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 16 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
Client-side compute is the only web model scaling to a billion users
“If you look at the other productivity apps that have really worked on the web, they've all had this compute model, right? Figma, when you open a Figma document, there's not like some cloud VM that gets spun up for you to render the documents you're dragging th…”
Wu: OpenAI managers use internal ChatGPT for employee performance reviews
“We're doing performance reviews right now, and it's actually really easy to use ChatGPT with internal knowledge, hooked up to GitHub and like our Notion docs and Google docs. To give a, get a really good sense of what this person has done over the last 12, 12 …”
Baxter: Google Docs beats Asana by letting irrelevant tasks fade naturally
“My memory of it is that it spent, you spent more time in the meeting grooming a backlog of irrelevant stuff than actually, you know, talking about the proper priorities. So I think it's nice in the Google doc that if something becomes irrelevant, it can kind o…”
Schillace: Google Docs would have died without legal protections and Schmidt's support
“If I had just been, like, a random Google employee with this idea, and no legal protection, and the CEO wasn't, you know, a fan of the project, it would have died. Like, there's no way it would have made it through that, that negativity, and that pessimism”
Schillace: Google Docs won market share, but Microsoft kept the money
“In retrospect, they did fine. Like, we took a bunch of market share, but they kept all the money, basically. So, you know, we being Google, like, you know, so, like, they survived it. Like, you know, they survived. They did a good job surviving the challenge. …”
Schillace: Writely co-founders initially rejected building Google Docs in browsers
“When I had the idea for Rightly, like, my two co-founders, who were both deep domain experts in both app building and word processors, were like, the browser's never going to support this. It's a bad idea. Let's not do this.”
Schillace: Testing candidates with seemingly impossible problems reveals builder resilience
“The reason I ask is not to get to the answer, it's because I just want to see how people react when I give them something that seems impossible and unreasonable. And some people just like back off and, you know, refuse to engage with it. And some people are ju…”
Schillace: Google executives wanted to kill Google Docs despite millions of users
“Like in the early days, like we had like, I don't know, a couple million users, five million users. And there were still executives at Google telling me that it was a stupid idea and that it should stop. And like, we shouldn't be doing it.”
Schillace: Google Docs collaboration began as an accident before locking was built
“And like, the fact that you could collaborate on them was kind of an accident. Like, they're just like these things on the server. We hadn't built the thing. That would lock somebody out yet. So there was just like, here's a document, like you can edit these t…”
Perri: Product strategy belongs in two-page memos, not 20-page PRDs
“And it's not like a product requirements document that's 20 pages. It's like a two pager just explaining what we're doing and why. And that context we usually throw into Google docs or a wiki or something like that, link them all together so that you can go fr…”
Chip Conley had never used a Google Doc before joining Airbnb
“I'd never used a Google doc back then when I joined Airbnb.”
Coleman: Community Notes runs off a single long-running Google Doc
“There is a very long running doc that has had to be chopped and purged because it was breaking Google Docs and Chrome at various points in time. It's sort of like a note taking doc. It's really where we coordinate what we're doing.”
Yien: Easiest decision log setup tags decisions and schedules future reviews
“This is not what I do, but I think it's the easiest place to start. Spin up a Google doc or a notion page, just call it daily log and then bullet point out like the date of today. And then as you're going through your day, you have a meeting, just type in the …”
Schillace: Writely originally ran on C# on three rented Windows servers
“We started off, in, in C Sharp, which is little known, in, you know, our own, there's, like, pre-cloud, so we, like, had three file servers that we rented that were Windows machines in a data center in Texas with a sysadmin in the Philippines running them. So …”
Schillace: Writely initially let users edit documents without an account or email
“When we did rightly at the beginning, we didn't even ask for an email address because it was such a novel thing. We didn't want any friction at all in the onboarding process. So you could just come in and make a document and start using it without telling us a…”
Schillace: Writely might not exist if founders knew collaboration's difficulty first
“Because if we understood how hard the collaboration piece would have been first, Without understanding that value might have been like, eh, it's not worth it. Like, it's gonna be so hard to solve that problem. It's probably not a, you know, useful absence.”