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 8 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
Heavin: Taking venture capital starts a clock and shifts employee motives
“I knew the second you take a dime, we're starting a clock. We're starting expectations. It kind of changes the nature of people when they even come for a job interview. You know, the question is, how much stock do I get, you know?”
Venture capital shifted Lynda.com to merciless EBITDA optimization
“And I think my fear was realized because it took away our passion and focus on education, and it drove it down Just a pure business path, and decisions were merciless. It was just about how to gain EBITDA, and it made working there a lot less fun.”
Adding closed captioning drove more growth for Lynda.com than paid marketing
“Believe it or not, it, the closed captioning was a very beneficial thing to us, more so than any marketing.”
Heavin: Data analytics cannot successfully drive educational content programming
“You can't do all this based on data analytics to understand what you need to do for programming of content for learning. But I kind of always had this belief you had to be a little bit of a bookie and a fortune teller. And the data analytics is very important,…”
Lynda.com secured massive enterprise adoption entirely through organic employee demand
“A lot of people who taught web design and Photoshop were using our courses, and they were bringing it into their schools and into their companies, so we'd be installed in all of Apple, all of Adobe, all of Microsoft, all of Google, and the employees were start…”
Heavin: Employee departures surged at Lynda.com after raising venture capital
“It made working there a lot less interesting, and I could tell you I could count on one hand how many people chose to leave before we took money. But after we took money and the business started changing because of investors, because of this pressure, we had m…”
Bruce Heavin: Adobe and Martha Stewart sent employees to Lynda.com workshops
“And we were having Adobe sending their employees to us. Martha Stewart was sending employees to us.”
Early Lynda.com sold video tapes via mail-in checks without e-commerce
“We had no e-commerce. We had a thing on the website that said, send your check and money order to PO Box in Ojai, California, and then we had notified them by email when we got their payment. So people were sending their checks and money orders to our PO Box i…”