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 25 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
Hollender: Eco-friendly products are just "less bad," not actually good
“To be quite honest, it's often about being less bad rather than good, and I think we've gotten the two things confused. I think that when you're buying a seventh generation diaper, you're causing landfills to fill up, you're causing increased climate change. Y…”
Hollender: My board fired me by phone on a Saturday and locked me out
“Done in a somewhat brutal fashion because not only was I let go, but I was let go over the telephone on a Saturday morning and told that I wasn't even allowed to go back into the office ever again.”
Founder Obsession With Rapid Hyper-Growth Is Dangerous and Causes Burnout
“The bigger, the faster, the better, and I think that that is a dangerous thing. I think that, that we need to monitor how obsessed we are with how fast we grow, because it's a dangerous thing to be moving so quickly, and it's stressful, and it challenges your …”
Nassif: Seventh Generation initially had sketchy cleaning performance
“On the bottom triangle, we have seventh generation. Right? They're earth-friendly. Performance at the time was kind of sketchy. I think that's changed.”
Hollender: My board hated that I kept getting arrested with Greenpeace
“I was a board member of Greenpeace for 13 years. I was getting arrested for standing up for things that we believed in, and my board was definitely not comfortable with a CEO who was getting thrown in jail.”
Newman: My co-founder fired me by letter while I was on sabbatical
“I didn't know until I sent an email or a letter or however we communicated in those days
Saying, okay, getting ready to come back, why don't we get together and let me talk about some of the ideas that I have put together that I'd love to start implementing, a…”
Hollender: Seventh Generation achieved 20% employee ownership
“We had built ourselves up to having a company where the ownership of 20% of the company was Resting in the hands of the employees.”
Newman: The Gulf War crashed our daily orders from 1,500 to 100
“When the Gulf war started, everybody turned on their television and was glued to the television. And our, we went from, I seem to remember 12 to 1500 orders a day down to less than a hundred.”
Newman: Hollender was brilliant in turning Seventh Generation around
“I think what Jeffrey did with the business after I left was in many ways, brilliant, you know, certainly deserves a lot of credit for taking this concept and this fledgling business who was really down on its luck and finding the way”
Hollender: Seventh Generation gave a weekly prize for the biggest employee mistake
“One of my fondest memories is that in our staff meetings, we would actually give a prize out to the person who made the biggest mistake that week, and they would get a coupon to go out to dinner with their friend or their wife.”
Newman: I held up the IPO until Seventh Generation bought out my shares
“If you really want to solve this problem, you need to buy me out. And that's when that's when I got paid out.”
Newman: Creating a culture where employees share fears makes businesses more productive
“What I learned was that the greatest obstacle to success was fear, fear of people that they didn't know what they were doing and somebody was going to find out. And so what I discovered was that if I could get people To share their fears and realize that we're…”
Newman: Eco-friendly products must sell on personal benefit, not just environment
“And this is really where I personally learned that you really need to sell from benefit, not feature. You know, the feature that you're saving the environment, yeah, that was nice, but it was only good after you passed the what's in it for me.”
Hollender: Why Seventh Generation killed its catalog to bet on wholesale retail
“We had raised about five million dollars of additional capital, and the board and I came to the conclusion that we had two very different businesses, and they both demanded lots of money, and we decided that we should do something that appeared highly risky an…”
Hollender: Seventh Generation products tested at 90-95% of mainstream effectiveness
“Well, every product we sold, we sent to an independent lab and tested our performance against Lysol, Tide, or Bounty, and we had pretty good test results. We were 90 or 95% as effective. We weren't a hundred percent as effective or more effective, but we felt …”
Hollender: We donated our Albertsons profits to their striking grocery workers
“And we debated, and the whole company sat down in a meeting together, and some brilliant young man whose name I can't remember came up with this idea that we should take all the profits we generated from selling in Albertsons and donated to the Workers Strike …”
Hollender: Prior business delivered a 10x return to investors
“For every dollar they put into the company, they got 10 dollars back.”
Hollender: Firing stemmed from failure to keep board aligned
“I was very headstrong. I was impatient, and I was too focused on doing what I was passionate about doing, and not focused enough on ensuring that I had brought the board along with me.”
Hollender: Diapers added about a third to Seventh Generation's sales
“I mean, when we got into the diaper business, I was Traveling in Europe, and I saw these brown diapers, I said, wow, unbleached diapers made from, ah, non-chlorine bleached pulp, and I said, I gotta have these, we gotta sell these, and they were a success from…”
Hollender: Getting into Whole Foods grew our revenue from $12M to $50M
“Yes, it was huge, and it basically unleashed growth that would propel us from, you know, 10, twelve million dollars to five years later, almost fifty million dollars.”
Hollender: Seventh Generation's first $850K came entirely from past investors
“The vast majority of the investors were those investors from the prior business. And they put up 850,000 dollars in 1989.”
Hollender: Seventh Generation Laid Off 50% of Its 120 Employees in 1991
“My recollection is we had about a 120 people, and we had to lay off half of them, almost 60 people, 50%.”
Unilever Acquired Seventh Generation for Up to $700M in 2016
“You stayed on as CEO until twenty-ten and by 2016, seventh generation was acquired by Unilever for about Six to seven hundred million dollars.”
Hollender: Seventh Generation never put Newman's sabbatical terms in writing
“One of the things we could have done that we didn't do is put things in writing when Alan left. So,
A written document that says Alan's taking six months off, and he will return at the end of six months and fulfill the position he had before.
I mean, that wasn…”
Hollender: Seventh Generation co-founders saw a counselor to reconcile differences
“We went to see a third party to try to reconcile our differences. And we had a series of meetings with a sort of marriage counselor type person to see if we could mend the relationship, which I don't think happened very successfully.”