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 651 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
Herold: A legitimate Chief Operating Officer earns $300,000 to $400,000 annually
“A true COO, you're usually three to 400,000 a year. You know, I was three 2010 years ago. It got junk.”
Herold: Job postings should repel bad fits to attract the right talent
“Write it like an ad that pushes some people away and magnetizes people towards you.”
Herold: Kolbe index profiles show CEOs are 'Quick Starts', COOs 'Fact Finders'
“In fact, we use some profiles at the COO Alliance where we profile all the CEOs and the COOs that are members and everyone's Colby profile that is the entrepreneur or high quick starts. All the COOs are very high fact finders and follow throughs. They're just …”
Herold: Hired Kimbal Musk and Peter Rive as painting franchisees in 1993
“I hired Kimball Musk to be a franchisee for mine. I hired his cousin. No, Elon's brother. Brother. Okay. And then I also hired his cousin, Peter Reeve, who built solar city. They both were franchisees for me in 1993.”
Herold: I told Uber's founder at Burning Man that Uber was stupid
“In fact, I told the founder of Uber camp years ago when we were burning man together, that it was a stupid idea because I just didn't understand Uber.”
Herold: CEOs must monitor organizational ripple effects of a new COO
“Your job in the first 90 days is to watch the ripples As they're getting up to speed, you have to watch for all the ripple effects that they cause. Most people miss that. They're so worried about getting the answer, the CEO up to speed that they miss all the t…”
Yang: Messenger bot multi-step micro-interactions achieve 95% to 98% CTR
“It's 95 to 98%, and it doesn't get lower.”
Yang: 10K-user health bot achieved 80% opens sending 14 messages weekly
“So we had one bot that had over 10,000 subscribers, and they messaged, like in the span of a week, they messaged their audience 14 times. And? And they got 80% open rates and 10%, 10% CTR on each one of those messages.”
Yang: WebViews will be huge for Messenger by enabling complex use cases
“I think web use are going to be huge for messenger because they unlock so much of more complex use cases that are not just not possible through bots.”
Yang: Website visitors are anonymous, but Messenger bot visitors become active connections
“If you're, if you have visitors on websites, those visitors are not your, like, They're not your customers yet. You don't know them. You know who they are. You don't know, like, what's, you don't have a connection with them. But if they're in Messenger, everyo…”
Yang: Low ARPU consumer apps require pure viral growth
“With consumer projects, like, when you have the like, revenue per user less than a dollar a year, if you're, like, running ads or something, you have to have millions of users. And that you can get only, like, getting them for free, basically, virally.”
Pairing service and product models eliminates the cash flow trough
“With service businesses, they have, they don't have a trough in the cash flow model, but with product businesses, they have a very big trough. And by trough, I mean, you know, capital expenditure and outlay before revenues start coming in. So I just paired a s…”
Auditing specific client mistakes sells better than pitching general competence
“It's just really powerful to point out actual mistakes instead of going to someone and saying, I'm so good, I can help you. Everyone's first reaction is prove it, right? So it's so much more powerful to go in and identify problems.”
Making prospects articulate their own problems outperforms direct pitching
“So instead of me saying those words to them, I ask questions which make them say that to themselves, because it's so much more powerful that way. If I come on and I'm like, I'm so good, I've got this amazing thing for you, it's gonna do all of these things for…”
Customers buy transformations of themselves, not products or services
“No one buys yoga because they want yoga. No one buys Mixergy because they want Mixergy. They buy it to achieve something and to get a desired version of themselves which they've got in their mind.”
Sam Ovens paid between $300,000 and $1M for Consulting.com
“It was in between a 1,300,000, somewhere in there.”
Sam Ovens plans to eventually take Consulting.com public
“I think with, you know, a company like mine, I've got some plans for it in terms of, ah, like I do want to float it eventually, and the speculative value of some things is, it means, it can mean a lot. It's not a wise idea to mention every asset on the balance…”
Consulting.com has logged over 700,000 Facebook conversion pixel fires
“So I've put Over 700,000 fires on my conversion pixel, so it is so smart that I can target America, and I do.”
Sam Ovens completely rebuilds his consulting course from scratch twice annually
“It's more like, honestly, it's probably version 17 or 18. Like, I, even when there's absolutely nothing wrong with it, and people tell me this is the best course I've ever done, or this is the best course in the world, I still, just for fun, because I just am …”
Harbinger: First impressions happen upon entering a room, not introducing oneself
“Your first impressions were made when you walked into the room, not when you decided to introduce yourself.”
Harbinger: The Art of Charm invested $30,000 into stolen digital IP
“Oh, the guys stole it for, and it was worth that much. We had invested 30 grand.”
Warner: Most people in 2014 do not know how to access podcasts
“Go through the streets of San Francisco, ask someone to show you how they install a podcast on their phone. Most people don't freaking understand what it is. Yes, there are programs like Stitcher that make it more accessible. Ask someone about Stitcher, and th…”
Godin: Trying to conquer fear and resistance is a distracting mistake
“Well Steve and I disagree with this about the resistance, but I don't think it can be conquered. I think that trying to conquer it is the problem. That trying to make the fear and the lizard brain go away is what distracts us and takes all of our time and ener…”
Godin: A creator's next project must be scarier than the last
“The goal of the next thing, it has to be scarier than the last thing, or else we've wasted our platform.”
