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 9 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
Donohue: Capital invested in Pinterest yielded better returns than funding Instapaper
“The reason being is that treating it as a business unit, I just felt that every dollar put into Instapaper could maybe return 70 cents a dollar. Like, it would be pretty challenging to, like, have it kind of be an investment that had a solid return. But I felt…”
Alströmer: Startups should copy Pinterest and Airbnb's authentication flows
“Look at the best websites in the world. Look at Pinterest. Look at Airbnb. Look at some of those sites. They have teams optimizing these flows the authentication flow. Copy what they do. They probably figure it out. They spend a lot of time optimizing.”
Alströmer: SEO-driven startups must eventually match Pinterest and TripAdvisor
“If you are going to rely on search engine optimization to grow you're going to have to Be as good as a Pinterest or a TripAdvisor. Eventually. Not right away, but eventually. Because, ah, it's so competitive to win in this, like, large world of SEO.”
Instapaper became cash-flow positive within three months of spinout
“We are now cash flow positive, which is great. Like a couple thousand dollars. A lot of that was around significantly reducing our server costs.”
Schwartz: Google dislikes ranking search-within-search platforms like Pinterest
“Google specifically does not like search within search. Google would much prefer that you don't go to Pinterest, that you go directly to where that image was, but maybe that site didn't do a great job of optimizing the image, but Pinterest did, so now Pinteres…”
Alströmer: Pinterest acquires new users primarily via Google SEO
“If you think of Pinterest, SEO is the re, the real way how Pinterest is going. You type something in on Google, there already exists a Pinterest board for that, and you land on that Pinterest board. That's how they acquire new users.”
Donohue: Only 16% of Instapaper URLs appeared on Pinterest on day one
“And what I found is that on day, on the first day that we saw those links, only 16% of those links were in Pinterest. So we actually see like a much different set of URLs on a given day. And then over time, I think within seven or eight days, Pinterest gets to…”
Instapaper raised $80,000 from friends and family for spinout
“So we raised 80,000 dollars from friends and family. Very ragtag, like six people. So to kind of give you the average size, I think the largest check was from me, which was 13,000. And then most of the people had 10, some people put in five.”
Brian Chesky and Ben Silbermann scaled rapidly by internalizing new domains
“Ben, the CEO of Pinterest is a great example of this, where every time you talk to him, ah, six months, ah, ah, later he'll have, ah, internalized everything and have learned way more than you ever knew about a topic. And so that's an example of somebody who's…”