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 2,289 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
Svenson: Post-pandemic capital needs forced MOD Pizza to sell the company
“And then we got into a dynamic where we needed to raise capital, which we knew we were going to. It just accelerated it and put us into a position of either needing to raise capital or sell the company. And we ended up selling.”
On only pursues product concepts considered impossible to build
“I think it's so deeply ingrained nowadays in the company that we only approach things that are impossible. If people are coming back, you know, after initial idea or vision, and people come back and say, oh, yeah, we can do it. I said, then we don't do it. Lea…”
Dhar Mann settled criminal fraud charges with a no contest plea
“So I went in front of a judge, and the judge said if I agreed to pleading no contest, paying a 40,000 dollar fine, and doing probation, I could have my case completely expunged at the end of probation as long as I didn't mess up again. And there'd be no jail t…”
Weaver secured Uncle Nearest trademarks before informing Jack Daniel's
“I had already, I already had the trademarks. So by the time I shared with them what I would be doing, I made sure I had the trademarks.”
Uncle Nearest spent $1M on ads while completely sold out nationwide
“I spent a million dollars in commercial ads when we were out of stock everywhere in the country.”
Lewis: Magic Spoon gave influencer investors bonus equity based on attributed sales
“Actually, what we did when we founded Magic Spoon is we created an equity pool for these influencers who are investors in the business, and based on the revenue they drove through their sites or email lists, we divided up this bonus equity pool Amongst them af…”
Yassin: Nas Daily has never worked with the Israeli government
“So, and I, we've never worked with Israeli government to be clear, but one thing I've realized is that this whole what's taboo and what's not is very relative.”
Wolfe Herd: Bumble is exploring AI dating coaches to prepare users for chats
“So we have been hard at work exploring ways to have coaches or matchmakers or friends in your pocket, whatever you want to call it. You know, basically be that wing woman, wing man, wing person in your pocket to really show you that you've got this and to have…”
Mycoskie fired Aviator Nation's entire retail staff over store drama
“So I ended up doing, like you said, this kind of mass firing all the retail employees. And I literally let everyone go, but I just didn't know how else to deal with all the drama.”
Altemus: Intuitive Machines charges roughly $1M per kilogram for lunar payloads
“We can charge roughly a million dollars a kilogram to take those payloads to the moon, whether that's a government payload or commercial payload. So if you can do that, that's roughly a hundred million dollars plus of revenue that you can generate with each mi…”
Altemus: Intuitive Machines will survive even if its first lander fails
“We have three missions to the moon. Failure is likely like you indicated. We have now three shots at the moon, so we are not a company that builds one lander, and if it succeeds, we're successful. If it fails, we go under. We have diversified revenue streams. …”
Von Ahn: Duolingo promised investors it would never charge users
“And so when we talk to investors, the first thing I would tell them is, look, the one thing that will not change is I'm not going to charge for people to learn a language here.”
Wondery rejected a 2018 acquisition offer exceeding $80 million
“We, they came with an offer that was four times when we had raised that.”
Lacy: Prenuvo Uses One Multi-Organ Radiologist Per Scan
“So we have one radiologist that looks at the entire body. They're trained in identifying what they see in, in every single organ. And then we have subspecialties that can chime in if there's something abnormal and they need help.”
Dolgov: Waymo accepts legal responsibility for actions of its autonomous driver
“For the actions of, you know, the Waymo driver. The responsibility, you know, lies, you know, with Waymo.”
Steve Ells: Kernel will offer restaurant workers stock options and full benefits
“And since we only have three people we'll be able to afford those higher wages. Plus I think our Purpose is bigger than our product. Being able to address global warming, being able to address some of the inequality with pay for folks in, in, in the world of f…”
Ramadan refused to fire co-founder Norton, opting for temporary step-away
“I ended up, I wouldn't say fighting with the board, but informing the board that that wasn't the path I was going to take, but that we would go down a slightly different path, which is that I would ask Scott to step away from the business for a little bit.
[44…”
Hartz: Eventbrite stands for freedom of assembly despite controversial content
“We stand for freedom of assembly, and that's a really important thing for people to understand when they join the company, and there are things that people aren't going to agree with on the platform.”
Kudla: Vuori used 2019 VC funding for liquidity to preserve financial discipline
“A lot of the money ended up going to shareholders because the business didn't need capital. So we didn't go out and put a bunch of money on the balance sheet at that time because we didn't want it to create bad habits. We were very proud of the discipline and …”
Harrington: Yasso blamed TSA for missing strawberry samples during retail pitches
“So we would tell a few white lies where one of the hard things about frozen food is you're always handling dry ice, and early on we realized that the TSA would confiscate Our dry ice. And when we realized strawberry wasn't as great tasting, we'd kind of show t…”
Clark promised Rothblatt a cross-country electric aircraft flight in 10 months
“And I told her that in 10 months we would create this electric aircraft and fly it across the country.”
Clark set aside 70% of BETA's equity for employees on day one
“So day one, I took 70% of the business and usually people take eight or 10 or seven or five percent of the business and say, that's going to be the employee pool. I took 70% of the business and I said, this is what I'm going to use to attract people to be real…”
Rogers used his in-laws' real estate as collateral for a $2M loan
“So I convinced my wife to convince her parents to put up all of their real estate as collateral for a loan.”
