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 2,397 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 42 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
Andre Agassi: Winning never feels as good as losing feels bad
“Winning changes nothing. Now that I've won a slam, I know something that very few people on earth are permitted to know. A win doesn't feel as good as a loss feels bad. And the good feeling doesn't last as long as the bad, not even close.”
Michael Dell advises leaders to manufacture crises to drive necessary organizational change
“Michael Dell told me in the episode I did with him and on the David center feed in our conversation, he says, if you don't have a crisis, make one, you get people excited, motivated, and you drive the necessary change that you need in your business.”
Brad Jacobs targets middle and upper management bloat during post-acquisition layoffs
“Typically, when we acquire a business, most of the people we exit do not come from the front lines. They're in the mid to upper echelons of the legacy operation. That is where we usually find most of the bloat.”
Mateschitz: Editorial media value from owned sports teams beats direct advertising
“The total editorial media value plus the media assets created around the teams That's such a good insight. Plus, the media assets created around the teams are superior to pure advertising expenditures.”
Dietrich Mateschitz threatened an unauthorized Russian biographer with having kneecaps broken
“There was another potential biographer, this Russian author that tried to start writing a biography, an unauthorized biography on Matashitz, and Matashitz threatened to have his kneecaps broken. He didn't like that the author was going to, like, his hometown. …”
Ellison: Picking Public Fights Prevents Retreat and Forces Commitment
“Once I'm finally certain of the right direction, I pick a fight. It helps me make my point and it makes it impossible to do an about face and go back. Once a course has been plotted, I sail a long way off and I burn the boats. It is win or die.”
Pursuing High Apparent Risk Deters Competition and Improves Winning Odds
“The bigger the apparent risk, the fewer people will try to go there. We would surely lose if we had to face serious competition. But if we were all alone in pursuit of our goal of building the first commercial relational database system, we had a chance to win…”
Ellison: Bill Gates Is Dangerous Because He Lacks Intellectual Vanity
“Most people hate to admit they're wrong, but it didn't bother Bill one bit. All he cared about was what was right, not who was right. That is what makes Bill very, very dangerous. If Bill has to choose, he'd rather win the war than win the argument.”
Jensen Huang has 60 direct reports and skips one-on-ones
“Jensen has 60 direct reports and he doesn't do one-on-one meetings.”
Senra: Jensen Huang benchmarks project timelines against physics, not competitors
“Each project must be broken down into component tasks, and each task must have a target time to completion that assumes no delays, no queues, and no downtime. This sets the theoretical maximum, the speed of light, that it is physically impossible to exceed. We…”
Jensen Huang says success requires allowing yourself to be work-obsessed
“You have to allow yourself to be obsessed with your work. I work every day. There's not a day that goes by that I don't work. If I'm not working, I'm thinking about working. Working is relaxing for me.”
Jensen Huang targets 'zero-billion-dollar markets' to ensure zero competitors
“Where there are no customers. There are also no competitors. That is a zero billion dollar market. Something that barely exists, maybe doesn't exist at all, but one day we'll be giant.”
Jensen Huang predicted Nvidia's average selling prices would uniquely rise
“He said that Nvidia would be a unique semiconductor company where products average selling prices rise. We are going to be the only guy where ASPs go up over time when everyone else's ASPs will go down, he said.”
Peterffy predicted in 1971 that automated systems would replace floor traders
“As soon as this electronic brain is hooked up to its voice box so it can answer the phone, staff will be able to go on a permanent vacation.”
Ellison: Gates's true advantage is unmatched focus and endurance, not intellect
“There are a lot of people in the world smarter than Bill Gates. There are very few people in the world that have his focus and endurance.”
Ellison: Gates is dangerous like Rockefeller, utterly relentless and wanting it all
“Someone once said Bill wants people to think that he is Thomas Edison when he is really Rockefeller. If he was Edison, he would be less dangerous. He is utterly relentless. He is indefatigable. He is absolutely focused, and he wants it all.”
Jobs: Making great products requires more time and perseverance, not more money
“If you're gonna make something, it doesn't take any more energy, and rarely does it take more money to make it really great. All it takes is a little more time and a willingness to do so. A willingness to persevere until it's really great.”
Jobs: The concept of a career is stifling and dangerous
“The enemy of most dreams and intuitions, and one of the most dangerous and stifling concepts ever invented by humans is the career.”
Jobs purposefully provoked interview candidates to see if they would push back
“Many times in a job interview, I will purposely upset someone. I'll criticize their prior work. I'll do my homework, find out what they worked on and say, God, that really turned out to be a bomb. That really turned out to be a bozo product. Why did you work o…”
Colin Chapman: Any Racecar That Survives a Full Race Is Too Heavy
“He also said any car which holds together for a whole race is too heavy.”
Prosecutors alleged John DeLorean and Colin Chapman split millions in UK funds
“They alleged that DeLorean had pocketed 8.5 million of the government fee while Chapman had taken eight million for himself.”
Ferrero: Private ownership enables decade-long product development horizons
“I was able to do all this because we're a family business and we're not listed on the stock exchange. This allowed us to grow calmly. To have long-term plans, to know how to wait, and to not be caught up in the frenzy of the daily ups and downs.”
Tamara Mellon advises founders to always retain majority ownership and control
“She says, I've learned to always retain majority ownership and control.”
Short-term volume increases almost never offset the cost of price decreases
“We have significant data related to price elasticity with rare exceptions. The volume increase in the short term is never enough to pay for the price decrease.”
Make decisions with 70 percent information because waiting for 90 is too slow
“Most decisions are probably made with somewhere around 70% of the information you wish you had. If you wait for 90%, you're being too slow.”
