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 684 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
Epstein: Netflix relies on price increases as the easiest revenue growth lever
“And now Netflix has two hundred and twenty one million paid subscribers, and they've been able to figure out how to raise prices because that is the easiest way for them to grow revenue rather than continuing to try to scale subscriber growth at the same rate.”
Epstein: Segment increased contract values 150x by anchoring quotes at $120,000
“So while they didn't actually get the thousand x price increase, they were able to increase their price a 150 times from a 120 dollars a year All the way up to 18,000 dollars a year. And it wouldn't have happened if they didn't ask for the higher price.”
Fintech and vertical SaaS have drastically higher unicorn hit rates than consumer
“Over the last 10 years, if you started a company that did, like, fintech infrastructure or vertical SaaS for enterprise, the probability that your company became a billion-dollar company was astonishingly high. Whereas if you started something in consumer hard…”
Caldwell: YC's best startups often launch during economic downturns
“Some of the best companies we've ever funded happened when either there was a full downturn or at least a blip.”
Caldwell: Gmail invite system was forced by server limits, not growth hacking
“They physically did not have enough servers. So they had to build an invite system. There was not an option to not, but basically there was no option other than building an invite system. It was not like genius PM growth hacking.”
Caldwell: Google ran on a stale search index for months around 2001
“There was some point where for maybe three months, maybe four months, I don't remember the exact details. There was no new index of Google. They had stale results. So anyone, any user of Google, they didn't know that, you know, the user didn't know this, but a…”
Saez-Gil: Traditional carbon offset markets rely on multiple intermediary layers
“Today companies that want to purchase carbon offsets, they generally have to go to brokers. The brokers get their credits from, you know, a trader, the trader maybe from a retailer, the retailer from a, you know, a lot of middlemen along the way.”
Saez-Gil: Old-growth forests remain net carbon sinks
“All growth forests continue to capture carbon. The Borneo forest that has millions of years continues to capture carbon, and while a forest, like every living, ah, ecosystem and organism dies out and regenerates, and when a tree dies out, yes, it releases some…”
Seibel: Early Uber avoided rider subsidies due to immense natural demand
“So in the extreme beginning of Uber, what was so interesting was that it launched in San Francisco, and it launched as Uber Black, which is a really expensive product, actually. It wasn't well subsidized. And the real value is that it was impossible to get a t…”
Srini: ZeroDown qualifies buyers in minutes and delivers keys in seven days
“A pretty fast, like, three to five minute, like, qualification flow. You just connect your bank accounts using Plaid. Like, we look at an asset report. We look at your income. And we say, like, Craig, you can go and buy a 1.4 million dollar house. Like, and he…”
Srini: Zenefits bypassed US immigration by locating global engineers in Vancouver
“So one of the ways we grew really quickly at Zenefits in terms of hiring was we were able to tap talent all over the world. It was just easier to bring them To Vancouver in terms of immigration than like the US.”
Srini: Bay Area households making over $200,000 still cannot afford homes
“There are people in the Bay Area today making more than 200,000 dollars household income, but they can't even think about buying a house.”
Cutts: The SearchKing lawsuit established search results are First Amendment protected
“The result of that lawsuit was that search results are protected by the first amendment.”
Astranis built its first test telecommunications satellite for under $50,000
“It turns out actually that the cheapest telecommunication satellite that is useful costs like at least ten million dollars to build and launch. And so Astronus' hack was to start with a test satellite. The satellite in this photo was their first satellite. The…”
Rossmann: Make School students only pay tuition if they get jobs
“What's really special about it is that students don't have to pay tuition unless they get a job.”
Rossmann: Make School students can earn a four-year bachelor's in two years
“So you can actually graduate with a four year bachelor's in two years. If you take our intensive our intensive track.”
Rossmann: MOOCs have an industry standard completion rate of 2% to 5%
“And if you look at Courses that are kind of self-serve, like the MOOCs, you see that it's industry standard to have two, three, four, five percent completion rates, meaning that probably 95% of people are actually not a fit for the type of education that is au…”
Stitch Fix did not cannibalize department store spending, Second Measure found
“And what we found is that Stitch Fix had
no impact on department store spend.
Right?
People just started spending more on clothes.
Period.”
Peloton monthly active members have surpassed SoulCycle riders, Second Measure data shows
“I mean, the short version is that Peloton has now surpassed SoulCycle in terms of, like, the number of active Peloton members, right, and this is based on a spending based on spending behavior. Active Peloton members on a monthly basis have surpassed the numbe…”
Aatrey: Major Indian marketplaces have not solved selling unbranded goods
“If you see like all big destination marketplaces in India today, mostly sell brands across all categories. None of them have figured out how to sell a lot of unbranded products.”
Aatrey: Meesho sets up supply chain from China for cross-border sourcing
“Now we have even set up a supply chain from China.”
