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 70 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
Newmark denies Craigslist killed newspapers, blaming TV news, Google, and Facebook
“I, in the past, felt that Craigslist did have a substantial effect on newspaper survival, but until
No one had done any of the numbers.
I'd spoke to industry analysts like Ken doctor and Rasmus Nielsen, who said it was ridiculous to think Craigslist had that b…”
Spiegel: Instagram sold to Facebook way too early
“Well, I think, as you mentioned, we did have the benefit of learning from Instagram, and it was very clear that Instagram had sold way too early.”
Spiegel: Zuckerberg Disclosed Facebook's Poke Clone In Late 2012 Meeting
“He was telling us about working on a new poke app, which ultimately ended up being a copycat of Snapchat at the time.”
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.”
Ramadan: Instacart Retail Ads Deliver 2x–3x Higher ROI Than Meta Ads
“When you get into those stores, really focusing on services like Instacart, I've seen that have a much higher, I'm talking like
Two to three times higher ROI than spending on Meta.”
Harris: Safety controls on open-source AI models can be removed for $100
“I won't go into technical details, but basically for about a hundred dollars, you can retrain all the safety controls off of it.”
Gilboa: Warby Parker unit economics are comparable across retail and e-commerce
“We find that the economics for us are pretty comparable regardless of channel that, that customers are shopping in.”
Yassin: It is impossible to build a 30-year business on social media
“You cannot build a business on top of social media. Impossible. And so, so this idea that Facebook will be my livelihood, and I can build an empire for the next 30 years, thanks to Facebook's algorithm, is, is a dream that will never materialize.”
Cuban: Algorithmic content promotion is effectively an editorial choice
“Because when you're
Designing an algorithm or using AI and setting the goals of the AI that you've created, the neural networks you've created, you effectively are making an editorial choice to promote something.”
Patrick Collison: Money cannot be mechanically turned into great software products
“And this is one of the great facts about our industry is that you cannot turn Money into great products as a kind of mechanical operation. If it were possible, there would be many more great iPhone competitors. Facebook would have been long since eclipsed by M…”
Peretti: Publisher content no longer goes viral across a fragmented social web
“The biggest difference is that content from publishers used to go viral on Facebook all the time, and everyone used to be on Facebook. Now, now the social web is really fragmented. Some people are on Facebook, some on Instagram, some on TikTok, so, you know, s…”
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?”
Best: Facebook's core issue is working too well without serving its users
“The problem with Facebook is not that it doesn't work, right? The problem with Facebook is that it works too well. And doesn't serve the people who use it. Right. Yes, it kills all the newspapers, but it's a massively successful business that takes, takes adva…”
Acevedo: Multi-channel network economics broke when YouTube enabled direct creator monetization
“The model of an MCN, or the model when you are on rented territory, for the lack of a better word, you're on YouTube, you're on Facebook, those algorithms change, those rules change. Also, your economics, talking about business model, because when we launched,…”
Samantha Bee: Facebook has caused immense damage globally and should be deleted
“Boy, I would I would just delete Facebook. I mean, I never was a Facebook person, but it's just done so much damage, not just in our own country, but across the world.”
Kadakia: Aggregator CAC is More Efficient Due to Higher Lifetime Value
“The synergies, right, of a company like ClassPass being able to do customer acquisition for an entire industry, right, where a class is, you know, 25, 30 dollars is just obviously more efficient when we're selling a product that has a bigger lifetime, right? W…”
Collison: Google possessed every advantage and should have beaten Facebook
“Google should have beaten Facebook. Google had every advantage against Facebook. They had you know, more people, more money, more distribution, more brand recognition, more of kind of any of the obvious inputs, and yet somehow there was something missing.”
Fabricated fake news websites have had almost zero impact on Wikipedia
“And those kinds of sites have had almost zero impact at Wikipedia because while, you know, they might do well to share on Facebook something that comes from a publication called the Denver Guardian because, well, it looks like a news site, and Denver, everybod…”
Systrom: Instagram never actually intended to use user photos in ads
“One of the sections Reading it again today, if I look at it, can be interpreted that we were going to take user photos and somehow use them in advertising. That was definitely not our intention, and like, no one in the company had even thought of that idea.”
Modern brand building centers on digital attention rather than retail shelf space
“I think when we created the brand in 2002 and three and four, our biggest obstacle was how are we going to get space in a retail environment controlled by four guys? I think today, now it's how are you going to own the most amount of attention from the consume…”
Acton Smith: Silicon Valley offered scaling talent and openness lacking in London
“Silicon Valley was the place to build this business. You know, the, there was more investors who were open to ideas like this. The climate was more open to it as well. A lot of our friends and people we knew in London were very, very skeptical of meditation an…”
Best: Facebook charged creators to build audiences then charged again for reach
“And this had happened with Facebook pages at this point. They created a thing where people spent all this money getting people to like their Facebook page on the assumption that that meant they'd built up an audience. And then they said, oh, just kidding. Actu…”
Winer: Hexclad Blew Its $1M Cash Reserve on April 2020 Meta Ads
“And I remember we had a million bucks. And we just looked at each other, and we're like, let's blow the whole million on advertising on Meta, and we spent a million bucks in April, and I think in February we had, we were doing a million a month online, and we …”
Facebook offered $500M in stock for 30-person Twitter in 2008
“Facebook, of course, was private at the time, but based on their valuation, they could do a stock deal that may value us around Half billion dollars, and that was a lot of money, and we were maybe, no, we were we were 30 people at the time.”
