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Acquired Live presents an exclusive interview with Mark Zuckerberg. Dive into Meta's journey, future vision (AI & AR), strategic challenges, and Zuckerberg's unique leadership. Explore company culture, open-source contributions, and the evolution of social connection.
Published September 18, 2024
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Mark Zuckerberg
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SPEAKER_02: So how many interviews with Mark do you think you watched before tonight? SPEAKER_01: Oh, to prepare? SPEAKER_01: Yeah. SPEAKER_01: 30 to 40. SPEAKER_01: The best ones are the '04 to '06 vintage, but they're also different. SPEAKER_01: It's almost like every three to four years is a new era that is markedly different from all the previous eras.
SPEAKER_02: And I think we might have witnessed the beginning of a new era right in front of us on stage. SPEAKER_01: Oh, yes. SPEAKER_01: Absolutely. SPEAKER_02: All right. SPEAKER_02: Should we do this? SPEAKER_02: Let's do it.
SPEAKER_04: Who got the truth? SPEAKER_04: Is it you? SPEAKER_04: Is it you? SPEAKER_04: Is it you? SPEAKER_04: Who got the truth now? SPEAKER_04: Is it you? SPEAKER_04: Is it you? SPEAKER_04: Is it you? SPEAKER_04: Sit me down. SPEAKER_04: Say it straight. SPEAKER_04: Another story on the way. SPEAKER_04: Who got the truth?
SPEAKER_01: Welcome to the fall 2024 season of Acquired, the podcast about great companies and the stories and playbooks behind them. SPEAKER_01: I'm Ben Gilbert. SPEAKER_01: I'm David Rosenthal. SPEAKER_01: And we are your hosts. SPEAKER_01: Listeners, we have something very special for you today. SPEAKER_01: Our interview with Mark Zuckerberg from Acquired live at Chase Center. SPEAKER_01: Mark is the iconic founder CEO of our time. SPEAKER_01: And this conversation was just too good to hold on to any longer. SPEAKER_01: So we are getting it out quickly before we release the full video of the entire show.
SPEAKER_02: Which, speaking of the full show, was utterly amazing. SPEAKER_02: We had surprise appearances from Jensen Huang, Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, and of course, we had the one and only Mike Taylor, the artist who sings, who got the truth, performing live. SPEAKER_02: It was incredible. SPEAKER_02: We've got basically a whole film production that's now happening behind the scenes. SPEAKER_02: With another 90 minutes of content beyond just this Mark interview. SPEAKER_02: We should have that out in the next couple of weeks. SPEAKER_02: So stay tuned for that.
SPEAKER_01: First, though, a huge thank you to our partners this season. SPEAKER_01: You know our presenting partner, JPMorgan Payments.
SPEAKER_02: And we are also pumped to have two more great returning sponsors this season. SPEAKER_02: 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. SPEAKER_02: You can find out more about them at Statsig.com/acquired. SPEAKER_01: Sounds a lot like Meta. SPEAKER_01: And Crusoe, which is the world's best climate-aligned AI cloud and data center operator that is leading the industrial buildout of AI. SPEAKER_01: Find out more about them at Crusoe.ai/acquired.
SPEAKER_01: As always, come discuss this afterwards with us in the Slack, acquired.fm/slack. SPEAKER_01: And if you want to be notified when every new episode drops, sign up at acquired.fm/email.
SPEAKER_02: All right. SPEAKER_02: One more thing before the interview. SPEAKER_02: 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. SPEAKER_02: Our partnership this year has been absolutely incredible and gone, I think, way beyond what either of us ever could have imagined.
SPEAKER_01: Yeah. SPEAKER_01: 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.
SPEAKER_02: Yep. SPEAKER_02: And the payments business specifically, like most things at JPMorgan, is the largest and most trusted payments provider in the entire world. SPEAKER_02: They move $10 trillion a day. SPEAKER_02: That's almost 25% of all U.S. dollar payment flows in the global economy. SPEAKER_02: Pretty much every single company that we cover on Acquired works with JPMorgan Payments in some way. SPEAKER_02: You can never outgrow them. SPEAKER_02: 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.
SPEAKER_01: 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. SPEAKER_02: Yeah, that was super cool. SPEAKER_01: Yep, so that you can learn which may be the right fit to solve your payments challenges and grow your business.
SPEAKER_02: The other thing we got to say is, like, Ben and I really worked side-by-side all year with their incredible team to make this evening happen. SPEAKER_02: And we really got to know them. SPEAKER_02: Max, Umar, Dustin, Hannah, Vinny, Nick, Amy, Carly, and so many others. SPEAKER_02: It's like we were one team. SPEAKER_02: You guys rock.
