The Mark Zuckerberg Interview_128k_compressed
AI Summary
The speakers discuss the challenges of building a strong technology company and creating a flexible and inspiring product definition. They emphasize the need for a strong technology foundation and the importance of building a smart product definition. They also discuss the political and technological miscalculations that have occurred in the past and the importance of maintaining flexibility and being flexible in one's career path. They touch on the political and technological miscalculations and the potential for the company to become a monster product. They thank the entire Meta executive team and the entire Meta team for their help, and express a potential future show.
So how many interviews with Mark do you think you watched before
tonight? Oh, to prepare? Yeah.
30 to 40. The the best ones are the 04/2006
vintage,
but they're also different. It's almost like every three to four years is a new era that is markedly different from all the previous eras. Totally. And,
I think we might have witnessed the beginning of a new era right in front of us on stage. Oh, yes. Absolutely.
Alright. Should we do this?
Let's do it.
Welcome to the fall twenty twenty four season of Acquired, the podcast about great companies and the stories and playbooks behind them. I'm Ben Gilbert. I'm David Rosenthal.
And we are your hosts. Listeners, we have something very special for you today. Our interview with Mark Zuckerberg from Acquired live at Chase Center. Oh. Mark is the iconic founder CEO of our time, and this conversation was just too good to hold on to any longer. So we are getting it out quickly before we release the full video of the entire show.
Which speaking of the full show
was
utterly amazing.
We had surprise appearances from Jensen Huang, Danielle Ek, Emily Chang, and of course, we had the one and only Mike Taylor, the artist who sings Who Got the Truth performing live. It was incredible.
We've got basically a whole film production that's now happening behind the scenes with another ninety minutes of content beyond just this Mark interview. We should have that out in the next couple weeks, so stay tuned for that. First, though, a huge thank you to our partners this season. You know our presenting partner, JPMorgan Payments.
And we are also pumped to have two more great returning sponsors this season. Statsig, the world's first product acceleration platform that thousands of companies from OpenAI to series a startups rely on to ship fast, learn more, and make smart decisions. You can find out more about them at statsig.com/acquired.
Sounds a lot like Meta.
And Crusoe, which is the world's best climate aligned AI cloud and data center operator that is leading the industrial build out of AI. Find out more about them at cruso.ai/acquired.
As always, come discuss this afterwards with us in the Slack, acquired.fm/slack.
And if you wanna be notified when every new episode drops, sign up at acquired.fm/email.
Alright. One more thing before the interview.
We need to say a huge,
huge
thank you to the entire JPMorgan payments team for securing the Chase Center for this, for orchestrating
the entire evening.
Our partnership this year has been absolutely incredible and gone, I think, way beyond what either of us ever could have imagined. Yeah. For those who don't know about JPMorgan payments, they empower businesses to accept money, hold money, send money, protect money from fraud, and gain unique insights from money flows
to help your company grow. Yep. And the payments business specifically,
like most things at JPMorgan, is the largest and most trusted payments provider in the entire world. They move $10,000,000,000,000
a day. That's almost 25% of all US dollar payment flows in the global economy.
Pretty much every single company that we cover on acquired works with JPMorgan payments in some way.
You can never outgrow them. They partner with startups and small companies like us. Like, you would be Ben, all the way up to the largest enterprises in the Fortune 500.
Yeah. We've got more to share about their new payments products and technology this season, like the pay by face biometric payments that we saw live at Chase Center. Yeah. That was super cool. Yep. So that you can learn which may be the right fit to solve your payments challenges and grow your business.
The other thing we gotta say is, like, Ben and I really worked side by side all year with their incredible team to make this evening happen.
And we really got to know them. Max, Umar, Dustin, Hannah, Vinny, Nick, Amy, Carly, and so many others. It's like we were one team. You guys rock. Yeah. For the first time, we actually got to experience what it would be like if Acquired was a large world class organization and not just, you know, our little team. And, what happened at Chase Center is really the physical embodiment of that. Thank you guys for being the best partners we could ever imagine. And a very special shout out to Dustin Sedgwick, JPMorgan payments CMO, who's a longtime listener of the show and a good friend of ours. And he's just been the driving force behind all of this. Without him, Chase Center wouldn't have happened. We're so grateful for our incredible relationship with you and all of JPMorgan.
Yep. So please enjoy our conversation with Mark Zuckerberg, and to take us in, the chairman and CEO of JPMorgan Chase,
Jamie Dimon.
Hello, Acquired listeners.
Welcome to the Chase Center and to Acquired Live. I'm Jamie Dimon, chairman and CEO of JPMorgan Chase.
I'm happy to kick off the show tonight and welcome all of you to one of my favorite arenas.
It's been a great partnership all year between JPMorgan payments and acquired storytelling and educating about some of the greatest companies in the world.
For many of them, just like many of you in the crowd, we're thrilled to call you friends and partners of the firm. Sorry I couldn't be there in person tonight, but I hope everyone enjoys the show. Ben and David, over to you.
Mark. Hey.
It's great to have you here. It's great to be here. You know, I was watching
I was watching Jensen's video correcting the record, and I was thinking to myself,
we might need to book the next one of these for all the things I'm gonna have to apologize for that I'm gonna say tonight.
No. Just kidding. Well I don't apologize anymore.
We've
noticed.
Well, okay. Wait. Wait. Here's the question. If you knew what you knew today
What's up? If you knew what you know today, would you have started Facebook?
Oh god. I mean, look. I I think Coming out hot, David. Yeah. You know what I mean? He started it,
literally.
I I think there's something to Jensen's original sentiment,
which is that
the entrepreneurial journey is very challenging,
especially the early days when you're
running a startup and, you know, there's the sense that what you're doing could just die at any moment and and the volatility, everything is just getting thrashed so much. And it's it's not
you know, you you obviously look back, have all these fun memories, but it was not the most fun part of the journey or, you know, the part of my life that I, like, wish I could go back and relive. So, I mean, I I do think that there's something to what Jensen was saying that I thought was very honest.
And
that when I heard him say it the first time, I was like, yeah. I get that. Right? So I think I I think there are, like, a lot of people for whom, you know, if you knew how
painful
it would be along the way, you wouldn't get started. But then, you know, I think that that's one of the things that's good about
human nature is you can underestimate how painful things are going to be. So that way you can go and do good things.
Well,
on that topic,
we have a lot to talk about. Yeah. I think this is actually very appropriate.
First,
we have to ask you about
your shirt and what you're wearing. Yeah. You know,
I I
started
working with people to design some of own clothes.
And so I figured, you know, look, we're gonna design eyewear. We're gonna design other stuff that people wear. Let's get let's get good at this.
And
so so this one, I actually I worked with this great
fashion designer, Micah Meary,
and he's got a great story. So I I I wouldn't be surprised if you're doing one of these with him one day.
And
this one is so I've I've I've kinda started working on this series of
shirts with my some of my favorite classical sayings on them. So this one is
pathe matos,
learning
through suffering.
It's a little family saying and
also Aeschylus.
Was was
that your family saying growing up or is that your family now? That was something my sister said. Well,
know what? Let's pull that thread. Yeah.
No pun intended, I promise.
What does learning through suffering mean to you?
Well, I think you learn what matters to you
important and kind of your place in the world through repeatedly hitting your head against different challenges.
And, I mean, I think that that is sort of that's the journey. Right? I mean, that's the the entrepreneurial journey. It's also, I think, part of the beauty of building things.
And
but,
you know, something that Jensen talks a lot about too. Right? It's like I I I feel like
you you know, when you go to start a company, you you know, everyone kinda writes down what they would like their values to be, but values are not what you write down on the wall. It's like your lived behaviors.
And you only really learn what you care about
when you have to make hard trade offs and face challenges.
So,
yeah, you learn the most important things through facing challenges.
Well,
speaking of facing challenges, we wanna talk about a number of those because I we counted by our count. I think you have faced more existential challenges than
any meaningful company in history through your first twenty years. First though It's a
dubious distinction.
We will make our case to you of why Well and enumerate them. You're still good. But first, I first just kinda I I kinda think my you know, like that old Nike Michael Jordan ad where he's talking about how he's failed over and over and over again and that's how he succeeds? That one really resonates with me too. So
thanks to you guys. I got a pair of these this summer,
and I genuinely
love them.
Tell us the story of how these came to be.
Yeah. So
thanks.
I'm I'm I'm excited about them too. The the
you know, we at Meta, we've been building
social experiences
for twenty years now.
