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 2,289 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
Eleven Madison Park will reintegrate fish, shellfish, and duck in October
“In October, we will reintegrate a few animal products, such as fish or shellfish, and yes, we will bring our duck back, our honey lavender glazed duck.”
Dhar Mann admits falsifying dates on city grants to accelerate reimbursements
“I decided to take some shortcuts on my grant application. I changed the dates on my paperwork to make it seem like the projects had been completed and contractors had been paid sooner than they were in order to start the reimbursement process faster.”
Yassin: CCTV approached Nas Daily to promote tourism in Xinjiang
“To be clear, we've had people from China, CCTV, tell us to go to Xinjiang and talk about the culture and the food.”
Yassin: US State Department asked Nas Daily to make anti-China videos
“But we also had people from the State Department tell us, hey, why don't you make videos about China and how bad it is?”
Eleven Madison Park Decided to Reopen as 100% Plant-Based
“So we decided that our restaurant will be a hundred percent plant-based.”
Kirban: Vita Coco sabotaged Zico by buying and trashing products
“A lot of that, you know, I mean, literally, like, buying their product out of stores, putting it in trash cans, taking their point of sale material down, hiding it in back rooms, stupid stuff.”
Founders sold all Cisco stock due to zero respect for management
“Len and I agreed to sell our stock on a very joint basis, and we did it because we fundamentally had no respect for people running the company. And it wasn't really that we didn't believe in the company. I mean, I was the one who said that Cisco would be a bil…”
Jenn Hyman: One investor sexually harassed her while building Rent the Runway
“I, through the process of building Rent the Runway, was sexually harassed by one individual, and I'm happy to share that experience. However, I will say that I've had interactions with dozens and dozens of venture capitalists at dozens of firms, and this was j…”
YETI's 2008 excuse of raw materials cost increases was "total bullshit"
“We blame that price increase on a cost of raw materials increase. Which was total bullshit, but we had to tell them something.”
Modi: Bobbie originally launched in the US positioned as a supplement
“Bobby brought it over as a pilot and decided to make what I thought was a very smart decision to position it as a supplement, as a companion formula to breast milk, which means that it moved out of the category as being the sole nutrition, and now it was in th…”
Bobbie halted new customer orders during shortage against board advice
“I called my board. I'm going, look, here's a little bit of the dilemma. Most of them were like, this is crazy. Just keep the growth going. Like, these moments don't come around often. Like, great moment for the brand. But I went to bed that night, and I rememb…”
Peretti plans to resolve BuzzFeed's going-concern accounting notice
“So our plan and management's plan is to resolve that going concern. And really going, going back to founder mode of saying, hey we got to reinvent the company for this near future, and wanting investors to know there's risk to that, but also now we're getting …”
Beautycounter's closure forced Gregg Renfrew to lay off employees without severance
“So I ended up having to let go of the majority of the associates for the company without severance or health insurance, which was horrendous.”
Colin Angle Favored Amazon Acquisition Because iRobot Scooba And Terra Failed
“And really that was what led me to saying, hey iRobot and Amazon might have some pretty interesting synergies, and because Scuba hadn't succeeded, because Terra hadn't succeeded, then when Amazon started to be interested in iRobot, it felt like a good idea.”
Lore pitched investors that Jet.com would lose $3B before turning profitable
“I told the investors we needed, we were gonna lose three billion dollars.”
Walmart acquired Bonobos strategically to change its image and attract elite talent
“The most strategic part of the plan was to change the narrative. I knew that we didn't have the talent inside of Walmart at the time to do what we needed to do. We had to attract the best people in the world, and at that point, you know, honestly, that wasn't …”
Rubin: Indiegogo board replaced him as CEO after growth debate
“Definitely not. No, I mean, that was me having a debate with the board as to how we needed to grow. I really wanted to create a massive company, and I really thought we had the opportunity to create the Airbnb of crowdfunding, because it should all be consolid…”
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 …”
Larian: MGA operates with zero outside investors or bank credit lines
“You know, maybe as big as MGA is, We don't have a bank line. We don't have any investors in here because I did that previously, and the banks and the investors are for you. When it's sunny, when it rains, they all run away.”
Best: Substack was pitched to journalists as a media 'getaway vehicle'
“I had this speech that I would give to people at the time. I was like, think of sub stack as your getaway vehicle. You don't have to get in it right now, but like, Fuel it up, have the engine idling, like create your account, like claim your handle, have this …”
Best: Substack does not change content enforcement based on public pressure
“If something comes to our attention that is against the broadly applicable substack rules, we're going to take action. But we're not changing what we enforce based on pressure.”
Chris Best: Substack does not need to raise outside capital again
“We're not running the company to, like, turn a profit, but the thing that is true, and we've kept true pretty much the whole time, is we don't need to raise money again. We're not on this clock. We have, like, we are in control of our financial destiny.”
SpotHero's board voted to pivot into on-demand valet parking
“And there was actually a vote to pivot the company to be on-demand valet.”
Hero Cosmetics Rejected Early 2020 VC Deals With Predatory Liquidation Preferences
“There were just a lot of little tricks, a lot of trap doors and, you know, onerous prep structures so that essentially we could sell the business later on and still walk away with barely anything. I mean, they were just very investor friendly, very founder unf…”
Shufelt bought his own beer off store shelves to trigger reorders
“There were definitely times where on Sunday, I would roll through a bunch of stores and clear out the shelf to make sure there were reorders the coming week.”
