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 613 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
Lessin: The Washington Post lost 250,000 subscribers over the endorsement decision
“The Washington Post, which is about 10% of their subscribers.”
Dave Morin: Microsoft 'quite literally had to buy a nuclear power plant'
“Microsoft quite literally had to buy a nuclear power plant, right?”
Lessin: Ad companies bypassed Apple tracking and reached new highs
“And then they found other ways to track them and their market caps had fully recovered and surged to new heights.”
Brit Morin: Radar breast cancer detection technology will launch commercially in 2025
“This technology will be launching next year though, so soon you won't have to do a stupid mammogram.”
Dave Morin: Unprofitable OpenAI and Anthropic will be forced to increase prices
“Like at the rate they're having to raise capital and at the unprofitability of their business models, they can only increase prices from here.”
Jessica Lessin: Inflection and Character VCs were compensated via licensing fees
“The VCs invested in inflection. The VCs invested in character. The teams were acquihired and they got like a licensing fee to compensate, you know, for their money.”
Dave Morin: The Apple App Store did $1 trillion in business in 2022
“You know, he was telling me that the app store did a trillion dollars in business in 20, 22 alone.”
Brit Morin: Harris's unrealized gains tax proposal only impacts 5,000 people
“Harris was talking about unrealized gains tax, which really only impacts like 5000 people.”
Lessin: Carta Report Shows Venture Funds Failing to Return Capital to LPs
“CARTA, the company that helps people
track their cap tables and has other sorts of data and occasionally gets in trouble, but that is a topic for another day.
Released a really interesting report that basically said venture capital funds are not returning mon…”
Brit Morin: Seed-to-Series A graduation rates halved from 30.6% to 15%
“In 2018, there were 30.6% of companies that raised a seed round and then made it through series A within two years. Now that's only 15% in the last two years.”
Dave Morin: Year-Five Fund DPI Has Only 0.22 Correlation With Mature Returns
“They analyzed 71 funds from vintage years, oh five to oh eight. And they found that the correlation between year five DPI and current DPI was just 0.22.”
Morin: Google 20% projects required pitching to Page, Brin, and Schmidt
“When you pitched a 20% project, you had to pitch it to Larry, Sergey, and Eric. You had to go to, like, the exact meeting. Pitch the project and explain to them how you were going to also keep up your normal day job while doing the project.”
Morin: AI boyfriends far outpace AI girlfriends in App Store usage
“Well, there was a piece this week, I'll have to find it, that looked at the data in terms of what's being used in the App Store, and AI boyfriends are far outpacing AI girlfriends, apparently.”
Morin: Anthropic rotates bot names to bypass web scraper blocks
“And suddenly you've got this problem that I was reading about this week where Anthropix changing the name of their bots. They're creating 10 more bots. Developers are having to, like, you know, block this bot and that bot and this name and that name. It's a bu…”
Jessica Lessin: TikTok Pays Microsoft $20M a Month for Azure OpenAI
“I read in the information that TikTok is paying Microsoft Twenty million dollars a month to access open AI through Azure.”
Jessica Lessin: OpenAI Generates $1 Billion Annually Selling AI Model Access
“Yeah, I mean, as my colleagues at The Information have reported, OpenAI is making a billion dollars a year in selling access to its model.”
Sam Lessin: EssilorLuxottica Does Not Manufacture Hardware for Meta Smart Glasses
“Look, Sadika, I promise you, is not making the hardware. Like, they make, they print lenses and, like, slap plastic on the brand and make a bunch of money on margin. Like, they're not a manufacturing company.”
Jessica Lessin: The Washington Post Lost 50% of Its Audience
“The Washington Post lost half its audience and seventy seven million dollars last year, not 77% of its audience.”
Sam Lessin: ByteDance Will Sell TikTok to Saudi Buyers
“They're going to sell, you know, they're going to sell it to the Saudis.”
Jessica Lessin: Mubadala Will End Up Owning TikTok
“I think Mubadal is going to end up owning TikTok.”
Jessica Lessin: TikTok Will Sue the U.S. Over First Amendment
“So what's gonna happen after Biden signs this is ByteDance or TikTok is gonna sue to block it on the grounds that it's infringing on the First Amendment.”
Sam Lessin: Elon Musk will still run Tesla in 12 months
“Yes.
Unless he does some hissy fit about his compensation package and like.”
Sam Lessin: Dude Perfect will secure $100M for their theme park
“Well, I don't know what's public or not, but they, I don't know if this is public. They're going to have that money.”
