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
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.”
Ferrari: Evernote had around $90M revenue and was breakeven when acquired
“David Senra: So wait, they were doing a hundred million in revenue, right? Luca Ferrari: A little less, like 90. David Senra: 90? Were they making any money or no? Luca Ferrari: I would say roughly break even. David Senra: Ok. Luca Ferrari: Roughly break even.…”
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: ElevenLabs pays voice actor 'George' per user listen
“Yeah, somebody else is getting paid. That's a great voice actor that That worked with us for now for a long time. And every time you listen, he gets fed.”
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…”
Staniszewski: FinTech adopts ElevenLabs conversational voice agents faster than other sectors
“Then, ah, the healthcare, retail, e-commerce, and telcos are the four of the biggest ones. FinTech is moving the quickest. Of course, it's, you know, slightly different regulatory aspects. But then I think the healthcare telcos is kind of a second and retail e…”
Staniszewski: ElevenLabs has helped over 10,000 people restore lost speaking voices
“Today it's over 10,000 people where we worked on, on bringing their voices back”
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.”
Leone: 70% of Sequoia Capital comes from nonprofits and charities
“70% of our capital comes from nonprofits, charities, so I never thought of it as a game.”
Leone: Pushing ServiceNow distributions left a 10x return on the table
“How many of distributions I push for at ServiceNow? I left a 10 Xer on a table.”
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.”
Kalanick: US food supplier spends $3B yearly on forklift labor
“I was talking to one of the large food suppliers in the U S they supply all the food to the to the restaurants. They're spending three billion dollars a year on the labor that moves the pallets on forklifts.”
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: Rework Manuscript Was Cut in Half from 50,000 Words to 25,000
“In fact, when we wrote Rework, the initial manuscript that we submitted was, I think, 50,000 words. That was what the publisher got to see, right? And they were very excited. Great. This fits. This is like just the size of the book. And then Jason and I went t…”
DHH: First version of Basecamp took only 380 hours to build
“And especially in the early days of Basecamp, for example, we built the entire first version on me having 10 hours per week, not per day, per week. To build it. That is an enormous constraint on how you could do anything because you can waste 10 hours really q…”
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.”
Zalaznick: Carbone Miami opened within 100 days of signing the lease
“I turned around the Carbone on Collins Street in, in a hundred days from taking the lease.
Got it open.”
Senra: Spotify Co-CEO Uses AI Agents to Generate a Private Daily Podcast
“I just spent time and recorded an episode with Gustaf, who's the co-CEO of Spotify right now. And he did something very similar because he tries to avoid any kind of feeds. The whole thesis behind, like, the organizing principle of Spotify is, like, time well …”
Ross: Groq had about 450 employees during NVIDIA deal
“About 450, but it was more difficult to manage than a typical group of 450.”
The first automated task Devin successfully performed was setting up MongoDB
“The first task that Devon did was it like set up MongoDB for us.”
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.”
Ego-Free Creative Flow Happens Only Once or Twice Per Pixar Film
“And once or twice per film, then magic happens. By magic, I mean that ego has left the room. You have these intense discussions, and somebody can say something, and it doesn't work, and they're not thinking about, my idea wasn't there. They're always back on t…”
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.”
Catmull: Subgroups felt treated as second class three times at Pixar
“There were three times in the history of Pixar in which a group arose that felt like they were second class and we missed it and we were looking for it.”
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: 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: 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…”
Ivanka Trump is developing Cezanne, a 1,400-hectare private Mediterranean island
“It's an unbelievable, beautiful, fourteen-hundred-hectare private island in the middle of the Mediterranean.”
SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell has held a memoir offer for a decade
“I just saw Gwen Shotwell yesterday, and I was like, listen, I know you don't know me, but I know you. I've read every single book on the history of SpaceX. I've read every single biography of Elon. It's like, will you please write a book? And she's like, it's …”
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.”