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
White: Michael Rubin Offered $10M Blind for My Next Business Venture
“Michael Rubin told me after, after we launched power slap and it started killing it, Michael Rubin said to me, whatever you do next. I'm in for ten million. You don't even have to tell me what it is.”
Foroughi: AppLovin received a $600 million all-cash buyout offer around 2015
“We started getting interest from other tech companies to buy us, and so got as big as an offer for six hundred million dollars cash.”
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.”
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.”
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 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…”
Baszucki: Roblox shares all discovery boosting signals with platform creators
“One of the things that Roblox Creators like is we share all of the signals of what's boosting something. It's almost as if we were YouTube or TikTok or real saying, here's all the factors that, you know, bring you up here.”
Spiegel: The internet's permanence originated from expensive disk-drive overwrite costs
“One of the reasons why everything was saved forever is because hard drives, disk-based hard drives, right, were expensive to write over. And so it was actually more expensive to go back and write over something enough to delete it than it was to just leave it …”
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.”
Spiegel: Snap's design team is completely flat with identical titles
“The design team is actually flat, right? Everyone's got the same title, like that kind of thing.”
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…”
Xu: Early DoorDash deliveries were faster in Palo Alto than San Francisco
“One of the earliest experiments we ran at DoorDash was doing deliveries in Palo Alto versus doing deliveries in San Francisco. So, a city center, if you will, that was close to where we started the company. And one of the fascinating things we found out and we…”
Xu: DoorDash spent 40% of its cash refunding customers in 2013
“We were, Maybe two or three weeks of cash out, and this refund would have cost us about 40% of the bank account, so it would have just made the two or three weeks and just shrunk that into even fewer days. But yeah, you're right, nobody asked us for the refund…”
Payne did four hours of deliveries unprompted before being hired as COO
“Christopher Payne, our first Chief Operating Officer, I didn't ask him a single interview question, but after a two-hour discussion about our logistics algorithm, he went home that night, it was Friday, drove with his son for four hours doing deliveries. I did…”
Xu: DoorDash received over 100 investor rejections during fundraising slump
“I stopped counting after 50, but it was over a hundred.”
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…”
Armstrong: Many founders in my YC batch burned out within 3-4 years
“A lot of founders, like the found, the other founders that were in my YC batch that I went through I saw many of them, like, burn out within three, three, four years.”
Armstrong: About 60% of Coinbase support inquiries are answered by AI
“Customer support inquiries, I think, is about 60% answered by agents now.”
Fried: Personally Answered Around 200 Customer Emails in a Single Day
“Yesterday, I answered like, 200 emails from my customers.”
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: Steve Jobs declined to co-found Beats, urging Iovine to build alone
“He said, I don't want to do headphones. You do them. So we went out to a restaurant once. I'll never forget it. We went to this Greek restaurant and this was it was after he was sick and but we went out to a restaurant and it was one of those restaurants where…”
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…”
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.”
Lütke: Shopify had 5,500 job titles across 8,000 employees
“We had like something that was 8000 people in a company, and there was five and a half thousand different titles in a company.”
Lütke: Shopify came within one week of running out of money multiple times
“We got like within a week of running out of money so many times, and sometimes we were bailed out. Many times it was like, just like the clearance of the one-time try hurdles that shop went through was like millimeters at times”
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: Marc Andreessen oversees everything while Ben Horowitz operates a16z
“Mark knows everything that's going on in the company, but Ben operates it, and Mark's very comfortable with that.”
Ovitz: David Rockefeller funded MoMA expansion without explicitly asking trustees for money
“David raised all the money by himself to build the new museum.
And he took me out to dinner after I was a trustee, and we spent three hours talking about politics, art,
People, things that had happened in his life, travel, his 10,000 index card file... And he …”
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”
Ovitz: Got ABC's president to sign Wolfgang Puck to TV deal on a napkin
“I got the president of ABC to sign on a napkin, a contract for a week's work on Good Morning America as an audition to replace Julia Childs, and the guy signed it, and he dated it, and I took the napkin.”
Patrick Collison spent 2.5 hours interrogating Ovitz's career mistakes
“Patrick sits down. He said, are you ready? I said, yeah, I'm starving. He goes, no, no, no, no. See your book? I said, yeah. He says, I have a lot of questions. I said, oh, sure, anything. He said, no. I want to know. I've marked every place you made a mistake…”
Ovitz: Mike Nichols's fee increased $2 million after joining CAA
“Mike Nichols' price, because he was put in with our clients, you know, Oliver Stone, Barry Levinson, Ron Howard, Stanley Kubrick, Steven Spielberg, Marty Scorsese, everybody, his price went up two million dollars, because he fit into A higher strata price with…”