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 214 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
Yampolskiy: Founders Should Ignore Advice from Investors Who Never Operated
“Do not listen for advice from people who've not done your job. That's my number one advice. It doesn't matter if you have a Investor from Sequoia or Andreessen. We've taken money from top investors, including Sequoia. It doesn't matter if you are a board membe…”
Hyman: Google and IBM Watson lack data to match Sapia.ai
“It's something that IBM tried to do with Watson for a couple of decades, but couldn't because they didn't have the data. And even though Google has 10,000 PhDs working in NLP, they can't do it either because they don't have the data.”
Jonathan Herzog claims SEO disinformation generated 100,000 false headlines post-launch
“Immediately thereafter, a targeted Systematic disinformation campaign was launched, where if you Google my name, Jonathan Herzog, on a computer and hit the news tab, you will see 100,000 of false headlines improperly indexed through SEO manipulation to myself,…”
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.”
Pysh: Breaking up Big Tech treats symptoms; unpegged fiat is the root cause
“Well, of course, what they're doing, all these arguments of people that are saying those types of things, they're getting a mop out to clean up the floor because the kitchen sink is flooding. But you have to stop the kitchen sink from running. It's locked in p…”
Malone: The US government built hidden backdoors into Silicon Valley tech companies
“I watched the secretary of Homeland Security show up at a coffee shop in Los Altos and talk to the two founders of Google quietly.
There's trap doors that have been built all over Silicon Valley that we know nothing about.”
Google's Firebase copied Branch's SDK variables and marketing collateral
“They launched a product in last year at Google IO that was a direct replica of branch under the Firebase brand called dynamic links, literally copied all of our marketing collateral. I think the variables of their iOS SDK you reused variables from my header fi…”
Omnisend CEO warns against buying cheap backlinks to avoid Google penalties
“Shall you buy backlinks? Yes. Shall you buy from the low authority website? Please don't do that because Google recognized it and then you can be penalized, yeah? So if there is something for cheap in the market, usually there is a trap.”
Novoselsky: 65% of B2B Searches Start on Social, Not Google
“Here's the stat that's really alarming, is 65% of the B to B search starts on social, not on Google.”
Booth: Tech Monopolies Inevitably Reconsolidate Because Humans Cannot Handle Infinite Choice
“So even if you now break it back apart, somebody's going to sit on top and consolidate it back.”
Myers: RippleMatch outperforms human recruiters, noting Google's 1,000-person sourcing team
“Google alone employs a thousand internal sourcers, and we are matching at a more effective rate than the average human recruiter, and it's, you know, all tech-driven, so that's been really powerful, and I think a lot of why those early results have been good.”
Any.do claims retention is 5 to 10x higher than competitors
“I can say that from benchmark tests that we've had, both from, you know, third parties, like SimilarWeb, or even Google gave us some data, we have about five to 10 X the retention of our competitors, like day seven, day 30, day one. No, day one, no, but like d…”
Latka: Apple and Google amplified Facebook's Cambridge Analytica scandal
“I really believe that Apple, Google, these guys that see Facebook as a threat are doing a great job right now at propping up this Cambridge Analytica scandal.”
John Jonas refuses to use Google Analytics due to distrust of Google
“I don't, I ignore Google Analytics. I don't have Google Analytics on my site. I don't like Google Analytics. I don't like the way it gives data. I don't trust its data. I don't trust Google.”
Leber: Building SaaS entirely dependent on third-party platforms is fatally dangerous
“Building a SaaS company on the back of another platform that could kill you is a very dangerous thing to do. And my million run rate business died, but I've, you know, there are 10,000,020 million run rate businesses that also died. Same fate, building on the …”
Google and Facebook do not want the open web to survive
“The Facebook-Google, you know, industrial complex doesn't necessarily want that same internet to exist in the current form. You know, it may be more about Facebook apps on Facebook, or maybe more about Google AMP pages.”
Austin: Google put 300 sales reps on Firebase Dynamic Links before effort stalled
“Then they threw 300 sales and marketing people at this product with the sole objective of pushing Firebase, deep linking, and replacing branch. So every single one of our customers got an email from somebody at Google. All of our pipeline got it. Like they wen…”
Intellectual property is a startup's only leverage in Big Tech acquisitions
“Because in the end of the day, once they're about to get acquired by Google or whatever that might be, the only actually tool that they will have in the conversation will be how good IP they have, of course.”
Tigranian: Standard Google SEO directly drives visibility in LLMs like ChatGPT
“We actually optimizing for Google and whatever we do, same impact is happening also in LLMs. So not much specific for ChartGPT. You actually doing exactly for SEO, it have a lot of impact on ChartGPT.”
Goyo: Google traffic is more qualified than G2
“No, we never try because I believe, like, the traffic of Google is more qualified than G two.”
Rush: Ranking top on Google will solve LLM search visibility long-term
“I think you should bet on one thing that all LLMs will end up searching internet before they produce any results, and they will end up searching internet in a very similar way. So basically, as long, so if you think that Google is the best search on the intern…”
Rush: Page Rating Matters More Than Domain Rating for Google Rankings
“Even A website with really poor domain, domain rating can have high rating on a specific page. And the page rating is more important than the domain rating because Google actually looks at the page rating first.”