SPEAKER_01: 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. SPEAKER_01: And what happened at Chase Center is really the physical embodiment of that. SPEAKER_02: Thank you guys for being the best partners we could ever imagine. SPEAKER_02: 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. SPEAKER_02: And he's just been the driving force behind all of this. SPEAKER_02: Without him, Chase Center wouldn't have happened. SPEAKER_02: We're so grateful for our incredible relationship with you and all of JPMorgan.
SPEAKER_01: Yep. SPEAKER_01: So, please enjoy our conversation with Mark Zuckerberg and to take us in, the chairman and CEO of JPMorgan Chase, Jamie Dimon.
SPEAKER_00: Hello, Acquired listeners. SPEAKER_00: Welcome to the Chase Center and to Acquired Live. SPEAKER_00: I'm Jamie Dimon, chairman and CEO of JPMorgan Chase. SPEAKER_00: I'm happy to kick off the show tonight and welcome all of you to one of my favorite arenas. SPEAKER_00: 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. SPEAKER_00: For many of them, just like many of you in the crowd, we're thrilled to call you friends and partners at the firm. SPEAKER_00: Sorry I couldn't be there in person tonight, but I hope everyone enjoys the show. SPEAKER_00: Ben and David, over to you. SPEAKER_00: Mark.
UNKNOWN: Hey. SPEAKER_00: It's great to have you here. SPEAKER_03: It's great to be here. SPEAKER_03: You know, 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 going to have to apologize for and I'm going to say tonight.
SPEAKER_02: Nah, just kidding. SPEAKER_03: I don't apologize anymore.
SPEAKER_01: We've noticed.
SPEAKER_02: Well, okay, wait, wait. SPEAKER_02: Here's the question. SPEAKER_02: If you knew what you knew today. SPEAKER_02: What's up? SPEAKER_02: If you knew what you know today, would you have started Facebook?
SPEAKER_03: Oh, God. SPEAKER_03: I mean, look, I think... SPEAKER_03: Coming out hot, David. SPEAKER_03: Yeah, no, I mean... SPEAKER_03: He started it. SPEAKER_03: Literally. SPEAKER_03: I think there's something to Jensen's original sentiment, which is that the entrepreneurial journey is very challenging. SPEAKER_03: 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. SPEAKER_03: And the volatility, everything is just getting thrashed so much. SPEAKER_03: And it's not... SPEAKER_03: You know, you obviously look back, you have all these fond 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. SPEAKER_03: So, I mean, I do think that there's something to what Jensen was saying that I thought was very honest. SPEAKER_03: And that when I heard him say it the first time, I was like, yeah, I get that. SPEAKER_03: Right? SPEAKER_03: It's like, 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. SPEAKER_03: 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.
SPEAKER_02: Well, on that topic, we have a lot to talk about. SPEAKER_02: Yeah. SPEAKER_02: I think this is actually very appropriate. SPEAKER_02: First, we have to ask you about your shirt and what you're wearing.
SPEAKER_03: Yeah. SPEAKER_03: You know, I started working with people to design some of my own clothes. SPEAKER_03: And so I figured, you know, look, we're going to design eyewear. SPEAKER_03: We're going to design other stuff that people wear. SPEAKER_03: Let's get good at this. SPEAKER_03: And so this one, I actually, I worked with this great fashion designer, Micah Miri, and he's got a great story. SPEAKER_03: So I wouldn't be surprised if you're doing one of these with him one day. SPEAKER_03: And this one is, so I've kind of started working on this series of shirts with some of my favorite classical sayings on them. SPEAKER_03: So this one is pathematos, learning through suffering. SPEAKER_03: It's a little family saying and also Aeschylus.
SPEAKER_02: Was that your family saying growing up or is that your family now? SPEAKER_01: Oh, yeah. SPEAKER_02: I'm just doing my sister saying.
SPEAKER_01: Well, no, let's pull that thread. SPEAKER_01: Yeah. SPEAKER_01: No pun intended, I promise. SPEAKER_01: What does learning through suffering mean to you?
SPEAKER_03: Well, I think you learn what matters to you and what's important and kind of your place in the world. SPEAKER_03: Through repeatedly hitting your head against different challenges. SPEAKER_03: And I mean, I think that that is sort of, that's the journey, right? SPEAKER_03: I mean, that's the entrepreneurial journey. SPEAKER_03: It's also, I think, part of the beauty of building things. SPEAKER_03: And, but, you know, this is something that Jensen talks a lot about too, right? SPEAKER_03: It's like, I feel like you, you know, when you go to start a company, you, you know, everyone kind of writes down what they would like their values to be. SPEAKER_03: But values are not what you write down on the wall. SPEAKER_03: It's like your lived behaviors. SPEAKER_03: And you only really learn what you care about when you have to make hard trade-offs and face challenges. SPEAKER_03: So, yeah, you learn the most important things through facing challenges.
