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 79 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
Blogger was Google's first acquisition involving employees rather than just IP
“We were literally the first acquisition that involved people. They had bought some IP, but we're the first group of employees to come in who were Googlers, but not.”
Google merged DeepMind and Google Brain because separate scaling made no sense
“It was becoming clear that extremely scaled up models were going to become a really important thing in the future. And, you know, for Google it was important that we had the biggest and best models. And it doesn't make sense to have, you know, two different gr…”
Sonos Anticipated Apple, Amazon, and Google Would Enter the Audio Market
“What we were worried about is that Apple, Amazon, and Google would ultimately get into this space, and they understood software clearly they had a global footprint, They could do an amazing job, so we knew down the road we would compete, be competing with them…”
Von Ahn: Duolingo raised $45 million from Google's CapitalG
“And at some point we raised money from Google capital G is one of their investment arms. We raised money from them. It was, I believe it was forty-five million bucks that we raised from them.”
Luis von Ahn: Google Acquired ESP Game for Google Image Labeler
“And at some point, actually Google, in fact, bought it. They just bought the technology, and then it got implemented. They changed the name from the ESP game, which I call it the ESP game, because it's like ES, extrasensory perception. The idea was like, tried…”
Von Ahn forfeited part of his Google payout by leaving early
“Leaving cost me quite a bit of money, because some of the recapture payment required that I stay there for three years, yeah, and I did not stay for three years.”
Dolgov: Google gave self-driving team a 100,000-mile zero-intervention mandate
“The first one was to drive a 100,000 miles in autonomous mode. That was, you know, way more than orders of magnitude, more than, you know, what anybody has done at that time. And the second one, and, you know, actually that one turned out to be more interestin…”
Ferguson: Google's early self-driving car project incorporated ML first into behavior prediction
“When I got there, I actually worked on, on the prediction system. So this was trying to predict what other agents, other road users were going to do. And so this was some of the first machine learning that, that we incorporated into the self-driving car projec…”
Levchin: Sundar Pichai was singularly the kindest person at Google
“Sundar, who is now of course the CEO of the whole thing was singularly the kindest person I met at Google.”
Google has roughly 100 people on its Santa Barbara quantum computing team
“The fact that I can go talk to our quantum team in Santa Barbara, and there are a hundred people working on literally some of the most state of the art technology That humanity has ever worked on.”
Google uses AI to map African buildings for the UN
“We are mapping buildings in Africa, and these are hard to do, and we're using AI to really scale up the number of buildings we are mapping, and we are sharing the data with the World Bank and the United Nations to use for nonprofit purposes.”
A mid-2000s Google survey revealed WordPress powered 0.8% of the web
“Google had done this survey, published a survey of the internet. It was kind of like a statistical analysis of all the websites that were in the Google index and the code they used. And there was this part of the report that said, yeah, and then on .8% of webs…”
Citron: Free-to-play rise and Apple competition squeezed OpenFeint
“Free-to-play games kind of had less of a need for Openfeint. And we were also competing with Apple, and now Google at this point.”
Dang Foods' corporate tech pantry sales dropped 90 percent during the pandemic
“Because of stay at home, they, those sales dropped about 90% pre and post-COVID, and even now they're not fully back.”
Marshall: Planet supplies satellite data to Google for Google Maps
“So we supply data to Google for their maps. They do huge numbers of requests to us.”
Marshall: Apple and Google's consumer electronics R&D far outpaced NASA's electronics budget
“But now, the billions and billions of dollars that would be going on in the consumer electronics industry, like Apple and Samsung and Google and all these companies, was far outpacing what NASA could spend on the development of electronics.”
Reffkin: Compass Co-Founder Ori Allon Sold Startups to Google and Twitter
“I had a friend named Ori Alone who had sold a company to Google and another company to Twitter”
Insurance keywords on Google cost upwards of $40 to $60 per click
“It's one of the most expensive AdWords that you can purchase on Google. The word insurance and insurance related terms can go upwards of 40, 50, 60 dollars a click.”
Toby Egbuna: Chezzi has 1,400 stories and roughly 1,200 users
“We Have about 1400 stories from companies at some companies like Google, Goldman Sachs, Facebook. We have around 1200 people signed up for our platform, maybe around 1212 150. I haven't checked today.”
Google's corporate offices accounted for 15% of Hint's total business
“And obviously, when Google offices closed, that business for us went away. It was about 15% of our overall business.”
Sam Yam: AdMob Acquired Adworld One Month Before Google Acquired AdMob
“It was a company called AdMob, and then literally the month afterwards, we were acquired into Google.”
Google and the Gates Foundation granted $4M to Khan Academy in 2010
“And by fall of 2010, both the Google and the Gates Foundation each gave about two million dollars. So we had a four million dollar initial funding for that first two years to hire up a team, internationalize, and start scaling Khan Academy.”
Von Ahn: Early OCR failed on 30% of scanned book words
“Computers cannot, or at the time, could not recognize many of the words. About 30% of the words computers could not recognize.”
Von Ahn forfeited part of Google payout by leaving before three years
“Leaving cost me quite a bit of money, because some of the reCAPTCHA payment required that I stay there for three years. Yeah, and I did not stay for three years.”
Von Ahn: reCAPTCHA had no outside investors when Google acquired it
“Especially since we didn't have investors or anything. It's all the money went to us.”
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.”
Founders cold-emailed hundreds of bag factories found via Google
“We literally turned to Google and started to Google things like how to make backpacks, how to start a backpack factory, where to make backpacks, and we took our little PDF on the same email, and we sent it to, like, hundreds of email addresses we found in comp…”
Marshall: Planet founders shared a communal house with Apple, Google, and Stanford peers
“Yeah, no, actually, but it wasn't just NASA people. We had Students who are at Stanford, people that worked at Apple, people that worked at Google, all these places, and that created a fervor of intellectual dizziness that was always fun for us. So it was a mi…”
Seth: Stayed at Google because H-1B visa prevented founding a startup
“The reality was that I was still on an H-one B visa and I couldn't. And so I just continued working at Google and just kept building stuff there, hoping that one day I would get a green card so that I could work in my own company.”