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 40 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
Neeleman views employee unionization as a fundamental failure of corporate leadership
“You know, I always thought if our people need someone else to come tell us how to treat them, then that would be pretty tragic. If I thought I didn't treat our people well enough that they needed somebody else, then, you know, that's not the company I wanted t…”
Southwest claims Smithsonian credit for e-tickets, but Morris Air invented them
“They were, and have credit today in the Smithsonian as being the first Ticketless airline, but it was really our system that did it.”
Neeleman asserts JetBlue's board was completely wrong to remove him as CEO
“It was not only devastating, but it was just absolutely the wrong decision.”
Neeleman: 10,000 of Azul's 13,000 employees volunteered for unpaid leave
“You know, we have about 13,000 people that work for Azul, and, So we went out to the group and said, Hey, you know, everybody we're going to need your help here. Who would like to take a few months off without pay? And remarkably enough we had almost 10,000 of…”
Neeleman: Kelleher suggested Neeleman could eventually succeed him at Southwest
“I mean, he kind of led me to believe that if I just minded my P's and Q's that I would be a successor one day, you know, that I could, you know, follow in his footsteps”
Southwest CEO Herb Kelleher vowed to fiercely enforce Neeleman's non-compete agreement
“About halfway through the non-compete, I called, or a couple, maybe a year and a half into it, I called Herb, and I said, hey, Herb, you know, I've consulted, you know, legal counsel. This thing is not really enforceable. I mean, I didn't get any consideration…”
Neeleman: Resolving service mistakes properly should increase customer loyalty beyond baseline
“If you have a, make a mistake, or you treat someone poorly, or whatever, you need to make them more loyal having had an issue with your company than if they had not had an issue in the first place.”
Neeleman structured Azul's voting control so he can never be fired again
“I can't be fired at Azul.”
Neeleman: Azul's business dropped 95%, cutting flights from 900 to under 50
“You know, our business is off 95%. We had 900 flights a day before the crisis. We're down to under 50 flights a day.”
Neeleman: Azul's daily revenue plummeted from nearly $10M to under $500K
“Our revenue we were doing something close to ten million a day, and now we're doing you know, five percent of that.”
Neeleman: US airline executive expects carrier to shrink by up to 50%
“I was talking to one, you know, airline executive in the US, and they said, you know, we're probably going to be 25% smaller If we come back in a few months, but if this goes for a year, we could be 50% smaller or more.”
Founders with ADHD should delegate weaknesses and simplify complex problems
“And so, you have that, all that kind of negative stuff, which you can solve by just hiring good people that can fix all that, and then you have this ability just to hone in on things, and just to take really complicated things and just simplify them.”
Neeleman: Azul directors and VPs must speak to every passenger on their flights
“Every single one of our directors or VPs, when they fly on a flight, they have to talk to every single customer on the flight.”
Neeleman: Class Mobility in Brazil Is Virtually Impossible
“In Brazil, it's virtually impossible to do that, and it made me very resentful, and you know, I really, in, in that, you know, I got tucked away in my mind that I would, I wanted to come back to Brazil, and I wanted to do something to help these people at some…”
JetBlue was originally planned to launch as Virgin America with Richard Branson
“And I, you know, I was talking to early, to Richard Branson early on. JetBlue was going to be called Virgin America.”
Neeleman: Azul is Brazil's #1 airline in departures and cities served
“It's the number one airline in terms of daily departures. Number one airline in numbers of cities serves. We serve over a hundred cities in Brazil. We have 800 flights a day. We fly about 80,000 people every single day.”
Neeleman: ADD gives me the ability to simplify complex problems
“My form of ADD has an, I have an ability to just look at a situation that's very complex and simplify it, and say, let's just do it this way, and it drives my teams crazy because they're like, no, it's not that simple. I'm saying, yes, it is. Just go do this, …”
Neeleman: Azul has no nonstop competition in 85% of markets
“Even till today, Azul, about 85% of their markets, they have no nonstop competition.”
Neeleman: 125 US cities lost 25% of air service in decade
“125 cities had lost 25% of their air service over the last 10 years.”
