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
Amazon refused Kindle integration without acquiring an equity stake in Goodreads
“And so we had this strong vision, and we met with Amazon, like I said, four or five times over the years, kind of talking about, would we do this? And they were always into it. The issue was, it required deep integration to pull off, and they weren't comfortab…”
Marshall: Planet has repeatedly refused data requests to prevent civilian harm
“We have our own ethics committee. That reviews every case with the government and checks. Is, is there some way in which this might bring civilian harm? And we have many cases refused to give data where we think that would be the case.”
Tofurky refuses to sell outside equity to maintain independent mission control.
“We haven't sold equity yet. You know, we'd like to keep our equity so that we can keep the mission at the center of our lives, and so that nobody can tell us what we can do or can't do.”
Armstrong: Coinbase preferred shutting down over pivoting to enterprise banking software
“If we have to pivot this company to be an enterprise software company, I think we maybe just want to shut it down and return capital to investors. Cause like, I just didn't want to run that company. Like we really were in it for the mission. We were a mission …”
Park: Title Nine has never prioritized purely financial shareholder value
“The sole purpose of a publicly traded company or a private equity backed company is to maximize shareholder value in purely financial terms. And plain and simple, I haven't done that.”
Park: Title Nine will transition to new owner-operators over 10-15 years
“I do not need a liquidity event because of the way we have grown it. At this point, we have zero debt. We have zero outside investors. So it is a good spot for someone to come in and be able to earn a seat at the ownership table, and that is my hope, is that a…”
Afeyan: Moderna released early vaccine data to satisfy public disclosure obligations
“Well, we indeed, in May, we indeed did come out and say at a very high level that we had some encouraging results, and people attacked us every which way for having said that, because they basically said, well, that's doing science by press release and many ot…”
Weaver spent $1 million on commercial ads while completely out of stock
“Last September. We were out of stock in the entire country, meaning we were selling much faster than we could bottle. I spent a million dollars in commercial ads when we were out of stock everywhere in the country.”
Early Kayak scraped airline websites without permission to build its inventory
“So originally Kayak had no revenue. And also we were scraping these websites without their permission. It's one of these things sort of ask for forgiveness, not permission.”
Logic and Zarou turned down a $1.5M indie contract while broke
“In front of us. And Chris had it. And I remember he said something really corny. It was really funny. Like he was just excited. He was like, how much you think our brand that we're creating is worth? And I was like, I don't know. And he was like, Well, somebod…”
Rich Barton: Zillow is not trying to replace real estate agents
“You're mistaken if you think we're trying to replace the agent and replace the industry.”
Policygenius plans to evolve from broker to first-party insurance issuer
“Eventually, yep. We look at our journey similar to Amazon or Netflix which started in the third party world. Consumer goods in the case of Amazon, content in the case of Netflix, and they eventually moved from third party to first party, where they were actual…”
Business Expansion Caused the Famous Humm and Guidara Split
“I think in our partnership also with Will, this is kind of when things started to be where we didn't Always see eye to eye. And I felt like a lot of these opportunities were taking my time away from the things that I really wanted to do. And so I felt that whe…”
Boxed guaranteed employees will not lose jobs solely due to automation
“What we committed for everyone here is that you weren't going to lose your job solely because of automation. You will have to be retrained. You will have to learn how to operate, how to service the state of the art machines and work alongside of them.”
Hsieh: Deteriorating Culture Was the Real Reason LinkExchange Was Sold
“What a lot of people don't know is the real reason why we ended up selling the company, and the real reason was because the company culture had gone completely downhill, and I myself dreaded getting out of bed in the morning to go to my own company, which is k…”
Prakash: Civil Disobedience Forces Private Suffering Into the National Debate
“The reason why we do civil disobedience or the reason why we take this type of action is so people, so that we can bring the kind of private suffering that is happening all across the country into public relief and force that into the national dialogue and deb…”
Anderson Severed All Legal and Financial Ties With Famous Dave's in 2014
“I basically, emotionally, legally, financially, was separated out of Famous Dave's.”
Lush caps founder share valuation at 5x average three-year profit
“So we came up with this scheme where we valued our shares at five times the average of the last three years profit, so that we capped it a little bit, But we only kept the greed and we still, that still enabled us to, if we want to build the business, we can b…”
Yelp removes unrelated reviews and places public alerts during media controversies
“We can put up an alert on the page and we actually pull down the content that's unrelated to the actual business.”
Zimmer: Lyft avoids mandatory rider photos because it would reduce ride volume
“We don't want it to be a blocker in the sense that we don't want to get less rides, which would be less income earning opportunities for you and the company. But we have increased the percent of riders that are posting a photo and we're working on more feature…”
Shah: Wayfair avoids corporate stances on issues lacking broad employee consensus
“There are other opinions that I have personally that I don't know that the company should take a stand on because frankly, there's two sides to a lot of topics that in our mind, there is not just one side that reflects everyone's reasonable views. And so one o…”
Chesky: Airbnb gave $250M directly to hosts during the pandemic
“We took a quarter of a billion dollars, two hundred fifty million dollars, and we sent it to our host. Just didn't loan it, just sent it to host.”
Chesky: Airbnb will be ready to IPO in 2020 if markets allow
“And we don't know when we'll be public, but I basically said, we'll be ready this year if the market's ready for us. If the market's not ready, we'll be ready when they are.”
Agencies Rejected Tatcha Claiming Asian Beauty Lacked Demand in the U.S.
