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 18 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
Mark Zuckerberg once argued having multiple online identities was intellectually dishonest
“Mark Zuckerberg was very adamant for a while that in the future there would be one profile online. There was a point where he thought it was almost intellectually dishonest to represent yourself in different ways online.”
Kreps: Half the challenge in ML products is data infrastructure, not models
“Half the problem in any of these products is actually not the machine learning stuff. It's actually just the data, like Getting, getting it, being able to work with it at scale, being able to apply it, being able to do that in the context of like a real runnin…”
Nash: Distinct user identities are valuable enough to support independent platforms
“People have different slices of their life. They have different identities, and there are some of those identities that are valuable enough to build independent platforms around.”
Nash: Professional networks offer immense value primarily to outbound roles
“When you work with the same people every day, it turns out there's a lot of substitutes for kind of a professional network. When your job is, if you're in sales, if you're in recruiting, there's a lot of, actually, you know, as an executive, entrepreneur, ther…”
LinkedIn had no mobile product strategy in 2009 beyond an intern's project
“So in 2009, I was handed LinkedIn mobile.
It had been literally a fun, innovative thing that one of the engineers had built.
We had an intern over the summer work on actually keeping it up, but we did not have a heavy focus on mobile.
And it was because when I…”
Reid Hoffman stayed directly involved in LinkedIn's product as chairman
“Even as a fact, even when he stepped out of the CEO role and was chairman, he kept his hand pretty directly in product.
He might even argue too much at some times.”
Berner: Enterprises prefer internal end-user training while smaller companies expect vendor support
“I find that, you know, when we're selling to enterprises, they want to take care of that themselves. They want to write the copy. They want to do the email campaigns. They want to actually run the trainings, but in smaller companies, they actually expect us to…”
Berner: CS must quantify end-user value when product impact accrues to consumers
“If the value is accruing to the end user that is about maybe a better user experience or a better buying experience, then I do think it's important to try and quantify what is the value that your end consumer is getting and how is that different before and aft…”
Berner: Hire a firefighter first in CS, add systems builders by fourth
“The first hire does need to be that firefighter bias for action. I think by about your third or fourth, you need to make sure you have that skill set somewhere in your team.”
Kracov: Promoting personal profiles with LinkedIn ads offers marketing arbitrage
“You basically have to start paying for content now, but you can start running ads as a person now on LinkedIn. And so that's a really interesting arbitrage potentially where you can spend a lot of money and promote Content as a person on LinkedIn, not just as …”
Kracov: B2B influencer marketing is just audience borrowing
“I think something that's more in vogue now is a lot of this like influencer marketing that's like happening, especially on LinkedIn, where a lot of companies are spending money on different podcast brands or different people with big like LinkedIn influencers.…”
Kreps: Confluent's initial seed round shifted to a Benchmark-led Series A
“And it went from something where LinkedIn was going to be the kind of major investor to being, you know, a smaller part of the round. And it went from kind of a seed investment to a series A through the course of that fundraising process. But yeah, it was, you…”
Kreps: Signal of a major problem is use cases growing tenfold
“You can kind of, you know, you're onto a big problem when the number of use cases just keeps, you know, going up by like an order of magnitude that kind of pop out and where the problem you're solving seems really fundamental.”
Kreps: Apache Kafka Sat on the Shelf During First Open-Source Year
“And you know, it actually took a while, you know, probably the first year, it mostly sat on the shelf as a open source project, which we were quite disappointed about.”
Kreps: LinkedIn offered an unprecedented balance sheet investment in Confluent
“When we went to quit, LinkedIn was like, oh, okay, well, this is, you know, first of all, we don't really want you to leave, but if you're going to leave, we do think this is really valuable. We would be interested in investing.
And we were like, okay.
Off the…”
Moore: Crossbeam's partner network requirements make the product intrinsically viral
“The business itself is intrinsically viral. We're like LinkedIn for data. Like you can't use Crossbeam unless all your partners are also on it, or at least your most important ones are. So you are
Intrinsically motivated to invite your partners on and talk the…”
Reid Hoffman stepped back to ensure Jeff Weiner had full CEO authority
“The best transitions, founder transitions, I think, with leadership, Reid imbued Jeff with a lot of moral authority. I mean, even when Jeff came on board, for example, Reid actually spent time away from LinkedIn. He wasn't really that away. Could have been rea…”
Narkhede: Kafka was built only after finding no existing streaming platforms
“We actually began by researching the market to see if anyone had built something like that. So definitely wasn't the preference to build Apache Kafka, but when we realized that nothing else existed, we decided to take the leap and start Apache Kafka, open sour…”