And, originally, it took the form of a website,
then mobile apps. But the thing is I I never thought about us as a social media company. Right? We're not a social app company. We are a
a social connection company. Right? I mean, I I and we talk about what we're doing is building the future of human connection,
and
that's not only gonna be constrained over time to what you can do on a phone, right, on a small screen.
So when you think about you know, when we got started,
okay, we're like a handful
of kids.
You know, we weren't able we didn't have the resources at the time to go define whatever the next computing platform is. And also, you know, Facebook originally got started around the same time as, you know, a bunch of the early smartphones and those platforms got started. So we didn't really get to play any role in developing that platform.
And
one of the big themes, I think, for the next chapter of what we do is
I I wanna
be able to build what I what I think are sort of the ideal experiences. Not just what you're allowed to build on some platform that someone else built, but, like, what is actually if you can think from first principles, what is the ideal social experience? So I I think what you would like to have
is not a phone that you look down at
that kinda takes your attention away from the things and the people around you, you know, not just a small screen.
I think what you ideally have is glasses.
And
through the glasses,
there's one part of it where the glasses, you can they can see what you see and they can hear what you hear. And in doing so, they can be kind of the perfect AI assistant you because they have context on what you're doing. But then part of that
is also that the glasses can
project
images, basically, like holograms out into the world.
And that way your social experiences with other people aren't constrained to these little interactions you can have on a phone screen. You know, in the in the not so distant future, you can imagine,
because you guys have demoed some of the stuff that that we that we've done. Like, a a version of this where we're having a conversation like this, but, you know, maybe, like, one of us isn't even here. They're just like a hologram, and we have glasses. And it really there's the question of delivering a realistic sense of presence. There's something magical in the realm of building social experiences around
the feeling of human presence and, like, being there with another person and this physical perception, right, where and we're very physical beings. Right? And people like to intellectualize everything, but a lot of our experience is very physical. And this physical sense of presence that you are with another person
doing things in the physical world is something that you're gonna be able to do through holograms,
through glasses,
without being taken away from, you know, whatever else you're doing. Just kind of have that mixed in with the rest of the world.
It's gonna be, I think, the ultimate
digital
social experience,
and I think it's also gonna be the ultimate incarnation of AI
because you're gonna have conversations where it's like, alright. There's some people. It's like maybe, like, I'm physically here. There's, like, a person. You're you're, like, hologram there. There's an AI that is kind of embodied as someone is there, and the glasses will enable. So okay. So how are we going after this, building this? This is like some some huge project. We've been working on it for
ten years,
and
there are a lot of different challenges to solve to get there. There's like, you have to build a novel display stack. Right? It's not these aren't just screens like the kind that are in phones. There's this long lineage. They they're they're connected to the screens that have been in TVs and monitors and things for a long time. There's been this massive optimization of the supply chain. There's like, brand new display stack around holographic displays
that basically need to get created.
And then they need to be put into glasses. They need to be miniaturized.
And the you also in the glasses need to fit chips, microphones,
you know, speakers,
cameras,
eye tracking to be able to understand what you're doing, batteries to make it last all day. Operate on some Then it's like new novel RF protocols. Yeah. It's it's like, okay. It's a pretty big challenge. So we're like, alright. Let's go try to go for the big thing. Right? And and we we've been working on that for a while,
and we're pretty close to being able to show off
kind of the first prototype that we have of that. I'm really excited about that. At the same time, we also came at it from this lens of alright. So that's like a lot of new technology that needs to get developed,
a lot to pack into a form factor because the glass has to be good looking too.
So
what if we just constrain ourselves to, like, we're gonna
work with a great partner, Essilor Luxottica. They make Ray Ban. They make a lot of the iconic glasses.
Let's see what we can fit into glasses today
and make them as useful as possible.
And,
you know, I I actually
I kinda thought when we were getting started with those
that it was almost like
a practice project
for, like, for the the ultimate Which let's be clear. That's what you thought Facebook was. That's true. That's true. Yeah. It did. Like for your real startups someday. Yeah. No. This is yeah. Let's go on a tangent there for a second. When when so I started Facebook in school,
came out to Silicon Valley with Dustin and and a handful of people working on it at the time.
And we did that because Silicon Valley is where all the startups came from. And I remember we got off the plane. We were driving down 101. We're like, wow. EBay, Yahoo. Like, this is amazing. The all these great companies. One day, we're maybe we'll build a company like this. And I'd already started Facebook. And I was like, surely the project that we're working on now is not a company. And Facebook had, like, some scale at this point. No. No. It was a great project. I just didn't have the ambition to turn it into a company at the time. That just kind of happened.
But, anyway yeah.
I mean,
a lot of hard work, obviously. But but it's but I I just at the time, I was kinda like, yeah. No. I don't don't don't think this is it.
Well, that's your answer of would you have started
actually didn't try to start Facebook. Yeah. I didn't know.
So yeah. So, I mean, the the the glasses though, you know, we thought that this was like, alright. We we wanna get working with SLR Luxottica so we can start building more and more advanced glasses.
And then, you know, they're really good. They look good. And then AI, like, the massive transformation in AI. And And I remember For listeners, let's just be really clear. You guys shipped this product that I'm holding
before
LLMs
or at least before the public consciousness was aware of Yeah. You know, the chat GPT moment. And Yeah. These were not manufactured and shipped as an AI device.
Came later when they were already in market. Yeah. A few years ago,
I would have predicted that AR holograms
would have been available before kind of, like, full scale AI.
And now I think it's probably gonna be the other order. So now it's like, alright. Great. Well, this is actually a great product because it's got it's got the cameras so it can see what you see. It's got the microphone. It's got the speakers. You can talk to it. I I remember calling Alex Himmel, the guy who runs the product group that Exactly. Running it. And I'm like, hey. You know, I I think we should probably pivot this and make it so that that Meta AI is the primary feature of it. And then, like, I remember I came in the next week, and they'd build a prototype of it on Tuesday. And it was like, alright. Good. Yeah. No. This is good. This is gonna be a very successful product. He told us a much more high stakes version of that story. He's like, so I was I was on the highway with my kids, and I get this call on a Saturday from Mark, he's like, those glasses,
could we put Meta AI in them running on device
and, like, ship that soon so we can see if that's a good idea or not? Yeah, that tracks. That's what I just said.
Sounds right.
Okay, so
thank you for opening up with a story. The question that I would like to try to answer tonight
is why has Meta worked as spectacularly
well as it has? I mean
one of the most valuable companies in the world through multiple iterations, multiple technology waves fighting off,
you know,
maybe let's
name all the waves in which people said, oh Facebook and Meta are so screwed
and yet
that is not the way it looks today.
Myspace,
Twitter gen one
Yep. Instagram,
Snapchat,
WhatsApp,
TikTok
Apple app ATT. Transparency.
Put in its own whole category,
and now ChatGPT.
That's Like,
there is a widely held public narrative every single time Snapchat discovers stories or there's something where people are like, oh, the cool thing that Facebook, the company did,
is just obsolete now and they're gonna go away. You very much haven't gone away.
What do you think is the through line of the DNA of the company that allows you to keep winning?
I think it's that we're a technology company
that is focused on
human connection,
not a specific type of app.
So, like, we never thought about ourselves as
a website or a social network or anything like that. For for me, building this kind of glasses to enable the future of
people being able to feel present with another person owner where they actually physically are
is the natural
continuation
of the kind of apps that we build today, but it depends on how you define what you are.
And then you need to figure out,
well, how do you build how do you give yourself the confidence to actually go do that? And that's where I think being a strong technology company comes in. Because, you know, a lot of companies, I think, think about themselves too narrowly in terms of, okay. Well, we're this kind of one thing,
and
the reason why we can build all these things is because
we are have a really strong technology foundation.
And
some of that is just
me and how I think about stuff. I mean, I I was an engineer before I got started. I mean, I, like, mostly took, like, systems
engineering type classes when I was in college. So, you know, you talk about, like, Friendster and Myspace and all the scaling challenges they had during the graph calculations of, alright. Or do you know this person? Should you show them that Yeah.
Yeah. Actually, can you take us back and like, we wanna ask you the story of that time. I mean, it
seems quaint now, Friendster, MySpace, but you study computer science,
graph,
networking,
social graphs, that is a very, very difficult conversation to calculate. It's a combination of of a
a product question and a technology question. I think you can define the product in a such a general way that the technology becomes basically impossible to solve.
So you wanna have a smart product definition,
but then you wanna be competent and better than everyone else at the technology.
