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 274 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
Pieter Levels generated 74 million impressions on X in three weeks
“He has posted about the game 104 times in the last three weeks. These 104 posts generated seventy-four million impressions, which is insane.”
Elon Musk's retweet drove 9 million impressions for Pieter Levels' game
“When Levels announced an update that his game supported multiplayer, Elon Musk, quote, retweeted the post, which drove nine million impressions to Levels' post, or roughly 38% of the impressions he has gotten so far.”
ButcherBox generates $600 million in annual revenue, says CEO Mike Seguero
“Mike Seguero, the CEO of ButcherBox, which is the six hundred million dollar a year meat subscription business, he said, quote, why wouldn't you pay to outsource the stuff you find boring?”
Sadeghi: 23andMe Used Microarrays Because Genome Sequencing Cost $20M in 2006
“23 and me, they got started in 2006, the cost of sequencing the genome at that point was around twenty million dollars per sample, ok. So they couldn't actually employ the technology to read the entirety of someone's DNA, all six billion letters. They opted fo…”
Parr: Financials of £10M UK private companies are available for free
“If that's basically in the UK, I think it's ten million. If you're a privately held company with at least ten million in revenue, You have to display your financials and put out a report, and it's all free, and you can, like, learn anything you want from them.”
Morning Brew leverages its 4.5 million daily subscribers for podcast promotion
“We've been able to promote it to an audience of 4.5 million daily subscribers every single day.”
Morning Brew reached 1.5M subscribers and eight-figure revenue by late 2019
“We have, you know, 1.5 million subscribers roughly at that point. The business is doing eight figures in revenue. We have probably 20 plus team members, very profitable.”
Tyler Denk proposed productizing Morning Brew's internal tools before launching beehiiv
“Something I just want to add here that's just a fun anecdote is I remember the first time that Tyler came to Austin and I, because Tyler was employee number three or four at Morning Brew, and he had been building all of our internal tools at the company. So th…”
Skype Acquired Users for $0.001 Via Word of Mouth Versus Vonage's $400
“It shows that Skype's cost of adding a new user was a 10th of a penny, whereas Vonage's was 400 dollars, and that's because Skype had a peer-to-peer technology where they were acquiring customers through word of mouth, whereas Vonage had to pay for their custo…”
Noah Kagan was fired as Facebook's 30th employee for leaking expansion plans
“Noah gets into this section by sharing his experience as a twenty-four-year-old being hired as Facebook's 30th employee and subsequently being fired for leaking information about the company's expansion plans beyond colleges while he was partying at Coachella.”
Ali Abdaal built his 5M+ subscriber audience starting with ultra-niche medical content
“That is the level of specificity you want for your initial audience on social, and that's exactly how Ali Abdaal created a strong core for his YouTube audience that gave him the permission to get broader over time and now accumulate over five million subscribe…”
Blockbuster Made $800M in Late Fees in 2000
“In 2000, Blockbuster said it made eight hundred million dollars in late fees, or 16% of its revenue.”
How Instagram and WhatsApp Reached Billions With Tiny Teams
“Both were worth billions of dollars with less than 60 full-time employees, 13 employees for Instagram, and 55 employees for WhatsApp.”
Snowflake lost $17B in market cap following Frank Slootman's retirement announcement
“On the news, Snowflake stock was down 24 and a half percent, or seventeen billion dollars in market cap.”
Yelp reached its first 1,000 users through PayPal alumni network
“Inviting people from our network, mostly former co-workers from PayPal, drove our initial users. We asked all our network to invite their friends and being startup people who wanted to help us They obliged, so two degrees out, we probably got to a thousand or …”
Direct outreach drives early growth for 30% of consumer startups
“The second most common way to acquire your first 1000 users, and it's important for early growth of 30% of consumer startups, is to go recruit them directly.”
Calm collected 100,000 email addresses in two weeks from a viral website
“Alex Tu created a website that was basically just some waves lapping on the beat. And it was called do nothing for two minutes.com. And you literally had to just stare at these waves for two minutes and not move your mouse or tap on the keyboard. And not many …”
Noom was the fourth app on the Android app store
“He said, Noom's first product, way before my time, was the fourth app in the Android store when it launched, and as a result, got a lot of organic downloads. Artem had a connection at Google at the time, which helped getting placed.”
Morning Brew generated $13 million in revenue in 2019
“Our business had done thirteen million dollars in revenue in 2019.”
Morning Brew achieved $20 million in revenue in 2020
“The goal was to hit twenty million in 2020, which we would end up doing, and there were no signs of slowing down.”
Stripe CEO Patrick Collison met global experts to calibrate executive hiring
“Patrick Collison, co-founder and CEO of Stripe, made it a point to meet with, quote unquote, the best in the world in each field so he could get a sense of what a great candidate looks like.”
Lieberman: Theranos employees made a game shooting at the WSJ reporter
“Theranos employees made a video game where they shot at the Wall Street Journal reporter who exposed the company's fraud.”
Google Apps Launched with Simple $50/Employee/Year Pricing Against Microsoft
“We offered one price of 50 dollars per employee per year compared to the wacky, twenty-page price list Microsoft would drop on you.”
Lil Nas X produced Old Town Road for $50 before 2.5B streams
“He started making music in his closet, and in December, 2018, he dropped Old Town Road, which he made with a 30 dollar sample and 20 dollars worth of studio time. The song was played over 2.5 billion times in 2019 alone.”