SPEAKER_02: Well, speaking of facing challenges, we want to talk about a number of those because we counted, by our count, I think you have faced more existential challenges than any meaningful company in history through your first 20 years. SPEAKER_02: First, though, it's a dubious distinction. SPEAKER_01: We will make our case to you of why and enumerate them. SPEAKER_01: You're still here. SPEAKER_03: But first, I kind of 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? SPEAKER_03: That one really resonates with me, too.
SPEAKER_02: So, thanks to you guys, I got a pair of these this summer. SPEAKER_02: And I genuinely love them. SPEAKER_02: Tell us the story of how these came to be.
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, so, thanks. SPEAKER_03: I'm excited about them, too. SPEAKER_03: So, you know, we, at Meta, we've been building social experiences for 20 years now. SPEAKER_03: And originally, it took the form of a website, then mobile apps. SPEAKER_03: But the thing is, I never thought about us as a social media company. SPEAKER_03: We're not a social app company. SPEAKER_03: We are a social connection company, right? SPEAKER_03: I mean, we talk about what we're doing is building the future of human connection. SPEAKER_03: And that's not only going to be constrained over time to what you can do on a phone, right, on a small screen. SPEAKER_03: So, when you think about, you know, when we got started, okay, we were like a handful of kids. SPEAKER_03: You know, we weren't able, we didn't have the resources at the time to go define whatever the next computing platform is. SPEAKER_03: 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. SPEAKER_03: So, we didn't really get to play any role in developing that platform. SPEAKER_03: And one of the big themes, I think, for the next chapter of what we do is I want to be able to build what I think are sort of the ideal experiences. SPEAKER_03: 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? SPEAKER_03: So, I think what you would like to have is not a phone that you look down at that kind of takes your attention away from the things and the people around you. SPEAKER_03: You know, not just a small screen. SPEAKER_03: I mean, I think what you ideally have is glasses. SPEAKER_03: And through the glasses, there's one part of it where the glasses, they can see what you see and they can hear what you hear. SPEAKER_03: And in doing so, they can be kind of the perfect AI assistant for you because they have context on what you're doing. SPEAKER_03: But then part of that is also that the glasses can project images, basically like holograms, out into the world. SPEAKER_03: And that way your social experiences with other people aren't constrained to these little interactions you can have on a phone screen. SPEAKER_03: You know, in the not-so-distant future, you can imagine, because you guys have demoed some of the stuff that we've done, like a version of this where we're having a conversation like this, but, you know, maybe, like, one of us isn't even here. SPEAKER_03: They're just like a hologram and we have glasses. SPEAKER_03: And it really, there's the question of delivering a realistic sense of presence. SPEAKER_03: 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, you know, we're very physical beings, right? SPEAKER_03: People like to intellectualize everything, but a lot of our experience is very physical. SPEAKER_03: And this physical sense of presence that you are with another person doing things in the physical world is something that you're going to 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. SPEAKER_03: It's going to be, I think, the ultimate digital social experience. SPEAKER_03: And I think it's also going to be the ultimate incarnation of AI because you're going to have conversations where it's, like, all right, there's some people. SPEAKER_03: It's, like, maybe, like, I'm physically here. SPEAKER_03: There's, like, a person. SPEAKER_03: You're, like, a hologram there. SPEAKER_03: There's an AI that is kind of embodied as someone is there. SPEAKER_03: And the glasses will enable this. SPEAKER_03: So, okay, so how are we going after this, building this? SPEAKER_03: This is, like, some huge project. SPEAKER_03: We've been working on it for 10 years. SPEAKER_03: And there are a lot of different challenges to solve to get there. SPEAKER_03: There's, like, you have to build a novel display stack, right? SPEAKER_03: It's not, these aren't just screens, like, the kind that are in phones. SPEAKER_03: There's this long lineage. SPEAKER_03: They're connected to the screens that have been in TVs and monitors and things for a long time. SPEAKER_03: There's been this massive optimization of the supply chain. SPEAKER_03: There's, like, brand-new display stack around holographic displays that basically need to get created. SPEAKER_03: And then they need to be put into glasses. SPEAKER_03: They need to be miniaturized. SPEAKER_03: And 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.
