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 235 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
Five or six Stockholm unicorns were founded by Spotify alumni
“You go to Stockholm today, and there's five or six unicorns that came out of Spotify.”
Housel: 1990 Civil War Documentary Drew More Viewers Than the Super Bowl
“More Americans watched a Civil War documentary, fourteen-hour documentary, in 1990, then watched the Super Bowl that year.”
Gordon: HCA's IPO Raised Mainly Secondary Capital, Not Debt Paydown
“The IPO is actually mainly Secondary capital, because we had done a good job of growing into our capital structure and already going down the path of spreading it over time.”
Falbe: Games Workshop generates 90%+ gross margins on manufacturing plastic models
“First thing you notice is, wow, they are 90% plus gross margins on producing plastic.”
Between 25 and 40 companies go public with TRAs annually
“So on an annual basis, there are, call it, 25 to 40 IPOs with TRAs, depending on the IPO market.”
Boyd: 85% of US Apartment Buildings Are Family-Owned
“Apartments, 85% of the asset class are owned by families, and families have other things going on in their life, especially if they inherited an apartment project.”
Wyden: Small-caps outperformed large-caps by ~400 bps annually from 1927 to 2010
“From 1927 to 2010, which were the years prior to the launch of these strategies, the small, that's growth and value, outperformed large by about 400 basis points.”
Barth: Private REIT asset raises have swamped closed-end PE real estate funds
“If you look at assets raised By institutional real estate managers, the amount in private REITs versus private equity structured vehicles, the private REITs have swamped it.”
Bitar: Venezuelan Public Equities Trade Under $5,000 Daily Volume
“So you could gain exposure to some of the companies in the public markets, but the volume is probably less than 5000 dollars a day, so you can't build a position.”
Pawn Stars became the number one show on television overall
“Pawn Stars, which had risen to number one on TV at that time against scripted, unscripted, everything”
Toast founders built second commerce app on Apple App Store
“In fact, they were the second mobile app in the Apple App Store for commerce after Amazon.”
Aydin Senkut made 100 angel investments in his first 4.5 years
“By doing my own firm and making a hundred investments in four years, four and a half years, if I was at another firm, God knows if I would have even been able to make five or six investments in that time, if at all.”
Grinda: Zingy scaled revenue from $1M to $200M in three years
“We went from one million in revenues in O-two to five million in O-three, but most of that in Q-four, and so the most important date in my life professionally, in fact, probably to this date, is August 15 of 2003, when the check from Sprint
Mobile arrived for …”
First Round employs 75 people across platform, investing, and content
“I mean, there's 75 people working on Platform initiatives, investing, content production, et cetera.”
Some sports leagues mandate institutional funds have 10 years of remaining term
“So some of the leagues require that a fund have at least 10 years left in its term to be considered for approval.”
Graña: Controlling Shareholder of First Mexican REIT Disappeared Post-IPO
“Shortly after the IPO, the controlling shareholder disappeared. He went on a horseback ride on his beach resort and never came back. And lo and behold, the company was also short of funds.”
Garfinkel: Atherectomy Provided Better Long-Term Patient Outcomes Than Angioplasty
“The problem with angioplasty is that it would come back pretty quickly. If it's called re-stenosis, it re-blocks. With athrectomy, which was what this technology was called, it would shave it out and it wouldn't rebound so quickly. So it was better for patient…”
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?”
Dixon: Symantec was the world's largest subscription business around 2007
“I think at the time, Symantec was the biggest subscription business in the world. Like, it had a hundred and something million subscribers, which back then was The record.”
Dixon: Bill Gates's 1995 book 'The Road Ahead' omitted 'World Wide Web'
“The original version of Bill Gates's Road Ahead came out in 1995. It was talking about the future of computing and the word worldwide web did not occur in that book.”
Marshall Wace was roughly the third hedge fund established in Europe
“We were about the third hedge fund in Europe.”
Harvard Business School historically increased Black enrollment by adding a new section
“The way that they were able to increase the number of black students at HBS is by adding a new section. So no one felt threatened. We just have a brand new section. It's not like all the African-American people are in that one section. We sprinkle them through…”
Mauzé: VMG exited 20+ brands in 10 years, almost all strategic
“So we've exited 20 plus brands over the past 10 years, and all but one has been to the strategic buyers.”
Florida SBA Operates at Half the Cost of Institutional Peers
“We have been the lowest cost provider for three or four of the last five or six years per CEM. Our costs on average are about half those of our peers.”
Whittaker: Corporate engagement with JUST Capital tripled in 18 months
“Over the last 18 months, we've had a tripling of the number of companies that are in engagement with us. Now, 363 170 of the almost 900 companies we rank.”
Friedman: Amazon HQ2 in Northern Virginia Is Partially in an Opportunity Zone
“Amazon's second headquarters is partially an opportunity zone in northern Virginia.”
Berkshire Subsidiary MiTek Used Phantom Stock That Increased 1,000x
“They had an interesting phantom stock arrangement. They created a phantom share. Called a share of my tech within the company. And Warren referred at one point an annual report that had gone up a thousand times.”
Russo: Berkshire Hathaway has experienced 50% drawdowns four times
“You know, I think over its life, they've had a 50% drawdown four years over the period of time.”
Detroit Tigers had only one part-time analyst on staff in 2015
“It was about two years ago that the Detroit Tigers, for example, had like one part-time analyst on their whole staff. Two years ago, it was like maybe 2015 or going into 2016.”
Institutions accounted for at most 10% of stock trading in the 1960s
“10% of trading at most was done by institutions.”
Scaramucci: Jason Miller, not me, is the shortest-serving communications director
“And so now, I'm known as the former communications director for Trump, shortest serving communications director, but I'm actually not, because Jason Miller is the shortest serving communications director. He served for one day.”
Barclays Agg Credit Rating Dropped and Duration Doubled Since the GFC
“The Barclays Ag is not the Barclays Ag that it was at the end of the financial crisis, right? So the credit rating, Is a lot less today than it was back then, number one. Duration is doubled since that period of time.”
Lydon: ROBO Global ETF grew from under $100M to $3B in one year
“There's a robo-global that had been around for five years, hung under a hundred million dollars, and then all of a sudden people got it.
And now they're at three billion, you know, in an, in another year.”
Galbraith: Average net cost for a student at Yale is around $24,000
“The average person at Yale is being charged about 24,000 dollars a year.”
Dunn: 85% of Wake Forest endowment payout funds financial aid
“For Wake Forest, 85% of the payout goes to financial aid.”
Mogelof: Over 25% of 1990s DC assets were in company stock
“And so by the end of the nineties, more than 25% of all DC assets were in company stock.”
Choe: US CPA industry is a $40 billion market before advisory revenue
“And so an example of that would be the USCPA industry. It's a Forty billion dollar industry before accounting for surrounding advisory revenue that typically goes along with having an audit or a tax practice.”
Ou: GGV's first fund was a Series A investor in Alibaba
“The drivers for first GGV fund, for example, they were a series A investor in Alibaba.”
Papa: Walmart's 1993 10TB Data Warehouse Cost $80M with 10,000 Disks
“So when we talk about big data back in 1993 was the 10 terabyte Walmart data warehouse that cost eighty million dollars. That's how far things have come. That system had close to 10,000 hard disks to make it go.”
Lamont: There was only one public software company in 1983
“I wasn't that interested in investing in disk drive companies, and there was only one public software company at that point.”
Davis: There were no utility bankruptcies for 20 years before Enron and PG&E
“So, you know, at that point, I don't think there'd been a utility bankruptcy in two decades and lo and behold, We had Enron. And then we had Pacific Gas and Electric the first time around.”