The Mark Zuckerberg Interview
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So how many interviews with mark do you think you watched before tonight?

I want to prepare A A thirty to forty. And the best ones are the o ford o six vintage. But they're also different that I most like every three to four years as a new era that is markedly different from all the previous areas totally.

And I think we might have witness the beginning of a new era right in front of us on stage.

Oh, solution.

I, should we do this?

Let's do IT. Easy, you wait, you wait, you who got to? See me down. right? On the.

Welcome to the fall twenty twenty four season of acquired the podcast about great companies and the stories and playbooks behind them.

Bert, David.

and we are your listeners. We have something very special for you today. Our interview with mark zuck burg from acquired live at chatter.

Mark is the iconic founder C E. O of our time, and this conversation was just too good to hold onto any longer. So we are getting IT out quickly before we release the full video of the entire show.

which speaking in the full show was utterly amazing. We had surprised appearances from jenson huang, dan ej, and of course, we had the one and only mike tailor, the artist who things 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 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, J P. Morgan payments.

and we are also pumped to have two more great returning sponsors this season, stati g, the world's first product acceleration platform that thousands of companies from OpenAI to series a startups rely on. The ship fast, learn more and makes mark decisions. You can find out more about them at stats. Dom slash required .

sounds a lot like matter and crucial, which is the world's best climate aligned A I cloud and data center Operator that is leading the industrial build out of A, I find out more about them, a crude da I slash acquired, as always. Come discuss this afterwards with us in the slack acquired data m slash slack. And if you want to be notified when every new episode drops, sign up at acquired dot F M slash email.

All right, one more thing before the interview. We need to say a huge, huge thank you to the entire J. P. Morgan payments team for securing the chase center for this for orchestrating the entire evening. Our partnership this year has been absolutely incredible and gone and of us ever could imagine yeah .

for those who don't know about jp more in 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. yeah.

And the payments business specifically, like most things of J P. Morgan, is the largest and most trusted payments provider in the entire world. They move ten trillion dollars a day.

That's almost twenty five percent of all U. S. Dollar payment flows in the global economy.

Pretty much every single company that we cover on acquired works with J. P. Morgan payments. In some way, you can never outgrow them. They partner was started up, and small companies like us, like you would be been all the way up to the largest enterprises in the four five hundred.

You'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 was super ool so that you can learn which may be the right fit to solve your payments chAllenges and grow your business.

The other thing we got to say is like then and I really work side by side all year with their incredible team to make this evening happen. And we really got to know the max, ur, dustin, hana v nick, amy, carleon, so many others. It's late. 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's duc, jp morning payment cmo, who's a long time listening to the show and a good friend of ours. And he's just been the driving force behind all of this.

Without him, j center wouldn't happen. We're so grateful for incredible relationship with you and all of J. P. Morgan.

yes. So please enjoy our conversation with mark socker berg and to take us in the chairman and CEO of J. P. Morgan chase. Jamie diamond.

hello, required listeners. Welcome to the chase center and to required live i'm Jamie diamond, chairman and co. Jay Morgan chase. I'm happy to kick off the shelter night and welcome all of you to our my favorite is it's been a great partnership all year between japan Morgan payments and acquired storytime and education about some of the greatest companies in the world.

For many of them, just like many view in the crowd, were thrilled to call your friends and partners of the firm. Sorry, I couldn't be there in person tonight. I hope everyone enjoys the show. Been in David over to you.

mark. It's great to have you here.

It's great to be here. You know, I was watching as watching jenson's video, correcting the record. I think to myself, we might need to book the next one of these for all the things i'm going to have to apologize for, say, getting, well, I don't apologize anymore.

We've noticed. Well, okay.

maybe here's the question. If you knew what you knew today, what's up? If you knew what you no today, would you have started facebook?

Oh god, I mean, look.

I think come out hot day.

but he started in literally, I think there's something to jenson's original sentiment, which is that the entrepreneur journey is very chAllenging, especially the early day, is when you're running to start up and there's the sense that what you're doing could just die at any moment. And and the volatility, everything is just going thrash so much. And it's not you obviously, you look back, you 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 do think that there's something too or jenson was saying that I thought was very honest and that when I heard him say at the first time, I was like, yeah, I get that where it's I think I think there are a like a lot of people for whom you 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. You can underestimate how painful things are going to be. 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 working.

Yeah, you know, I. Started working with people to design to my own clothes. And so I figure you out, look, we're going to design.

I wear, we're going to design other stuff that people wear. Let's get, let's get good of this. And so this one, I actually, I worked with this great fashion designer, mica miri and um he's got a great story.

So I wouldn't be surprised you're doing one of these with him one and this one is so i've kind of start working on this series of shirts with my some of my favorite classical saying on them. So this one is pathy methods learning through suffering. Little family saying, and also equus, was that .

you're family saying .

growing up is that you're family out well .

in nod but was pull that thread go pon intended, I promise. What does learning through suffering me into you.

why I think you learn what matters to you and what's important and kind of your place in the worlds through repeatedly hitting your head against different chAllenges. And I mean, I think that is sort of that's the journey, right? Even that's the the entrepreneur journey.

