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 120 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 2 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
Sam Parr: Breaking Up Facebook and Google Would Make Their Founders Richer
“If Facebook and Instagram had to compete with each other it would actually make Zuckerberg richer. Same with YouTube and Google. If they had to compete, it would probably make them better. And thus the owners a little bit more rich.”
Yeung: Meta ad buying is commoditized; creative assets now handle the targeting
“Ad buying is like a commodity, right? Now, yeah, before, a few years ago, you have to be really, really good at ad buying, but now Meta does all of that for you already, right? You don't need to do the targeting. You don't need to do all this stuff, right? All…”
DHH: Surveillance advertising monetizes low-intent traffic by targeting identity over context
“Surveillance Capital flipped it on its head that it did not matter whether intent was there. If we know everything about everyone at all times, all that matters is eyeball time, because now we can pinpoint whether an ad should be shown or not shown on the basi…”
Horowitz: Facebook Executives Attempted a Coup in 2007 to Force Yahoo Sale
“The Facebook traffic had flattened and
The current, the executive staff that he had at the time was trying to run a coup to force him to sell to Yahoo. So they were leaking all this stuff to Valleyrag at the time and Valleyrag was, you know, calling for Zuck t…”
Sam Parr: OpenAI will combine Meta, Google, and the news media
“I just think that OpenAI is going to be, like, the combination of Facebook, Google, every news company ever, and then, like, five other companies combined into one.”
Puri: Sora will replicate Facebook's viral photo-tagging growth loop
“And if you remember one of the big growth levers for Facebook was when they introduced friend photo tagging. So they made it super easy where not just you could upload photos. That's a solar player experience, but when you could just click on somebody in the p…”
Puri: The next major social network will feature AI-generated content
“Every decade or so, there's a new big hit social product, Facebook, then Instagram, Snapchat, now TikTok. It's time we are due for a new one. And the Twist will be that the content is somehow generated with AI.”
Shaan Puri made 500% buying Facebook against Chamath Palihapitiya's short thesis
“Chamath tweets out the growing short case against Facebook, and he says, regulation is a problem, tax is a problem, antitrust is a problem, all this stuff. I bet on Facebook I'm up five X, so I made 500% on that trade, and so basically they went anti-Bitcoin f…”
Shaan Puri: Chamath would have made more money just holding Meta stock
“And if he had just simply like held the meta stock and chilled, he would have financially out far outperformed his own, you know, his own brilliance doing all this different investing action.”
Nagpal: How Peter Thiel shielded $27M in PayPal gains using a Roth IRA
“What he did is he bought his founder shares at PayPal with his Roth IRA. So he spent like 2000 dollars to buy PayPal shares that became worth twenty seven million dollars when PayPal sold. And then he had twenty seven million dollars to just make all kinds of …”
Meta will replace Zoom as the largest work platform in 10-15 years
“In 10 to 15 years, Facebook is gonna be, Facebook, like, Meta is gonna own the largest work platform, so I think that they're gonna be the Zoom, the whatever, because this experience where it looks like you could feel like you're in the same room as a person, …”
Sam Parr actually trusts Meta with user data and privacy
“I kind of trust them for some reason. I definitely trust them.”
Puri: Big Tech will reduce AR captioning hardware to a software feature
“And they're going to get there first, most likely, as to having the lightweight form factor. And at that point, captions might just be a feature Or an app on top of their thing. And so you're gonna waste a ton of money. I think doing, trying to get the hardwar…”
Luckey: Oculus likely would not have survived without Facebook's billions
“It's a tough business, and I'm not convinced that Oculus would still be around if we hadn't had those resources.”
Tech equity granted in 2022 could reach eight figures in a decade
“I think now's the time where you can get some of these offers where you're getting paid a 102 103 100,000 dollars a year in equity, and that could be worth potentially eight figures in 10 years.”
Dharmesh Shah: Big-name press release hires are wrong for early startups.
“If we felt like we ever hired someone that was worthy of a press release, we did it wrong. Right. That's not the kind of person we were looking for because they may have done amazing things at Google, Microsoft, Facebook, pick your company of choice, but the s…”
Puri: Antitrust enforcement will prevent Facebook from acquiring emerging rival networks
“So the next one that takes off, Facebook can't buy, and that will, because of antitrust, and so they're just gonna lose their stranglehold because that was their previous way of, like, extending their lifespan was to acquire the next best social thing and brin…”
Puri: Next Facebook successor will be hands-free wearable camera glasses
“I think the next Facebook is not going to be an app. It's not going to be another social network. It's going to be some kind of hands-free, always on camera. So it's going to be something you wear, either glasses or a lapel or something, a fucking drone that's…”
Isenberg: Open-Source AI Video Is Already Viable for Commercial Ads
“I mean, it's 100% good enough to use in ads. Now I wouldn't use, you know, Tyler Swift in an ad because you might not get approved by Meta, but, you know, people are using JFK You know, JFK and Plato and you know, things that are in the public domain that you …”
Puri: Meta's massive AI salary offers force competitors to drastically overpay
“First, it raises the price for all of his competitors. So he's like, cool, even if they don't take my offer, now they have to pay 100 X what they were paying for talent before. Like, way to screw up their business.”
Shaan: Meta has an uncontested lead in smart glasses as rivals fail
“I think it's interesting because it's kind of uncontested right now. Like maybe Apple will get in the game. Maybe. If they still have, like, the juice to do it, Snapchat seems to have fallen out. The famous, like, I forgot what the thing was called. Magic leap…”
Pujji: Ampush got a $5M interest-free loan in exchange for aggregate Meta data
“So this guy, Peter, he's a good friend of mine now, he gave us a five million dollar loan, so we didn't have to pay any interest to our bank to do working capital, and all I had to do was basically give him a real-time feed from our Tableau or whatever, our ag…”
Shaan Puri: Joining hypergrowth startups around employee 200 creates low-effort wealth
“At by employee 200, you no longer need to be at the top of the genius curve. Work, you know, an incredible amount and you still get rich.”