Ferriss: Diversifying identity across athletic, intellectual, and work goals sustains momentum
“By diversifying your identity, say, with one athletic component, one sort of intellectual component, and one professional component, every week can still be a win, and you can gain that sort of positive momentum
To do more things.”
Ferriss: Finding a partner before succeeding is critical for relationship success
“Finding a companion before you make it, so to speak I think can be extremely, Critical for long-term relationship success”
Ferriss: Soft-sell outreach gets more responses than aggressive persistence
“You tend to get more bites with a softer cell, so I always give them an easy way out.”
Kagan: AppSumo generates over $100,000 in monthly revenue
“AppSumo as a business is above a 100,000.”
Suster: Entrepreneurs must avoid platform risk by monetizing across multiple platforms
“As an entrepreneur, you just can't put all your eggs in one platform. You really have to have three or four different platforms, and I don't think we were quick enough to recognize Pinterest, Reddit, YouTube, and other platforms we could have monetized through…”
Suster: CEO's job is chief psychologist; VC's job is evaluating founder psychology
“I always say the job of the CEO is chief psychologist. You need to be able to hire talented people, but then lead and manage them. The job of a VC, I think, is understanding the psychology of the people you're about to work with.”
Suster: Goal is to back the largest IPO in Los Angeles
“So my very clear goal is I want to have the largest IPO in Los Angeles. I want to back a company in LA that IPOs and has the biggest IPO in LA. My goal with that is not purely financial. My goal is to see an ecosystem form around that company that will cement …”
Suster: Upfront Ventures sold Maker Studios to Disney for nearly $1B
“We just agreed to sell Maker Studios to Disney for almost a billion dollars.”
Allis: Gaining deep mentor collaboration requires aligning economic incentives
“In order to get the level of a collaboration, you often need to align economic interests in some way by allowing them to invest in your firm or by potentially paying them on a monthly basis for their advice.”
Allis: Scheduling meetings at abnormal times prevents people from showing up late
“Well, there's a, you want it to be an abnormal time so people aren't late. If it's an, if it's a normal time, people are four minutes late. If it's an abnormal time, then people are right on time.”
Allis: Large preferred venture rounds increase liquidation risk for common shareholders
“When we raised forty million dollars in, in series B preferred security, which is how you do venture capital, that forty million dollars is now senior in the capitalization structure, which means above all of the common shareholders, which is me, my co-founder…”
Allis: Driving organizational change multiplies in difficulty past 150 employees
“And so, I think when you get beyond, I think the magic number is a 150 employees, things become, ah, a multiple, ah, things become challenging at a multiple of the degree of difficulty that they were previously in order to drive change within an organization.”
Allis: Startups require formal processes and metrics around 50 employees
“It generally tends to be that when you get to a scale of about 50 employees, you need these wonderful things called processes and you need these other wonderful things called metrics.”
Allis: Startups with 10 to 15 people must codify their values
“When you get to 10 or 15 people, you need to find, ah, the adjectives that describe your culture, and you need to take the time to write down the values.”
Allis: Startups Should Hire a COO Around 30 Employees
“One is hire a chief operating officer. When you get to about 30 employees,”
Huffman: Reddit avoided centralized moderation because it does not scale
“And one of the decisions that we made on Reddit is that we don't want to be moderators. It's, it doesn't scale very well.”
Huffman: Paul Graham asked Reddit to build Hacker News first
“Paul, Paul had approached us before building Hacker News and said, Hey, can you guys make me my own Reddit where people can only upvote and I can have like supreme control over the content? And then we were like, no, that's not, You know, that's not really on …”
Huffman: Alexis Ohanian handled Reddit's marketing and goodwill better than Condé Nast
“And it turns out he just did that stuff better than what kind of NASA do for us. And so he continued, you know, I always describe his job as making us seem cool. And that's what he would do is, is he would basically maintain our goodwill, which was one of our …”
Huffman: Startups get tons of press just for joining Y Combinator
“Whether or not you build a good product, you're going to get a ton of press just being a part of Y Combinator.”
Huffman: Founders trying to feign usefulness to avoid embarrassment often succeed
“Most people have a have a desire to not look like fools, and so that they work really hard to at least feign usefulness whether or not they actually have it, and most of them in the process of feigning usefulness build something useful.”
Huffman: Paul Graham is an exceptional product thinker lacking social filters
“Paul is, I think he's an exceptionally good product guy. He has a really good eye for what's useful and what isn't. And he's also completely stateless and has no social filter. So it helps that you can go to this guy who will just be like, this is stupid. And …”
Huffman: All travel search sites access the same flight data
“All the travel sites have access to the same data, effectively, including us.”
Huffman: He burned out repeatedly on early Reddit by lacking work-life balance
“One of the things I learned on Reddit was how to not burn out, or I should say, like, on Reddit, I burned out a couple times. I just wouldn't get any work done for a while, because I just didn't feel like working on the same thing. And, you know, one of the ex…”
Huffman: He personally moderated r/atheism to keep Reddit welcoming for new users
“While I agree wholeheartedly with their message, I felt like I was kind of the standard bearer for making Reddit seem welcoming for new users, and so people were like, oh, Spez, he's, I guess he's just some sort of devout Christian who just wants to squash our…”