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 61 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
Currier: Sell Nvidia, buy Google and Microsoft for their distribution
“Oh, I mean, opinion is that I would sell. Yeah. NVIDIA compared to long-term, I would still be a Google and a Microsoft buyer because of the distribution.”
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.”
Marc Lore refuses to interview candidates with lateral career moves
“Any kind of deviation to that, I don't, I just don't even, won't even interview. So a lateral move, out. Right. You know, move from a Google to Kmart. Sorry, Kmart, but out. Like, I just, I, anything, any little, like, tap that says not top five percent, and s…”
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.”
Rydhan: Google's failure to lead in LLMs is a lifetime-scale fumble
“I think the biggest fumble
You know, in our lifetime.
Decade fumble.
Yeah.
They built the technology for Transformers.
Right.
The thing that OpenAI and others have used to develop this large language model, they are the ones that were the first entry and like …”
Shaan Puri: The AI email assistant market will be an absolute bloodbath
“I do feel undoubtedly that email inboxes are going to start to have AI in them and the AI is going to help you process, categorize summarize your emails in a way and respond, help you with the responses. The problem is Do I really believe that you are going to…”
Puri: OpenAI is Google's first credible competitor in 20 years
“It's the first credible Google competitor in about 20 years. It is something that actually could displace, replace search”
Puri: Generic AI Search Will Create Demand for Human Community Wisdom
“In an AI world, a lot of shit's going to change. And if you're gonna just type into, you know, a box, and it's just gonna give you the answer, and it's gonna scrape the internet, it's just gonna give you some generic answer, That's going to be big for sure. Th…”
Galloway: Getting rich slowly at monopolies like Google is vastly underrated
“Going to work for a big company is vastly underrated. They can abuse their monopoly position. They will have that mole removed. You will get rich slowly working at Google or at McKinsey. So if you're credentialed you know, we over romanticize entrepreneurship.…”
Google's ad dominance stems from DoubleClick capturing early international market share
“And that is the reason today, 25 years later that, you know Google still has a commanding share because we got it early on and it's never been given up.”
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…”
Tesla's Competitive Advantage Is Overestimated Due to Apple and Google Software
“I just think that everyone overestimated their competitive advantage. And then at the end of the day, you've got all these legacy manufacturers and, you know, ultimately if Apple and Google are providing the interface that most people use, it barely matters, r…”
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…”
Shaan Puri: Foreign spies stole Google machine learning models on USB sticks
“Of course there are people working for China, for Russia, for different countries as foreign agents, and there's actually been like cases of this where guys basically took the, you know, like The machine learning model out on a USB stick out of Google and like…”
Mazzeo: Google's Firebase sucks because of its tight ecosystem lock-in
“Firebase just sucks. Firebase sucks. Every, like, it's like, I'm in the Google universe. Like everything is tied to the universe.”
Vimeo Was Vastly Superior to YouTube but Lost on Storytelling
“There were other video platforms that were, I would argue, way better than YouTube, and I mean, Vimeo is a perfect example. Vimeo was a thousand times of a better product, and a prettier, easier to, all these things, and YouTube just told a great story, and Go…”
Parr: AI software will track screens and speech to give direct feedback
“Well, the next step of that is here's what's going to happen. There's going to be software. It probably exists. And I'm tinkering with a few of them that records your computer screen, your phone screen, the words that you say out loud, the things you type. And…”
Rydhan: Perplexity saves multiple steps over slow, ineffective Google Search
“I try not to do Google search anymore, mostly because it's slow and ineffective and perplexity really made it where it does a search. It reads the result as I would. It clicks into the links as I would, and then it tries to answer my question more purposefully…”
Puri: Musk attempted a $500M emergency bid to block Google buying DeepMind
“Elon then went to the PayPal co-founder, this guy, Luke Nosek, and tried to quickly like emergency raise, five hundred million dollars to buy DeepMind instead of Google, just to keep it out of the hands of Google. And he fails, he can't pull the deal together …”
YouTube founders sold to Google to avoid copyright infringement bankruptcy
“YouTube was also flooded with pirate content. Because of that, they were getting sued like crazy, and because they were worried that they would go out of business, they sold to Google for, like, a billion and a half dollars.”
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…”
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.”
