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 4 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
Buchheit: Early search rivals failed because they did not know what they were doing
“When we started really just like pushing all, just crushing all of the other search engines, and then there was like a feeling of inevitability. Like it was pretty clear we were just gonna win because no one else, Like, they just didn't even know what they wer…”
Caldwell: Pre-Google conventional wisdom wrongly treated search as a commodity
“I think that the conventional wisdom pre-Google was that search was a commodity, and that Yahoo was good enough, and that incremental engineering breakthroughs in search wouldn't matter, and Google disproved that where it was actually a hard technical problem,…”
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.”
Buchheit: Google founders tried to sell for $1M to Yahoo and Excite
“Larry and Sergey were PhD students there. And they actually wanted to continue being PhD students and, like, finish their degree, so they went off and tried to sell Google to one of the big internet companies of the time, so, you know, Yahoo, Xsite, Infoseek. …”