It's also, I think, part of the beauty of building things and um but as something that jensen talks a lot about to where it's like, I feel like you when you go to start a company, you everyone kind of writes down what they would like their values to be. But values are not what you're right down on the wall. It's like you're lived to behaviors and you only really learn what you care about when you have to make hard tradeoffs and face chAllenges. So yeah, do you learn the most important things? They are facing chAllenges.

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 existence al chAllenges than any meaningful company in history through your first twenty years. First.

though. Dubious distinction.

we will make our case to well in a numerate them you so good. But first I first think .

you know like that old nike Michael Jordan and where is talking about who is failed over and over and over again and that's how we that one really resonate with me.

too. So thanks to you guys. I've got a pair these this summer, and I genuinely love them. Tell us the story of how these came to be.

Yes, so thanks. I'm, i'm, i'm make to have them to so IT meet. We've been building social experiences for twenty years now.

And originally I took the form of a website and mobile apps. But the thing is, I never thought about us as a social media company. We're not a social APP company.

We are A A social connection company, right? I an I we talk about what we're doing is building the future a human connection and. That's not only going to be constrained over time to what you can do on a phone, right on a small screen.

So when you think about when we got started, okay, we're like a handful of kids. We weren't able. We'd love the resources of the time to go define whatever the next computing platform is. And also know facebook originally got started around the same time as a bunch of the early smart phones, and those platforms have got started. So we didn't really get to plenty role in developing that platform.

And one of the big themes, I think, for the next chapter of what we do is I want to to be able to build what what I think you're sort of the ideal experiences is not just what you're allowed to build on some platform that someone else built, but what is actually, if you can think from first principles, what is the idea of social experience? So I think what you'd like to have is not a phone that you look down at that kind of takes your attention away from the things in the people around you. You are not just a small screen, I think, would you ideally have as glasses? And through the glasses, there's one part of IT, whether 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 for you because they have context on what you're doing. But in 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 want to phone screen the not so just in future you can imagine um because you guys have demo and some of the stuff that we've done a version of this, we're helping a conversation like this. But you know maybe like one of us seeing him 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 you were very physical being. So people like to intellectualized everything. But a lot of our experience is very physical.

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. And whatever else you're doing just kind of have that mixed in with the rest of world. It's going to be, I think, the ultimate digital social experience.

And I think it's also gonna be the ultimate incarnation of A I because you're going to have conversations where it's a art. There are some people like maybe like i'm physically here. There's a person there.

You're like hologram there. There's an an eye that is kind of a body to someone is there, and the glasses were unable. So OK.

So how we're going after this building, this this is like some huge project. We've been working on IT for ten years um and there are a lot of different chAllenges to solve to get there. There's like you have to build a novel display stack or it's not.

These are just screens like the kind that are in phones. There's this long lineage. They 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. The supply chain, there's like brand new display, starker on holographic displays, the base of we need to get created and then they need to be put in to glasses. They needed to be minimized.

And then you also in the glasses need to fit chips. Microphones of speakers, cameras are tracking to be able to understand what you're doing. Battery is to make IT blast all day.

right like new novel R F protocols.

Ah OK it's a pretty chAllenge. So great. Let's go try to go for the big thing, right? And we've been working on that for a while, and we're pretty close to being able to show off um from the first prototype that we have that and really excited about that.

At the same time, we also came at IT from the slides of all right. So that's like a lot of new technology that needs to get developed a lot to pack into a form factor because glass that would be good looking to. So what if we just constrain ourselves to like we're going to be work with a great partner, esolar oxidase a they make gray band.

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 I actually I kind of thought when we were getting started with those, that IT was almost like a practice project for for the the ultimate.

which lets be clear, that's what you thought facebook was.

That's true. That's true. Yeah.

I did like for your real startup.

S this is just going attention there for a second. Started facebook in school, came out to silicon valley with a dusty and and a handful of people working on at the time. And we did that because silk belly's world, the startups came from.

And I remember we got off the plane, we were driving down one of one like, wow, ebay, yahoo. Like this is amazing that all these great companies one day or maybe will build a company like this. And idt started facebook. And it's like, surely the project that we're working on now is not a company .

and facebook had like some scale at this.

IT was a great project. I just didn't have the ambition to turn IT into a company of the time that just kind of happened. Um but I know yeah I mean, not a hard work obviously but but but I just at the time I just come like, yeah I I I don't think this um well.

that's the answer of what you started.

You should try to start this, I don't know. So yeah in the glasses though no, we thought that this was that we want to get working with us a luxeuil. We can start building more, more advanced glasses.

And then, you know, they are really good. They look good. And then A, I like the massive transformation in .

A I so remember, for listeners, this should be really clear. You guys shipped this product that i'm holding before l emps or at least before the public consciousness was aware of the ChatGPT moment. And these were not manufactured and shipped as an AI device that came later when they were already an market.

Yeah, a few years ago I went have predicted that holograms would have been available before, kind of like full scale A I. And now I think it's probably going to be the order. So now it's a great, great.

Well, this is actually a great product because it's got it's got the cameras so I can see what you see. It's got the microphone. It's got the speaker. You can talk to IT. I remember calling alex hmo. The guy runs the product exactly running in them like, hey, you know I think we should probably private this and make IT that um that met a AI is the primary feature of IT and then like I remember I came in the next week and we'd build a prototype of that on tuesday and I was like, are right good yeah now this is good.

