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 11 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
A startup could reach $100M in revenue using entirely no-code tools
“Like Airbnb, if it's being built today, could be built on Bubble, Webflow, one of these tools, Squarespace, Zapier, Slack, Airtable. You could glue all this stuff together and do it without a developer and probably get to 10 to a hundred million in revenue wit…”
Alfred Lin: Competitor Wimdu copied Airbnb's website pixel by pixel
“There was a fight to win Europe, and a competitor called Windu that copied the Airbnb website pixel by pixel.”
Lin: Early Airbnb functioned as a listing service rather than a true marketplace
“Maybe in the early days of Airbnb, I think people forget it was much more of a listing service, and it was less of a marketplace, and if you sort of take the definition of a marketplace, you have to complete the transaction, and you just not only have to compl…”
Airbnb commoditized brand trust by digitizing reputation into a systemic baseline
“What a company like Airbnb, for example, did was it took that trust, which is very hard to build and develop and companies would spend, you know, hundreds of billions of dollars and lots of time on building brands. They basically digitized trust to being this …”
Airbnb held $3 billion in cash against $4 billion in customer deposits
“We have three billion dollars of capital on the balance sheet at Airbnb, but we have three billion dollars or four billion dollars of customer deposits.”
Lin: Airbnb lost 80% of its revenue when the pandemic hit
“You have a business that went from a business that was growing 2030, 40% a year to a business that declines and you lose 80% of your revenue.”
Maples: A $250K seed check in Airbnb would be worth $1B
“Had I invested 250,000 dollars in Airbnb at the time, it'd now be worth a billion dollars.”
Maples: An earned secret is a counterintuitive insight discovered through direct work
“So it's basically
Some work that you did to discover something that most people would think is non-intuitive.”
Maples: Floodgate passed on investing in Airbnb, Pinterest, and PagerDuty
“And I looked at all the companies that we had passed on that we should have invested in, Airbnb, Pinterest who else, PagerDuty, Anaplan.”