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: Snapchat fired Anthony Pompliano over refusing Facebook intel request
“It was Anthony Pompliano. He worked at Facebook. This is all public. This is, you can read the deposition, or I believe it's deposition... And basically, according to the records that we read, he worked at Facebook. He decided to work at Snapchat, and they sai…”
Shaan Puri: Companies shouldn't raise venture capital to pay for Facebook ads
“You shouldn't go raise venture capital to pay for Facebook ads.”
Yeung: IM8 runs 2,000 to 3,000 live ads simultaneously
“Right now we have anywhere from, you know, two to 3000 ads live at any given time. We're testing out, you know, 500 to 800 creators on a weekly basis.”
Meta's Dave Wehner: Mark Zuckerberg Is Even-Tempered and Never Lashes Out
“He said he's a pleasure to work for. I swear to God. He said he's even tempered. I'm not joking. This sounds like I'm brown nosing. He said he's even tempered. He's like, man, he's been a great boss. Like he's been, he never like is lashes out. He has always e…”
DHH: Facebook had no clear monetization strategy in 2010
“When I did that analysis on Facebook, they did not have a monetization strategy. What they had was a lot of traffic”
Parr: Instagram videos generate substantial revenue despite maxing at 80,000 views.
“You don't need that many people to watch it. Like I'm seeing it's changing our, like, we're getting customers. I've made a lot of money off of it already in a very short amount of time with very few views. I think my most popular thing is getting like, 70 or 8…”
Shaan Puri: Meta is preparing to add screens to its smart glasses
“I think they're about to make them good, bad. And what good, bad is they, they're putting like a screen in it.”
Shaan Puri: The next major wave of AI applications will be multiplayer
“Every AI tool right now is single player. He's like, ChatGPT is just a tool you use yourself, and same thing with the image creators, and same thing with almost all of the tools are still single player, but the internet has showed us that, like, all the most p…”
Alex Hormozi: Simple 60-second iPhone narrative ads work well on Meta
“Advertising works. It's not like meta ads don't work, right? It's like you just needed to get the process down. But if you just do a very simple narrative ad with your iPhone demonstrating the product and the problem that it solves and keep it under 60 seconds…”
Tech Employees Leak Info Out of Ego, Impatience, or Grievance
“People that would leak stuff to me that worked at Apple or Facebook, some of them were so, just so excited to say, oh my god, I worked on this thing, and it was like, and they just want it out there, and they don't have the patience, and you know, and others o…”
Shaan Puri: Content-first storytelling drives runaway growth for DTC brands
“The smart brands in the DTC space are basically content first right now. They know how to tell their story on TikTok and Instagram and YouTube, and that's where they're getting just like a sort of runaway growth compared to everybody else who just doing very b…”
Jared Kushner Convinced Donald Trump to Treat Facebook Ads as Revenue
“That came because Jared Kushner came to him and convinced him that instead of all the other things in the campaign where consultants are begging you to spend money and it goes out the door, that you can make this a revenue center by fund by through, for fundra…”
Suby: Creative is the number one bottleneck for large-scale Facebook ads
“Anybody that runs a lot of Facebook ads knows that the number one bottleneck is creative.”
Corporate values without explicit trade-offs are just meaningless corporate posturing
“And once you go to speed without breaking things, you're now Subway eat fresh painted chicken. You're bullshit, right? It's now a unusable, non-useful value. It might be something you put on your website, but it's never going to have any weight. You're never g…”
Puri: Alex Schultz said localization was Facebook's biggest growth driver
“He goes, the biggest growth driver in Facebook's growth bar none was when we localized the service, which he's like, was not easy.”
Gary Vee invested $200K of his $236K life savings into Facebook
“I haven't bet everything on everything, but if I ever feel the way I felt about Facebook in 2007, when I put, I had 236,000 dollars in savings, I put 200,000 into Facebook, right?”
Puri: Plunge acquires customers on Facebook for $387 on a $5,000 product
“The CAC on Facebook, so the cost to acquire a customer on Facebook for them is 387 dollars. They're selling this thing for 5000 dollars, so you can see you're paying, you know, just under 400 bucks to get somebody to pay you 5000 bucks.”
