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 7,044 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
Twelve 8-inch deep geothermal wells could power all of San Francisco
“They're only eight inches in diameter, so absolutely you can. Yeah, I don't think you can do it with anything else, but you're right. It's 12 wells for that amount of energy to run San Francisco.”
Araque: Geothermal could supply 20% of global energy by 2050
“So let's say by 20 50 we have on the order of one to five terawatts, that's probably a healthy 20% of global energy needs, but certainly after that, you know, you start talking about the majority of energy coming from here.”
Baird: Carbon capture market will be larger than gold and oil
“Yeah, it's going to be like Bigger than gold and oil. That's correct.”
Cuban: Cost Plus Drugs prices are almost always lower than insurance copays
“All the complications that are introduced by these pharmacy benefit managers and the big companies that they are part of, we eliminate, and that allows us to sell our drugs almost always for less than the copay that you have for your insurance.”
Nature's Path faked its factory launch using competitors' cornflakes
“We did not turn the factory on. We invited everybody there, and we went out and bought the big, giant competitors' cornflakes, and we sprinkled them on the conveyor belt.”
Liedtke: Humans ingest roughly a credit card worth of microplastics weekly
“You could argue that microplastics you're eating based upon your diet, you're eating about a credit card worth of microplastics a week.”
Liedtke: FTC rules allow '100% cotton' clothing to contain hidden plastic components
“A hundred percent Cotton shirt that's labeled a hundred percent cotton doesn't have to be a hundred percent cotton because the guidelines were not set from a sustainability standpoint. They were set from a federal trade commission's standpoint, and it was all …”
McKelvey: WeWork's massive pre-IPO losses were deliberate investments in growth
“The challenge that we are facing is that it's not that those losses were a surprise. They were by design. You know, again, we were a fast growing company and we were investing in our growth. And so we were making the decision to lose money.”
Bonobos' retail stores and Nordstrom wholesale profits funded its e-commerce losses
“And our second most profitable were our retail stores, and those two businesses' profits were funding losses from the e-commerce business, which is a wonderful paradox to the way that we conceived of the company.”
E-commerce platforms will vertically integrate proprietary brands just like Netflix
“The future of e-commerce was gonna look a little bit like the history of Netflix. That a platform that was streaming other people's content and distributing other people's content would vertically integrate and start to develop their own proprietary content.”
Mullenweg accidentally invented an SEO spam technique using hidden CSS links
“And I unintentionally invented a new way to spam. I basically was able to use some code called CSS to have the code on the website, but if you visited it in a browser, it would be invisible. But if you visited as a bot, like Google, it would look like the word…”
Citron: Discord paused hiring for a quarter to train internal managers
“Rather than bringing in managers from the outside, we created our own manager training program and asked anyone at the company, we said, hey, does anyone want to try and learn management? So we stopped hiring for a quarter. And basically talked about and taugh…”
Armstrong: Less than 1% of crypto transactions are for illicit purposes
“And so the best data that I have on it today, like over the last couple of years, is that crypto transactions, it's less than one percent are for illicit purposes.”
Armstrong: Only 5% of Coinbase employees took severance after 'no politics' memo
“It turned out it was about five percent of the company. We offered this exit package to people, anybody who was not on the same page and wanted to make it all win-win, about five percent of the company decided to take the exit package”
Armstrong: Crypto could become 20% of global GDP within two decades
“Crypto as a whole industry, I think could become 10, 20% of global GDP, like in maybe 10 or 20 years, something like that.”
Park: Title Nine hired no retail specialists until passing $40M revenue
“We didn't have anybody really until we were over forty million dollars. We didn't have anybody who had retail experience, apparel experience, marketing experience. Man, we had, everybody was just true believers, product users, That are really interested in wom…”
Suppliers immediately called Weaver's husband after ignoring her all-female team
“Keith called every single person on our collective list, and he got through either immediately when calling, or they called him back by the end of the day. He didn't have to wait 24 hours to get in touch with any of those people that we had been trying to reac…”
Grant: Independent idea generation produces more and better ideas than group brainstorming
“We have over 40 years of evidence that if you had a group of people, let's say five, brainstorming together, if instead you had let them come up with ideas independently, you get more ideas and also better ideas on average.”
Vaynerchuk: 99% of current NFT projects will fail and collapse in price
“Yeah, I mean, I think 99% of the projects that are being launched right now are gold rushes, and they're gonna be projects that fail, and people are gonna buy tokens from celebrities, leagues, different things, and the price is gonna go down.”
Reffkin: Compass senior team secretly asked co-founder Ori Allon to fire me
“One morning, Ori Was invited to a breakfast by one of the senior members of the team. He goes to breakfast, and everyone is there on the senior team except me. And they basically tell him that they want to fire me.”
Reffkin: Average agent grows business 19% in first year at Compass
“The average agent that comes to Compass has grown their business 19% in their first year.”