SmartSweets raised $3M on common shares using only a four-page deck
“Once they supported me we closed the round in two weeks. And had a really clear philosophy about this is common shares, so there was never any preferred shares, and that was it, and we didn't share financials or anything beyond just like the four page deck tha…”
Coppetti conditioned joining On on ousting co-creator George Brunsweiler
“And so I made a pretty bold move and said, yes, I'm going to get involved, but without you, George.”
On founders faced mandatory share forfeiture for any side income
“We actually wrote in our shareholders agreement, and it lived there all the way through the IPO. We put down this thing when if someone, someone of us took another job or, you know, even like a side hustle or any income from any other source, we would have to …”
Williams claims he did not plan to take over as Twitter CEO
“He was pushed out, and then I became CEO, which It's hard to believe, but it wasn't actually my plan. I still didn't necessarily want to be CEO. And we talked to a few other candidates, but then I was like, okay, maybe I'm the best person to be CEO.”
Larian offered Mattel designer Carter Bryant a 3% royalty for Bratz
“We give you three percent royalty on the dolls, but you must quit Mattel and come here right away.”
Gilboa: Warby Parker unit economics are comparable across retail and e-commerce
“We find that the economics for us are pretty comparable regardless of channel that, that customers are shopping in.”
Ells: Kernel needs only three peak-period workers versus twelve at typical restaurants
“And so where a typical fast casual restaurant might have, you know, a dozen folks at peak period Colonel would have three.”
Wolfe Herd: Bumble will speak publicly on abortion and women's rights
“If something, even if political, is in threat of that, is in violation of that, then we just simply cannot be silent. So when you look at empowering women's relationships, Yet our country is saying that women don't even have a right to their own bodies. How co…”
Orfalea: Kinko's avoided franchising to prevent store partners from spinning off rivals
“The reason I didn't choose Franchise-een is If they viewed me as a parasite from the top, they would easily go across the street and do it. But I shared in the profits, and they got a good salary, they had a car, we had a pension plan for the partners.”
Suitsupply hired actors to pose as customers for its initial London store
“So then I started hiring actors to be in the store, to sort of browse around, and sort of, we had some dynamic happening”
Yassin: Nas Company rejected a CCTV request to film in Xinjiang
“To be clear, we've had people from China, CCTV, tell us to go to Xinjiang and talk about the culture and the food... For me, that was a step too far, so I said no.”
Sashen slipped 50,000 Xero Shoes business cards inside 'Born to Run' books
“I would I printed up a few thousand business cards, and I would go to bookstores and find his book, and then insert our business card in the book.
and then eventually I made like 50,000 of those and sent those to customers and asked them to do the same thing…”
Acevedo: mitú board rejected DTC monetization to preserve VC view metrics
“So whenever I would bring up to my board, hey, should we be doing direct-to-consumer anything? Should we be charging one dollar for premium content that people could not get enough of? The answer immediately was absolutely not. You cannot disturb those numbers…”
Investors Demanded Near-Majority Equity and Ulukaya's Ouster During Chobani Crisis
“A time came, and I remember the gentleman called me, and he said, here's the amount that you will get, here is the, you know, percentage of the company that you have to give away, which is what was almost majority at that time, and you will be out of the compa…”
Baszucki: Roblox does not pre-filter every creation through day-long moderation
“We have made the decision not to filter every single Roblox creation through a day of moderation.”
Cuban: Cost Plus refuses to work with insurers that demand rebates
“Our mission is very straightforward.
We want to be the low cost provider of every drug we sell.
And with that definition, we can't work with an insurance company that
Is going to require rebates or anything like that.”
Levchin took out startup frustration by ripping into founders' pitches at Sequoia
“And then I started noticing that I was really good at ripping into people's ideas. They would bring in this really cool concept. And of course it was half baked. It was just, you know, some bright eyed kid Freshly out of college thinking about here's what they…”
McKelvey: SoftBank pushed WeWork to prioritize market share over profitability
“When SoftBank made that investment, it opened us up to a new way of thinking about how do you build a company and the way that, you know, I would say they prescribed and we agreed to was that capturing as much market share as possible was the way to go.”
Lerner and Bosack sold all Cisco stock out of disrespect for management
“Len and I agreed to sell our stock on a very joint basis, and we did it because we fundamentally had no respect for people running the company, and it wasn't really that we didn't believe in the company.”
Tenev: Robinhood tightened options criteria and added phone support after user tragedy
“Right after that happened, Beju and I sent a letter outlining the changes that we were committing to make in the wake of the tragedy. So changes to the user interface More criteria for how you access options in the product. More education. So we hired an optio…”
Conte: Patreon refused to alter content policies to retain high-profile creators
“We weren't going to you know, we weren't going to change our minds to keep two or three creators as painful as that was.”
Howroyd Often Had White Colleagues Pitch to Sidestep Client Bias
“I'll tell you candidly, and I'm not proud of it, there were times when I would gift my intelligence to other members of my team and have them go in and make a presentation or them make the pitch. So that the client wouldn't have to interact directly with me as…”