A company's failed experiments must scale proportionally as the business grows
“As the company grows, everything needs to scale, including the size of our failed experiments. If the size of your failures isn't growing, you're not going to be inventing at a size that can actually move the needle.”
Akio Morita: Lead consumers with new products rather than doing market research
“Our plan is to lead the public with new products rather than ask them what kind of products they want. The public does not know what is possible, but we do. So instead of doing market research, we refine our thinking on a product and its use and try to create …”
Akio Morita: Short-term quarterly profits often conceal value-destroying underinvestment
“The remarkable thing about management is that a manager can go on for years making mistakes that nobody's aware of. This is because management is an elusive thing. It cannot be judged by next quarter's bottom line. Managers can look good on the bottom line, bu…”
Interviewing all competitor employees reveals their business model and edge
“Interview everyone and you get a 360 degree perspective of the industry, how the business makes money, its competitive edge, who the best employees are, etc.”
Griffin advises leaving stagnant jobs after six months to build career equity
“If you're in an environment where you've been somewhere for six months and you haven't learned much, do not make it six months in a day. The most valuable equity that you'll create in your lifetime is your career equity that you own is really thinking about yo…”
An Australian report found China leads in 30 of 45 emerging technologies
“He says this report was published in Australia. There was a survey of roughly 45 of the most important emerging technologies from quantum computing to solar power cells, to various areas in biotechnology, and the Chinese led in 30 of these areas.”
Citadel hired Enron's entire quant team post-bankruptcy and made $30 billion
“Now, the great part of this story is I hired the entire leadership team of the quantitative research effort at Enron, all the people who actually knew how the place worked, and we've made thirty billion dollars in commodities since then.”
Tech entrepreneurs should prioritize long-term durability over rapid early growth
“The problem, a lot of technology company entrepreneurs is they optimize for growth at the expense of durability. But if you actually look at when these companies make the most money, it's like 10, 20, 30 years into the future. So that takeaway was like, you do…”
Munger: The secret of investing is finding places safe to not diversify
“The whole secret of investment is to find places where it's safe and wise to not diversify.”
Berkshire operates with no HR, legal, IR, or PR departments
“We have no human relations department, no legal department, no investor relations, no public relations. We don't have any of that. We've got a bunch of all-stars out there running businesses. We just asked them to mail the money to Omaha.”
Berkshire refuses to sell businesses unless they drain cash endlessly
“And like one thing that they bring up over and over again is in their wholly owned businesses, unless it's going to completely drain a bunch of money, they're not going to sell them. Even if, you know, they can say, Oh, we're, we used to make 15%. Now we make …”
Ogilvy: Advertising Is an Essential Production Cost, Not a Selling Cost
“I've come to regard advertising as part of the product to be treated as a production cost, not a selling cost. It follows that it should not be cut back when times are hard any more than you would stint on any other essential ingredient in your product, assumi…”
Munger: Hire CEOs who already succeeded in the role, never for potential
“Munger's response to Brent was something like, we find somebody that did a good job before and ask them to do the same job for us. And the follow-up question, Brent's follow-up question was something like, yeah, but what about, you know, hiring for potential o…”
Munger: Being extremely wealthy and universally beloved goes against human nature
“There is something interesting when I had dinner with Munger. One of the most fascinating things he said, it was so odd. He thought it was very unusual to be so wealthy and love that that goes against human nature. The fact that him and Buffett, everybody obvi…”
Charlie Munger Believed Overconfidence Can Occasionally Trigger Outsized Success
“While an excess of self-regard is often counterproductive in its effect on cognition, it can cause some weird successes from overconfidence that happened to cause success. Never underestimate the man who overestimates himself.”
Jerry Jones Secured a Gas Contract Paying Nine Times Prior Producer Rates
“The agreement that he signs with the company that his friends is CEO of, it allows Jones to sell gas to Arkansas, Louisiana gas company, which is also known as ArcLaw at a price that was far higher than what the utility was paying others in the field. So he ma…”
John Mackey claims Whole Foods would remain independent if Founders existed earlier
“He had listened to over a hundred episodes before we met, and he told me that if founders existed when he was younger, Whole Foods would still be an independent company.”
Brad Jacobs argues slightly understaffed teams are more focused and avoid busywork
“Brad wrote, I find that slightly understaffed teams are more focused and spend less time doing redundant busy work.”
Senra: Great founders have near-zero introspection once they know their goals
“Many of the great founders, once that they know what they want to do, I would argue that they actually have very low levels of introspection to like almost no introspection. And the reason that is important is because low introspection equals more action.”
Tech Talent Dynamic Range Is 50 to 100 to 1
“The key observation is that in most things in life, the dynamic range between average quality and the best quality is at most two to one. But in the field that I was interested in, I noticed that the dynamic range between what an average person could accomplis…”
Jensen Huang Manages 60 Direct Reports but Refuses One-on-One Meetings
“Jensen's famous or infamous, the fact that he has 60 direct reports and he refuses to do one-on-one.”
Jensen Huang Criticizes Employees Publicly So the Entire Company Learns
“Jensen does not believe, you know, there's this maximum like praise publicly, criticize privately. No, he does not. He criticizes publicly so that the entire organization can learn from a single person's mistake.”
Jensen Huang Benchmarks Projects Against Theoretical Limits Assuming Zero Friction
“So the speed of light means that you have to take every single project inside of your company. You break it down into its component tasks. And then each task must have a target time to completion that assumes no delays, no cues or no downtime. Why? Of course y…”