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
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: 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…”
Söderström: Almost 90% of Spotify revenue comes from subscriptions
“Most of our revenue is from subscribers paying for their experience, you know, like almost 90% of the revenue.”
Söderström: Amazon bundled lifetime carrier data into Kindle hardware pricing
“And what they did was they signed deals with these carriers. They calculated the average book size, and they made a fixed cost deal where all the data sort of forever was included in the price of the hardware. You bought this thing for one time cost, and it ju…”
Rubin: 'It's Yours' sold 100,000 copies over 18 months without radio play
“It took a long time, probably took 18 months to sell a 100,000, but over 18 months sold about a 100,000, and it was a hit, as much of a hit could be in something that would never be on the radio and a kind of music that nobody listened to or liked.”
Rubin: U2 requires unanimous consensus for every creative decision
“In a band like U-Two,
It's democratic. Everybody in the band has to like it. If three of the guys like it and one of the guys doesn't, it doesn't happen.”
White: UFC Scaled From 5 Events to 44 Annually Post-Acquisition
“We do like, 43, 44 events a year.
When we bought the company, we were doing five, which seemed like a lot.”
White: Joe Rogan Commentated His First 12 UFC Events for Free
“First of all, Joe Rogan did the first 12 fights for us for free, right?”
Foroughi: AppLovin grew EBITDA from $700M in 2021 to over $1B in 2022
“At the same time, interestingly, we went out with seven hundred million dollars of EBITDA in 21. We did a billion dollars plus of EBITDA in 22, so like fast growth, executing on the business, yet public market investors were telling us business is terrible”
AppLovin brought in KKR and formed its first board in 2018
“Bring in traditional US capital, get some debt. Clear out the Chinese convertible debt. Give them their ownership. Off we go. Clean cap table. And so, we did that, I believe it was in the summer of 2018, and we had to build the first board that I'd ever been p…”
Baszucki: Roblox's first product was a failed single-player puzzle builder
“There was actually an original product and that was an incredible failure. So, and the original product that was the incredible failure was arguably us knowing, we intuitively knew what the viral product would be. We knew the viral product would be online in t…”
Baszucki: Roblox modeled Builders Club after Club Penguin's subscription
“At that time, Club Penguin had a club membership.
Can we just charge people five bucks a month for something?
So we worked on that for a while, and so we had this thing called Builder's Club.”
Baszucki: Roblox used early AI BERT models for safety for years
“So at Roblox for many, many years, we were pushing very early AI BERT models, primitive type models to drive safety.”
Baszucki: Early economy hack forced Roblox to shut down for two days
“Other near death or rough things is our economy got hacked once. So we had to like shut down the whole economy for Two days, literally.”
Spiegel: Vertical Video Completion Rates Were 9x Higher Than Horizontal
“Showing them that, like, the completion rate was nine times higher when they used vertical video instead of these little, like, postage stamp size horizontal videos.”
Spiegel: Snap grew from 100 to over 1,000 employees in 18 months
“There were periods of time when we went from, you know, having a hundred people to over a thousand people in like 18 months, right?”
Spiegel: Hundreds of millions of people use Snap AR daily
“Hundreds of millions of people are now using AR, like every day.”
Xu: DoorDash Dot vehicle operates on roads, sidewalks, and bike lanes
“We built actually DoorDash Dot, which actually will, yes, it will travel on the road, but it also can travel on the sidewalk and in the bike lanes. It's a much smaller form factor. It doesn't go as fast but it has the ability to actually get to the last 10 fee…”
Andreessen: IBM held 80% of total tech industry market cap in mid-1980s
“They were in the mid-eighties, they were 80% of the market capitalization of the entire tech industry, right? There's nothing even close to that.”
Armstrong: Legacy Latin American payout services charged Airbnb hosts 7% to 12% fees
“In many of the countries where they operated, like in Latin America, there would be some local cash pickup service that you could, like, kind of like a Western Union, but it was different ones in different countries. And they typically had very high fees, like…”
Armstrong: First Coinbase version lacked Bitcoin buy or sell features
“Believe it or not, the first version of the Coinbase app, actually, you couldn't buy or sell Bitcoin. I thought we were making a wallet for payments on the internet. And so you could store Bitcoin, you could make Bitcoin payments, and this prototype went out, …”
Armstrong: Coinbase was not a hot Y Combinator company, raised $600k seed
“Like we were not a hot company at Y Combinator. We went to the demo day that they do, where we raised like the six, raised the 600 K seed round. And but there was lots of companies that raised like multi-million dollar rounds and beyond. Like we were kind of m…”
Iovine: Springsteen remixed 'The River' after blunt feedback on buried vocals
“So I just said, when are you going to sing it? Right? And, you know, it was very funny, but it was very clear, and they did. They went back in, and they remixed the whole album, which was the right thing to do.”
Iovine: 'A Very Special Christmas' raised over $100M for Special Olympics
“When I, when he died, I made a Christmas album about him. I it was called A Very Special Christmas, and we raised over a hundred million dollars for Special Olympics.”
Iovine: Educational initiative now operates five inner-city schools
“The stuff we're doing in the inner city, we have five schools now.”
Lütke: Shopify traded above 50x revenue at its peak
“Like at the high point of our stock price, I think we were trading at beyond 50 x of revenue and stuff like this.”
Standard motors run at 15,000 RPM while Dyson aims for 130,000 RPM
“We don't know that we can make a motor go at 130,000 RPM when existing motors only go 15,000 RPM.”
Dyson produces approximately 30 million digital motors annually
“Oh, we've made about a hundred and fifty million of them.
David Senra: A year though now?
James Dyson: Yeah, we make about thirty million a year.”
Graves: Raising Cane's has 75,000 crew members system-wide
“We got 75,000 crew members across the system.”
Graves: Hurricane Katrina shut down 21 of Raising Cane's 28 locations
“21 out of the, 21 out of the 28 were down from either power to damage to flooding to whatever it was, and so no cash is coming in.”
United Rentals and XPO were top 10 stock performers over a decade
“United Rentals and XPO were both top 10 stock performers in the last decade.”
Jacobs employs former White House Oval Office scheduler as chief of staff
“So I have a chief of staff. He used to work in the Oval Office and manage the most important person in the world's calendars.”
IBM manufactured none of the core components in its original PC
“And inside the IBM PC, None of the chips were made by IBM, right? And none of the disk drives were made by IBM. The power supply wasn't made by IBM.”
Dell: Over 80% of Dell's first-year business was to enterprises
“If you go back to the very, very beginning, like the first full year, like over 80% of the business was to businesses.”
Dell: 75% to 80% of all technology spending is from businesses
“So, if you look at all technology spending roughly 75 to 80% of it is businesses, not consumer.”
Ek: Mark Zuckerberg runs a weekly 'large group' meeting with 20-25 people
“And then you have someone like a Mark Zuckerberg, who literally has this thing called large group, where he has 20 to 25 people. That he runs every week.”