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
Johnson: BET Capitalized on MTV Not Airing Black Music Videos
“And then when MTV refused to play, or started out not playing black music videos, and the black talent wanted to have their videos shown, and I went to them and say, hey, if you keep making the videos, I'll keep putting them on. And as a result of that, we gai…”
Schultz: Starbucks had about seven months until insolvency in 2008
“I knew that we had about seven months left, if we continued on this track, where we would be insolvable.”
Kelleher: Southwest kept low costs despite being the most unionized US airline
“Yeah, we were the most heavily unionized carrier in the United States. Our low costs were not due to being a non-union carrier, since we were more unionized than our competitors were.”
Male VCs told Hyman they needed to consult their wives or admins
“That wasn't one investor, that was most. Let me talk to my wife, my daughter, or my admin. Those were the three, you know, target customers that we would hear.”
Hyman: Harasser called Rent the Runway board member claiming CEO unresponsiveness
“And then this person decided to call one of my board members up on the phone and say, you know, Jen never responds to me. And I think that this is a real problem, and She's a really unresponsive CEO, and she's probably, if she's doing this to me, she's probabl…”
Blakely Paid Friends to Fake Retail Momentum at Neiman Marcus
“First of all, I paid people basically friends to go buy the product and create a buzz about it because I was like, you know, I gotta have these things move off the shelf or the buyer's not gonna give me any more chance.”
Whole Foods Went Public in 1992 to Prevent VCs Taking Control
“Yeah, but venture capitalists didn't want us to go public. They wanted us to do another round of venture financing, but I was determined not to do another round of venture financing because that would have given them control of the company, and I just didn't t…”
Ethan Brown claims livestock causes 51% of global greenhouse gas emissions
“Look at climate change. You know, it's about 51% of greenhouse gas emissions from lifestyle.”
Branson: Virgin won the largest damages payout in UK history against British Airways
“And in the end, we took them to court. We won the biggest damages in UK history, and it was Christmas time.”
Branson asserts the 2014 SpaceShipTwo crash was pilot error, not technical
“Once we realized it was a pilot area, not a technical area, I was able to tell all the engineers that it was nothing to do with them and that the basic craft was sound”
Southwest maintained low costs despite being America's most unionized airline
“We were the most heavily unionized carrier in the United States. Our low costs were not due to being a non-union carrier, since we were more unionized than our competitors were.”
Arista required Reid to replace Clive Davis as condition of buyout
“The owners of Arista, they said, we'll buy your label, but you'll have to agree to a move to New York. B, you'll have to replace Clive Davis and take over Arista Records as its president.”
Founders bluffed about an investor's interest to secure a meeting with him
“We said in, in that interview in La Presse that he was interested in buying us, and he then read it, and then had his office contact us a few days later and said he wants to meet you guys.”
Goodwin: Rising Food Allergy Rates Are Linked to the Microbiome
“The rate of gluten and general food allergies have gone up precipitously since the seventies. Spoiler. It has a lot to do with the microbiome.”
Modi: FDA issued a national recall of Bobbie's pilot product
“And they issued a national recall. Right there and then. Issued a national recall of what was a pilot”
Maveron told Serena & Lily they wouldn't even fund Starbucks in 2008
“In fact, Maveron, who was, you know, came from the money of Starbucks, they told us that if Starbucks had walked in their door right now, they wouldn't fund them.”
Mandatory employment contracts saved founders from board-forced company sale
“Listen, we, the board could have voted to sell the company because they had enough votes around the table that were incentivized to sell the company.
The problem is that the acquisitions were requiring us to sign three year employment contracts.”
Untuckit Lost $9M to Tariffs and De Minimis Rule Changes
“We had about nine million that was pulled out of our bank account that we had no line of sight to. And that was for two reasons. One, the normal tariffs, but then also Trump removed in the middle of the night, this three, two, one de minimis rule, which you co…”
Life Alert Mandates Three-Year Contracts That Only Cancel Upon Death
“Life Alert hasn't really innovated since the eighties. And when you set up with them, it's a three year contract unless you die.”
Toast laid off 55 percent of its workforce during early pandemic
“Because restaurants weren't taking payments, and when restaurants aren't open, they can't really pay their software fees, and so we had to make the hard decision to cut, I think it was like, 55% of the team, and then also to like, get on a call with the team a…”
Failed premium drugstore lines from Revlon and L'Oreal enabled e.l.f.'s retail expansion
“Revlon launched a brand called Vital Radiance. Now you probably don't remember, ever heard of it. And L'Oreal launched a brand called Hip to compete with Mac. And the major premise of both those brands was we are going to sell more expensive cosmetics in the d…”
Live Nation monopolizes music profits via venues, parking, and ticketing fees
“Nowadays, the act gets everything, and then the promoter, which is really basically one promoter, Live Nation now, they own a lot of the venues, they get the parking, and they, because they own Ticketmaster, they get that ticket charges.”
Clark: Basic Brown Bear's Tour Had No Protected Secrets
“Anybody could go and see the business. Nothing about that was protected.”
VCs rescinded Shopify's term sheets during the 2008 financial crisis
“So basically, I got this around this time, notice that term sheets will no longer be honored, because everyone needs to tighten bells, and so on.”
