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 24 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
Shopping.com forced Nirav Tolia to resign before IPO due to past controversies
“When you are a company that wants to go public, you want to be as unencumbered by controversy as possible, right? And the best thing for me to do at that point was to step away. Now, did I have a choice? No, not really. I mean, they kind of Asked me nicely to …”
Nirav Tolia predicts AI action platforms will completely replace multi-link search
“Particularly in a world of AI, where most consumers are going to go to one place, ask a question, and everything's going to be taken care of behind the scenes. It's not going to be, You go to Google, you get 15 links, you click on all of them, you hit back, yo…”
Nirav Tolia claims Google, Meta, Apple, and Amazon have failed at local
“I also think no one has won local. Google hasn't. Meta hasn't. Apple hasn't. Amazon hasn't, right?”
Jerry Yang told Nirav Tolia he was less intelligent than he thought
“And he looked at me right in the eyes, and he said, you're a lot less intelligent than I thought you were. Do you have any idea how hard it is to build something like Yahoo? Well, you're about to find out.”
Tolia: Co-founder merger litigation permanently fractured friendships
“It took friendships, and it fractured them, and they've never been repaired.”
Tolia: NYC had zero billion-dollar consumer internet companies in the mid-2000s
“How many billion dollar
Consumer internet companies are there in New York?
And at the time the answer was zero.”
Tolia: Online contributor communities only require a 1% participation rate
“Most of these contributor communities, Guy, Of a hundred users who visit, you only need one to contribute.”
Bill Gurley blocked Fanbase's shutdown by handing Nirav Tolia Kipling's 'If'
“And he slides over a piece of paper and says, read this. And I look at it, and it's a poem. Actually, one of my favorite poems. He probably didn't know that, but it's If by Rudyard Kipling. And it was a very powerful way for him to say, I don't think you can g…”
Founders must build ad platforms sequentially, not acquire users and ads simultaneously
“When you choose an indirect business model and an indirect business model is when you're not asking your primary users to pay you directly, you are making money indirectly through advertising or through some other means. When you're building that kind of busin…”
Nextdoor actively disciplines users for discussing national politics on the platform
“We created neighborhood guidelines. You can't discuss national politics. If you do, you can get reprimanded, right? You can get disciplined, right?”
Tolia: Nextdoor made a mistake delaying small business onboarding
“I think we probably made a mistake not thinking about how to bring small businesses into the conversation from the beginning.”
Nextdoor claims 100 million verified users and 25 million weekly active users
“And today, of our hundred million verified neighbors, twenty-five million use Nextdoor every week.”
Tolia: Larry Page and Reid Hoffman attended early Round Zero meetups
“We then incorporated it as a nonprofit, we got some sponsors, and yes, Reid Hoffman, Larry Page, many of the other stars of today were just attendees at Round Zero.”
Tolia: Shopping.com Went Public And Was Acquired By eBay For ~$620M-$630M
“We merged with another private company. We renamed the entire thing shopping.com. And believe it or not, shopping.com ultimately went public. Had a bit of a mixed track record, but ultimately was bought by eBay for, I think, about 626 hundred thirty million.”
Nextdoor co-founder Prakash Janakaraman refused to code without user feedback validation
“Prakash in particular said, as the person writing the majority of the code, he said, I'm sitting on my hands and not writing a line of code until you can prove to me with user feedback that whatever idea we have, is something that's worth building.”
Tolia: Nextdoor has 335,000 distinct neighborhoods using its platform
“We have 335,000 distinct neighborhoods that use Nextdoor, and we needed to build a system that would be flexible enough that all of those neighborhoods could feel authentic to themselves.”
Tolia: Nextdoor had 176 neighborhoods at national launch
“Before we uncloaked publicly, we wanted to be sure that we were on to something, and when we launched nationally, we had a 176 neighborhoods Using Nextdoor.”
Tolia: Pew report found 30% of Americans could not name one neighbor
“When we started Nextdoor, in the Pew report on community in America said, 30% of Americans could not name a single neighbor by name.”
Tolia: Recommendations make up roughly 30% of Nextdoor content
“That's been 30%, roughly, of all the content on Nextdoor since inception.”
Tolia: 3,500 local publishers produce 50K weekly articles on Nextdoor
“But now with the new Nextdoor, we have 3500 local publishers that are publishing 50,000 articles a week, and they're real journalists.”