Jessica Lessin: Most of Microsoft's $10B OpenAI deal is cloud credits, not cash
“We saw it with Microsoft's huge, you know, ten billion dollar investment in OpenAI, huge portion of which isn't in cash. But it's in credits”
Lessin: Microsoft Repaid Inflection AI Early Investors Plus a Small Return
“What the information was able to report last night is a little bit more of the terms there. So it looks like Microsoft gave the early shareholders in inflection their money back, plus a little bit of a return and more to come on what that structure looks like.”
Jessica Lessin says Bloomberg newsroom employees must badge in for bathroom breaks
“Bloomberg does that. You have to badge in and out of the bathroom. Don't work at Bloomberg. Work at the information. It's true. The newsroom. You have to badge in and out of your desk, including, like, bathroom breaks, so.”
Jessica Lessin predicts the US Senate will take up and pass the TikTok bill
“I think the Senate's gonna pick it up. I think it's happening.”
Dave Morin says China limits youth screen time and mandates STEM algorithms
“They've actually banned TikTok usage longer than a certain number of minutes per day. They've also Banned the algorithm. They've like changed the algorithms that only pumps, you know, science and engineering and STEM related content to their kids. And yet they…”
Jessica Lessin: OpenAI is actively developing an AI agent and search engine
“The two new products coming out of OpenAI, one being the agent, the other being a search engine.”
Dave Morin: Latin American payment providers are clearing payments with stablecoins
“I've been hearing that in Latin America and other areas, there's starting to be payment providers that are doing their cross border, you know, settling, clearing, like payments related stuff. They'll do it on chain with a stable coin and then just convert it b…”
Lessin: Sam Altman Pursues Major Outside Projects Beyond OpenAI
“Sam Altman doesn't just lead OpenAI. He runs or, you know, is, is hugely involved in Helios, a big nuclear project, in WorldCoin, big crypto project, He is one of the most prolific investors in Silicon Valley, and he was pursuing two side projects in recent mo…”
Brit Morin: California VCs must report portfolio diversity starting March 2025
“Yeah, starting March, twenty-twenty-five, we are all going to be reporting our Diversity status of all of our portfolio vendors, which I think is going to get really murky.”
Lessin: OpenAI is trying to raise capital at a $90 billion valuation
“OpenAI is trying to raise money at 90.”
Jessica Lessin: Sam Altman and Jony Ive are discussing an AI device
“Myself and my amazing colleagues at the Information Broker story recently that Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, and Johnny Ive, the former Apple designer and designer of the iPhone, Have been deep in conversations about building a hardware device together that k…”
Less Than 1% of Founders Taking Companies Public Are Female
“One of like less than one percent of the founders who took a company public in the last 10 years were female.”
Every Instacart Investor Since 2015 Is Underwater Post-IPO
“Basically everyone, everyone since 2015 is underwater.”
Jessica Lessin: Apple's U.S. chip manufacturing requires final assembly in Taiwan
“We reported the information that their big bet on, like, US semi-manufacturing actually has this wrinkle that final assembly still happens in Taiwan.”
Dave Morin: The majority of startups have chosen to stay remote
“You've got startups that have made the hard choice to stay remote. We've got, I would actually say that's the majority case in the startup world.”
Sam Lessin: NVIDIA stock will go up regardless of earnings report
“It literally doesn't matter what they report, the stock will go up.”
Jessica Lessin says Cadre is selling for $100M after $800M valuation
“Jared Kushner, I think Andreessen Horowitz was going to let anyone invest in commercial, commercial real estate, eight hundred million dollar valuation, likely selling the Yieldstreet according to the information team for around 100, if that.”
Brit Morin: Penn gave Barstool back to Portnoy for 50% upside
“But I'm just, I think it's interesting that now, basically, Penn Entertainment is saying, like, hey, Dave, you can have Barstool Sports back for free as long as you give us 50% of whatever upside, if and when you ever sell it.”
Jessica Lessin: SoftBank is suing the founder of IRL
“SoftBank is now suing the founder of IRL after the information reported its user numbers were suspect and the SEC investigated and so on.”
Jessica Lessin: Bob Iger hired ousted executives Mayer and Staggs as consultants
“Bob has actually hired two people he pushed out of the company to As consultants to help him figure out this problem. Kevin Mayer and Tom Stacks.”
Brit Morin: Clinical trial shows semaglutide reduces cardiovascular risk by 20%
“There was a new paper that came out that actually proved that there is a reduction of heart attack and stroke risk by 20% for those that have used Ozempic”
Dave Morin: Meta needs 18% of Instagram to match Twitter's size
“All they need to do is convert, I guess, about 18% of Instagram to threads, and they'll have an app the size of Twitter.”
Morin: Study shows 72% of founders report mental health concerns
“There's a wonderful study that came out from UCSF Berkeley and Stanford called, Are Entrepreneurs Touched with Fire? And it looked at the mental health of entrepreneurs and founders in Silicon Valley and found that a surprising 72% of founders report mental he…”