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 233 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
Baszucki: Roblox accelerated operational cadence from quarterly to daily cycles
“The whole history of the company has arguably been a motion from quarterly things, monthly, weekly, daily, like the whole pace of our company, I think, has just been a historical acceleration of the pacing of the company.”
Spiegel: Monday mornings start with a 2.5-hour Spectacles risk review
“Yeah, so, so my Monday morning, for example, is like two to two and a half hours in the specs business going through the risks and dependencies. Red, yellow, you know, red, orange, yellow, green. What are we doing to solve it? Right? And what progress are we m…”
Spiegel: Snap adopted Walmart's 'In It to Win It' problem-surfacing format
“I think one of the things that's really, I stole this from Walmart, which I thought was great. They have a Friday meeting called in it to win it. They have their leaders from across the company, not just like super senior leaders, but leaders from across the c…”
Spiegel: Developing Spectacles hardware is probably my last company
“I think Spex is probably my last company, I would guess.”
Andreessen: The ideal day is 12 hours caffeine, 4 hours alcohol
“So for a very long time, I always said that the ultimate day, like the perfect day was 12 hours of caffeine followed by four hours of alcohol.”
Andreessen: a16z has always considered launching an in-house bank
“One of the things we've never done, but has always been on the idealist is to actually just have an in-house bank.”
Fried: 37signals Employs About 62 People, Down From a Peak of 80
“We have 62 people at 37 signals, and we've gotten as high as, I think, 80 at some point, and then we're about 63, or 62 right now, which is feels really good.”
Fried: Personally Writes All Marketing Copy and Landing Pages at 37signals
“I don't do the design on the line. I work with our designer to do a lot of that, but he's sort of the visual person there. But I do all the writing.”
Iovine: Universal Music invested in his project Complex
“Universal Music has invested in a project that we're doing called Complex that has the ability
To go on and do a lot of these things that I'm talking about, it's media, it's live, community complex con, you know, and it's e-commerce, right?”
Iovine: Wealth never cured my fear; obsession with getting work right overrode everything
“No, because I had to get something right. That overrised. I knew I had a lot of money. I knew I didn't need money. I knew I was never going to be broke. But it was, that overrode any of it. Was having to get the job right. That overrode everything.”
Iovine: I strictly cap my inner circle at four or five people
“I try to have an infield. You know?... Five, four... And by the way, I don't need another shortstop until the other one dies. You know what I mean? I limit it. I don't go for six, you know?”
Lütke: I write the first 20 to 30 commits for many Shopify repositories
“I still do not a ton of production production engineering, but like I do I sometimes start new projects with people like and the first 20, 30 pull requests or commits in many repositories for things that we use come from me.”
Lütke: I did not take a salary for four years at Shopify
“I didn't take a salary for, I think, four, four years.”
O'Shaughnessy: Architecting life around picking and championing specific people
“I also kind of like picking sides. I like saying I like this person and by extension, I like them more than the other available options in this field or this industry or whatever. And I just get tremendous joy out of that. So now I'm architecting my life to ju…”
O'Shaughnessy: Personal principle is fostering unrealized potential into existence
“It is trying to see enormous, like, not yet realized potential. And my principle is that is, when I do, it is my obligation. With nothing, maybe I invest, maybe, maybe I end up benefiting, but that's not the point. That it's my obligation to tell people about …”
Dyson runs his private company with public company governance structures
“For example, I have non-executive directors. I run the business as though it was a public business, but it's a private business. And I think it's very important to have good people advising you.”
Dyson originally planned to license his inventions rather than manufacture them
“I thought that, yes, I thought, look, I've done all that. Why can't I just invent and design things and license them to other people? Like an author, you know, writes a book and someone else sells it.”
Dyson: Developing proprietary electric motors took a decade with academic recruits
“So I recruited some people from British universities who are academics, who knew about electric motors, and we started as a non-electric motor manufacturer, developing our own motor. It took a long time, took 10 years.”
Ovitz: Loudcloud buyers in 1999 did not understand what cloud meant
“When I was on the board of Mark's first company Loud Cloud, they were dealing in an area that frankly, I really at the beginning in 1999 didn't understand it because they were talking about the cloud. I don't think anybody we were selling to understood what th…”
Ovitz: Traveled weekly to NYC and took red-eyes to work six-day weeks
“I traveled to New York every week, to Japan once a month, and to Europe once a month, and, but I did, I decided to do everything short. So if I went to New York, I would go for one day But I'd get in that one day, breakfast, lunch, drinks, dinner, meetings in …”
Graves: Raising Cane's Spent Two Years Setting Up Middle East Supply Chain
“Same thing we opened in the Middle East. It took two years to get the supply chain just right to make sure it tastes just the same. Two years to do that. Took two years to procure the chicken. Two years to get all the ingredients right.”
