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 290 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
Von Ahn: Knowing English doubles income potential in most countries
“And it turns out that in most countries in the world, if you know English, you can double your income potential.”
Creelman asserts there is no real standard for natural flavor additives
“There really is no standard for a natural flavor. There may very well be all of the things you described, but there's no assurance of that.”
Flanker brand K&G enabled Men's Wearhouse to raise gross margins 10%
“K&G provides a unique opportunity for an offensive and defensive strategy, and they didn't quite understand what that meant, and so what it means is men's warehouse stores were able to raise the gross profit percentage of By a full 10%, which is a thousand bas…”
Dollar Shave Club captured 20% to 25% of the non-disposable razor market
“I think that, you know, as of now, there's about 20 to 25% of the men's non-disposable razor market that we have.”
Tom's of Maine pushed the personal care industry to end animal testing
“All the other companies stopped testing on animals, so we had a big influence.”
Chappell: The garment and textile industry is Earth's second-largest polluter
“The textile and the garment industry, because it is the second largest polluter on this earth.”
Schultz: Store retraining shutdown cost Starbucks about $24 million
“I think we estimated about twenty-four million dollars that day, in terms of lost sales and labor.”
Zimmer predicted autonomous cars would gradually handle a growing percentage of rides
“An autonomous car is not going to drop out of the sky and be able to do a hundred percent of our trips. That's not real. What's real is that over the next couple years, it'll be able to do A few percent of our trips, 10% of our trips, 50% of our trips.”
Systrom: Instagram grew because prior photo apps were closed, friends-only networks
“If you look at every photo service before then, it was basically a closed-only, friends-only network, and we were the first ones to really open that up.”
Toast's share of US restaurant sales volume exceeds its location share
“Even though we have 20 plus percent of the restaurants, we actually have more of the sales volume, because the average restaurant that's on toast has more sales than the average restaurant in America”
Scrub Daddy generated $1M in sales the night Shark Tank aired
“We did a million dollars the night the show aired.”
Osher: Overhead baby toy arches didn't exist before his Rainbow Toy Bar
“Every, every baby in the world uses some form of this now, but back then it did not exist.”
Chewy Sells More Pet Supplies in the United States Than Amazon
“I think it's the biggest distributor of pet supplies. I think it's bigger than Amazon when it comes to pet supplies in the U.S.”
Philadelphia had no cafes when La Colombe scouted the city
“There were no cafes in the city. You know, it's a city of a million, some people, and there wasn't one cup of coffee.”
Government forced Winston to pull Baer's cigarette ads for looking 16
“They, in fact, with my Winston ads, the government made them tape my ads down, because I always looked young for my age. They thought I looked 16. And that it was just wrong for my image to encourage children to smoke.”
Gymshark found its wedge because no brands targeted bodybuilders and weightlifters
“No one made Clothing specific to bodybuilders and lifters, and it's less even, it was more around the branding. No one sold product that was dedicated to that sort of, that group that we were very much a part of.”
Tolia: NYC had zero billion-dollar consumer internet companies in the mid-2000s
“How many billion dollar
Consumer internet companies are there in New York?
And at the time the answer was zero.”
Chestnut: Mailchimp hit 1M users within one year of freemium
“So you're talking about having, you know, a few 100,000 customers at the time after six years of business. And then within one year of launching freemium, we ballooned to a million users and it just kept growing exponentially after that.”
Simon Cowell reveals a 1990s hit saw 930,000 first-morning retail reorders.
“And I saw this number, and I went, no, what is the real repeat order this morning? That number was 930,000.”
US Landfill Methane Emissions From Food Waste Far Outstrip Aviation Emissions
“10% of greenhouse gas emissions in the U S comes from methane produced by landfills, which is, which are filled with food waste. It's an order of magnitude higher than what's produced by planes.”
VCs poured $500M into on-demand valet parking startups
“Half a billion dollars went to fund companies that said we were the relic.”
In 1993, no one was adding protein to foods besides bars
“But there was no one putting protein in anything other than a protein bar.”
