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 79 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 2 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
Schneider: Facebook Is the Best B2B Advertising Channel Currently Available
“Facebook has turned into the best B to B ads channel. And that exists right now.”
Bier: Apple is the true monopoly, hurting small businesses via ad changes
“Yeah, it goes to show that the monopoly might not be Facebook. It might very well be Apple. The fact that they could just, you know, hobble a bunch of small businesses overnight with by hurting the performance of ads. And I think, you know, a lot of people say…”
Kerner: Facebook Marketplace APIs Allow Third-Party Apps to Be Built
“I've already looked into it. Don't tell me the API permissions don't allow for it because they do.”
Hudack: Meta has one of the largest permissioned training datasets globally
“Facebook has one of the largest permissioned training sets in the world.”
Courtney: Meta ads are only dead for audiences under 35
“Meta ads are only dead for people under 35. So meta ads work really, really well for us better than anything else for over people over 40.”
Zuckerberg launched Facebook's Like button after dinners with Kevin Rose
“Facebook introduced the like button about a year later, I'd had multiple dinners with Zuckerberg talking about social voting and things like that.”
Ries: Facebook buried internal scientific research proving its products cause depression
“Facebook even commissioned the scientific research to find out if their product makes people depressed. And then they found out that it does. And they were like, oh, better bury that. Instead of take it seriously and do something about it.”
Greathouse Fall: Personalized AI will make Google and Meta look like tinkertoys
“So when it has a personal relationship with the person who's running it, that's going to be the next big watershed moment. I think that's what's going to make like Google and Facebook look like tinker toys.”
Lavingia: Over 90% of startup value comes from engineer-founded giants
“If you look at startups and you say, okay, 99% of the public value is basically, or 90 plus percent is basically in four or five companies. Right? If you get rid of, like, Google, Amazon, Meta, like, we haven't done shit as an industry, right? In terms of actu…”
Isenberg: Meta's heavily criticized metaverse investments will actually pay off long-term
“And I think that over the longterm, I actually think that a lot of these metaverse bets are going to play Play in the favor of meta.”
Pal: Zuckerberg knows Meta must change to survive Web3
“Mark Zuckerberg is not stupid. He completely understands what is going on in web three and why they have to change as a business. You know, knowing many people at Meta, they get it because they won't exist otherwise.”
Ball: Build Compelling Social Products First, Not Consumer Computing Platforms
“We have this ongoing lesson that trying to build the next big platform in computing, especially on the consumer side, less so on the enterprise side, you shouldn't seek to do it.
And by that, I mean, there's this classic example of we've always known that a qu…”
Mullenweg: Competing for SF Talent Was Fishing in a Small Pond
“Like I'm a big believer in in-person and physical space. A big part of automatic culture is actually meetups where we would bring either the whole company or teams together a few times a year. But it just felt like the best, most talent in the world was not in…”
Content Creators Have a Shelf Life of 5 to 6 Years
“You have a shelf life that either the market dictates or your mental health dictates, which is basically like say five, six years, you know, even the algorithm on Facebook and YouTube does not like you forever, right? At some point, the algorithm's best intere…”
Bier: Big tech companies exist for founder egos, not profit
“Companies exist for like big tech companies exist for the egos of the founders. And at the end of the day, he just wants to be liked. He just wants to build something that helps people.”
Bier: Meta has the world's best misinformation systems
“They have some of the best integrity systems, the best Spam the best misinformation detection systems out of any, probably any company in the world.”
Bier: Big tech takes over two years to clone startups
“After being on the inside, it takes about a year of collecting data for them to even think about building something like this or building something they see happening in the market. And then it takes three months of like a framing process where you do research…”
Bier: FTC will block Meta from acquiring competitors to fix growth
“The regulators the FTC they won't re they won't sign off on any sort of large acquisition of a user base. So They're losing users from an engagement from these two other competitors. And at the same time, they can't really buy their way out of it like they did…”
Belsky predicts 3D creation will democratize and go mainstream like mobile photography
“Same exact thing's gonna happen for three D. I'm like wholly convinced that that's the case.”
Schneider: Meta's Andromeda Eliminates the Need for Interest-Based Ad Targeting
“So on the Facebook ad side, so for targeting on Facebook anymore after Andromeda, you don't do interest-based targeting. Historically, how I would probably do this is I would actually go and I would target people who have a WordPress interest on Facebook ads. …”
Isenberg: Niche agent-first action apps will be acquired like Instagram was
“Like I think someone can go and create a studio that just focuses on action apps. And I think those, you know, assuming they're picking the right niche, assuming it's a real pain point, assuming the customer has willingness to spend on that pain point. There's…”
Schneider is building autonomous agents for end-to-end ad creation and optimization
“Where I'm seeing this head personally is like, I'm going to build these tools. That an agent is going to have, and then it's going to be able to run this process in the background where it's basically has the ability to make new creative. It can publish that c…”
Isenberg: Big tech ignores startup ideas until they reach millions of users
“Someone like Facebook is only copying your idea once it hits millions or hundreds of millions of users.”
Schneider: Facebook ad algorithm makes creative quality the only differentiator
“Facebook has gotten so good at understanding the person that's most likely to sign up for this thing that you're trying to promote. All that matters is you make good creative now”
Hudack: Targeted Facebook ads no longer work well for acquiring early adopters
“I think that there was probably a golden age in which the answer would have been like,
You know, target exactly the right message at exactly the right people on Facebook.
