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 12 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
McKenzie: Billions spent on social media content moderation failed to fix trust
“They've invested billions of dollars on this. They come up with these policy documents that are hundreds of pages long. And it doesn't appear to us like it has actually helped misinformation problems, or it's helped Reduce the level of harassment, or it's help…”
McKenzie: Musk offered to buy Substack and make Chris Best Twitter CEO
“And he responded by getting Chris on a call and saying to him, well, how about Twitter acquire Substack, and you, I'm looking for a CEO to run the company.”
McKenzie: Media succeeds when readers replace advertisers as paying customers
“The core insight he had was that you should make readers the customers instead of advertisers the customers. And if you change that core dynamic, especially if you monetize the relationship over time through enough subscription, then different things are possi…”
McKenzie: Tesla had a messy, cut-throat, throw-under-the-bus culture
“It's totally different from Tesla, which was messy and cut-throat and had to, like, throw everyone under the bus kind of culture.”
McKenzie: Ben Thompson was earning over $1M annually from Stratechery in 2017
“We figured out, you know, through napkin math and guessing, basically, that he was already making more than a million dollars a year from that.”
McKenzie: Patreon proved audiences will pay directly for creators they love
“Yeah, Patreon, I think, is a hugely important company because it changed the culture. It showed not only that people will be willing to pay for content online, they'll be willing to pay for the artist or creator who they most love or trust.”
McKenzie: Tech sector believed a billion-dollar company for writers was impossible
“2017, writers were not the sexiest customer base in the world. No one thought they were going to build a billion dollar tech company by serving writers. In fact, people were forsaking writers, forsaking the media, turning their back on that, they'd given up on…”
McKenzie: Elon Musk offered him a Tesla job instead of a biography
“I was pitching him the idea of this book, but Elon said, I don't know about the book. Maybe, but would you be interested in a job at Tesla?”
McKenzie: Twitch co-founder Emmett Shear became an early Substack investor
“I remember on the first demo day we did, which is the one that's for YC alumni, Emmett Scheer came up to me and he said, Emmett Scheer, founder of, co-founder of Twitch, who was on the show a couple years ago, yep. Yeah, he's like, I look at you guys, I'm real…”
McKenzie: Substack reached 7,000 paid subscriptions by the end of Y Combinator
“By the time we Finished YC at the end of March. We had, we, 7000 paid subscriptions across the network that we could point to and say, look, this thing is working.”
McKenzie: Substack recruited writers with devoted followings over large overall audiences
“We looked for people that we thought weren't being well served by the dominant media structure, but actually had interesting things to say and had a devoted audience. And so it wasn't necessarily the people with the largest audiences. Maybe they'd have a small…”