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 52 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
Jain: Over half of hyperscaler backlog stems from OpenAI and Anthropic
“Now we're getting more clarity that more than half of the backlog, hence probably the revenue too,
Is coming from basically anthropic slash open AI.
If you look at Google and Microsoft is more than half open AI.
Amazon is more than half.
So they invest with op…”
Jain: Google's operating margin would be single digits without depreciation changes
“If you look at Google, if they had not changed the depreciation policy, the margin would be high single digits, operating margin.”
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.”
U.S. Antitrust Chief Makan Delrahim Was Once Google's Lobbyist
“Macon Dalrahim, for example, is the attorney general for antitrust in the US. He was Google's lobbyist for the double click acquisition.”
Russo: Refusing Defense AI projects threatens Google's science-driven leadership
“Well, the moment you say that you're not going to have an AI business that has an involvement with some aspect of the Defense Department, particularly if it's defense-oriented, and you say that we just won't touch it because of our values, the moment you stop …”
Russo: Alphabet CEO Larry Page no longer shows up to work
“At a time when, by the way, Larry Page no longer shows up. To work.”
Sacca: Google's $6B spectrum bid established net neutrality rules for wireless networks
“We went from zero to within a year bidding six billion dollars on spectrum and attaching openness rules to wireless spectrum. That's why the wireless networks are net neutral. It was because of this big hand of poker we'd played.”
Milkman: Rigid routines harm exercise habit durability compared to flexible schedules
“We were startled to find that the rigidity was harmful. What we found is that that group, they went ever so slightly more often, they did sort of form a habit around going at that magic time, a little bit more often than the group that had had a more flexible …”
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…”
Russo: The ideal cash flow conversion ratio for compounding businesses is zero
“You can imagine from my perspective, my ideal cash flow conversion ratio is zero. That means that we have a button. And at some level, Google stands out on that. They have zero because they have the ability to plow all that money back into moonshots. Unfortuna…”
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.”
Chainlink uses OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google models to reach data consensus
“Through our technology, we were able to have the AI models reach consensus on that single piece of data that is the share split 10 to one. OpenAI, yes. Anthropic, yes. Google, yes. We posted that on a blockchain as a unified golden record.”
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 …”
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…”
Drobny: Public ESG ETFs are filled with non-ESG companies like Amazon
“It's really hard to do in public markets, because when you look at these ESG ETFs, they're full of Amazon and Google and things that aren't really ESG.”
Lamont: Google and Amazon wouldn't exist without 1990s internet mania
“If we hadn't had a mania, we wouldn't have funded things like Google and Amazon, some of the great companies of today.”
Larry Page mandated insane goals at Google to prevent incremental thinking
“He had a very simple philosophy, which was, I'm going to ask you to do insane things. And they are insane by default because If they're not insane, you're going to basically revert to status quo and you're going to come up with incremental ideas. And the only …”
Singh: Uber's decentralized ownership drove global expansion over Lyft's comfortable culture
“Why is that? I'd argue that it was the cultural difference because they had all the same resources, they had the same people, and you had one culture that was so intense that was driven It treated every manager as a CEO of a business unit. You go run that, tha…”
Housenbold: Made eBay Google's first advertising customer in the world
“In that role, I also became Google's first customer in the world. Having ran AltaVista and competed with them, they were starting to monetize their search, and I became the first customer, and that really changed the trajectory for both Google and for eBay”
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.”
Inker: Google cannot outgrow GDP forever without a new business model
“Google has been able to grow extraordinarily fast by taking share from every other kind of advertising that has happened.
The underlying fundamental truth that advertising grows with GDP has not changed, and as their share of advertising gets bigger and bigger…”
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…”
O'Shaughnessy: A High-Quality Twitter Following Functions Like Having an AGI
“That having a big, smart, diverse group of people that follow you on Twitter is literally like having an AGI. I believe that that is true. It's the best search engine in the world. So if you're looking for something, ask a big group of people, you're going to …”
Scaramucci: Wall Street is the essential arterial system of capitalism
“Wall Street is the arterial structure of the capitalist system. It's literally the design of where capital can flow. You want to go into fracking, you come to Wall Street, you raise money. You want to build a new search engine, your name is Google, you come to…”
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 …”
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.”
Pompliano claims Google would have sold early for slightly more money
“Google, they just got a little bit more money offered to them early. They would have sold.”
Google tried to acquire early Reddit for a YouTube commenting system
“It actually made us an acquisition offer. It was like an acqui-hire type thing, and Google wanted to roll Reddit into YouTube, and they were gonna make us this sort of YouTube commenting system.”
Breitfelder: Debate without psychological safety causes wasted organizational energy
“Psychological safety must be inherent for a team to fulfill its total potentials for performance. Seems like an obvious point. But if you have debate but not psychological safety, there's a lot of wasted energy.”
Sacca: Invested $25K into Twitter while employed at Google
“I wrote a check into Twitter while I was still at Google for 25 K. And that was one of the things I needed that money back. So I would show up at the company and work my ass off to try and make it more valuable because that wasn't break off 25 to be polite sit…”
Sacca: Early angel deals fail when backing fixable companies over great ones
“The first few deals I did with my own individual money once I got out as an investor were garbage because they would come pitch me
and I'm like, oh, I know how I can make this better because that's what I was used to doing at Google was just making things bett…”
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.”
Crypto assets are functional utilities, unlike passive traditional equities like Google
“When you hold Google stock, it's not an asset that gets sort of activated and used in a system, whereas in a crypto asset, it really is a useful asset a lot of the time.”
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…”
Larry Page launched Google Research when the company had just 50 employees
“Exactly at 50 people at Google, Larry said, you know what, we need to move even faster, and if we only put engineers on projects as they become relevant, It's not fast enough and we're going to fall behind. So for the first time in the history of Google, he to…”
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…”
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…”
Ariely: Human motivation factors drive impact across all industries, not just tech
“There are big differences about people care, and we can all imagine how people who care at Google are going to create a bigger impact, but no, people who care, it would manifest everywhere. So the things that we're capturing are Feeling appreciated. Feeling th…”
Massey: Google was ground zero for evidence-based people analytics
“The people analytics world really blew up in the last, I don't know, 10 years or so. Google was ground zero and the tech world really kind of bought into this. We need to improve HR decision-making by being more evidence-based.”
Fontana: Google will never build AI solutions for niche vertical markets
“They're not really structured, and their businesses are so big such that it's not really worth it for them to go in and solve problems in a lot of vertical markets, so markets where the total opportunity is a couple hundred million dollars. This just doesn't w…”
Friedman: Google Is Moving 20,000 AI Employees to Lower Manhattan
“Google is just moving 20,000 AI people to the tip of New York. Now, some of it's not an opportunity zone, but it's surrounded by three opportunity zones.”
Russo: Gardner, Russo & Gardner adds Google as new portfolio position
“Well, it's Google and it's Googled now.”
McKeon: For-profit corporations struggle to establish widely adopted industry standards
“It's very hard for sort of a for-profit corporation to create a standard that's gonna be widely adopted, because, of course, everyone knows that a lot of value is going to accrue to that corporation, and so you get all these sort of strategic forces that preve…”
Google is the Number One Research Tool for ETF-Focused Advisors
“We do a study every year entitled how to communicate with ETF-centric advisors, and we ask them not only how they want to be communicated with, but how do they get their research. Their number one research tool is Google.”
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.”
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…”