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
Visram: Happy Family is the biggest brand in Target's baby section
“And I'm, like, very proud to tell you that Happy is the biggest store, biggest brand in Target and Baby.”
PayPal lost tens of millions per quarter to fraud in mid-2000
“And so by mid June, I think I was starting to sort of become aware of the fact that we're probably losing tens of millions of dollars to these fraudulent activities per quarter.”
Kolbeck: Humans ingest a credit card's worth of microplastics weekly
“The number that I can't get out of my head is five grams or the equivalent of a credit card worth of microplastics that Going to our bodies every week.”
Liedtke: Every piece of plastic ever created still exists on Earth
“What I like to term is, plastic is a forever material, which means there's not a piece of plastic that's ever been created that's not still with us today in some shape or form.”
Pre-pandemic surgical masks were mostly made by hand globally
“And I found that mostly masks were being made manually one at a time by hand at the time.”
Harari: Preschool Is a Steady Toy Market Where Transformation Was Untapped
“It's an incredible demo for toys, very steady demo for toys and no one had ever done anything with that play pattern for that demographic.”
Nouri: Packaging from Single-Use Items Makes Up 45% of Landfill Waste
“And 45% of all landfill waste is from packaging, and that's usually from single-use things.”
Katz: Audible's first player cost $208 to manufacture and sold for $215
“But it cost us 208 dollars to make that little device, and we tried to sell it for 215 dollars.”
Giant Conductive Ring at South Pole Could Launch Objects Into Space
“In the end, one of the best ideas would be to go to the south magnetic pole and put a big ring of conductor material around the magnetic field there and put a huge current through it, and it would actually fly into space.”
Costco CEO Jim Sinegal Initially Refused to Sell Trampolines Over Safety
“The CEO of Costco was a man named Jim Senegal, and Jim said, I will not sell trampolines.”
Mailchimp Hit One Million Users Just One Year After Launching 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.”
Hint was the first preservative-free commercial beverage using real ingredients
“And so we were the first beverage using real stuff to actually produce a product that didn't have preservatives in it as well.”
A class-action lawsuit was filed one hour after Kenneth Cole announced privatization
“When we announced that we were going to do this, we announced it at nine o'clock when the New York Stock Exchange opened, we put out an announcement. We had a class action suit filed and on our desk By 10 o'clock, an hour later.”
Lowry: Green products represent only about 5% of US sales
“They're only about five percent of products in the U S market that are sold are green products.”
In 2005, every US chemical sunscreen relied on oxybenzone
“What I also found is that every single chemical formula in the country relied on oxybenzone for its efficacy.”
Hyman: 50% of women leave the workforce after having children
“One of the biggest challenges for women has been that 50% of women leave the workforce after they have kids”
Poneman: Sub Pop pioneered direct COD retail sales for US indie labels
“And at the time, independent record labels weren't doing this in the United States. We all figured that we needed to have a relationship with a distributor to get our records into the stores. But Bruce and I picked up the phone, and we decided to start selling…”
LaFleur: Corporate women's workwear is a $100B to $120B market
“You know, there are thirty million women, age 25 to 45, who work in some sort of corporate environment, and these women spend on average, for women making 75 K and up, 4000 dollars a year on clothes to wear to work, and so that's roughly a hundred to a hundred…”
Visram: Happy Baby launched the first-ever probiotic baby food
“We launched the first ever baby food in the world that had probiotics”
Carpenter: Burton Doubled Snowboard Sales Annually for First 20 Years
“We've doubled the number of snowboards sold for the first 20 years, I think, of the company”
Walker: Consumers of color outspend all demographics in health and beauty
“Folks of color spend more money in every single health and beauty category than anyone else.”
Murrell: Five Guys sold 3,500 U.S. franchises within two years
“And I think within a year and a half, or two years, we sold 3500. We sold the whole United States.”
Hyman: 80% of closet items are worn under three times
“And 80% of that stuff is worn three times or less and ends up in a landfill.”
Lerner: Stanford refused to license early router technology
“But Stanford said, no, you cannot license this technology. They would not entertain any licensing. We had done our part, and we had taken the government's money. This is all public domain. We'd invented all of these wonderful things, but the Office of Technolo…”
Slack sold $1M in software within three weeks of its official launch
“Within maybe two weeks or three weeks of launching that officially, we had sold a million bucks worth of slack.”
Goldman: Most US Bottled Tea Is Made From Powder or Concentrate
“Most of the bottle tea in the U.S. At the time, and still today, Is not brewed with, you know, it's not brewed tea. It's a powder or a concentrate.”
Naficy: Literally no one was selling cosmetics online in 1998
“Nobody was selling cosmetics online. Nobody. Can you believe? Literally no one.”
Shaich: VCs controlled 3 of 5 board votes during Au Bon Pain divestment fight
“It was a huge boardroom struggle, because I had two votes, our venture capitalists had three, and all of them had invested in Au Bon Pain.”
The 1975 toy industry refused to sell products priced above $35
“What we didn't know
Is that the toy business at that point in time did not sell anything that was more than 35 dollars.”
Gilboa: No company offered a home try-on program before Warby Parker
“And that's when kind of this light bulb went off for the home try-on program, which really no, no company was offering until that time”
Ross Bagdasarian Sr. was the first songwriter to own masters and publishing
“He was the first songwriter who not only owned the publishing but also The master recordings.”
Koch: Two global brewing conglomerates control 90% of the US beer market
“90% of the U.S. Beer market is in the hands of two big global brewing conglomerates.”
Five Guys sold 3,500 U.S. franchise locations within two years
“And I think within a year and a half, or two years, we sold 3500. We sold the whole United States.”
Mycoskie: TOMS reached $450M in annual sales within seven years
“We went from basically from zero to four hundred and fifty million dollars in sales on an annual basis in, like, seven years.”
IBM's 1987 PS/2 computer launched without running any existing PC software
“Because this thing not only didn't run all the software, it didn't run any of the software.”
In the 1970s, women dominated NYC real estate but men owned everything
“The whole business was 90% female. It wasn't like women were not in the real estate brokerage field. But it just happened that all the firms were owned by the men.”
Virgin started as the first mail-order business to discount music records
“Nobody had ever sold music at a cheaper price than the normal retail price and it was the start of Virgin.”
Webb says Drybar faced zero direct competition when it launched
“No, there was no competition. There were hair salons.”
Gilboa: No company offered home try-on before Warby Parker
“And that's when kind of this light bulb went off for the home try-on program, which really no, no company was offering until that time”
Cuban: $285M Mavericks purchase was the highest price ever paid then
“When I bought the Mavs, everybody like, are you an idiot? It was the highest price ever paid for a sports team. Two hundred eighty-five million dollars, and everybody thought I was a moron.”
Koch: Two global conglomerates control 90% of the US beer market
“90% of the U.S. Beer market is in the hands of two big global brewing conglomerates.”
Blakely: No female patent attorneys existed in Georgia when Spanx launched
“I couldn't find a single female patent attorney in the state of Georgia, and I even called the Georgia Chamber of Commerce, and they said there isn't one.”
Dawes: Cape Cod factory was Cape's second-biggest tourist attraction
“I mean, the only thing that was practical about it, maybe, was that we had a factory tour, and at the time, you know, when we reopened it and redid the factory tour, I mean, we were the second largest tourist attraction on the Cape after the National Seashore.”
Food distributor UNFI required brands to service 30 to 40 regional stores
“In order for us to get enough economies of scale to deliver to enough stores, you need to be in at least 30 or 40 stores, which is usually the whole region.”