And I think that that's something that we've held ourselves to and build a good organization around. And it's it's one of the things that I I
observed as soon as I came out to the Valley, that all these companies that called themselves technology companies
were not really set up that way. Right? So, like, the the companies I was talking about, it's like they,
you know, they the CEO wasn't technical.
The board of directors had no one technical on it. They had, like, one dude on the management team who was the head of engineering who was technical and, like, everyone else wasn't. It's like, alright. If that's your team,
then you're not a technology company. So I I think one of the things that I've always been pretty careful about
is I I actually, like, want
like, the a lot of the people on our on our management team, it's like, you know, splits mostly people running,
either these big product groups who come up through different technical pathways of the company, and I think that there's, like, a balance. Right? It's like you don't want everyone to be an engineer because there's other things that matter too.
But if you don't have enough of your kind of share
of the company as engineers,
then you're not a technology company. And I think that that
also is important to the board.
And and I I think it just, like, in terms of how you weigh decisions and culturally things inside the company matters a lot. But but I I think that that's one of the things that has been really fundamental. Right? It's like we're able to kind of go from
platform to platform and do these different things because we've invested and cared about the underlying technology. The product experiences that we build on top of that are an implementation, and they matter. And for that, I think we also, I think, are a pretty curious and learning focused organization
where,
you know, I view the product strategy
less as any one specific thing
and more as
how do we iterate and learn as quickly as possible
how to make each thing better for
for the people we're trying to serve. Right? So if like, I define our strategies. We can learn faster than every other company. We're gonna win. We're gonna build a better product than everyone else because we're gonna get it out first or early. We're going to have a good feedback loop. We're gonna get get a bunch of feedback. We're gonna learn what people like better than other people. And then over time, by the time you get to, know, whether it's version three or four or five, I mean, they're not even discrete versions because we you ship so frequently.
It's
you just
you learn faster.
So I think that's basically the formula. Be a technology company,
build good foundation,
like, learn from what what people are are kind of focused on in the world and and situate it as quickly as you can. In one of my research calls to prep for this, someone
described you as a master strategist, which, like, it's we we all sort of acknowledge that at this point. But that the I mean, except for, like, all the stuff that I just thought was not gonna be that important that ended up actually being the most important. It's
but Well, but that's the thing is you Part of it is, like, okay. You you wanna set up the game so that way you optimize you create your luck. This is what Jensen told us. Like, the apple's gonna fall from the tree in some direction.
And if you just set up the game
that
you have a hand close enough to catch it.
The comment that someone made to me was
the reason Mark is such a good strategist is because he he plays
the company as if it's a turn based strategy game and he just makes sure he gets more turns than anybody else and he makes sure that he learns more from each turn than the next player does. Do you feel like that encapsulates I do the better like product turn off strategy mix.
But it does kind of feel like the way that you make bets is like I well, if we have great engineering,
then that can kinda take care of the speed part. That's like, you know, many iterations or multiple at bats. And then the the Well, great engineering and speed and duration are actually two different values. They're not necessarily at odds, but I think, like, there are a lot of great engineering
organizations that try to build things that are super high quality and have good confidence around that. But
I know there's there's a certain
personality
that goes with kind of taking your stuff and putting it out there before it's fully polished. And and look. I'm not saying that our
strategy or approach on this is the only one that works. I think in a lot of ways, we're like the opposite of Apple, and clearly, their stuff has worked really well too. Right? But, I mean, they take this approach. It's like we're gonna take a lot like a long time. We're gonna polish it. We're gonna put it out.
And
maybe for the stuff that they're doing that works, maybe that just fits with their culture. But for us, I I think that there are a lot of conversations that we have internally
where
you're almost at the line of being embarrassed about what you put out.
Because you
it's you know, obviously, not not in the sense that it's like,
you know, you you wanna
you wanna put stuff out early enough so you can get good feedback.
You obviously wanna test things that are reasonable hypotheses. So if it's, like, so ineffective, then you're not testing a good hypothesis. That doesn't work. But I I do think a lot of the conversations that we have are are like, okay. Well, we can get this to be a lot better if we work on it for, like, another couple of months or whatever. And and
I I I do just think that, like, you wanna really have a culture that values
shipping
and and getting things out and getting feedback
more than needing
always to get great positive accolades from people when you put stuff out. Because
I I think, like, if you wanna wait until you get praised all the time, you're missing a bunch of the time when
you you could have learned a bunch of useful stuff and then incorporated that into the next version you're gonna ship. And it's just about making sure that the what the thing that the company is known for or its brand can withstand
all the little damage that you do to it by shipping stuff that's not quite ready. Well, I would like to hope that it's not damaging to the brand,
but
Well, but it innately,
is. Like, when you're like, oh, I feel bad because I I shipped a product that wasn't good enough. You're you're sort of Yeah. No. I I don't wanna overstate it. I mean, we don't ship things that we think are bad,
but we also don't take and we wanna make sure that we're shipping things that
that are kind of early enough that we can get good feedback to see what they're gonna be most used for. Like, I think a lot of the AI stuff that we're building now, for example,
it actually
you know, it's it's pretty clear that AI is going to be transformative for a lot of different things. It
is actually less clear what are gonna be the initial use cases for for a lot of these things that that are that are super valuable. And so, okay, part of it is like, okay. You put something out. You wanna kind of collect feedback and and what people are actually what what it's
you know, where it's resonating. Now if if what you put out is bad, then you're not gonna collect good data because people aren't gonna use it for anything because it sucks. So but but I do think that you you have hypotheses for what people might really wanna use it for, and they're not all gonna be right, and you wanna kinda go early enough on that as as more. Yeah. So I'm building to this question of to
you,
is product creation
an act of invention
or discovery?
Like, is David always inside that marble and you just need the very best tooling and ability to get things in market and get feedback to discover the statue of David,
or do you conceive of David in your head and I'm like, I'm going to make this and put it in the world?
Does it have to be one or the other? I mean, I think it's a combination. I think you're basically taking some kind of values,
either kind of, like, values that you have or a value for something that you believe should exist in the world
and trying to build something that's aligned with that while trying to
match it up with what
is is going to resonate the most with people. Right? I think if you if you just do the latter,
then I think you just don't have enough conviction to see through hard things.
And if you just do the former, then you probably don't get to product market fit or optimize what you do because you're not focused enough on your customers.
So I
think I think both probably matter.
Yeah.
The I'm like as I pour through all these historical examples,
there's like, the market discovers
some other participant in the market discovers the story's format, and suddenly the whole world is like Yeah. Oh my god.
That is the way that we all that's the social interaction mechanism.
And that's like a pretty pure
discovery
where you have products that have stories. They perform very well.
That's been discovered. But there's other times it feels like everything you're trying to do in Reality Labs, all you know 50 plus billion dollars that you've put into it is like we're going to freaking will this thing into existence because I have an idea of the way that I want the world to be. I'm not really like asking for that much feedback. I'm putting it in the world.
Well, it's a combination. I I mean, I I think that there's
there's certainly a lot of things that we've invented or created for the first time. I mean, like, in 2006 when we built the first version of News Feed. Right? The like, before that social networks are basically profiles,
and then we're like, hey. Like, people actually kinda wanna get the updates, and let's, like, show them that. And if we rank them, then we can you know, there's so many updates that this can help people parse through that quickly. And today, it's, like, hard to imagine any social product without a feed. So I think that that's obviously there's some of these things are sort of seminal
don't wanna call it an invention, but, like, patterns that we that we basically established first.
And then some of them are ones that other people did where we take pride in learning from what is working in in the in the world.
You know, I you know, we're not embarrassed about learning from things that other people, like, discovered that were good first, and and then we build a better version of it. And,
I mean
Good, man. I think that that's
you know, no one company is gonna invent everything.
Right? I think if you don't invent anything, then it's hard to to kinda be a successful company. But
but I I do think that there's a mix of this. There are more smart people outside of your company than inside your company. If you're not learning from what's going on in the market, then you're missing a lot of opportunities to get valuable signal from from people in the community and customers about what they want you to be doing.
Which
speaks to the thesis of Facebook as a technology company.
Meta.
Meta is a technology company.
We'll get to that later.
Ben and I have been, having a conversation. I wanna take this, to open source,
and open source technology and its importance to you. And Ben posited,
first to me and then to many other people in our calls over the last couple weeks, that
Meta
has been the largest
Beneficiary. Beneficiary
of open source technology
in the modern world. And I'm curious if you would agree with that and
if you would comment on
your relationship to open source.
I think almost all of the major technology companies at this point are primarily using open source stacks.
