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 36 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
Reyes: Meta's 7B parameter Llama 2 model achieves GPT-4 level behavior
“Facebook open-sourced their model this JAMA that is a competitor to chat GPT, and with seven billion parameters, it reaches very similar behavior than GPT-IV.”
Weisbrot: Zuckerberg Falls Out With Acquired Founders And Destroys Their Companies
“So every company he's purchased, the founders and him have a falling out afterwards. He pays well, but then he basically destroys your company from the inside out.”
Weisbrot: TikTok promotes divisive content outside China while curating positivity domestically
“It's been made clear that they have two algorithms, one for inside of China and one for outside of China. The one inside of China promotes social harmony, positive things, because the Chinese government wants people to see positive imagery and things that prom…”
Tulla: VC funding and digital ads let startups buy customers without PMF
“And now if you get VC funding, this is only new phenomenon, maybe last, maybe 10 years where you can actually buy customers. Think about you build, like I do, I built Products for consumers. I can go to Facebook, and TikTok, and Meta, and I get influencers. I …”
Weisbrot: WhatsApp Co-Founder Forfeited $400M Payout To Get Away From Zuckerberg
“The guy ended up telling Zuckerberg to F himself and he walked away from a four hundred million dollar, like partial payout. Just so he could walk away from the company and get away from it.”
Weisbrot predicts individuals must own AI by 2040 to avoid economic subordination.
“You know, there's a good chance that by 2040, if you don't own your own AI, you will be owned by an AI that Google, Facebook, Apple, or Facebook, you know, one of these companies own. Like you basically have 20 years to make your money or you're going to becom…”
Rischitelli: Meta Collects Smart Glasses Data Regardless of User Consent Settings
“Whether you are sending it to Meta or not, Meta's getting that information.”
Corkadillo: Meta will win post-smartphone computing due to mass social adoption
“And, you know, I have my money on Zucks because you don't bet against it.
You always bet for the jockey, right?
Who's the jockey that's going to win?
I think Zucks is going to figure it out because I think he has the mass adoption of the social network.”
Rom Lacritz: Nobody has successfully figured out location-based social data
“Nobody really uses check-ins and Foursquare and events on Facebook. It's not really a thing. Nobody really connected between the real world and the social world in the location-based data cause theoretically you have so much data who goes where and what type o…”
Tulla: Startups Rarely Achieve True Large-Scale Impact Compared to Big Tech
“It's very difficult to use the vehicle of entrepreneurship and building a company and really have a true impact in the world around you in a big scale, because the big scale impact is done by the big companies. And for you to found a big company like Google or…”
Weisbrot: Zuckerberg Pivoted Meta To AI Because The Metaverse Was Overweighted
“I think in the case of Facebook, he realized that his metaverse play was, I don't want to say doomed, but that he was way overweighted, and he was going to have massive problems if he continued to put energy into it, and he shifted to AI.”
Wong: Asian KOLs frequently purchase likes, comments, and followers
“A lot of them boost particular posts that they have. Not in the traditional sense of Instagram or Facebook posting their posts. I think that's the biggest issue here. They purchase likes, they purchase comments, they purchase followers.”
Startups must pitch reporters two to three weeks before major announcements
“If you're going to make a large announcement, unless you are Microsoft or Apple or Meta or something, you're not going to get same day or next day coverage. You're going to need to reach out to reporters two to three weeks in advance to give them a heads up, t…”
Ustinov: Non-ecommerce ad optimization requires stitching backend, CRM, and ad data
“To make decisions about ads, they need to centralize data from their backend, their payment systems, their CRM, their call tracking systems, like compared to compared to e-commerce, it's not enough to just have ad platform data or web analytics, like Google an…”
Weisbrot Built a $6K Monthly Passive Commission Stream via Revenue Splits
“He was doing all of the work and I got 50% of the revenue. It was an amazing deal. And within like the first three or four months, I scaled it to, it was like five, 6000 dollars a month in passive commission for me.”
Agobin: Website SEO and YouTube compound value unlike transient social platforms
“So there's certain things and it's like SEO on your website and YouTube. Are the two biggest things that pop out as kind of this evergreen content. And if you think about it as profit per minute, every minute you put into doing amazing YouTube content or amazi…”
Adilbaev: Big tech credentials are the best ticket to intro calls
“I think everybody looks at, everybody likes like big names, like I don't know, Google or Meta or
Like some software engineers that like top AI startups or I don't know, some big schools or whatever.
