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
VC Weapon Bans Hurt Biofire Fundraising More Than the NRA
“Fundraising for bio fire was probably more challenging than average. And I
I would actually mostly pin that on, on two main factors, neither of which is, you know, special interest groups or the NRA or anything like that. The two main factors is one, we're bui…”
Electric flights cost one-sixth to one-half as much as gas-powered planes
“A six to half the cost of flying gas-powered airplanes, and you're doing it sustainably.”
Fambro: Aptera yields 11,000 miles of free solar charge yearly in SoCal
“You plug it in like normal if you want, but most people won't ever have to because here in Southern California, you'll probably get about 11,000 miles a year of free charge, so.”
Tetris was the first video game to be widely played by women
“It's completely genderless. You know, it's the first game that was being played by women. Just by that alone, it could, you know, double the sales.”
Khan: 15 to 60 minutes weekly on Khan Academy prevented COVID learning loss
“What we saw in twenty-twenty-one is that the students who put in an average of 15 minutes on Khan Academy a week in a school setting, they actually saw no COVID learning loss, And that students who put in 30 to 60 minutes, they accelerated almost 40% faster th…”
Khan: Majority of minority-majority US schools lack Algebra II and Physics
“A majority of minority-majority schools, so that's a mouthful, but a majority of minority-majority schools don't offer courses like Algebra II, Physics, Et cetera. Not to even mention things like AP courses or IB courses.”
Simkhai: Egyptian authorities actively use Grindr to track and arrest gay men
“It's not alleged. It happens.”
Black women start U.S. businesses fastest but receive disproportionately low venture funding
“The reality is, guy, black women are starting businesses faster than any other group of people in this country, but we're not getting funding, and also, because we're not getting funding, we can't really grow our ideas, so if we really wanna, like, reduce the …”
Major Consumer Brands Are Failing Their Sustainable Palm Oil Pledges
“The, some of the largest consumer products companies in the world had made these commitments, but every one of them was failing because there was no viable alternative.”
Co-founder Chris Burch personally sued Tory Burch and her entire board
“So we wanted him to change his concept, and then he sued us. He sued me personally and my entire board.”
De Jong forged municipal zoning blueprints to save first Suitsupply store
“And so then I thought, ok, I took a pen, I practiced as long as I could, To, you know, have almost the same handwriting as the unit where it was store written in, and I just penciled store in my unit. And then I went back to the municipality and said, but guys…”
Nike offered Allyson Felix a 70 percent pay cut during 2017 negotiations.
“I remember when Wes called me, and he told me what it was and the number was 70% less than what I had been making, and I remember just feeling like somebody had just, like, punched me.”
Female track athletes routinely concealed pregnancies to avoid sponsor pay cuts.
“Women really struggled through pregnancy and motherhood in track and field, and so what they would do is, if they were like in between contracts, like I was, they would Hide their pregnancies, they would sign new deals, and then they would carry on or contract…”
Major athletic brands traditionally construct women's footwear using molds of men's feet.
“A shoe is made off of a lass, which is a mold of a foot, and it's, A man's foot that has been used to make women's footwear.”
A multibillion-dollar rival pressured a major retailer to drop Xero Shoes
“When we were first trying to get into retail, we had a significant order that was supposed to get placed one day by a major, major retailer. And at the end of the day, the order didn't come through, and we called and said, what happened? And from investigating…”
Simmons: ESPN canceled scheduled 2008 Obama interview over political bias concerns
“ESPN squashed it, and they squashed it for reasons that... I didn't fully understand. ESPN was very worried about... Bias, or... Seeming like they were biased one way or the other, with Democrats, Republicans, whatever it was. And they were just like, well, yo…”
ESPN Undersold Grantland's $8M Podcast Ad Inventory For $750k, Says Bill Simmons
“They sold all of our podcasts advertised in the subway for 750,000 dollars a year. When we had, it was easily six, seven, eight million dollars worth of advertising we could have gotten from the pods at that time.”
Bill Simmons Was Shocked Spotify Paid $200M For Gimlet's $10M Revenue
“And then they bought Gimlet and they bought Gimlet for like two hundred million dollars. And we were like, wow, Gimlet makes like Ten million dollars a year. They just got two hundred million dollars. Like, what the hell? Like, we were way more profitable than…”
Jerry Moss refused to offer A&M equity to acquire I.R.S. Records
“Jerry Moss, I wanted to merge with A&M and get shares in A&M. And Jerry Moss had said initially, yes, we'll do that. Then when I went in to finally make the deal, he said, well, we can't give you shares in A&M, but we'll buy IRS. And he quoted a number which w…”
Menker: Gro predicts data months before the USDA with near-perfect accuracy
“Even in the U.S., our models are predictive and accurate four to six months in
In advance of when the USDA comes out with its numbers within like, 98 to 99% accuracy.”
Menker: Gro insights outpace foreign government agricultural reports by two years
“In places like India, in places like Russia, in places like China, in places like Africa, our lead time for sort of our insights is one to two years at times.”
Wood: Steve Jobs rejected Netflix app on Apple TV over hardware rivalry
“And I think Reed sent an email to Steve Jobs saying, are you guys interested in this? And Steve Jobs replied, no, we're not interested because we hear you're building Hardware that competes with Apple TV. And so why would we ever do business with you? You know…”
Ulukaya reveals Chobani was nearly forced into bankruptcy after Idaho recall
“You're about to File bankruptcy. Exactly. I've never talked about this anywhere before. It wasn't that damaging. But what it is, is the banks got really nervous, and they wanted their loan to be paid back. And that loan was used to build a factory supported by…”
Kaufer: Fake review farms target Google but explicitly exclude TripAdvisor
“We see these review places offering to write fake reviews on Google and some other sites. And then they say, except TripAdvisor. Cause like, yeah, if like, if they try, we catch them, we shut them down.”