This is gonna be a very successful product. He told us a much more high stakes version of that story.

I was on the highway with my kids, and I get this call on a saturday from mark. And he's like, those classes. Could we put mitra AI in them, running on device and like ship that soon? So we can see if that a good idea or not.

Yeah, that's that tracks. That's what I just said.

Sounds right.

Okay, so. Thank you for opening up with the 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, all facebook has met are so screwed. And yet that is not the way IT looks today.

My space, twitter, je one, instagram, snapp chat, WhatsApp, tiktok, apple t putting .

its own whole category .

and now ChatGPT and like there is a widely held public .

nerve of every single time stack jet discovered stories or there's something where people like up the cool thing that facebook the company did is just absolutely and they're gonna go away. You're very much haven't gone away. What do you think is the three line of the DNA of the company that allows you to keep winning?

I think it's that were a technology company that is focused on human connection, not a specific type of APP. So like we never thought about ourselves as website or a social network or anything like that. For me, building this kind of glasses to enable the future of people being able to feel present with another personal or 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 competence 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, we were 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 was an engineer before I got started. I am that mostly took like systems engineering type classes when I was in college. So if you talk about like friends to and my space, the scaling chAllenges they had doing the graph calculations.

yeah if can you take us back and like we want to ask you the story of that time I mean, um IT seems quite now friends are my space. But you study computer science graph, networking social graph. That is a very, very difficult .

lining of 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 itself. Um see, you want to have a smart product definition, but then you want to be competent, Better than everyone else at the technology.

And I think that that's something that we've held ourselves to build a good organization around. 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 like the company is I was talking about. It's like you the CEO was in technical.

The board of directors had no one technical on IT. They had like one dude on the management team was the head of engineering who is technical like eban else wasn't. That's right.

If that's your team, then you're not a technology company. So I think one of the things that i've always been pretty careful about is I actually like one like a lot of the people on our on our management team. It's like split, mostly people running up either these big product groups to come up through different technical pathways of the company.

And if there is a baLance, right, I think you don't want ever want 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.

The board and and I think I just like that in terms of how you weigh decisions and culturally, things inside the company matter is a lot. I think that's one of the things that has been really fundamental. Where is 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 pretty curious and learning focused organization um where I view the product strategy less is 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 are trying to serve right. So like I define our strategy, we can learn faster than every other company.

We're going to win. We're going to build a Better product than everyone else because we're going to get that out first early. We're going to a good feedback loop. We're going to get get a bunch of feedback. We're onna 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 five and there's not even discrete versions because we ships are frequently you just uh, you learn faster. So I know that 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 state as quick as you can.

In one of my research calls to prep for this, someone described the u. As a masterful strategist, which like we all sort of acknowledged that at this point.

But I would separate like all the stuff that I just thought was not going to be that important that ended up actually being the most important well, but that's the thing part of me is like, okay, you want to set up the games so that way you optimize.

you create you, this is what gets told us, like the apple is going to 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 market is such a good strategist is because he he plays the company as if it's a turn base strategy game, and he just make sure he gets more turns than anybody else and he make sure that he learned more from each turn, then the next player does. Do you feel like that encapsulates .

like and but IT does .

kind of feel like the way that you make. That is like, well, if we have great engineering, then that can kind of take care of the speed part. That's like many donations are multiple at bats. And then the will.

great engineering and speed in 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 competence around that. But there's a certain personality that goes with kind of taking your stuff and putting that out there before it's fully polished.

And and look, i'm not in that our strategy approach on this is the only one that work. I think in a lot of ways, we're like the opposite of apple. And clearly, their stuff has worked really well too.

And they take the approaches like we're going to take a like a long time, we're going to polish IT, we're going to put IT out. And maybe for the stuff they're doing that works, maybe that just fits with their culture. But for us, I think 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.

Um because you obviously in the sense it's like you you want to you want to put stuff out early enough so you can get good feedback. You obviously to test things that are reasonable hypotheses. So if it's like so and effective, then you're not testing a good hypothesis that doesn't work.

But I do think a lot of the conversations that we have are like, okay, what 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 do just think that like you, anna, really have a culture that values shipping and getting things out and getting feedback and more than needing always to get great positive accolades from people when you put stuff out. Because I think like if you want to wait until you get praise, ed, all the time, you're missing a bunch of the time when you you could have learned a bunch of useful stuff and then incorporate IT that into the next version, you're in a ship.

And it's just about making sure that what the thing that the companies known for or its brand can withstand all the little damage that you do to IT by shipping stuff .

that's not quite ready. I would like to hope that it's not damaging to the brand. But what would .

IT in at IT is like when you're like all I feel bad because I shift the product that wasn't good enough.

you're sort of yeah no, I I don't not overstate. I mean, we don't ship things that we think are bad, but we also don't take we want to 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 going to be most used for, like I think a lot of the A I stop that we're building now, for example, IT, actually, you know, it's it's pretty clear that A I is going to be transformative for a lot of different things.

