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 28 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
Zennström: Microsoft Missed a Huge Opportunity to Make Skype 'Really Big'
“They could have done, if you ask me, they could have done so much more with it. You know, they kind of, I think they missed an opportunity to make it really, really big.”
Microsoft threatened to drop Figma unless it started charging for its product
“One of their design leaders came to our office and spent some real time with me, and he I think was sussing out, like, is, are they serious or not? And at the end, he goes, you know, your tool is free. I said, I know, I, we gotta make some improvements, I thin…”
Citron: Discord rejected acquisition offers because the team wanted to keep building
“The interesting thing about the experience we went through earlier this year, you know, I can't comment on any specific companies, but it was a really crystallizing moment because, you know, I was talking to some of the folks on my team about sort of what path…”
Katz: In the 1990s, Microsoft targeted any startup building a platform
“If anyone said they were building a platform, Microsoft would make it their business to destroy your company.”
Reffkin: Traditional brokerages pocketed profits instead of investing in R&D
“This has been a model for over a hundred years where brokerage firms had taken the profits from the agents, split it between the manager, the manager's manager, and the owner, and on balance that owner put in their pocket and then they went on vacation. But wh…”
Huang: NVIDIA's initial graphics architecture was incompatible with Microsoft's DirectX API
“And Microsoft is about to announce Windows 95. And Windows 95 has a API called DirectX, and DirectX does it the right way, and we were incompatible with DirectX. And so anyways, we chose some approaches that were just fundamentally wrong.”
Lee resigned from Microsoft because Xbox games isolated children
“And I just thought, like, oh, I am so clearly part of the problem here. Like, something about it feels broken. And within about two weeks, I resigned and knew I had to go do something else.”
Gordon: Working at Microsoft Was More Prestigious than Amazon in Mid-2000s
“Like, truthfully, getting a job at Microsoft was much more prestigious than getting a job at Amazon at that time in Seattle.”
Guy Raz: Microsoft Will Permanently Retire Skype on May 5, 2025
“Microsoft announced that it would permanently retire Skype and shift its remaining users over to Microsoft Teams. Skype will ring for the last time on May fifth, 2025.”
Major 1990s Software Giants Refused Internet Sales Over Channel Conflict Fears
“The folks that kind of were the gatekeepers at the big software companies at that time, Microsoft, Borland, Lotus Weren't interested in selling their software over the internet. They were more worried about hurting their sales through the conventional channels…”
Heirloom signed a multi-hundred million dollar carbon removal deal with Microsoft
“This year we signed a contract with Microsoft. It's about 315,000 tons. It's a multi-hundred million dollar deal.”
Donnel Baird: Goldman and Microsoft debt provides most of BlocPower's capital
“The majority of the capital that we've raised is actually from Goldman and Microsoft, and we have to repay them. And so, every dollar that we take in from them has to have a plan where we can give them four, five, six, seven percent return. Out of the profits …”
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…”
Riot's early lead developer held secret pitch meetings with Sony and Microsoft
“So that was a really contentious moment in, in the office where it turned out that we heard that this individual was having meetings with, you know, Sony and Microsoft to try to go build games for, you know, the PlayStation network or the burgeoning Xbox marke…”
Hsieh: Walked Away from Unvested Stock Following Microsoft Acquisition
“Well, in Silicon Valley, usually there's a four-year, what's known as a four-year vesting for your stock, and I'd only been there for two and a half years, so really had to stay for another year and a half after Microsoft acquired us in order to get the full a…”
Field: Coda, Notion, Microsoft, and Uber were early Figma customers
“So, early customers like Coda Notion, Microsoft, Uber, MindBody, you know, there was a bunch that, that started to really use the platform.”
Zennström: Microsoft Acquired Skype for $8.5 Billion in 2011
“Microsoft came along and makes an offer that, you know, the investors took on for eight and a half billion.”
Barton's Microsoft team secretly pivoted Expedia from MSN to the open web
“We were building for MSN, which we recognized wasn't going to probably succeed as a platform. And so we quietly pivoted to building a web app and we kind of didn't tell anybody. And so we launched, we never launched on MSN, we launched on the broad internet.”
Barton pitched Bill Gates on a graphical online travel booking service
“I showed him Prodigy, and it was all a command line really ugly thing, but I talked about how I could see him doing a Kind of a Windows version of this and giving it to consumers could be a complete game changer for consumer empowerment. And he agreed, yeah.”
Barton: Microsoft formed a travel agency to access airline reservation systems
“We knew that if we started a travel agency, that from an equal access perspective, we ought to be able to plug into these electron, these big mainframe based reservation systems that ran the industry and act like a travel agent. And if we got discriminated aga…”
Hsieh: LinkExchange Grew to 100 People and Sold to Microsoft for $265M
“Yeah, over two and a half years, we ended up growing the company, which was called Link Exchange, to about a hundred or so people. And then ultimately ended up selling the company to Microsoft in 1998 for two hundred sixty five million.”
Tony Hsieh walked away from 18 months of Microsoft stock vesting
“Well, in Silicon Valley, usually there's a four-year, what's known as a four-year investing for your stock, and I'd only been there for two and a half years, so really had to stay for another year and a half after Microsoft acquired us in order to get the full…”
LinkExchange grew to 100 employees and sold to Microsoft for $265 million
“Over two and a half years, we ended up growing the company, which was called Link Exchange, to about a hundred or so people. And then ultimately ended up selling the company to Microsoft in 1998 for two hundred sixty five million.”
Hoffman: There is a very low probability I will start another company
“I think so. You know, it's kind of this never say never thing, but you know, there's a wide variety of really important organizations that I sit on the boards of. Microsoft, obviously, one of them. Airbnb, Convoy there's a set of these different you know, kind…”
Case: AOL board narrowly voted against selling to Microsoft
“So it came down to a close vote, but eventually the board decided not to sell to Microsoft.”
LinkExchange Grew to 100 Employees and Sold to Microsoft for $265M
“Over two and a half years, we ended up growing the company, which was called Link Exchange, to about a hundred or so people. And then ultimately ended up selling the company to Microsoft in 1998 for two hundred sixty five million.”
Tony Hsieh Walked Away From 1.5 Years of Unvested Microsoft Stock
“Well, in Silicon Valley, usually there's a four-year, what's known as a four-year vesting for your stock, and I'd only been there for two and a half years, so really had to stay for another year and a half after Microsoft acquired us in order to get the full a…”
Barton: Egghead Software Held First Midnight Madness Sale for MS-DOS 5
“MS-DOS-V was the first time that Egghead Software, which was the big retailer, software retailer at the time, had ever seen, they ran a midnight madness sale on the first day that the DOS-V upgrade was released, and they had people camping out and lining up ou…”