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 20 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
Weinman realized her hired CEO held more power than the founders
“And I realized very late in the game that the CEO had more power than I did. And more power than Bruce did.”
Heavin: Taking venture capital starts a clock and shifts employee motives
“I knew the second you take a dime, we're starting a clock. We're starting expectations. It kind of changes the nature of people when they even come for a job interview. You know, the question is, how much stock do I get, you know?”
Venture capital shifted Lynda.com to merciless EBITDA optimization
“And I think my fear was realized because it took away our passion and focus on education, and it drove it down Just a pure business path, and decisions were merciless. It was just about how to gain EBITDA, and it made working there a lot less fun.”
Heavin: Data analytics cannot successfully drive educational content programming
“You can't do all this based on data analytics to understand what you need to do for programming of content for learning. But I kind of always had this belief you had to be a little bit of a bookie and a fortune teller. And the data analytics is very important,…”
Weinman: Offering free content is the enemy of a successful business
“You know, we sort of felt that free was the enemy of a successful business.”
Adding closed captioning drove more growth for Lynda.com than paid marketing
“Believe it or not, it, the closed captioning was a very beneficial thing to us, more so than any marketing.”
Weinman: Scale New Topics by Empowering Connected Domain Insiders to Curate Instructors
“So what you do is you find another me, you find somebody who is an industry insider at the top of their field, who knows everybody. And then they were empowered to, you know, curate who they were going to invite to come in as teachers and oversee the quality o…”
Lynda.com secured massive enterprise adoption entirely through organic employee demand
“A lot of people who taught web design and Photoshop were using our courses, and they were bringing it into their schools and into their companies, so we'd be installed in all of Apple, all of Adobe, all of Microsoft, all of Google, and the employees were start…”
Heavin: Employee departures surged at Lynda.com after raising venture capital
“It made working there a lot less interesting, and I could tell you I could count on one hand how many people chose to leave before we took money. But after we took money and the business started changing because of investors, because of this pressure, we had m…”
Lynda.com generated $1.7 million in revenue in its first year
“In the first year, our revenue was 1.7 million dollars, which to us was just, you know, we'd never imagined.”
Bruce Heavin: Adobe and Martha Stewart sent employees to Lynda.com workshops
“And we were having Adobe sending their employees to us. Martha Stewart was sending employees to us.”
Lynda Weinman purchased the lynda.com domain name for just $35
“And sure enough, it was for 35 dollars, so I bought it.”
Weinman: Lynda.com reached top 100 global websites by web traffic
“There were times where we would look at where we ranked in the world in terms of traffic, and we would be in the top 100 websites in the world, you know, because we were just so early.”
Weinman: Lynda.com dropped books, DVDs, and classes to go all-in online
“We had sort of this moment of reckoning right around 2005, 2006, and it was, what do we do that's different from all the competitors in the field? What's our differentiator? And we made the decision. It's the fact that we're delivering online and that's our co…”
Weinman: Lynda.com laid off over half its workforce in 2001
“We had to lay off more than half our people.”
Inbound investor interest in Lynda.com surged at $10 million in revenue
“I remember when we hit this sort of magic number, ten million in revenue, that the phone started ringing off the hook with people wanting to invest in us.”
Lynda.com dipped to $1M in revenue and 9 employees at its low point
“Even the year, I think our worst year, We did a little over one million dollars in the year and we had like nine employees.”
Weinman: LinkedIn Was the Perfect Suitor for Lynda.com
“It was not, it didn't feel perfect at the time, but it was the perfect suitor with the perfect business and the perfect time, and even though, you know, they've done something different with it than what we were doing, I know it's been super successful for the…”
Early Lynda.com sold video tapes via mail-in checks without e-commerce
“We had no e-commerce. We had a thing on the website that said, send your check and money order to PO Box in Ojai, California, and then we had notified them by email when we got their payment. So people were sending their checks and money orders to our PO Box i…”