Wilkinson: Major AI competitors to GPT-3 will emerge within six months
“There's going to be a lot of. A lot of other players in that space coming out over the next probably three to six months. And that it will be, there's going to be an ecosystem of offering similar to AWS and Azure and Google cloud. I think it'll be the same thi…”
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…”
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: Being ex-Google is a stronger career signal than current Google
“Ex-Google is a better look than current Google.
Isn't that amazing?
It's a such a stronger signal that you're ex-Google than current Google.”
Saylor: Google should have paid $1B for voice.com
“Like the truth is Google should have paid a billion dollars for the word voice. I mean, if they're going to try to launch a voice service, it's worth it to them.”
Foster: Google found hiring managers have no predictive edge over each other
“I remember Google sharing like a lot of their hiring insights where they did a ton of tests around this stuff like this. And I think what they found was that no hiring managers were like, had an edge over any other hiring managers with one exception. And the o…”
Ron Conway Secured a $250K Allocation in Google for Brokering VC Deal
“He gets the 250 K. So that's how Ron Conway gets in on this deal.”
Puri: David Cheriton made over $1B from early Google shares
“So he, this guy's made, this guy ended up making over a billion dollars just off his Google shares.”
Puri: Shaquille O'Neal made over $100M from early Google investment
“Shaq turned, like, you know, a couple hundred grand into, you know, hundred million plus off of his Google investment.”
Puri: Provocative Corporate Values Are More Memorable and Effective
“Lesson one is if you make it provocative, you make it memorable. If you make it memorable, people might actually use it.”
Puri: Charity: Water Used Real-Time IoT Flow Meters To Drive Fundraising
“He literally installed like little Google donated these like IOT devices, these flow meters so that you can see that the well you helped build, you can go in the app, and you can literally see how much water is flowing through that well right now, and so he di…”
UFC and WWE hold over 95% market share in their categories
“Basically these two brands have over 95% market share in their market. This is total monopoly. More than Google has in the search market.”
Parr: University of Phoenix spent $3B on marketing over five years
“The University of Phoenix in the last five years has spent three billion dollars in marketing. On Google alone, it's estimated that they're spending roughly five million dollars a month. And they receive roughly 70,000 to 80,000 clicks per month off of Google.”
Puri: Sustainable SEO Requires Objectively Better Pages Rather Than Tricks
“You can do all the tricks, but at the end of the day, you have to have the best result. Like you have to have the best page and you have to have an honest conversation itself of, is your page better than these other pages? He's like, if you really want to sust…”
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,…”
Sean Puri: Top-ranking Google results with outdated websites are highly profitable
“One of our like telltale signs is any business that shows up at the top of a Google, a popular Google search, but the website looks like it was last updated in like those are businesses that print money.”
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 …”
Puri: UnitedHealth stock outperformed Amazon and Google after Obamacare passed
“Oh, you know, like, as the, as Obamacare kicked in, the stock price went from, like, 24 dollars a share to 400 dollars a share now. And so you know, that was a better investment than Amazon, Google, Netflix, whatever, during the same period of time because the…”
Shaan Puri: DeepMind generated billions in incremental Google AdWords revenue
“They also apply it to the Google AdWords machine learning. And I think it's generated like incremental multiple billions of dollars already for Google, just on the slight optimization of AdWords.”
Shaan Puri: Google bought DeepMind for $500M with zero usage
“DeepMind, it was an AI company, got acquired by Google for five hundred million when, you know, no usage yet. It was just Vision and team.”
Saylor: Bitcoin Hit $1T Faster Than Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, or Google
“It took Google 22 years to get to a trillion. It took Amazon 24 years to get to a trillion. It took Apple 42 years to get to a trillion. It took Microsoft 44 years to get to a trillion. It took Bitcoin 12”
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…”
Puri: Google acquired DeepMind for around £400 million
“So they bought it for, I think, four hundred million pounds, so it was like, you know, 500 something million dollars”
Puri: Isomorphic Labs raised $600M upon spinning out from DeepMind
“And this company, by the way, their first round of funding was six hundred million dollars to, as they spun it out of Google and DeepMind”
Jared Smith co-ran Google China with Kai-Fu Lee before joining Qualtrics
“And he had been assigned to go run China for Google. So he was living in Beijing. He was working with Kai-Fu Lee and like running Google China.”
Shaan Puri: Google released an AI tool that builds personalized learning curricula
“Google just released this thing called, like, I forgot what it's called, like, personalized learning, where you can basically tell it what you want to know, and then it just, like, develops this incredibly personalized curriculum for you and feeds you, like, t…”