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 116 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
Booth: Breaking Up US Big Tech Would Cede AI Superiority to China
“If Elizabeth Warren or anybody breaks up Amazon or Google or the giant AI companies, or Microsoft for that, that, that, that matter, effectively by doing that, you seed AI superiority to China.”
Lewis: Amazon copies and sells every profitable third-party vendor product
“There's basically no vendor who's worked with Amazon that hasn't been screwed over by them. If Amazon finds a product that is making good money, they copy it and they sell it themselves.”
Latka: Consumers do not care about privacy if given enough value
“Like if you deliver enough value, people don't care about privacy in my opinion.”
Friend: Amazon is unlikely to drop S3 prices against Wasabi
“For Amazon to simply drop price, they could do it, but unlike diapers, you know, storage is a multi-billion dollar product for Amazon, and it just seems unlikely to me that they're going to do that.”
Yaman: Competing with Walmart and Amazon requires $2 billion and 10 years
“Don't try to compete with Walmart, Amazon, and Costco. That's, or if you're going to do that, you need to put Two billion dollars on the balance sheet and you need to make that like a 10 year journey.”
Yampolskiy: SecurityScorecard's Worst Hires Were Polished Amazon and Google Execs
“My worst hires were polished executives with Amazon, Google. They would come in, I start micromanaging, they would tell me, I'm a terrible CEO. And then I leave them alone for three months, and they fuck everything up. And then I have to fire them, and I get m…”
Amit RG: Product automation should resolve 95% of enterprise support tickets
“They need to do what Uber has done. They need to do what Amazon has done. They need to get to a stage where the product handles. 95% of the issues and only five percent come to them. When the issue is only five percent, then these people will not be somewhere …”
Medina: Public equity allows SaaS companies to cap base salaries
“I want to do what Amazon is doing, which is they pay their salaries fairly, they're fairly low, but the, each employee is capturing the entire upside of their execution because of the market reward. You see what I mean? Exactly. It's a beautiful position to be…”
Lenski: Profitable e-commerce products must be discovered supplier-first
“If you want to find a good product to sell in e-commerce, you need to find it supplier first, right? One that's not yet being sold on Amazon, one that's yet not being dropshipped”
Amazon ruthlessly cloned Square's card reader and undercut its price
“Amazon came after us in a way that was terrifying. They copied our product, they undercut our price, and they added the Amazon brand name to that, along with some customer support that we at the time didn't have.”
Brands need their own media channels to survive Amazon competition
“Everyone needs to be a media company. Brands need to have their own, like, Media. They need to control it. They need brand safety. They need to be able to tell their story. Consumer product brands right now are like, they're having so many problems. They're ev…”
Amazon will build the world's largest parcel carrier, preventing new entrants
“I don't personally think we're going to see another parcel carrier. Parcel would be like FedEx UPS start ground up like ever. I think what we'll see is, is Amazon come in and build the largest parcel carrier in the world, sort of from the side door or top down…”
Greenberg: Algopix is the only provider of multi-marketplace transactional market share data
“We're actually the only ones who provide market share insights into sales that occur on amazon.com as well as Walmart, eBay, Google Shopping, etc. There are other players that do only one of these platforms, usually it's Amazon, and they're basing their data o…”
Lewis: 30% of prospective smart speaker buyers abstain over privacy
“The 30% of the people who are interested in buying a smart speaker have not done so because of privacy concerns.”
Arnott: Amazon's A9 algorithm rewards keyword stuffing despite official best practices
“The Amazon A nine algorithm is similar to Google was like five years ago. So they're kind of behind the curb. So keyword stuffing is, you know, even though they tell you know, best practice not to do it we've seen over and over again that the companies that ar…”
Arnott: Amazon product sourcing tools rely on guesswork due to hidden data
“But we've seen a huge Problem with that, because the data skewed, it's all based on algorithm, and so it's guessing, because Amazon doesn't release that data, right?”
The Amazon-to-eBay retail arbitrage market is heavily saturated and exhausted
“Amazon to eBay, it's definitely kind of exhausted. There's a lot of sellers doing it.”
Smith: Major tech incumbents are currently out-executing agile startups
“What's happening in tech is you're watching for the first time ever the biggest companies execute better than the smaller companies in a lot of different ways with Amazon and everything else where we haven't seen this kind of juice since probably the Microsoft…”
Huynh questions why Google, Amazon, and Samsung invest in smart homes
“So we don't really see the value in the smart home space, and we still don't understand why Google and Amazon and Samsung are still working in the smart home space.”
Cameron: AWS customers are 'SOL' for direct technical support
“You know, if you're running on Amazon and you do need help, You're kind of SOL in a lot of ways. So, so that's a great benefit.”
Moran: Amazon sales do not create real customers without direct capture
“And taking a sale on Amazon is neither of those. It's taking a sale. It's not taking a customer. When you buy from Amazon, you don't really know who you bought from. You just bought from Amazon, right? Who says, oh, I bought this thing from this company. No, y…”
Moran: Packaging inserts capture Amazon buyer data for external marketing funnels
“The most Simple way would you can put things in your packaging in order to draw attention to other, other websites or other squeeze pages. And that's one of the things we focus on.”
