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 37 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
Dixon: Google and Facebook will become low-growth legacy giants like IBM
“I think they're very likely going to become like IBM and HP and just chugging along and not really doing much new innovative stuff. They'll still be around and they'll still have their services, but I think that their relevance and growth are limited.”
Sacerdote: AI Adoption Has Driven $50B to $70B in Extra Sales for Meta
“And we think that's driven fifties to seventy billion of extra sales to Meta by adopting AI.”
Sethi: A startup's core product-market fit dynamics never improve over time
“One thing that never changes, and we've seen that across every company, we've been a part of Uber, Facebook, Airbnb, Lyft, et cetera. The list goes on where we built a lot of these growth and data science frameworks is that their product market fit and how the…”
Wolfe: Denying Early Liquidity to CTRL-Labs Founders Was a Colossal Mistake
“What I realized was what I should have done, which was a colossal and historic mistake, was make sure that we gave some interim liquidity. Because if we had put a few million dollars in that founder's pocket early on, the ability to stay the course would have …”
Facebook Killed Twitter's Vine Platform by Blocking Video Sharing
“Facebook effectively killed off fine by preventing that from being shared, which was Twitter's video platform. Facebook wanted to own video.”
Russo: Firm avoided Facebook because its engagement relies on unsustainable conduct
“And I haven't involved capital with Facebook, because within Facebook, though they are probably even more indispensable than Google in terms of programmatic advertising, part of the appeal has been the length of time and the height of passion that people exert…”
Only two or three truly transformational companies emerge in every VC cycle
“But if you really look at What are the companies that really become big and sustainable? Every cycle, there's only two or three. You know, the Googles, you know, the Facebooks. There's only a couple, and those tend to be funded by the same people.”
Tepper: Investing with CEOs holding outsized voting control is generally ill-advised
“Being in a relationship with a CEO who has outsized control relative to their shares is generally not a good idea.”
Dixon: Hollywood understands Web3 and NFTs while Silicon Valley dismisses them
“People at Google and Facebook, in my experience, just don't get this stuff. Web two entrepreneurs just scratching their heads and they say it's all scams and fraud. They just don't get it. People in Hollywood get it. It's not weird to them. They've been sellin…”
Bloom: Very few markets are true winner-take-all outside consumer social
“Most markets don't have winner take all either. There's going to be a few people. Consumer social has been one of the areas where there's been real winner take all. Like Facebook existing meant that MySpace was not going to exist, but very few markets really h…”
Walden: Open NFT media libraries let developers build the next Spotify
“One way to think about what's happening with NFTs is we're building this universal open media library on top of which any developer can build the next Spotify or build the next Instagram or build the next Facebook. And when there's a lot more competition, ther…”
Blood: Generation invested early in Facebook but exited over data practices
“We were investors in Facebook. Early on. And we ultimately decided that how they were treating information, and how they were dealing with some of their challenges, which they still have, was unsatisfactory to how we were thinking about sustainability.”
NZ Super Fund leads $10T investor coalition on social media moderation
“Post the Tragedy in Christchurch, we, together with another group of the New Zealand Crown Investors. We got together to lead an engagement with the social media companies about the, well, aimed at preventing the live streaming of objectionable content and sub…”
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 …”
Social Media Platforms Face Severe Problems from Pending Parliamentary Scrutiny
“And when it comes to social media companies, the House of Commons Digital Media Committee has been holding hearings in London and Washington about the role and activities of these social media platforms. And not just because I'm personally interested in it, bu…”
Baker: Google JAX and Meta PyTorch teams fought publicly on X until leaders called truce
“The JAX team at Google got into a giant fight with the PyTorch team on Meta on X, and the heads of each company's respective AI division had to make a public truce and instruct their troops to stop fighting.”
Facebook ran a 90-day project to grow Zuckerberg and Sandberg's followings
“There was a three-person team that was assembled. It was a ninety-day special project, and the whole goal was to help those two individuals grow their following on Facebook, which, when I tell people that, they always think it sounds a little almost vain, but …”
Saguaro traded Meta from $90 puts to $200 calls in four months
“We were writing put options on Meta slash Facebook in November, and then the 90 dollars or something, and then we turned around and we were writing call options once it got past 200 in March. And so we were able to kind of see the full investment cycle on the …”
Crypto startups cannot rely on Facebook or Google for customer acquisition
“Many of the traditional customer acquisition channels you can't use like Facebook and Google don't make it easy to advertise crypto things. You just can't use those channels.”
