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 69 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
Spiegel: Snap did not anticipate Instagram directly carbon-copying Stories
“The one thing that we didn't anticipate was that Instagram would actually perfectly copy stories, like carbon copy it, because in the past they had sort of tried different rifts on our products, like they would take the core idea, but then try to make it bette…”
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.”
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…”
Whitney Wolfe Herd: Interacting on TikTok and Instagram Kills Real Friendship
“Friendship has moved online, and it has actually killed friendship. Chatting with your buddies on TikTok and Instagram does not count as relationship. That is not a soulful, real relationship, and candidly, It creates more of a voyeuristic fear of missing out …”
Wolfe Herd: Interacting on TikTok and Instagram degrades authentic offline friendship
“So friendship has moved online, and it has actually killed friendship. Chatting with your buddies on TikTok and Instagram does not count as relationship. That is not a soulful, real relationship, and candidly, it creates more of a voyeuristic fear of missing o…”
Lütke: Digitally Native Retailers Replaced Over 90% of Lost Sales
“The businesses that were More digitally native. Business that had retail, but also were online and on the different channels like Instagram or Pinterest. They have replaced over 90% of their lost sales.”
Systrom: Choosing an open network model drove Instagram's sustained growth
“I believe the thing that kept it growing was we created an open network.”
Systrom: Instagram grew because prior photo apps were closed, friends-only networks
“If you look at every photo service before then, it was basically a closed-only, friends-only network, and we were the first ones to really open that up.”
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.”
Systrom: We copied our first Terms of Service from another site
“We had these terms of service that we had I think effectively copied from some other site way back in the day and just find and replace their name with Instagram because we were a startup and we didn't know what we were doing.”
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…”
McKelvey: TikTok favors raw, direct storytelling more than Instagram
“And again, I think what you find in the difference between tick tock and Instagram is
You know, narrative, like, rough storytelling, real people in front of a camera, that's really on TikTok these days, and it's less so on, on some of these other platforms, …”
Mei Xu: Consumer startups must pursue omnichannel distribution rather than single-channel sales
“I don't think one can try only one channel these days. We really are in a, in an economy where you need to meet people where they shop and people shop everywhere. They shop on TikTok, they shop on Instagram, they shop in store, they like what they see in a hot…”
Kevin Systrom and Jack Dorsey paired to build Odeo's desktop podcatcher
“We also had Kevin Systrom, founder of Instagram. Was working for us as an intern. So, Kevin and Jack paired to write our, I think our installable podcatcher, as we called them.”
Displaying a flashy luxury lifestyle accelerated Dhar Mann's Instagram follower growth
“It didn't take me long to realize that the flashier I was on Instagram, the faster my following would grow.”
Preysman argues Instagram and TikTok have become America's new shopping malls
“I think Instagram and TikTok have become the shopping malls of America. You're discovering small brands all the time.”
Lincoln: Performative activism is about image protection rather than thoughtful action
“Performative activism is rooted in a motivation to show up, like on Instagram, let's say, to preserve or protect your image. Versus doing something that's super thoughtful and based on truth.”
Krieger felt guilty leaving Instagram during the platform's public backlash
“I saw it less like, you know, the tide is changing, therefore it's time for us to leave, and in fact, it was like the other side, like, ugh, like, maybe, not to sound conceited, but like, maybe this is when we could be most needed and that was definitely like …”
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…”
Foley: Pure Software Companies Are Easiest to Build and Fund
“A pure software company is easiest to do, and it's easiest to raise money for. Every venture capitalist is looking for the next Instagram platform. Where you put 250,000 dollars in, and 18 months later it sells for a billion dollars.”
Systrom: Instagram account deletions dropped to zero after apology blog post
“And Mike and I sat down and we were like, what do we do? And we felt helpless. I mean, it was like all over, it was that first day all over again. It's like, we've screwed this up. How do we make sure people know? And I went back in my head. I was like, why do…”
Systrom: Instagram's original Terms of Service were copied from another site
“We had these terms of service that we had I think effectively copied from some other site way back in the day and just find and replace their name with Instagram because we were a startup and we didn't know what we were doing.”
Systrom: Instagram's first filter and photo were created in Mexico
“I literally just, like, researched how to make the first filter, which ended up being called X-Pro II, and if you scroll all the way back on my account to the very first photo, there's Nicole's foot and a little stray dog in Mexico, and that's because that day…”
Systrom: Account deletions dropped to zero after our Terms of Service apology
“I posted this blog post on our blog. You can probably still find it online. And I was like, we're sorry. Like, we didn't mean this. That's absolutely not what we're trying to do. And we tweeted about it. And actually the graph of deletions at that moment drops…”
Krieger: End users don't care about your startup's valuation or funding
“Your valuation and the amount you raise, it can be helpful in building your product, but it does absolutely nothing. People, end users don't care at all how much money you've raised. They care if you're providing some kind of value”
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 …”
Krause: Scrub Daddy has nearly 5M TikTok and 1M Instagram followers
“I mean, we have almost five million followers on TikTok now, almost a million on Instagram, and some of our videos get twenty million views.”
