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
Gross: Zoom During COVID Was the BlackBerry Era of Video Collaboration
“We're going to think about Zoom and hanging out in COVID times. As the BlackBerry era, not the iPhone era, this stuff.”
Gross: Converting free users too fast harms retention and customer quality
“If you're trying to accelerate people or mine too aggressively for, convert them too aggressively from free until paid, and you don't have that engagement, you're going to pay for it on the other side and quality and retention and those things.”
Gross: Vimeo Is Not Seeing AI-Driven Headcount Disruption Yet
“I'm not connecting those dots yet. I I'm not seeing that. I'm not saying it doesn't happen. I'm just not seeing that from where we sit.”
Gross: Infrastructure choices are the single most determinative decision for SaaS companies
“Your infrastructure choice, your platform choice, is your destiny. It is the single most determinative, ah, decision that your organization will make, and will have profound implications that will ripple across the rest of your, ah, go to market strategy, your…”
Gross: Building proprietary data centers is no longer credible for most companies
“It is not credible for an organization, unless you're truly one of the top three technology organizations in the world, to do that. Net, if your organization is thinking about building and running its own data centers, good luck. Because that's no longer a thi…”
Gross: Complex big data and ML stacks will deploy in 10 minutes
“By the end of the year, your developers are going to be able to stand up a stack that does this in 10 minutes. Because you're just going to consume all these things as a service. And we're going to see a rapid and dramatic commoditization in the data nature of…”
Gross: Heroku's 10-Person Team Built the Equivalent of Google's Infrastructure
“And they did some of the work that they did in the size of that team. They did the equivalent of Kubernetes and what Google was doing with buildings full of people with 10 people in a room. Still, I don't appreciate, I don't know that Technical brilliance of t…”
Gross: Vimeo generates 250 million video player impressions monthly
“We're the second largest video player after YouTube. We're doing about a quarter billion impressions of the video player a month.”
Gross: Niche video creators are building $100M subscription businesses
“I meet with these folks all the time and they are building a hundred million dollar businesses, selling subscriptions to whatever specialty content that they have.”
Vimeo shifts strategy to reinvest heavily in its free product tier
“We made a very explicit strategy in the past couple months. To reemphasize and reinvest in free.”
Gross: PLG requires cross-functional alignment across three distinct GTM motions
“What makes it so hard is it's highly cross-organizational, right? And most companies we've all worked at are not good at cross-organizational in a single go-to-market mode. And here you have to be good at cross-organizational in three go-to-market modes, right…”
Gross: Vimeo switched from Zoom to Google Meet to cut costs
“You switched from zoom to Google me, which we did.”
Gross: Vimeo spends too much money on internal SaaS tooling
“And I think we spend too much on SaaS. So that's a, there's a lot of, it's a remarkable, we're a thousand person organization, four hundred million revenue. It is remarkable how many effing tools we”
Gross: Operating self-hosted databases wastes company focus on undifferentiated work
“If you as a company are still running your own database service, you are so far down on the undifferentiated kind of, you know Not great part of your focus set as opposed to just consuming those data services as higher level of abstractions where you don't hav…”
Adam Gross: SaaS companies over three years old are decomposing monolithic stacks
“If your company is more than three years old, your engineers are currently on a journey to take the application stack that you created, which was a classic web application stack, right? This is what Salesforce looks like under the hood in 1999. This is kind of…”
Adam Gross: Microservices architectures unlock greater product capabilities than monoliths
“Because we have cloud nativeness, what we can now do is embrace more heterogeneity into our architecture much more easily, which in turn means we can deliver much more sophisticated and new kinds of functionality and business value than would be able to otherw…”
Gross: Container ecosystem battle will drive infrastructure platform dynamics
“What's happening now under the hood is, or kind of in the industry, is there's this really kind of fierce battle happening around the container ecosystem. And this will something, be something that really kind of drives the core dynamic of the infrastructure a…”
Gross: Engineers default to building infrastructure internally unless guided otherwise
“You should think about consuming even these capabilities as a service as opposed to building it yourself because we all know that engineer's core MO is to just build everything themselves unless otherwise guided to.”
Gross: Data platform shifts are the biggest business opportunity in SaaS
“The single biggest economic business opportunity in Sastom right now is related to the changes that are happening in the data platform or data services space”
Gross: Heroku grew enterprise revenue from 5% to 50%
“Part of the joy for me at Baroku was really being able to tie those businesses together, take what was almost exclusively a credit card online business, builds an enterprise business on top of that, that by the time I left was about, went from five percent to …”