SPEAKER_01: Operate on new novel RF protocols. SPEAKER_03: Yeah, it's, like, okay, it's a pretty big challenge. SPEAKER_03: So, we're, like, all right, let's go try to go for the big thing, right? SPEAKER_03: And we've been working on that for a while. SPEAKER_03: And we're pretty close to being able to show off kind of the first prototype that we have of that. SPEAKER_03: And I'm really excited about that. SPEAKER_03: At the same time, we also came at it from this lens of, all right, so that's, like, a lot of new technology that needs to get developed, SPEAKER_03: a lot to pack into a form factor, because the glasses have to be good-looking, too. SPEAKER_03: So, what if we just constrain ourselves to, like, we're going to work with a great partner, Essilor Luxottica. SPEAKER_03: They make Ray-Ban. SPEAKER_03: They make a lot of the iconic glasses. SPEAKER_03: Let's see what we can fit into glasses today and make them as useful as possible. SPEAKER_03: And, you know, I actually, I kind of thought when we were getting started with those that it was almost like a practice project for, like, for the ultimate AR.
SPEAKER_01: Which, let's be clear, that's what you thought Facebook was. SPEAKER_03: That's true. SPEAKER_03: That's true. SPEAKER_03: Yeah, it did.
SPEAKER_01: Like, for your real startup someday. SPEAKER_03: Yeah, no, this is, yeah, let's go on a tangent there for a second. SPEAKER_03: So, I started Facebook in school, came out to Silicon Valley with Dustin and a handful of people working on it at the time. SPEAKER_03: And we did that because Silicon Valley is where all the startups came from. SPEAKER_03: And I remember we got off the plane, we were driving down 101, we're like, wow, eBay, Yahoo, like, this is amazing. SPEAKER_03: All these great companies. SPEAKER_03: One day, maybe we'll build a company like this. SPEAKER_03: And I'd already started Facebook. SPEAKER_03: And I was like, surely the project that we're working on now is not a company.
SPEAKER_01: And Facebook had, like, some scale at this point. SPEAKER_03: Oh, no, no, it was a great project. SPEAKER_03: I just didn't have the ambition to turn it into a company at the time. SPEAKER_03: That just kind of happened. SPEAKER_03: But, anyway. SPEAKER_03: Yeah, I mean, a lot of hard work, obviously. SPEAKER_03: But I just, at the time, I was kind of like, yeah, no, I don't think this is it.
SPEAKER_02: Well, that's your answer of would you have started. SPEAKER_02: You actually didn't try to start Facebook.
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, I didn't know. SPEAKER_03: So, yeah, so, I mean, the glasses, though, you know, we thought that this was, like, all right, we want to get working with Essilor Luxottica so we can start building more and more advanced glasses. SPEAKER_03: And then, you know, they're really good. SPEAKER_03: They look good. SPEAKER_03: And then AI, like, the massive transformation in AI.
SPEAKER_01: So, for listeners, let's just be really clear. SPEAKER_01: You guys shipped this product that I'm holding before LLMs, or at least before the public consciousness was aware of, you know, the ChatGPT moment. SPEAKER_01: And these were not manufactured and shipped as an AI device. SPEAKER_01: That came later when they were already in market.
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, a few years ago, I would have predicted that AR holograms would have been available before kind of, like, full-scale AI. SPEAKER_03: And now I think it's probably going to be the other order. SPEAKER_03: So, now it's like, all right, great. SPEAKER_03: Well, this is actually a great product because it's got the cameras so it can see what you see. SPEAKER_03: It's got the microphone. SPEAKER_03: It's got the speakers. SPEAKER_03: You can talk to it. SPEAKER_03: I remember calling Alex Himmel, the guy who runs the product group.
SPEAKER_01: That's exactly the story. SPEAKER_03: And I'm like, hey, you know, I think we should probably pivot this and make it so that Meta AI is the primary feature of it. SPEAKER_03: And then, like, I remember I came in the next week and they'd build a prototype of it on Tuesday. SPEAKER_03: And it was like, all right, good. SPEAKER_03: Yeah, no, this is good. SPEAKER_03: This is going to be a very successful product.
SPEAKER_02: He told us a much more high-stakes version of that story. SPEAKER_01: He was like, so I was on the highway with my kids and I get this call on a Saturday from Mark and 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?
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, that tracks. SPEAKER_03: That's what I just said. SPEAKER_03: Sounds right.
SPEAKER_01: Okay, so thank you for opening up with a story. SPEAKER_01: The question that I would like to try to answer tonight is why has Meta worked as spectacularly well as it has? SPEAKER_01: 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. SPEAKER_01: And yet that is not the way it looks today.
