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 441 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: Tim Berners-Lee and Jimmy Wales say Australia's law breaks internet
“And both Tim Berners-Lee and Jimmy Wales were saying, look, this breaks the internet.”
Evans: Shopify reached $120B GMV in 2020, over 40% of Amazon Marketplace
“2019, Shopify did sixty billion dollars of GMV. GMV is gross merchandise value. That means people spent sixty billion dollars on Shopify sites. And in 2020, it was one hundred and twenty billion dollars, which makes it about 40%, a bit over 40% of Amazon Marke…”
Evans: Owned podcasts provide structurally higher profit margins for Spotify
“I'm not going to judge how well Spotify's push into podcasting is going, which they're clearly doing because it's massively better, has a structurally massively better margin structure than paying record labels per stream in this content that they can actually…”
Amazon managed net income to zero for 25 years by continuously reinvesting
“What Amazon did was they, if you look at the P&L for the last 25 years, they basically managed net income to zero. It was always zero, even as the revenue went up.”
Amazon's search advertising business generated over $20 billion in 2020
“The other thing that I've noticed recently is Amazon's advertising business, where they sell slots in search results. That is in its category called ads and other in the back of the report, where they disclose revenue but not profit. That did over twenty billi…”
Evans: Tesla market cap roughly equals top 40 auto companies combined
“Tesla's market cap is roughly equivalent to The market cap of like the top 40 companies in the auto business.”
Evans: VR hardware saw no lockdown sales surge until Oculus Quest 2
“It did have a surge when the Oculus Two came out, but it did not have a surge from lockdown at all.”
Evans: Meituan and Ele.me daily orders dwarf Western delivery apps
“Meituan is doing about twenty-five million orders a day. E-L.me is doing about 10, fifteen million orders a day. Just Eat, Grubhub, those are doing like half a million.”
Evans: WeChat failed in India because headquarters neglected local product needs
“WeChat launches this business in India and the Indian team keeps saying, we need you to do X and Y and Z. But India is so much smaller and so much less a show of attention. They can never get anyone on the phone in China to make, because the Chinese market is …”
Evans: Most component value in iPhones comes from outside China
“The iPhone is made in Shenzhen, but actually, the vast majority of the value inside it doesn't come from China.”
Evans: India has 500M smartphone users but only 100-150M active spenders
“India has five hundred million smartphone users. It has sort of a 150 to a hundred to a hundred and fifty million people who actually have money and spend money.”
Evans: Regulatory proposals require Google to share clickstream data with rivals
“All these competition proposals that Google has to give clickstream data to competing search engines so they can actually build a competing search engine.”
Evans: Amazon's 20 percent private label business is standard retail practice
“Amazon doing private label, like, yo, that's how retails work for the last hundred years. Like every retailer is 20% private label, but on the web somehow it's evil.”
Evans: RSS never became mainstream consumer tech and died
“RSS never really became a consumer thing, and RSS died.”
Evans: Mailchimp banned an anti-vaxxer without a recommendation algorithm
“MailChimp took down this Australian anti-vax campaigner, and MailChimp has no algorithm at all.”
Walmart's Historic Advantage Came From Database-Driven Supply Chain Efficiency
“An awful lot of the Walmart story is actually about computers because they use databases to have much more efficient supply chain and much more efficient inventory than a traditional supermarket did.”
Evans: Banning search default payments would eliminate Firefox's business model
“They say that you're not allowed to pay third-party browsers to be the default search engine, but that's Firefox's whole business model, so if they don't do that, Firefox goes away.”
Evans: US antitrust historically prioritized low consumer prices over consumer choice
“And so for a long time, there'd been this divergence between the US and the rest of the world in which US competition law had got very narrowly focused on low consumer prices as your objective. The argument was, well, if the prices are cheap, it doesn't matter…”
F1 ranks just behind the Olympics and World Cup in global viewership
“And F one was one of the most watched events in the world. I think it's just right after the Olympics and the world cup, it is one of the most watched events and it provided the tobacco industry. With, which was at the time, one of the biggest sponsors with un…”
Evans: TSMC makes 5nm chips while Intel is stuck above 10nm
“TSMC is now making this chip at five nanometers, so that's how small the components are, when Intel is stuck at over 10 nanometers.”
Cowan-Brown: US campaign software companies must pick Republicans or Democrats
“In the US, campaigning software is politicized. So you create software for one political party, not for both. And so you either create software or campaigning software, organizing software for the Republicans or the Democrats, but you can't be seen doing it fo…”
Cowan-Brown: Online abuse targeting women is visual, but moderation tools focus on text
“Most men, the way they have misinformation or get attacked online is actually written content. With women, it's generally pornographic in nature, it's memes, it's visual, but a lot of the censorship and a lot of the content moderation tools that are being put …”
Evans: Apple captures over 75% of global smartphone industry profit
“Apple sells from memory sort of 10 or 15% of all the mobile phones on Earth. They sell, however, they have probably over 50% of the revenue and probably three quarters or more of the profit. They have 25% of the install base.”