Yeah.
Everybody likes this.
So this is, yeah, I would say the…”
Sherman: Broad targeting now outperforms granular audience targeting on Meta and Google
“Facebook posts iOS, 14.5 and for privacy concerns, kind of for broad is better in a simple, simple way. You set up campaigns where you're targeting the entire country and optimizing towards conversions. Similar with Google where you used to have pinpoint keywo…”
Weisbrot: Big Tech employees are inhumanely stressed or paid to do nothing
“And when you look at the stories that have come out of Google and Facebook and Apple and Amazon, These employees are getting paid incredible packages, but they're either stressed beyond, you know, whatever's fair and humane, or they're doing absolutely nothing…”
Chalana: Future AI will combine big tech and open-source models
“I think it'll be a combination of both, just like it is today. It's, there's some companies who created these I mean, open AI created this with a lot of investment from Microsoft and all that stuff. But then Pretty soon, right after that, we had Facebook open …”
Facebook allowed Influence Mobile to pay massive ad debt in installments
“I, you know, we owed the most amount of money to Facebook, who was a big advertising partner. They were actually super cool to deal with. They let me push it out for many, many years, literally of this, like I'll pay 5000 dollars this month, or I can pay zero …”
Wade: Friends-of-friends privacy models fail before a social network reaches scale
“When there is zero or a hundred or a thousand friends of friends is very limited, right? Because you don't have a lot of friends on there. It's not, it hasn't reached the scale of Instagram and Facebook and whatnot. And so like that, that's the gap that I'm aw…”
Wade: Ads account for only 10% to 15% of WeChat's revenue
“Like it's only about 10 to 15% of their sort of revenue pie is advertisements. Whereas in the West, you're looking at 98 to 99%, especially in the cases of Facebook and whatnot.”
Tobias: Meta will maintain a $300 Oculus alongside a $1,000–$1,200 device
“The Oculus will stay the 300 dollar consumer type thing and they'll have a thousand or 1200 dollar one.”
Weisbrot: Oculus sold 2M to 3M units during holiday season
“The Oculus sold two to three million units during black Friday and Christmas time.”
Schneider: Big tech companies do not sell proprietary user data
“The big guys are keeping it to themselves. That is their competitive advantage.”
Toles: Co-founder lawsuits rarely happen over success, but rather commercial failure
“Lawsuits almost never happen over a company being successful. Now, there are exceptions. There was a lawsuit that happened because Facebook was successful, but that also happened because one of the founders did the other founder wrong. Usually, if you have two…”
Parrish: No-code handling Twitter-scale traffic is likely a decade away
“Certain things can't be done in no code and it might be a decade before they can be done in no code. So that might be some of the really heavy traffic loads that you would have a social network, like Twitter, Facebook”
Cohen: Marketers cannot effectively reach millennial audiences on Facebook
“If you want to reach millennials, for example, you're not going to be on Facebook.”
Grazer: Facebook had to buy patents before its IPO at bankers' insistence
“Facebook actually had to buy more patents before its IPO, because the investment bankers handling the IPO said, you don't have enough patents. This will make it hard for us to do the IPO because patent pending represents potential.”
WhatsApp's architecture leaks unreleased features to developers during internal tests
“When I was at Meta on the WhatsApp side, we had that problem. The WhatsApp app for whatever reason is built in a way where you can, I don't know, maybe this is common. I don't know enough about mobile apps, but it's built in a way where you can break it down a…”
Global degrees of separation have reduced from six to 3.5
“Last researchers from Meta or LinkedIn demonstrated that now what was called the six degrees of separation from any two human beings on planet Earth in reality as of today is being reduced to 3.5 degrees of separation.”
Influence Mobile racked up $1.5M in ad debt in just 45 days
“So it didn't actually take long to get a million and a half dollars in debt. It took like 45 days.”
Todd: Influence Mobile became profitable and debt-free within 20 months
“1820 months later we paid off Facebook. We were profitable. We were completely debt free.”
Clayton: GreenPal unlocked Facebook marketing only after mastering it in-house
“And it wasn't until we ran a Facebook campaign, did our own creative, took classes on copywriting did, ran the campaign ourselves, did the A-B testing ourselves, and got pretty good at it, and then we could delegate tasks to specialists that we were able to th…”