SPEAKER_02: MySpace, Twitter Gen 1, Instagram, Snapchat, WhatsApp, TikTok, SPEAKER_02: ATT, you could put in its own whole category, and now ChatGPT. SPEAKER_02: That's nine.
SPEAKER_01: And, 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 going to go away. SPEAKER_01: You very much haven't gone away. SPEAKER_01: What do you think is the through line of the DNA of the company that allows you to keep winning?
SPEAKER_03: I think it's that we're a technology company that is focused on human connection, SPEAKER_03: not a specific type of app. SPEAKER_03: So, like, we never thought about ourselves as a website or a social network or anything like that. SPEAKER_03: For me, building this kind of glasses to enable the future of people being able to feel present with another person no matter where they actually physically are is the natural continuation of the kind of apps that we build today. SPEAKER_03: But it depends on how you define what you are. SPEAKER_03: And then you need to figure out, well, how do you give yourself the competence to actually go do that? SPEAKER_03: And that's where I think being a strong technology company comes in. SPEAKER_03: 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. SPEAKER_03: And the reason why we can build all these things is because we have a really strong technology foundation. SPEAKER_03: And some of that is just me and how I think about stuff. SPEAKER_03: I mean, I was an engineer before I got started. SPEAKER_03: I mean, I, like, mostly took, like, systems engineering type classes when I was in college. SPEAKER_03: So, you know, you talk about, like, Friendster and MySpace and all the scaling challenges they had doing the graph calculations of, like, all right, do you know this person? SPEAKER_03: Should you show them their page?
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, actually, can you take us back? SPEAKER_02: And, like, we want to ask you the story of that time. SPEAKER_02: I mean, it seems quaint now, Friendster, MySpace, but you study computer science, graph networking, social graphs, that is a very, very difficult computational calculation.
SPEAKER_03: So I think it's a combination of a product question and a technology question. SPEAKER_03: I think you can define the product in such a general way that the technology becomes basically impossible to solve. SPEAKER_03: So you want to have a smart product definition, but then you want to be competent and better than everyone else at the technology. SPEAKER_03: Technology, and I think that that's something that we've held ourselves to and build a good organization around. SPEAKER_03: And it's one of the things that 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. SPEAKER_03: Right? SPEAKER_03: Like, 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. SPEAKER_03: And it's like, all right, if that's your team, then you're not a technology company. SPEAKER_03: So I think one of the things that I've always been pretty careful about is, I actually, like, want, like, a lot of the people on our management team, it's, like, you know, splits mostly people running either of these big product groups who come up through different technical pathways at the company. SPEAKER_03: And I think that there's, like, a balance, right? SPEAKER_03: It's like, you don't want everyone to be an engineer because there's other things that matter, too. SPEAKER_03: But if you don't have enough of your, kind of, share of the company as engineers, then you're not a technology company. SPEAKER_03: And I think that that also is important to the board. SPEAKER_03: And I think just, like, in terms of how you weigh decisions and culturally things inside the company matters a lot. SPEAKER_03: But I think that that's one of the things that has been really fundamental, right? SPEAKER_03: 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. SPEAKER_03: The product experiences that we build on top of that are an implementation, and they matter. SPEAKER_03: And for that, I think, we also, I think, are a pretty curious and learning-focused organization SPEAKER_03: where, you know, I view the product strategy SPEAKER_03: 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 the people we're trying to serve, right? SPEAKER_03: So, like, I define our strategy as if we can learn faster than every other company, we're going to win. SPEAKER_03: We're going to build a better product than everyone else because we're going to get it out first or early. SPEAKER_03: We're going to have a good feedback loop. SPEAKER_03: We're going to get a bunch of feedback. SPEAKER_03: We're going to learn what people like better than other people. SPEAKER_03: And then over time, by the time you get to, you know, whether it's version 3 or 4 or 5, I mean, they're not even discrete versions because we ship so frequently. SPEAKER_03: It's, you just, you learn faster. SPEAKER_03: So, I think that's basically the formula. SPEAKER_03: Be a technology company. SPEAKER_03: Build good foundation. SPEAKER_03: Like, learn from what people are kind of focused on in the world and iterate as quickly as you can.
SPEAKER_01: In one of my research calls to prep for this, someone described you as a master strategist, which, like, we all sort of acknowledge that at this point. SPEAKER_03: I mean, except for, like, all the stuff that I just thought was not going to be that important that ended up actually being the most important. SPEAKER_03: But you're very generous.
SPEAKER_01: But that's the thing. SPEAKER_01: Part of it is, like, okay, you want to set up the game so that way you optimize, you create your luck.
SPEAKER_02: This is what Jetson told us. SPEAKER_02: Like, the apple's going to fall from the tree in some direction. SPEAKER_02: And if you just set up the game, that you have a hand close enough to catch it.
