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
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.”
Atari Produced More E.T. Cartridges Than Total Consoles in Existence
“Because they didn't really have a lot of experience in how video games were made, they basically, they made the game in five weeks and put it in the box, and it was a terrible game, and then they manufactured more games, more cartridges than there were Atari c…”
Warner Communications Took a $400M Write-Down on Atari in 1982
“I think they took a write down in 82 of four hundred million dollars, which was a lot of money in 82 for Warner Communications.”
Dirty Dancing Held the Independent Box Office Record Until Blair Witch
“I greenlit derby dancing, which was the, Highest grossing independent film of all time then and stayed that way for a very long time and until pop quiz what? Blair Witch. Many years later.”
Rupert Murdoch Overleveraged News Corporation Across 150 Banks
“He over leveraged the company during my tenure there by buying Star. And the company had real trouble with its debt facility. And my recollection is they had a diversified debt facility with like a 150 banks and a whole cross default mechanism.”
BMG Invested Roughly $40M to Build its Video Game Division
“So we put aside a small amount of capital for BMG because in those days, BMG's revenue was five billion a year, and it was very profitable. And I think we devoted around forty million dollars to investing in this basket of games and building up the distributio…”
Take-Two Had $700M Revenue and $50M Cash in 2007
“About 700 in revenue, and losing loads of money, and no debt, thankfully, and about 50 in cash.”
Grand Theft Auto Was Take-Two's Only Profitable Asset in 2007
“The plan was there was only one good property, which was GTA, which was in development and was soon to be released. We thought ended up getting delayed and everything else was total mess except the NBA franchise, which was really tiny. It was making a tiny amo…”
Take-Two Historically Lost Money Three Out of Every Four Years
“When GTA released, the company would have a meaningful profit, like, a hundred or so a year, but it only released every four years. They lost money the rest of the time.”
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: UFC Owned Almost Nothing But the Brand at 2001 Acquisition
“So all we bought when we bought the company. Was those three letters UFC and old wooden octagon and some contracts that we have, that we had obligations to. And maybe it was eight or nine. That's it, eight or nine contracts. We have almost a thousand guys unde…”
White: UFC Reacquired Its Video and Merch Rights for $3M From Lionsgate
“All the ancillary stuff was sold off to Lionsgate because the old owner was trying to stay alive. So to show you People can't wrap their head around this now. How much people didn't believe in the UFC? We went back to Lionsgate, and we bought the rights back f…”
White: Spike TV Renewed The Ultimate Fighter on an Arena Napkin
“And Spike TV execs took us out in the alley of the arena, and we did a deal on a napkin.”
White: The Power Slap Reality Show Has 50M YouTube Views
“Power Slap's reality show is at, like, fifty million views on YouTube.”
White: UFC First Started Making Real Money When DVDs Exploded
“The DVD business, at the time the DVDs exploded, that's really when we started making some real money.”
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”
Foroughi: AppLovin generated over $100M EBITDA in 2017
“We got to, like, I think it was 2017, you're talking over, well over a hundred million dollars of EBITDA. We cleared whatever numbers we told them.”
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…”
Foroughi: AppLovin's ad business ran on 400 staff versus 1,500 for gaming
“As you said, our core team on advertising is only 400 people. Well, to run studios is a huge lift. You need a lot of headcount. There were 1500 plus people on those businesses, and it was distributed over the world.”
Foroughi: AppLovin's average ad duration is over 35 seconds
“Our average ad is over 35 seconds long.”
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…”
Roblox's entire social graph traces back to 1,500 initial Google ad users
“If we were able to, like, reverse engineer the whole social graph tree all the way back to the starting of Roblox, we'd probably see a one month period, you know, times 50 users, times 30, probably see 1500 users that were saw some ad, like an online building …”
Baszucki: Roblox operates 40 data centers and hundreds of thousands of computers
“There is a mini cloud infrastructure company running with 40 data centers and hundreds of thousands of computers.”
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 has roughly one to two million game creators
“I don't know if we give out our latest Roblox Studio numbers, but it's definitely a lot of people, but it's not ten million. Small percentage. It's one or two million.”
Bruno Mars's Roblox event drew 20 million users across sharded instances
“So in Bruno Mars, we're talking twenty million people but those are sharded amongst copies of experiences.”
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.”
Roblox's 1,000th-ranked creator is growing bookings faster than its top creator
“The growth rate in bookings per year for creator number a thousand ranked by how much they're making, they are growing faster than creator number one.”
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: Nobody Used Snapchat Stories for the First Six Months
“I mean, with stories, right, like, you know, the first six months of stories, no one used it.”
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.”
Spiegel: Snap generates nearly $7B in annual revenue
“Snapchat's almost a seven billion dollar revenue. Business, right?”
Xu: Only 20k-25k of US restaurants delivered food in 2013
“Where there were about a million restaurants in the States, and maybe 20 to 25,000 of them offered deliveries.”
Xu: Early DoorDash customers were almost always mothers with young children
“And the second thing is you get to see who the customer is. And you saw the customer actually almost always was a mom, you know, who had young children, who had not a lot of time, who didn't want to cook, you know, every single meal, who wanted just look for a…”
Xu: DoorDash did not lose money while run from personal bank account
“We were, we ran this out of my bank account, and that's why I knew early on, even though, look, we didn't have any models or, you know, unit economic forecasts or anything like this, but even though it was running out of my bank account, where I also had stude…”
Xu: DoorDash MVP required building four separate software systems
“DoorDash early on, even to this day, but early on, it was so hard to explain because it was actually, even to build the MVP, yes, to test it was just this website, you know, paloelto.com, but we had to build like four things. We had to build this website for c…”
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…”
Senra: Each SpaceX site operates with a single dominating objective
“Each SpaceX site has a single dominating objective. Right, to simplify prioritization.”
Andreessen: Only 1 of 12 Recruits Agreed to Join Jim Clark
“So there were like a dozen of us in there. And I remember that dinner very, very precisely for two reasons. Number one is I was the only one of the dozen to basically to say yes.”
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: Fred Ehrsam discovered Coinbase lost money on every trade
“And so when he came in and started to analyze all of the flow of funds on every trade, he was able to map that out. And due to like certain time risks and things, things, he actually was correct that he'd mapped that out. And it was just a set of conditions, w…”
Armstrong: Early Coinbase faced a 10,000 support ticket backlog
“Anyway, so we had like a 1002 1005 1010 thousand backlog of these customer support tickets and people were getting Very angry about all of this.”
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, …”