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 12 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
Lin: Startups Can Scale by Making First Orders Profitable via Service
“Or in sales, and here's a company that basically raised ten million dollars, and it probably was undercapitalized, but it really did highlight that you can build a company by having CAC be profitable on the first order, by being focused on customer service, an…”
Zappos's most valuable customers also had the highest product return rates
“We then did this analysis and this is the type of analysis I really enjoy doing, like, let's take our best customers, and let's take our worst customers, and look at their return rates, and it turned out our best customers at the highest LTVs return the most”
Zappos reached $1.6 billion in sales on just $10 million in equity
“Tony invested ten million dollars of his own money, but most of it was financed through being very, very creative, figuring out how to get merchants that we ordered from to give us credit and to increase the credit line. We had a, eventually got a line of cred…”
Lin: E-commerce should optimize return processing costs, not return rates
“You want to keep the return policy as liberal as you can, but make the cost of processing as low as possible. And so, the first order issue there is exactly, going back to first order issue, the first order issue is not the return rate. The first order issue i…”
Banks called Zappos's $60 million loan during the 2008 financial crisis
“At Zappos, it was, what do we do after nine-eleven when sales went to zero, what do we do during the financial crisis when credit became very, very difficult, and we were borrowing sixty million dollars, and we had sixty million dollars that we did nothing wro…”
Lin: Zappos pushed the retail industry from 30-day to 365-day return policies
“I think we changed the whole industry, and it originally was just a competitive response. We had a liberal return policy in 30 days, other people copy 30 days, then it was 90 days, other people copy 90 days, and then we made it three 65 days.”
Investors who sat out the 1999 bubble missed Google and Salesforce
“And if you decided not to invest in that time, you would have missed out on Google, Salesforce, PayPal, Zappos, OpenTable. There are a lot of great companies that were still founded during that time, and Paying market prices for those investments would have be…”
Lin: Having ten core values fails because most employees only remember two or three
“The problem with 10 is that there are probably a handful of people that remember all 10. Most people remember the first one or two or three of them”
Lin: Only Amazon and Zappos Solved Unbatched E-Commerce Operations
“The solution to pick back and ship in four hours was to solve a operations flow issue and not batch the operations, which I don't think anybody else figured out in e-commerce back then besides Amazon.”
Burgis: Tony Hsieh demanded empirical proof of happiness before considering marriage
“His approach was, you know, basically in a very empirical one, you know, it was like, well, I need like evidence, right? I need evidence that I will be happier married than not married. And you know, I didn't really know what to say to that because like the on…”
Lin: 80% of Zappos's Daily Orders Came from Repeat Customers
“When we, on any given day, the orders that we had, 80% of it was from repeat customers, and we grew the business, some with marketing, but the majority was by providing great customer service, having high repeat rates, having high LTV, and having customers bas…”
Lin: LinkExchange degraded its culture by hiring for conventional fit without defined values
“Tony Hsieh had this experience at Link Exchange where we didn't define the values of the company. We started hiring people that were conventionally right for the positions in the job, and one day he woke up and realized the company that he had founded and buil…”