Dhar Mann Studios derives 97% of its revenue from platform advertising
“It's still 97% through ad revenue coming from Facebook and YouTube. And the remaining delta is us having brand sponsorships in certain videos.”
Liu: Typical E-Commerce Companies Spend $50 to $100 Per Customer on Ads
“People, other e-commerce companies spend probably 50 to a hundred dollars to Google and Facebook to acquire a new user, right?”
Norton: Sir Kensington's spent zero dollars on Facebook ads from $8.5M raise
“Unlike so many of our peers, you know, Facebook didn't see a cent from that eight million dollar raise.”
Early Facebook ads let brands link page likes directly to in-store purchases
“They could track if you liked a page on Facebook and They could track that, link it to your wallet, and find out what type of products you were buying at the store.”
Solivan: Facebook's social graph creates sufficient trust for peer-to-peer services
“And so I saw Facebook as a way to leverage the social graph to build trust between people. So if I could tell you that, You know, you need your dry cleaning picked up, and the person that was gonna pick up your dry cleaning was two degrees of separation from y…”
Solivan: Facebook Offered $15,000 for Equity to Join fbFund Incubator
“So we get the offer from Facebook to come out to do the incubator program. It's 15,000 dollars. And it's for a chunk of the company. It's like, you know, a few percentage points of the company.”
Vaynerchuk: Facebook marketing is driving massive under-30 signups for Groups
“I'm blown away by how much under-thirty-year-olds are signing up for Facebook groups at scale right now. I think it's an effective marketing job by them.”
Vaynerchuk's first three investments were Twitter, Facebook, and Tumblr
“I put 34,000 dollars into Twitter. Okay. Okay. The reason I had that, and then I also put money into Facebook, and then put money into Tumblr. Those were my first three investments.”
Patrick Collison: Google had every advantage over Facebook and still lost
“Google should have beaten Facebook. Google had every advantage against Facebook. They had you know, more people, more money, more distribution, more brand recognition, more of kind of any of the obvious inputs, and yet somehow there was something missing.”
Butterfield: Shutting an online community is like ending a small civilization
“Any of you who have participated in online communities, especially in the early days, where, like, the online community was the nexus of all of these friendships and all these relationships, when they disappeared, that's it. Like, people can say, we're gonna m…”
Wales: Fake news sites have had almost zero impact on Wikipedia
“Those kinds of sites have had almost zero impact at Wikipedia because while, you know, they might do well to share on Facebook something that comes from a publication called the Denver Guardian because, well, it looks like a news site, and Denver, everybody kn…”
Systrom left Facebook due to exhaustion and desire for new projects
“That's why I think we ended up leaving, because you want a little break and recovery time, and then my personality is such that I'm excited about doing something new. Like, I, I'm just like, I'm always on to some new idea, And I don't know, it probably won't b…”
Gebbia: Top VCs behind Google and Facebook said Airbnb would never work
“I can tell you all the times and show you all the emails from really credible investors, like people that, these, they're investors that picked Google and PayPal and YouTube and Facebook and all of the kind of internet greats that came before us, and so sittin…”
Krieger: Instagram was Facebook's first acquisition allowed to operate independently
“We were the first company that Facebook acquired and sort of kept running, and then since then you've seen Oculus and WhatsApp, and, ah, I think there were a lot of things that we figured out early on in terms of the relationship, the office space, hiring and …”
Facebook acquired entire design agencies to grow its internal team
“You know, Facebook was acquiring entire design agencies to try to make their design team bigger.”
Hedrick: Tecovas faced no Western boot brand advertising competitors in early 2016
“There was a combination of there not being any other, I think, Western boot brands advertising at the time, and us having a really compelling value proposition, and candidly, man, we had product market fit, and people loved the boots,”
Misfits Market Spent $1,500 Daily on Facebook Ads Before Outside Funding
“I got to a point where I was probably spending about You know, 1500 dollars a day on paid ads on Facebook and bringing in a hundred customers a day.”
Dhar Mann: Facebook ad revenue reached six figures monthly in 2020
“In 2020, I think we were bringing in hundreds of thousands of dollars from Facebook.
Guy Raz: A year?
Dhar Mann: No, it was around six figures a month.
Guy Raz: Wow.
Dhar Mann: On Facebook.”
Dhar Mann: Studio expansion is fully bootstrapped without outside investors
“It's all self-financed, all bootstrapped, and all made possible through Facebook and YouTube.”
Dhar Mann Studios amassed three billion Facebook views by late 2019
“And by July that year, we hit one billion views. So it took us just over a year from starting to hit that milestone. But by October, 2019, three months later, we hit two billion views. And then two months later, by November, we hit three billion views.”
Dhar Mann's 2018 video on stay-at-home moms surpassed 200 million views
“And sure enough, that video within a few hours had gotten thousands of shares and over a million views. And I'll never forget. It was posted on August 30th. And today that video has gone to receive over two hundred million views.”
Chandra: Poshmark grew 3x to 5x in two months from Facebook mobile ad beta
“And it turned out that in the first two months, it was an extremely successful product. And we just grew Three to five acts in two months.”