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 12,668 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 96 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
Huang is less concerned than most about a hot conflict over Taiwan
“If you ask me, am I concerned about a hot conflict? I'm less concerned than most. But depending on the actions of the leaders, We may cause the hot conflict, and so I am of the opinion that we all must be more long-term minded if we can. We ought to have a mor…”
Huang would 'absolutely not' start NVIDIA again if he knew the pain
“The question is, suppose I knew everything then that I now know how hard it is, and all of the pain and suffering and all the embarrassment and humiliation and all the setbacks, and you compress all of that. And you just told that thirty-year-old kid, listen t…”
Peretti plans to resolve BuzzFeed's going-concern accounting notice
“So our plan and management's plan is to resolve that going concern. And really going, going back to founder mode of saying, hey we got to reinvent the company for this near future, and wanting investors to know there's risk to that, but also now we're getting …”
Gregg Renfrew felt Carlyle's replacement CEO Marc Rey was the wrong choice
“I felt better with his departure than I did with him staying there. So for me, I didn't feel that he was the right person for the job, and I felt more confident in the choice they made in their interim CEO, Mindy McKenzie, with whom I partnered really, really …”
Beautycounter's closure forced Gregg Renfrew to lay off employees without severance
“So I ended up having to let go of the majority of the associates for the company without severance or health insurance, which was horrendous.”
Colin Angle Favored Amazon Acquisition Because iRobot Scooba And Terra Failed
“And really that was what led me to saying, hey iRobot and Amazon might have some pretty interesting synergies, and because Scuba hadn't succeeded, because Terra hadn't succeeded, then when Amazon started to be interested in iRobot, it felt like a good idea.”
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.”
Steve Ells: Robots will not displace restaurant cooking anytime soon
“And so the, your question, will robots displace that? I mean, maybe someday, but certainly not Not anywhere in the near future.”
Lore pitched investors that Jet.com would lose $3B before turning profitable
“I told the investors we needed, we were gonna lose three billion dollars.”
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…”
Walmart acquired Bonobos strategically to change its image and attract elite talent
“The most strategic part of the plan was to change the narrative. I knew that we didn't have the talent inside of Walmart at the time to do what we needed to do. We had to attract the best people in the world, and at that point, you know, honestly, that wasn't …”
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.”
Lopez: Prosecutors find it easy to convince juries of falsehoods
“They have it wrong, and I also realize how easy it is for them to convince a jury of something that really didn't happen”
Lopez: AI audio flood will increase the value of trusted human hosts
“And ultimately, the people who are afraid that AI is going to create an influx of so many low quality and cheap alternatives to actual real voices, I think what they're not seeing is that in that environment, if that environment does happen, the value of a con…”
Middlemen organizations, not Visa and MasterCard, exploit small merchants with fees
“Where the crazy abuse is, is all the middlemen in those transactions. So Visa and MasterCard, they don't really abuse the merchant, but the abuse happens with all their partners. Like the independent sales organizations that work for the banks that work for Vi…”
Square's early investor prototypes broke numerous banking laws and financial rules
“Everything worked, but it was breaking many, many laws and rules.”
Venture capital pitches are adversarial games where entrepreneurs routinely lie
“If you've ever been a VC pitch, they're really weird things, because they're basically, the VCs are up there playing defense. They're like goalies. And the entrepreneurs, the people who are pitching are just lying to them.”
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.”
Interdependent 'innovation stacks' protect novel inventions from giant corporate copiers
“If you invent something truly new, you're not inventing one thing. You're inventing a stack of things, and that invention becomes its own protection. And as long as you behave properly, I mean, it turns out there are a bunch of rules that if you follow these r…”
Osher: Initiating a company sale yields one-tenth of buyer-initiated prices
“Because anytime you try to sell something, you get about one-tenth of what you get when they want to buy you.”
Hastings: High talent density eliminates the need for corporate process and rules
“The core of it was if you had incredibly talented people, you didn't need a lot of process and rules. Netflix was anti-process and rules and pro-talent density.”
Hastings: Generous severance packages save money by accelerating exits and preventing lawsuits
“So I don't think it actually cost us money because it got managers to act more quickly. And it made it easier on the person who was let go because they got, you know what they perceived as a generous severance package. So then, you know, we could be letting go…”
Hastings: Netflix uses an 'informed captain' leadership model, not consensus democracy
“We talked about it as the informed captain. The leadership model is to be the informed captain. So the captain of a ship is the absolute ruler of that ship and makes decisions. We want our leaders to feel like they're the captain. It's not a democracy, but the…”
Hastings: Films will keep human actors because audiences demand human drama
“And I think in the same way you know films will have human actors, not because it can't be something else but because other humans won't be that interested.”