That is actually less clear what you're going to be the initial use cases for, for a lot of these things that that, that are super valuable. And so okay, part of IT is like, okay, you put something out, you want to kind of collect feedback and and what people are actually what is you know where it's resenting. Now if if what you put out is bad, then you're not going to collect your data because people can use for anything because that sucks. So but I do you 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 go that is more yeah.

So I building to this question of tu. 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 like i'm going to make this and put IT in the world.

Does that 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 a value for, something that you believe should exist in the world, and trying to build something to line with that while trying to match IT up with what.

Is going to resonate the most with people where 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 um I think I think both probably matter yeah that i'm like as I por .

threw these historical examples, there's like the market discovers some other partisan in the markets, discovers the stories 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 that feels like everything you're trying to do in reality labs, all you know fifty plus billion dollars that you've put into IT is like we are going to freak ware 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 put in in the world.

What's a combination? I mean, I think that there's there's certains, a lot of things that we've invented or created for the first time. I mean, like in two thousand and six when we built the first version of news feed before that social networks are based in profiles.

And then really, hey, like people actually kind of want to get the updates and what's like, show them that. And if we rank them, then we can there's so many updates that this can help people pass through that quickly. And today, it's I hard to imagine any social product without a feet.

So I don't know that's obviously, there are some of these things sort of seminal, I call 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 and learning from what is working in in the the world. Um you know we're not embarrassed about learning from things that other people like discovered that we're good first and then we build a Better version of IT. And I mean.

I think that .

that you know no one company is going to invent everything, right? I think if you don't invent anything, then it's hard to to be a successful company. But um but I do think that there is 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 gone on in the market and you're missing a lot of opportunities to get valuable signal from from people in the community and customers about what they want to be doing.

which speaks to the pieces of facebook is a technology company that that is a technology company. We will get to that later then. And I have been having conversation, I want to take this to open source and open source technology and its importance to you.

And then positive first to me and then to many other people in our calls over the last couple weeks that meta has been the largest beneficiary of open source technology in the modern world. And i'm curious if you would agree with that, if you would comment on your relationship to open SARS. I think almost .

all of the major technology companies at this point are primarily using open source stacks. So yeah, I mean, I don't wouldn't 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 know nineteen the late nineteen ninety, this or something for us open source that has been important, valuable. I mean, you are specially the .

first big company built on the lamp stack.

Yeah, yeah. No, it's it's great. Makes the super easy to developed up quickly and iterate quickly.

But we will start 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 infrastructures. So they came first.

They're like, right? Let's keep this. Propriety is a big advantage for us. And then we're like art, we need that too, but we built IT.

And then we're like, okay, not advantage for us because google already has that. So we want as well just make IT. And by making that open, then you basically get this whole community of people building around IT.

So IT wasn't to help us compute with google for any of this stuff that we were doing to have that technology. But what we we're able to do with things like open compute where um get IT to become the industry standard. It's so now you like all these other cloud service platforms that basically use open compute.

And because of that, the supply chain of standard around standards, ed, around our designs, which means that it's like way more supply, way cheaper to produced. We've save billions of dollars and the quality of the stuff that we get to use goes up. So that's like a win win.

But I think in order for this to work, we do a lot of open source stuff. We do a lot of close source stuff. I'm not like as ellet on this.

I think open sources is very valuable. But I also think IT sort of makes sense, rose, because of our position in the market. And the same for A I .

i'm around OK. This is where .

we were going with this yeah it's you know similiar um you know we want to make sure that we have access to a leading ai, right? I think just like we want to build the hardware that we can build the best social experiences for the next twenty years. I don't think that for us, it's like we've just been we've been through too much stuff with the other platforms to fully depend on and anyone else.

And we're big enough company at this point that like we don't have to. Where we can build our own core technology platform is whether that gonna be A R glasses or mixed reality or A I. So I can know that's somewhat of an imperative for us to go do that.

But you know, these things are not like pieces of software that are monolithic. Their ecosystem is they get Better when other people use them. So for us, there's a huge amount of good and IT philosophical lines up with where we are, where like, I mean, look, I definitely, first hand, have a lot of experiences. We are like trying to build stuff on mobile platforms.

The platforms are just like now you can build that. That's frustrate. Can we take a real quick, dear, I really want to ask you o, we're going to take a ty tok, help us with our research. Here are the eve of the IPO .

is a quite detour. Wait, did you in the world is this connected?

Or did you just decide that IT was your turn to talk?

Sorry, I was like, really like when I and A.

I think it's related. I do. I really, genuinely do. Facebook on mobile .

is HTML five in twenty?

Yeah.

twice.

Yeah, yeah.

I want to ask you what you were thinking going into the IPO with facebook on mobile being HTML five and what happened IPO at one hundred billion dollar market cap over the next three months? You have a fifty percent of probably because of that. But I I guess the related question to what we're talking about now is how much is that informing your approach here with that 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 of some, this like APP model comes along and we have to build like different ones for each phone.

And like you have to go through approval to get a shift doing to weight like weeks before I can ship is like a sucks. So well, right, we have an idea. Let's build this platform where we can get a webbed platform.

So basically build a native shell and you build this web base platform minute and they'll be able to just update our apps every day. You will have one thing once and update our apps across android and iphone and blackberry and windows mobile and all the stuff that existed at the time because I hadn't gotten consolidated yet. And like that's going to be like basically whatever downside we are gonna have for not having the most native thing, we're going to make up foreign ilo city.