Neeleman: Breeze Airways operates 314 routes across 89 cities
“We were, we've announced 89 cities. We're in 36 different states. We have 314 different routes, and people love flying us.”
Neeleman: Breeze Airways has highest NPS of any airline he's founded
“It's the highest NPS score I've ever seen in any of my airlines I've ever started.”
Neeleman: Azul aircraft suppliers granted six-month payment deferrals during COVID-19
“A lot of our salaries have been reduced, and those that supply our planes for us have said, hey, don't pay us for six months.”
Neeleman credits his Brazil mission over college for building his confidence
“Be plucked from your life, and put into a completely different environment, and to be able to learn a foreign language, and to be able to kind of learn from a new land, and it just had a profound influence on me, and it changed my life in ways that, you know, …”
Azul Airlines operates 1,000 daily flights as Brazil's highest-valued airline
“It's the largest in term of value, and we have a thousand flights a day. We serve a 117 cities.”
Neeleman teaches Stanford courses despite holding only a high school diploma
“I teach courses at Stanford, actually, with my high school diploma, I don't even have a college degree.”
Neeleman: Provo Sales Companies Recruit Fearless Returned Missionaries
“Yeah, I mean, it's, there's a lot of companies that are in Provo, Utah, that do door-to-door sales of alarm systems, and pest control, and whatever, and, you know, they take all these guys that have come, and gals that have come home from missions, that are ki…”
Neeleman: College travel company reached $6 million in annual revenue
“The company was doing six million dollars a year,”
Neeleman lost $500K in his first venture when Hawaii Express collapsed
“It did, because I had prepaid, you know, every single ticket, And it was about a half a million dollars.”
Neeleman used idle Hawaiian Airlines planes for $69 Salt Lake-to-LA flights
“I put flights onto Los Angeles for 69 dollars using this old airplane, flying into the old West Imperial Terminal.”
Neeleman: Aircraft leasing enables low-capital airline bootstrapping via maintenance reserves
“You aren't buying the airplanes. You're just, you know, agreeing to pay them like a monthly rent payment on the airplanes with leasing. And then they take a certain amount per hour in reserves for maintenance. And then when the planes go in for maintenance, th…”
Neeleman: Finished Morris Air's two-year Southwest integration in six months
“They asked me to take two years to integrate Morris into Southwest, and within six months, I had it all done.”
Southwest Airlines fired Neeleman just five months after acquiring his company
“So I started in December, and they fired me in May.”
Neeleman: 1990s airlines lacked relational databases and real-time reservation data
“Airlines had these big mainframe computer systems they were using at the time, and everything was done on a flat file. So there was no relational databases. The actual, the database was actually the ticket. So if you lost your ticket, and, you know, it became …”
JetBlue raised an unprecedented $135 million before launching commercial operations
“We moved, I moved the family to Connecticut in July of 99, and we were, you know, full bore, had raised a hundred and thirty-five million dollars, and so we were ready to go.”
Neeleman: JetBlue chose Airbus even after Boeing dropped its 737 price
“Boeing ended up coming below that number, which I would have shaken with him on the first day but we were, we went with Airbus, and we've had a great relationship with it.”
Neeleman: Brazil's top 25 cities had nonstops only 20% of the time
“The 25 largest cities in Brazil only had non-stops about 20% of the time, but then there were like 50 cities that had no service that needed service.”
Neeleman: Brazilian airfares were double US airfares prior to Azul
“Fares were really high. They were about double where they were in the United States.”
Neeleman scored a 16 on the ACT with an 8 on English
“I, when I took the ACT test, I think I got 16 on it, and my advisor said, look, you got eight on the English section, and if you had just put C on any question, you would have got 12.”
Every JetBlue reservation agent works entirely remotely from their home
“At JetBlue, we have all of our reservationists at JetBlue are in their home. They don't work at the office.”
Neeleman: Morris Air Charters launched Hawaii packages for $399 on chartered DC-8s
“You'd spend, you know, basically seven days, six nights in Hawaii, and then fly direct, and the whole package was three 99, because we were buying the charter flight, and so we started this company called Morris Air Charters, and that was kind of the hallmark …”