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 25 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
Giannini: Global Tech Leaders Will Split Into Regional Entities Like Apple
“If you wanted to make money in smartphones, 20 years ago, whenever it was, you invested in Apple, and you had a global industry leader. That's not going to happen anymore. You will have Apple US, Apple China”
Baker: Fidelity led three Roku rounds when VCs feared Big Tech
“There's this company, Roku, no VCs would fund it, because every venture capitalist was worried about competition from Amazon, Google, and Apple. I was like, well, I'm really familiar with those companies. Competing with Roku, it is not on their top 50 list of …”
Morfit: Microsoft burned $4B to $6B annually chasing Apple and Google
“We could deduce that there was massive amounts of costs and losses being poured into these hardware initiatives. To the tune of four or five, six billion dollars a year that might be better spent driving Office three 65 in Azure instead of trying to chase the …”
Gleich: Fund managers claiming an unchanged 20-year process is unacceptable
“My biggest pet peeve in the industry is when a manager shows me a pitch book with an upside down triangle with an investment universe at the top and a portfolio at the bottom. I'm sure you've seen a thousand of them as well. And then they proudly claim that wh…”
Sands Capital holds five of the Magnificent Seven, excluding Apple and Tesla
“And at the firm wide level, we own five of the seven across our various different portfolios. But two of them, in this case, Apple and Tesla are companies that we have not embraced.”
Yale endowment rejected Steve Jobs' pitch for the first Apple Store
“They wanted to open up their first Apple store in our building, and we were very close to wrapping up a deal with someone else. We spoke to Steve Jobs, and he explained his vision for the business, which, to be honest, is exactly what turned out to be the case…”
Mullen: Allocators face no penalty for choosing consensus giants like Blackstone
“The infrastructure of it is a little bit reminiscent of the Apple, IBM computer debate of the nineties, where it's like you were never incented to buy an Apple product if you were a corporate purchasing person, because you got no penalty for buying IBM and you…”
Tedlow: The need for charismatic leadership will increase as knowledge work grows
“I think that the need for charisma is actually going to increase, not decrease, and here's why. The people who are going to create whatever it is that's coming down the pike are going to be knowledge workers, and they're going to have to be really smart. If yo…”
Trigg: Buying Dell and Yahoo over Apple and Google damaged WCM
“We were buying Dell instead of Apple, eBay instead of Amazon, Yahoo instead of Google. I mean, those three trades alone would have had, had they been done differently, would have had dramatically different results for that domestic product.”
Paying Hedge Fund Fees for Mega-Cap Tech Stocks Is Not Valuable
“And I know this is not the greatest thing to say, but being in the hedge fund business for all these years, it's interesting how few hedge funds I give money to. And it's not because I don't want to. It's that the market's gotten more efficient. There's a lot …”
Sacerdote: Apple's post-iPhone product categories failed to move the needle
“Apple had one that was just so big with the smartphone, The challenge for them was they did well with tablets and they did well with earbuds. They're doing well with the watch, but those weren't big enough to move the needle.”
Apple's five-year stock growth was driven by valuation expansion, not earnings
“If you were to take something like Apple over the last five years, a big driver of Apple's growth has actually been valuation driven rather than earnings driven.”
Wyden: Competing with Tiger Global and Coatue on Apple is functionally impossible
“I'm never going to beat Tiger Global or KOTU or anyone on Apple because they're going to have Yippit data and they're going to have robots and AI and credit cards and all of this stuff that's just going to make it functionally impossible for me to beat them.”
Tedlow: Public reaction to Steve Jobs's death was unprecedented in American history
“Because there has never been in American history a reaction to the death of a CEO the way the country, and indeed the whole world, reacted to the death of Steve Jobs. I mean, there were people, Ted, you may remember this if you were walking past an Apple store…”
Graña: The S&P 460's Returns Match Emerging Markets Exactly
“If you were to strip out the 40 most successful US stocks out of the S&P 500 and compare that to the, so the remaining S&P 460, I guess. The S&P 400 sixty's performance is actually bang in line with emerging markets. Bang in line with European markets. There's…”
Russo: Berkshire's IBM Failure Paved the Way for $40B Apple Position
“And sure enough, IBM was a complete dud. However, it allowed for them to begin the journey to technology, and sometime later, instead of a six billion dollar position in the dud, IBM, they have a forty billion dollar position in Apple, and they were willing to…”
Friedman: Banks face massive disruption from mobile payments within 20 years
“Certainly banks are going to be under unbelievable pressure, but I'm talking 20 years from now by this. I'm holding up a cell phone, an Apple phone, because go to Kenya. You don't have banks. You have mobile payments. Go to China.”
Steve Jobs Mastered Four Key Storytelling Tactics in One Minute
“If you watch Steve Jobs' 2007 iPhone launch, he uses steak, suspense, surprise, and humor. All four of them in the 1:06 minutes of the presentation. He does it masterfully and brilliantly. He's not really telling a story. He's bringing out a new product for a …”
Steve Jobs Practiced for Months and Still Misstated His Second Sentence
“Jobs famously practiced for months on that performance. The crazy thing about it is he messes up on the second sentence. He actually speaks the fourth sentence second, cuts himself off, fixes it, and then goes back.”
Tremblant Held Apple Through a 50% Drawdown in October 2008
“We got invested in Apple in January of oh four. It was our largest position for years. In October of oh eight, the stock fell 50% and stayed there for six months.”
Tremblant Made and Lost Substantial Money on an Early BlackBerry Position
“We made a bunch of money in BlackBerry, and then we lost a bunch of money in BlackBerry. We were early, one of my partners was like, this mobility thing is going to scale much faster than people think, and the winners are going to be Apple and Google and Black…”
Vieth: Overhaul tracks high-value cargo for Apple, Dell, and Pfizer
“Their customers are, I think, high-value goods. So Apple, Dell, Microsoft, Pfizer, Bristol-Myers, some cold storage, where they're Tracking and monitoring the environment of this high value cargo from beginning point to end point.”
Vulcan sold Apple at a split-adjusted $33, missing a massive run
“When I first started at Vulcan, we owned Apple, and at the time, I mean, it was just unbelievably cheap. It was like, and the iPhone that they'd released that year was not as popular as the Samsung Galaxy, which is hard to believe today, but everybody was kind…”
Hambrecht & Quist took Genentech and Apple public within three months
“And the first three months I was there, we took Genentech Public. We took Apple Public. I carried Steve Jobs bags on the Apple IPO Roadshow, and I was just exposed to the two of the most amazing entrepreneurs ever, and I fell in love.”
Housenbold: SoftBank Vision Fund 1 was backed by six limited partners
“In the Vision Fund one, we had six limited partners. One was SoftBank itself, so SoftBank's a big operating company, spits off a lot of free cash flow. The second was the Sovereign Wealth Fund of Saudi Arabia called PIF. The third was the Sovereign Wealth Fund…”