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 6,762 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 44 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
A 2X participating preferred term blocked Serena & Lily from raising capital
“One of our other major investor on Sandhill Road came up with the capital. They actually put the money into the company on top of our cap stack, on top of the capital chart, At a very heavy duty preference of a two X preferred participating, very gnarly securi…”
Acquirers demanded perpetual rights to founders' name, image, and likeness
“And meanwhile, our investors want us to take the acquisition offer regardless of the egregious terms, including, ah, owning our name, image, and likeness in perpetuity.”
Brian Smith: Lack of Prior Use Enabled US Trademark Registration for UGG
“And I did a search of the world, especially the US, to see if there'd been any prior use of the trade name Ugg, and they had not. So, That opened up the gate for me to do the registration of the trademark.”
AI revolutionized radiology scans, but human radiologist demand has still increased
“AI has now completely revolutionized radiology. Every single radiologist uses AI to Study the scans. It does it incredibly fast, incredibly accurately, better than a human can. However, radiologists' demand has gone up.”
Angle: China now leads consumer robotic floor care instead of US
“We used to, past tense, lead the consumer robotic floor care industry.
We don't anymore.
China does.”
Jet.com raised a $618M Series A while operating with negative gross margins
“But the real key was raising, we did a six hundred and eighteen million dollar Series A. So we'd raised some money before that, and then we had the six hundred million Series A. That was a really tough round to get done. That was, at that time, we had negative…”
O'Hayer laid off 140 employees on 9/11 before the second tower fell
“So I got on the phone right before the second tower came down, Got on phone with London and Austin and laid off a 140 people.”
Square's early investor prototypes broke numerous banking laws and financial rules
“Everything worked, but it was breaking many, many laws and rules.”
Amazon board member offered VC funding to stop Amazon attacking Square
“I remember one guy telling me, oh, Amazon's gonna attack you? Don't worry, I'm on the board of Amazon, and I developed Amazon Prime, and we can get them to leave you alone. Like, if you take our money, we'll guarantee that Amazon doesn't attack you.”
FDA $365,000 application fees are the primary barrier to domestic generics
“Our biggest inhibitor and why we haven't done it yet is all the fees that the FDA charges. So it's about 365,000 dollars to set up what's called an end on new drug application.”
La Colombe clashed with its first PE backer over canned cold brew
“We did the deal, and that lasted 52 days to the first board meeting.
I said, ok, I believe that cold brew is going to be a thing, and La Colombe needs to be the father of it.
We also need to create ready-to-drink drinks that include milk, and hopefully one, if…”
Tech Deck falsely accused Carlton Calvin of infringing their intellectual property
“And at the time they sent around a letter saying that I was infringing their intellectual property, even though the exact opposite was true in, you know, it was really, so it was really dirty actually in my understanding of the world.”
AriZona recently earned its co-founder's entire buyout amount in one year
“Absolutely. You know, what we earned last year was what to get bought out for, you know.”
Kilgore: Mainstream beauty products carry at least a 1,200% retail markup
“And in all of these different layers of distribution, you would end up with a markup of 1200% At minimum on that product. So something that is manufactured for five dollars would retail for 60 at minimum because the retailer themselves are taking at least half…”
Lawyers advised Dylan Field the Adobe acquisition would almost certainly clear
“Our lawyers said that it would almost certainly go through.”
Von Ahn: Duolingo could charge $150/year and users would pay
“The reality is it's not even 60 bucks a year. I mean, we can charge 150 and people will pay it.”
Spiegel: Zuckerberg Disclosed Facebook's Poke Clone In Late 2012 Meeting
“He was telling us about working on a new poke app, which ultimately ended up being a copycat of Snapchat at the time.”
Spiegel: Snap did not anticipate Instagram directly carbon-copying Stories
“The one thing that we didn't anticipate was that Instagram would actually perfectly copy stories, like carbon copy it, because in the past they had sort of tried different rifts on our products, like they would take the core idea, but then try to make it bette…”
Dunn: Investment capital is flowing to profitable wholesale brands, not DTC
“All the money is going into profitable wholesale led brands now, not into DTC brands.”
Chang: Uber Eats and DoorDash take up to 50% of restaurant margins
“So with margins becoming thinner and thinner in the restaurant industry, we find our original strategy of delivery becoming highly unsustainable with delivery apps like Uber and DoorDash taking margins specifically in the city up to 50%.”
Rubin: Masayoshi Son said GSI Commerce was not losing enough money in 2000
“I remember having the founder of SoftBank, Masayoshi's son, tell me in 2000 that we weren't losing enough money.”
Ainsworth: Legacy bat competitors shipped dozens where few were game-ready
“We saw that the other competitors in the space were sending out, you know, 12 bats to a player when they'd order a dozen players, and only three or four of them would be good enough to use in a game.”
Ainsworth: Competitors' bats also failed lab tests, but only Marucci was decertified
“We then took bats from the field, sent them to the lab, and they were all over the limit, but nobody else was decertified but us,”
Rudolph: Banza lot testing was 97% lower than activist claims
“We published a statement very quickly on our website that, you know, not only acknowledged historical testing results for what was sort of being questioned, but also even tested the same lot. It was 97% lower than what was being claimed.”
