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 50 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
Steve Jobs told Drew Houston Dropbox was a feature, not a product
“He was like, alright, well, in so many ways, he's like, well, you guys are a feature, not a product. You know, we're gonna have to build our competitor, and I guess we'll have to get to work on, you know, in so many words, killing you guys.”
Luis von Ahn: Do not bet early on unproven new tech platforms
“What we've learned
Is not to bet on these very new products, because you really never know if they're going to work. So it's not that Apple Watch didn't work. Apple Watch ended up working, but what didn't work was apps on Apple Watch. There's just.
That's ju…”
Steve Jobs Pounded MacFarlane's Chest, Threatening to Sue Sonos Out of Existence
“He walked right up to me and pounded on my chest and said they were gonna sue us out of existence for having a scroll ring on our remote.”
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.”
James Park says the original Apple Watch did not impact Fitbit
“If you looked at the Apple Watch that was announced at that time, I think everyone will admit, maybe even Apple, that it was a product that didn't quite know what it was supposed to be used for. So, with the launch of the first Apple Watch, I don't really thin…”
Steve Jobs called Stoppelman urging Yelp not to sell to Google
“You know, he said, don't sell to Google. We think you're a great company. We think what you're doing is really interesting. He didn't say, oh, well, Apple, you know, is interested in you, but he did say, is this about money? Because Apple has a lot of money, a…”
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?”
Chaudhri: Working on iPhone X at Apple felt like 'Groundhog Day'
“Around that time, we were working on iPhone X, which in and of itself is kind of like a bit of like a Groundhog Day thing.”
Apple Has Brand Permission to Dominate Home Audio but Deprioritizes It
“I think Apple of all those brands has the brand permission to do a great home music experience, but they've got so many other things to do. They haven't really done that.”
Baird: Targeting low-income customers gives BlocPower a mass-market advantage
“We've flipped that on its head and said, we're going to start with the lowest income people first, and that allows us to be mass market first, and so that has been a painful journey, but now that we've seen a little bit of success, yeah, we do have a competiti…”
Reffkin: Traditional brokerages pocketed profits instead of investing in R&D
“This has been a model for over a hundred years where brokerage firms had taken the profits from the agents, split it between the manager, the manager's manager, and the owner, and on balance that owner put in their pocket and then they went on vacation. But wh…”
Neistat: Apple refused to replace iPod batteries under official 2003 policy
“The other end of the phone explained to me that Apple as a policy does not replace the batteries in their iPods”
Steve Jobs offered Bushnell a third of Apple for $50,000
“And so he got the apple going and he came to me and says, I want to start this company and I'm going to be leaving. Do you want to be my first investor? And I'll give you a third of the company for 50,000 dollars.”
Steve Jobs offered Bushnell a third of Apple for $50,000
“And so he got the apple going and he came to me and says, I want to start this company and I'm going to be leaving. Do you want to be my first investor? And I'll give you a third of the company for 50,000 dollars.”
Apple's strict dock connector rules nearly killed Square's early hardware ambitions
“And at the time, it was this big port at the bottom, and you had to pay Apple for access to that port. You had to pay Apple for a special chip that allowed you to build your hardware, and then you had to Convince them to let you do it, and at the time the iPho…”
Gina Davis: Good Thomas ROAS fell from 10x to 3x after Apple changes
“We raised that outside capital in twenty-twenty-one, and then in the summer of twenty-twenty-two, the Apple Privacy Act happened, and our digital ad spend or return on ads went from 10 X To eight X to five X. And now we are lucky to hit three X.”
Tannen: Web gaming behavior shifted when App Store launched, not iPhone
“And people's Behaviors with games changed overnight. It was actually not when the iPhone came out. It was when the app store opened up.”
Meeker Traded Loaded iPods for Meetup Angel Investor Checks
“It was the exact moment where the iPod came out, and we sent notes to all of them, and we said, hey, Matt's gonna come up and pick up your paperwork and your check and if you hand it to him today, he's gonna hand you back an iPod pre-populated with a thousand …”
Odeo's $5M pre-product seed round eliminated agility against Apple's podcast entry
“We made the mistake of actually raising too much money pre-product, really even pre-product, we raised five million dollars, which was a terrible mistake because it allowed us to grow the team to the point where We just weren't nimble enough to easily pivot”
Apple bought out Rober's Morphsuits contract and initially banned YouTube videos
“I still had a year left in my contract with Morph Suits, so I interviewed at Apple. They liked me, so they bought me out of the contract. But one of the stipulations was like, you can't make YouTube videos anymore.”
Chaudhri: Multi-touch was the fundamental unlock for direct digital manipulation
“You know, I think that was the fundamental unlock for making the transition from remote interactions from a keyboard and mouse to really allowing people to do what we call direct manipulation, and that's literally just being able to touch the screen and have a…”
Chaudhri: Siloed stealth teams enable 1.0 products but create integration friction
“You know, there's some advantages. You get a, an amazing amount of focus, which is good, and I think the projects that, that I worked on were all essentially one point O's that, that turned into something else, and that really siloed, protected space allows fo…”
Gonzalez: Apple Was the Only Computer Maker Prioritizing Distinct Design
“The only guys that were really doing something
Interesting with the PC that gave it a design, gave it a life was Apple.”
Katz: Steve Jobs pledged $15M to market the original iPod
“Steve said he's going to spend fifteen million dollars marketing their audio player.”
