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 32 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…”
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.”
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.”
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.”
Instagram is automatically transitioning tens of millions of teen accounts to private.
“So there's tens of millions of teens that currently have public Accounts today that we are going to automatically transition to private accounts, unless they get their parents permission to stay public.”
Bosworth: Facebook users doubled product usage immediately upon Newsfeed's launch
“Now newsfeed was an easier case than people suspect because everyone was outraged at the same time as they immediately doubled their usage of the product.”
Mosseri: Meta has long advocated for parental app approval policies
“I think parents should be approving what apps to kids specifically are downloading onto their devices. We've been advocating for this at a policy level for a long time at Meta.”
Mullenweg: WordPress community forced Meta to reverse restrictive React licensing
“I think it was React that they were doing something with the licensing or like a patent restriction on. And the WordPress community actually got Meta to change that and reverse something they were doing to lock it down.”
Coleman: Dorsey mocked Community Notes as a Facebook name while Meta copies it
“Jack has made fun of it, calling it like the ultimate Facebook name or something like that, but the most boring Facebook name, which is funny because they're now, you know, launching community notes.”
Liu: The games platform was Facebook's first billion-dollar business.
“I, you know, I came in actually on the payments team and we worked on payments and eventually built games, which was the first billion dollar business.”
Deb Liu: Facebook's mobile feed ads hit $1 billion in eight months.
“And we said, okay, we'll build an ads product for the Facebook feed, the new mobile Facebook feed, and suddenly became a billion dollar business within about eight months, which was such an incredible journey.”
Bosworth: Meta's FAIR is the second most-cited AI research lab after Google
“People don't notice that FAIR, our AI research lab is are the second most cited research lab in AI behind Google.”
Meta experienced both the largest single-day drop and gain in stock history
“We, I think we had the single largest, the largest single day stock drop in history, followed 18 months later by the largest single day gain in stock market history.”
Bing wasted 100 person-years integrating social feeds before shutting it down
“We hooked into the Twitter Firehose feed, and we hooked into Facebook, and we spent a hundred person years on this idea, and it failed. You don't see it anymore. It existed for about a year and a half, and all the experiments were just negative to flat.”
Becker predicts WhatsApp will likely launch advertisements later in 2023
“Instagram and probably eventually WhatsApp, which I think will probably launch ads later this year.”
Hardiman: Facebook historically divided feeds into friends and public content
“And the approach to content on Facebook historically was very binary. You basically had content from friends and family, and then you had public content, and public content could come from anywhere.”
Winters: Pinterest growth stalled due to Facebook and SEO algorithm changes
“We were a fast growing startup that stopped growing due to some changes in, in the market related to Facebook. And then actually, once we had switched to growing primarily through SEO, there was an algorithm change that severely impacted our growth at one poin…”
Kalinowski: Meta's Orion AR glasses have a 70-degree binocular field
“The great thing about Orion is you got a 70 degree field of view, binocular.”
Balfour: Facebook was one-fourth MySpace's size when launching its platform
“And so at the time they launched their platform, I think they were maybe like one fourth, one fifth the size of, you know, something like my space or even friends or orchid, like some of these are some of the names.”
Taylor: Facebook required News Feed designs to use real, messy data
“At Facebook, we would always you know, we spent a lot of time designing the newsfeed... We made a system. So, you know, designers had to show their newsfeed designs with Real newsfeed data that was messy rather than, you know, anything artificial, because I th…”
Weil: Aptos and Mysten Labs are built on Facebook's Libra technology
“There are a couple of current blockchains that are built on the tech because the tech was open sourced from the beginning. Aptos and Mistin are two companies that are built off of this tech, so, you know, at least the, all of the work that we did not die, but,…”
Liu: Direct response generates the vast majority of Meta's ad revenue.
“Direct response is a vast majority of the ads revenue for the company.”
Kapoor: Meta distills the PM role into product sense and execution
“Meta basically distilled the product role into two core capabilities. One was product sense and one was execution.”
Boz: Ray-Ban Meta glasses will soon get multimodal AI capability
“You can buy the Ray-Ban meta glasses and very soon, I won't say when, but very soon they'll have this capability”
Facebook tapped Paul Adams for Cannes keynote after Zuckerberg's privacy grilling
“And the year prior, Zuck had been interviewed. He was the speaker. He'd been interviewed. He'd gotten a hard time on privacy. It didn't go well as well as they'd hoped. So the next year they asked me to do it.”
Massive regional and Reddit Notion communities are entirely moderated by users
“So you end up with Facebook groups that have, I think Notion in Vietnam has like, 250,000 or the subreddit, which I now know has like, 210,000 people in the Notion subreddit. And those are all run and moderated by community members who just love running their …”
Shah: Uniswap, Gemini, and OpenSea are hiring Big Tech product managers
“Specifically Uniswap just made a big hire out of Meta. I saw that Gemini also did the same. We're seeing OpenSea hire a lot of talent along these lines too, even through the ups and downs that Their business has seen. So, and at all levels, whether it's kind o…”
Grenier: HotelTonight was an early alpha tester for Facebook mobile ads
“Hotel Tonight, we were one of the, like, alpha testers of mobile ads, because I'd been sitting here buying, you know, ad inventory on networks for, you know, the last five or six years, and just waiting for Facebook to work, because it just wasn't really worki…”
Vora: Ami Vora entered Facebook in 2007 as a PR temp
“And she said, but we need a temp to review our press releases. So if you want to come and join a temp agency, we'll, like, tell me to send you here. And that's what I did. I moved out to California, and I slept on people's couches, and eventually they hired me…”