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 138 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
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: 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.”
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.”
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 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.”
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.”
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…”
Musk realized raw materials accounted for only 2 percent of rocket costs
“But at the time with the rockets, he realized that like, 98% of the cost of a rocket was not from what it was made out of.”
Andreessen: Allen & Company is the only 1920s boutique bank surviving unchanged
“There's one firm that survives in the old model, and that's Allen & Company. And there are other boutique investment banks today, but Allen & Company was founded in the 19 twenties and has, you know, has, is uniquely the one that survived in the original model…”
Andreessen: Netscape was the largest internet ad company until 1997
“So Netscape was the largest internet advertising company until, I think, 97.”
Armstrong: Coinbase met with the SEC approximately 30 times after going public
“We did maybe 30 times. We met with the SEC after becoming a public company where they allowed us to become a public company.”
Armstrong: PayPal founders initially tried to create decentralized money like Bitcoin
“You go back and look at what, you know, Peter Thiel and Elon, Max Levchin, all these guys were doing, David Sachs, they actually had many similar ideas to Bitcoin. They were trying to create a decentralized form of money that could be permissionless global on …”
Armstrong: Coinbase's first employee hire was former lumberjack Olaf Carlson-Wee
“Actually the very first hire at Coinbase was this guy Olaf Carlson Wee, outside of Fred and I as the co-founders, and we were trying to hire this customer, someone to come in to run customer support, because of the backlog I mentioned, and I remember it came d…”
Fried: Non-Tesla Automakers Are Reverting From Touchscreens Back to Physical Buttons
“In fact, car manufacturers with the exception of Tesla, because Tesla is outstanding, but everyone else who put a bunch of screens in their cars, they're starting to move back to dials again and buttons again, because people are like, this sucks.”
Iovine: Interscope settled three lawsuits, including a RICO case, to sign Dre
“There were three lawsuits. There was a RICO lawsuit, right? That came with Sony, yeah,
yeah,
yeah.
There was .
Wait, is RICO money laundering?
What is? Gangsterism.
Gangster.
Okay, okay, that's right.
That was from the Eazy-E thing.
Oh, okay.
Right?
This isn't…”
Mackey: Whole Foods avoided opening stores in competitors' home markets
“But I didn't compete directly with anybody else in stores ever. I didn't, I never did it. I didn't go to Portland for that reason, because Nature's was there. I didn't go to Boulder until Alfalfa's and Wild Oats had sort of partnered up.”
Mackey: 250 years ago 94% of humanity lived on under $2/day
“250 years ago, 94% of everyone alive. 94% lived on less than two dollars a day. 94%, and that's in today's dollars. 88% of the people alive were illiterate. 88%. The average lifespan was 30.”
Dyson: Vacuum cleaners lose suction from pore clogging, not full bags
“And I suddenly realized that the suction is created by airflow, which has to go through the pores of the bag. But this fine dust is clogging the pores. It's not the fact the bag's full. It's the fact that the bag is clogged. They call it a bag full indicator. …”
Dyson: All major vacuum incumbent competitors rejected licensing cyclonic technology
“When I was trying to license it to, I went to all the people who are now my competitors, and a lot of others as well, and they all turned it down. They were all quite interested in it, but turned it down.”
Senra: In-N-Out Founder Harry Snyder Invented the Drive-Through Speaker
“He invented the drive through speaker.”
Graves: Raising Cane's carries approximately $3 billion in debt
“Someday when I clear debt, I'm like a three billion dollars in debt now, eventually with our growth, you know, as we go, God willing, we'll go, and then we'll be able to pay down debt, and we'll have, when I have this free cash flow coming out, and doing, we'r…”
Graves: Raising Cane's Ranks #2 in Quick Service Average Unit Volumes
“We're number two on average unit volumes in quick service restaurants, Chick-fil-A than us. And I think McDonald's might be a million behind us or per unit per restaurant, all the way down to our, a lot of our competitors are like a third of what we do sales w…”
Dell operated on five days of inventory while competitors held ninety days
“They had like, 90 days in their collective supply chain. And we figured out how to have like, five days. I mean, it was crazy. It was like a massive advantage.”
Ek: Steve Jobs tested product ideas by calling journalists for feedback
“And I know one of the ways he did it, which was brilliant and that don't get talked about. He actually called up journalists. Sometimes, and tested ideas on them, and like, we might do this kind of thing, and then hear the journalists react to it, and it's lik…”
Ferrari: Bending Spoons has acquired over 50 businesses
“We've bought a little over 50 businesses over time.”
Senra: MrBeast hires famous Japanese voice actors for YouTube dubs
“And he told me, he's just like, yeah, well, for my Japanese, like the Japanese versions of my videos, it's like, he doesn't just dub them. He'll hire like a voice actor. That's like the voice is famous in that country.”
ElevenLabs builds voice agents for Deutsche Telekom and Poland's government
“It can be support, working with Deutsche Telekom and creating voice agents for the call center, or it can be sales, helping on inbound sales qualification to make sure that that streams through. Or even wider operations and working with the government of Polan…”
Staniszewski: ElevenLabs has 20,000 voices on its marketplace
“We have 20,000 voices today on the marketplace.”
Staniszewski: Deutsche Telekom deployed an AI agent inside the T-Mobile network
“And then more recently, they even deployed an agent inside of the network. So if you are a T-Mobile subscriber, if you call, you can ask agent to join the call and help you out, schedule a booking or real-time translate your conversation to the other person. A…”
Dell: 80% of Texas electricity market is deregulated, 20% regulated
“In Texas, 80% of the market is deregulated. 20% of the market is still regulated.”
Rockstar Games licensed NaturalMotion technology for GTA and Red Dead Redemption
“So then we started a long collaboration with Rockstar Games, who ended up using our technology in GTA IV, GTA V, Redemption, and a whole range of other games.”
Altman: OpenAI took four and a half years to launch first product
“The thing that was really different about OpenAI than anything that I had pattern matching before is it was four and a half years from when we started the company to when we launched our first product.”
Ovitz: Matsushita Electric held an unheard-of $20 billion in 1980s liquidity
“Matsushita Electric, one of the largest
companies in Japan that at the time had 15 to twenty billion dollars of liquidity on their balance sheet, unheard of in the late eighties.”
Malka: Lemon Bank scaled to 7,000 Brazil locations serving 15 million customers
“We had, at peak, we had 7000 of these physical spaces all over Brazil. We were serving fifteen million customers. Half of Brazil back then was unbanked.”
DHH: 37signals maintained four products with just seven people in 2007
“By, I think, 2007, we had four major projects or products. We were launching one a year while we were also running Basecamp, while we were seven people at the company.”
Zalaznick: Carbone jarred sauce is sold in thousands of retail doors
“Carbon tomato sauce, you know, for example, which is sold in thousands of doors across America, right? More than you could ever penetrate with a restaurant.”
Cognition's first commercial success was an enterprise migration for Nubank
“Our first success ended up being with a company called Nubank, biggest bank in Brazil, you know, by market cap at the time, and the use case was like one of these big migrations, and we had a kind of a custom Devon that was like extremely, extremely optimized …”