And by having like way more of our energy focused on one platform, we were wrong in IT turned IT out that you know having the native integration was actually critical for having the interactions feel good and and that so we basically into 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 ruby 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 need to figure out what does that mean to put ads into the experience.

So like let's be fear the feed ad had .

not been invented here. Yeah like advertisers have like specific formats that they like working with. And the idea that we were just going to be like right now, your ad is going to look like a feed story with a big chAllenge for advertisers. And the idea that now for people, you are going to have this organic feed that was the most important part of the product and our origins start putting ads in IT was a chAllenge for for the people are using the product. So we need to figure that out and we need to get the apps to be Better.

And we basically took, I think I must have been like a year, something we're just like, look, we're going to pod speech development of the company because it's hard enough to do a rewrite, right? And if you look like the history of the tech industry, they're all these examples like netscape and know these things that like they tried to do a rewrite, they needed to reestablish their technical platform and they also try to add features the biscuit, just like never terminated. So that's a real risk, right?

When you're like completely changing you're underlying platform that you you're going to see that um was like we got to minimize the chance that happens. So we're not a ship. Any new features were just going to rewrite IT, make IT faster. Um but what we're doing this like basically mobiles growing. So the percent of our traffic that is monetized is shrinking because web is basically shrinking and in .

mobiles and that only .

business model .

yeah and and you're now .

cents pretty clear what we needed to do. I think strategically, a lot of the time it's it's someone harder to know what to do when you're winning, when stuff is going well, it's like what is the next move till I go from winning to winning more? But when you're losing, it's usually pretty clear what you have to do you 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, right?

The team was like, okay, um what we're going public and its investors really are going to like this if we are like not making money for a year and a half and it's like, well, a year a half this short in the grand scheme of things, lets to do this. And what we did IT and there was a painful you're in a half and then we came out of that and we were in great trip. So I think like people inside the company had felt a lot Better sooner because I was pretty clear to people that we were doing the right thing um and they they knew that we were executing in a responsible way um IT basically focused and we're doing the right thing.

But I think it's actually when you have something that's working well in your own one local hill and you need to jump to another hill, that's a stuff is really culturally hard. Um but this one I think was IT was not fun. They're going to period a serious of periods throughout the company that were not I don't know, not not the not the most fun periods but um although that one in retrospect is no looks pretty good in not that bad. It's like your market cap only got cut ten and half for a year and a half like great. Great, 然后 这个。

Maybe so can I connect the David asked, hey, can you help with with our research? Can I follow that thread that you just said, hey, that one wasn't so bad. There's been a lot of amazing things the company has done IT. There's also been like a lot of criticism, if you were to be self critical of your own company, 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 are so many things that we've messed up that there are many criticisms that are a legitimate um. But if that was a year and a half mistake, I think one of the things I reflect on over the last like ten years or so was the political environment just changed dramatically, right? It's like before twenty sixteen, there was like not a month that went BIOS for maybe the IPO period where the sentiment about the company was anything but positive.

And then after two thousand sixteen, after the election, business was not a month for a while where the sentiment about the company was positive. And we I think so much of this stuff is correctly understanding your place in the world in the history. And so I think we taught to work before how it's like.

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, were a human connection company, and that will take different forms at our time. The political environment, I think I didn't have much sophistication around, and I think I just fundamentally missed diagnosed the problem.

So I think that there is this basic chAllenge. There are a lot of things I don't want to simplify this too much. And there are there are a lot of things that we did wrong with something that we did right.

But I think one of the things that I look back on regret is I think we accepted other people's view of some of the things is that they were certain that we were doing wrong or we're responsible for the that I don't actually think we were. And no, that's it's. There are a lot of things that we did mess up and we need to fix.

But 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 instincts like take ownership for IT, I say like okay, like maybe maybe it's not like maybe it's not all our thing, but we're going to fully on this problem we're going to take responsibility for. We're going to fix IT more, and it's a political problem. I actually think a lot of the time sometimes that their people are Operating in good faith through your identifying of a problem that wants something refixed.

And there are people who are just looking for someone to blame me. And 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 review is like, okay, like i'm going to take responsibility for all this stuff, like people are basic, like like blaming social media, the tech industry for g all these different things in society. And if we're going okay, we're going to really like do our part to go fixes like this stuff.

And there are a bunch of people who just took that and we're 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 clear about which of the things we actually felt like we had a part in, in which ones we didn't.

And my guesses as if the IPO was a year and half mistake. I think that the political miscalculation was a twenty year mistake. And so I started in twenty sixteen, 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 dynamics across both the country and multiply across all these places are around the world.

