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 91 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
Lore: Quidsi rejected a competing buyout offer $100M higher after Amazon threats
“Yeah, it's even, even worse that we got a higher offer that we didn't take.”
Amazon threatened to drop diaper prices to zero if Quidsi resisted sale
“They said, well, yeah, we're gonna take the price of diapers to zero, and we're gonna, you know, and they made some analogies to some other, used explicit language, and it was pretty scary stuff.”
Amazon explicitly threatened to price diapers at zero to force Quidsi sale
“They said, well, yeah, we're gonna take the price of diapers to zero, and we're gonna, you know, and they made some analogies to some other, used explicit language, and it was pretty scary stuff. I'll just leave it at that.”
Quidsi rejected a $100M higher buyout offer due to Amazon retaliation threats
“Because Amazon very clearly stated that if we took that offer, they would do even more to harm the business.”
Ahmed: Amazon copied WHOOP with Halo, tweeting 'whoop, there it is'
“They knocked the product off. There's no question. And by the way, it was so egregious that one of the lead product manager from Amazon, when it came out, posted on Twitter, whoop, there it is announcing the new Amazon Halo.”
Emily Powell: Amazon Marketplace will never help independent bookstores succeed
“And Amazon is never going to help us be successful in the long run. They're going to help Amazon be successful, and I don't believe that's good for Powell's. It's certainly not good for our community, so it wasn't something we had to put a lot of brain power b…”
Jeremy Stoppelman claims Amazon does not take review integrity seriously
“I don't rely at all on Amazon reviews because I don't think they take the system very seriously. I think they use it as a way to just sell stuff.”
Colin Angle Favored Amazon Acquisition Because iRobot Scooba And Terra Failed
“And really that was what led me to saying, hey iRobot and Amazon might have some pretty interesting synergies, and because Scuba hadn't succeeded, because Terra hadn't succeeded, then when Amazon started to be interested in iRobot, it felt like a good idea.”
Amazon board member offered VC funding to stop Amazon attacking Square
“I remember one guy telling me, oh, Amazon's gonna attack you? Don't worry, I'm on the board of Amazon, and I developed Amazon Prime, and we can get them to leave you alone. Like, if you take our money, we'll guarantee that Amazon doesn't attack you.”
Interdependent 'innovation stacks' protect novel inventions from giant corporate copiers
“If you invent something truly new, you're not inventing one thing. You're inventing a stack of things, and that invention becomes its own protection. And as long as you behave properly, I mean, it turns out there are a bunch of rules that if you follow these r…”
Mason: Groupon could have rivaled tech giants without post-rejection execution mistakes
“And it could have, maybe it could have been, were it not for some execution mistakes that happened after we made that decision.”
Startups Only Compete Against a Tech Giant's Specific Division
“You're not really competing against the whole company. You're competing against the section that's making a competitive product.”
Amazon could not build a successful social product due to commerce-first culture
“But no, I mean, it turns out Amazon could not have built a successful social product because they are wired for commerce. This is my impression. You know, they shared with us a bunch of thinking they had in the social space, and it was just clear that they, wh…”
Powell: Amazon fails its workers and harms local economies
“They're not the best employer. They're not taking care of their people. But they're also not supporting small businesses that allow our local economies to thrive.”
Jeremy Stoppelman argues transaction verification fails to prevent fake online reviews
“And there is this like false, I would call it very false belief That if you prove that someone transacted, then that review is therefore trustworthy, but all you have to do is, like, read one of the 20 stories on Amazon about how people still easily game that …”
Shah: Winning commodity retail does not guarantee success in home goods
“If you're in any of these other categories, certainly there's a big business there, but that's effectively the business that the Walmarts and the Amazons and the Targets and the Costcos, they're all in that business, selling the same exact items to everybody. …”
Amazon told Quidsi's team to keep competing against them post-acquisition
“Like, Amazon didn't even, when they brought us in, say, hey, we want you guys to run the mom, baby, parent category within Amazon. They said, you know what, just keep doing what you're doing. Just continue to keep competing with us.”
VCs rejected Quidsi's $100M funding round because Amazon was targeting them
“We had only raised 50,000,055 million dollars up until that point, which was pretty modest amount of money raised compared to today's standards, but we went out and we needed another hundred million to keep all the websites going and to really blow it out. We …”
Nirav Tolia claims Google, Meta, Apple, and Amazon have failed at local
“I also think no one has won local. Google hasn't. Meta hasn't. Apple hasn't. Amazon hasn't, right?”
Ahmed: Amazon's Alexa Fund passed on investing after extensive product diligence
“Yeah, we spent a lot of time with them, and they included their product team in the diligence, and then they ultimately did not invest in Whoop, to our surprise.”
Rahal: Consumer brands cannot avoid Amazon and must embrace it
“Amazon's like a force of nature you can't avoid. So it's not, it should never be a question. Are we on Amazon or not? I think it should be, how do we optimize it?”
Zennström: Early 2000s European VCs Primarily Funded US Internet Copycats
“The model for European VCs at the time was to invest in a copycat of a U.S. Internet company, and use the language barrier as a moat. So you kind of was really smart to invest in say a German copycat of eBay because eBay would probably buy them or a Nordic ver…”
Marc Ecko: Amazon was a corrosive force on consumer behavior
“Amazon was this incredibly powerful, but corrosive force in affecting the way consumer behavior was going to be direct to consumer online.”