So, yeah, I mean, don't we wouldn't have been able to get built without open source. I think probably that's true for any
new company that's been created since, like,
I don't know, '19 the late nineteen nineties or something.
For us, open source has been important and valuable.
Mean, you were Partially the first big company built on the LAMP stack.
Yeah. Yeah. No. And it's it's great. Makes it super easy to develop stuff quickly and iterate quickly. But we've also had an interesting relationship this with this because, sequentially, as a company, we came after Google. So Google was the first of the great
companies that built this distributed computing infrastructure. So they came first. They were like, alright. Let's keep this proprietary because it's a big advantage for us. And then we're like, alright. We need that too. But we built it, and then we're like, okay. Not an advantage for us because Google already has that, so we might as well just make it open.
And by making it open,
then you basically get this whole community of people building around it. So, you know, it wasn't gonna help us compete with Google for any of the stuff that we were doing to to have that technology.
But what we were able to do with things like open compute were get
it to become the industry standard. And so now you have, like, all these other, you know, cloud service platforms that, you know, basically use open compute. And because of that, the supply chain is standard around standardized around our designs,
which means that it's, like, way more supply, way cheaper to produce. We've saved billions of dollars, and the quality of the stuff that we get to use goes up. So alright. That's like a win win. But
I I think in order for this to work,
we do a lot of open source stuff. We do a lot of closed source stuff. I'm not like a zealot on this. I think open source is is very valuable, but I also think it sort of makes sense for us because of our position in the market. And the same for AI. I mean, around long Okay. This is where we were going with this. Yeah. It's,
you know, similar deal.
You know, we wanna make sure
that we have access to a leading
AI model. Right? I think just like we wanna build the hardware so that we can build the best social experiences for the next twenty years,
I don't think that you know, for for us, it's like we've just been
we've been through too much stuff with the other platforms to to fully depend on anyone else, and we're a big enough company at this point that, like, we don't have to. Right? We can build our own core technology platforms, whether that's gonna be AR glasses or mixed reality or AI. So I think that's somewhat of an imperative for us to to go do that. But, you know, these things are not like pieces of software that are monolithic. They're ecosystems. They get better when other people use them. So
for us, there's a huge amount of good,
and it philosophically lines up with where we are. We're like mean, look. I I I definitely,
you know, firsthand have a lot of experiences.
We were, like, trying to build stuff on mobile platforms. The platforms are just like, no. You can't build that. Okay. That's
frustrating. Can we take a real quick detour? What's up? I really wanna ask you something. We can take a detour. Okay. Yeah. You took a detour. We're gonna take a detour.
Help us with our research here.
The eve of the IPO.
This is quite a detour. Wait. Quite a detour. David, you I know. Did you just grabbing the wheel here. Is this connected,
or did you just decide that it was your turn to talk?
I'm
sorry. I was, like, really, like, wound up. I know.
Open source and AI. We're back. We're talking about I back.
Think it's related. I do. I really genuinely do.
Facebook on mobile is HTML five. Uh-huh. In '20
Yeah. '12. Maybe 2012.
Yeah.
I wanna ask you what you were thinking going into the IPO with Facebook on mobile being HTML five
and
what happened to IPO at a $100,000,000,000 market cap over the next three months.
You have a 50% drawdown
probably because of that. Mhmm.
But I I guess the related question to what we're talking about now is
how much is that informing
your approach here
with AI? It was a pretty different different technical
issue.
So, I mean, our legacy was building on web for websites,
and we were very used to building one thing and being able to continuously deploy it, and it fits with our iteration style and all that. So now all of a sudden, this, like, app model comes along,
and it's like we have to build, like,
ones for each phone.
And, like, you have to go through approval
to get it shipped. Do we have to wait, like, weeks before it can ship? It's like, this sucks.
So we're like, alright. We have an idea. Let's build this platform where we can get
a web based platform.
So you basically build a native shell, and you build this web based platform in it. And we'll be able to just update our apps
every day, and we'll ship one thing once, and we'll update our apps across Android and iPhone and
BlackBerry and Windows Mobile and all the stuff that existed at the time because it it hadn't gotten consolidated yet.
And,
we're like, that's gonna be that's
we're like, basically, whatever downside we are gonna have from not having the most native thing, we're gonna make up for in velocity and by having, like, way more of our energy focused on one platform.
Well, we were wrong.
It turned out that, you know, having the native integration was actually
critical for having the interactions feel good.
And
and that so we basically went through this period where we had to go rewrite our apps from scratch.
And that coincided
with
mobile growing dramatically.
And mobile, we didn't have any revenue
because
it may seem like it's pretty similar, but there's a very big difference on. On desktop, you basically have the app and you have a column on the side that we could put ads. And on mobile, we needed to figure out what does it mean to put ads into
the experience. Right? So Like, let's be clear. The feed ad had not been invented. Yeah. Like, unit of our team did. Yeah. And it's and, like, advertisers have, like, specific formats that they like working with. And the idea that we were just gonna be like, alright. Now your ad is gonna look like a feed story was a big challenge for advertisers.
And the idea that now for people, you were gonna have this organic feed that was the most important part of the product, and now we're just gonna start putting ads in it was a challenge for for for the people who are using the product.
So
we needed to figure that out, and we need to get the apps to be better. And
we basically took I think it must have been like a year or something where we're just like, look. We're gonna pause feature development of the company
because it's hard enough to do a rewrite. Right? So if you if you look at, like, the history of the tech industry,
there are all these examples like Netscape and, you know, these things that, like, they tried to do a rewrite. They needed to reestablish their technical platform, and they also tried to add features. They basically just, like, never terminated.
So that's a real risk, right, when you're, like like, completely changing your underlying platform that there's you're you're gonna miss it.
It's like, alright. We gotta minimize the chance that that happens, so we're not gonna ship any new features. We're just going to rewrite it, make it faster.
But
while we're doing this,
like, basically, mobile is growing. So the percent of our traffic that is monetizable
is shrinking because web is basically shrinking and and mobile is growing. Your only business model. Yeah. And I was like, alright. Like And you're now recently You know, but thing is it was actually pretty clear what we needed to do. You know, I think strategically,
a lot of the time, it's
it's somewhat harder to know what to do when you're winning. Like, when stuff is going well, it's like, is the next move to, like, go from winning to winning more?
But when you're losing, it's usually pretty clear what you have to do. Yeah. And and I think a lot of it is, like, is is just do you have the pain tolerance to go do it? So a lot of this was like, alright. The team was like,
Well, we're going public and, you know, it's investors really aren't gonna like this if we are, like, not making
money for a year and a half. And it's like, well,
a year and a half is short in the grand scheme of things. Let's do this. And we did it, and it was a painful year and a half. And then we came out of that, and we were in great shape. So I I I think, like, people inside the company had felt a lot better sooner because it was pretty clear to people that we were doing the right thing.
And they they knew that we were executing in a responsible way
and and and basically focused, we're doing the right thing. But I I think it's actually when
you have something that's working well
and you're on one local hill and you need to jump to another hill, that's the stuff that's really culturally hard.
But this one I think was it was it was not fun. There have been a period a series of periods throughout the company that were not
I don't know. Not not the not the most fun periods, but
although that one in retrospect is, you know, looks pretty good in retrospect. It's like not that bad. It's like your market cap only got cut in half for a year and a half. Like,
great.
Great.
Yeah. I'll take that.
Anyway,
where were we? Maybe
can I so can I connect David asked, hey, can you help us with our research?
Can I follow that thread that you just said, hey, that that one wasn't so bad?
There's been a lot of amazing things the company has done. There's also been, like, a lot of criticism.
If you were to be self critical of your own company, of your own creation,
of all the criticisms that have happened over the years, which do you believe is the most legitimate and why?
I mean, there's so many things that we've messed up
that there are many criticisms
that are legitimate.
But if that was a year and a half mistake,
I think, you know, one of the things I reflect on over the last, like, ten years or so was, you know, the the political environment just changed dramatically. Right? It's like before 2016,
there was, not a month that went by except for maybe this IPO period where the sentiment about the company was
anything but positive.
And then after 2016,
after the election, basically, there was not a month for a while where the sentiment about the company was positive.
And
we I I think so much of this stuff is
correctly understanding your place in the world and in history.
And, you know, so I think, you know, we talked about before how it's like
I I think we understood that we are a technology company
and that you have to be a technology company to build this kind of thing. I think we understood that we're not a social network company. We're a human connection company, and that will take different forms over time.