Find the, like, 3400 people who are your early adopters and just, like, get it in front o…”
Hudack: Meta's open-source strategy smartly commoditizes competitors' closed AI models
“I think that the strategy that they have right now of like open sourcing a bunch of models, you know, makes a ton of sense. It's like the right strategic move. If you're in their position you're kind of like salting the earth in a pretty meaningful way, you kn…”
Coogan: Stolen AI Model Weights Are Far More Usable Than Web Codebases
“If you stole the code base to Facebook, And you were like, okay, I have all the code to Facebook. I'm going to launch Facebook to.com. Well, you don't have any of the users. People aren't going to your website. It's not valuable, but with the large language mo…”
Courtney: Copying Silicon Valley's Anti-Ad Status Games Hurts Small Businesses
“We take a lot of the Silicon Valley status symbols and try to apply these status symbols to small businesses. I think this is what Jason Fried is good at kind of cutting out and getting through the bullshit. A lot of these status symbols, like not running ads,…”
Pujji: Use bad creative initially to train the Facebook pixel's core audience.
“Part of it is you almost want bad creative upfront because you want Facebook's algorithm to get a better and better signal on who your audience is. And if you give them too much good creative, like, you know, if I show you a pretty girl with dancing around or …”
Jordan Mix: Nextdoor is terrible, gossipy, and fear-mongering
“Next door is terrible. There's a bunch of Karen's on there. It's become Facebook. It's just gossipy and really just like fear mongering.”
Rogenmoser: Meta could wait five years on the metaverse and remain first
“I just think it's early and you've got this thing in front of you. That's so clearly here that I think you could, they could still be the first by a long shot to the metaverse by waiting five more years.”
MacLean: Facebook Is Only Dead for Specific Demographics
“Facebook is nowhere near dead, but it is dead for a specific demographic of people.”
Lavingia: Zuckerberg won because he could code, not from superior engineering
“Zuck didn't win because he was the best engineer on planet earth. It's because he really wanted to build stuff. I don't even think Facebook was his idea, right? Like, but he won. Why did he win? Like, you know cause he was the one who knew how to code.”
Mark Zuckerberg started Facebook to meet women, not for billions, says Kagan
“Like Mark didn't start Facebook. I'm going to be a billionaire. It's like, ah, let me see if I can meet some chicks online. If we're honest. Right. And I worked for him. So I know that stuff.”
Katayev: Advertising Arbitrage Windows Shrank from Six Years to Under One Year
“The windows of opportunities are starting to get shorter and shorter. So like you're talking about 2002 1006, well, it's affiliate market or really search. Like I look at it more on the search side, right? That's the, I have like a six, nice six year window. B…”
Isenberg: Yuga buying CryptoPunks is NFTs' Google-YouTube moment
“This is going to, you know, go down as like the Google, you know, buying YouTube moment or the Facebook buying Instagram moment. You know, it's just going to be such a pivotal time in NFT history.”
Bier: Big tech companies rarely build breakout zero-to-one products
“Many, most of big tech has not ever built in house zero to one products that have had that have broken out. I like the iPhone. It was truly like a historical example that that happened. But I think if you look across all of big tech, you rarely see that happen…”
Bier: Meta stock is a strong value buy at 16x PE
“I think they have a shit ton of, bottom line is they have a shit ton of talent for that PE ratio. I think it's a very good value buy right now”
Isenberg: Meta stock will outperform over the next one to three years
“And I feel like, I don't know, a year, two, three years from now, like, I feel like they're gonna ship some stuff, and some of it's gonna work. So I'm a, I think I think the stock will outperform. That's what I think.”
Schneider: Meta's Andromeda Analyzes Multimodal Creative and Landing Pages
“So Andromeda is Facebook's new like ad algorithm, right? It basically, it decides what ads get shown to what people and how it functions is the AI is basically looking at the ad creative. And it's understanding, okay, like what is in this static ad? What is th…”
Schneider: Facebook account bans stem from API read spam, not agents
“The agent is not the reason it got banned. All right. The reason it got banned is because they violated TOS and they spam the API because they were trying to pull in like, you know, hundreds of millions of rows of data from their Facebook ads account. And that…”
Isenberg: Senior Brain-Training App Could Generate $5M to $15M ARR
“If you can actually build that, like I could see how you, this could be a five, 10, fifteen million dollar ARR business on top of it, right? You start with Instagram reels and you probably focus on Facebook. Like the seniors are on Facebook.”
Isenberg: 'Share this win' CTAs convert significantly better than generic share buttons
“I didn't tell it to say share this win, but I know as someone who's built social products that millions of people have used, That if you say share this win versus share this on Facebook, share this win is going to convert a lot more. And what does that mean ta…”
Thompson: Test Meta Ad Campaigns at Product Price or $50 Minimum
“I generally like minimum 50 bucks a day, but like if your product is more than 50 bucks a day, I would just, whatever your product is priced at, if you know you can get one purchase off of that ad spend to break even, it's like where I would start.”
Thompson: An Amazon seller made $30M selling hummingbird nectar without ads
“There's a guy on Amazon that's done thirty million dollars selling sugar as hummingbird nectar on over the last 10 years. And his branding is like atrocious, has never ran a Facebook ad in his life.”
Thompson: 3% to 5% Meta conversion rate is a strong benchmark
“I would say if you're sitting between like three and five on something like this, you're in like a reasonably good space.”
Schneider: Average Facebook CPM is around six dollars
“The average CPM on Facebook is about six dollars, depending on which category you're in.”
Schneider: Wish hit a billion-dollar valuation in 18 months via cheap Facebook ads
“Wish.com became a billion dollar company in like 18 months with Facebook ads in the early days. And the reason is you could get, like, one cent link clicks on Facebook ads, and there was nobody else running ads to, like, cheap shit that was being basically imp…”