Lieberman: Salesforce followed Christensen's disruption playbook exactly
“Salesforce followed Christensen's disruption theory to a T, first offering their lower-priced cloud CRM product to small businesses, who are used to using pen and paper to keep track of customers because the Cybele and SAPs of the world were far too expensive …”
Lieberman: Successful Kickstarter campaigns average only 241 funders
“The average number of supporters for a successful Kickstarter project is 241 funders, far less than a thousand.”
Lieberman: Idealab launched 150 companies with 50 IPOs or exits
“Idea Lab went on to find 5000 startup ideas, Launch a 150 companies, and successfully IPO or exit 50 businesses.”
Gumroad generates $160 million annual GMV and $8 million net income
“Now we do about a hundred and sixty million dollars a year in annualized GMV. So that's sort of like the marketplace volume of that we take. 10% ends up being our revenue, and that's how we make money. And about half of that ends up being our margin. So you ca…”
Nagpal: US tax code expands by 150,000 words annually
“It's growing by a 150,000 words a year, which is insane.”
Nagpal: Business owners get a 20% QBI income tax deduction
“As a business owner, you get something called a QBI deduction, which is the automatic 20% deduction on your income right there. It's part of the Trump jobs act in 2017. There's some nuance to it, but 20% right off the top.”
Nagpal: Dedicated home office deductions apply to business owners, not W-2 employees
“A lot of people know you can deduct business expenses with a business that you can't if you're an employee, but a very big one is if you have a dedicated home office That you use specifically for your business, you can proportionally deduct that from your rent…”
Nagpal: S-Corp election saves roughly $5k at $100k net income outside NYC
“Because New York City levies an additional tax on S-Corps, but in most other cases, like at a 100,000 dollars in net income, you're saving about 5000 dollars for an S-Corp election.”
Nagpal: Solo 401(k) tax-deductible contribution limits reach $66k and $69k
“You can put in Up to 66,000 dollars this year, 69,000 dollars next year, and get that entire amount as a tax deduction.”
Nagpal: R&D tax credits offset payroll taxes by up to 6-8% of engineering salaries
“If you're contributing to any kind of innovation, you get something called research and development tax credits, R&D tax credits, And this can be up to six to eight percent of the salary you spend on people who are actually building this innovation. And for us…”
Lavingia built the Pinterest iPhone app as a freelancer without receiving equity
“Just like I built Pinterest for iPhone as a freelancer initially. Right. I didn't get any equity in it because I was a freelancer.”
Fried: Early Groupon hired comedians to write product descriptions
“My friend of mine ran as a Chicago based company. He would hire a lot of comedians and basically show writers to write their one, their descriptions of products that they were selling on Groupon.”
Bezos: Parasitic mass is trivial for large rockets but critical for small rockets
“If you have, let's say you have an avionics system, so you have a guidance and control system, That is gonna be about the same mass and size for a giant rocket as it is gonna be for a tiny rocket. And so that's just parasitic mass that is very consequential if…”
Bezos: Rotating machines and turbopumps gain efficiency at larger sizes
“All rotating machines, in fact, get more efficient as they get larger. So really tiny turbo pumps are very challenging to manufacture and any kind of gaps, you know are like between the housing, for example, and the rotating impeller that pressurizes the fuel,…”
Nagpal: Carry raised $2M from 200 angels as one cap table line
“So we had 200 investors involved, each putting in about 10,000 dollars each, various two million dollars with 200 people. And it's one line on our cap table. So right now, if I want to do anything, all I need is two signatures, my fund and this entity, and we'…”
Morning Brew Main YouTube Channel Reaches 1M Views on a Video in 6 Days
“Morning Brew's main YouTube channel had a video that hit one million views for the first time. That video hit a million views in six days”
Nagpal: QSBS exempts up to $10M in capital gains from federal and state taxes
“The way it works is if you hold shares in a qualifying C-corporation, and we'll come to that in a minute and what that means, for up to five years, when you sell your shares, you pay no federal taxes on ten million dollars, And in 42 states, including New York…”
Lieberman: Brett Adcock Invested First Exit Proceeds Into Archer and $100M Into Figure
“Like I think of like Brett, Brett Adcock, who took all of the money from his first exit put it into his second company, which was an electric vertical takeoff and landing business called Archer. Then he took a hundred million dollars from that business and put…”
Gagliardi: Bottom 100 S&P 500 Names Make Up Only 3-4% of Index
“The bottom hundred is about three or four percent, so if a name from the bottom hundred goes bankrupt, as we did see with Silicon Valley Bank or First Republic Bank, they were one 100th of a percent of the portfolio.”
Tyler Denk: Beehiiv's public launch MVP had only three core features
“So RMVP was simply the most basic website builder you could possibly imagine. It does two things. It collects emails, and it posts, and it publishes all of your published posts in an archive. And then the other component is a text editor that you can send emai…”
Denk: Beehiiv raised $16.7 million across seed, extension, and Series A
“So we raised 2.6 million in our seed round, which was in the summer of 2021. And then we went full time shortly after raising that round. We did an extension round of 1.6 million the following May, June. So that's May of 2022. And then we raised a formal serie…”
Timmer: 80% of Q2 Companies Beat Earnings Estimates by 7%
“Second quarter earnings season just wrapped up. 80% beating estimates by an average of seven percentage points.”
Timmer: TIPS Market Implies 2.25% to 2.5% Future Inflation
“If you subtract the real yield of tips from the nominal yield of regular treasuries, you get an implied inflation rate, and that inflation rate is around two and a quarter, two and a half percent which is the market's way of saying that the Fed will be success…”