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 268 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 5 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
Huffman: Reddit founders initially thought early moderator qgyh2 was a bot
“I know one of the first outside moderators that sticks in my mind is QGYH too. He was this insane Reddit user. I shouldn't say he was insane. He spent insane amounts of time on the site and we always thought he was a bot for a long time because we would look a…”
Huffman: Reddit grew 20x following its 2006 sale to Condé Nast
“You know, we have the benefit of hindsight now, and we can see, you know, if we had known that Reddit was gonna grow 20 times since we got bought, you know, maybe we would've played our cards a little differently.”
Huffman: Paul Graham insisted early Reddit cram content into the upper-left
“So one of the things he told us very early on, if I don't even think we had launched anything, maybe we had shown him some screenshots, was he insisted that we put as much content in the upper left of the page as possible.”
Huffman: Paul Graham hated Reddit's alien logo and wanted it hidden
“Oh, our name, the logo, he hated the logo. He thought we should put the logo down in the lower right of the screen so people would, you know, it's, there was a lot of branding things that he cared about.”
Huffman: Early Reddit iterated on just two core features
“On Reddit, we basically, we had kind of two features and just iterated them over and over. You know, user submit stories, user submit content, or comments.”
Chesky: Airbnb has listings across 2,200 cities in 110 countries
“While we don't list the number of listings we have listings in 2200 cities in a 110 countries, and we've got about 75,000 travelers on our site.”
Gebbia: Airbnb originally required all listings to attach to specific conferences
“At the time, we were just housing for conferences. You had to list a room to an event. When the event was over, the listing went away.”
Godin: Squidoo Reached Top 100 on Quantcast Without Venture Capital
“If you look at Squidoo's traffic, sure, we're number a hundred on the Quantcast chart now, but for the first year, it was pretty quiet. And for the second year, it was quiet, but we were losing money, and we're not venture funded.”
Godin: Squidoo runs with six people who are better than him
“And that's the secret of Skidoo, by the way. Six people, all of them are better at what they do than I am, so I don't bother them.”
Cera: Anthropic reports run rate rather than ARR due to API usage
“That's why Entropic, for example, also talks about an annual run rate and not recurring, because they have subscriptions, but they also have revenue coming from one off, like, API consumption, but then that volume is then annualized.”
Cheney: Ukrainian dev agency quoted $105,000 to build travel app
“And it was literally the same day I had received this proposal from this dev shop in Ukraine for a 105,000 dollars. They had actually sent over, we'd already done some architecture discussions and they'd sent over a PDF with a proposal about here's how we're g…”
Foster: Has written zero lines of production code
“I am not an engineer. I have, like, written zero lines of production code in my entire life.”
Warner: Built custom note-taking app in 15 minutes using AI
“I'm such love with this note taking app because I just didn't think to create it. There's so many note taking apps. And suddenly I said, I'm just going to do it. And within 15 minutes I had my ideal note. Notepad.”
Thummala: Strategy is under 10% of PressW business; 80% are engineers
“I used to say consultancy, and people then thought that we were mostly doing advising work and strategy work, which is actually, like, less than 10% of our business. Like, a majority of our, almost 80% of my team are engineers.”
Matze: Real Estate Agents Can Dial 200 Numbers per Live Connection
“First, you have to actually get connected to a person that picks up on you. That's okay. You can call 200 people before you actually get connected to someone that is the correct homeowner.”
Foster: A former roofer built an agency automating roofers' back offices
“We have one of our like solutions partners, experts, he started as a roofer. So he was running small time business, local roofing business, you know, Hale would come in, people would call him up and be like, I need a new roof, and he'd go out and, like, get hi…”
Dan Shipper: Monologue's initial version was built over a single weekend
“Naveen, who's the GM of Monologue, just was like, I don't know. I like, I want an invitation app. The ones that I, the ones that I've been using, like aren't quite right for me. And he just like built it over a weekend and then demoed it and everyone was like,…”
Warner: Mixergy sent guests iPads before realizing poor internet caused audio issues
“We, at one point, we're sending out, I think iPads to people to record, and it turns out that wasn't the problem. The problem was their internet connection that caused the issue, and by sending them a new iPad, we were exacerbating the problem, because then we…”
Yang: Facebook drove high F8 engagement using Messenger parametric codes for swag
“What Facebook did is they put up this parametric code that said, like, Hey, if you want free swag, just scan this code, and you're gonna we're gonna send you a message of what you've got, and it can be a t-shirt, socks, or something else, and everyone was like…”
Warner: Sony bought all early newsletter ads for $7,500
“And this guy on the phone said, Andrew, you have to think a little bit bigger. I'm going to think bigger on your behalf. I'm going to buy all the ads that you have for sale. And he bought ads for me at 7500 dollars.”
Early piano pamphlets became HearAndPlay's flagship product two years later
“Those books would then go on to be The basis of my primary product of Hear and Play just two years later.”
Allis grew iContact to $1M in sales shortly after turning 21
“I remember we chatted last time about a goal I set when I was 16 to build a company to a million dollars in sales by the time I turned 21. And I told you I missed that goal by 18 days. But you know what? I was 21 years old in 18 days, and eye contact got to on…”
Huffman: College returns drove Reddit's traffic spikes every August and September
“Kids going back to college in the fall is generally a big boost of users for us. There's not generally one event that's tied to it, but we found ourselves always chasing spikes that happened in August and September.”
Chesky: First Airbnb SXSW release had no online payments
“That, for that vision, Did not have online payments like it has now. It was merely to provide housing for conferences, and that was our, kind of, the first entry into the market.”