Graves: Raising Cane's Operates on a Roughly 10% Profit Margin
“We're doing well if we make 10 cents on a dollar.”
Graves: Started Raising Cane's with $90k SBA loan and $60k equity
“I got a small SBA loan for 90,000, for 90,000 dollars. I'd raised equity in a sense of, like, 60,000 dollars with original shareholders”
Graves: Raising Cane's buys the underlying real estate wherever possible
“Wherever I can. Absolutely wherever I can, I do. Just good real estate, a quality real estate. It's just, there's so many people that own it. It's part of larger shopping centers, larger developments. A lot of it's in trust, you know, family trust and things l…”
Jacobs allocates the largest percentage of his CEO time to talent
“If I did a pie chart of like how I divide up my time, the largest percent is on people issues.”
Jacobs plans a sequel titled 'How to Make a Few More Billion Dollars'
“Okay, I'm gonna write a sequel that addresses those particular questions. You know what the title's gonna be? That was How to Make a Few Billion Dogs. Yeah. This one's gonna be called How to Make a Few More Billion Dogs.”
Jacobs screened 55 industries for QXO, eliminating sectors vulnerable to AI
“So when I looked at 55 different industries before I picked building products, I ruled out a bunch of them, so this looks like an interesting industry, but I think AI and automation are going to kibosh it. And I didn't do it.”
Jacobs reviews executive equity models twice a month with CHRO
“I meet with my CHRO, who's fabulous, regularly, usually twice a month, and she shows me a spreadsheet Of how much the equity is going to be worth at 50 dollars a share, at 75 dollars a share, at a hundred dollars a share, and I look at that, I look at the numb…”
Selling his first company led to Ek's most depressed period
“It's probably the most depressed I've been in my life, to be honest, because, you know, I knew from a very young age what I wanted to do.”
Ek cared about nothing besides Spotify for its first 15 years
“That's how Spotify came to be. I literally couldn't care about anything else for at the very least the first 15 years.”
Ek: Attempting polyphasic sleep was his worst productivity experiment
“The worst productivity thing I did was I was at one point doing these 15 minute naps. I don't know if you've heard about this exercise. It's a really bad idea by the way. So don't try this, but I sort of learned that you can like Daisy Shane sleep together by …”
Ek gained 40 pounds during Spotify's most stressful negotiations
“I've gained in periods of my life, like 40 pounds in my worst negotiations, et cetera.”
Dell: Base Power is exclusively focused on residential homes
“Today, we're only focused on residential homes.”
Scott Wu's childhood home displayed math trophies instead of family photos
“We didn't have like, you know, growing up, like we didn't have like pictures of our parents, like on the walls. You know, we just had old math competition trophies.”
Baszucki: Roblox holds weekly 4-5 hour executive staff meetings
“Executive staff meeting Every Tuesday, we get together four or five hours. Leaders of all these nine companies come together. We go through the things they're working on by themselves, but we go through a lot of times of all of the horizontal things that are b…”
Andreessen: Excessive coffee consumption caused his heart to skip every 10th beat
“A while ago I was drinking so much coffee. At work that I was sitting in a meeting a couple years ago, and I started to feel just a little bit, something felt off, and I just took my pulse, and I, but I was, realized I was skipping about every 10th heartbeat.”
O'Shaughnessy: Personal career accolades bring zero emotional gratification
“If I look back on my life, The sort of like wins that I've had, the things that if you were to write like a Wikipedia article about me would be like the accolades or the accomplishments. I don't care about those things. I don't think about them. When they happ…”
O'Shaughnessy: I dropped intense introspection after discovering my life's direction
“Once I have clicked into, I think, understanding what I want to do, I don't think about it at all. And now I have very little introspection left in my life. I used to be so obsessed with all of these personality tests and what they mean and psychology and seek…”
O'Shaughnessy: I cannot visualize mental images in my mind's eye
“If you close your eyes and try to visualize something, a red cardinal or something, there's a degree of how spec, how visually sharp that thing looks in your mind's eye when you close your eyes. For me, it's just black. I can't visualize anything. I can't see …”
Dell shipped electronic catalogs on floppy disks before the World Wide Web
“We'd experimented with how do you create an electronic version of the catalog, even like, we're going to send you a floppy disk or a CD-ROM, and you put it in your computer, and you load it up, and the catalog is there.”
Ek: I Refuse to Downshift Gears Because I Owe My Younger Self
“I actually feel like I owe that guy to keep pushing myself, right? Because there's so many things, there's so many demands of my time, so many things that tells me to sort of downshift gear into an easier gear, because life would be a lot more comfortable that…”