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 36 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
Bark Air Aims to Reduce Ticket Prices to $600 Within One Year
“We have line of sight to, how do we get to that 600 dollar ticket? We have very clear line of sight to doing that, I'd say, in the next year.”
Bark Walked Away From an Active 2018 Fundraise to Sustain Itself
“We, I definitely freaked out my board and our investors but walked away from the fundraising round and said, forget it.”
Meeker: Corporate Executives Often Struggle to Adapt to Early-Stage Startups
“So you have very talented people who are bringing You know, imagine you're running marketing for AT&T one day, and the next day you're trying to start something. You're bringing that approach. And it meant we spent a lot of days in conference rooms talking abo…”
Meeker Traded Loaded iPods for Meetup Angel Investor Checks
“It was the exact moment where the iPod came out, and we sent notes to all of them, and we said, hey, Matt's gonna come up and pick up your paperwork and your check and if you hand it to him today, he's gonna hand you back an iPod pre-populated with a thousand …”
Meetup Launched Globally Across Hundreds of Topics on Day One
“No, it was everywhere. Which probably went as well as that sounds like it would go. You've got a computer in New York City making decisions of how things should go in Moscow. We started with a couple hundred topics, and then we would tell people, it's seven p.…”
Howard Dean Promised to Plug Meetup at Every Campaign Speech
“That turned into a meeting with Governor Dean and Joe Trippi, his campaign manager, at which they said I intend to run for president, and I don't have a lot of money, but I can promise you this, from now until the day I get out of the race, I will end every sp…”
BarkBox Sold $15 Groupon Subscriptions Despite Having $20 Box Costs
“If I remember right, we were selling three-month subscriptions for 45 dollars so 15 dollars a month, but you'd probably have a 20 dollar cost of goods in every box.”
Accepting Venture Capital Forces Founders to Build a Different Business
“I think it meant you're, you come to that fork in the road of, if you're taking venture capital on, you're now deciding to build a different kind of business in a different way.”
Bark Crushed Copycat Competitors by Deliberately Outspending Them on Ad Channels
“They're usually copying the whole playbook, so taking to Google search or Facebook advertising, and it's easy enough to just lean on them and outspend them. If you're bigger, we'll, we'll bleed you over time, and that happened time after time after time.”
Bark Founders Ignored Market Sizing and Avoided Data When Choosing Toys
“We never looked at the market data or the market sizing and said, let's go here. If we had, we would have never chosen toys.”
Bark Required Its Incoming Pandemic-Era CEO to Commute From Seattle
“And a very good guy that I think we put into difficult spot. You're saying to someone, take on a CEO role. Take it on in the middle of a pandemic. You'll live in Seattle, but you'll commute to New York. That's fun. You won't get the opportunity to meet most of…”
Bark Burned $194 Million During Its 2022 Fiscal Year
“So that year ending March 31st, we burned a hundred and ninety-four million dollars, and if we had done that for the next 12 months, that would have been it. We're done. We're gone.”
Bark Holds a Ten Percent Share of the Dog Toy Market
“And it does get, it gets poo-pooed by a lot of people because, well, that's only three and a half billion dollar industry. And you already own 10% of it.”
Meeker Projects Bark Will Achieve Net Profitability This Fiscal Year
“This year, we should make four or five million dollars. And up from there.”
Meetup Found Its Co-Founder CTO Through a Craigslist Ad
“We put an ad on Craigslist. It was very obnoxious saying interviews are next week. We were looking for a co-founder CTO. If you're not here in New York City next week, then you're, you can't be interviewed, and that's it. Within 24 hours, we had 450 applicants…”
Early Meetup Saw a 50% In-Person Show Rate from RSVPs
“Worldwide, what we would see is about half of the people who RSVP'd would actually show up.”
Meetup Took Four Years to Adopt a Subscription Business Model
“It took us probably four years to get to the subscription service.”
Meetup Reached Profitability and 10 Million Active Users by 2008
“Growing quickly, profitable, supportive investors and board, everything looking very good, and ten million plus active members worldwide every month.”
Bark Sold Early Subscriptions Using a Phone Mockup and Square Reader
“So I started to carry a square in my pocket, and I'd show people, and they'd give me the reaction. I'd plug the square in, and I'd say, it's live. Swipe your card. And I'd hand, hand the phone to them, and their faces would change. They'd be like, well, so the…”
Bark Launched With $10,000 and No Initial Venture Capital Ambitions
“Henrik and I together put in 10,000 dollars, and it kind of that same story of too much money or money at all. Isn't the type of company we want to build. We want to build something for us and something that's profitable, and this isn't going to be a venture-b…”
Bark Founders Gave Carly Strife a One-Third Equal Equity Stake
“We did an equal chunk of equity. So a third of the company.”
BarkBox Reached 15,000 Subscribers by the End of Its First Year
“That first year we thought we were huge, where we ended the year with about 15,000 subscribers.”
BarkBox Experienced Zero Customer Churn During Its First Four Months
“So I remember the first four months that we were alive, we had no churn, not one subscriber left. Now, not a whole lot of subscribers there, but out of over a hundred, no one left.”
Bark's Seed Investor Conditioned Funding on Meeker Becoming Full-Time CEO
“In May of 2012, Mike Hirschland, who had started Dogpatch Labs, and Mike and I obviously worked closely while, while I was there, and he reached out and said, I'm starting this new fund. Can I invest in this thing? Can I lead a round for you? But that came wit…”
U.S. Dog-Owning Households Grew From 38 Million to 65 Million
“When we started, there were thirty-eight million households in the U.S. With a dog, and today that's sixty-five million.”
Bark Shut Down In-Home Vet Service Due to Immense Capital Requirements
“We started a service in 2013 called Bark Care, which was an in-home vet service in New York, and people loved it. Dogs loved it. Everyone was loving it, but it would have taken us a tremendous amount of capital to do it and scale it the way that it needed to b…”
Stalling Growth Reverses Subscription Working Capital Cycles to Drain Cash
“If you're not growing, it catches up to you and works in reverse and eats away at your cash.”
Bark Accelerated Rapidly in 2020 After Nearly Running Out of Cash
“Again, we were going month to month on our cash. I remember in March of 2020, having conversations with investors and our banks and saying, well, we'll see what retention looks like on April first. And then all of a sudden, customer acquisition is just off to …”
Meeker Stepped Down Because He Did Not Want to Run Publicly
“Then we also had ambitions of someday being a public company, and I had an idea that I didn't want to be a public company CEO.”
Bark Raised $200 Million in SPAC PIPE Following $500 Million Demand
“We went out to raise a hundred million through that pipe process. We had an interest of nearly five hundred million, so we ended up raising 200 from that in addition to the SPAC funds.”
Bark Air Sold Out Summer Flights at $8,000 Per One-Way Ticket
“Those tickets are six to 8000 dollars one way, and we're sold out in September. We were sold out in August.”
Bark Reduced Its Annual Net Losses From $57 Million to $11 Million
“Our fiscal year, 22, when I stepped in, we lost fifty-seven million dollars. The next year, it was 31. Last year, it was 11.”
Meeker Intends to Remain CEO of Bark For the Long Term
“And what I say to people now is, I intend to die in the saddle. It, truly, it goes back to Hugo. And that responsibility at that And the legacy. But I say that knowing that I'm a month away from having a baby boy. A human child, yes. Maybe that becomes my obse…”