Shaan Puri bought Meta stock during its metaverse-driven crash
“So I start buying the stock. I'm like that guy who liked the GameStop, you know, stock. And he said, I like the stock.”
Parr: Facebook algorithm changes destroyed Little Things' $100M revenue acquisition deal
“They're at a hundred million in revenue.
He had a deal sell.
They went through due diligence.
The deal was going to close in two weeks.
That change that you just referred to, it happened to Little Things.
At the time, Little Things was the most
Trafficked webs…”
Puri: Mark Zuckerberg recruited Stan Chudnovsky for over 10 years
“Stan's currently not at NFX, which is where, where James is, the thing that they, I think they co-founded together, maybe they didn't co-founded together, but they were, you know, they've been doing business together for 20 years. Naturally, he would have been…”
Shaan Puri: Facebook was the highest bidder for his startup
“Dude, when we were going through our sale process, Facebook was one of the potential buyers. They offered the highest deal.”
Shaan Puri: Invested $250,000 in Meta stock after the 2022 crash
“So I took I don't know, 250,000 dollars, like, I don't know, three or four months ago, and I bought meta because I was like, why is everybody down on meta? And I was like, did they forget the number one rule? You don't bet against Zuck.”
Ali: Paid $75K penalty to back out of 2008 Facebook secondary
“I signed a contract to buy some Facebook stock, like, a 150,000 dollars worth, and the stock price, you know, it was private, but in the private market, the price went down by 50%, and I called my father and was like, oh, you know, if this happened to me, And …”
Shaan Puri: Campus Marketplaces Are Too Small for Venture Capital
“I wouldn't personally invest in this because I don't think it can be that big. You would have to basically take a Facebook path where you would say, we're going to go get every college. We're going to dominate that college. It's going to be like the way that y…”
Luckey: Oculus rejected Facebook's initial $1 billion acquisition offer
“First time we talked, I think basically we were offered a billion dollars to sell. And we said, no, we're not interested. We think this company is easily going to surpass that value. We think it's not going to be a problem for us to make more money.”
Luckey: Oculus founders maxed out multi-hundred-million earn-out in two years
“We had an earn out. That was a, it was a huge earn out. It was hundreds of millions of dollars for the founders of the company. If we could hit certain sales targets, And user user, like hours, hours of time targets. And we actually had four years to hit those…”
Puri: Record label pricing power prevents Spotify from generating tech-like cash flow
“To deliver music, you have to have the rights of the record labels. They can always, they own the pricing power. And that's why, you know, Spotify after, you know, like building the best in class product, getting everybody to use it after 15 years or whatever,…”
Bebo received acquisition offers from Twitch, Facebook, and Discord
“I think at the end we ended up with three offers. We had a Facebook offer. We had the Twitch offer and we had a not papered, but like only because we turned it down early, but he was interested, the, a discord offer.”
Dharmesh Shah: Most massively successful ideas are derivative rather than brand-new.
“Most ideas that have been super successful are not complete new from old cloth cut, right? They're like, and I don't like the cliche of building on the shoulders of giants, but it's like just about everything that's ever been done is derivative to some degree.…”
Puri: External public announcements effectively force internal company alignment
“One of the best ways to get your company to realize you're serious about something is to go talk about it externally.”
Ad platforms ban zero-nicotine herbal cigarettes like Oklahoma Smokes
“You can't advertise for this on Facebook or, like, pretty much any ad network, because they don't want you advertising cigarettes, even though this is, like, a nicotine-free, tobacco-free, and he's like, so it's all just organic, like TikTok, basically people …”
DTC customer acquisition costs hit all-time highs due to Facebook changes
“The cost to acquire a customer is stupidly high right now. It's, I think it's the highest it's ever been at least the highest it's ever been. Yeah. Correct. But particularly with the Facebook change and competition, it's just getting high.”