Amazon refused Kindle integration without acquiring an equity stake in Goodreads
“And so we had this strong vision, and we met with Amazon, like I said, four or five times over the years, kind of talking about, would we do this? And they were always into it. The issue was, it required deep integration to pull off, and they weren't comfortab…”
Policygenius plans to evolve from broker to first-party insurance issuer
“Eventually, yep. We look at our journey similar to Amazon or Netflix which started in the third party world. Consumer goods in the case of Amazon, content in the case of Netflix, and they eventually moved from third party to first party, where they were actual…”
Lore: Amazon's 30% diaper price cut was unprecedented in retail history
“It was unheard of at the time, you know, the idea that a commodity product that already lost money, it's already a loss leader, that you would lose another 30%. That's unheard of, unprecedented in the history of retail.”
John Collison: Payments has shifted from tactical vendor decision to product strategy
“For internet businesses, payments is actually part of the strategy that matters. It's part of the product experience. And so basically, I think this used to be a fairly tactical vendor decision for the business, where it was just something that needs to be tak…”
Lütke: Good non-Amazon e-commerce experiences were powered by Shopify
“If you bought something online, and it wasn't on Amazon, and you liked the experience, it was Shopify.”
Mehta: Competing with Amazon required partnering with retailers rather than underpricing them
“I realized in order to sort of really compete with them, I would have to do something that's meaningfully different, and it couldn't be something that was just, it was like cheaper or anything like that, because Amazon has gobs and gobs of money, so it wasn't …”
Amazon surrendered its payment product and mailed Square readers to merchants
“And it failed so badly that Amazon gave us all their soon-to-be former customers and mailed them a Square reader and said, we're out, go to Square.”
Chewy Sells More Pet Supplies in the United States Than Amazon
“I think it's the biggest distributor of pet supplies. I think it's bigger than Amazon when it comes to pet supplies in the U.S.”
Gordon: Working at Microsoft Was More Prestigious than Amazon in Mid-2000s
“Like, truthfully, getting a job at Microsoft was much more prestigious than getting a job at Amazon at that time in Seattle.”
Poppi's monthly Amazon sales surged from $3,000 to $250,000 post-Shark Tank
“We're doing, like, 3000 on Amazon quickly over the next few months. We're doing 250,000 on Amazon a month.”
Viral TikTok video generated $100,000 in overnight Amazon sales for Poppi
“Honestly, one night, I sat down on the couch, and I just told my story. I did it in one minute or less of, started this in my kitchen, got a deal on Shark Tank, it's five grams of sugar, it's apple cider vinegar, it's this, dah, dah, dah, and I posted it and w…”
Gebbia: Early-Stage Brands Should Prioritize Channel Reach Over Selectivity
“I think the idea is that eventually over time you build, build a brand that people recognize and you grow out of your reliance on the, on a platform like Amazon and have your own distribution channels that are independent. But I think at this stage, you know, …”
Lore and co-founder didn't celebrate selling Diapers.com to Amazon
“We had a big vision for what we wanted to accomplish, and it was cut short. So, yeah, it was, I mean, you would think after a sale like that, we made, obviously, a lot of money, me and my co-founder, but we said, do you want to celebrate? You want to go grab a…”
A Single Employee Can Scale Amazon Sales to $100,000 per Day
“I think the biggest thing is that you can't scale that retail without significantly increasing your team, but whether or not you sell a thousand dollars a day on Amazon or a 100,000 dollars a day, you can still do it with one person online.”
Guayakí reached $100 million in revenue without Costco, Walmart, or Amazon
“We got to a hundred million without Costco, Walmart, Amazon, any of those big retailers that are usually a big part of it.”
Otis Chandler: Amazon Is Not a Place to Cruise Post-Acquisition
“Amazon was not a place where you go to cruise.”
Otis Chandler: Amazon promised to run Goodreads as an independent brand
“Amazon made it a little easy in that they told us they would want to run us as an independent subsidiary and an independent brand, just like they run Audible and IMDB and Zappos and now Twitch, and they have a long list of track record of doing this.”
Krim: Amazon banned Casper's account for buying hundreds of backup airbeds
“Amazon canceled our account because they thought we were reselling them, which we weren't, but we were buying hundreds of these arrow beds just to help people sleep.”
Limiting SKU assortment prevents customer decision paralysis and concentrates wholesale buying power
“We tried to curtail SKU's assortment because it made for an easier and smoother shopping experience. And so you didn't have this kind of paralysis by analysis. And so people would come through the app and hunt and pack and just build this, suddenly build a bas…”
Smith: Simple Mills became Amazon's top-selling muffin mix ahead of Martha White
“Full stop. It was probably something like 50 to a hundred units a day, and Martha White was number two.”
Hsieh: Amazon preserved Zappos' independent culture seven years post-acquisition
“They approached us again and said, okay, we will let you guys be your own separate subsidiary with your own separate culture and own separate way of doing business. And happy to report seven years later, they've remained totally true to their word. And we've b…”
Siminoff: Amazon is the only tech giant that elevates acquired companies
“Amazon was the only large company that I saw or felt
When they bought companies truly like brought it to the next level. Like I, you know, with audible and IMDB and Zappos and I mean, you look at Twitch, like you look at all the, they've just kept founders and…”
Birchbox's 2016 struggles stemmed from market shifts, not weak unit economics
“The unit economics were strong, but the market changed. I think that it was a Perfect storm of there being some formidable competition and having, not having access to capital that was limitless. All of a sudden, it was just this question around direct-to-cons…”
Amazon kept its promise to let Zappos operate autonomously post-acquisition
“They approached us again and said, okay, we will let you guys be your own separate subsidiary with your own separate culture and own separate way of doing business. And happy to report seven years later, they've remained totally true to their word. And we've b…”
Collison: Payments shifted from tactical decisions to strategic product advantages
“For internet businesses, payments is actually part of the strategy that matters. It's part of the product experience. And so basically, I think this used to be a fairly tactical vendor decision for the business, where it was just something that needs to be tak…”