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 9 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 realized Glitch could never justify its $17.5M venture investment
“It was never going to become the kind of business that would justify 17 and a half million dollars of venture capital investment.”
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…”
Glitch might have survived if it had not bet on Flash
“And we had made a bet On Flash as a technology for delivering the game, which wasn't going to work on mobiles, and I think in the end that, that really was the nail in the coffin. If it hadn't been for that, I think it would have been worth trying a little bit…”
Only 8 of 45 Glitch employees stayed to build Slack
“So there's 45 people at the company, and eight of them were going to stay on to work on Slack. So for the other 37 people, we did kind of career coaching. We wrote reference letters. We set up interviews for them. We ended up getting everyone a job”
Butterfield: Glitch had capital left over when the company shut it down
“In fact, we had money left over when we decided to shut it down, but it was apparent that it wouldn't work”
Pivoting from failed game Glitch to building Slack took under a week
“My memory is, is it took us months to decide this, and there's a lot of debate. In fact, it took us, like, less than a week. The core was there, like, almost instantly.”
Butterfield ensured all 37 laid-off Glitch employees secured new jobs
“By the end of that process, we had gotten, you know, every single person who worked there who was getting laid off, and there was like, 37 of them, I believe. Every single one of them got another job, and in most cases, they got a better job than the one that …”