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 17 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
Wood: Nonprofits Are Less Accountable and More Wasteful Than Companies
“It's actually very difficult to give away money effectively because there's less accountability versus a company. Like if you imagine putting money in a nonprofit versus putting money in a company, well, the company is measured and is very motivated on being e…”
Wood: Steve Jobs rejected Netflix app on Apple TV over hardware rivalry
“And I think Reed sent an email to Steve Jobs saying, are you guys interested in this? And Steve Jobs replied, no, we're not interested because we hear you're building Hardware that competes with Apple TV. And so why would we ever do business with you? You know…”
Wood: ReplayTV burned $20M monthly and missed its IPO window
“You know, even though we raised two hundred million dollars plus the burn rate had cranked up and we were spending, you know, I remember some months it would be twenty million dollars a month. The thing that changed the dynamic is they went public Before us, w…”
Wood: US TV Advertising's $80B Market Will Entirely Move to Streaming
“You know, there's, I don't know, 70, eighty billion dollars a year spent on TV advertising in the US alone, and it's all moving to streaming.”
Anthony Wood: Selling iBand for $36M felt like selling out
“And looking back on it, selling a company for 30, whatever million dollars is quite successful, but that's not the way it felt. Like I wanted to build the real company. I didn't want to just make the money. It felt like I had sold out.”
Wood: TiVo used dot-com funding to subsidize DVRs at $99
“TiVo, then Teleworld, decided that they would take advantage that this was like in the dot com boom. They would take advantage of the fact that they could raise a lot of money. They raised a lot of money, and then they started subsidizing the DVRs. Yeah, so th…”
Wood: Hastings allocated 3% of Netflix revenue to background streaming R&D
“And so he actually told me once that he, you know, I, I've allocated, I'll call it three percent of our revenue to keep working on this idea of streaming in the background so that we don't miss the transition.”
Wood: Netflix took 20% of Roku before selling stake to Menlo Ventures
“Right. And so they, I think they got 20% of the company. So after, Netflix invested and we started shipping the Netflix player, we then decided to raise venture money. And so we raised money from a venture capitalist called Menlo Ventures. And then Netflix dec…”
Wood: Web browsers are too resource-heavy and costly for TV manufacturing
“Web browsers were a very inefficient way to distribute software. Like they required lots of memory and lots of processing power and that it was not the way to make a, there'll be ways to do it a lot cheaper and manufacturers always picked the less expensive wa…”
Wood: Competitors underestimate how simple consumers want TV interfaces to be
“I think our competition continually underestimates how simple consumers want their TV experience to be. Like television, they want to sit down, maybe drink a beer, and they want to watch something as quickly as they can. And they don't want to get confused try…”
Wood: Media execs are surprised Roku is their top customer source
“Most media executives, when they start getting into streaming, they underestimate Roku because they all have Samsung TVs or an Apple TVs, and so They're always surprised when they find out that we're their number one source of customers.”
Wood: Hardware Businesses Face Severe Tax and Cash-Flow Lag
“One of my big lessons was the amount of money you have to report on your tax return is unrelated to how much cash you have in the bank. In the hardware business, you know, you got to buy parts, you assemble them, So you got to buy the parts. You got to pay for…”
Wood: Audio Is Always a Second-Class Citizen to Video
“In the audio for video business, which is our market, audio was always the second-class citizen compared to the video.”
Wood: Roku was designed from day one to be TV's Windows
“My goal was always to be the platform for TV that, you know, just like phones have Android and PCs have windows and I felt like TVs needed Roku.”
Wood: Selling video ads is Roku's largest revenue driver
“Right, and that's actually our biggest business, is selling, selling video ads.”