Reffkin: In 2018, rival brokerage heads claimed Compass would fail within five years
“At a big real estate conference, one of the top, you know, brokerage firms says, oh, you know, this was like in 2018 I think compass is going to go out of business in five years. And then the head of the fourth largest broker from the country says, oh, I think…”
Stanford excluded Lerner from curriculum meetings held at a men-only venue
“When the faculty would meet at the beginning of the year to plan the curriculum, even though I was the head of all of the computing facilities, Both administrative and the curriculum computing I went and had lunch with the faculty wives because where they had …”
Sequoia imposed four-year vesting despite Cisco booking $250,000 a month
“Len and I walked into a four-year vesting plan after funding the company for three years, clearly a mezzanine investment. We're making, we're booking a quarter million dollars a month at that point.”
Don Valentine invested $2.6 million for massive Cisco equity and control
“He gave us 2.6 million dollars, and Len and I got about 30%, but remember, he was the chairman of the board of the company, and he got stock from that, and all of his friends got stock.”
Humm Packed the Dining Room With Friends for the NYT Critic
“So on nights that we thought he would come, we would invite a bunch of people, friends, regular guests. So the restaurant felt full when he came.”
Tenev: All market makers pay Robinhood the exact same order flow rate
“Well, I mean, I would first say they all pay the same rate. We work with the largest firms and you know, the stuff is all highly regulated.”
Tenev: Robinhood's March 2020 outage was caused by open-source DNS failure
“It was a DNS system failure, which was a failure by a system that we didn't even write ourselves, right? Open source software for some of that.”
Tenev: Robinhood faced 4x NSCC collateral hike on $700 million deposit
“Yeah, at the time we had seven hundred million on deposit at NSCC, so the request was a four X increase in our deposit requirement.”
Tenev: Customers had over $35 billion in gains by congressional hearing
“You know, the fact that Robinhood customers had At the time of the congressional hearing, 35 plus billion more in unrealized and realized gains, equities in crypto on top of money that they deposited.”
Baird predicts women's soccer will reach media parity within 10 years
“I do, and I know that's kind of a bold, brave statement to say when we're only four percent of the coverage today, and we're certainly not anywhere near the massive audience or revenues that some of our men's leagues have, but I think we and other women's spor…”
Hollender: My board fired me by phone on a Saturday and locked me out
“Done in a somewhat brutal fashion because not only was I let go, but I was let go over the telephone on a Saturday morning and told that I wasn't even allowed to go back into the office ever again.”
Jack Conte: 8chan launched on Patreon to crowdfund the site's initial development
“The thing that caused the debate was a website called eight Chan that launched on Patreon.
Guy Raz: Yeah.
Jack Conte: And they were using Patreon to fund the development of the site.”
Hsieh: Zappos could expand into airlines and hotels within 10–20 years
“We're hoping, 1020 years from now, people won't even realize we started selling shoes online, and I can imagine one day there could be a Zappos Airlines or Zappos Hotel that, Is really just about the very best customer service and customer experience.”
Abuzeid: Removing Candidate Names and Photos Drops Interview Requests
“What we've tried, you know, removing names, even removing pictures the number of interview requests you receive drops.”
Butler: Black women launch businesses fastest in US but lack funding
“Black women are starting businesses faster than any other group of people in this country, but we're not getting funding, and also, because we're not getting funding, we can't really grow our ideas, so if we really wanna, like, reduce the wealth gap in this co…”
Famous Dave's Board Refused to Give the Founder a Seat in 2005
“Yes, that's one of the unfortunate things of publicly traded companies. They felt they didn't need me, you know.”
A Mavericks manager told their team Marshall would not last 90 days
“I had one situation where somebody actually told their whole team, don't respond to her. Don't do anything she's asking to be done because she won't be here in 90 days.”
Mark Constantine: Anita Roddick copied The Body Shop from a US store
“It was a totally different company that inspired Anita Roddick to copy it and do it in Brighton.”
The Body Shop went public without owning its own product formulas
“They went public. They were now a listed company, but they didn't own the product they were selling. I owned it.”
Jeremy Stoppelman says Yelp filters out 25% of submitted reviews on average
“Yelp has a mechanism where 25% on average of reviews are not shown on the businesses page, and we are by far the most aggressive of any review site out there.”
Ben Conniff: Right whale entanglements are not happening in Maine waters
“All the data and evidence shows that any issues with right whales are not, really not happening in Maine waters based on their migratory patterns and where their food is”
Chesky: Remote work will shift travel to long stays in smaller communities
“I mean, maybe the most fundamental change that I see in our world that's going to happen, if you're so fortunate enough, typically upper middle class person or upper class, not everyone can do this, but for those who can, They're realizing, maybe I'll go a mon…”
Chesky: Travelers will shift from crowded cities to outdoor destinations
“People are gonna, instead of traveling to the same 20 cities, going to the same hotel districts that are really crowded, and then standing in line, To get their selfie photo, instead of the same landmarks, to put it on Instagram, say, look, I got that too. The…”
Most Skincare Brands Use Stock Formulas With 0.01% Active Ingredients, Tsai Claims
“You go to a contract manufacturer, they have stock formulas and stock packaging, you pick it, you put in 0.01% of a marketing level ingredient, you put your name on it, you pick a fragrance, and it's out the door. And that is how the vast majority of skincare …”
Skin bleaching products are the largest skincare category in Africa
“The biggest skincare product in Africa is skin bleaching products.”