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
Mullenweg models Automattic's WordPress strategy on Google's Android and Pixel ecosystem
“Think of it kind of like Google with Android. Like, they'll make their Pixel phones, so we'll make some versions of WordPress that we think are the best in the world. But very key to our strategy is also working with every other manufacturer out there and ever…”
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…”
Most 2012 social media software acquisitions failed to deliver for acquirers
“Most of those acquisitions were great for the companies that were acquired, but they, the business model did not work out the way a lot of those big companies thought.”
Austin: Branch aims for 98% app penetration to build mobile search index
“The goal though, is to get 98% of the app ecosystem using branch. Why is that a goal? Because when we have that, we basically indexed the app ecosystem. We built a directory of every page that's accessible inside apps and the analogous, you know, index in the …”
MobileGo operates non-profit, passing 100% of revenue to developers and gamers
“They are for profit companies. We are a non-profit company. We have only one goal to provide all 100% that are generated by the business to provide it to developers and to gamers. Yes? And a part of it even to charity. Yes? So, no profit we are going to get ou…”
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.”
Mojsilovic: Yanado would not accept an acquisition offer below $10 million
“No, they have to, today they have to offer around ten million. Not less than that.”
Mavenlink was the #1 Google Apps Marketplace app for four years
“Ended up becoming the number one installed app across every category in the world for four years through the Google Apps Marketplace, which drove tens of thousands of visits to Mavenlink at zero acquisition cost.”
Foo: Google and Microsoft Have Not Advanced Email in 10 Years
“I mean, if you sort of look at the timeline of Google's or Gmail's products in the past 10 years, it hasn't really changed very significantly, and I think that there's a huge opportunity for innovation where Google or Microsoft even hasn't really made signific…”
Latka: Autonomous fleets will shift car ownership to corporate balance sheets
“I believe that very soon, you know, the assets of a car is going to live on the balance sheet of a company versus an individual because companies are going to have automated vehicles are going to have Fleets like Google, Apple, and Uber, and people aren't goin…”
Danzy: Google lacks document control tools because it isn't in their DNA
“Google, they don't have a tool for document control. It's not their business. It's not their DNA. And for this, it makes sense to go look on the market for specialists.”
Danzy: AODocs manages documentation for Google data centers and Airbus
“We do the same with Google. We help them build data centers. We are working with Airbus as well on, on the airplane certifications.”
Goyo: Google favors SEO content with unique, hands-on screenshots
“We produce our own screenshots bottom. We are trying the competition for real. So we are doing our own video of the competitions, our own screenshots. So that try to make a difference on them in terms of people try to add image, but they never have unique imag…”
Fennell: Programmatic SEO without quality control confuses Google and degrades traffic
“Programmatic SEO is good, but you have to keep an eye on it, and you have to make sure the content is still quality. Otherwise, what happened to us essentially is that we produced far too much content, and it was confusing Google because a lot of it was very m…”
Reviews.io was one of only five original Google Seller Ratings partners
“So if you wanted your rating to show up on your Google Ads, gold stars next to your ads, you had to work with one of the Google Seller Ratings partners, and we were one of those partners. Now, originally, there was only about five partners.”
Polzin: Wing recovered $41,000 from Google following nine-month ad fraud dispute
“I fought with Google quite a bit, actually, over nine months and good thing was that I had the data. I had the hard proof that that was happening, and with that data in place we were able to get that refund from Google. I actually wanted to have 60,000, but, w…”
Google Gemini attributes and links to Stack Overflow contributors via API
“We launched this program called Overflow API, and the first company that basically engaged with us is, ah, Google, and so now all Stack Overflow content, when used within Gemini's AI capability, will show up in their AI tools with links to Stack Overflow back …”
GreenPal generates around 100,000 monthly signups via Google organic search
“We're getting about a 100,000 people sign up a month through, through Google organic search.”
Larry Kim: Selling lead data captures more wallet share than advertising software.
“WordStream was like a kind of a management tool. They would spend 500 dollars with us for the tool expense, but then they would spend 10,000 on leads through Google and Facebook. So, so our share of wallet was, you know, smaller, more modest. Here we're provid…”
Bottom-of-funnel search bidding minimizes landing page and demo complexity
“Because if someone searches Google for those keywords or those phrases, they're ready to buy, which Is fantastic, because it kept our website lean, like we didn't really need many landing pages, and we didn't need to be super creative with our sales calls or d…”
Stevens: Google's Project Aristotle found psychological safety predicts high performance
“What they found across Every hypothesis tested, over 200 hypotheses, thousands of people, is those teams with the highest levels of psychological safety were the highest performing teams.”
Ben Barokas's team at Google developed the real-time bidding protocol
“While I was at Google, after we almost created the problem while there, we developed a protocol that, Called real-time bidding. And the RTB protocol enables marketers to bid on individual users based on their data profile. And that made data available on just …”
Major ad networks restrict sales teams to the top 3% of developers
“They only have sales or service teams that cater to the top two or three percent of developers, right?”
