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 62 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 3 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
Jacobs: QXO will reach $50 billion by capturing 6% of distribution market
“I want to build a company that's called fifty billion dollars. I can do that. If there's an eight hundred billion dollar size, I can take six percent of that through acquisition and through organic growth. I can get to fifty billion dollars.”
Jacobs: Most Fortune 500 board meetings are scripted wastes of time
“Most Fortune, 500 company Board members, board meetings, are kind of, they're very scripted, and they sometimes even rehearsed, and there's a careful It's a story that's being told by management, and it's done by PowerPoint, it's done by rehearsed presentation…”
Jacobs only hires 'raw capitalists' who are absolutely motivated by money
“I want my company, people who are absolutely motivated by money, who are raw capitalists, who are people who want to make money for themselves and their families, and that we can figure out a way that by being part of our company, they can help us make money f…”
Jacobs: Most Fortune 500 board meetings are scripted wastes of time
“Most Fortune 500 company board members, board meetings, are kind of, they're very scripted, and sometimes they even rehearse. And there's a careful It's a story that's being told by management, and it's done by PowerPoint, it's done by rehearsed presentations …”
Jacobs: Kurzweil is probably right that human-technology merger will create new species
“Ray predicts a singularity whereby technology becomes more intelligent, more capable than humans, and we merge with technology, that we use so much technology in our own bodies, with wearables, and nanobots, and so forth, that, and AI, and outsourcing our memo…”
Jacobs: Sensible M&A creates massive shareholder value with unmatched certainty
“I love M&A as a way to create value for shareholders because I don't know of another way on a risk adjusted basis on a certainty level that Is more likely to create massive shareholder value than doing sensible M&A.”
Jacobs: Middle-market PE rollups create unintegrated messes for multiple expansion
“You see a lot of these middle market private equity firms do that. They roll up these small companies. They're doing five, 10, twenty million dollars EBITDA each, and they bat, they just buy a bunch of them, and now they're up to a hundred million or two hundr…”
Jacobs structures executive equity to double-vest above the 85th percentile
“If our shareholder returns are less than 55% or so, I don't want it to vest. If it's 65%, it vests some. If it's 75%, it vests more. If it, if it's 85%, 90%, 95%, I want it to, I want them to make, I want it to double vest.”
Jacobs: Getting the major trend right overrides operational mistakes in business
“In business, in the business world, you've got to get the major trend right. You've got to get the major trend right. And as my main business mentor, may he rest in peace, Ludwig Jesselson used to say, you can mess up a lot of things, but if you get the main t…”
Jacobs: 99% of building products distribution companies are 20 years behind in tech
“I found a company, an industry that's got 20,000 companies, and there's about six or seven that are doing really cool things in technology. And that's pretty much it. And I hate to say that so negatively, but I think that's an objective assessment of it. I thi…”
Jacobs: Catching the main trend matters more in business than operational perfection
“In business, in the business world, you've got to get the major trend right. You've got to get the major trend right. And as my main business mentor, may he rest in peace, Ludwig Jesselson used to say, you can mess up a lot of things, but if you get the main t…”
Paribas gave Jacobs's early oil trading business a $1B credit line
“I deposited it with Banque Paribas, now it's BNP Paribas, back then it was Paribas, and they gave me a billion dollar line of credit, and I swung for the fences. I used sometimes up to nine hundred and ninety million dollars of that line of credit, doing count…”
Jacobs: Capital cost arbitrage and operational improvements drive M&A value
“The biggest lever, the biggest component is the differential between what I raise capital at due to my relationships with mostly institutional investors and because of the track record and what I can deploy that at on doing acquisitions. The second biggest lev…”
Jacobs: Lengthy diligence memos are bureaucratic CYA exercises nobody important reads
“So, you see some companies when they're negotiated by a company do this very lengthy and detailed and bureaucratic diligence process, and they hire a firm and they write this big huge memo that nobody ever reads, and some wonk reads it but nobody important rea…”
Jacobs: Board members can contact any employee anytime without supervision
“Any board member can reach out to any person in the company anytime they want and ask them anything they want. And there's no supervision or people have to accompany them or none of that.”