And I think we've sort of found our footing and like, like 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 found in any fact that I think we should push back on harder. And I think it's gonna another or 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 will 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 critics that I think people get. We get critics on both sides on that. There are people who don't think we've got respons ibt. But um but I I think certainly there's one line of critique which is no, you kind of bought into too much of the stuff that you shouldn't have. And yeah, I think it's going to take us a long time to dig out about .

do you have a reasonable framework at this point for like okay, here's this stuff where I feel like we actually do want to take responsibility for IT and here's the stuff where like, no.

that's not a reflection. T yeah, I mean, at this point, I think a lot of this stuff has has been studied. So I mean, I want to go rehash all the different things. But um but I think at this point, there's been not like years of academic research on a lot of these things. And you important the thing that's chAllenging is in one of the things that we learned as we actually should be trying to support more academics and doing more this research ahead time because that 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 I I don't think we did this one um you know it's like so but what has worked over time is like, you know you do the research in advance and and you get a third party academics respected folks who get to debate all these different issues and then it's like, oh no like the evidence just does not show that social media correlated with this kind of harm at all. So I think that like, or I know so I that cuts that to meet.

This brings up another topic we wanted to talk about with you. And you just, what's twenty years isn't that long?

Yg Young are.

This is the vange of being a college drop out.

Found you in your nineteen fuck.

hopefully we will have more than twenty years and hopefully .

you have buffer duration.

You you set up the .

company in a especially at the time, truly unique way, uh, where you can Operate the company and take that take that approach. Do you mean super voting shares? Super voting shares is like know with the technical aspects.

I think there are a bunch of technical aspects to IT we're not going to get into at 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 just can't. And I think in doing all the research for this atheists 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 competing, 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 two thousand six, 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 had a good job communi don't know me. I had done job communicating the long term sion I am thinking about.

I like, wasn't thinking in terms of this as company. I was like this is a great project, is awesome. Like a lot of people like what we're doing.

I think this will probably continue for a while. I think it's can be pretty important in the world. 对， like know how to think in terms of you like long term financial .

plans or yes, we're .

the company. So without having made the case, that was understandable that basically yahoo comes around. A lot of people like this is like all the start of dreams come true.

You've got to take the soft because 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. If I wasn't super confidence inspiring to them when I was OK and we should turn this down because we're going to do this. So so after that, it's like, right, well, I don't want to get fired for 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. Learning to offering well and being very cash gender .

and very early such that you had a very real going concern on your hands and you just did didn't need to cut off your ARM and sell IT to someone in order to yeah build your business yeah like I think this is a fundamentally .

misunderstood .

thing about facebook that started tup IT .

is the .

prototypical of the .

iconic start up found .

of this century. And there's a lot of people that want to start to start up for a lot of the glamorous reasons of starting to started up. You hated being a startup and wanted to stop being a start up as fast as possible. And ba, like going concern.

Yeah, I been I ve ve been a lot more fun now. Think of to work on all the stuff with awesome.

What is your advice to all these founders who sort of romanticized the idea of of starting a company and company? I don't know. Yesterday.

starting the companies, not bad. I, I, I think that there are different schools have thought how to do IT. I think some people think, okay, I want to go start a companies. So i'm going to like go dive into this idea.

And I didn't think that that's a little bit dangerous because there is this issue, which is you have to be able to be nimble and pivot around until you can like figure out what work, right? I mean, part of the reason I didn't think face because going to be the company early on was because when I was in school, I built like twelve different things, right? That were just things that I wanted to exist.

And I got, this is fun. Okay, let's build another thing. It's like, okay, this one point, keep are still using that, all like helping keep this one. But I would like a bunch of other ideas for stuff I was going to build to. So I just like I didn't like know how to think about what the company was going to be and and is so i've never something about maintaining flexibility. That's that's helpful.

Once you hire a bunch of people, it's a lot easier and you can just have meetings in your own head about what direction you want to go in um and it's like there's a lot less pride and like people dug in when you're just like, okay, i'm onna change direction. It's know people I don't like invested their ego and like, no, we were going in this direction and like now I must be convinced and like now, so I do think that that's a thing where you wanted keep things like and bill to do that. That's one of the reasons why we tried to get the company back to being in over the leanest diversion of a large company is that we can we can be.

But um but I didn't know there's something to that where it's like. It's obviously it's it's not super fun not having the resources to do what you want to do. But I think IT also is problematic to have more people working on something then you should have for the stage that it's at because then the people who are working on, I 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 attract the best people to go work on those things because it's less fun. And so I do think you've IT you just have to dialog, right?

You're spending a good jillion dollars on reality .

labs and the technical term.

it's not making that much money. So I want to play mark back to you of it's not appropriate to have all these people and resources working on things for more than the stage warrants. I'm being a little facetious here, but i'm curious how you why you .

categorized IT differently. I mean, well, 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 want to do over the next ten to twenty years and what do you think you're going to be important? And we were talking about like making your own lock and all that and how it's like I think there are some broad strokes that we kind of a sense of where things are going on, pretty share glasses and kind of like holographic presence.

And A R is going to be a completely ubiquitous product, right? It's just like everyone phone before replaced with a smart phone. And then a lot of more people got smart phones.

If all we get is all the people in the world's worry of glasses upgrading to glasses that have a ye and 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 going to go a lot further than that. So another there is that there is the thing of a controlling our own destiny. Um it's strategically valuable.

We did this calculation and our 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 run the add business the way that we think we should be able to, when they tell us we can ship certain products at that way, like people use the things is lesser like them less. And um it's hard to exactly estimated, but I think we might be like twice as profitable if we are on the platform or something. So I think from that perspective, that's worth a lot just from like a peer like dollars perspective, which is not primarily how I come at the stuff.