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.”
Founders should ignore venture capitalists pushing top-line sales to avoid dilution
“What I'm going to tell you is to ignore your VC no matter what they say. If they tell you to chase sales, ignore them, because they'll be right in saying this is the only way to get huge, but you don't want to be in the position where you lose control of your …”
Taylor: Excessive manual crafting time does not make better acoustic guitars
“That's when I figured out not to make love to every guitar that I'm building. I'm production-minded. I like to get it done, and come out with a good guitar, you know, at the end, and the amount of time that you stroke it isn't the key factor there.”
Blumenthal: Warby Parker Customers Ranked Social Mission Last in Buying Decisions
“After survey after survey, what we found was what mattered first and foremost was how these glasses look on your face. Second price you know, third quality last, if at all Would be the social mission.”
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…”
Graves: Most quick-service restaurant franchisees operate at 65 to 70 percent efficiency
“Our franchisees were about an 85, which is exceptional in the franchise world, because most of them, in quick service food, run at about a 65, 70.”
Graves: Company-owned restaurant chains achieve far higher valuations than franchise models
“Another advantage of having your own restaurants, company restaurants, is that your valuations are way higher, right? So your sales, your profitability, your EBITDA that goes through as you grow company restaurants, just the company's worth so much more, man.”
Rubin: Indiegogo board replaced him as CEO after growth debate
“Definitely not. No, I mean, that was me having a debate with the board as to how we needed to grow. I really wanted to create a massive company, and I really thought we had the opportunity to create the Airbnb of crowdfunding, because it should all be consolid…”
Rubin: Replacing founders too early handicaps a company's potential
“If you take out a founder too early, I do think you handicap the potential of the future of that company. And I think you see that with some of the results of Indiegogo.”
Rubin: Indiegogo missed owning crowdfunding by obsessing over unit economics
“We were in the position to own all of them, and, you know, we decided that we had to think too much about unit economics and profitability, and I think that's a shame.”
Tannen: Taking Outside Capital Forces Founders to Prioritize Shareholder Return
“As soon as you take money from an investor, your number one goal moves from whatever it is today to providing a shareholder return. And there's an expectation from those shareholders that you're going to pick up the phone, you're going to talk to them, and you…”
Casalena: Websites are more relevant than ever because AI relies on them
“And I think that the website ends up being more relevant than ever for a number of reasons. One being, It's where the answer engines are finding their information. You know, they're crawling the web and using either old data or modern data or more relevant dat…”
Newmark believes Craigslist should shut down if it fails its community mission
“I do think about Craigslist future, but if a community service fails in its mission to be a community service, maybe it's time to go.”
Newmark claims the majority of billionaires he knows are miserable
“And, you know, I know some of these billionaires a little bit, and some of them are not miserable, but the majority are miserable.”
Shopping.com forced Nirav Tolia to resign before IPO due to past controversies
“When you are a company that wants to go public, you want to be as unencumbered by controversy as possible, right? And the best thing for me to do at that point was to step away. Now, did I have a choice? No, not really. I mean, they kind of Asked me nicely to …”
Nirav Tolia predicts AI action platforms will completely replace multi-link search
“Particularly in a world of AI, where most consumers are going to go to one place, ask a question, and everything's going to be taken care of behind the scenes. It's not going to be, You go to Google, you get 15 links, you click on all of them, you hit back, yo…”
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.”
Chestnut: Serving the long tail makes a company much more resilient
“You know, you have to depend on just a handful of customers with the long tail. You know, we're serving You know, thousands or millions of tiny customers who pay small amounts of money. You don't rely on anyone too much such that, you know, they're sort of too…”
Humm realized real food culture change requires avoiding dietary dogmatism
“I feel like I started to realize that to create real change, we can't be as dogmatic.”
Larian: MGA operates with zero outside investors or bank credit lines
“You know, maybe as big as MGA is, We don't have a bank line. We don't have any investors in here because I did that previously, and the banks and the investors are for you. When it's sunny, when it rains, they all run away.”
Larian: Private equity contracts are designed to strip founders of control
“Most of these, what I have seen, they write the contract the way it is all in their favor, because you need the money, and they have the money, and they hardly lose money. They take over your business, so you lose your business.”
Ahmed: Nike made a fatal mistake designing FuelBand as a step counter
“The way in which they were wrong at assessing the story I was telling versus the strategy that Nike was pursuing was that Nike made, in my opinion, a fatal mistake with their product. They made a product that all of their best athletes would never use. It was …”
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…”