SPEAKER_01: The comment that someone made to me was, the reason Mark is such a good strategist is because he plays the company as if it's a turn-based strategy game. SPEAKER_01: And he just makes sure he gets more turns than anybody else. SPEAKER_01: And he makes sure that he learns more from each turn than the next player does. SPEAKER_01: Do you feel like that encapsulates, like, Meta's product development? SPEAKER_01: But it does kind of feel like the way that you make bets is, like, well, if we have great engineering, then that can kind of take care of the speed part. SPEAKER_01: That's, like, you know, many iterations or multiple at-bats. SPEAKER_01: And then the...
SPEAKER_03: Well, great engineering and speed and iteration are actually two different values. SPEAKER_03: 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 competence around that. SPEAKER_03: But, I don't know, there's a certain personality that goes with kind of taking your stuff and putting it out there before it's fully polished. SPEAKER_03: And, look, I'm not saying that our strategy or approach on this is the only one that works. SPEAKER_03: I think in a lot of ways, we're, like, the opposite of Apple, and clearly their stuff has worked really well, too. SPEAKER_03: Right? SPEAKER_03: But, I mean, they take this approach. SPEAKER_03: It's, like, we're going to take, like, a long time. SPEAKER_03: We're going to polish it. SPEAKER_03: We're going to put it out. SPEAKER_03: And maybe for the stuff that they're doing that works, maybe that just fits with their culture. SPEAKER_03: But for us, I think that there are a lot of conversations that we have internally SPEAKER_03: where you're almost at the line of being embarrassed about what you put out. SPEAKER_03: because you, it's, you know, obviously not in the sense that it's, like, you know, you want to put stuff out early enough so you can get good feedback. SPEAKER_03: You obviously want to test things that are reasonable hypotheses. SPEAKER_03: So, if it's, like, so ineffective, then you're not testing a good hypothesis. SPEAKER_03: That doesn't work. SPEAKER_03: But I do think a lot of the conversations that we have 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. SPEAKER_03: And I do think that, like, you want to really have a culture that values shipping and getting things out and getting feedback more than needing always to get great positive accolades from people when you put stuff out. SPEAKER_03: Because I think, like, if you want to wait until you get praised all the time, you're missing a bunch of the time when you could have learned a bunch of useful stuff and then incorporated that into the next version you were going to ship.
SPEAKER_01: And it's just about making sure that 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. SPEAKER_03: Well, I would like to hope that it's not damaging to the brand. SPEAKER_03: But...
SPEAKER_01: Well, but innately, it is. SPEAKER_01: Like, when you're like, oh, I feel bad because I shipped a product that wasn't good enough, you're sort of... SPEAKER_03: Yeah, no, I don't want to overstate it. SPEAKER_03: I mean, we don't ship things that we think are bad, but we also don't take... SPEAKER_03: And we want to make sure that we're shipping things that are kind of early enough that we can get good feedback to see what they're going to be most used for. SPEAKER_03: Like, I think a lot of the AI stuff that we're building now, for example, it actually... SPEAKER_03: You know, it's pretty clear that AI is going to be transformative for a lot of different things. SPEAKER_03: It is actually less clear what are going to be the initial use cases for a lot of these things that are super valuable. SPEAKER_03: And so, okay, part of it is like, okay, you put something out, you want to kind of collect feedback and what people are actually... SPEAKER_03: What it's... SPEAKER_03: You know, where it's resonating. SPEAKER_03: Now, if what you put out is bad, then you're not going to collect good data because people aren't going to use it for anything because it sucks. SPEAKER_03: So... SPEAKER_03: But I do think that you have hypotheses for what people might really want to use it for, and they're not all going to be right, and you want to kind of go early enough on that as more.
SPEAKER_01: So I'm building to this question of... SPEAKER_01: To you, is product creation SPEAKER_01: an act of invention or discovery? SPEAKER_01: 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? SPEAKER_01: 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?
SPEAKER_03: Does it have to be one or the other? SPEAKER_03: I mean, I think it's a combination. SPEAKER_03: I think you're basically taking some kind of values, SPEAKER_03: 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 going to resonate the most with people. SPEAKER_03: Right? SPEAKER_03: I think if you just do the latter, then I think you just don't have enough conviction to see through hard things. SPEAKER_03: 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. SPEAKER_03: So I think both probably matter. SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
SPEAKER_01: 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 stories format, and suddenly the whole world is like, oh my god, that is the way that we all, that's the social interaction mechanism, and that's, like, a pretty pure discovery SPEAKER_01: where you have products that have stories, they perform very well, SPEAKER_01: that's been discovered. SPEAKER_01: 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 gonna freaking will this thing into existence because I have an idea of the way that I want the world to be. SPEAKER_01: I'm not really, like, asking for that much feedback. SPEAKER_01: I'm putting it in the world.