Gill: China's paid audio market exceeds the US market
“The ecosystem for podcasting and paid for content in China is much greater than even the U.S. Market.”
Johnson: TikTok will produce more traditional, mainstream creators
“I think that TikTok is going to produce some people some more traditional, quote unquote traditional creators.”
Allred: Google spent $100 million in compensation to retain Sundar Pichai
“Google has in the past spent a hundred million dollars to retain Sundar and stuff like that.”
Knoop: Zapier had reached $50M in annual recurring revenue by 2019
“And it's like, well, yeah, we have, you know, a hundred, we have like fifty million in ARR, like, yeah, we're a real company.”
Hoover: At most 50% of products on Product Hunt are consumer
“People think that most of product hunt is actually consumer as well. It's probably, I don't know, 50% at most is consumer. There's a lot of B to B stuff on there.”
Authoritarian governments have used social bots since early platform days
“From some of the research that I've done here at the OII and on the Computational Propaganda Project, we know that these techniques have been experimented with by governments for a long time. We've had evidence of them going back to, you know, even the early d…”
Political actors use traditional SEO tactics to game Google and YouTube
“We're seeing a lot more gaming of the algorithms as well, and more of these kind of sophisticated techniques. So not just liking and sharing, but using specific keywords to get content trending, to try to get things at the top of Google's search algorithm, try…”
Social media users in 2016 swing states shared more junk news
“And we also in 2016 did a study on the swing states. And you know, in actual swing state, States people were sharing more junk news compared to uncontested ones.”
VIPKID has grown to more than 60,000 teachers
“And today VIP kid has more than 60,000 teachers. It's almost three times of the supply.”
Susskind: Black holes store 10^10 times more information than ordinary matter
“Our world is mostly all black holes, it really is, in the sense that the information stored in matter is at least
let me think I think about 10 to the 10th, a factor of 10 to the 10th more information stored in black holes than anything else.”
Altman: Unknown 22-year-olds have raised rocket company funding at YC
“I think one of the things that's amazing about Silicon Valley is you actually can raise money. As an unknown twenty-two-year-old to go make a rocket company. It's happened several times at YC.”
Paystack was the only Nigerian payments company with automated disputes
“So we started building where the first company, I think was still the only company that has like An automated dispute process and all that.”
Most cryptocurrency activity in Nigeria is focused on rapid trading
“Most of the activities around trading, you know, people are buying and selling very quickly.”
Migicovsky: Pebble sold around 1,500 watches before launching Kickstarter
“Most people don't know this, but when we launched our Kickstarter campaign, we had already made and sold around 1500 of our first watch.”
Hua: 67% of California lacks local regulations, blocking state cannabis permits
“33% of the state that has some form of local laws, and then 67% of the state that has no laws whatsoever. And because of that, you have this disconnect between state law where you can get your permits, but you can't get a permit unless you get your local permi…”
Ning: California requires a licensed distributor for all B2B cannabis transit
“No one can move product between two different license entities without a distributor. So even if you're just like a farm moving your product to a manufacturer, you have to contract out a distributor or get your own distributor's license in order to move it.”
Ralston: Magic Leap raised billions of dollars purely on a story
“Look at Magic Leap. If you've heard of Magic Leap, they raised billions on just a story.”
Ralston: The average YC startup seed valuation cap exceeds $8M
“The vast majority of companies that go through YC raise seed, and the average cap tends to be over eight million now, so it's clearly not a handicap.”
Schwartz: Local businesses have a Google ranking advantage over national competitors
“You don't really need to rank on unclogged drains anymore, because Google is very local. So if you're in San Francisco, and you're a plumber, and someone searches unclogged drains, you now have a much higher chance of ranking on unclogged drains than Roto-Root…”
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…”
Schwartz: Google grew Korean search share via Samsung and LG ties
“What Google used to not be dominant in In Korea, and they've been increasing dominance through their Trojan horse of Android. So Google's obviously very closely partnered with Samsung and LG, Korean companies. And as Korean users use these products, they use G…”
Schwartz: Sites penalized by Google can recover within weeks
“Now, like, things are more automated and algorithmic, where if you got hit by the penalty one day, you cleaned it up, did everything possible, maybe filed a reconsideration request, you can be back in a couple weeks.”
Lasenby: Geometric algebra unifies classical mechanics, linear algebra, and quantum physics
“So if you know this language, you can not only do rigid body dynamics in engineering, classical mechanics. You can do linear algebra without matrices and without tensors. And you can do complex things in quantum space-time physics with the same mathematical sy…”
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: Justin.tv reached $24M in five years, then $1B in three
“And if you look at the history of Justin TV, in the first five years, it went from being worth nothing to being worth about twenty four million dollars. In the next three years, it went being worth twenty four million dollars to being worth a billion.”