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 90 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 3 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
Halligan: Very few HubSpot customers originate from Facebook or Google ads
“Like, if you look at where our customers come from today, they come from search engine optimization. They come from our freemium model. A very small percentage of them comes from ads we do on Facebook and Google.”
Disinformation actors target locally dominant platforms like WhatsApp in India
“The people who want to manipulate public opinion, they're gonna go to where the people are, and the platforms that the people are using. So in the US, we tend to see a lot of these campaigns on Twitter and Facebook, because that's the platforms that the majori…”
Twitter's open API and anonymity allow more automated fake accounts
“Twitter tends to have a lot more of these fake accounts that use some kind of automation. There are also a bunch of tools that allow you to, you know, automate your activity on Twitter, things like Hootsuite and whatnot.”
Cannon: Remarketing to website visitors is the cheapest Facebook ad audience
“What this is going to do is capture who's hitting your site, who's logged into Facebook, so then you can later remarket at them, and this is going to be much cheaper than any other kind of Facebook audience that you can create.”
Doshi: LivingSocial pivoted to daily deals due to poor retention
“LivingSocial literally had to pivot the entire company to basically competing with Groupon because the app wasn't very retentive in those days.”
Seibel: Primary startup KPI must be revenue or daily active users
“Almost always, if you ever are going to charge money to your customers, this number should be revenue. Almost always. If you are never going to charge your customers money, like Facebook, then maybe it should be a usage based metric. Like how often do your cus…”
Gil: Early Facebook was mediocre at hiring but excelled at firing quickly
“Other companies like Facebook were known as not as good at hiring early on, although they'd gotten much better over time, but in the very early days they were known as not great at hiring, but they were very good at actually letting people go if they didn't wo…”
Gil: Facebook used email scrapers and European name ads to acquire users
“So with Facebook, that was email scrapers, and it was, you know, they were literally running ads against people's names in Europe to try and acquire European users, for example.”
Preskill: STEM education should prioritize critical reasoning over workforce training
“That STEM education, we shouldn't think of it as, we're going to need this technical workforce, and so we better train them. I think the key thing is, we want the general population to be able to reason effectively. You know, and to recognize when an argument …”
Nozad passed on Facebook's Series B investment over office lease terms
“So part of the investment was, ah, they wanted to lease one of our offices on University Avenue, ah, for five years. So we went back and forth, and we didn't agree on the lease terms, and we didn't invest in Facebook.”
Buchheit: FriendFeed sold to Facebook for about 0.5% equity
“We sold FriendFeed to Facebook for about half a percent of Facebook's equity”
Twitter and Facebook killed the independent era of blogging
“There's no question. It was killed by Twitter and Facebook, and just really the sense that People moved on.”
Bernstam: Facebook shutting down Parse was a remarkably graceful sunset
“The company did an amazing job with that. I think it was one of the best shutdowns of a company that I've seen. So often, users are really angry and, like, but this was a really graceful, long, like, over a year notice that we were gonna be shut down. Open sou…”
McCarthy: Users Have Grown Accustomed to Algorithmic Mood Manipulation
“Cause I think now people are so used to that idea. Like, of course they're manipulating my mood. Of course. You know, they're filtering out certain things or targeting me.”
Baker: Facebook's MAUs Were Driven More by Retention Than Acquisition
“Facebook was already at a size where retention and engagement were bigger drivers of the North Star metric MAUs than new user acquisition.”
Elman: Facebook Insiders See Instagram App Install Ads as Significantly Underpriced
“The tip I got yesterday at F eight talking about to Facebook folks is they think Instagram app install ads are significantly underpriced relative to Facebook.”
Alströmer: Growth disciplines become vital when new platforms emerge
“Growth kind of becomes important when they have new platforms. So you have Facebook platform, you have the mobile platform, you have Google, SEO, there's a bunch of larger platforms that makes people actually care about investing in them.”
Baker: Simple copy change made Japan Facebook's most viral market
“And Japan went from like our least viral country to our most viral country. But it was literally just a copy tweak to make people more comfortable with sharing what the product they were using with their friends.”
Zuckerberg: Entire Facebook management team left within a year of rejecting Yahoo offer
“The whole management team was gone within within about a year after that.”
Zuckerberg: Social understanding required expression tools, not search indexing
“All that other content was just out there able to be indexed by, you know, search engines and other services, but in, in order to understand what's going on with people, you needed to build tools that made it so that they could express what was going on with t…”
Zuckerberg: Facebook's IPO CFO had never taken a company public before
“The CFO who took the company public had not taken a company public before, right? And a lot of his background was in you know, production development at Genentech before.”
