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 175 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
Meta paid $14B for a 49% non-voting stake in Scale AI
“The transaction was Meta invested a little bit over fourteen billion dollars to get 49% of the company non-voting stock. Didn't take a new board seat.”
Mullenweg: Meta's Llama isn't truly open source due to user restrictions
“However, there's a clause in it that says, if you're above a certain threshold of monthly active users, I forget what it is, like, it's big, it's like seven hundred fifty million, so it's pretty high. You need a license from them. And so that does not give you…”
Mullenweg: Shopify and Facebook are not true platforms, will rug-pull developers
“And proprietary services can create platforms. You know, Shopify has a third party ecosystem and things like that. But it's never a true platform. And not a true platform. It's when your ecosystem makes more money than the core does. And so many times, whether…”
Fournier: GraphQL rarely works well in practice outside of Facebook
“The impression that I have from sort of listening to people talk about it is that GraphQL is kind of trying to promise front end engineers that they don't really have to like collaborate with back end engineers and they can just sort of build whatever and it'l…”
Dunford: Most legendary businesses did not create their categories
“Obviously creating a category is not the only way to create a legendary business because the vast majority of legendary businesses did not create the categories that they're in. So Google did not create search. Facebook did not create social network. Like, I m…”
Lochhead: Zuckerberg will blow over $1B on Threads, and it will fail
“Zuckerberg is going to blow in excess of a billion dollars on threads, and it will fail. It already has failed, because you can't take an existing problem with an existing solution, launch exactly the same shit, tell the world it's better, and have the world e…”
Mosseri: Engineer token burn could match salary within two years
“I think that you can imagine at least in a year or two. Coming that the burn rate of a strong engineer might be the same as their salary or their cost of employment.”
Mosseri: Tech will shift to smaller teams with fewer large-org managers
“I think we'll have more smaller teams and there'll be less people who manage thousands of people. And so That's not that that job will go away, but that will be less of what I'm looking for in hires because I'm gonna have less roles like that.”
Spiegel: Snapchat+ hitting a $1B run rate got Meta's attention
“Yeah, I think, you know, we just hit twenty-five million subscribers on Snapchat Plus, more than a billion revenue run rate, so it was, I think, probably enough to get Meta's attention that it's a good time to copy.”
Molly Graham: J-curve career leaps lead much further than incremental corporate stairs
“Chamath, when he pitched me on this job, actually drew me a picture on a whiteboard. He said, you know, look, you can stay the way a lot of people do careers is a set of stairs. You can be boring to use Chamath and stay on these stairs. Just walk up the stairs…”
Stein: Successful product formats quickly become primitives every app must adopt
“Facebook probably created the modern feed, but there's a feed for every single product, right? And there's a LinkedIn feed and there's a feed for DoorDash. You know, it's not like these things become core primitives quickly and formats. And then at the end of …”
Mann: $100M AI compensation packages are cheap compared to value created
“I'm pretty sure it's real. If you just think about like the amount of impact that individuals can have on a company's trajectory, like in our case we are selling like hotcakes and if we get You know, a five, a one to 10 or five percent efficiency bonus on our …”
Deng: Most valuable tech companies started without novel technological breakthroughs
“So many of the tech companies that are most valuable today didn't really start with any technological breakthrough. They were built on some kind of technological breakthrough and they ended up building a lot more technology, but really a lot of these companies…”
Founder DNA actively prevents tech giants from succeeding in misaligned product categories
“I have this premise that certain companies can never succeed at certain type of products, right? Like Microsoft with mobile or Google with social or Facebook with enterprise, right? It's just the DNA of the founder actively acts against you succeeding there.”
Vohra: No app has ever sustained a viral coefficient above 1.0
“No app has sustained a viral factor of greater than one for any real period of time. Even Facebook in its heyday had a viral factor of about the 0.7. And he told me that lasted for perhaps a year.”
Zuckerberg tipped off Mark Pincus about timeline posting, driving FarmVille's growth
“Pincus and Zuckerberg were very good friends and Zuckerberg told Pincus that apps were going to be allowed to post to users timelines. This is why FarmVille grew almost overnight.”