The political environment, I think I I didn't have much
sophistication
around, and I think I just fundamentally misdiagnosed the problem. So I I I I think that there was this basic challenge,
and there were a lot of things. I don't wanna simplify this too much. I mean, there were there were a lot of things that we did wrong. There are some things that we did right. But I think one of the things that I I look back on regret
is
I think we accepted
other people's view of
some of the things that, you know, they were asserting that we were doing wrong or were responsible for that I don't actually think we were.
And
now that's
it's
there are a lot of things we did mess up and we needed to fix.
But
I I think that there's this view
where
when you're a company
and someone says that there's an issue, I think the right instinct is to, like, take ownership for it. Right? Say like, okay. Like, maybe maybe it's not, like, maybe it's not all our thing, but we're gonna fully own this problem. We're gonna take responsibility for it. We're gonna fix it. But when it's a political problem,
I actually think a lot of the time
sometimes there there are people who are operating in good faith who who are identifying a problem that wants something to be fixed, and there are people who are just looking for someone to blame.
And I I think to some degree, if you
if if you take responsibility
for things because you think it's a corporate crisis, not a political crisis,
And your view is like, okay. I'm like, I'm gonna take responsibility for all this stuff. Like, if people are basically, like like, blaming social media and the tech industry for, like, all these different things in society. And if we're saying, okay. We're gonna really, like, do our part to go fixes, like, this stuff. I know there were a bunch of people who just took that and were like, oh, you're taking responsibility for that? Let me, like, kick you for more stuff.
And and, honestly, I think we should have been firmer about and and clearer about which of the things we actually
felt like we had a part in and which ones we didn't. And my guess is if the IPO
was a year and a half mistake,
I think that the political miscalculation
was a twenty year mistake.
And I so it started in 2016,
and I think that
we have been working super hard to fix a lot of issues
and to figure out kind of what the right tone is for navigating what is a very kind of fraught political dynamic across both the country and multiplied across all these places around the world. And I think we've
sort of found our footing on and, like like, what what what the principles are, like, where we think we need to improve stuff, but where,
you know, where people make allegations about the impact of the tech industry or our company, which are just not founded in any fact that I think we should push back on harder.
And I think it's gonna take another ten years or so for us to kind of fully work through that cycle before our brand and all of that is back to kind of the place that it maybe could have been if I hadn't messed that up in the first place.
So but look, in the grand scheme of things, twenty years isn't that bad either.
And we'll get through it,
and and I think we'll come out stronger.
But I do think that is one of the
kind of more interesting critiques that I think people got. And we get critiques on both sides on that. There are people who don't think we've taken enough responsibility.
But but I I think certainly there's one line of critique, which is, you know, you you kind of bought into too much of the stuff that you shouldn't have.
And,
yeah, I think it's gonna take us a long time to dig out of that. Do do you have a reasonable framework at this point for like, okay. Here's the stuff where I feel like we actually do wanna take responsibility for it. Here's the stuff where like, no, that's not our fault.
Yeah. I mean, at this point, I think a lot of the stuff has been studied.
So,
I mean, I don't wanna go rehash all the different things,
but
but I I think at this point, there's been, like, years of academic research on a lot of these things. And, you know, part of the thing that's challenging is and one of the things that we learned is we actually should be trying to support more academics and doing more of this research ahead of time. Because, when you get to a point where you're being kind of accused of something, you're not super credible just standing up yourself and being like, I don't think we did this one.
You know, it's like so I but but what has worked over time is like, you know, you do the research in advance and and you get kind of third party academics,
respected folks who get to debate all these different issues.
And then it's like, oh, no. Actually, like, the evidence just does not show that social media is correlated with this kind of harm at all. So I I I think that, like or it's
you know? So I I think that's
I think that that's it's it kinda cuts it cuts both ways.
To me, this brings up another topic we wanted to talk about with you,
and you just, you know, you said, that's twenty years isn't that long.
I'm young. Wait. You're you're young.
We are. This is the advantage of being a college dropout founder. Yeah. No. It is. Yeah. You start when you're 19, it's like, hopefully, we have more than twenty years. And hopefully, have, like, buffet duration. Yeah. I don't know. You Hopefully. You set up the company
in a, especially at the time, truly unique way,
where
you can operate the company
and
take that, you know, take that approach.
Do you mean supervoting shares? Supervoting shares is like, you know, the technical aspect. There are I think there are a bunch of technical aspects to it that we're not gonna get into in this conversation. But effectively,
you can take that perspective in a way that if you are a
CEO,
non founder, you know, without a structure that you've set up, you you just can't.
And I think, you know, in doing all the research for this, a thesis we've developed is that, like, that is just one of the core fundamental advantages that Meta has.
So as you were setting up the company, you know, when you were so young, even when you went public, you were so young. Like, why was that so important to you?
Well,
in 2006,
Yahoo wanted to buy the company for a billion dollars, and everyone on our management team wanted to sell it. And the board tried to fire me,
and everyone and basically, in the next year, everyone else on the management team left because they I hadn't done a good job communicate I mean, I don't wanna blame them. I I, like, I hadn't done a good job communicating the long term vision because I didn't I wasn't thinking about that at the time. I, like, wasn't thinking in terms of this as a company. I was like, this is a great project. It's awesome. Like, a lot of people like what we're doing. I think this will probably continue for a while. I think it's gonna be pretty important in the world.
But I didn't I didn't, like, know how to think in terms of,
you know, like, term financial plans or
Like, a case to them why it would be worth more than anybody. Yeah. Yeah. Or or just like, look. We're doing this for the long term. We're not planning on selling the company. So it's like, without having made that case, it was understandable
that basically Yahoo comes around.
A lot of people, it's like, is like all their startup dreams come true. You gotta take this offer.
Because I I, like, I just wasn't in a place where I had the sophistication to basically
articulate a lot of the stuff around
where we were going longer term.
It probably wasn't super confidence inspiring to them when I was like, hey. I think we should turn this down because we're gonna do this. So
so after that,
I was like, alright. Well, I don't wanna get fired
from my own company for wanting to build it. So let's try
to set up a governance structure that makes it somewhat harder to do that.
So
Wow.
Learning through suffering.
Wow.
And being
very cash generative very early such that you had a very real going concern on your hands and you just didn't didn't need to cut off your arm and sell it to someone in order to Yeah. Build your business. Yeah. I think this is a fundamentally
misunderstood
thing about Oh. Facebook
the startup.
It is the prototypical
startup.
You are the iconic startup founder. Of this century.
And there's a lot of people that want to start a startup for a lot of the glamorous reasons of starting a startup.
You
hated
being a startup and wanted to stop being a startup as fast as possible and be a, like, going concern.
Yeah. I mean, I think we're having a lot more fun now.
It's a good to work on all this stuff. It's awesome. Who what is your advice to all these founders who sort of romanticize the idea
of of starting a company and kind of I don't know. Raising all this money Obviously, starting a company is not bad. Right? I mean, I I think that there's different schools of thought on how to do it. I think some people think, okay. I wanna go start a company, so I'm gonna, like, go dive into this idea.
And I just think that that's a little bit dangerous
because there's this issue, which is you have to be able to be nimble and pivot around until you can, like, figure out what works. Right? It's, I mean, part of the reason why I didn't think Facebook was gonna be the company early on was because when I was in school, I built, like, 12 different things.
Right? That I were just things that I wanted to exist, and it's like, alright. This is fun. Okay. Let's build another thing. It's like, This one's fun. People are still using that. I'll, like, help up keep this one. But I had, like, a bunch of other ideas for stuff I was gonna build too. So I just, like I didn't I didn't, like, know how to think about what a company was gonna be, and then it's so
I think there's something about maintaining flexibility
that's that's helpful.
You know, once you hire a bunch of people,
you know, it's a lot easier when you can just have meetings in your own head about what direction you wanna go in.
And it's like and there's a lot less pride and, like, people dug in when you're just like, okay. I'm gonna change direction. It's like, you know, people haven't, like, invested their ego and, no. We were going in this direction. And, like, now I must be convinced. It's like, nah. I just so I I I do think that that's a thing where you wanna, like, keep things lean and and be able to do that. And that's one of the reasons why we try to get the company back to being, you know, whatever the
leanest version of a large company is that we can we can be. But
but I do know there's something to that where it's like,
it's obviously it's not it's not super fun
not having the resources to do what you wanna do,
but I think it also is problematic
to have
more people working on something
than you should have for the stage that it's at. Because then the people who are working on it don't have the agency to actually, like, make the changes and do the things that they need to, which is less fun, and then you can't attract the best people to go work on those things because it's less fun. And so I I do think you got it. You just have to dial it right. You're spending a gazillion dollars on Reality Labs
and It's a technical term. It's not making that much money. So I'm gonna I'm gonna play mark back to you Sure. Of it's not appropriate to have all these people and resources working on things for more than the stage warrants. Mhmm. I'm being a little facetious here, but I'm curious how you why you categorize it differently.
