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 206 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
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: Crypto commodity vs security debate is uniquely American
“So in other countries where we operate, like in the UK or in Singapore, they only have one federal regulator for financial services. So they actually don't care whether these are commodities or securities. It's a totally parochial issue in the United States th…”
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: Beats was number one in 50 countries when sold to Apple
“When we sold to Apple, we were number one in 50 countries, man. We were number one In Germany, in Sennheiser was number two. We were number one in, in Japan, and Sony was number two.”
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: 74% of Americans Are Overweight and 43% Are Obese
“74% of Americans are overweight, and 43% are obese, and that has not peaked. It is still going up.”
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.”
Ovitz introduced Nobu Matsuhisa to Robert De Niro to start Nobu
“Several years later, I introduced Nobu to Bob De Niro, and he and Nobu started the present business with a sushi restaurant called Nobu”
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: US electricity demand grew at inflation rate over 50 years
“Over the last 50 years, demand for electricity in the U.S. Has grown at basically the rate of inflation, so it has not really grown much.”
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 …”
Stoute: HP Distributed Early iPods Because Apple Lacked Retail Sales
“Remember HP was the partner for the iPod. They, they're the ones who put it in all of the best buys and circuit cities or whatever the retailers were around the world. Apple didn't have the sales team to do that.”
Senra: Russ is first person to solo-create a billion-stream album
“He's the first person in history to a single person that wrote, recorded, engineered, produced, mixed, and mastered an album that got a billion streams.”
Catmull: The Rescuers Down Under was first feature where every frame went through computers
“It is the first motion picture where every frame went through the computer. Was using the paint system that we had developed under contract for Disney.”
Catmull: Bob Iger visited Pixar completely alone after becoming CEO
“Bob, Decided to come up as soon as, you know, he was made the CEO. He came up to Pixar, and, ah, the idea was to spend a day with us, ah, seeing what we were doing, how we thought about things, and what we had in the works. And when he came, he walked up our w…”
Catmull: Roy Disney initiated contact with Pixar to modernize studio
“Roy, when he, when now he came in, because he's part of the rescue of Disney as this possible takeover, He's the one who said we need to bring some technology into the studio because we're stayed. He's the one that initiated the contact with us at Pixar.”
Catmull: George Lucas Shared Lucasfilm Technology to Advance the Film Industry
“But he also wanted to share it. So the fact that we would say this is how we're doing editing or there are graphics techniques or audio. Was what he wanted. He was trying to affect the industry as well as build tools for himself.”
Söderström: In 2009 Spotify ran ML on world's largest Hadoop cluster
“When I came to Spotify, We already had one of these large data sets of music playlists, and so there were some very talented people there, specifically a guy named Erik Bernadsson, who at the time, this is 2009, was doing machine learning something called coll…”
Söderström: Daniel Ek prepared Co-CEOs for three years before succession
“So already about three years ago, He asked me and Alex Nordstrom to step up and become co-presidents and sort of start to run the day to day of Spotify for him. He was still the CEO. And so he's been gradually like giving us more and more rope to run the busin…”