Yaman: A top-20 global retailer chose Spresso over Amazon and Rakuten
“We have a retailer, top-twenty retailer in the world. They looked at everything. They looked at using Amazon, Rakuten, local providers, in-house solution, and they chose the espresso solution because they did see that it's a superior software platform”
Venture Funding Would Have Prevented Backblaze From Building Custom Hardware
“If we had raised a whole bunch of venture funding, we probably would have done it and said, we'll figure it out later. Somehow we'll figure out how to make the math work. But we didn't have any money. So we had to start from first principles and figure out how…”
Timebolt pays $7 monthly for AWS because processing is handled client-side
“Because we're a downloadable software, it actually sits right there on your computer. So your pot, your computer is what's powering all the algorithms. So, you know, we pay maybe seven bucks a month to Amazon. You know, for the server, just for actually downlo…”
Campbell: ProfitWell used Amazon's backloaded 10/20/30/40 equity vesting for employees
“We actually have profitable. The one thing that we did is we did like backward bending vesting. So it was 10, 20, 3040. It's kind of like how Amazon used to do it. So like you only get a 10% of your shares allocated shares when you get over that one year cliff…”
Hyman: Training hiring models on CVs and incumbents amplifies bias
“When you're hiring off your incumbents, you risk amplifying existing biases, and secondly, when you're using CV data, you're very likely to amplify existing biases.”
MedStack differentiates from hyperscalers with enforced, mandatory security defaults
“This is what really differentiates us from, like, an Amazon or an Azure is, you know, for MedStack, firewalls are on by default, and our customers can't turn them off. We encrypt all incoming communications. By default, you can't turn it off. We back up everyt…”
Amazon conceded to Square by mailing Square readers to Amazon customers
“What they did was they said, the best thing for our customers is to make them Square customers. So they mailed all their soon to be former customers, one of our Square readers, and said, look, if you like what Amazon is doing, you'll be happy with Square. So t…”
Spiffy employs service technicians directly, rejecting Uber's 1099 marketplace model
“Unlike Uber where it's a 10 99 marketplace our, we decided early on to take a page from Amazon's playbook. And these are our employees.”
Only 4% of Six Million Amazon Resellers Exceed $100k Annual Revenue
“And there are last count that I've heard six million odd Amazon resellers, but only four percent of those Amazon resellers, Nathan ever exceed a 100,000 dollars a year in revenue.”
Dyrsmid Predicts More Brands Will Directly Operate Amazon Seller Accounts
“There's a trend in the Amazon marketplace. And that trend is this, the manufacturers of these goods, brand owners, more of them are wanting more control over the Amazon channel. So that means. That they're going to start opening their own Amazon seller central…”
Arnott: Amazon PPC costs surged as platform reduced organic traffic
“In the last couple of months, there's been a huge shift on Amazon. They're driving less organic, more paid, and so the cost per click on the Amazon PPC platform is astronomical.”
Dane Maxwell says beginner entrepreneurs obsess over mechanisms, not customer outcomes
“The fundamentals of a business, as you know, as many know, is a customer that uses a mechanism to get a result. That's really a business in a nutshell. A customer that uses a mechanism to get a result. New people that are looking to start a business obsess abo…”
Booth: Over 60% of AI Investment Comes from Tech Monopolies
“I think it's over 60% of the dollars invested in AI are coming from the monopoly companies.”
FarmRaiser founder claims platform can beat Amazon on marketplace flaws
“Of course I'm following Bezos cause he's going to be my new neighbor and much of what they did in their marketplace we like, and much of it that we don't like, we think we can beat them at.”
Traditional Retail Merchandising Fails on Algorithmic Platforms Like Amazon
“The age old techniques that you as a consumer brand used to use to work with brick and mortar retailers like Target or Kroger just does not work. You need a machine to work with a machine called Amazon”
Amazon employs hundreds of people globally just on one-click checkout
“Amazon's got hundreds of people that are focusing on one-click checkouts globally, and that's the checkout part.”
Kolysh believes Zinc is a top-two scraper of Amazon
“We are probably like the number one or number
Two scraper of Amazon and all these other sites.”
Zinc holds under 15% of the Amazon-to-eBay arbitrage software market
“In terms of the market, we probably have less than 15% of it in terms of Amazon to eBay.”
Lee: ProsperWorks is not for sale to Amazon for a quick flip
“I, no. Not, I would not sell the Amazon. This is a massive market. I built this company to help bring prosperity to the world, to usher in the relationship era. And I've built and sold three companies in the past. To me, I'm not looking for another flip. I'm l…”
Cloudability processes 11% of total AWS revenue
“We have 11% of Amazon's revenue going through our system, and a fairly large amount of the other two big clouds going through our system.”
Budman: Backblaze Storage Costs One-Quarter of AWS and Google
“And so we actually introduced a, an offering where you can use storage for anything, similar to an Amazon or Google or a Microsoft offering, but one quarter of their price point.”
Kilkka: Power tools created the best arbitrage opportunity due to model consistency
“So with tower tools, you've got great model numbers. It's very consistent. You have like dozens of very high quality sellers on eBay. You have customers who typically are more like power buyers, you know, they, it's not their first power tool they've ever owne…”
Montgomery: Mycroft Targets Any Business Competing with Apple, Amazon, or Google
“So we want our target is any business that views Apple, Amazon, and Google as a potential competitor. And given that Google's making self-driving cars and Amazon is launching spaceships, that's a really broad category of businesses.”
Amazon receives no data or operational learnings from Convoy
“Yeah, I can't comment on Amazon's plans, but it's certainly not the case where they're learning or getting data from Convoy. There's no relationship like that.”