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 1,041 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 11 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
Catmull: Steve Jobs developed empathy and a sense of humor during 1991-1995
“I would say from 91 to 95 was a dramatic change in him as a person. He became more empathetic and caring. He paid attention to people. You actually begin to see him having a sense of humor.”
Alba: Every early VC said they would ask their wife about Honest
“It's really interesting cause like all of my initial VC meetings, everyone was like, I'm gonna go home and ask my wife if this is something that she likes. Literally every single one of them.”
Fake: Early Flickr explicitly permitted bare midriffs despite alienating Muslim users
“You know, the Muslim community did not like the bare midriff photographs that were all over Flickr, and we had to make a decision, and we came down on the side of the bare midriff. We were like, the bare midriff is okay here, and that is a decision that we are…”
Saujani: Working mothers earn 58 cents for every dollar made by fathers
“We have a motherhood penalty, and what I mean by that is moms make 58 cents and every dollar made by fathers.”
Nocera: School closings and pandemic lockdowns exacerbated income inequality
“And then I had a particular obsession with school closings and lockdowns that they exacerbated income inequality, but nobody was talking about that.”
Suleyman: Inflection AI has ensured users cannot prompt hack Pi
“We've really tried hard to make safety our number one priority, and part of the way that we do that is by ensuring that you can't actually prompt hack Pi.”
Khan: NYPD testified it lacks accuracy data for its facial recognition systems
“When we asked the NYPD for its own data on the bias and the accuracy of this technology, when we wanted to look underneath the algorithmic hood at how this system is operating, they told us under oath they don't have any data on how accurate this technology is…”
Read: WPP US Office Occupancy Lags Global Hubs at 15–25%
“Shanghai, we're running at 75%. Mumbai, 64% average occupancy. Here in London, 52%. Milan, 45. And New York, 24. And in the US, I'd say we vary between 15 to 25% occupancy.”
Suleyman: Google Bard Uses LaMDA's Search-Grounded Model Architecture
“And actually that's what you now see in Bard, you know, Google's new AI. It's pretty much exactly the same model.”
Krawcheck: Women hold 30% of white male wealth; Black women hold 1%
“Women have 30 cents of wealth to every dollar a white man has. Black women have a penny.”
Schmidt: 80% of management turns over in a corporate turnaround
“The number is 80% of the management team will turn over in a turnaround.”
Mayer bet she could train new grads faster than hiring senior PMs
“I want to bet that I can hire new people right out of school and train them to be great product managers at Google faster than you can hire the people you prefer who are more experienced and senior.”
Dr. Walker: Sleep-deprived employees are more likely to act unethically
“One of the more surprising facts is that the less and less sleep that an employee has had, the more and more likely they are to lie become unethical. So for example, falsify data in a spreadsheet.”
Polman: Unilever's purpose-driven brands grew faster and were more profitable
“But we saw that these brands that actually were more purpose-driven were actually growing faster and more profitable as well.”
Obama: Economic inequality continued to grow throughout his presidency
“You saw some trends that unfortunately continued even through my presidency of growing inequality.”
Obama: Administration's 2008 crisis decisions averted depression and drove record job streak
“The decisions we made at the time did not solve some of the broader underlying trends that I had actually campaigned on, like income and wealth inequality, but it did avert a great depression and stabilize the situation that would allow for painfully slow, but…”
Obama: Administration wanted a stimulus package twice as large as $800B Recovery Act
“As a consequence, we could not get enough votes to do more in the initial Recovery Act, as we called it, than eight hundred billion dollars. And I think Subsequently, people have said, ah, you know, you should have done twice as much. Well, yeah, we wanted to …”
Krawcheck found photocopies of male genitalia on her Salomon desk daily
“I would come in every day, and there'd be a Xerox copy of male genitalia on my desk, which was, for a young lady from Charleston, South Carolina, was a little horrifying.”
Citigroup fired Krawcheck for advocating client reimbursement during the financial crisis
“Happily, the reason that I was fired from Citi during the financial crisis, and now a decade plus ago, was because I had advocated for returning client money.”
Anagnost: Autodesk coined the phrase 'generative design' a decade ago
“We actually coined the phrase generative design 10 years ago.”
Daunt: 'Showrooming' for Amazon in physical bookstores is largely a myth
“There was this sort of obsession that people were coming into our stores and photographing books and then ordering them Amazon and, or coming in and choosing books and then downloading them on their Kindles. And it was, which just simply doesn't happen except …”
Freston: Viacom offered $1.5 million to buy Facebook in early days
“We offered to buy the Facebook for a million and a half dollars, which was a lot for us.”