Mason: Hired actress to impersonate Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz to prank staff
“What happened was we had an all hands meeting at this church down the street from the office and, you know, they're the 500 or a thousand Groupon employees were in this church. And I came up to the stage. I said, hey, I have a special announcement... I said, h…”
Bosch: Former manufacturer planted metal in SmartSweets bags before national launch
“When Whole Foods, when we're like, okay, we're doing a national launch with them, simultaneously, at the same time, the first manufacturer that we had, sketchy things start happening. There's metal that's starting to be found in some bags. There's I get a call…”
Trump and Biden Administrations Maintained Surprisingly Consistent Protectionist Trade Policies
“Two pretty opposed administrations, obviously. They're quite consistent on trade policy. Bob Lighthizer, who is the U.S. Trade Representative under Trump, right? And Ambassador Tai under Biden actually see the world quite similarly and are doing good work.”
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 …”
Pansino: YouTube's Promote Feature Costs Roughly $10,000 Per Million Views
“And now I think the math that I did, if you, the cheapest I think you can do, cause you can pick region and you can pick but if you want, it's about a thousand bucks for a 100,000 views. So if you want your video to reach a million views, it's about 10,000 dol…”
Grant: Top Individual Salespeople Actually Tend to Make Worse Sales Managers
“And the better you are at individual sales, the worse you tend to be as a manager. Your teams actually achieve poorer performance.”
Suppliers ignored Weaver's female team but answered her husband immediately
“Keith called every single person on our collective list, and he got through either immediately when calling, or they called him back by the end of the day. He didn't have to wait 24 hours to get in touch with any of those people that we had been trying to reac…”
Before Uncle Nearest, 100% of American whiskey brands represented white males
“White males represent 30% of this country and a hundred percent Of the whiskeys up until uncle nearest, 100%.”
Harris: Safety controls on open-source AI models can be removed for $100
“I won't go into technical details, but basically for about a hundred dollars, you can retrain all the safety controls off of it.”
Researchers Took Two Years to Discover GPT-3.5 Could Synthesize Dangerous Chemicals
“It took two years, for example, for researchers to figure out that GPT-III.V, the predecessor to GPT-IV, had research-grade chemistry knowledge, meaning you could ask it questions about, you know, how to synthesize dangerous chemicals, and it would tell you ho…”
Steve Jobs Pounded MacFarlane's Chest, Threatening to Sue Sonos Out of Existence
“He walked right up to me and pounded on my chest and said they were gonna sue us out of existence for having a scroll ring on our remote.”
Heirloom's direct air capture is 5,000 to 10,000 times more land-efficient than trees
“So compared to trees, these are actually about Five to 10,000 times more land efficient.”
Masterson: Drunk Elephant did zero paid advertising from launch until 2023
“So I decided not to advertise early on. Yep. Never advertised till last year, actually.”
Gilboa: Optometry is the only medical field where doctors sell prescribed products
“Optometry is interesting. It's the only part of human medicine where A doctor can prescribe something to their patient and then sell them that product and make margin on it.”
Prenuvo CEO: Vast Majority of Detected Cancers Are Stage One
“And that's why the vast majority of the cancer that we catch is actually stage one or localized to the organ of origin.”
Lacy: No public critics of Prenuvo have experienced its scan firsthand
“And there's no one that's really spoken out against these technologies that actually has experienced it firsthand. In fact, most of those people bring their family members in and then start referring their patients.”
Lacy: Prenuvo scans detect chronic disease 10 to 20 years before symptoms
“I think one of the really fascinating things that we have discovered as we started to image more and more patients is we can see oftentimes at very early stages of chronic disease, 1020 years before you might ever feel symptoms.”
Lacy: Prenuvo Detects Cancer or Aneurysms in 1 in 20 Patients
“We just had cancer aneurysms in maybe one in 20 to one in 25 people, depending on the location.”
Lacy: Scanning every American biennially for cancer would cost ~$60B
“In fact, to just screen for cancer in the U.S. Using the techniques that we use, probably to scan every person in the U.S. Every two years would cost something like sixty billion dollars.”
Finke: Brimstone's process can be carbon-negative even using dirty fuels
“The beauty of our process is that actually could be substantially lower carbon or even carbon negative under a wide range of energy sources, including the use of those dirtier fuels.”
Kalin: VC Fred Wilson fired me as Etsy CEO without giving a reason
“And went to their office and met him, and he told me that I was fired, but he didn't tell me why. And he just said, we have to do this.”
Advisors almost universally told Ramadan to oust co-founder Scott Norton
“The advice I mostly got was, number one, this happens to every co-founder set.
[4357] Mark Ramadan: It always happens.
[4358] Mark Ramadan: Co-founders have falling outs or fights.
[4360] Mark Ramadan: And then number two, the only solution is to remove Scott …”
Morris: New Tyson CEO Blocked Freshpet Funding to Force Distressed Takeover
“The last CEO that came in did not get along. And he said, let's get rid of all these other businesses. And they were basically like, well, what do we want to do with Fresh Pet? And he said, I don't care. Don't give them another penny. And because they had the …”