I mean,
I think some of the stuff by the time you're at the scale that we're at
is also just about, like, what do you wanna do over the next ten to twenty years, and what do you think are gonna be important? And, you know, we were talking about, like, making your own luck and all that and how you know, it's like, I think there were some broad strokes
that we can have a sense of where things are going. I'm pretty sure glasses
and kind of, like, holographic presence and AR is going to be a completely ubiquitous
product. Right? It's just like everyone who had phone before replaced it with a smartphone, and then a lot of more people got smartphones.
If all we get is all the people in the world where you have glasses upgrading to glasses that have AI in them,
then, like, this is already going to be one of the most successful products in the history of the world. So and I think it's gonna go a lot further than that.
So I know there's that. There is the thing about controlling our own destiny.
It's strategically valuable.
You know, we did this calculation or estimate at some point where it's like, how much money do we lose from our core family of apps to the various, like,
taxes that the platforms have to, like, when they tell us we can't run the ad business the way that we think we should be able to, when they tell us we can't ship certain products so that way, like, people use the things less or like them less.
And
I I it's hard to exactly estimate it, but I think we might be, like, twice as profitable if we own the platform or something. So I think from that perspective,
that's worth a lot. Just from, like, a pure, like, dollars perspective, which is not primarily how I come at this stuff, but even, like, now I've learned a thing or share since the Yahoo days. And now at least I'm able to, like like
I might not be able to convince the all the investors that we should be investing to the extent that we are in Reality Labs if I didn't control the company, but at least I can sort of articulate a case for why I am confident that it's going to be good over time.
But
for me, it's always been way more about
the product experience
and
what you can enable and build. And, you know, one of the shifts and this is sort of like a value shift
over time is, you know, one of the things that
you know, when some of the early Oculus guys used to say to me that there's a difference between building good things
and awesome things.
And and, like, good is
good. Right? It's helpful. It's useful.
It's things that people use on a day to day basis because it adds something to their lives.
But awesome is different. Awesome is
uplifting
and inspiring
and
just, like, leads you to just be way more optimistic about the future
and is is just like this uplifting thing about humanity.
And so I I think a lot of what we've done with social media so far is is very good.
Where we've got we've built these products.
More than 3,000,000,000 people use them
on a, you know, near daily basis. Right? It's like It's like 3,300,000,000
on a daily. Yeah. Yeah. So yeah. And so that's
and they use it because it is useful in their life.
Right? And in in all these different ways. I mean, obviously,
people vary. People use it for different things, but
it's useful.
And it helps people and it it helps people stay connected. It helps people build businesses. It helps people form communities.
It's good.
There aren't that many people on a day to day basis who get out of bed and are like, fuck yeah. Social media. Like, it's like that's right? It's I mean, that's not like
I I kinda think for the next for my next stage, right, for the next stage of the company, the next, like, 15,
I want us to build more things
that are awesome in addition to things that are good. And I think that they both matter,
but
to me, this is like a little bit of a kinda the next stage of what I want our company to stand for and be. And
so I think
a lot of the Reality Lab stuff that we're doing is gonna be in that bucket.
A lot of the AI stuff that we're doing, I think, is gonna be in that bucket. There are a bunch of things in the apps that are gonna be in that bucket too.
New apps too. But
but I don't know. I think that there's there's just something that's, like, fundamentally pretty good about that. And that's maybe it's also just like where I am in my life. Right? I'm I'm like like to think I'm young, a little older. Right? But it's but it's like
I I I do think that at this point,
you know, it's not just a meta thing. Also, you know, in my, like, personal life, a lot of what I personally value is doing things that are inspiring with people who I find inspiring.
Alright? And, you know, so there's the personal version of this. It's like I get to work on,
you know, interesting
science problems with, like,
Priscilla and my wife and, like,
and a bunch of awesome people. You know, I get to,
you know, design shirts with, like, some of the best fashion designers in the world. Right? It's like I am Statues.
Yes. Sculpture of of my wife. Bring back the Roman tradition of designing
sculptures of people you love.
I'm not at all being facetious. Like Yeah. No. It is. No. I but I mean, think Daniel Arsham is, like, a really talented guy, and I was like, that's a person who I'd love to work with on something. Let's go find a project. You know, building you know, I have one of my side projects is, you know, we have this cattle ranch in Kauai,
and I'm trying to
if we can raise the highest quality beef in the world. And there's like all this stuff. It's like starts with like it's it's awesome. We got we got the steer,
chunk. He's like he's
he's just the man. He's the man. We're having a hard time
keeping him on the ranch because
we every time we put him in a steel enclosure and he sees a female cow, he busts through the steel enclosure.
But I feel like that's the kind of bull that you want to make the highest quality beef in the world.
And
we're just working with, you know, trying to do really high quality awesome things with awesome people. That's like if if that's what I get to do for the next
fifteen or twenty years then like
it's gonna be a good fifteen or twenty years. Was was there a moment like, what changed?
Like, when did this become your priority and why? I can't it feels so radical that it's how could it have possibly been gradual,
or was this just like Mark all the time
and we just couldn't see the real Mark? I don't know. I I think that there might have been something around the way the company shifted in operations around COVID.
I mean, it's like the COVID,
like, all these tech companies went
remote temporarily,
and it was an interesting period to just, like,
get some more time, like, a step back. I'm a pretty introverted person, and I do think it's
I need to be careful where, like, I get a lot of value and energy and ideas from being around other people, but I also need time with myself.
And
with COVID, I I kinda got that, and I it was a time of reflection
where I I was able to think about this stuff. And we were also going through this very difficult
political time in the country,
and and our company was at the center of a lot of those things. So think that that that was a cause of a bunch of reflection.
And then I think that a bunch of the things that we'd
spun up earlier, but at smaller scale.
Right? So the RealityLab stuff that we started
in 2014,
really.
The fair stuff around, you know, fundamental AI research
that
yeah.
2012,
'13? 2012, 2013,
some sometime around then. These things, they they kinda got started,
and they were growing.
And it was it kind of reached this moment, which is like, are we gonna double down on this and do this, or are we gonna kind of, like, do this as a hobby?
And I was like, no. I think we should do this.
Right? So, I mean, this is I think that this, like, this is gonna be a really important part of what we do. And we had to make a really important set of decisions, but we knew it was gonna be really painful,
you know, to
go double down on those things and build out the AI infrastructure that we needed to and
scale up some of the Reality Lab stuff. And I knew that a lot of the investors would hate it
at least in the short term before it's clearly the right thing to do.
The
what I didn't know was that at the time, I thought they were gonna not like it,
but I thought it was gonna be okay because I didn't think there was also gonna be a recession at the same time.
So that like, really, it's like I mean, look. Like like, you learn who you are through challenges.
Right? It's like we we had, a really you know, it's like, okay. Like, losing half of your market cap is
is quaint compared to losing 80% of your market cap or whatever it was. Right? It's you know? So
but so, I mean, these are all intentional decisions. Right? It's like, I mean, there are a lot of conversations that we had, which are like, should we go forward with this?
And
the answer that I came out with is yes. I this is what I believe in. I think this is gonna be important for the world.
I think it's gonna work over time.
We're no stranger to going through painful periods.
In some ways, it makes the company better.
Let's do it.
We're
we're start we're
starting to enter
looking at the clock like
conclusion
lightning round territory. Alright. I've had one like lurking in the back of my head. Yeah.
It makes sense to me that you would rebrand the company something that is not Facebook given how broad the family of apps was
that you've got. Let's imagine you were going to rebrand it today. You've got AI going on, you've got AR going on, you've got VR going on.
Would you pick the name Meta if you were going to rename the company today? I like Meta. It's
a good name. You know, finding good short names
I mean, this actually was a thing that we talked about for a while because it was pretty clear that
if Facebook is continuing to grow in importance in the world, which I think a lot of people don't appreciate, and it's kind of mind boggling at the scale that it's at. But the the others, I mean, when you know, we went through a period where it's like we had Facebook and a handful of small apps. So now we have, like, you know, four apps that have a billion people or more using them, you hopefully in the next few years, five with threads if that continues scaling.