Companies Now Practice 'Green Hushing' Around Sustainability and DEI Initiatives
“There is sort of this new language called green hushing, where people do sustainable things, and they don't talk about them, and part of it is the sort of political environment we live in, and we have many aspects of responsible business, like diversity and in…”
Purpose-Driven Businesses Generate Better Profits and Financial Results
“And there is abundant research, much of which NYU has done itself, that demonstrates that people that run businesses in a responsible, purpose-driven fashion generate better results, more profits, better growth, and as young students, they have to be very fami…”
Dogs Evolved as True Omnivores Capable of Digesting Carbohydrates
“So they had to evolve to have digestive enzymes to break down carbohydrates and starches, and they are true omnivores like humans.”
Distributing CUDA for free on GPUs severely depressed NVIDIA's gross margins
“The answer was, let's use GeForce, which is the GPU that is now everywhere in the world used for playing video games. And let's have GeForce carry on its back CUDA to every single computer in the world. Now, of course, by doing so, our gross margins would go f…”
Gabbert: Father Refused to Honor Signed 1980 Buyout Agreement for Family Business
“I went, simply went to him, said, here we have the agreement, and he said, I'm not gonna do it. I said, we have a legal agreement, and he said, oh, I'm not gonna do it.”
Martha Stewart and COO Sharon Patrick fought constantly over everything
“Martha and Sharon fought a lot. They had differences of opinion on just about everything, so that was the first thing, and I think dual reporting of equal measure is challenging.”
Carlyle Group halted capital funding for Beautycounter in mid-March 2024
“Well, in mid-March of 24, Carlisle made the very difficult decision to move away from funding, continuing to fund the brand.”
Post-Oslo Accords, Arab suppliers were eager to do business with Israelis
“They were super receptive because this was, remember, the romantic time. This was after, after the Oslo peace process. And it's hard to appreciate and remember how magical that time was, but you would go to Arab capitals, and you would go to Arab towns, and th…”
Swad sued Wingstop's buyers to recover the $12 million owed on his note
“Well, me and that one lawyer, we sued him. And keep in mind, they owed me twelve million dollars. Okay, that's a lot of money to a young, young man from Ohio who started off at the dish machine, you know. So I sued him. I sued him for my money.”
Pizza Patron's controversial 'Pizza for Pesos' promotion catalyzed massive global publicity
“Got a lot of attention, global attention, and it catapulted the brand and the franchising program into a light. I couldn't have Couldn't have bought that much publicity at any price, and that, and that's when we really started to go, but it galvanized that cus…”
P&G and Kimberly-Clark initially refused to sell to Diapers.com
“Procter & Gamble and Kimberly Clark, the two big diaper manufacturers that make Pampers and Huggies, they refused to sell us diapers. They said they just don't want to waste their time on a business that's never going to work.”
VCs rejected Quidsi's $100M funding round because Amazon was targeting them
“We had only raised 50,000,055 million dollars up until that point, which was pretty modest amount of money raised compared to today's standards, but we went out and we needed another hundred million to keep all the websites going and to really blow it out. We …”
Amazon told Quidsi's team to keep competing against them post-acquisition
“Like, Amazon didn't even, when they brought us in, say, hey, we want you guys to run the mom, baby, parent category within Amazon. They said, you know what, just keep doing what you're doing. Just continue to keep competing with us.”
Jet.com reached a $1B revenue run rate within 10 months of launching
“I mean, we got to a billion people Run rate in revenue within 10 months of the business launching, which was I think probably unprecedented at the time.”
Jet.com burned roughly $40 million per month after its launch
“We were burning about forty million a month.”
O'Hayer: Big meat and egg companies routinely break farmer contracts
“Routinely all the big chicken companies, egg companies, beef companies, they would always break their contracts when it was economically favorable for the big producer to do so, or the big brands.”
O'Hayer: Roughly half of US laying hens are now cage-free
“I think the factory farming method, the, you know, the battery cages are still there, right? But instead of being 95, 97 or eight percent, whatever it is, it's around 50 or so today. I don't have the exact numbers, but somewhere in the half. So we've had a pre…”
Lopez: Federal bribery indictment stemmed from former partner falsely implicating him
“Everybody who knew me understood that this was a false accusation that stemmed from the actions of a former joint venture partner who himself was the one paying off soccer officials for his own benefit, and when he got caught, he falsely implicated me.”
Healy capitalized his early business by speculating on peanut contracts
“I had a broker. I was buying all my peanuts through, and he tipped me off that there was gonna be a big crop failure that year because of drought, and so I went very bullish. I speculated, which was, Really crazy. And I contracted way, way more nuts than I act…”
Early press reports actively erased Twitter founders Jack Dorsey and Noah Glass
“They not only kicked him out of Twitter, they tried to write him out of the history, and I know this very well because I was reading at the time The reports, and they would mention Biz, and they would mention Ev as the founders of Twitter, and they would omit …”
Pre-Square, merchants under $100K in revenue were barred from processing cards
“Basically, if you didn't have a 100,000 dollars of business, You would not take credit cards. That was sort of the cutoff. Because it was too expensive. You had to have a sponsoring bank. You had to have a certain level of accounting. You had to have a physica…”
Osher: Spinbrush was the highest-testing consumer product in P&G history
“And it turned out, and we didn't know this till later, that it was the highest testing product they ever did in the history of Procter & Gamble with consumers.”
Hastings: Netflix accounts for under 10% of U.S. TV viewing
“Well, if you look today at TV viewing in the United States, as an example Disney's ahead of us. YouTube is, this is combining linear and on demand. YouTube's ahead of us. They're the largest. Disney's ahead of us. Even Paramount's ahead of us, because they all…”