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 24 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
Frosst: Meta's Llama is a corporate giveaway for notoriety, not open source
“Lama, Lama three, like the stuff Meta is doing great models, great engineers, really cool stuff. But it's not open source the way Linux is open source. It's not open source the way, you know, I don't know, like Wikipedia's contributions are open source in that…”
Mashrabov: Thin gross margins make AI innovation harder for Snap than Meta
“And frankly, you probably can see Snap's stock price and the gross margins are relatively thin compared to Meta. So I think for Snap, it's way more difficult to innovate to bring new innovative products with AI capabilities.”
Mashrabov: $10M+ Meta advertisers launch over 10,000 creatives annually
“I think on average company, we spend over ten million dollars in advertising on Meta. They're launching more than 10,000 new ad creatives every year.”
Lutsky: Meta's engineering scale is largely enabled by stacked diffs workflows
“And I think if you look at companies like Meta where, where they managed to scale to, like, tens of thousands of engineers all, all working in the same repo at a time and, you know, merging and deploying constantly, a lot of that, I think, is, is attributable …”
Most products naturally fit only one major customer acquisition channel
“And for most companies, and for most products, there's typically one channel that works really well. I mean, if you even want to oversimplify it, think of it as like Google versus social. And social, I'll put in Meta, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, right? And wh…”
Arvatz: First-time founders with market pull shouldn't settle for quick exits
“Don't think I need to, you know, do the exit and cash out and my next one will be a lot better because you might, you know, hit huge pain, huge market. You need to go full force. There are amazing companies that were built by first time founders. I don't need …”
MacKinnon: Meta revoked Later's API access for 3 days in June 2018
“Like, I remember very clearly in June of 2018, we lost our API access, because this was right after that whole Cambridge Analytica fallout, where all, they got really particular about Users of their API being properly credentialed and verified, which is unders…”
Marietti: PR Is Not Predictable or Scalable for Sustained Growth
“There's a limit of how much you can rely on PR to grow your business. It's not as systematic as predictable scalable. So, to truly be able to do paid acquisition well, we had to be nationwide. It was really hard back then, to, like, be efficient in Facebook on…”
Facebook shut down Brigit's main customer acquisition channel after Series A
“Right after our Series A Facebook decided that, that, that some aspects of FinTech, they didn't understand, so they just shut, shut them off. So our main acquisition channel, good news, it wasn't just us, fundamentally shut off, and we had to figure out other …”
Chopra: Social ads work for SMBs because employees befriend managers online
“In SMBs, employees have their managers also on social. So it doesn't happen in enterprise, right? You're not, your manager is not, if you're Oracle, your manager is not your Facebook buddy, but in small businesses, it does happen. And so employees start talkin…”
Chopra: Micro SMB owners behave like consumers on B2C social channels
“The SMBs, micro SMBs behave like consumers, right? So they were on Facebook, and our cost per click was, ah, oh my God, it was so, so low, you know, we're talking about cents to the dollar, and we were talking about 20 12”
The selfie replaced the autograph for shareable social proof
“The selfie is the new autograph. When you see someone famous today, you pull out your phone and you want something to go on your, you know, your Instagram you know, your Instagram grid or your Facebook wall. Like that's what you wanted. Back in the day when yo…”
Brauer: Early Facebook ads achieved 4x to 6x LTV:CAC for GoHenry
“Facebook could generate, like, easily a four to six X LTV to CAC, ok?”
Walker: Pre-Cambridge Analytica Facebook Was Most Effective ABM Channel
“Back in the day, you could target exact accounts and exact job titles inside of Facebook before Cambridge Analytica happened, so you're running heavy one-to-many, one-to-few, and one-to-one ABM campaigns through Facebook, which is by far the most effective adv…”
Liew: Reddit is the only major social platform that started male-dominated
“If you think about a lot of, it's not just Snap, Instagram, Facebook, MySpace, they all started with the young female users. Pinterest, maybe older female users. I think Reddit's really the only big social media example that started with a primarily male audie…”
Consumer startups should buy Spotify and TikTok ads for lowest CPMs
“So if you're doing a consumer good play, you may want to play with Spotify ads, TikTok ads, because those are the newest, lowest CPMs. Google and Facebook are going to be pretty saturated.”
Rubrik Spent Months Building IPv6 For Facebook, Its Only IPv6 Customer
“Facebook ended up being a customer, I would say in year two, and they said, you know, our data centers run on something known as IPv six. It's just a, it's a particular way in which, you know, servers are identified. It was all the rage. The idea was that the …”
Robinson: GetEmails Generated $10K MRR in Week One from $5K Facebook Ads
“Put it on Facebook, ran it to a Shopify audience, spent 5000 dollars and got 10 K monthly recurring revenue in week one.”
Chopra: Facebook ad costs spiked 6x in three months around 2014
“Facebook's costs went up six X in three months, like literally, and we're like, oh my God, this is not, there's no, I mean, the CACLT will be brutal.”
Chopra: Cupcake imagery ad was Perkbox's highest-performing ad ever
“It's still the highest performing ad ever was cupcakes. So the ad was just an image of beautiful images of cupcakes, and we tried everything, we were like, you know, everything the teams tried, and it annoyed a bunch of people, but it just got so many people e…”
Gift recipients sharing watermarked videos drove Cameo's organic growth
“When someone bought, we learned right away, they're almost all gifts. So I buy for you. Then you share on your Facebook, you shared on your Instagram, you shared on Twitter in a group chat. And then those people saw the cameo watermark. They're like, what the …”
Facebook ads yielded 10x more survey respondents than physical mall intercepts
“We're able to survey like a hundred people versus on Facebook we're able to get a thousand people within the same day. Like it was crazy, crazily less efficient, but still, we're still doing that.”
McNairn: Four of six Meta AI engineers recommended Gigs as co-founder
“When I was at let go the job before a bunch of my team moved over to matter afterwards the AI team there. So I called them when I was thinking about doing this and said, Hey, who's the best dude around? And I think I spoke to a half a dozen and four of them sa…”
Srugo: Facebook Poke clone ended up generating free publicity for Snapchat
“Facebook launches this copycat app called Poke, and it quickly, I mean, they have Billion users at this point. So it quickly goes to the top of the charts and it's a bit of a existential moment for Snapchat, but it turns out all that that did was actually make…”