Parr: Noah Kagan lost $100M in unvested equity when Zuckerberg fired him
“Noah was the 32nd or 30th employee employee... And Zuck goes to his desk and he goes, you're fucking with my company. You're out. And he fires him on month nine. So Noah was three months away from his first invest. And Noah's told me, he goes, had I just made …”
Puri: Facebook might be dead today if it had not acquired Instagram
“And by the way, today, if Facebook had not bought Instagram, Facebook might be dead.”
Fuller: BuzzFeed sold out to programmatic ads and platform reliance
“Well, I think Buzzfeed along with a lot of other publishers have sold out to programmatic and have relied upon the platforms, the Facebooks and the.”
Gary Vee will not sell his Meta shares until Zuckerberg leaves
“And the reason I've never sold a share of Facebook is I've been committed for a long time in this, in my own mind, which was I'll never sell until he's gone.”
Pompliano sold all of his Facebook equity compensation to buy Bitcoin
“Well, I sold it. And bought Bitcoin.”
Pompliano: Big tech resume cachet fades after the first 500 employees
“Working at a place like Facebook, unless you're one of the first maybe, like, two to 500 employees it kind of just is like, all right, you're, like, kind of legit. You know, you worked at a place that has some sort of high bar. But now there's 80,000 people th…”
Sam Parr: Meta is still the best ad platform for e-commerce
“Fucking meta, dude. It's still the best platform for buying ads for e-com.”
Shaan Puri: One prestige brand logo is enough to carry a resume
“And one is enough. One is enough. That's the key. I think one problem people can do is they go logo collecting. One is enough. If you got Harvard, Awesome. You don't need to also go get another MBA from some other place. Or if you have Facebook, you don't have…”
Noah Kagan: Leaking email expansion to TechCrunch led to Facebook firing
“And I let Arrington at TechCrunch know like, Hey, Facebook's opening up to at Microsoft and at corporate emails in the morning. I think you should write about it and get and talk about it. Cause Facebook wasn't going to do any press. And he wrote about it that…”
Noah Kagan: Companies like Facebook and Airbnb started in a weekend
“Facebook started that way in a weekend. Airbnb did. A lot of other companies can too.”
LittleThings lost a nine-figure exit and died after a Facebook algorithm shift
“They built this entire company, littlethings.com, on the back of Facebook, and they got, ah, an LOI to sell the business, and they were literally three weeks from selling. They were gonna sell for hundreds of millions of dollars. Facebook puts out this annual …”
Coogan: Facebook would have died without venture capital
“I think that if Mark Zuckerberg didn't raise venture capital, his company would be dead.”
Sam Parr predicts a billion-dollar company will be built from Twitter
“We've seen billion dollar companies start on Facebook. We've seen that on Instagram. No one's done it on Twitter, but it will happen.”
Shkreli: Google and Meta had OpenAI-equivalent tech years ago but missed productization
“Both Facebook and Google had sort of equivalent technology to open AI, in my opinion, years ago, and they just still just haven't sort of seen the actual product, you know, making sense and launching.”
Shaan Puri: Facebook talent was far superior to Twitch, YouTube, and Discord
“The difference of talent quality between we interviewed with we talked to YouTube, we talked to Twitch, where we ended up going to Facebook, to discord, to a bunch of other players. And Facebook was so much more, so much better, so much more impressive.”
Luckey: Facebook had unique incentives to push VR over Google and Microsoft
“Facebook was one of the very few companies that had a strong incentive to make virtual reality and immersive computing writ large to come about as quickly as possible, because unlike Google, unlike Microsoft, they did not benefit from the status quo in the har…”
Luckey: Facebook committed billions per year for 10+ years to VR
“They were willing to commit billions of dollars a year for a period of a decade or more.”
Dharmesh Shah: Economic downturns are net positive for early-stage startups.
“So my position is I lean more towards kind of Paul Graham and the spectrum, which is, I think it's either neutral, that it doesn't matter. It's one of the things you're suggesting towards positive. And the positive elements of being in a kind of downturning ec…”
Puri: Middle American women are the easiest audience for Facebook ads
“The easiest thing to sell on Facebook is stuff that appeals to like white women in middle America. So like, how do you sell to a 35 to 65 year old woman that lives in Texas? And like, that's the persona. That's like the most easy to fish for on Facebook.”
Wilkinson: Facebook Acqui-Hires Potential Competitors Solely to Shut Them Down
“Facebook basically just buys companies to shut them down. Right. They find promising social networks that might compete with them. They go buy them for tens of millions of dollars before they turn into anything. And they bought his company and it's kind of lik…”
Puri: Meta sold 10M Oculus units in 2021, outselling Xbox
“Oculus outsold Xbox this year. So Oculus sold ten million units, which is about four billion in revenue for Facebook on just the hardware for getting the games and the app store that they have.”
Parr: Google and Facebook will lose their tech dominance by 2031
“I actually think that if you told me this could be like crazy wrong in 10 years, if Facebook and Google are not like
I think they'll exist, but if they're not like the big shots, I actually, I'll be surprised if they're still the big shots.”
Puri: iOS opt-outs cause Facebook to miss 40% of ad conversions
“Even when you send it, you show a Facebook ad to somebody, they click it and they go buy a product from you. Facebook's only catching like 60% of those conversions. It doesn't know about the other 40% because they've opted out of tracking or it didn't work.”