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 379 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 1 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
BMG Sold Its Take-Two Stake for $14M Right Before GTA Released
“So we sell the stock in the open market for, wait for it, fourteen million dollars. So a month later, this public company launches the first property that we had completed into the market.”
Zelnick Won an 88% Shareholder Vote to Take Over Take-Two
“The general counsel comes into the meeting room that we're in, and he says, well, we don't have the final vote, but we have a provisional vote. You have 88%. He said, so will you accept that, or do you want us to keep counting? I said, we'll accept that. And t…”
White: Early UFC Was Banned From Pay-Per-View While Porn Was Allowed
“At that time it wasn't allowed on pay-per-view. You as a grown adult didn't have the right to purchase it on pay-per-view porn. Was on pay-per-view. Okay. But the UFC was not allowed on pay-per-view.”
White: The Ellison Family Aggressively Snatched UFC Rights From Netflix
“We were talking to them the whole time, and you know, what an incredible business they've built, and but the Ellisons are aggressive guys, you know, they're aggressive guys. Obviously, financially, you know, powerful, And at literally the half yard line, they …”
White: We Sold the UFC for $4B in 2016 Without a TV Deal
“We sell for four point oh two five billion, right? No TV deal. We're coming up to the end of our Fox deal. We have no TV deal. Nothing.”
White: UFC Media Rights Scaled From $35M to a $7.7B Mega-Deal
“Spike, thirty-five million dollar deal. Fox, hundred million dollar deal. ESPN, three billion dollar deal. And now here we are, 7.7 for seven years.”
White: I Produced a Fully AI-Generated Commercial for the White House
“Well, the response was I did a whole commercial in AI, ah, after that for the White House.”
White: Every UFC Employee Was Willing to Work Through COVID-19
“Nobody was saying, no, we're not going to work during COVID. Too dangerous and we're scared. I'm not saying people weren't scared. Everybody was willing to go. Men, women, everybody.”
White: Bob Iger Guaranteed ESPN Payments Even If UFC Scrapped All Events
“Iger says, I'll pay you every fucking dime, no matter how much COVID lasts, whether you do no events, or you put on all 44.”
Foroughi: Top VCs rejected AppLovin's $1M seed pitch at $4M valuation
“When we first started the business, I went out and talked to VCs to raise capital, and I got turned down by all the top VCs. So a million dollars over four million dollar valuation at some point in spring, 2012.”
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: 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…”
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…”
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.”
Spiegel: Snap's core product and design team is only 8 to 12 people
“If you look at the core, like the core product and design team, that's a very small team. I mean, I think it's like currently like nine people. It's usually fluctuates between like eight and 12 people at any given time.”
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: Modern introspection and therapy are 20th-century inventions
“And you probably know if you go back before a hundred years ago, it never would have occurred to anybody to be introspective. Like it's the whole idea of, I mean, just all of the modern conceptions around introspection and therapy and all the things that kind …”
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…”
Andreessen: Elon Musk conducts up to 120 five-minute design reviews daily
“He'll do like a 12, 14 hour stretch where he'll do design reviews with, but the way that he does it, he does five minutes per engineer. Right. And so he does five to six divided by five. It's been way too long in this podcast. How much is that? 12? He can do 1…”
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.”
Armstrong: Over 50% of Coinbase's code is written by AI agents
“More and more of code is being written by these agents, more than 50% now.”
Fried: Roughly 20 of 62 Employees at 37signals Received Six-Figure Cash Bonuses
“Our bonuses are based on profits. We've been profitable for 27 years, and they're distributed every year, and they're meaningful. They're, I looked this up before the show about 20 out of the 62 people Last year, or twenty-twenty-four, because we haven't close…”
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.”
Iovine: Akio Morita's vertical integration at Sony inspired Steve Jobs's Apple strategy
“Marita bought Sony, bought Columbia Records, bought Columbia Pictures. He saw the distribution, the hardware, the software, he saw it all. But Steve took it, not literally, but it was part of the inspiration behind his chain of thinking, right?”
Lütke: Top earners in ML labs like OpenAI are individual contributors
“The best paid people in, Many companies are now individual contributors at this point in in history especially in machine learning, like at least in the, at the machine learning labs, like OpenAI.”
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?”
Lütke: Everything in Shopify's Offices is Sourced from Shopify Stores
“In fact, like everything in our offices is from Shopify stores, right? Because again, like if anything we are doing is not mission aligned, we just didn't align to the mission, axiomatically.”
Mackey: Supermarkets ignored Whole Foods until its NYC Columbus Circle store opened
“Whole Foods flew under the radar. The supermarkets never took us seriously for decades. It wasn't until we opened up in Columbus Circle in New York City.”
Mackey: Whole Foods Had 20 to 25 Years of Competitors Ignoring Them
“We had, you know, 20, 20 to 25 years where nobody paid any attention to us, and that allowed us to scale and compound, and they just dismissed us.”
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 represented 46 of top 50 grossing filmmakers
“Having A 75% market share of the talent for me wasn't enough, which people thought I was crazy, because no one had ever gotten over 25. We had 46 of the top 50 grossing filmmakers in the world.”
Ovitz: CAA made 35 Coke ads on 6-ad budget
“Coke was doing six commercials a year for the same budget. We did 35 for the same budget, and we got Quincy Jones to redo their theme song, and we changed their saying.”
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.”
Graves: Shaving two seconds off drive-through time yields $60M in sales
“Every two seconds that I can get faster is a point on sales. So let's just say just roughly one percent. If we do six billion in sales this year, what's one percent, six billion, that's six, sixty million dollars in sales you can do if you can tweak that, that…”
Graves: Raising Cane's customer frequency matches multi-item QSR competitors
“Our frequency is just as high. Is any other quick service restaurant, meaning how many times somebody comes back in a month period of time.”
Graves: Buying back Raising Cane's franchises increased sales and wages
“So we got way more efficient. We bought them out. We actually operated at 95. Sales went up in all the franchise markets. So literally sales went up, wages went up, everything went up, and it actually improved out better.”
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.”
Senra: Iconic founders do their best work in their 40s and 50s
“If you look at all of them, Steve Jobs, Enzo Ferrari, Akio Morita, Sam Walton, Estee Lauder, Coco Chanel, Edwin Land, they do their best work when they're much older. And so I would, I thought a lot about that. I'm like, dang, this is like a reoccurring theme …”
Senra notes Bending Spoons centralizes hiring and firing for all portfolio companies
“The hiring and firing is centralized for all the companies that you own.”
Ferrari: Evernote had under $100M revenue when transformed by 50 Bending Spoons staff
“Evernote in 20, 23, early 23, we had a team, a task force of Spooners, these people from the core team, you know, we've been talking about probably about 50 people who joined Evernote and really drove that transformation, rewriting the code base, re-architecte…”
Ferrari: Bending Spoons acquired Evernote for approximately $200 million
“It was about a hundred million dollars. David Senra: Say that number again? Luca Ferrari: Two hundred million. David Senra: 200, ok. Luca Ferrari: More or less. David Senra: About, ok. Luca Ferrari: Two or three, something like that.”
Ferrari: Bending Spoons runs at around 54% to 55% operating margin
“You can see our overall profitability as a group adjusted operating income margin. We're at around 54, 55%.”