Zuckerberg: 11 of 12 Facebook product leaders were promoted internally
“We have about 12 different product groups at the company. And all of the people who are running them with the exception of one did not join the company running a product group or reporting to me.”
Zuckerberg: 5-to-10-year corporate bets are harder than early buyout decisions
“Sometimes you have to bet on something and, you know, either, you know, bet the direction of the company or, you know, bet billions of dollars on something, and it's not going to be clear whether you're right for five or 10 years. And, you know, that, that I t…”
Zuckerberg: Any company can replicate Facebook's growth group with data infrastructure
“There's no magic In the growth group that we that we built that other people can't replicate, you know, it's just being very rigorous with data, investing in data infrastructure, so that way you can process all these different experiments and learn what people…”
Facebook's Custom Audiences Launch Pushed Perfect Audience to Sell
“When Facebook announced that they were going to launch custom audiences and sell this themselves directly, Facebook was now a competitor And they own the platform. They wrote all the code. They control pricing. So that's a time when you should worry about comp…”
Caldwell: Facebook took years to build a unified global users table
“It actually took them years to build a global users table, as I recall and avoid this hack.”
Rossmann: Make School Has Run Income Share Programs Since 2014
“We've been running the income share based program since 2014. So we actually have five years of data, our students getting jobs at Facebook, Google and Tesla and all these great companies.”
Dennis: Facebook and Instagram ads became AptDeco's most profitable channel
“And toward, toward now it's our one of our, it's our most profitable best channel. And, you know, it's something that it took us quite frankly, three, four years to kind of really figure out how to do it, you know?”
Facebook mobile game ad competition has intensified due to high LTV titles
“So because the sort of
game, mobile game industry has evolved so much.
There's like people with higher LTVs who are willing to pay much more.
So the competition on Facebook has gotten really steep.”
Playdots accidentally blew its $10,000 Facebook marketing budget in one hour
“We had, like, a really small budget, and I think there was actually a mistake, and it all got, like, instantly, like, instantly bought a ton of players. But it was, like, 10,000 dollars, I think.”
Urban: The Public Unfairly Reduces the Entire Tech Sector to Facebook
“People are pushing tech away, like in big quotes, because they think of tech as like just Facebook. But in reality, it's so, so, so much more.”
Robin Sloan: Social media has not yet reshaped long-form fiction
“I don't really think so, not yet, and I think that's for a couple reasons if I had to kind of just guess. One is the truth is that the readership for books I mean, it's obviously diverse, and like, there's a lot of young people who read books. There's also a l…”
Laura Behrens Wu: Turnkey tools removed the need for custom e-commerce infrastructure
“It's easier than ever today to build your e-commerce store online. You don't have to be a developer. There is less upfront cost because you don't need to invest into a physical retail location. Everything's online. You get Shopify, you get Stripe, you get. Lik…”
Baker: Facebook Relied on Organic Growth While Uber Scaled Paid Acquisition
“So, Facebook, we didn't really do very much paid acquisition, but at Uber, we had an entire performance marketing team. Well, initially it was a one-person team, but ultimately became a team where we would actually spend money to acquire both riders and driver…”
Baker: Facebook's entire analytics team was once part of growth
“In fact, all of analytics back then was part of the growth team.”
Baker: Facebook's growth team reached around 500 people during his tenure
“And when I was at Facebook, I think the growth team was about, around 500 people or so.”
Bartram: Facebook provides interview prep classes to all applicants
“Facebook, for example, has started providing a sort of an interview prep class to everyone who applies so that they're sort of going over the material.”
Zuckerberg: Built roughly 10 projects at Harvard before Facebook
“There were probably, you know, 10 other things like that that I built when I was at Harvard before I actually got around to building the first version of Facebook that kind of added a lot of these things together.”
Zuckerberg: Facebook told Peter Thiel they planned to return to Harvard
“When we were first talking to Peter about raising money, Dustin and I were very clear with him that we were planning on going back to school, right?”
Reinhardt: 80% of students ignored Segment's first product to browse Facebook
“And we discovered at the beginning of class, about 60% of students were on Facebook and by the end about 80% were on Facebook.”
Kabam launched its early Facebook games in about three months
“Within about three months, we could launch a game, and that was really because I think our game mechanics were simpler, even for a mid-core game, like even.”
McDonnell: Facebook's Managing Bias training makes company inclusion training easier
“Facebook has an online training called Managing Bias. That's basically about, well, managing bias. So it's an inclusion training. And one of our team members, Isaac, has adapted that training for the company and given it in a few different ways, and it's great…”