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 581 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 3 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
In 2008, Tim Cook sent Sabih Khan straight to China mid-meeting
“In 2008, he was meeting with Tim Cook about a production snafu in China. Tim said, this is bad. Someone ought to get over there. 30 minutes went by and the conversation moved to other topics. Suddenly, Tim looked back at Sabi and asked, why are you still here?…”
Brett Williams's Designjoy generates over seven figures annually on minimal weekly hours
“It requires only a few hours of Brett's time per week, but it does well into the seven figures each year, and it has maybe one full-time employee, but it actually may be fully freelancers.”
Airbnb lost 80% of its business in eight weeks during early 2020
“And we lost 80% of our business in eight weeks.”
Gumroad turned a $351,000 monthly deficit into net profit within one year
“For the listener, it was June, 2015, this is a few months before Gumroad layoffs, revenue was 89,000 dollars a month net profit was 351,000, -351,000 dollars. They're burning 351,000 dollars. Obviously this was at the point in the business where still venture …”
Vohra: Superhuman's PMF score grew from 33% to 58% in one year
“In the summer of 2017, after the resegmentation, our products market fit score was 33%. A quarter after that, It was 47%. A quarter after that, it was 56%. And a quarter after that, so a year later, it was 58%.”
Fried: 37signals Generates Tens of Millions in Annual Profit
“And since we've been a profitable business for a long time, we generate tens of millions currently in annual profits.”
Lieberman: Gumroad to Distribute 60% Profit Share in 2024
“I was actually talking yesterday to Sahil from Gumroad, and this year they're gonna do 60% profit share With employees and shareholders.”
Fried: Basecamp was one of the first SaaS and freemium tools
“We were one of the first SAS, SAS tools, and also first freemium tools, actually, in fact.”
Fried: 37signals has approximately 100,000 paying customers across its software products
“So we've got a 100,000 or so paying customers across base camp and hay, and also high rise.”
Bezos: A good six-page memo can take two weeks to write
“A good six-page memo might take two weeks to write. You have to write it. You have to rewrite it. You have to edit it. You have to talk to people about it. They have to poke holes in it for you. You write it again. It might take two weeks.”
Lieberman: 60-Second Startup drove funding rounds and more sales than TechCrunch
“We have videos that have gotten anywhere between 250,000 views to up to a million views, and it's driven a lot of really cool results for founders, ranging from Snoop Dogg finding out about one of the founders' products and trying it out, To founders raising e…”
Siroker: NEA has 15-year fund lifecycles and buys at IPO
“NEA is known to have 15 year fund life cycles as opposed to the traditional 10. Very often they're buyers at the IPO. They're not sellers.”
Siroker: Rewind has six years of runway to justify its valuation
“And because the good news is we have six years of runway. We've got plenty of time to live up to the big valuation.”
Adcock: Roughly 50 Dual-Class Companies Went Public in Two Decades
“Roughly 50 companies went public last like two decades that had this.”
Nagpal: QSBS rollovers allow founders to reinvest proceeds tax-free into new startups
“You can do something that is called a QSBS rollover that actually lets you take the proceeds and invest it in another qualifying small company And then your clock resumes ticking. So let's say you sold the company after three years. You only then have to wait …”
Gagliardi: 2022-2023 Fed rate hikes were most aggressive since 1982
“You'd have to go back to 1982 to find a Fed moving this hard, this fast, hard line, no exception, and just hawkish all the way.”
Gagliardi: Only three and a half years in last 50 were severe market losses
“If you looked at the last 50 years, and you really took a look at how markets trade over the last 50 years, there's really three and a half years to worry about. 2001, 2002, 2008 through the first quarter, 2009. And if you avoided those three years, you could …”
Corcos: NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang manages roughly 40 direct reports
“He has something like 40 direct reports, which is crazy, but he does it in such a way that it's not super burdensome, and the intent behind it, from what I understand, is that the closer you get to the ultimate decision maker, the faster decisions get made.”
Denk: Beehiiv generates $750,000 monthly revenue with 45 remote employees
“So right now we are 45 full time employees. We're totally remote. We're across eight different countries. I believe right now we are coming up on our second year anniversary since launching. So we launched November of 2021. We have, we're doing about 750,000 d…”
Denk: Beehiiv employs only full-stack engineers
“We don't have separate front-end and back-end engineers. We have full-stack engineers top of bottom.”
Denk: Beehiiv delayed hiring a product designer for two years
“We didn't hire a product designer until two weeks ago.”
Denk: Traditional ESPs are built for e-commerce, not content newsletters
“And so MailChimp sale through campaign monitor, like a lot of these classic, like traditional ESPs are actually built around e-commerce and marketing, which is probably what most emails use for.”