Puri: Achieving a corporate mission forces a dangerous company reinvention
“One of the most dangerous things for a company is achieving your mission because you have to reinvent your mission. You have to reinvent yourself and think bigger.”
Shaan Puri: Facebook and Twitter pay zero ad revenue share to creators
“Us, the dancing monkeys that go sit on Twitter all day, coming up with interesting ideas, giving them the interesting content. We get zero, right? So like if I go check my Twitter ad split or my Facebook ad split, and Facebook made, I don't know how many tens …”
Al-Naji: Ad business models force platforms to keep content databases closed
“Today, you know, Facebook, Twitter you know, they're really about monopolizing content. Like you said, keeping it under lock and key so that they can show ads on it. And if they allow anyone else to build an app, like if they allow another company to build an …”
Puri: Facebook failed in Russia because VK copied every feature in 24 hours
“And in Russia, they just could never beat VK for, like, a combination of, like, slightly political reasons, but also I've seen interviews with Zuckerberg where he's like, Dude, they're engineers. These are like the most brilliant mathematicians ever, and they'…”
Puri: Native selfie UGC consistently outperforms polished commercials on social media
“Almost all digital advertisers have realized that this selfie style content that looks like native content, if you're on TikTok, it's got to look like it's going to be a funny or cute or interesting or amazing video. Or if it's on Instagram, it's got to look l…”
Puri: Renting out time rarely creates wealth; equity ownership is required
“You'll never get rich renting out your time, which is, you know, 90 something percent of people are employees somewhere. You are basically renting your time to an employer and you'll never become wealthy or you rarely become wealthy. With that path you become …”
Parr: Considering selling Meta stock because the platform has deteriorated
“I'm thinking about selling my Facebook stock because I think, like, I've totally done a one-eighty. I think Facebook's whack as fuck now.”
Puri: B-Roll.io could easily become a nine-figure business
“I think that this could easily be, you know, nine figure business.”
Puri: Raw UGC video ads outperform polished studio ads on social feeds
“That ad will kick ass compared to the studio photographer official
high quality you know, professionally done.”
Puri: Early Zuckerberg chat transcripts show he favored Wirehog over Facebook
“There's chat transcripts of him talking at that time. Like, you know, Facebook's cool, but like, yeah, like I think Wirehog's the thing. You know, like, so even them, it's not obvious at that time. And whereas people try to project that these guys are visionar…”
Puri: Buying FAANG stocks outperformed top VC returns over 10 years
“If you had just brought, bought the fang companies, so Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Google in the 10 years it outperformed all VCs or sorry, It outperformed even this sort of top like expected returns of venture capital. So the public market, if you just bought th…”
Polyvore outpaced Pinterest and Twitter in social commerce traffic
“We have about twenty million visitors per month. Ah, we're the second largest driver of social commerce traffic on the web. Ah, so first is, ah, Facebook, then Polyvore, then Pinterest, and then Twitter.”
Meta's Dave Wehner: Jeff Bezos Gives Full, Unbroken Attention in Conversations
“He's one of the only titans of industry who I've ever met. When he looked me in the eye, he was never looking around to see who else was in the room. And he was like, I was a little, kind of a small fry compared to all the people who could be around. He looked…”
Puri: Bebo Messenger hit #3 globally with 1M week-one users before collapsing
“We built a messaging app that got to number three in the worldwide charts, I remember, above Facebook, which was kind of incredible, but Had no retention. Incredibly viral, but no retention. I think we got a million users in the first week or something like th…”
Currier: Isolating in an incubator instead of joining Facebook was a mistake
“Our structure of the incubator wasn't super network centric. It was creativity centric. It was isolated a little bit, and that was a mistake. And had I gone and worked at Facebook and learned more about that ecosystem, or had I gone and become a venture guy or…”
Early Facebook monetized by selling campus sidebar ads for $10 daily
“And at this time, Facebook was limited to college campuses. And the way that they monetize Facebook at that time was you could set up a flyer. So like I went to Carnegie Mellon, I could pay 10 dollars a day to have the sidebar at Carnegie Mellon. And it was ba…”