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 14 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
Tannen: Taking Outside Capital Forces Founders to Prioritize Shareholder Return
“As soon as you take money from an investor, your number one goal moves from whatever it is today to providing a shareholder return. And there's an expectation from those shareholders that you're going to pick up the phone, you're going to talk to them, and you…”
Tannen: Suppliers sold Chinese-grown cotton labeled as 'Egyptian cotton'
“I found that these Egyptian cotton sheets that they were selling me were woven in China. They just named a plant, a cotton plant in China, Egyptian cotton, so that they could call it that.”
Scott Tannen: DTC bedding cuts out 50-point importer margins
“By going direct, there's an importer somewhere that's used to making a fifty-point margin on this stuff that's just not going to gonna get it, right?”
Tannen gave up 20% of Boll & Branch to raise $2M
“Reached out to, you know, the true definition of friends and family, and I needed about two million dollars. And I closed it in a week and a half... It costs us at least 15 to 20% of the business.”
Tannen: Leveraged home equity and $2M SBA loan for Stern ads
“I finally decided to take all of the equity out of my house and then some, and I got a two million dollar term loan from the Small Business Association.”
Scott Tannen: Wall Street Journal article generated $500K in sales
“We wake up in the morning and I pull open our system and we had done over a 100,000 dollars in sales. And this is like 10 o'clock in the morning. And by two in the afternoon, we were completely out of inventory. By the time the day and the next couple days wer…”
Scott Tannen: Boll & Branch Early Investors Made 12x to 15x Returns
“None of those early investors are with us anymore. Most of them honestly made somewhere between 12 and 15 X their money which isn't bad for a three-year investment.”
Tannen had $5M in personally guaranteed SBA debt by 2017
“At that point, I was already sitting with five million dollars in personally guaranteed debt from the SBA. So there was no ability to raise additional debt”
Tannen: Howard Stern ads drove Boll & Branch from $1.5M to $13.5M
“Thanks to Howard, we ended up going from a 1,000,005 in sales in 2014 to almost 13 and a half million in our second year.”
Tannen Took Massive Personal Debt to Advertise on Howard Stern
“I took the most amount of debt I've ever had on anything in my life. Just to advertise on Howard Stern.”
Tannen: Minimum spend to advertise on Howard Stern was $2M
“The minimum to get on Howard Stern was two million dollars.”
Tannen: 2015 was Boll & Branch's only unprofitable year in company history
“So it's the only year in our history we ran a loss. We lost 200,000 dollars that year.”
Boll & Branch accidentally ordered 10x shipping boxes due to extra zero
“We had placed an order for 10 times the number of boxes that we needed... There was literally an extra zero added at the end of the purchase order.”
Boll & Branch Committed to Full Traceability Without Prior Factory Experience
“And so that was the point where we said, forget, let's forget this conventional route. We've got to go the route of Full traceability from end to end. We'd never at that point had never walked or stepped foot in a textile factory, nor had Missy.”