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 11 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
Butterfield: Working with a spouse during an early startup is uniquely stressful
“It's pretty challenging to work with your spouse, especially in the early days of a startup, so this is going back many years now, when we first started working on Flickr, like, out of money, and it's not just the business is out of money, it's like, we're out…”
Flickr was initially built to be sold for $1M to fund gaming
“And that thing ended up being Flickr, and I think when we started it, the intention was, we'll build this, and someone will buy it for, like, a million dollars, and then we can use that million dollars to finish the game.”
Modern venture investors would unanimously advise against Flickr's early $20M acquisition
“I mean, like, a hundred percent of the time, they would give the opposite advice today.”
Butterfield originally paid co-founder Cal Henderson via Amazon wishlist purchases
“The original payment he got was me buying stuff off his Amazon wishlist.”
Cal Henderson built Flickr's core architecture during his daily train commutes
“On the train to London every day, two hours in, two hours out, he wrote almost all of the guts of Flickr the way to upload the photos and to process them, to store them, display them.”
Google's early Blogger help docs explicitly recommended users host photos on Flickr
“Google had bought Blogger which was one of the early blogging programs, and they didn't have a way to host photos, so they put, you know, in their help materials online When people said, how do I upload photos? They said, use Flickr.”
Getting approval for new Flickr servers at Yahoo took five weeks
“Now when we wanted to get more servers, we had to go to the hardware review committee, and you had to make an appointment, and you couldn't get an appointment for like five weeks.”
Butterfield initially lost a team vote to pivot to Flickr
“So we had this vote. I lost you know, or Flickr lost in game one, so that I had to call Eric on the side and, like, you know, do some, what I imagine happens in the Senate, some kind of, like, horse trading to convince him to change his vote. And that worked, …”