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 21 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
Hoover: Grammarly has been cash flow positive almost since inception
“We've been cash flow positive pretty much since inception.”
Stone: Early B2B Expansion Requires Build-and-Learn Over Short-Term Revenue
“Near term growth is not the goal. When I stepped into this role, we'd actually already promised very strong growth to the board on the revenue line. But it was very clear, very quickly, particularly in light of digging in and realizing some of those assumption…”
Hoover: Asynchronous communication eliminates critical real-time nonverbal calibration
“The challenge with this communication is we lose the nonverbals that we get when we're talking to someone in person. And so we can't calibrate how our message is landing And adjust what we're saying or ask follow up questions to make sure that our points actua…”
Hoover: ML apps create compounding data network effects for early movers
“Certainly an example of applications that do are machine learning powered applications that have data network effects. Grammarly is an example of that. In our case, as an early mover, that enabled us to really build a very high quality set of suggestions to dr…”
Hoover: Grammarly scaled enterprise sales separately before reintegrating it
“As we made the decision to build out our Grammarly business sales organization, we decided to carve much of that out into a separate group with a separate senior leader to build it up to a level of scale. And then to integrate it back into the rest of Grammarl…”
Hoover: Organizations break at 5–7 and 150 employee thresholds
“As you move beyond five or seven people you know, things break. As you move beyond a 150, you have another break point, and so you want to make sure that you have a plan to address that as you scale.”
Hoover: Engagement data misleads if current users do not reflect future users
“First off, you need to think about the users that you have and whether or not they're representative of the users you expect to have in the future. If they're not, you're looking in the rearview mirror.”
Hoover: Breakthroughs come from novel user nuances, not standard personas
“When we're talking to individual users, it's very easy to just bucket those users in the personas or segments that we've identified. But the value of those conversations and the breakthroughs comes in the difference between what we know and that person's persp…”
Hoover: US businesses lose $1.2 trillion annually to ineffective communication
“In that pool, we learned that just US businesses, which is a small fraction of global communication, lose over a trillion dollars a year, 1.2 trillion, to ineffective communication.”
Stone: Grammarly had to unwind board-committed enterprise revenue goals
“Even when I started, we had revenue goals already committed to the board for the next year that Frankly, we had to unwind and that's not just on the revenue line.”
Stone: GTM teams must productize and remove manual work from day one
“Ensuring particularly the leaders in those areas of the organization that they share the same responsibility as any other leader in the organization on the product side to be driving productivity, to be productizing things, to be looking at places where manual…”
Stone: Hiring for experience must require curiosity to avoid misplaced playbooks
“Bringing people in for pattern recognition has to be paired, and with their expertise, has to be paired with the right values, and those things have to be separately and collectively met in terms of a bar for hiring.
I would not, I would be very worried about …”
Stone: Grammarly should have documented why enterprise strategy could fail
“I think it's probably in retrospect probably would have been better if we'd even taken a stronger stance to write down the reasons why our current strategy to go into B to B and to go into enterprise would not work rather than allowing ourselves To be over opt…”
Stone: Consumer workplace usage does not equal B2B product-market fit
“The extensibility of our product market fit simply because it was being used in a work setting was not the same thing as becoming a B to B product and having the right product market fit that we wanted.”
Stone: Grammarly paired enterprise hires with SMB reps on accounts
“We took a two-pronged approach to that. We hired some enterprise sales leaders and enterprise sales team members. We then put in rather than dividing the teams up, we allowed the teams to work together on accounts so that those with greater experience could al…”
Hoover: Grammarly had accounts in half of Forbes 2000 before enterprise sales
“We had individual accounts in about half of the Forbes 2000, which was something we felt great about, but we weren't getting these wall to wall implementations.”
Hoover: Grammarly chose end-user subscriptions from early days to ensure alignment
“Going back to the very early days, we wanted to align our interests with our users, and we did that by selecting a business model where we're only paid, in our case subscriptions, by our end users.”
Hoover: Grammarly has over 30 million individual users
“We also help over thirty million individuals improve the quality and impact of their writing so they can accomplish their goals and live fuller lives.”
Hoover: Grammarly serves over 50,000 enterprise teams globally
“We help over 50,000 teams improve their communication and drive results at about as many companies globally.”