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 41 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 1 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
Younis: Startups Are Not Meritocratic; Connected Founders Perform Better
“The other uncomfortable truths are like the rule is the mostly the highly educated, connected founders do better than the not highly educated, connected founders. Like the top, like people, I think we want to have this feeling that it's egalitarian and or it's…”
Schillace: Google Docs has become a complicated, bloated version of Microsoft Office
“To be honest, like, I'm a little bit sad at the state of Gdocs these days because I think they're losing sight of the idea that, you know, they're kind of turning it into Office and like making it very complicated to use again. And I find lots of things broken…”
Varanasi: OKRs only work for money-printing monopolies like Google
“If you have a money printing machine, you should have that kind of stuff, but for everybody else, it's different.”
Younis: Applied Intuition's culture is closer to Elon's X than Google
“On the spectrum of like Google to, you know, working for Elon at X, like we're more on the Elon X. I don't, we're not anywhere near there, but we're more towards that than being like Google.”
Younis: Levels.fyi shows startups paying higher compensation than Google or Facebook
“You, like, you can just look on levels, FYI, you get paid more to go to a startup than you do at Google or Facebook, and those companies generate billions in cash flow a month.”
Early-stage startups cannot compete against incumbents on Meta and Google ads
“Ads, you know, let's just be specific. We're talking about Meta and Google. Those are the main ways you buy, and they're sold at auction, which means ultimately they're going to go to the people who can pay the most, which means the most well-funded companies,…”
Blank: Generative AI innovation will die if big tech stops competing
“So I sure hope OpenAI, Google and Facebook, and even Apple continue to slug it out at some point. Because if they don't, innovation will die in the browser or like the browser did, it will die in generative AI.”
Information retrieval is not the majority use case for Google Bard
“Some people, and it turns out not the majority use case, but some people are going to use it to try to find information.”
Google frames Bard as an experiment because LLMs aren't fully baked products
“It's part of why we talked about Bard as an experiment at this point. We don't think that this technology is yet ready to be a fully baked product.”
Elliott-McCrea: Google hires often struggle elsewhere because its internal systems don't replicate
“I think the canonical example of this is Google, by the way. I mean, I think that
Sort of in industry. Now we've kind of learned you hire people out of Google and they show up and they don't know how to operate because they've been such a determined high funct…”
Berson: Modeling startup cultures after Google caused net damage to the ecosystem
“I'd also argue that a lot of people trying to model their orgs and culture after Google has probably created
More damage to our ecosystem than sort of positive outcomes.”
Guild: Most restaurant discovery happens on Google, not DoorDash or Uber Eats
“It's still not DoorDash or Uber Eats. The vast majority of restaurant discovery still happens on Google, but that was especially true eight years ago.”
Google's famous 20% time policy was gamed and is no longer used
“I think even the Google thing got gamed. No one uses it now.”
Zima: Looker's 6% spend on support drove 15-20% lift across metrics
“Even post Google, I wrote up a case study that said Google should retain Looker support because this six percent that we spend on support as a percentage of revenue is worth 15 or 20% in terms of, you know, like growth, retention, every kind of metric that we …”
Siroker: Google culture prioritizes technical sophistication over solving customer problems
“At Google, you know, they value sophistication of the technology more than they value solving a customer problem. And so that was a cultural thing that started from the early days that served us well, served Google well for certain products like search and pro…”
Siroker: Google's 'Googliness' Was Poorly Defined and Occasionally Weaponized
“Google has this, Sense of Googliness that you had to assess candidates by, but it always frustrated me that there was no clear definition of what Googliness meant, what it meant to be Googly. And I actually found that it tended to, on occasion, become weaponiz…”
Weiss: Google was notorious for demoralizing eleventh-hour launch cancellations
“Or the absolute worst thing, and this happened at Google all the time, they were notorious for this, is like launch, Readiness review something or other. And you did all this work. You maybe worked for years as a team. And it's like, finally, you have one of t…”
Noronha: Gamma mixes multi-provider models while incumbents are tied to in-house models
“We're also able to combine different models from different providers in a way that some of our competitors structurally aren't. They're kind of tied into their own House models, and so we get to directly test, you know, particularly in the world of image model…”
Abraham: Reducto operates fully in person without daily one-on-ones or long write-ups
“We don't do daily one-on-ones. We don't have sort of like extensive write-ups for the work that we're doing for the sake of showing that it's a lot of work. The way that we approach product building is we have a channel on Slack called Daily Updates where ever…”
Schillace: Google Workspace and Microsoft Office are reaching market stasis
“And I think it's hard for either one company to fully become what the other one is and take, take the whole market. So I think we're getting close to stasis on this actually.”
