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
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…”
Amazon leadership originally conceived AWS as a low-margin infrastructure business
“They didn't think this was a, this is a high margin business. They thought of it as like, ok, this will be a low margin business too, and we like low margin businesses.”
Lin: DoorDash proactively digitized merchant menus during COVID lockdowns
“They decided, like, these merchants are going to be hurting, and we need to help them, and so they proactively went out and uploaded menus from different merchants onto DoorDash and said, hey, I know you guys are hurting. The only thing you can do is delivery.…”
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: 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.”
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: DoorDash expanded delivery market beyond Grubhub's existing-courier restaurant base
“The only restaurants that would be on Grubhub's website were all the companies that already had delivery staff available. So what DoorDash did was to expand the market. And by expanding the market, they were very focused on that problem.”
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…”
Tellme Networks burned $60 million a quarter before its enterprise pivot
“At tell me networks, when we're burning sixty million dollars a quarter, how do we get through that, and how do we pivot the company from a consumer business that wasn't working into an enterprise business?”