Lynda.com secured massive enterprise adoption entirely through organic employee demand
“A lot of people who taught web design and Photoshop were using our courses, and they were bringing it into their schools and into their companies, so we'd be installed in all of Apple, all of Adobe, all of Microsoft, all of Google, and the employees were start…”
Tew: 10% of early Calm mobile app downloaders paid the $5 fee
“There was like a couple of audio recordings for free, and then you'd pay five dollars to unlock the full app. There was no subscription. In fact, at the time, Apple hadn't embraced subscriptions at all but it was encouraging because 10% of people who downloade…”
Rober's YouTube earnings surpassed his Apple engineering salary around 2017
“Yeah, and that deal, that one specifically, I think, was a brand deal for, like, 40,000 dollars, which to me was, like, really big money, like, to make that much money on a brand deal. So I started to make more money on YouTube than I was at Apple, for starter…”
Bongiorno: Apple gave 24 hours to accept secret iPad role before NDA
“A couple months after I joined, they asked me if I would take on a new project. And at the time they told me that they couldn't tell me what the project was, but that it would require that for the next, you know, year and a half to two years of my life, I woul…”
Chaudhri: He championed and added the Do Not Disturb feature at Apple
“Even at Apple, I was the champion for Do Not Disturb, and it was something that, you know, I added in because I had coexistence experiences like the one you described.”
Bongiorno: She and Chaudhri co-developed FaceTime and iMessage at Apple
“We, had the opportunity to build a lot of things together, whether it was new hardware and new, totally new product categories or software, things like FaceTime and iMessage, you know, that were really complicated things for billions of people that involved a …”
Sonos Anticipated Apple, Amazon, and Google Would Enter the Audio Market
“What we were worried about is that Apple, Amazon, and Google would ultimately get into this space, and they understood software clearly they had a global footprint, They could do an amazing job, so we knew down the road we would compete, be competing with them…”
MacFarlane: Purchased iTunes tracks could not play on Sonos due to DRM
“Well, that's where it got a little complicated because iTunes had that digital rights management. So if you bought an iTunes track, you couldn't play that. But if you used iTunes to play your ripped music, you could.”
Apple gave Wondery's 'Dirty John' a rare carousel takeover promotion
“And then finally we went to the Apple podcast team and actually shared with them the first episode of the show. They loved it so much that they agreed to give us what at the time was called the Beyonce treatment, you know, the takeover of the top carousel of t…”
Kelley: IDEO Predecessor Designed Around 50 Products for Apple
“And we ended up doing like 50 products for him, and Steve became a close friend and, you know, introduced me to my wife and couldn't have been closer to him. It was really that initial connection to Apple for IDEO, was called David Kelly Design at the time, th…”
Kelley: David Kelley Design created Apple's first mouse
“We got early involved in Apple and did the first mouse for them and many other products.”
Apple invited Gilt to build a launch app for the original iPad
“It made Apple then come and ask us, could we be one of the first apps to launch on the iPad device when the iPad launched?”
Nobu Nakaguchi designed Gilt's original iPad app using a cardboard cutout
“What Nobu did to design this was he watched the Apple, there was one Apple TV commercial where they showed an iPad, and he would watch that commercial again and again and freeze frame it to kind of zoom in on what is actually possible on this magical new devic…”
Citron: Free-to-play rise and Apple competition squeezed OpenFeint
“Free-to-play games kind of had less of a need for Openfeint. And we were also competing with Apple, and now Google at this point.”
Citron: Aurora Feint was among the first 50 App Store titles
“We were one of the first 50 titles on the App Store, and I remember thinking, like, if we get a thousand players in the first, you know, week, that would be incredible, and we got a thousand in the first hour, and I was like, oh, this is something.”
Marshall: Apple and Google's consumer electronics R&D far outpaced NASA's electronics budget
“But now, the billions and billions of dollars that would be going on in the consumer electronics industry, like Apple and Samsung and Google and all these companies, was far outpacing what NASA could spend on the development of electronics.”
Jony Ive replied to founders' cold email and mentored them
“We actually, funny story guy, we ended up reading the Steve Jobs biography and were super inspired by their design principles and cold emailed Johnny Ive from Apple on a Sunday afternoon, and he actually got back to us in like five minutes. And We were able to…”
Neistat: Apple iMac was the first consumer computer for video editing
“He bought an iMac computer, which was the first kind of the first consumer market computer that you could edit video on.”
Krieger: Instagram seeded pre-launch beta invites to Dribbble designers and journalists
“So one of the things we did was we have you have a hundred sort of Invites that you can have before you launch your app to the Apple store where you can invite people to try it out. And we're like, how are we going to use these hundred people? And we use them …”
Compaq co-founder Rod Canion exclusively uses a MacBook, iPad, and iPhone
“I use a MacBook Air and an iPad. Pro and iPhone.”
Case: Apple paid millions to buy out brand license, prompting AOL rebrand
“It was, I think, the first time Apple licensed their brand to another company, and indeed, not long after, within the first year of launching the Apple Inc. Service, Apple basically decided they didn't like the idea of, you know, they wish they hadn't licensed…”
Marshall: Planet founders shared a communal house with Apple, Google, and Stanford peers
“Yeah, no, actually, but it wasn't just NASA people. We had Students who are at Stanford, people that worked at Apple, people that worked at Google, all these places, and that created a fervor of intellectual dizziness that was always fun for us. So it was a mi…”
Social games dominated Facebook but were rare on Apple's App Store
“They evaluated the game, probably liked the story of us just being a few country bumpkins in Jersey in a, in an attic trying to build for this new platform they were launching, and liked the fact that we were building a social game, which was wildly popular on…”