Dixon: Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram pay zero ad revenue to creators
“Twitter and Facebook have zero dollar revenue share. Instagram is zero dollars. So Instagram makes all their money on advertising. They pay zero out to the creators.”
Wolfe: Tech veterans from Stripe and Google are returning to Africa
“You have people that were born and raised in Nigeria and Ghana and Kenya who have gone to Silicon Valley and trained at Stripe and Google and Facebook and Amazon and are coming back, and they're coming back Sent to millionaires. They've made hundreds of millio…”
Wolfe: Facebook Nearly Tripled Its Initial Acquisition Offer for CTRL-Labs
“Facebook made an initial entreaty. We rejected it. They effectively nearly tripled their offer. It became more financially attractive”
Fishner-Wolfson: Founders Fund was not a premier VC firm in 2007
“In all fairness, Founders Fund wasn't one of the premier venture funds on the planet back in 2007, right? There really had been no new venture funds It was not like a trivial thing to raise that fund. People were a lot less famous. Facebook was a much smaller …”
Cocke: Digital infrastructure is the Class A real estate of the 21st century
“I think that digital infrastructure, which is in the bite index, is 40 digital infrastructure businesses. So think data centers, fiber, towers, cable. I believe that is the class A real estate of the 21st century. It's incredibly recurring, inflation protected…”
Walden: NFTs establish permanent cryptographic provenance for internet media
“Whereas today, think about an image you see on Instagram. You could screenshot that, you know, crop it, and then paste it on another platform. So like, repaste it on Facebook. And as soon as you do that, you break its entire history, its entire provenance. You…”
Palihapitiya: Left Facebook after Zuckerberg resisted capital for Facebook phone project
“I was working on a project to build a Facebook phone, kind of like a competitor to Android and iOS, but instead of really just building the product, I had kind of wrapped that whole project up in my own ego, and when I got pushback from Zuck, About the capital…”
Clarkson: Facebook and Instagram should be off-limits for LP due diligence
“I don't know if Facebook and Instagram are fair places to do diligence on people since it becomes so personal. I feel like that should be a bit of a safe space. Some people use it very mindfully, and that's great, but I say a lot of people are just sharing pic…”
Job seekers should target great companies that are under temporary stress
“I would always say find a great company with a great team of people that is currently under stress. But still looking to hire? That's a very wonderful combination if you can find that, and that's not what most people are looking for.”
Dorsey: Meta Became Wildly Undervalued Trading at Nine Times EBIT in 2022
“It certainly got wildly undervalued at one point in late 22 when it was nine times EBIT.”
Baker: Fidelity invested privately in Facebook in 2010
“I reengaged with venture right around the time Allen and company started bringing growth stage equity opportunities to big mutual fund managers, which is so important to own Facebook privately in 2010.”
Wolfe: Meta acquired CTRL-labs for slightly under $1 billion
“Coincidentally, Meta bought that for a little under a billion dollars, started by this guy Reardon.”
Facebook's social good team created Amber Alerts and voter registration features
“The last team I worked on was something called the social good and goodwill team. And that team was tasked with a pretty interesting mandate, which was go do good things in the world using the size, scale, and advantage that Facebook has, but don't worry about…”
Wincek: Facebook shut down apps because developers monetized before Facebook
“Facebook, a shut everybody down because everybody was making money on their platform and they weren't.”
Sethi: Early Facebook apps reached 100M monthly active uniques in one year
“In about a year, I think we went from zero to over a hundred million in a month of active uniques for these apps.”
Montgomery: Facebook gave its first presentation at the Montgomery Summit
“This is where Facebook first presented.”
Housenbold: 120 VCs passed on Starbucks and 88 passed on Facebook
“And if you look at, I think, Starbucks, when Howard was raising money, a 120 different venture capitalists passed on Starbucks. And I think 88 passed when market Facebook was looking to raise capital, right?”
Tech giant antitrust scrutiny parallels late 19th-century Standard Oil trust-busting
“You had the government agencies in the states suing Facebook, you have these challenges and these emerging powers in Amazon, and you're seeing these comparisons to standard oil back in the late 19th century and how it evolved and the trust busters”