And
this was a conversation that we had a bunch. Right? So does it make sense for the name of the company to be one of the apps as the other apps as as it's really becoming a family of apps?
And
it was important to me
this was also coinciding with a lot of
a lot of the challenges that we were having, right, the political brand challenges, different things. And a lot of people were proposing that from the perspective of running away from the Facebook brand. Right? They they were like, oh, well, like, is the does the Facebook brand have issues? Do we need a new brand? And I was like, we don't run away from that.
Right? It's like, like, it might make sense one day to not have Facebook be the lead brand for the company because we do so many different things,
but I'm only gonna do this
when we come up with a brand that is going to be evocative of the future that we're trying to build because we run towards something. We don't run away from things.
And when we got to Meta, then I was like, alright. We're here. And it was around the time when we were doubling down on the investment and where there was all the controversy.
And it's like, look. Like, if we're doing this, we're gonna lean into this, and we're gonna do it. So let's do it.
And if I were to make the case to you, I feel
the core competency of Meta
is
you are able to discover
products in the world. You have great ideas, you work on them, you discover interesting products,
and you, Mark, are not someone who wants to define yourself by anything. You want to have like your
hands on a bunch of great controls and maximize your degrees of freedom, see where the world's going and then have the best freaking spaceship possible to go maneuver your way over there.
It seems like I would pick a brand that almost doesn't pigeonhole me into a specific future. I might be looking for something that's more like, look, I I wanna maximize my
maneuverability.
Yeah.
I get it.
But
I don't know. That's just I I
we align around a vision and a mission of what we're trying to do, and we run towards it. That's always been how we've operated.
Yeah. And in many ways, doing what I just suggested would kind of be running. It's like, well, we don't believe in it that much. And you're like, no. We Yeah. No. I I mean, we're we're a company that, like, puts a flag down around what we're doing, and we're gonna go do it. It's like, put a wall in front of us, there's gonna be a mark shaped hole in the wall.
Speaking of lightning rounds and mark shaped holes,
you are accelerating
what used to be your annual challenges.
I was I mean, when when we were all kids and and we didn't know each other, I mean, I was so inspired
you would do your annual challenges. You would post about them. And I was like, wow. That's, like, pretty damn cool.
And then we all get a little older Mhmm. And
we all have kids on the stage now.
And we all have companies on the stage now. And there's Some large, some small. The demands on your time, like, it
for me, especially, I think lots of people, that's like
that space
gets sucked,
and you have expanded it.
How?
What do you mean? Well, you used to do annual challenges, and I feel like now doing weekly challenges.
You're you're designing t shirts. You're making sculptures. You're raising a cap on Yeah. Just like I'm trying to trying to do inspiring things.
I mean, it's yeah. I don't know.
I'm also really competitive.
Who's your competition for this? What do you mean?
Oh, I was just thinking about about about other things that I'm doing. I'm like, what if I what if I start doing? I, like, got into all these, like, more extreme sports and fighting and stuff. And, like, I don't know. I mean, there's there's we face a lot of competition and a lot of different aspects of what we do.
Some of there's the social media competitors. There's the platform competitors. I think Apple is a bigger competitor than people realize. They kinda think, hey, they're doing a different type of thing, but
I don't know. I think over the next ten,
fifteen years, I I
think that kind of like battle over ideological
battle over what should the architecture be of the next set of platforms. Are they gonna be the closed integrated Apple model that Apple has always done, which, again, I mean, like,
there's multiple
there are multiple good ways to build things. Right? So I I think if you look at the different generations of computing,
PCs, mobile, they've all had sort of a closed integrated version
and an open version.
And
the thing that I think there's just a ton of recency bias around is because iPhone basically won.
You know, I I know that there are more Android phones out there, but I mean but iPhone is sort of like the intellectual leader and by far, like, has all the Let's take it as a conceit. Yeah. Yeah.
I know there's the recency bias, and probably, like, almost everyone here has an iPhone. And, right, I think that because of the recency bias,
there's sort of this view that's like, oh, no. This is just the superior way to do things.
But I I I don't actually think that's a given. But in in the PC era, Windows with the open ecosystem was the leader.
And
part of my goal for the next ten,
fifteen years, the next generation of platforms
is to build the next generation of open platforms and have the open platforms win.
And I think that that's gonna lead to a much more vibrant tech industry. Now there are advantages
of of doing a closed and integrated model. I think Apple will have a place for sure. I expect them to be our primary competitor. And I think it will not be
just a product competition. I think it's like a, in some ways, very deeply values driven and ideological competition around what the future of the tech industry should be and, you know, how open
these platforms, whether it's things like llama and AI or,
the glasses or different things should be for developers, like an individual, someone getting started in their dorm room like me to not have to ask for permission to go build the next set of awesome things.
I've got a closing question here.
Please. Thank you.
So so we have a lot of builders in the audience tonight, a lot of founders.
We're in
probably the most interesting technology environment since
the early mobile days in terms of opportunity.
It's been twenty years, you may have to go back a little bit, but what advice do you have for founders today on something that's different than trying to pattern match Mark Zuckerberg from 2004
given we live in a different world today?
Yeah. I don't know. I mean, just do something that you care about. And
and, I mean, if if you're trying to run our strategy, try to learn as quickly as you can. But but I mean, if there's like, I think part of what I'm trying to say is
I think there are different ways to build stuff. Right? It's like our way worked for me
and our team, you know, it's
different things have clearly worked for other companies.
I don't know.
One one day my daughter went to we went to it took her to a Taylor Swift concert and
she she was like, you know, dad, I kinda wanna be like Taylor Swift when I grow up.
Hell, yeah. I was like, you you can't but you can't. That's not available to you.
I was like, but and she and she thought about it, she's like, alright.
When I grow up, I want people to wanna be like August Chan Zuckerberg.
And
I was like,
hell yeah.
Hell yeah. So I I think that that's
yeah. I don't know. I I think it's like, look. Learn from other people's
successes and failures, but do your own thing.
I love that. Love that. Well Well,
that
is the perfect place to leave things.
We
made you something that
you already have a very amazing,
well designed shirt.
I hope you have room in your life for more than one. I do. I
used to only wear one type of shirt. Now I've
moved on.
So David and I made you a custom one of one
shirt
that represents tonight. Thank you.
It is size Zuck.
So no one else can, you know, there's they can never be made again. And we've got these coordinates on the back. The first one GPS coordinates. GPS coordinates.
The first one represents Kirkland House where you wrote the first line of code for Facebook, and the second one is Chase Center. Awesome. So thank you for joining us here tonight. Joining us.
Wow.
What a night.
Absolutely crazy. I mean, Mark has done
many interviews this year, both with other podcasts and in in traditional press,
but that felt different. If for no other reason than it happened live in front of a 6,000 person audience in an arena, but I wasn't expecting it to feel that different.
Yeah. I mean, it was,
I I think, the wildest experience of my life being up there.
I I don't even know what else could compare. Pretty insane.
Well, listeners, as you may have noticed, thanks to our sponsors, this conversation was uninterrupted.
And we do wanna reflect a little bit and share some of our thoughts and our you know, how we're feeling looking back on this conversation with you. But first, we do wanna share a word on Statsig and Crusoe.
So Statsig.
So Mark's most famous catchphrase is probably move fast and break things. But like we talked about with him, despite instilling this in Facebook's engineering culture, Facebook
doesn't actually break very often. How? Certainly not anymore. And really relative to its peers, not even throughout its past. Yep. Facebook invested hundreds of thousands of engineering hours in a set of internal tools.
These tools let any engineer set up new metrics, ship new features, and measure performance in real time. That means anyone could just ship a new feature, but they always had metrics to use as guardrails,
and they could always roll back a feature if anything broke. Oh, man. There are legendary stories of engineers shipping features, like, in their first week at boot camp as interns or new hires at Facebook and Meta over the years.
And you might wish that you could do the same on your team and build products like they build products at Facebook. Ship fast, make database decisions, iterate rapidly, but you need the right tools. So you're stuck. Right? Well, enter Statsig.
Statsig has built the world's first product acceleration platform, combining tools like feature flags, product analytics, experimentation,
and observability all in one place, helping you move faster and make smarter decisions.
Even better, Statsig was literally founded by an ex Meta team who wanted to help everyone build like the best and bring these same tools to the market. Today, many of the world's leading tech companies rely on Statsig, including OpenAI,
Microsoft, Notion, Anthropic, Figma, plus thousands of early stage startups. David, every time we work with Statsig, this list gets more and more impressive. Like, now it is purely,
you know, a list companies.
