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 22 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
McKenzie: Musk offered to buy Substack and make Chris Best Twitter CEO
“And he responded by getting Chris on a call and saying to him, well, how about Twitter acquire Substack, and you, I'm looking for a CEO to run the company.”
Twitter's conflict-averse board never gave Williams negative feedback before firing him
“Somewhat ironically, the board of Twitter had a lot of conflict aversion. Because they never, never gave me that feedback to my face. I didn't know I was going to be fired at all, because no one ever told me I was doing a bad job. So there was a whole culture …”
Williams claims he did not plan to take over as Twitter CEO
“He was pushed out, and then I became CEO, which It's hard to believe, but it wasn't actually my plan. I still didn't necessarily want to be CEO. And we talked to a few other candidates, but then I was like, okay, maybe I'm the best person to be CEO.”
Early press reports actively erased Twitter founders Jack Dorsey and Noah Glass
“They not only kicked him out of Twitter, they tried to write him out of the history, and I know this very well because I was reading at the time The reports, and they would mention Biz, and they would mention Ev as the founders of Twitter, and they would omit …”
Initial Twitter hackathon prototype included an audio feature that Williams removed
“I do remember a conversation where at first there was a version of what became Twitter presented that had audio, and I remember asking, what if it didn't have the audio piece?”
Jack Dorsey had never been a manager before becoming Twitter's CEO
“Jack went from individual contributor, he had never been a manager, I believe, before he became CEO of this very fast-growing company,”
Williams: Intuitive product feeling matters significantly more than early usage metrics
“It felt like a thing, which has, I've come to realize, is the most important thing, and like, it's, feeling is much more important than metrics early on.”
Williams defends Twitter's heavily criticized trust and safety staff as integrity-driven
“You know, the team over the years gotten a lot of flack on the trust and safety side, but those people are some of the most earnest, hardworking, Integrity-driven folks I've ever seen in, in the world of business”
Best: Substack traffic from Twitter had steadily declined for years by 2023
“By the time it went down, the share of Substack traffic that was coming from Twitter had been on a steady decline for years.”
Facebook offered $500M in stock for 30-person Twitter in 2008
“Facebook, of course, was private at the time, but based on their valuation, they could do a stock deal that may value us around Half billion dollars, and that was a lot of money, and we were maybe, no, we were we were 30 people at the time.”
Founders should only sell for burnout, imminent failure, or undeniable money
“I thought about it very deeply, and I came up with this, like, okay, why would you sell a company? I think there are three reasons, and none of these meet that criteria. Three reasons being, you don't want to do it anymore, and so you need someone to do it for…”
Social networks derive value from distribution and connectivity, not content hosting
“What we had learned from social networks was that
The value was in the connectivity. Like, if Twitter just did what Blogger did and posted your tweet to a webpage and didn't fan it out, if there wasn't this follow mechanism, it wouldn't be very interesting. I…”
Vaynerchuk's first three investments were Twitter, Facebook, and Tumblr
“I put 34,000 dollars into Twitter. Okay. Okay. The reason I had that, and then I also put money into Facebook, and then put money into Tumblr. Those were my first three investments.”
Vaynerchuk bought Twitter founder shares from original CTO Blaine Cook
“The next thing I know, I am negotiating to buy a portion of Blaine Cook, the original CTO's founder shares of Twitter, and now I'm in the game.”
Crumbl chose milk chocolate chips over semi-sweet based on a Twitter poll
“And so we put a survey out on Twitter and the survey results came back and it was 70% milk chocolate chip, 30% semi-sweet. And that's how we decided that we were going to go with milk chocolate chips instead of semi-sweet.”
McKenzie: Substack recruited writers with devoted followings over large overall audiences
“We looked for people that we thought weren't being well served by the dominant media structure, but actually had interesting things to say and had a devoted audience. And so it wasn't necessarily the people with the largest audiences. Maybe they'd have a small…”
Twitter grew tenfold in valuation and headcount during Williams' CEO tenure
“The company grew 10 X in users and employees and valuation in the two years I was CEO”
Williams owned 100% of Twitter through Obvious Corporation following SXSW 2007
“I still owned a hundred percent of it at that time through obvious, but it was clear that we needed to grow.”
Williams admits he was not a great CEO for a scaling Twitter
“I was not a great CEO by any stretch, and I think I was getting better at What I was very good at was product, and knowing, in my opinion, product and strategy, and knowing where to take the company, what we should build. But the company got to a size where lo…”
Displaying live tweets on SXSW 2007 hallway screens created Twitter's tipping point
“Basically, everybody, everybody there got on Twitter. And, you know, it was a few thousand people, and again, lots of journalists, lots of bloggers, and so then they talked about it and wrote about it. It was a moment, just capturing lightning in a bottle amon…”
Reffkin: Compass Co-Founder Ori Allon Sold Startups to Google and Twitter
“I had a friend named Ori Alone who had sold a company to Google and another company to Twitter”
Peoples Wagner: Twitter performance does not determine the quality of journalism
“Just because a piece doesn't do well on Twitter doesn't mean it isn't good, and I think a lot of times people are writing in that vein, and I want young writers especially to just understand that that validation only goes so far, and what you really need is to…”