Jacobs's companies run budgeting and plan tracking every single day
“We don't do budgeting once in a while. We do budgeting every day. Every single day where we've got our numbers, that our plan is our plan, and where are we tracking versus the plan?”
Jacobs: FP&A should calibrate manager forecasts against their historical accuracy
“The FP&A people are really good at figuring out who's sandbagging, and who's exaggerated? By that, what I mean by that is you have some managers who just do their personalities or for whatever reason, or maybe they're playing games with their bonus. They want …”
Jacobs: Only six or seven building products distribution firms innovate in tech
“I found a company, an industry that's got 20,000 companies, and there's about six or seven that are doing really cool things in technology, and that's pretty much it.”
Jacobs: Business Initiatives Are Meaningless Talk If They Do Not Enrich Shareholders
“All the things I'm doing of hiring people and putting in technology, all the things we've been talking about for the last couple hours, that all comes down to making money for shareholders. If you're not making money for shareholders, it's just jabber jabber. …”
Jacobs: QXO will reach $50B by taking 6% market share
“There are this eight hundred billion dollars of distributors in Western Europe and in North America, which is where I want to plant my flag. I want to build a company that's called fifty billion dollars. I can do that. If there's an eight hundred billion dolla…”
Jacobs: Middle-market PE rollups create messy, unintegrated businesses
“You see a lot of these middle market private equity firms do that. They roll up these small companies. They're doing five, 10, twenty million dollars EBITDA each, and they bat, they just buy a bunch of them, and now they're up to a hundred million or two hundr…”
Jacobs delivered 32x to 150x returns across five consecutive companies
“So in my companies, we've been fortunate that we've been able to give back 32 times their money in one, and another company is over 150 times. So really, Really large, large, large returns, like over the top, unusually high returns. That wasn't by luck. That w…”
Jacobs: Shareholder returns are a business's single true report card
“In business, the bottom line, the report card is,
How much money did you generate for your shareholders?
That's the one, it's a, it's an examination with one question on it.
It's how much did you make your stockholders?
How much money did you make for your sto…”
Jacobs: QXO targets one to two turns of EBITDA in debt
“In my new company that I'm forming, QXO, we're going to have, I think our target, a healthy target should be one to two turns of debt.”
Banque Paribas granted Jacobs a $1B credit line for oil trading
“I took all the rest of my money. I deposited it with Banque Paribas, and now it's BNP Paribas, back then it was Paribas, and they gave me a billion dollar line of credit, and I swung for the fences. I used sometimes up to nine hundred and ninety million dollar…”
Jacobs: QXO can reach $50B in revenue through acquisitions and organic growth
“There are, there's eight hundred billion dollars of distributors in Western Europe and in North America, which is where I want to plant my flag. I want to build a company that's called fifty billion dollars. I can do that. If there's an eight hundred billion d…”
Jacobs: Capital cost spread and operational improvement drive M&A value
“The biggest lever, the biggest component is the differential between what I raise capital at due to my relationships with mostly institutional investors and because of the track record and what I can deploy that at I'm doing acquisitions. The second biggest le…”
Jacobs: Middle-market PE roll-ups create unintegrated messes for multiple expansion
“I, you see a lot of these middle market private equity firms do that. They roll up these small companies. They're doing five, 10, twenty million dollars EBITDA each, and they bat, they just buy a bunch of them, and now they're up to a hundred million or two hu…”
Bureaucratic M&A diligence memos primarily serve to cover corporate liability
“So you see some companies when they're negotiated by a company do this very lengthy and detailed and bureaucratic diligence process and they hire a firm and they write this big huge memo that nobody ever reads and or some wonk reads it but nobody important rea…”
Jacobs gives board directors unchaperoned access to all company employees
“Any board member can reach out to any person in the company anytime they want and ask them anything they want. And there's no supervision or people have to accompany them or none of that.”
Jacobs structures executive equity to double-vest only at top-tier shareholder returns
“So that if our shareholder returns are less than 55% or so, I don't want it to vest. If it's 65%, it vests some. If it's 75%, it vests more. If it, if it's 85%, 90%, 95%, I want it to, I want them to make, I want it to double vest.”