It's awesome. So if you're ready to accelerate your growth and democratize product building at your company, go to statsig.com/acquired.
And when you get in touch, just tell them that Ben and David sent you. Thanks, Statsig. And now for Crusoe. Crusoe is a climate aligned cloud platform built specifically for AI workloads and powered by clean energy. They build and operate GPU data centers powered by low cost stranded energy that otherwise goes to waste or worse gets emitted as greenhouse gases. It's crazy. When Acquired first started working with Crusoe, this was a cool idea.
Now they're, like, one of the most important companies in the world with an AI cloud that's superior to the hyperscalers
and a whole bunch of the largest companies in the world trusting their AI infrastructure to them. Yep. It's easy to think about AI as like, oh, that's a bunch of PhDs at meta or OpenAI or Anthropic or whatever, you know, tinkering with model weights in their office and hitting compute.
But there's this whole other industrial
side of AI that's everything that happens after you press go on the model training, and that's energy, cooling, construction, all the physical infrastructure behind AI. And Crusoe is powering that by producing or repurposing huge amounts of power. We are talking gigawatts in their development pipeline, which is nuclear reactor amounts of power for less cost than other providers and with zero or, in some cases, actually negative emissions.
It's super important. If you listen to Zuck and others talk about what the bottleneck to AI progress is, it's actually not compute, but energy,
and Crusoe is solving that problem. It's just an awesome company. We are super proud to work with them and to be investors in the company. You can work with Crusoe either through their managed AI cloud, which is great for startups and enterprises who wanna complete end to end platform for AI, or directly as a data center customer, which several of the largest companies in the world are now doing. So just go on over to crusoe.ai/acquired.
That's crusoe.ai/acquired,
or click the link in the show notes and tell them that Ben and David sent you.
Okay. So David, reflections on this conversation.
The biggest thing that I kept thinking going into the night,
as we're talking with Mark, as we're talking with his team, you know, people kept saying, we don't really do this. Mark doesn't really do this. And I kept thinking, yeah, he kinda does, because he's done all these podcasts this year. And He does Facebook Meta Connect. Like, he's done big events before, of course. Right. And he does a good number of in person press interviews too. It's not like he doesn't talk to the traditional press even though that has kind of become a narrative. It's not really true. However,
Mark has not done an external
several thousand person
live
thing like this. This is a very unusual format
and kind of an uncomfortable one even for you and I. Like, we're so used to stopping, starting, being thoughtful in our answers, and, like, this is a show. You're performing. There are no breaks. There's no retakes. Yeah. Right. But Mark and, like, all the meta execs really embraced it. A bunch of the executive team came.
Like, they took off this whole day and actually some stuff we did the night before too. Bunch of the board members were there. A lot of people important to Mark were there. His family came. They made it an event. Right. I thought this was a big deal for us. I was kinda shocked to the degree that Mark
also thought it was a big deal for him. Which is super cool. Totally agree. That's one. I was also surprised and delighted that he was willing to dive into history with us. Yes. We totally did not expect that. He's so, like, usually so maniacally focused on the future. And in our conversations
to prep with him before the event,
he was like, I think of you guys as a history podcast. You know? Let's talk about the future. I'm like, okay. Okay. But we wanna ground it in history. And he showed up and was totally ready to go back. And I think that made the talking about the present and the future even better. Totally. Because you could create these through lines. I mean, as funny as your interjection on let's go back to the IPO moment was, it opened up the door to have, like, these comparative moments to is what Meta doing today. Is that similar to
something that you've done over and over? Should we be watching for a pattern here, or are you very different today than you were historically?
The way that he was talking about that stuff
on stage
felt very authentic,
and
I just haven't heard him speak in that way before, at least publicly. I think it was also a great way to let us all get a window into his psyche,
which kinda brings us to
another point, which is like, he is still in it. Oh. What other
founders of companies like that? I mean, there's Jensen.
Who else? You know, it's the two of them. Yeah. I think the casual observer
to Meadow might observe, like, you know, Mark's been running it for twenty years, and most of the time, these founders kind of, like, go and do something else. They become executive chairman, or they, like, stepped into a board role, or they own 4% of the companies. There's some pattern there. And for Mark, I think it was plain as day on stage.
He is more in it than ever, and I don't think he thinks he's, like, halfway through his journey. Like, I don't think he's twenty years in. At 40, I'll be done. I don't get that sense either. I think meta is his
vehicle
by which he wants to live his entire life,
and he wants to make things with this group of people that he wants to make, period. And that is kind of the product strategy.
I got chills when he said the twenty year mistake,
and then I got
even more chills when he said, but twenty years actually isn't that long.
Yeah. It's a pretty illustrative comment.
Totally.
I was appreciative that he engaged with us on the be critical of the company. Because honestly, I was asking that as research for when we inevitably do our meta episode. I think he gave us a regret,
not a criticism, but we were live on stage in front of 6,000 people, and it's it's not really the right format for that. Yep. Totally. That said, obviously, very interesting answer. I think related, though, back to the he's still in it.
In some sense,
Reality Labs, you could look at, like, his blue origin.
A 100%. It's just within Meta. I'm glad you caught this too.
Other
big tech CEO founders
have their moment running the company. They take a board role. They go do another thing. And oftentimes, it's big and important for the world and capital intensive.
And Mark is doing that, but inside Meta with Reality Labs.
I think it'll be super fascinating twenty to fifty years from now to reflect back and say, what were the unintended or perhaps intended outcomes of commingling
multiple huge swings under one corporate umbrella versus having people who are either CEO of multiple companies concurrently or, you know, step down from one to run the other? For Mark, I kinda feel like, again,
Meta is his vehicle
for executing the things that he thinks are awesome products.
And, of course, it's not just awesome products, but, like, things that could let him have more control
over his universe. He's clearly a guy who who values,
having a lot of degrees of freedom and and doesn't like being boxed in. I loved your, turn based strategy game of Oh. Get more turns, learn more on each turn. Like, oh, man. Starcraft,
pro player one zero one there. Yes. But it'll be interesting to see the the knock on effects of having Reality Labs in the meta organization versus as a new venture.
Totally.
All of that brings me to, you know, frankly, just my biggest overwhelming takeaway from the whole experience,
which is,
Ben, you've developed a really
great
research interview question that you use on all the sources that we talk to now, which is you ask, what is the one thing that is most misunderstood
about this company, this organization, etcetera? And everybody at Meta for years
always would say Mark.
And I never totally
got it until this evening.
He's both a singular individual himself, but it's not just that.
It's that
a true superpower of the company is that it is
architected from top to bottom
legally,
financially,
organizationally
Culturally.
Culturally
to
reflect and amplify
his immense
strength.
Which
I think is probably true of, like,
Apple Steve Jobs, Bill Gates Microsoft,
Nvidia Jensen.
Yes. But we are right up close to the ways in which Meta is a sort of, an amplifier. Almost like it's a way for you to take the gain on Mark's output and turn it up, you know, 10,000 x.
Yes. And I think what was so striking about it to me versus you're absolutely right. All those other companies.
It is generally accepted in the public narrative about Apple under Steve Jobs, about Nvidia under Jensen, that that is the case. I don't think it is about Meta and Mark. I don't think people understand that. I didn't understand that until this experience. Are you saying Meta is still very much a Mark Zuckerberg production?
I'll see myself out.
Well put. There we go.
Well, listeners, thank you so much for joining us on this journey. Come talk about it with us in the Slack, acquired.fm/slack.
We'd love to hear all of your thoughts as well. Join our email list, acquired dot f m slash email.
That will let you basically know every single time a new episode drops, or when we are doing something like Chase Center again, to be the first to know about that. God, if we ever do something like that again. We've got a merch store. Check it out on acquired.fm.
We've got ACQ two, our second show where we are always interviewing
earlier stage companies than Meta, but where we think there are great insightful conversations with founders and CEOs.
And David, I know you've got some thank yous. One last thing. Final thank yous. Thank you to Mark. Thank you to basically the entire Meta executive team who helped with the evening. Thank you to Hermes for dressing us, which was my favorite Easter egg of the night. Yes. So fun. Thank you to Jamie Dimon, JPMorgan Chase, and JPMorgan Payments for making it all possible. It was truly a dream come true, and that is because of our incredible partnership.
Indeed, it was. Well,
listeners,
we'll see you next time. Yes. In a couple of weeks with the full show. We are pumped to drop it. We'll see you next time.