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
Gil: The largest startup successes had solo or unequal founders
“If you look at the biggest successes in the startup world over time, they were either solo founders or very unequal founders. So that, and there's counter examples to that, of course, but that was Amazon, right? Jeff Bezos was the only founder. Microsoft, it w…”
Srinivasan: Google is very overrated and 'cruising for a bruising'
“Google, I think is very overrated. It's cruising for a bruising. It'll take a while, but you know, it's possible to get turned around like Microsoft, but that's where they are right now.”
Evans: Apple risks being 'Microsofted' by cloud-based AI models
“There's this sort of question for Apple around, does this actually change the experience of what a smartphone is, what the ecosystem is? Does it end up kind of getting Microsofted, in the sense that you're going to still, for the time being, you're still going…”
Garry Tan: Microsoft's market cap heavily depends on OpenAI's success
“I mean, I think Microsoft has you know, just really, really deep access to OpenAI, and I think OpenAI is probably, you said public companies, right? ... So, you know, I think There's a non-zero, pretty large percentage of, like, the market cap of Microsoft tha…”
Taylor: AI model market will consolidate into a few massive capex players
“I think we have probably have too many people building models right now. There's already been some consolidation actually of companies being folded into Amazon and Microsoft and others. But I do think it will play out a bit like the cloud infrastructure busine…”
Satya Nadella executed subtraction at Microsoft better than most founders
“Nadella has done it at Microsoft in a phenomenal way, like, potentially better than many founder CEOs can. But it's about probably 10 times harder to do or a hundred times harder.”
Brockman: Altman Asked Satya Nadella to Fund Venture Absorbing All OpenAI Staff
“Sam talked to Satya, who we'd been talking about. Hey, can you be a funder? Could you know, help, help support this new endeavor? I was like, Hey, actually, can we expand from the small life raft to like, yes, can we take everyone? And we're like, all right, w…”
Evans: Microsoft's in-house AI models are not very good
“Microsoft has this kind of weird situation in that his own models aren't actually very good, but it's got this very kind of weird relationship with OpenAI.”
Hastings: Outperformance of founder-led over professionally managed companies is not a strict correlation
“There are some very bad founder-led companies, there's some very good professional-led companies and there might be some correlation that founder-led ones, you know, are extraordinary, but you know, Microsoft under Satya Nadella has done incredibly well.”
Halligan: Big tech 'press release hires' usually fail at scaling startups
“If you're hiring someone that you want to go from two to 2000, you're just really attracted by that person who came from Google or Microsoft or whatever huge company with a huge resume and all that stuff. And once in a blue moon, that'll work, but generally th…”
Greenblatt: Tech mega-caps driving the market are not irrationally valued
“Most of the big indexes are driven by the Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Apple, and those businesses don't seem very irrational to me. Those are some of the greatest businesses that man has ever created partially due to the internet interconnectedness of the world…”
Wolfe: Bill Gates and Nathan Myhrvold notoriously eviscerated dissenters at Microsoft
“And it's interesting because Bill Gates, in a sense, was notorious for that. You know Nathan Mervold, brilliant, you know, but would sort of eviscerate people if they were wrong.”
Wolfe: Thomas Reardon single-handedly coded Microsoft's Internet Explorer
“Single-handedly codes Internet Explorer, and makes a lot of money, retires, does another company, retires, and then early thirties now.”
External market context drives corporate outcomes far more than executive leadership
“Saying Microsoft failed because of the actions of Steve Ballmer. It's such a presumptuous and it's human nature to ascribe things to people, but it's wrong. Like, what matters far more is the context and environment around Microsoft”
Microsoft didn't miss mobile; they were culturally ill-equipped to compete
“Microsoft didn't miss mobile. Microsoft started building mobile phones in the late nineties. Like they didn't miss it. They just were fundamentally inequipped to compete in it.”
Evans: Big Tech capex reached $220B and will surpass $300B
“I think last year the Google, Google, Microsoft, AWS, and Meta spent about two hundred and twenty billion dollars of CapEx last year, And we'll probably spend something over 300 this year.”
Flatt: Brookfield is building $13B in power plants for Microsoft
“We're building from Microsoft thirteen billion dollars of power plants.”
Hoffman: Companies should adapt between memos, slides, and bullet points
“And I actually think the answer is these are all tools and you should use all of them, right? Sometimes you should write like a six pager on something. Sometimes you should write a PowerPoint. Sometimes you should just have a list of bullets, right? And it dep…”
Holland: Founders bypassed Vista using fake company DenWipAtsiv, 'Vista Pwned' backwards
“So what we did was we wrote a tool called DenWipAtsiv. The name of the company was DenWipAtsiv, which is Vista pooned in reverse. You know, got a signing certificate under this fake company, legitimately registered fake in reality, and released a tool that wou…”
Wolfe: Bill Gates only sits on Berkshire, Microsoft, and Kymeta boards
“Which led to this company called Kymeta, which I co-founded with Bill Gates. And I'm in a board room with Bill Gates, and he's on the board of this company. It's the only board he's been on besides Berkshire and Microsoft.”
Microsoft acquired LinkExchange for $265 million on $15 million in revenue
“We had fifteen million dollars in revenue. You can kind of tell that we were in a bubble when someone would be willing to buy a company that had fifteen million dollars in revenue for two hundred and sixty-five million dollars. But also, you know, it was the t…”
Stephen Hawking emailed Myhrvold asking if he was returning after Microsoft
“Many, many years later, I retired from Microsoft, and when that was announced, I got an email the next day from Steven saying, shall we clear out the office? Are you coming back?”
Myhrvold convinced Bill Gates to grant him leave for culinary school
“Well, I had to convince the Culinary Institute in France to take me as a student. I had to convince Bill to give me a leave of absence. But it worked out.”
Myhrvold left a postdoc with Stephen Hawking to build a startup
“Took a leave of absence to work on a project I had started in graduate school with some friends. And that project turned into a software company, and I became the CEO of the company. And Then Microsoft bought the company, and I was at Microsoft.”