Eremenko: Lithium-ion batteries will never power planes larger than 10 passengers
“And lithium ion batteries, even if you take them to their absolute theoretical maximum, You are never going to fly an airplane that's bigger than about 10 people and a couple hundred kilometers distance.”
Altman: OpenAI's board can wipe equity to zero for safety
“We also have something in our documents which says if we need to for safety, the board can just totally wipe out everyone's equity value to nothing.”
Araque: Gyrotron millimeter waves can vaporize any subterranean basement rock
“Anything that's down there in the basement rock
Can be vaporized through this.
if you try to vaporize a metallic wall, it's not going to work, but there's no metallic walls down there.
So, so rock vaporizes.”
Araque: Millimeter-wave drilling creates vitrified glass walls that stabilize deep boreholes
“So when you're drilling the energy, you use temperature to stabilize the hole, and it basically keeps itself open.
It creates a glass wall that's very, very, very strong.
We've seen this in the lab.”
Araque: Existing power plants can be repowered with geothermal in weeks
“Yeah, I mean, the power plant's already built, and all we have to do is to feed it the steam that's carbon free. And you can do each one in weeks. That's precisely the play we're after.”
Twelve 8-inch deep geothermal wells could power all of San Francisco
“They're only eight inches in diameter, so absolutely you can. Yeah, I don't think you can do it with anything else, but you're right. It's 12 wells for that amount of energy to run San Francisco.”
Cuban: Cost Plus Drugs prices are almost always lower than insurance copays
“All the complications that are introduced by these pharmacy benefit managers and the big companies that they are part of, we eliminate, and that allows us to sell our drugs almost always for less than the copay that you have for your insurance.”
Nature's Path faked its factory launch using competitors' cornflakes
“We did not turn the factory on. We invited everybody there, and we went out and bought the big, giant competitors' cornflakes, and we sprinkled them on the conveyor belt.”
Liedtke: Humans ingest roughly a credit card worth of microplastics weekly
“You could argue that microplastics you're eating based upon your diet, you're eating about a credit card worth of microplastics a week.”
Liedtke: FTC rules allow '100% cotton' clothing to contain hidden plastic components
“A hundred percent Cotton shirt that's labeled a hundred percent cotton doesn't have to be a hundred percent cotton because the guidelines were not set from a sustainability standpoint. They were set from a federal trade commission's standpoint, and it was all …”
McKelvey: WeWork's massive pre-IPO losses were deliberate investments in growth
“The challenge that we are facing is that it's not that those losses were a surprise. They were by design. You know, again, we were a fast growing company and we were investing in our growth. And so we were making the decision to lose money.”
Bonobos' retail stores and Nordstrom wholesale profits funded its e-commerce losses
“And our second most profitable were our retail stores, and those two businesses' profits were funding losses from the e-commerce business, which is a wonderful paradox to the way that we conceived of the company.”
Mullenweg accidentally invented an SEO spam technique using hidden CSS links
“And I unintentionally invented a new way to spam. I basically was able to use some code called CSS to have the code on the website, but if you visited it in a browser, it would be invisible. But if you visited as a bot, like Google, it would look like the word…”
Citron: Discord paused hiring for a quarter to train internal managers
“Rather than bringing in managers from the outside, we created our own manager training program and asked anyone at the company, we said, hey, does anyone want to try and learn management? So we stopped hiring for a quarter. And basically talked about and taugh…”
Armstrong: Less than 1% of crypto transactions are for illicit purposes
“And so the best data that I have on it today, like over the last couple of years, is that crypto transactions, it's less than one percent are for illicit purposes.”
Armstrong: Only 5% of Coinbase employees took severance after 'no politics' memo
“It turned out it was about five percent of the company. We offered this exit package to people, anybody who was not on the same page and wanted to make it all win-win, about five percent of the company decided to take the exit package”
Park: Title Nine hired no retail specialists until passing $40M revenue
“We didn't have anybody really until we were over forty million dollars. We didn't have anybody who had retail experience, apparel experience, marketing experience. Man, we had, everybody was just true believers, product users, That are really interested in wom…”
Suppliers immediately called Weaver's husband after ignoring her all-female team
“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…”
Grant: Independent idea generation produces more and better ideas than group brainstorming
“We have over 40 years of evidence that if you had a group of people, let's say five, brainstorming together, if instead you had let them come up with ideas independently, you get more ideas and also better ideas on average.”
Reffkin: Compass senior team secretly asked co-founder Ori Allon to fire me
“One morning, Ori Was invited to a breakfast by one of the senior members of the team. He goes to breakfast, and everyone is there on the senior team except me. And they basically tell him that they want to fire me.”
Reffkin: Average agent grows business 19% in first year at Compass
“The average agent that comes to Compass has grown their business 19% in their first year.”
Reffkin: In 2018, rival brokerage heads claimed Compass would fail within five years
“At a big real estate conference, one of the top, you know, brokerage firms says, oh, you know, this was like in 2018 I think compass is going to go out of business in five years. And then the head of the fourth largest broker from the country says, oh, I think…”
Stanford excluded Lerner from curriculum meetings held at a men-only venue
“When the faculty would meet at the beginning of the year to plan the curriculum, even though I was the head of all of the computing facilities, Both administrative and the curriculum computing I went and had lunch with the faculty wives because where they had …”