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 12 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: Skype Was the Largest Post-Dot-Com Internet Acquisition Globally
“The largest Internet M&A before us was PayPal to eBay, right? One point by a billion. And So this was like two X. And then you had. This is amazing. YouTube. YouTube was also 1.6 billion or something like that. Yeah. Also the same year with Google. So this was…”
Levchin: eBay Offered to Buy PayPal to Stop Its 2002 IPO
“Right as we filed to go public, they came in and said, Hey we'll we'll buy you. Don't go public. And we said no.”
PayPal lost tens of millions per quarter to fraud in mid-2000
“And so by mid June, I think I was starting to sort of become aware of the fact that we're probably losing tens of millions of dollars to these fraudulent activities per quarter.”
Oh Lin: KiwiCo's founding team included YouTube's first engineer and PayPal co-founder
“Ended up bringing on board a co-founder who was a bit more technical, had been in product management. And then I also brought on a technical co-founder, somebody who had been actually a founder of PayPal, was the first engineer at YouTube. And so at first ther…”
PayPal's makeshift web-to-web demo accidentally drove its explosive early growth
“And as a footnote, we had a Web to Web, very much a demo quality product that I threw together to just show how this works if you just don't happen to have any Palm Pilots around. And it's that demo that took off like crazy.”
Luke Nosek created PayPal's legendary double-sided $20 referral program
“And then Luke came up with the original viral marketing idea where he had said, hey, what if we gave every new user who signed up 20 bucks, but not just 20 bucks for signing up, but 20 bucks to the person who invited them.”
PayPal faced massive Eastern Bloc fraud attacks in April 2000
“Sometime in April of 2000, we saw just this enormous attacks primarily from my former homeland or the general region, like all those were the Eastern block countries, basically realizing that this is a very loosely secured financial system.”
Levchin: PayPal and X.com copied each other and competed on eBay incentives
“They came at payments a little bit after we did, but they had some really good ideas that we didn't have. So very quickly, we start just looking at each other and going, oh, that's a good idea. We'll copy that, and vice versa. And we were in the market just be…”
eBay attempted to route all platform transactions through Billpoint instead of PayPal
“EBay had bought a company called Billpoint, which it owned a hundred percent of, and it launched on its platform, and it wanted everything to go through Billpoint, nothing to go through PayPal.”
Kalin: PayPal was early Etsy's exclusive payment method
“Our exclusive method of payment was PayPal, and so if PayPal worked in that location, then we were able to just
Ride those rails.”