Evans: Chinese manufacturers going direct represent a meaningful share of Amazon Marketplace
“Part of the story of the greater marketplace, and I would love to find data on this, is that a meaningful part of marketplace is Chinese manufacturers going direct that previously sold to US retailers. Like a lot of it.”
Evans: Independent bookshop numbers have grown in the US and UK recently
“The number of independent bookshops has grown in the U S and the UK in recent years, because you're actually filling that other side of that.”
No company besides Apple has sold 250 million $600 machined steel devices
“Nobody has ever sold two hundred and fifty million things at 600 dollars each, machined out of stainless steel before.”
Evans: Barcode adoption grew US supermarket SKUs fivefold over a decade
“And there's this massive inflection point in the mid seventies when they deployed barcodes and the number of screws goes up by about five X over the next decade.”
Evans: US accountant headcounts rose every decade of the 20th century
“The number of accountants in the USA increased every single decade in the 20th century. As you go through adding machines and computers and mainframes and PCs and Excel and ERPs and SAS, you get wave after wave of automation and the number of accountants keeps…”
Evans: The typical large enterprise uses 400 to 500 SaaS apps
“The typical big company today has four to 500 SaaS apps.”
Evans: Big four platforms spent $400B CapEx last year, targeting $650B+
“Like the big four platform companies spent Four hundred billion dollars on CapEx last year, and they've announced something in the region of six hundred and fifty billion dollars this year, maybe more.”
Evans: Private equity holds $500B in debt from software buyouts
“There's a big piece in the FT this morning about how much money the private equity industry put into buying software companies in the last 10 or 15 years, and a whole amount of debt, like half a billion, half a trillion dollars of debt around that.”
Evans: Large US corporations typically use 400 to 500 SaaS apps
“The typical big company today uses four or 500 SaaS apps. Typical large, largest U.S. Corporations use four or 500 SaaS apps.”
Catton-Brown: ESPN pays $85M–$95M annually for US F1 rights through 2025
“They're currently paying anywhere between 85 to ninety-five million a year. That contract is up by, at the end of twenty-twenty-five”
Evans: Amazon generates $55 billion in annual advertising revenue
“Amazon has a three, has a fifty-five billion dollar ad business.”
Evans: Instacart generates almost all of its profits from advertising
“Almost all of Instacart's profits come from advertising.”
Evans: Accenture generates $1 billion per quarter in generative AI bookings
“And so Accenture is now doing a billion dollars a quarter in what they call generative AI bookings, doing pilot projects and building stuff for big companies.”
Evans: Typical large enterprise runs 400 to 500 SaaS applications
“Even at only a third of their workflows, it's sort of four or 500 SaaS apps. If you look at data from Okta or Productive or companies like that.”
Catton-Brown: Formula 1 has more tech sponsorship than ever before
“F-one today is more tech than it ever has been. And you look at the sponsors, it's the likes of Juniper, it's the likes of Salesforce, AWS, Oracle, like every other sponsor is a giant tech sponsor.”
Only 1% of Formula 1 fans attend races in person
“Salesforce came out with a stat that said one percent of Formula One fans will attend a race in a season, which means, says to me that this is a sport where 99% of the fans are consuming this at home digitally”
Federal court ruled Google is an illegal monopoly abusing its power
“This federal court ruled that the DOJ is right and Google is an illegal monopoly that it's abusing monopoly”
Programmatic display advertising accounts for only 10% of Google's total revenue
“There's another case coming down the pipe for Google on the display side the programmatic advertising, display advertising side which is, will be, is only 10% of revenue, but, you know, it might be more consequential on that side.”
Evans: Accenture reached nearly $4B run rate in generative AI work
“The May quarter over 900.
So they're now at close to a four billion dollar run rate in doing, except doing generative AI work for their clients.”
Evans: Pew data shows 18% of US adults have used ChatGPT
“US adults, 18% have used chat GPT ever, and 33% of 18 to 29, up to 43% have used ever.”
Evans: Roughly one-third of Americans under 30 use ChatGPT for work
“Something like a third of Americans aged under 30 have used it for work for some reason.”
Evans: Accenture Booked $1.4B From Generative AI Over Past Year
“So Accenture revenue from generative AI projects in the last four quarters, a hundred million dollars, two hundred million dollars, 450,000,600. Well, over, over 450 and over 600. So they've done 1.4 billion probably in the last 12 months, and 1.1 billion in t…”
Evans: The EU Issued Apple a €2 Billion Fine Over Spotify
“Apple has just got its first first find from the EU. Two billion euros over Spotify, and also there's a bunch of to-ing and fro-ing over exactly how it implements the DMA and rules for third-party apps and Epic and web apps and so on.”