Rogers eventually bought out the Soviet agency ELORG and now owns it
“I ended up buying them. I own Elord now.”
Horowitz: AMP Robotics builds 24/7 fully automated greenfield recycling plants
“We've now gone on to start building recycling facilities around our technology new greenfield sites built from the ground up around AI. What you find is you can do, you can go a step further. You can have facilities that'll run 24 seven facilities that can hav…”
Dutch Bros decided to grant franchises exclusively to internal employees
“And we got to grow from within and from within only with the people who understand the culture that have the fire in their belly.”
Yassin: Nas Company has never worked with the Israeli government
“We've never worked with Israeli government, to be clear”
Simmons: HBO invested $5 million into The Ringer
“HBO put in five million bucks as part of, they didn't want me to do the ringer. They wanted me to do the TV show and that's it.”
Ferguson: Nuro's BYD partnership enables capacity for hundreds of thousands of vehicles
“Well, so we're working with BYD who is, they usually alternate between Tesla as the number one or number two electric vehicle manufacturer in the world. I think right now they're number one. And so we do have the capacity or will have the capacity to make hund…”
Guayakí raised early capital without promising investors an exit strategy
“When we raise money, we raised it with no exit strategy. And typically that's the first question investor has is, well, how am I going to get my money back? And we would say, we're not sure we're not ruling out selling, but it's not something we're focused on.”
Ulukaya: Chobani targeted mass supermarket retail instead of natural food channels
“So I did not have huge interest on natural channels. I wanted this product to be in a mass channels where ordinary people shop.”
Ulukaya: Chobani offered its factory as collateral to secure ShopRite distribution
“I personally said, if it doesn't sell, I will give you the factory.”
Ulukaya: Rejected Multibillion-Dollar Acquisition Offers For Chobani Multiple Times
“I have offered this huge amount of money, and there's endless what you can do with this money. And I said no to it. And I said no a few times.”
Gizmodo pre-planned its legal defense before publishing the iPhone 4 leak
“Yeah, we went to our lawyer in-house and said, can you look this up? What would happen? How we can do this safely, legally? And we discovered these laws about returning stolen property. You can't get in trouble for it, basically, and the person who claims the …”
CustomMade's collapse made Mike Salguero swear off raising venture capital
“I thought in my mind, I never want to raise money again.”
Altman: Angel investing paid orders of magnitude more than founding Loopt
“I made like orders of magnitude more money from angel investments that I made. That I spent no time on the thing I poured my life into.”
Altman: OpenAI paused robotics research because hardware and simulators were too limited
“Well, it turned out to be a mistake. I mentioned that Dota was a great environment. It turns out that robotics are a very hard environment. Robotics is hard, and it's not hard because the machine learning is hard. It's hard because the simulator is bad, the ro…”
VCs rejected Universal Standard's inclusive pitch, urging a plus-size-only model
“The response was that this is going to be really difficult. And look, they're not wrong, because inclusive fashion has traditionally been very difficult, but that it was going to be very costly, the inventory was going to be impossible to manage, consumers are…”
Clifford bootstrapped Roam Luggage to avoid the VC-backed growth treadmill
“No, we did not raise tens of millions of dollars. We bootstrapped the business. We made a decision early on that as much as we admired and appreciated what a way had done with their business is that we were going to grow At a reasonable pace. We did not want t…”
Donnel Baird: BlocPower will forfeit profitability to scale for IPO
“Over the next two to five years, as we prepare to like go public and IPO, we will not be profitable. If I'm doing my job, like we will be investing in R&D and expansion, just like Uber did, right? Or Airbnb or any other tech company, because we want to take th…”
Cuban has invested $100M+ into founders he has never met
“Believe it or not, I've probably invested over a hundred million dollars into people I've never met in my entire life from cold emails or cold calls or whatever it may be and done really well with those investments.”
Cost Plus Drugs is building a robotics-driven pharmaceutical plant in Dallas
“We're, you know, I mentioned we're spending a lot of money on a plant here in Dallas, and it's going to be driven by robotics so that we can go through and take any, a given pill and manufacture one year or two years worth of supply switch it over to another p…”
Strava moved free features to a paywall to ensure long-term sustainability
“Would we rebalance the equation between the free and the paid by moving some things from the free side to the paid side? Yes. We would do that in the name of building Strava to be sustainable, building it so that we can be here for the next hundred years.”
McKelvey would not co-found another company with Adam Neumann
“I don't think that I would primarily because it doesn't support my own journey. I put myself into that second position because of a lot of insecurity and things that I thought I couldn't do. And so being around a person who's very much an alpha, you know, is v…”
Mullenweg joined CNET because it allowed him to retain code IP
“And the job I took, which was for CNET, I took it for a few reasons. First, they allowed me to retain the intellectual property to the code I was creating. So normally when you join a company like Google, you sign over the rights to everything you create there…”
Automattic didn't ban political talk, only anonymous internal political posts
“And we never banned talking about politics. We did ban talking about some of it anonymously. So we said, some of these things, if you want to talk about this, that's fine, but do it under your own name.”
Citron: Discord rejected acquisition offers because the team wanted to keep building
“The interesting thing about the experience we went through earlier this year, you know, I can't comment on any specific companies, but it was a really crystallizing moment because, you know, I was talking to some of the folks on my team about sort of what path…”