”
Evans: Yandex faces a $500M bond repayment if its stock is suspended
“The terms of the covenant and the bond says that if our stock is suspended for a week, then we have to repay them. And that's like half a billion dollars. And we don't have that. And we especially don't have that given that we can't get any money out of Russia…”
Evans: YouTube will soon be blocked in Russia
“I think YouTube is blocked, or if it isn't, it will be soon.”
Evans: The automotive semiconductor shortage was driven by older-generation chips
“Well, so ironically, so, so ironically, that's a completely different issue, in that it's most, in that it's mostly older generation chips. I mean, I'm not a semiconductor analyst, but most of what this was, and particularly in, like, the car industry, this wa…”
Brown: Chinese online platforms receive daily state takedown directives
“Chinese online platforms Receive like a daily guidance from the government about what content they should remove”
Evans: Running a full MMO on Ethereum is unfeasible
“And of course the Nirvana is everything runs on the chain, but try, try running a MMO, a massively multiplayer online game on Ethereum at like one transaction a second, like good luck.”
Evans: Tim Berners-Lee opposed Andreessen adding the HTML image tag
“Tim Berners-Lee was really angry when Marc Andreessen added the image tag. He thought we were ruining it.”
Evans: US e-commerce penetration returned to pre-pandemic trend line in Q4 2021
“And so they brought out the numbers for Q for twenty-twenty-one yet today, which now puts the U.S. E-commerce penetration almost exactly back onto the trend line from before the pandemic.”
Evans: US e-commerce penetration will probably stay flat for one to two years
“Now it's probably going to be flat for a year or two, and then it will kind of carry on back up on the same curve as it was before.”
Brown: Shein tests 2,000 items daily with 100-unit production runs
“The Shein inventory is like something like 2000 new pieces of clothing every day. And I hadn't realized that the way their process was done was very much like work on demand, that they produce a hundred of every item, and the moment the item does well, then th…”
Evans: Meta's 13 million VR headsets yield only 5 million active users
“I think Facebook's probably sold 12, thirteen million of them. There's maybe five million people actually using them.”
Evans: Amazon generated $31B in 2021 ad revenue, topping YouTube
“This quarter, what had previously been sort of implicit in their results, so they have this line in the back of the account, it's called a breakdown of their revenue, and they had this line called other, which they say is predominantly advertising, and this qu…”
Evans: Shein's US sales likely eclipse Zara and H&M combined
“And, you know, so it's not a tech company in that sense, but this is a company that nobody had heard of two or three years ago that, you know, is probably bigger than Zara and H&M combined in the USA now.”
Evans: Small brands drove most CPG growth over the past decade
“Something like half to two thirds of all the growth in CPG in the last 10 years has come from small brands, new brands”
Evans: More people download software on iPhone now than all pre-2005 platforms combined
“There are more people downloading software on an iPhone now than happened on every computing platform on earth before 2005.”
Evans: An Apple AR headset will take years to reach scale
“If Apple launches an AR headset at WWDC next summer, like that will not have hundreds of millions of users next year, the year after. Like it did take, it does take three to five years to go from the first thing.”
Evans: Apple's iOS privacy changes shifted ad revenue and hit Snap stock
“And we saw this really clearly, really clear for the first time this summer when Apple makes all these privacy changes in iOS and great chunks of revenue start shifting off other companies, A, either to
Off the platform altogether or be actually onto Apple and…”
Evans: Major brands spent millions on Second Life islands with zero users
“There was a period of like six months where absolutely every big company was spending millions of dollars each building a Second Life island, like everyone. And it's just like the cost, even if you think, you know, what does it cost to build a second, you know…”
Evans: Telecom broadband competition came from local loop access, not breakups
“You know, you didn't create more competition in broadband by breaking up British Telecom and Deutsche Telekom. You created more competition by regulating access to the copper local loop.”
Evans: EU antitrust regulators will target Apple's APIs and App Store control
“This EU are going to come back and they're not going to start with payment. They're going to start with the store and the APIs and everything else.”
Evans: China will target predatory mobile game monetization mechanics
“China is already having a crackdown on games addiction. You know, it has to be only a matter of time before China comes for this stuff as well and says, hang on, why are these people, you know, purely on sort of social harm and populism, whatever, but like Chi…”
Evans: No company has publicly solved core optics challenges for consumer AR glasses
“You need something with a wide field of view that's thin and light, that doesn't look like a pair of goggles, that works in broad daylight, that has depth of field, that can occlude things in bright light. Those are physics problems and optics problems, and no…”
Evans: Tesla lacks competing models for any Fiat or Honda vehicles
“And Tesla is, has a BMW three series competitor and it has a BMW five series competitor and it has a BMW X two competitor. It doesn't have anything competitive to anything that Fiat makes. At all. Doesn't have a competitor, anything that Honda makes at all.”