Meta uses machine learning classifiers to identify teens lying about their age.
“We're building classifiers to try to predict how old people are based on Not just the age that they've stated but, you know, based on who they're talking to, what kind of content they're looking at, what the age of the people they're connected to is, do we thi…”
Gleit: Activation metric value comes from team clarity, not exact precision
“I think the majority of the value is in the latter, is just having extreme clarity around the goal and that allowed everybody to work towards optimizing the same goal. You're right, like, we did sort of just pick a point on the curve. I think it could have bee…”
Schwartz: Top-Of-Funnel Search Queries Will Shift Into AI Overviews
“So now a lot of those keywords are going to be moving into these AI overviews. And I don't want to just focus on Google, although I think Google's going to own the entire search page forever and ever for at least for a very long time. But other engines, whethe…”
Bier: Big companies fail at consumer apps because teams sanitize product truths
“It is much, much more difficult to build apps at a large company. A lot of the insights That you have are not things that you can necessarily present or put in writing into, in a VP meeting. Like we're building an app for teens to flirt. Like that probably is …”
Vora: Shrank her presence to appear more likable early at Facebook
“I kind of went out of my way to be more likable, which for me ended up being like Shrinking myself a little bit and not being so aggressive, not being so opinionated, kind of being more unobjectionable. And the weird part is that it kind of worked for a long t…”
Giant platforms like Nubank and Google can mask failing products for years
“When you have a big app like new bank or places like Google and Facebook, you can make any product look great for months, if not years, because you have such a large customer base, you can always get them to try it with all sorts of basic techniques, but you'r…”
Shah: Zuckerberg touting Quest's utility actively boosts Apple Vision Pro's status
“The most fascinating thing that I saw was Zach talking about the utility of Meta being better than Vision Pro and their product. And that's exactly going to work well for Apple because when you try to make the product more utilitarian, it loses status. And if …”
Cagan: Mark Zuckerberg is very good at product
“Look, I I'm not the biggest fan of Meta, but Zuck is very good at product. Very good. That's sort of the problem in the world. He's so good at it.”
Bosworth: Companies that eliminate growth investments during downturns commit to dying
“You don't want to work at a company that when times are tough kills all future growth and just like shores up in the core business. That's a company that's just committing itself to dying at some point, a little later than expected, but like dying at some poin…”
Bosworth: Facebook built history's most efficient monetizing product surface outside search
“And we built like the most efficient monetizing surface in history outside of search, I think.”
Bosworth: Meta's bottom-up culture is a myth; Zuckerberg drives core ideas
“If you've ever met Mark Zuckerberg, he is not a, it's not a bottoms up thing. Like the ideas that we're pursuing are Mark Zuckerberg's ideas. First and foremost, that's not to say that he's not open to new ones.”
B2B growth teams should maximize treatment effects to overcome low sample sizes
“In B to B, you don't usually have the luxury of large N, which you do in consumer, right? You know, Facebook can get stats in two hours. You know, a B to B company could take two years to get to get to the same number of, you know, touch points. And so to coun…”
Adams: Google quarantined me and forensically analyzed my laptop when I left
“When I left Google kind of assumed that I was one of the spies, you know, I was quarantined when I told them I was leaving. They you know, forensically analyzed my laptop, like all sorts of stuff like that.”
Miller: The Browser Company does not have dedicated product managers
“We don't have PMs at the company. I'm my, you know, my title at Facebook was product manager. I love product management, but we view it not as a team. We view it as a leader, a role on a project, on an effort. And depending on the projects, different types of …”
Hardiman: Facebook feed algorithms optimized for engagement, not content quality
“When I was at Facebook and we were focused on news ranking and feed, all we could do was train pieces of information based on an engagement outcome. We couldn't actually train it based on the quality of that piece of information itself.”
