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 26 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
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 …”
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 …”
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.”
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.”
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…”
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”
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.”
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…”
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.”
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…”
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 …”
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 …”
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.”
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…”
Puri: Meta Quest has sold 20M units total and 1M Quest 3s
“Quest has sold over twenty million units, with the majority being Quest two. Quest three is currently sell has sold a million units at the 500 dollar price point.”
Puri: Zuckerberg spent years personally recruiting Stan Chudnovsky for Facebook
“For many years Mark Zuckerberg personally tried to recruit Stan, and he always said, no, no, no, no, no. And Zuck just kept reaching out, kept trying to recruit him, and eventually got Stan to join Facebook, and he ended up running Messenger, the, you know, th…”
Puri: Facebook crowdsourced user translations to localize globally overnight
“Facebook had to do like a Wikipedia thing. Cause there was, you know, there's 186 countries that they had to deal with. And so they were like, we need users to basically re re translate the site for their local region. And they incentivized people to do that. …”
David Choe's $60K Facebook mural equity became worth $200M
“I guess he was like supposed to get paid 60 grand, and instead of taking the 60 grand for the painting he did on Facebook's office wall, he took stock, and the stock ended up becoming worth two hundred million dollars.”
Sean Parker's 4% stake in Facebook became worth up to $5B
“So Sean ended up owning four percent of Facebook, which is, like, became worth, like, I don't know, four or five billion dollars just on his Facebook stock.”
LittleThings reached 250M monthly uniques and $90M revenue in four years
“And so within four years, they were the most shared website on Facebook, bigger than Viral Nova, bigger than BuzzFeed, bigger than HuffPo, all these publishers that were huge in the 2014, 15 era. And it started getting something like two hundred and fifty mill…”
Parr: Facebook created the Like button from its $50M FriendFeed acquisition
“After that, he started this social networking site called FriendFeed, which he sold to Facebook. And Facebook incorporated it. And one of the big things that Facebook took from it was they actually created the like button because of it. He sold that for about …”
Meta spent $26 million on security for Mark Zuckerberg's family in 2021
“For Facebook, they said last year, twenty six million was spent on Zuckerberg and his family, which was six percent higher than in 2020.”