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 200 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
Foroughi: AppLovin bought 14 to 15 game studios to train its ad models
“So actually like the business from KKR investment to IPO ended up looking wildly different than an advertising business because we ended up with like 14, 15 different game studios across all categories of gaming that we ended up owning so that we can not only …”
Foroughi: A 10-person Turkish gaming studio sold for $1B built entirely on AppLovin
“There's a company that recently exited out of Turkey and mobile gaming that I believe was like 10, 15 people and sold for a billion dollars. They sold under one year from launch for a billion dollars. Almost all of their business Growth on the marketing and mo…”
Foroughi: AppLovin operates with no CRO or COO in its C-suite
“To this day, we don't have a CRO. We're an ads business. I mean, anywhere you look, advertising business, who doesn't have a CRO? We don't have a CRO. We don't have a COO. We have today this, the C-suite is myself, the CFO, the CTO, and we have a general couns…”
Roblox's global infrastructure costs less than one cent per user hourly
“Like all of Roblox runs for less than a penny an hour. For every person around the world.”
Xu: 90% of DoorDash drivers work fewer than 10 hours weekly
“And then if you look at it today, there's almost no overlap, very little overlap between ride sharing drivers and delivery drivers, and the Dashers, more than half of them are women today. They come from Dozens of industries. Literally, I mean every place. The…”
Andreessen: The New York Times claimed early internet user metrics were fake
“New York Times kept running stories talking about how the whole thing was fake anyway. They kept saying that like all the numbers were made up, and like there actually wasn't anybody online. It was like a tiny little user base, and we were all like inflating t…”
Armstrong: Five GSIB banks are working with Coinbase on crypto integrations
“Five of the, you know, GSIB banks in the world, the largest banks are working with us now on crypto integrations.”
Iovine: Interscope was the sole survivor of 14 labels funded in 1989
“14, 14 labels started with fifty million dollars in funding in 1989, 90.
David Senra: And how many survived?
Jimmy Iovine: None.
David Senra: You?
Jimmy Iovine: Interscope.”
Lütke: Companies usually decline right after building monuments to themselves
“I think I mean, there's a well-documented effect of when companies build monuments to themselves, they usually decline right after, right?”
Mackey: VCs owned 34% of Whole Foods before IPO and another round would forfeit control
“The founding investors still had a majority of the stock. The VCs on 34%. But if we'd done another round, they would have gotten control of the business, and they had different agendas.”
Mackey: Whole Foods gave stock options to all employees, creating many millionaires
“So many of our team members became millionaires through our stock option program. If you're on a winning team that grows, you can make a lot of money, even if you're not the most senior executives. We gave stock options to everybody that worked there.”
Dyson bought out Jeremy Fry's 49% stake for £45,000
“He just said, I hate lawsuits, and my financial advisor thinks the vacuum cleaner's going nowhere, and he owned 49% of the business.
So what'd you buy an hour for?
I bought him out.
45,000 pounds.”
Ovitz: Stanley Kubrick never had any talent agent besides Michael Ovitz
“He never had an agent except me, and I could talk to him because Marty basically educated me”
Ovitz: CAA never lost a single agent during his tenure
“We didn't lose an agent in the whole time I was at CA, not one.”
Jacobs doubled profits on most of his major acquisitions within five years
“That's the main criteria I look at when I look at a company, is purchase price, and secondly, Can we double the profit in three to five years? And most of my main acquisitions, I've done that.”
Dell: Base Core battery is custom-designed and manufactured in-house
“It's called the base core, and it is our custom-built battery, and it is the output of the last three years of learning how to install, operate, and manage tens of thousands of distributed home batteries. It's completely designed by us from the ground up. It's…”
Sequoia historically owned 20% of Nvidia and 10% of Google
“And you know, we own 20% of NVIDIA. Think about that. I mean, you know, we own 10% of Google. And there's many others, you know. Apple. Are you kidding me? We were the first investor of Apple, in Apple. Cisco. We own a quarter of Cisco systems.”
Sequoia sold its 25% stake in Cisco for only a $90M gain
“We sold our Cisco shares for cash for the total gain of ninety million. We owned a quarter of Cisco systems.”
Reil: Germany's defense budget is growing to over †150B by 2029
“It's also the country that has in absolute terms, probably now the biggest growing defense budget, going from fifty two billion euros last year to originally, I think, hundred and fifty three billion in 2029. I think it's gone up again to over one hundred and …”
Reil: Drones can find and strike artillery 40-50 km away
“And for artillery systems as well, if artillery systems try to hide 40 to 50 kilometers away from the front, ah, to shoot, you can still find them with drones and you can attack them with drones.”
Reil: Daniel Ek invested €100M of personal money into Helsing
“Very difficult to raise money in 21 for defense, like no VC wanted to talk to us, and we didn't even try in the end, so we just raised money from individuals, family offices, and then we were lucky that Daniel you know, put in a hundred million euros of his ow…”
Reil: Helsing and Saab won German Eurofighter electronic warfare contract using AI
“We came in with an AI-based approach, deep learning-based approach that kind of recover that ability to interpret those radars, and it was a big technology jump, and we managed to win that program of record together with our partner Saab against, you know, a l…”
Altman: OpenAI's GPT series originated from its unsupervised sentiment neuron paper
“You know, what started as the unsupervised sentiment neuron paper turned into GPT-ONE and then eventually GPT-whatever.”
