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 15 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
Neistat: Never tell potential buyers you are selling your startup
“And when you meet with people who you think might be interested in buying your company, you tell them you're fundraising. You are never in the process of selling your company until it's been sold.”
Hackett: Leaders should share information only when employees can act on it
“My, Feeling about all this, and just this is a general thing, being a manager, executive, founder, is you should give people as much information as possible. You really should try and be transparent. If that information is actionable, if it can actually cause …”
Hackett: Programmers fool themselves thinking they sustain 12–14 productive hours daily
“Programming is like a deeply draining, incredibly mentally complex task, and doing it 12:14 hours a day, you're not getting 12 or 14
And you're just completely fooling yourself.”
Neistat: Group discussions melt and destroy original creative ideas
“When an idea at its inception, it's an ice cube, and it's rock hard, and you can look at it, and you can see it, and you can study it, and you know what it is. But when a discussion begins, you have to pass that ice cube around the room, it starts to melt, and…”
Neistat: Beme failed because watching people's unedited lives gets boring quickly
“And I think what we were trying to do with Beam, like, it's one of the things we talked about. It should be a four-second clip or a six-second clip. If you string a bunch of them together, it needs to feel fun, like you're watching an edited movie. We were wro…”
Neistat: Live video platforms struggle because they fail to make content interesting
“And I think the trouble that we're seeing, certainly we saw at Beam that they're seeing with spectacles, and that I think every single live platform, none of which have truly succeeded yet is because they don't address that struggle for interestingness.”
Neistat: Direct advisor advice far outweighs reading business books or blogs
“I could give you a book on how to read on how to skateboard, and you can study that book and memorize that book and follow up the board immediately, but skate with Tony Hawk for five minutes, and you'll be better than anything that book could impart, and I thi…”
Neistat: Solving "struggle for interestingness" made Snapchat Lenses work
“I think that the struggle for interestingness, that's a line that we used to use a lot when we were pitching, but like solving the struggle for interestingness from a video perspective is paramount to having anything succeed, and I think what Snapchat did that…”
Neistat: Gary Vaynerchuk invested $500K in Beme without understanding the product
“Gary's one of the first people I met with, and I pitched the product to him by myself as best I could. At the end of that pitch, he had this look on his face, and I looked at him and said, you don't have any idea what this is, do you? And he's like, I don't ge…”
Hackett: Startup acquisition processes take at least six months
“It takes six months if you want to go down that path at a minimum, and me as a, like, process optimizer, hyper-organizer, no, we can, of course we can do it in three months. You cannot.”
Neistat: My YouTube Channel Drove Beme's Acquisition
“It was a big part of why the acquisition took place. It's why now this is not just a, no longer just a technology company, but a media and technology companies, because I think there was a demonstration of what we can do within that cross section.”
Neistat: Beme never missed payroll and had zero turnover during sale process
“No one on our team ever There was never a missed payroll. There was never a delayed payroll. Like this was something that Matt and I always made priority number one. And I think that like, look, no one left. No one left. And this is a shitty seven month proces…”
Neistat: Specific prompts elicit far better user video than open requests
“If you hand someone a camera and say, say something interesting, they're gonna have no idea what to say. But if you hand someone a camera and say, you know, what do you think about the latest healthcare proposal? They might, they'll probably have something to …”