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 15 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
Pincus: Zynga had a $400M handshake deal to acquire Supercell
“And I had a handshake with Ilka, the founder and CEO, to buy the company for four hundred million in cash.”
Pincus: Friendster founder Jonathan Abrams doesn't speak to me to this day
“And Jonathan Abrams was
I'm very paranoid about any of us as investors doing anything close.
In fact, he doesn't speak to me to this day.
He feels like tribe.
He feels like we all kind of usurped and stole his idea for social networking by doing what we we…”
Pincus: Feud between Peter Thiel and Sequoia killed early Zynga financing
“The first round I raised, Was impossibly hard, and I got caught in between a fight, in a fight in between Peter Thiel and Sequoia, and he had just started Founders Fund, and Sequoia didn't like that, and they were mad at each other, and Peter had said, I'm gon…”
Pincus: Every Amazon C-staff member was once Jeff Bezos's technical assistant
“In fact, I believe every C staff member at Amazon was at one point Jeff Bezos' tech assistant, And Andy Jassy was, and the CEO.”
Pincus: Only Zynga and Spotify survived Facebook's app ecosystem
“The entire Facebook experience for Zynga was a near-death experience, and not just us, for everyone in their app ecosystem, it was the least stable app ecosystem ever imagined or invented, and many companies did die in it. Most. There's only two companies that…”
Pincus: Zynga drove 20% of Facebook page views and 10% of revenue at IPO
“They gave it on Friday, and they said, you have till Monday to sign this agreement, or we're gonna take down your apps, which was their right and that could have happened the whole way through, and who knows what would have happened, because, you know, at this…”
Pincus: Voice interfaces will make typing and texting look obsolete
“But I do think that voice will be the biggest thing that'll feel obvious, that we wasted so much time typing and texting and reading, and I think we're going to turn on our ears and our voices a lot more.”
Pincus: Every click cuts users by half and downloads lose 80-90%
“You lose at least half your users every click. Every time you say click here, half people don't click. And you lose 80% when you say download this. At least. It's probably 90 or more. 90% or more in the app store.”
Pincus: Vibe coding will let builders instantiate ideas with near-zero capital
“I think that the future state of all this is that we all get to live in some way like Elon. The ultimate vibe coding is life of the speed of play, and it's that you get to have an idea and bring it to life in some way for almost no capital. And get to instanti…”
Pincus: VCs doubted Zynga would be serious due to his age and wealth
“I think that, that my all-in has always been underestimated, so we'll get to, like, when I, life when I started Zynga, but the VCs didn't believe, like, I'd already been successful and made all this money, and they just were like, this is a lifestyle thing. I …”
Zynga's Words with Friends turnaround generated $180M revenue, $100M contribution margin
“And because of V and the team, and committing to this failure machine, this testing machine first, game did a hundred and eighty million in revenues, did a hundred million in contribution, so it did more dollars in contribution than they were projecting it wou…”
Pincus: Supercell made $500M profit the year after Zynga passed
“You know, and Supercell made five hundred million in profit the next year”
Pincus: TCI Considered $400M Prodigy Stake Instead of Buying AOL for $110M
“At one point, TCI was going to buy a third of Prodigy. It was The biggest online provider at the time, and it was terrible... And AOL had just gone public and was worth a hundred and ten million. Prodigy, this deal was to pay four hundred million for a third o…”
Pincus: Roughly 20% of Facebook users played FarmVille at its peak
“And Farmville was the first time that we hit this, like, mass market consumer tipping point where lots of people knew about Mafia Wars, but with Farmville, we hit this density on the social network and the feed with Facebook that something I think, like, 20% o…”