But even like now i've learned thing after since the other days and now at least able to like like um 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 providing control the company. But do we still can sort of articulated case 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 this is sort of like a value shift over time is you know one of the things is that um some the early oculus sky is used to see me that there's a difference between building good things and awesome things and and like good is good. Where is helpful? It's useful.

It's things that people use on a daily basis because IT add 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 just like this uplifting thing about humanity. And so I think a lot of what we're done with social media so far as is very good where we got we build these products. More than three billion people use them on a near daily basis.

It's three point three billion on a day.

Yeah, yeah. So yes. And so that's and they use IT because that is useful in their life, right? And in all these different ways.

I mean, obviously, people very people use IT for different things, but it's useful. And IT helps people and IT IT helps people stay connected. That helps people build businesses that helps people form communities. It's good done that.

People on a data basis, you get out a bader like book, social media like like that's not like so I kind of think for the next for my next stage, right for the next stage of the company, the next like fifteen years, I want us to build more things that are awesome in addition to things things that are good. And I think that they both matter. but.

To me, this is like a little bit of a kind of the next stage what I want our company to stand for and be. And so I think a lot of the reality love stuff that we're doing is going to be in that pocket. A lot of the A I stuff that we're doing, I think, is going to be in that pocket.

There are a bunch of things in the apps that are going to be in that pocket. Two new apps too. but. But I don't know. I think that there's there's something that's like fundamentally pretty good about that and that maybe it's also just like where I am in my life, like like to think i'm Young a little older, right? But it's but it's like I do think that at this point, it's not just a meda 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. And now so there's the personal version of this that I get to work on, you know, interesting science problems, who would like brazil? A my wife and like, and a bunch of boston people. You know, I get to design shirts with, like some of the best fashion designers is in the world, right? It's I got that .

use the sculpture .

of of my wife bring back the roman tradition of designing sculptures of people you love. I'm not at all .

being for science.

Like, yeah, I know I am. I think Daniel arch is like a really talented guy. I was like, that's a person who i'd love to work with on something.

Go find a project, you know, building you have one of my side projects is and we have this cattle ranch and kwai, and i'm trying to super and 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 his. 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 bust through the still enclosure.

But I feel like that's the kind of bold that you want to make the highest quality being in the world. And we're just working with you know, trying to do really high quality, awesome things with awesome people. That if if that's what I get to do for the next fifteen or twenty years, then like it's gonna a good fifteen or twenty.

was there a moment like what changed? But when did this become your priority? Why I can't IT feel so radical? That is, how could I have possibly been gradual? Or was this just like mark all the time and we just couldn't see the real mark? No.

I think that there might have been something around the way the company shifted and Operations around code that mean it's like the a coveted like all these two companies when remote temporarily 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 word 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 cover. I I kind of got that I was a time of reflection um where I was able to think about this step. And we were also going through this very difficult political time in the country and in our company was the center of a lot of those things that that was a casts of a lunch of reflection. And then I think that a bunch of the things that we had fun up earlier, but a smaller scale, right? So the reality lab stuff that we started in twenty fourteen, really the fair stuff around fundamental a eye research.

Twenty, twelve.

thirteen and two thousand thirty. And then these things, they kind of get started, and they were growing and was kind of reached this moment, which is like, i'm going to double down on this and do this, or we gonna have, like, do this as a hobby. But no, I think we should do this right.

I think this is like, like this. Like this is going be a really important part of what we do. And we had to make a really important set of decisions where we knew is going be really painful to go double down on those things and build up the AI infrastructure that we needed to and scale from 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 when I didn't know was that at the time, I thought they're gonna not like IT, but I thought I was going to be OK because I don't think there was also going to be a recession at the same time. Um so that like really it's like I mean luck like like you ve learned here you are through chAllenges, right? It's like we had like a really it's okay.

Like losing half of your market caps is quint compared to losing eighty percent of your market cap, whatever IT was, right? It's you. So but so I mean. These are all intentional decision.

So right? It's like, I mean, there there are a lot of conversations that we had which like should we go forward with this? And the answer that I came out with this, yes, I this is what I believe in.

I think this is going to be important for the world. I think it's going to work over time. We're no stranger to going through painful periods in some ways that makes the company Better. Do IT 好。

We're we're starting to enter looking at the clock like conclusion lightning round territory. I've had one like lurking in the back of my head. IT makes sense to me that you would rebrand the company something that is not facebook, given how brought the family of apps was that you've got.

Let's imagine you are going to rebrand IT today. You ve got A I going on. You've got A R going on. You've got V R going on. Would you pick the named meta if you were going to remove the company today like matter.

See good name, you finding good short names. This actually was a thing that we talked about for well because he was pretty clear that if facebook is continuing to grow an importance in the world, which I think a lot of people don't appreciate, this kind of mind boggling the scale that it's but the others I want, we went a period of words like we had facebook and handful of smaller PS.

So now we have like four apps that have a billion people are more using them. You know, hopeful ly, the next three years, five with threads of that continues scaling and. This was a conversation that we had a bunch where IT doesn't make sense for the name of the company to be one of the apps as the other absence 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, where the political brand chAllenges different things.