Maximoff: Sending over 200 daily cold emails per Google mailbox damages deliverability
“When I'm using Google as an ESP, one mailbox has A natural limit of under 250 emails per day that can be sent with a delay about 200 seconds between emails. So it means that I can send only 200, because if I send more, then it harms my reputation”
Knowledge Graphs Represent the New Sitemap for Modern SEO
“A knowledge graph is kind of a starting point for your AI strategy, but it's also important for Google because it represents a new sitemap. In terms of, you know, what are the concepts that matter for the business? How do we index them? What is the data, you k…”
Campbell: Google gave me a $5K bonus before shelving my algorithm
“I made Google a ton of money, but the point I was trying to make was like, they gave me an award and like a 5000 dollar bonus. And they were like, yeah, we're going to shut this down.”
Schleifer: Google coordinates tens of thousands of engineers in one monorepo
“Having been at Google, it's like, it's amazing. You have tens of thousands of engineers landing code all day long in a monorepo and it works.”
Gaither: Google search results fail to surface the best attorneys
“Well, because Google is just going to show you what people pay for through searching, search engine optimization. It's not always going to show you the best way to utilize it. Also, a lot of attorneys don't even take the time to make a website or put themselve…”
Chen: Testimonial.to created zero blog content for Google SEO
“There's actually no dedicated you know, content. I didn't really wrote any testimonial related blog posts.”
Rokt operates a closed walled garden for advertising data
“Unlike a typical advertising value ecosystem where, and this is slightly different from product and marketing which the other two sides of our business, but on the advertising side, we are a closed wall garden, similar to like a Google. And so we clear everyth…”
Koziej: Running multiple brands maximizes Google search real estate for one product
“So like we mostly use search traffic which we monetize. So in our case, it makes a lot of sense. To occupy a lot of real estate in Google, be it organic traffic or be it paid traffic. So we basically have a lot of different websites for career seekers, but at …”
New websites take six months to rank due to Google sandbox
“I mean, the problem with ready-made sites is Google has kind of a six month sandbox. So a site isn't going to rank and isn't going to grow and develop your revenue likely for the first six months.”
Nathan Latka shut down a $100K ARR Google plugin over platform risk
“I used to have a plugin that did sort of the same thing inside Google and I just shut it down. It was doing a hundred grand in ARR. Just shut it down. Cause I'm like, I can't keep up with Google and they're going to release this for free anyway soon.”
Moore: Looker won the BI market hands down with $2.6B sale
“Looker just got bought for two, 2.6 billion. And the consensus was basically like we fucked up. Yeah. They won hands down with that number.”
Volset: 2010 tech startup acquisitions yielded only mid-single-digit millions
“This is not like even valuations for very successful companies that you would now probably expect to sell for a hundred and 152 hundred and fifty million. We're selling for mid digits millions, you know.”
Latka: Alphabet spent over $1B of private capital on self-driving in 2019
“Alphabet and Google in 2019 spent over a billion dollars of their own capital on their self-driving unit.”
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.”
Google Will Soon Index Audio, Massively Boosting Podcast SEO
“No, but I think if you're a betting man, betting person, you would say Google will start indexing audio very soon, and that's what we think. So the SEO impact of podcasting will get massive, you know, for folks that have hundreds of shows.”
Google's EMEA VP Ronan Harris joined Kumo's board
“The MD of Google for Europe. It's just joined our board as well. And VP of Mia, Ronan Harris.”
ActivTrak paused almost all paid acquisition campaigns to test channel dependence
“On January first this year, we've decided to almost kind of stop all our paid acquisition campaigns just to see how dependent are we, like from Google, Bing, and that kind of stuff.”
Competitor Triggered Google Manual Penalty Against eLeap With Fake Backlinks
“Well, a competitor basically Sent a bunch of fake links to us and then turned around and reported us to Google. And so they looked at it and were like, well, you guys have a bunch of bad links, and so we're gonna manually demote your rankings.”
Valishev: Facebook is up to 10x less efficient than Google for acquisition
“Facebook is sometimes 10, 10 times less effective in number, in terms of Acquiring installation safe users than Google, for example, in Brazil.”
Zinc relies on outbound marketing because deskless software lacks inbound search
“And this is not a defined market, right? This is not something that's on PG&E's list to buy, right? And so, so they're not searching. They're not typing it into their Google browser. Like, we're still in heavy outbound Market awareness mode.”
Lee: Google Is an Investor in and Customer of ProsperWorks
“And Google's an investor.
Google's a customer.”
Ellis: Cloud IT is a supply chain problem, not a maintenance problem
“The way you made technology work before was you had smart people to make it just work. That Ubuntu server wasn't going to stay working unless it's someone to keep it working. Now you buy it from Google for eight cents an hour. Now the problem is not making it …”
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.”
Job board consolidation leaves employers with only a handful of vendors
“The consolidation of this of this job board industry is, is a little bit scary for employers though, because, you know, they really only have like a handful of people to choose from these days. So you know, the employers, they have to advertise either with, yo…”
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.”