Andy Dunn: Carraway scaled through 3,000 unpaid Instagram gifting partners
“I'm a, I'm an investor, angel investor in a brand called Carraway. It's pots and pans and kitchenware. And what he did that I thought that was so smart is he actually built an army of something like 3000 Instagram partners. It was just value exchange for free …”
ChatGPT Reached 100 Million Users in Two Months Compared to Instagram
“It took Instagram, I think two years to get to a hundred million users and it took chat GPT two months.”
Lewis: Same influencers generated 10x more sales for Magic Spoon than Exo
“Even down to the first month of Magic Spoon, we did a post from one of the same influencers that used to promote XO, and whereas at XO, if they did a post on Instagram about us, maybe generated a few hundred dollars, with Magic Spoon, that same influencer was …”
Cole: Early Slutty Vegan pop-ups drew 300 to 500 people per post
“And every time I post on Instagram, I literally had between three to 500 people that would stand outside.”
Suitsupply trains its retail style experts to become Instagram influencers
“You can become a style expert in, in, in training other people, but you can also become what we call a key opinion leader, where we train you in how to represent the brand on social media or on outside of the store, where you basically become sort of a I would…”
Dang Foods' website traffic spiked 100x after a Kourtney Kardashian Instagram post
“After the Kourtney Kardashian post, our website traffic spiked like a hundred times.”
Jeff Martin: Kate Spade posted Pipcorn on Instagram during its debut
“Kate Spade. Put us on her Instagram.”
Garza: Siete sold out its initial retail batch within 24 hours
“So we had put these tortillas on the shelf in May of 2014 at Wheatsville, and we put two cases to the shelf, and we had learned a little bit from owning the gym on, like, marketing a service-based business, so what, you know, what we did was we took a picture,…”
Magazine press drove Sephora sales in 2008 before influencer marketing
“So in 2008, you know, this is before Instagram and influencer marketing, and it was all really about those press placements. That you'd get in the magazine that showed your product. They were very product driven, and that's what sold product in Sephora.”
Instagram grew from 13 employees at acquisition to over 1,000
“When you're inside of a large company that has grown from, you know, 13 people at the acquisition to, you know, we were probably over a thousand towards the end, you get wired in a certain way to think a certain way and talk a certain way and that unwiring tak…”
Instagram launched without a block feature but built one within days
“Like, we didn't launch with a block feature, because we didn't need it at the beginning, or didn't think we needed it, and they're like, I don't want this guy on my Instagram, and we're like, oh yeah, that makes sense, and I think we had that out in like two o…”
Krieger recommitted to Instagram annually by assessing learning and impact
“I used to tell the team very openly, like every year, you know, I would sit down and like sort of recommit to Instagram and say like, am I still learning? Is this still exciting? I still feel like I can have impact. Or is it time for the next chapter?”
Instagram grew from 40M users at acquisition to over 1B
“You know, we sold it and it was how many million users? Maybe 30 or forty million users. And we got it to over a billion.”
Glossier hired early Instagram engineers to build its digital platform
“So, we actually just hired the person who built DMs and camera at Instagram, and then we also made another hire of the guy who was employee nine at Instagram who's an amazing product designer, digital product designer, because we're spending a lot of time thin…”
Krieger: Early users at an app launch set the community culture
“So we had this intuition that if you're going to throw a party, which is kind of what an app launch really is as people are streaming to the door, you want them to sort of know how they should act and who else is there.”
Systrom: Justin Bieber signing up drove viral adoption among teens
“And I remember Justin Bieber signing up, and the world going kind of bonkers for that as well, and by world, I mean teenage girls, and they basically started using the app incessantly, and it kind of took off with, like, a bunch of really young people as well.”
Systrom: Instagram gained 25,000 users within its first 24 hours
“The first 24 hours we had 20 5000 people sign up around the world, which sounded big to us at the time.”
Krieger: Instagram seeded pre-launch beta invites to Dribbble designers and journalists
“So one of the things we did was we have you have a hundred sort of Invites that you can have before you launch your app to the Apple store where you can invite people to try it out. And we're like, how are we going to use these hundred people? And we use them …”