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 27 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
Masad: Executive Personalities Have Become More Important Than Corporate Brands
“People are no longer sort of attracted to these, you know, bland corporate brands and the faces behind these companies. I mean, thanks to LinkedIn and things like that are becoming more important than the brands themselves.”
Hoffman: I accidentally undermined Dan Nye during LinkedIn's CEO transition
“Completely unintentionally, and obviously smart enough to not be doing it in any oblique, direct way, but essentially undermining Dan because I wasn't allowing those neural Pathways to reconnect. And so, and that's part of the reason I think, you know, we didn…”
Vaynerchuk: LinkedIn currently offers significantly more organic reach than Instagram
“Meanwhile, LinkedIn is acting like Facebook in 2015, where on LinkedIn, if you post about floral arrangements, or why you're a good option for a corporate floral, or just a one-off Valentine's Day thing, it is more likely that you will get organic reach. On Li…”
Nadella: Successful acquisitions require evaluating how Microsoft itself will fundamentally change
“So I've looked at M&A as, at the meta level, it needs to do two things. One is it needs to be something that we can clearly quote, unquote, say it fits our mission. It fits our identity. Oh, we can be a better owner, which is sort of a very narrow way to talk …”
Hoffman: LinkedIn invented its Series A revenue model in one evening
“At the time, potential Series A investors wanted to see a business model that showed how LinkedIn would get to profitability. I told potential investors that we weren't going to generate any revenue until after the next round of financing, and that therefore i…”
Hoffman: Following LinkedIn Open Networkers' advice would have derailed LinkedIn
“And if we followed their feedback, LinkedIn would not be where it is today. We had to steer away from a bunch of passionate users who told us very explicitly that we were fools for not following their advice.”
Hoffman: A startup's first 150 hires make or break the business
“I believe that the first 150 hires will make or break your business. They are your cultural co-founders, and it's up to you, the founder, to get everyone right.”
Thompson: Daily LinkedIn videos drive advertising deals for The Atlantic
“And then I actually realized it's good for a business. Cause you know, who's watching these videos? CMOs, right? And they're really important people to reach, and so you go into a meeting with the CMO, and you're like, hey, you know, I think you should adverti…”
Abuzeid: Why LinkedIn and ZipRecruiter fail the regulated healthcare hiring market.
“Horizontal marketplaces like LinkedIn and ZipRecruiter and so on, are not necessarily customized for healthcare. The reason that matters is there's, healthcare is a regulated industry. You have to, you know, the healthcare workers have licenses and certificati…”
Berman: LinkedIn has many $150,000 entry-level prompt engineering job postings
“You've got entry level, 150,000 dollar jobs for prompt engineers. You know, littering the LinkedIn landscape.”
Hoffman: Acquiring Lynda.com was not a priority he would have chosen
“Jeff was focused on education. So bought Linda. At that point, we'd already had enough of established relationship that I was like, look, this isn't the thing I would choose to do, but if this is yours, This is the thing that is too often under described in MB…”
Hoffman: LinkedIn deliberately avoided scaling around early 'LION' superfan networkers
“It's important to note, in the early days of LinkedIn, some of our initial superfans, the LinkedIn Open Networkers, or Lions, contributed real value, but also created a negative spam-like culture in corners of the platform. No matter how enthusiastic those use…”
Hoffman: Founders must shape online community culture from day one
“I believe that every founder of an online community has a responsibility to shape the culture from day one, because the tone you set is the tone you're going to keep. Your first users and the tone of their first interactions will set the norms for the entire c…”
Saujani: Tech careers offer unprecedented upward mobility regardless of socioeconomic background
“This is a job where you can march up into the middle class. Maybe for the first time, we're kind of starting kids out at the same place. And whether you are a young girl living in a homeless shelter in Harlem, Or a girl going to the best private school in New …”
Hoffman: Common spaces are as vital to Silicon Valley as big tech HQs
“I'd argue these common spaces are just as vital to Silicon Valley as the headquarters of Facebook, Google, or LinkedIn.”
Hoffman: Founders must discern mass-market feedback from misleading edge cases
“It's essential to seek out and listen to user feedback, but the caveat is, you have to figure out which users to listen to. You're going to have different kinds of users giving you feedback, and some of it will take you in the wrong direction. So you need to e…”
Chesky: Startups make their biggest product leaps when subscale
“The biggest leaps you ever get is when you're small. And another way of saying it is your product changes less the bigger you get, because there's bigger, more customers, more blowback, more systems, more legacy. The most innovative leaps you'll ever make, oft…”
Hoffman: David Sze returned $2.5B to Greylock via LinkedIn, Facebook, Pandora
“He invested in LinkedIn. He invested in Facebook. He invested in Pandora. He personally returned two and a half billion dollars to Greylock's funds.”
Hoffman: In 2004, three exact copies of LinkedIn existed in Shenzhen
“So in 2004, when I went to Shenzhen there were three copies of LinkedIn. There were such exact copies in Chinese. I could fill out a profile. And I don't speak any Chinese.”
Ben Teuber: Bill Gates was seen playing Catan: New Energies
“One of the most beautiful things that I saw was when I scrolled through my LinkedIn page and then I saw a Bill Gates playing it.”
Hoffman accepted speaking gigs for six weeks to vacate LinkedIn's office
“What I did is I said, I had this Kind of clever idea, which was, I will accept every speaking engagement for the next six weeks, wherever they take me, and whatever the level is”
Hoffman: LinkedIn capped visible connections at 500 to stop meaningless gamification
“So we capped the score at 500. After that, the score remained fixed, and you got stuck with a boring old plus sign. 500 plus.”
Cohen: Hamas posted October 7 attack footage on Twitter and LinkedIn
“Hamas videoed all of this and posted it in social media. So it was everywhere. It was on Twitter. It was on LinkedIn.”
Hoffman: LinkedIn took roughly six years to implement a database failover system
“I mean, LinkedIn was years before it had a backup database. Now, we had backup data that we could reload so it could come back in a day or two, but like the failover system, that was probably six years in.”
Hoffman: Even Facebook and Airbnb faced existential 'valleys of the shadow'
“All startups go through a valley of the shadow. All of them, PayPal, LinkedIn, things that I've done personally, things that I've invested in, Facebook, Airbnb, all have valleys of the shadow where you're like, why did we think this was a good idea?”