Winters: Low-frequency marketplaces typically remain fully reliant on Google SEO
“And I think that's normally what a low frequency marketplace looks is you're just grinding on SEO and conversion all day, every day. And there isn't really that opportunity to build that non-transactional product like Zillow has to create engagement. So essent…”
Masad: Perplexity consistently finds answers that Google search fails to surface
“The one consumer product that I use is perplexity. And they've done an amazing job. I'm almost always surprised how they arrive at results that in my Google searches I would never be able to arrive at.”
Parrish: Founders overcomplicate sales hiring by chasing big-name company resumes
“I think a lot of founders overcomplicate things, trying to think, think of someone that worked at a big name company, say Google, Salesforce, whatever it may be, and not really someone who has the right experience, whether it's working in the industry and kind…”
Google Bard declines sensitive breaking news queries to avoid inaccurate summaries
“We're making the decision to basically say, it feels like a higher risk to respond with something That is not a fair summary than just saying, we'd rather take the approach to say, like, I can't help with that yet.”
Google initially delayed streaming Bard responses to complete real-time copyright checks
“One of the things that we started to see in some of these outputs as you start to kind of stream them out is, well, even though it was a function of probability and not regurgitation of copyrighted material, you would get a response, and then at the end of the…”
Google initially delayed real-time streaming in Bard to enable content filtering
“Like today, before I came here, we just talked about Bard being able to respond in real time. Other language models have been able to do that, but we have elected to present results in piecemeal, because it allows us to do a certain amount of filtering.”
Asking 'why not today' forces prioritization without creating interpersonal conflict
“And early on, we started saying things like, why tomorrow, why not today? Because what that ends up forcing isn't this, like, uncomfortable clash of, like, how dare you make it make something I'm asking for not a priority. It's, hey, share your priorities. Lik…”
Google Bard no longer hallucinates on time and weather queries
“Which, happy to report, Bard does not hallucinate now on time and weather.”
Polishing AI products internally lets the fast-moving market pass you by
“If you spend all your time trying to build the world's greatest product, the world's gonna move past you.”
New engineering leaders fail by assuming prior company context transfers directly
“The number one way that I see new engineering leaders struggle when they come to a company is they just assume the context from their previous company applies as is.
And if you've got new leaders who come in and really make a mess of things,
It's always becaus…”
Looker scaled support staff linearly with customer count through acquisition
“We were hiring linearly with support with customers all the way through our acquisition. And like support was the fastest growing org inside Looker.”
Stauch: Serval's demo only clicks when showing the workflow builder
“The demo can be kind of broken up into everything that comes before showing the workflow builder and then everything that comes after, because before you show the workflow builder, people are bored and everything you show them, they think they've seen before. …”
Asthana: Google selected Postman as a top 20 Chrome Web Store app
“The biggest surprise for me was when Google reached out to feature Postman on the Chrome web store. They're building a version two of their web store and Postman was one of the top 20 apps to be recommended.”
Younis: Applied Intuition has recruited hundreds of people from Google
“We've recruited hundreds of people out of Google.”
Schillace: Google spends billions annually on Google Maps
“Google spends billions of dollars a year on maps.”
Schillace: Microsoft cloud tools must preserve desktop compatibility, unlike Google Docs
“They're trying to keep the cloud very strongly competitive roundtrip, or very strongly compatible, you know, roundtrip compatible with the desktop. That's a design point Google does not care about, but Microsoft does care about.”
Google initially experimented with integrating Meena and LaMDA into Assistant
“When I first got to Google in 2020, We were experimenting with a technology that was then called MENA, one of the first language models that was out available in the market. MENA became Lambda, and what we were experimenting with was, how do we get this very c…”
Google delayed Bard's coding capabilities because the initial version lacked quality
“We knew that code, for example, was something that people were using language models for, but we didn't think it was good enough, and so at some point we made the decision to say, look, code's not ready, so code launched a couple weeks after we launched”
Weiss outlines Google's 70-20-10 product portfolio allocation framework
“When I was at Google, they used to have this model they called seventy-twenty-ten, and I think they kind of classified as, you know, 70% should be, that first category you said, like, low-hanging fruit, obvious wins, incremental. 20% should be kind of extendin…”