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 8 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
Zennström: Skype Was the Largest Post-Dot-Com Internet Acquisition Globally
“The largest Internet M&A before us was PayPal to eBay, right? One point by a billion. And So this was like two X. And then you had. This is amazing. YouTube. YouTube was also 1.6 billion or something like that. Yeah. Also the same year with Google. So this was…”
Liu: Automated e-commerce price arbitrage remains viable across platforms today
“You can still do that today, and you can do, like, even more, right? So now there are, like, cross-border companies. You can actually scrape those companies and list down on eBay.”
Levchin: eBay Offered to Buy PayPal to Stop Its 2002 IPO
“Right as we filed to go public, they came in and said, Hey we'll we'll buy you. Don't go public. And we said no.”
Tolia: Shopping.com Went Public And Was Acquired By eBay For ~$620M-$630M
“We merged with another private company. We renamed the entire thing shopping.com. And believe it or not, shopping.com ultimately went public. Had a bit of a mixed track record, but ultimately was bought by eBay for, I think, about 626 hundred thirty million.”
Shear: Kiko Sold on eBay for $265,000 After 13 Bids
“It was on eBay. I believe 265,000 dollars was the winning bid. 13 bidders.”
Levchin: In 1999, individual eBay sellers could not process credit cards online
“Back in 99, there really isn't a way to take a credit card payment online if you were trying to sell things. For a business, there were a couple of companies that kind of provided that service. But if you were a, like, a normal person just trying to sell somet…”
Levchin: PayPal and X.com copied each other and competed on eBay incentives
“They came at payments a little bit after we did, but they had some really good ideas that we didn't have. So very quickly, we start just looking at each other and going, oh, that's a good idea. We'll copy that, and vice versa. And we were in the market just be…”