Jacobs: Business leaders should validate and agree before disputing or leading
“They're not disagreeing with you without first finding a way of agreeing with you. Joining, then leading. Validating than disputing. So even when they are changing the way you're thinking and say, gee, is there a better way to look at that? Is there another wa…”
Jacobs: High-performing meetings require zero devices and full non-judgmental concentration
“An element of that meeting is everyone in the meeting shuts off all their devices and concentrates, concentrates, non-judgmentally, non-judgmental concentration on the one person who's speaking at a time. No side conversations, no talking over each other. One …”
Jacobs: Non-revenue overhead should be an organization's lightest part
“The heaviest part should be parts of the organization that make money, that generate revenue, that close to the customer, that generate sales.”
XPO turned a $3B Con-way acquisition into a $15B asset
“We bought it for about Three billion dollars. Roughly half of it was equities. It really bought it for a billion and a half dollars plus, plus some leverage. Today it's worth something like fifteen billion dollars, and that's after having taken out Many, like,…”
Jacobs: Zero debt is suboptimal because modest leverage boosts per-share returns
“I don't think it's an optimal balance sheet if you have no debt. Because you can improve the returns by shrinking your share count, because you have fewer shares. So the same amount of returns is, is greater per share, because you have fewer returns. So I thin…”
Jacobs targets one to two turns of debt for QXO
“In my new company that I'm forming, QXO, we're going to have, I think our target, a healthy target should be one to two turns of debt.”
Jacobs is investing $900M of his own money into QXO
“Last week we had a call with my 75 co-investors in my new company, QXO. So my wife and I are putting in nine hundred million dollars and then Sequoia And a few dozen friends and family, like really friends and family, like my sister and my brother and my niece…”
Jacobs: Integration begins at agreement signing and standardizes immediately upon closing
“I integrate from the moment that we agree to buy a company, we're starting the integration process. And the day we close the acquisition, Gazaam. We're in there and we're standardizing everything as much as we possibly can.”
Jacobs asks target executives if they would buy the company themselves
“I like to interview the top 15 or so people, one on one, like an hour, hour and a half. And I like to ask them, if this was your money, would you buy this company? And what would, if you did buy it, what would you change? What would you do differently?”
Jacobs: Managers fundamentally only manage return on capital and return on time
“There's only two things a manager manages. Return on capital and return on time.”
Jacobs: A CEO is never smarter than the sum of their board
“I am never going to be smarter. Then the sum of all the directors, that's never going to happen mathematically.”
Jacobs: Capital cost spread and business improvements drive M&A value
“The biggest lever, the biggest component is the differential between what I raise capital at due to my relationships with mostly institutional investors, and because of the track record, and what I can deploy that at I'm doing acquisitions. The second biggest …”
Jacobs: Running high-value meetings requires device bans and absolute single-speaker focus
“Everyone in the meeting shuts off all their devices and concentrates, concentrates, non-judgmentally, non-judgmental concentration on the one person who's speaking at a time. No side conversations, no talking over each other. One person speaks at a time, but e…”
Jacobs: Non-revenue overhead must be an organization's lightest layer
“Heavy, heavy on the non-revenue generating top
Part of the organization, which should be the lightest part of any organization.
The heaviest part should be parts of the organization that make money, that generate revenue, that close to the customer, that gener…”
XPO's Conway acquisition yielded $15B in value and $5B in cash
“We bought it for about
Three billion dollars.
Roughly half of it was equities.
It really bought it for a billion and a half dollars plus, plus some leverage.
Today it's worth something like fifteen billion dollars, and that's after having taken out many, like …”
Jacobs: Meeting endings dictate participant psychology, requiring positive conclusions
“When I run meetings, I like to make it like an Oreo cookie. I like to make the good stuff, the negative stuff, but then end on the good stuff. It's very important how you end a meeting. For whatever reason, psychologically, how you end a meeting makes a big di…”
Jacobs is investing $900M of his personal capital into QXO
“Last week we had a call with my 75 co-investors in my new company, QXO. So my wife and I are putting in nine hundred million dollars, and then Sequoia And a few dozen friends and family, like really friends and family, like my sister and my brother and my niec…”