SPEAKER_03: Well, it's a combination. SPEAKER_03: I mean, I think that there's, SPEAKER_03: there's certainly a lot of things that we've invented or created for the first time. SPEAKER_03: I mean, like, in 2006, when we built the first version of News Feed, right, the, like, before that, social networks were basically profiles, and then we were like, hey, like, people actually kind of want to 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. SPEAKER_03: And today, it's, like, hard to imagine any social product without a feed. SPEAKER_03: So I think that that's obviously, there's some of these things that are sort of seminal, I don't want to 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 the, in the world. SPEAKER_03: You know, I, you know, we're not embarrassed about learning from things that other people, like, discovered that were good first, and, you know, and then we build the better version of it. SPEAKER_03: And, I mean, SPEAKER_03: I think that that's, you know, no one company is going to invent everything, right? SPEAKER_03: I think if you don't invent anything, then it's hard to, to kind of be a successful company. SPEAKER_03: But, but I do think that there's a mix of this. SPEAKER_03: There are more smart people outside of your company than inside your company. SPEAKER_03: 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.
SPEAKER_02: Which speaks to the thesis of Facebook as a technology company. SPEAKER_01: Meta. SPEAKER_02: Meta is a technology company. SPEAKER_02: We'll get to that later. SPEAKER_02: Ben and I have been having a conversation. SPEAKER_02: I want to take this to open source SPEAKER_02: and open source technology and its importance to you. SPEAKER_02: 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 SPEAKER_02: beneficiary of open source technology in the modern world. SPEAKER_02: And I'm curious if you would agree with that and if you would comment on your relationship to open source.
SPEAKER_03: I think almost all of the major technology companies at this point are primarily using open source stacks. SPEAKER_03: So, yeah, I mean, I don't know, we wouldn't have been able to get built without open source. SPEAKER_03: I think probably that's true for any new company that's been created since, like, I don't know, the late 1990s or something. SPEAKER_03: For us, open source has been important and valuable. SPEAKER_03: I mean,
SPEAKER_02: You were the first big company built on the LAMP stack. SPEAKER_03: Yeah. SPEAKER_03: Yeah, no, and it's great. SPEAKER_03: It makes it super easy to develop stuff quickly and iterate quickly. SPEAKER_03: But we've also had an interesting relationship with this because sequentially as a company we came after Google. SPEAKER_03: So Google was the first of the great companies that built this distributed computing infrastructure. SPEAKER_03: So they came first. SPEAKER_03: They were like, all right, let's keep this proprietary because it's a big advantage for us. SPEAKER_03: And then we're like, all right, we need that too. SPEAKER_03: But we built it and then we're like, okay, not an advantage for us because Google already has that. SPEAKER_03: So we might as well just make it open. SPEAKER_03: And by making it open, then you basically get this whole community of people building around it. SPEAKER_03: So it wasn't going to help us compete with Google for any of the stuff that we were doing to have that technology. SPEAKER_03: But what we were able to do with things like Open Compute were get it to become the industry standard. SPEAKER_03: So now you have all these other cloud service platforms that basically use Open Compute. SPEAKER_03: And because of that, the supply chain is standardized around our designs, which means that it's 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. SPEAKER_03: So, all right, that's like a win-win. SPEAKER_03: But I think in order for this to work, SPEAKER_03: we do a lot of open source stuff, we do a lot of closed source stuff. SPEAKER_03: I'm not like a zealot on this. SPEAKER_03: I think open source is very valuable, but I also think it sort of makes sense for us because of our position in the market. SPEAKER_03: And the same for AI. SPEAKER_03: I mean, around Llama.
SPEAKER_02: Okay, this is where we were going with this. SPEAKER_03: Yeah, it's a similar deal. SPEAKER_03: You know, we want to make sure that we have access to a leading AI model, right? SPEAKER_03: I think just like we want to build the hardware so that we can build the best social experiences for the next 20 years, I don't think that, you know, for us, it's like we've just been, we've been through too much stuff with the other platforms to fully depend on anyone else. SPEAKER_03: And we're a big enough company at this point that like we don't have to, right? SPEAKER_03: We can build our own core technology platforms, whether that's going to be AR glasses or mixed reality or AI. SPEAKER_03: So I think that's somewhat of an imperative for us to go do that. SPEAKER_03: But, you know, these things are not like pieces of software that are monolithic. SPEAKER_03: They're ecosystems. SPEAKER_03: They get better when other people use them. SPEAKER_03: So for us, there's a huge amount of good and it philosophically lines up with where we are. SPEAKER_03: We're like, I mean, look, I definitely, you know, firsthand have a lot of experiences. SPEAKER_03: We were like trying to build stuff on mobile platforms and the platforms are just like, nah, you can't build that.