Kalanick: At one point, Uber's top 10 global cities were all Chinese
“At some point, probably our top 10 cities were all Chinese cities. That's wild. In rides. Yeah. Not in revenue because the rides instead of like at the, in my day, 13 bucks, 15 bucks, whatever they were, these were like three bucks, two bucks type stuff.”
Kalanick: Pre-Uber, NYC taxi drivers paid $40k yearly for half-time rentals
“When Uber rolled into New York the driver was getting a 12 hour shift seven days a week.
But there are 2:12 hour shifts.
Each of those drivers was paying 40,000 dollars a year to rent a car for half time.”
Ovitz: CAA once represented 46 of the top 50 box office filmmakers
“At one time, CAA representative of the top 50 grossing variety box office filmmakers, we had 46. 46. And I was upset, because I didn't have all of them. There were four I couldn't get, and it really upset me, and it gnawed at me my whole career there.”
The uninterrupted task horizon for AI agents doubles every few months
“And that's just doubled every, you know, every couple of months basically. And now we're talking about like, Hours of work. So, so basically an AI can just take a task that would have taken humans hours of work to go do.”
Stoute: Usher was the first independent artist to play the Super Bowl
“Usher was the first independent artist to play the Super Bowl.”
Söderström: Apple Podcasts held 98.5% market share before Spotify's entry
“And when we looked at their usage, I think Apple podcast was still like 98 and a half percent.”
Söderström: Almost 70% of Spotify users work out with the app
“Almost 70% of people on Spotify work out with Spotify.”
Spotify launches 'Save to Spotify' for private AI-generated podcasts
“So this is something I'm working on at Spotify, and we released this just a few weeks ago, something called Save to Spotify. When you sit in your code code or codex or something, you can just, you know, you can ask these agents to go out and look at informatio…”
Ivanka Trump says her former fashion brand topped $800M in annual sales
“My fashion brand, we were doing over eight hundred million in sales annually.”
Donald Trump never spent a night in D.C. before the White House
“He'd never spent a night in Washington until his first night in the White House.”
Ivanka Trump says her Child Tax Credit push benefited 40 million families
“Forty million Americans Benefited, on average, 2500 dollars a family by the expansion of the child tax credit.”
Take-Two Acquired BMG Interactive for 20% Equity Worth $20M
“It's a little tiny public company with a, I want to say roughly a hundred million dollar market cap, and they agree to give us 20% of their company in stock for the business, such as it was. So, twenty million dollars.”
Foroughi: AppLovin generated $1.3B cash in a single quarter
“I mean, run, run rate wise, I think Q one we made, or I guess Q four, what we just announced in, in Q one was I think it was 1.3 billion in cash just in a single quarter.”
Foroughi: AppLovin valuation rose from under $4B to peak of $250B
“I think it was April, 2023 was when the stock was nine, 10, 11 bucks. So we peaked it was probably six months ago or so at 750 bucks. So the valuation went from under four billion to a peak of two hundred and fifty billion.”
Foroughi: AppLovin reaches over 1B daily gamers globally and 150M US adults
“In our business on the, on one hand, we have billion users who are playing games, billion plus users who are playing games every single day around the world in the U S over a hundred and fifty million only adults.”
Baszucki: Roblox implemented age verification independently, not due to legal mandates
“Age check. We made the call on our own. It's not because of laws or anything like that”
Roblox never burned through more than its initial $10 million in capital
“If we raised a secondary round, we might put some padding in there, but we actually never dipped below that initial ten million.”
Roblox creators earn over $1 billion annually through platform payouts
“Devex is well over a billion bucks a year, you know, that's the amount.”
Baszucki: Second Life's contiguous world model created severe scaling limits
“Second Life's architecture was contiguous earth kind of thing, which had some issues around scaling, because in a contiguous earth type situation, which is just the way the real world makes, there's only one copy of that roller coaster, and when 30 people want…”
Spiegel: Snap manufactures core AR components in its own US and UK facilities
“Yeah, people you know, I think would be stunned to learn that we manufacture core components in the U.S. And the U.K., right, in our own facilities, which allow us to do this really advanced R&D to push the boundaries of what's, you know, what's possible with …”
Spiegel: Snapchat reaches nearly 1B users and 500M daily active users
“We're almost a billion folks using our service. If you look at like our daily active engagements, about like half a billion folks.”
Spiegel: Snapchat subscription business reaches $1B revenue run rate
“We're doing a bit like a, yeah, like a billion run rate growing 60% year over year.”
Xu: Food delivery apps before DoorDash were just fax-based lead gen
“They were mostly honestly faxing orders, believe it or not. So they would be a website that would receive orders, if you can believe it. They would fax the orders literally into machines that would sit Near the kitchen or the payment systems inside these resta…”