“PR agents, even, I couldn't even give people money to take me as a client. And then retailers were not interested at all. So, and everybody also told me at the time, too, that there is no demand or interest in Asian beauty in the U.S. Because it's not aspirati…”
Trussell leveraged a Sharper Image deal to force Brookstone to stock mattresses
“So I started selling to Sharper Image. Their arch rival. Brookstone had an absolute cow about that, and they called me, Mike Anthony called me, and he said, Bob, we want you to not to sell to Sharper Image. It's going to hurt our business. And I said, okay, I'…”
Black Founders Frequently Showed Unease Toward Equity Partners At Bain
“And I will tell you, even in my fun, when we were looking to invest alongside black entrepreneurs, there was unease, sometimes an unfamiliarity often with the idea of having an equity partner come in and work alongside you.”
Meyer actively avoided hiring New Yorkers when opening Union Square Cafe
“My hiring, if you were from New York, I didn't pretty much want to hire you. I was looking for, because I didn't think of New York as being a very friendly place back then. I wanted a place that, that was welcoming.”
Poneman: Warner deal proceeds went directly to the founders, not Sub Pop
“Similarly, the deal was done with Bruce and myself, singularly. It was not done with SubPop, so the money went directly to Bruce and myself.”
Von Ahn: Duolingo canceled revenue contracts to rely solely on VC
“So I made the difficult decision to cancel those contracts and forget about trying to make money and just raise more venture capital.”
Jo Malone hired people to carry empty branded bags around NYC
“We employed people to walk around New York City holding 10 empty Jo Malone bags for the month and the six weeks run up to opening in Bergdorf Goodman, and by the time we did, everybody had seen these Jo Malone bags, which had nothing in them, and everybody tho…”
Spindrift discontinued a profitable five million dollar soda line for sparkling water
“So we made the hard decision to shut down. It was about a five million dollar business super profitable, and just focus our resources on, on the sparkling water.”
Stacy Brown: Chicken Salad Chick sold a 51% stake to franchising partners
“They wanted 51% of the business.
And Kevin was, you know, completely no.
That's not going to happen.
But, you know, I rationalized it out by saying, we really didn't have plans of getting into the franchising business, and so our exit strategy is probably goin…”
Madden admits flipping IPO stocks back to Stratton Oakmont.
“And I told myself that it was a gray area, you know, the trading in these stocks and the flipping, they would sell me the stocks and I would sell them back to them.”
The Knot founders posed as users to spark early AOL chat engagement
“We had aliases. Like, mine was Anya, and I would sit in this chat room waiting for people to show up, and most people tend to just lurk. They wanted to hear and want, read other people's conversations, and you had to try to figure out a way to get people engag…”
James Dyson claims he never gave away any equity in Dyson
“I've never made the mistake of giving away equity in the company.”
Hsieh sold LinkExchange because its company culture had gone completely downhill
“What a lot of people don't know is the real reason why we ended up selling the company, and the real reason was because the company culture had gone completely downhill, and I myself dreaded getting out of bed in the morning to go to my own company, which is k…”
Foley: Peloton amassed a 300-person cap table across its first five rounds
“The Series E, I mean, the date was two years ago, effectively, when investors started to really see it, and we actually turned down, I mean, for the first five raises, we took every dollar we could from anybody.
And that creates a cap table of 300 people, inst…”
Bagdasarian Productions earns just two cents per Chipmunks DVD sold
“So unfortunately Fox will send you the thank you card because we get about two cents per DVD.”
Steve Jobs offered Bushnell a third of Apple for $50,000
“And so he got the apple going and he came to me and says, I want to start this company and I'm going to be leaving. Do you want to be my first investor? And I'll give you a third of the company for 50,000 dollars.”
James Dyson never gave away any equity to outside investors
“I've never made the mistake of giving away equity in the company.”
Chouinard insists Patagonia will never sell out or go public
“We're not gonna sell out. We're not gonna go public.”
Bob Johnson: BET's pitch was adapted directly from an elderly channel proposal
“But I had his information, so when I started BET, I said, black people have certain spending patterns. Black people have certain shopping patterns. I just, wherever he had elderly, I just filled in black. And I just went in and took his model, and out of that …”
Johnson pressured reluctant corporate advertisers by threatening to alert Jesse Jackson
“I'd say within about two inches of threatening them, you know, and that if you don't do this, I'm gonna tell Jesse Jackson that you're not advertising, stuff like that.”
Kelleher: Consistently rejected cash compensation increases in favor of stock options
“I always turn down pay increases, bonus increases, to set a good example, I thought, for all of our people. Of course, the stock that I got rose enormously in value, but that was in lieu of cash compensation.”
Kickstarter's founders told early investors they would never sell or IPO
“Going into it, we knew that we weren't building this to sell this, and we weren't trying to create a public company. And when we went out for investment, this was, you know, one of the first things we discussed with people.”
Peretti: Why he rejected Disney's 2013 buyout offer for BuzzFeed
“I think that part of it is a gut thing or an emotional thing where you just didn't feel ready. I felt like there was a lot more we had to build. At the time we were really a website and our video business had just started. It was growing so much. And I knew th…”
McKelvey claimed WeWork was a 100-year company, not built to sell
“And Adam and I, like, we, when we talked about this, we're like, this is a hundred year challenge. It's not like, hey, we're building a company so we can sell it and move on. We're doing this because we think this is the most interesting and biggest challenge …”
Five Guys targeted 30% food costs by raising prices, never cutting quality
“The kids didn't know why we were raising the prices, but we would always say food costs would stay around 30%. Whatever we gotta do, if we gotta raise prices, we raise prices. And we said, if we have to worry about price, we don't want to be in this business.”