SPEAKER_02: Okay. SPEAKER_03: That's frustrating.
SPEAKER_02: Can we take a real quick detour? SPEAKER_03: What's up? SPEAKER_02: We can take a detour.
SPEAKER_03: We can take a detour. SPEAKER_02: Okay.
SPEAKER_02: You took a detour. SPEAKER_02: We're going to take a detour. SPEAKER_02: Help us with our research here. SPEAKER_02: The eve of the IPO.
SPEAKER_03: Okay. SPEAKER_03: This is quite a detour.
SPEAKER_02: Wait. SPEAKER_02: Quite a detour.
SPEAKER_01: David, you, SPEAKER_02: I really am grabbing the wheel here.
SPEAKER_01: Is this connected or did you just decide that it was your turn to talk? SPEAKER_03: I'm sorry. SPEAKER_03: I was like really like wound up.
SPEAKER_02: I know. SPEAKER_03: Open source and AI. SPEAKER_02: We are right in Mark's wheelhouse. SPEAKER_02: I think it's related. SPEAKER_02: I do. SPEAKER_02: I really genuinely do.
SPEAKER_01: Facebook on mobile is HTML5. SPEAKER_01: Uh-huh. SPEAKER_01: In 2012. SPEAKER_01: May 2012. SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
SPEAKER_02: Yeah. SPEAKER_02: I want to ask you what you were thinking going into the IPO with Facebook on mobile being HTML5 and what happened to IPO at $100 billion market cap over the next three months you have a 50% drawdown. SPEAKER_02: Probably because of that. SPEAKER_02: Uh-huh. SPEAKER_02: But I guess the related question to what we're talking about now is how much is that informing your approach here with AI?
SPEAKER_03: I think it was a pretty different technical issue. SPEAKER_03: 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. SPEAKER_03: So now all of a sudden this app model comes along and it's like we have to build like different ones for each phone and like you have to go through approval to get it shipped and we have to wait like weeks before it can ship. SPEAKER_03: It's like, this sucks. SPEAKER_03: So, we're like, all right, we have an idea. SPEAKER_03: 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 hadn't gotten consolidated yet and we're like, that's going to be, that's, we're like, basically, whatever downside we are going to have SPEAKER_03: from not having the most native thing we're going to make up for in velocity and by having like way more of our energy focused on one platform. SPEAKER_03: Well, we were wrong. SPEAKER_03: It turned out that, you know, having the native integration was actually critical for having the interactions feel good 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 SPEAKER_03: because it may seem like it's pretty similar but there's a very big difference. SPEAKER_03: 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,
SPEAKER_01: Right? SPEAKER_01: Like, let's be clear, the feed ad had not been invented yet. SPEAKER_01: Like, the ad unit of our time.
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, and it's, and like advertisers have like specific formats that they like working with and the idea that we were just going to be like, all right, now your ad is going to look like a feed story was a big challenge for advertisers SPEAKER_03: and the idea that now for people you were going to have this organic feed that was the most important part of the product and now we're just going to start putting ads in it was a challenge for the people who are using the product. SPEAKER_03: So we needed to figure that out and we needed to get the apps to be better SPEAKER_03: and we basically took, I think it must have been like a year or something where we were just like, look, we're going to pause feature development to the company SPEAKER_03: because it's hard enough to do a rewrite, right? SPEAKER_03: If you look at like the history of the tech industry there are all these examples like Netscape and all 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. SPEAKER_03: So that's a real risk, right, when you're like completely changing your underlying platform that you're going to miss it. SPEAKER_03: It's like, all right, we've got to minimize the chance that that happens so we're not going to ship any new features. SPEAKER_03: We're just going to rewrite it, make it faster. SPEAKER_03: But while we're doing this, SPEAKER_03: like basically mobile is growing so the percent of our traffic that is monetizable is shrinking because web is basically shrinking and mobile is growing.
SPEAKER_02: And that's your only business model. SPEAKER_03: Yeah, and I was like, all right,
SPEAKER_01: like, SPEAKER_03: And you're now SPEAKER_01: recently quarterly reporting. SPEAKER_01: but the thing is
SPEAKER_03: it was actually pretty clear what we needed to do. SPEAKER_03: You know, I think strategically a lot
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