Rubin: At age 21, his business did $120M with $50M debt
“By the time I was... 21. I bet you I owed the bank fifty million dollars. Because I had a business that was doing one hundred twenty million bucks, buying and selling clothes. I always had to finance the inventory and finance the accounts receivable.”
Rubin: Believes he was youngest public company CEO in the 1990s
“I think I was the youngest person to ever run a public company at that point, I think, in the world.”
Case: In 1985, fewer than a dozen VC firms backed startups
“In the early days when we got started, and AOL was started, as you mentioned, in 1985, it was really, can you raise the money to get launched? And not that many people could. It was, there was only a handful of maybe less than a dozen venture capitalists back …”
Black Diamond Was the First Outdoor Company Based in Salt Lake City
“At the time that I looked at Salt Lake, Park City, there was no other outdoor outdoor North ski company here. We would be the first”
Tice: Distrust of artificial sweeteners drove 2008 Coke and Pepsi diet slump
“So in 2008, Coke and Pepsi were experiencing this enormous downturn of diet beverages. And it was really due to the fact that there was enormous consumer distrust of artificial sweeteners.”
Ouidad Wise: No commercial curly hair products existed in the 1980s
“And there was nothing for curly hair out there, because the only thing that were out there that people knew how to manage their hair with was to put oil on it.”
American Apparel Brands Must Rebuild Fragmented Domestic Supply Chains From Scratch
“If you go to China today and you and I want to launch a, let's say, a jacket business, we can go order a 100,000 jackets in pink and 250,000 jackets with a hood in orange, and we can do a turnkey, just write the order. You can't do that domestically. Couldn't …”
Haydon: In 2013, Only Soy and So Delicious Coconut Creamers Existed
“The only two options was soy, and so delicious, all coconut.”
Humanity produces only three commodities at the billion-ton scale
“So it's three things. It's cement, steel, and fossil fuels.”
Lacy: All Solid Tumors Are Harder Than Surrounding Tissue
“All solid tumors are harder than the surrounding tissue.”
Lacy: US spends $130B annually on late-stage cancer drugs
“We spend a hundred and thirty billion dollars on late stage cancer drugs every year, let alone the obviously huge impact of people Passing away from this horrible disease.”
In 2014, No Belt-Drive Bike Cost Under $1,000
“At the time, I don't think you could find a belt drive bike. Under a thousand dollars.”
Vincent Kitirattragarn claims no keto bars existed on the market in 2019
“At the time, there were no keto bars on the market. We're like, wow, this is such a big opportunity.”
Neurable headphones let users control music playback using brain activity
“So we have the ability to, for example, use brain activity to do Very minimal controls on the hardware as well too. So changing music tracks, play and pausing music.”
Abraham: Orgain Hit $50M in Revenue Before Opening an Office
“We were probably at that point at least fifty million in, in revenue.”
The Black Onyx was the first role-playing video game in Japan
“The Black Onyx was the first role-playing game in Japan”
Ally Svenson: Flat-rate pizza pricing with unlimited toppings was an industry first
“And no, that had never been done before in pizza.”
U.S. military lost more personnel on Iraq supply lines than front lines
“We lost more people on the supply line than we did on the front line in, in Iraq.”
Only 15 to 20 people globally have founded two multi-billion-dollar companies
“So there's probably, you know, 15 or 20 people on the planet who can say that they've successfully started two multi-billion dollar companies.”
Landed Helped California Design the Dream for All Housing Program
“State of California just announced California Dream for All, the biggest shared appreciation program ever. And that was something that we helped them design and they saw our work and said, hey, how, what if the state tried to scale something like this?”
Xero Shoes created the first outsole specifically designed for barefoot running
“These guys helped us with the initial design for what was actually the first outsole specifically designed for barefoot style running”
Tarte was the first cosmetics brand to use fabric packaging
“So I got the packaging from a pack, a packaging company that I found and talked them into doing this amazing lavender fabric packaging. No one in the industry had ever done it. We were the first ever.”
Scaringe: Rivian's electric pickup is faster than most hypercars
“So our pickup is faster than most hyper cars.”
Veksler: US inclusive-size apparel market is about $100 billion
“It's about a hundred billion dollar market, and that's just in the U.S. Just in the U.S.”