Latka: Google Must Cannibalize Ad Revenue to Defend Search Against ChatGPT
“I actually think the ad space is very interesting because Google has an innovators dilemma, right? They're gonna have to, Cannibalize their ad revenue to go make sure that, you know, the LM search and the chat function stays with Google versus chat GPT winning…”
Rush: Building Target Page Backlinks with Exact Anchor Text Wins #1 Spot
“A few times I saw somebody on top of me on Google search results, and I just picked the query and I did this back links to the URL with anchor text. And eventually I took the number one spot. So that works definitely. And that's like, that's the most typical s…”
John Rush: Websites should maximize internal linking aggressively
“You should go crazy with links. So it's almost impossible to make it wrong. Like it's better to have more links than less links as long as those are internal links.”
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…”
Omnisend CEO: Google penalized our experimental fully AI-written website to zero
“We had one experimental branch of website, which was a full AI written. It just got down to zero. No results at all. Like, penalized to zero.”
Schumacher: SaaS Group halved DashThis's ad budget while doubling output
“One of the first things were we slashed their Google paid accounts in half. So we basically slashed the budget in half, but we doubled the output. So essentially we forex the lead gen just on that Google, Google paid account.”
Better Agency Yields 25 Customers per $10k Spend, Converts 70%
“So on tenk in spend, we'll get about 25 net new customers, so we'll get a bunch of trials, and we convert about 70% of those trials, so that'll equate to about 25 new paying customers.”
Saric: Open source is essential for privacy-first software to build trust
“I think open source and privacy first, they kind of go together hand in hand. I think if you want to be able to be transparent and trustworthy, you gotta show what you're doing, and kind of, you cannot be, like, Google, our biggest competitor, Google Analytics…”
Cross-channel user-level conversion tracking is no longer possible
“It's become now nearly impossible to do, and that's mapping like a user's ID. Nathan, your ID for being exposed on, let's say, Google media to Facebook media to Pinterest media to a conversion it is no longer possible within the realities of MarTech to build t…”
Indig: Google likely tracks unlinked brand mentions for SEO
“So we think that Google even looks at unlinked mentions on other sites, meaning you don't even need a backlink, but when Forbes or New York Times or these big publishers write a lot and mention your name a lot, that could be a signal that Google might be able …”
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…”
Strazzulla: VC and Google offer higher expected value than founding unicorns
“I think the expected value, probably the highest expected value is working in venture. Then it's probably working at Google. And then it's probably starting a venture back to business that has the potential for a unicorn outcome.”
Convertri subdomains sometimes outrank users' own primary root domains in search
“The SEO theory, right, is that subdomains don't get any benefit from that main domain. That doesn't entirely seem to be true in our case, because we've got, we get those rankings for people to just register like productname.convertory.com. We've seen that outr…”
Default 'Powered By' badges drive most of Convertri's backlink volume
“I'm pretty sure the bulk of it is that powered by badge doing its thing. Which, again, flies in the face of so much like conventional SEO theory, because it's all on the same IP address, well, the same handful of IP addresses in our data centers every single o…”
Latka: Confiscating top corporate cash reserves cannot solve the US deficit
“Even in Q four, two, 19, Microsoft, one hundred thirty six billion Berkshire Hathaway, one hundred twenty eight billion Alphabet one twenty one billion Apple a hundred billion. Even if you took all of that money, it doesn't barely even make a dent. In the 20 t…”
Paris: Founders should ignore outliers like Google and build sustainably
“Don't believe in the existence of Google or Facebook or company like that. They are not existing. So, build your company, grow at your own rate, And don't look at the exception. I know that all the people that raise money do only looks at the exceptions, but y…”
Bates: Alphabet faces internal controversy over speculative DeepMind AGI play
“For AGI, where you've got like Vicarious, you have DeepMind, those are really speculative plays. There's even a lot of controversy within Google and Alphabet now about DeepMind, and they're in Alphabet versus Google, and then there's Google Brain, and there's …”
Prince: Cloudflare does not run on AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud
“So we're not running on top of AWS or on top of Azure or Google. We actually had to build the network out ourselves.”
Lee: ProsperWorks is the only CRM recommended by Google
“And, you know, to the point of the Google relationship, we are the only CRM that's actually recommended by Google.”
James: Do not build your business on third-party platforms
“And so, you know, the advice and the learnings there is, you know, don't build your business on someone else's platform. Don't be Facebook's bitch. Don't be Google's Move it onto your own platform.”
Lynch: Pay-per-click ads fail to drive new enterprise customer growth
“In, in, in terms of, like new logo growth, in terms of, you know, PPC, it doesn't work. I mean, there's so much noise out there in the market right now. The only people making money out of PPC are, or Google.”
Iyer: Generic DSPs like Google fail B2B account-based marketing needs
“We see that DSPs are certainly not servicing some of the needs that these customers, DSPs are demand side type of, I'm talking Google app next to some of the others, right?”
Google maintains search ranking neutrality between new and legacy domain extensions.
“Google will say that, that new TLD and legacy TLDs they are in different. I'm sorry, top level domain. I hate it when I do that. So whether, so, so Google will say that there is no, a different, you know, bias one way or the other.”