Denk: Every terminated Beehiiv employee was hired via standard interviews
“Everyone that we have fired was like a, we did a few rounds of interviews, gave them an offer. I had no experience of how they handled adversity, communication, how they actually executed and did their job function in like a real setting, just in the hypotheti…”
Growth Assistant Marks Up Offshore Staffing Higher Than US Agencies' 30%
“Typically a staffing agency in the United States, if I just find you an engineer, I mark it up 30%. Like our markup is higher than that because we are like identifying really good talent that's so cheap”
Growth Assistant's Existing Clients Immediately Absorb All Sourced Overseas Talent
“Right now, the general answer is it's supply-constrained business. If I can find you great, cheap, talented people overseas, you will, the demand, because even our current portfolio, we know every time we have a good person, we say, hey, one of these top 10 cu…”
Kajabi powered $2 billion in creator revenue in 2023 alone
“It's one of the reasons we've powered over six billion dollars in creator revenue since our inception, two billion dollars this year, is because there's just a lot of value transfer there, right?”
Creators can build six-figure businesses with just 5,000 followers
“What we found is you can have like 5000 people following you on whatever platform you want, or just frankly have their email and you can build a six figure business on the platform, right?”
Kajabi is profitable and has surpassed $100 million in ARR
“Like we are a business that are pretty healthy. So we're, you know, over a hundred million dollars an hour. We're profitable, but we're really strategic about the way we build the business.”
Kajabi's $550M funding is the creator economy's largest round by far
“I think it's probably I think it's the biggest round in the great economy by far.”
Lieberman: Toastmasters did over $30M in 2022 and is undermonetized
“Toastmasters is a nonprofit, but it was founded in 1924, has 270,000 members across 14,200 clubs. And 147 countries, and I believe it is severely under monetized, yet I saw that in 2022, it did over thirty million dollars in revenue.”
Timmer: 2023 Corporate Earnings Estimated to Drop 3%
“Now, overall earnings are declining very, very modestly. They're scheduled estimated to be down three percent this year, which isn't very much.”
Morning Brew built its famous referral program with a $500 Upwork developer
“There was software that was out there at the time that we could have paid for to just use for Morning Brew's referral program, but instead, we found a developer on Upwork who was in Ohio, and we paid him 500 dollars to build Morning Brew's referral program.”
Sitting next to underperformers cuts individual performance by 30%
“It was basically this research showing that if you sit next to top performers, they increase your performance by on average, 15% as evidenced by a big study across multiple Years and hundreds of employees. And if you sit next to an underperformer, they decreas…”
Deckers acquired Hoka for a reported $1M in 2012
“In 2012, the oversized sneaker brand Hoka was doing around three million dollars in revenue, and it was bought by Deckers, the owner of Ugg and Teva and a few other brands, and Deckers bought Hoka for a reported million dollars.”
Hoka reached $1.4B in annual sales, up from $153M in 2018
“This past year, Hoka did 1.4 billion dollars in sales. That is up from three million dollars in sales, as I mentioned, just 10 years ago, and a hundred fifty three million dollars in sales just five years ago.”
Lieberman Cites Stat Claiming Business Coaches Outnumber Business Owners
“I actually read a stat recently that there are now more business coaches than there are business owners, which is absurd.”
Lieberman: Liquid Death Reached $1B Valuation Primarily Through Marketing
“You know, it's become a billion dollar company basically from just being really good at marketing water. It's a, the most commoditized product in the world, yet they've been able to sell hundreds of millions of dollars of this water”
Lieberman: Morning Brew's free student legal work cost 3x to fix later
“So we had all of our original, like, operating agreement, our tax number, all those filings done for free, but it ended up being really shoddy work. So the first lawyer that we ended up getting after graduating from college. Basically had to redo everything. A…”
Lieberman: Well-run ski mountains achieve at least 30% EBITDA margins
“What they shared is that a well-run ski mountain has at least 30% profit or EBITDA margins, and also a well-run ski mountain will sell the majority of its tickets before the season ever starts.”
Rob Dyrdek grew his net worth to $350 million in seven years
“The first is that Rob is conservatively worth three hundred fifty million dollars today. And he said that back in 2016, he was worth fifteen million dollars. So he has more than 20 X his net worth in seven years.”
Lieberman: Media ad market is precarious and Q3 is a grind
“From talking to executives in the media world, I learned that The advertising market is really precarious right now, and Q-three is a grind for media companies trying to source marketing dollars.”
Walking a humanoid robot within one year has never been done
“So our one year anniversary is coming up for the business. We're going to try to walk the robot before that, which has never been done. That's basically one, like less than a year getting basically the whole team together, getting the vision for the company, l…”
Airbnb generated $3.5B in free cash flow across 5,300 employees in 2022
“And last year he said the business did 3.5 billion dollars in free cash flow across 5300 employees.”
Airbnb Divides Product Teams Into Marketers, Junior PMs, and Program Managers
“So the way that Airbnb organizes its product function is there's basically three roles within product at Airbnb. There are product marketers, and these are senior product managers, and they're responsible for Marketing of the products that Airbnb has, as well …”
Pujji: Microsoft Teams is roughly five times the size of Slack
“Apparently Teams is like five times the size of Slack now. Because Microsoft owns the enterprise”
Pujji: Hotels pay travel agents a 25% booking commission
“Hotels. Pay 25%. To this day. So if you get a hotel a booking, you as a travel agent, whether you're online, whether you're a physical person, get 25% of the booking”