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 7 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
Barton: Zillow crashed by 8 a.m. on launch day from traffic
“No, I can't remember exactly, but it was down by eight a.m. It had tipped over and was sad and sick and dead by eight a.m. Of the launch day. Like, yeah, it immediately crashed.”
Zillow website views surged from 1.5 billion in 2019 to 9.6 billion
“In 2019, the site had 1.5 billion views, but it rose to more than 9.6 billion views in 2020.”
Zillow maintained traffic but slashed its 150-person staff during the 2008 crash
“Truthfully, our traffic held up quite, quite nicely throughout the whole thing, but because of massive uncertainty around business model and the pretty high expense burn rate we had, because at the time we had about 150
People at the company.
This was the most…”
Barton: In 2005, consumers could not find home listings or addresses online
“Like, it's 2005, and the web has been around for now nine years or 10 years, but still, I couldn't get pictures of homes and complete listings and prices and addresses even. Like, I couldn't get the address of a home I was shopping for online.”
Barton: Before Zillow, there was no resource for automated home valuations
“The way people did it was to just basically watch the market in their local neighborhood, right? Which was kind of hard to do, but if you keep some basic tabs on homes around your, you, or like yours that are being sold, what they're listing for, what they're …”
Barton: Zillow reaches 235 million monthly users
“Many do, but we have two hundred and thirty-five million users a month, many of them real estate agents.”
Barton: Zillow runs complex AI models to predict home values
“Now we run all of these, you know, galactically complex artificial intelligence models and just feed as much raw data as we can get our hands on into these machines, these software machines, and see what comes out. And then, of course, we get to test the resul…”