Hockenmaier: The thesis of unbundling horizontal platforms is overhyped and rarely succeeds
“Broadly though, I think that we overhyped the idea of unbundling. So I think every six months I've seen articles, somebody wrote, this is the unbundling of Reddit, the unbundling of LinkedIn, the unbundling of Facebook. We're going to take All those blue links…”
Grenier: Do not test new channels before scaling Google and Facebook
“There's very few companies that I recommend saying like, Yes, go put energy on this brand new channel that you don't know how to scale yet before you've figured out some type of like volume on Google and Facebook.”
Mosseri: Meta shifts product teams to small generalist pods
“We've adopted what we call pods, which are just mini teams where it's call it four to six engineers who are a bit more generalists. One We call product staff, which is sort of an evolution of the PM. So a PM who can do some of what a designer does, and some of…”
Mosseri: Billion-user platforms must prep communications before knowing if tests launch
“You can't launch something to three billion people and not test it first, but you can't test something at our scale and not expect people to cover it and not, and be, and so you have to be ready to talk about it before you even know you want to launch it.”
Pincus: Quitting Facebook and Instagram plunges user Net Promoter Score to -35
“I, we looked at NPS, net promoter scores, and we saw That when people quit Facebook and quit Instagram, they went from a plus 35 to a -35.”
Pincus: Sid Meier's Facebook game failed due to poor onboarding UX
“Sid Meyers, like, the, you know, godfather of game design, who's the most revered game designer, he came out with, I think, a social civilization on Facebook, and we thought, oh god, here comes, like, the ultimate game designer, and 10 minutes after the game c…”
Pincus: Facebook absorbed all platform verticals except music and games
“With us, you know, we saw it on Facebook, you know, they, the two areas that they just didn't care about going into was music. Cause it was really painful with IP rights and games because they didn't want to like hire artists. But everything else they did abso…”
Evans: Major tech incumbents are unlikely to be fundamentally disrupted by AI
“You can look at, you know, Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, and say, it's hard to see a problem for them, really, with all of this. You can certainly see questions for all of them and one of them may drop the ball, but it's worth, you know, kind of remembering…”
Kalinowski: Meta Orion’s waveguides and microLEDs are unready for mass production
“Orion, the air glasses we worked on, I worked on most recently are a bit ahead of their time because they're using waveguides and micro LEDs that are not quite ready for mass production. The yields just aren't there. The cost is still high.”
Kalinowski: Redesigning Quest 2 for cost created the best-selling VR headset
“And so what it required is a redesign Of the entire product essentially for cost, which then I think led to the highest selling VR headset of all time.”
Warwick: Candidates lose logical negotiations against companies due to information asymmetry
“But I'm trying to open up an emotional conversation more so than logic and credibility because you lose, you'll always lose the logical and credible argument against a company. There's information asymmetry here. Meta negotiates thousands of times a day. You n…”
Warwick: Meta hired 150 former CEOs as $1.2M IC growth PMs
“Now I have seen specifically with meta, I actually interviewed for a meta IC manager role, like an I nine, it was like 1.2 million a year. They were specifically hiring former CEOs. And I found that to be interesting. They hired a 150 growth PMs at this I nine…”
Younis: Google could only beat Facebook by becoming a social company
“The way that Google would have won the social media wars by being a social media company, it's just fundamentally not.”
Cherny: Traditional developer productivity efforts yield only minor percentage point gains
“Things that we saw is, you know, in a year with hundreds of engineers working on it, you would see a gain of like a few percentage points of productivity, something like this.”
Only 15 Scale AI employees moved to Meta in the $14B deal
“Only about 15 people went over in the transaction. So scale has about 1100 employees or so now, and we have two major businesses.”
Oji Udezue: Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg succeeded without pivoting
“A lot of the most successful people, you know, Bill Gates, Facebook and so they didn't even pivot. They had an idea, but it turned out that the idea was a sharp problem.”
Sharma: WhatsApp won on reliability and phone book integration, not features
“WhatsApp didn't win because it had Stickers or stories or dark mode. In fact, I don't even think it had all of those things when it won. It won on a few premises because one was the phone book. Like you knew that when you use WhatsApp, you could reach every si…”