Freston: MTV Brought Hip-Hop to American Living Rooms Before BET or Radio
“We kind of made up for that, and we were the first people to kind of give hip-hop put it in the living rooms of America. I mean, BET or in radio wasn't even playing hip-hop, but”
Cole: The Party Animals have more TikTok followers than any MLB team
“So like the party animals, which people don't realize they have more followers than every major league baseball team on TikTok.”
Cole: Bananas cap tickets at $60 with no fees or taxes
“The average ticket price in the secondary market is over 200 dollars. For us, it's 40, 50, and 60 dollars with no ticket fees, no convenience fees, we pay your taxes.”
Krishna: IBM achieved a 10x ROI on AI spending after year two
“After year two, we were definitely getting a return that was 10 X compared to what we were spending.”
Krishna: IBM software developers are 40% more productive over two years
“Our software developers are probably 40% more productive today than they were two years ago. So I'm not saying it's one month, over two years, they're 40% more productive.”
Scaringe: Rivian completed a $5.8B software licensing deal with Volkswagen
“We did a 5.8 billion dollar software licensing deal with the second largest car company in the world with Volkswagen Group.”
Scaringe: Rivian R1S outsells Tesla Model X as top premium electric SUV
“If you take in the premium segment, in the flagship space, we have an SUV, our R one S and it's by a pretty significant degree. It's this best selling premium electric SUV in the country. And so you know, it's significantly outsold the Model X. It outsells eve…”
Oza: 50 Cent made 10 times more from Vitaminwater than initially projected
“And he knew what he was capable of more than I did, because I had a number in my mind of what I thought 50 could make. And I think he made 10 times that.”
Frankfort: Sara Lee promised Coach freedom at $1 billion valuation
“There was a handshake between me and the CEO chairman of Sara Lee that if I could get them a billion dollars, they would give us our freedom.”
Epstein: Founders trained in the scientific method pivot more and succeed more
“And some of them were randomized to get trained in, in a scientific method version of this, where they make a hypothesis about what do they think is their value add. And then they have to commit to a way to go test it. And some decision rule, you know, ah, the…”
The US is the only nation where most say others lack morals
“I just saw there was a Pew survey out that showed America is now the only country where a majority of adults, it was a small majority, but a majority, said that other people have bad morals.”
Steven Ellsworth: Poppi CMO contracted Super Bowl ad before securing funding
“Our CMO actually signed the contract to buy the Super Bowl ad before we had the money to pay for the ad.”
Poppi Cannot Be Sold at Lakers Stadium Due to Concession Contracts
“We are the official soda of the LA Lakers. We can't be sold there at the stadium because of existing contracts.”
Eric Ryan: Method was first to combine high design and sustainability
“And so I guess I'm going to take credit for it because nobody's told us they've done it first of really combining high design and deep sustainability.”
Deeter: Three Bessemer portfolio CEOs stepped down from stress in 2024
“A year and a half ago, I had three CEOs in the same year tap out, including one that had to go away and needed real time.”
Brooks: Meaninglessness Is the Top Predictor of Depression in Young Adults
“As a matter of fact, the best predictor of depression, anxiety, For young adults is the answer yes to the question. Does your life feel meaningless? That's the best predictor.”
Robins: Prediction markets' combined volume trails tier-two betting rivals
“If you look at it, it's not like, even by volume, the prediction markets, or any more market share, if you put everything together any more share, I should say, than you know, some of the other competitors that we have that are not number one and number two in…”
Yuan: VCs rejected Zoom's seed round claiming market was saturated
“To start with, I tried to raise seed money from some VCs, and they did not think the world needed to have another solution. Luckily, I got the seed funding from a few of my friends and in Seneca Valley.”
Yuan: Zoom handled COVID traffic surges without changing its codebase
“That's the reason why, you know, during COVID, even having a certain access traffic, we do not need to change our code. You know, the architecture itself was very scalable.”
Masad: CEOs use Replit prototypes to challenge engineering team timelines
“We have CEOs that finally feel unleashed. Like they have Replit and they have an idea. They don't have to go beg someone to do it. They can like just vibe code and bring into a meeting and look what I built. And why can't you do that in two weeks if I can do i…”
Masad: Replit Agent 3 achieves 200-minute useful unsupervised runs
“And because of that, we went from agent one ran for two minutes unsupervised. After that, it didn't work very well. Agent two is 20 minutes. Agent three, you know, 200 minutes. We're seeing 200 minute runs that are actually really, really useful.”
Leonard Lauder apologized to Bobbi Brown for failing to protect her brand
“And at the very end, when I was getting ready to leave, and you know, at this point, he was in a, you know, sitting in a chair, not getting up, and he said, he grabbed my arm, and he said, I just have to apologize to you, and I said, Leonard, for what? I said,…”
Ali: The majority of early Chomps customers were female
“Well, I think we realized was the most of our customers were female.”