And a lot of people were proposing that from the perspective of running away from the facebook prints were like, oh, well, like is the facebook print of issues. Do we need a new print? I like we don't run away from that.

Well, it's 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 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 toward s something, we don't run away from things. And when we got to meta, then as a guy, we're here.

And I 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 going to lean into this and we're going to do IT. So it'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 or not, someone who wants to define yourself by anything you want to have, like your hands on a unch of great controls and maximize your degrees of freedom, see where the world's going, and then have the best freak and spatial 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 want to maximize my manuvers .

body yeah, I get IT, but I don't know that just a wheel line around the vision and emission of what we're trying to do and we run towards that. That's always been how we .

Operated and in many ways, doing what I just suggested would kind of be running.

It's like what we don't believe in that much. No, no, no. In the company that like quite flag down and what we're doing and we're going to go to IT, it's like put a wall in front of us. There's can be a mark shape hole in the wolf.

Speaking of lighting grounds in mark shape holes. You are accelerating what used to be your annual chAllenges. I always I mean, when we were all kids, we didn't know each other.

I think I was so inspired. You would do your annual chAllenges. You would post about them like pro, that's like pretty damn cool. And then we all get a little older 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 in lots of people that like that space get sucked and you have expanded IT.

how.

What you mean what you used .

to do annual chAllenges .

and I feel doing weekly.

i'm try to trying to do inspiring things, everyone that's yeah I don't know. And most are really competitive.

Who's your competition for this?

What you mean? I was just thinking about about about other things that i'm doing. Like what I what I started doing, I like got intel b is like more extreme sports and fighting and stuff.

And like I don't know, I mean, we face a lot of competition, a lot of different aspects of what we do. Um so there's the social media competitors, there's the platform competitors. I think apple is a bigger competitor than people realized that kind of think, hey, they're doing a different type of thing.

But I don't know. I think over the next ten, fifteen years, and I think that kind of like battle over ideological battle over what should the architecture be of the next set of platforms. They're going to be the closed integrated apple, a model that apple has always done, which again, I mean, like there's multiple there's multiple good ways to build things.

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 those just a ton of recency BIOS around is because iphone basically won. 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 let's take um I think that .

there's a recency bias and probably like almost everyone here is an iphone and I think because of the recency bias sort this view that's OK oh no, this is just the superior way to do things. But I don't actually think that's a given in the PC or 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 going to lead to a much more viBrant tech industry. Now there are advantages of of doing a close integrated model.

I think apple will have a place for sure. I expect them to be our primary competitive. And I think I 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 in there. How open these platforms, whether it's things like long on A I or um the glasses or different things should be for 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. Lot of founders were in probably the most interesting technology environments and the early mobile days in terms of opportunity, it's been twenty years. You might have to go back a little bit. But what advice do you have for founders today on something that's different then trying to pattern match mark zuker berg from two thousand and four given we live in a different world today.

Yeah, I don't know. I mean, just would do something that you care about and and I if if you're try to run our tragedy, you try to learn as quickly as you can. But but I mean, there's like I think a 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, and it's different things that clearly worked for other companies.

I don't know that my daughter, we went to IT, took her to a tailor swift concert and SHE was like, you know, dad, I can't anna be like Taylor swift when I grow up? Tell, yeah, I was like a new camp. It's not available to.

I was like, but and he thought about, and she's like, I when I grow up, I want people to want to be like August chance acrobat. And I was like, help yeah hello so I think that that um yeah I don't know. I think it's like like learning from other people's successes and failures. But do your own thing.

Love that. Love that well. That is the perfect place to leave things.

We made you something that you already have. A very amazing. Well, design shirt. I hope you have room in your life.

From modern one, I do. I used to only wear one type of shirt. Now I moved done.

So David, I made you a custom one of one .

shirt that represents tonight.

IT is size luck.

so no one else can.

They can never be made again. And we've got these coordinate on the back. The first one GPS GPS coordinates. The first one represents current in house, where you wrote the first line of code for facebook, and the second one is chase center. So thank you for joining us.

Wo what a knife?

Absolutely crazy. I mean, mark has done many interviews this year, both with other podcast and an in traditional press. But that felt different if for no other reason that IT happened live in front of a six thousand percent audience in arena. But I wasn't expecting IT to feel that different.

yeah. IT was, I think the wild dest experience of my life being up there. I don't even know what else can compare for the thing.

Well, listeners, as you may have noticed, thanks to our sponsors, this conversation was uninterpreted. And we do want to to 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 want to share a word on stat sig and crucial.

So stat sig, so Marks most famous catch for this is probably move fast and break things. But like we talked about with them, despite instilling this in facebook s engineering culture, facebook doesn't actually break very often. how?

Certainly not anymore. And really relative to its peer is 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 guard rails, and they can always roll back a feature if anything broke.

Oh, men, there are a legendary stories of engineers shipping features, like in their first week at book camp, as in turns, are new highs at facebook and met up 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 so fast. Make database decisions, iterate rapidly, but you need the right tools so you stuck right well.

Enter status g statistic has built the world's first product acceleration platform, combining tools like feature flags, product analytics, experimental and observably all in one place, helping you move faster and make matter .

decisions even Better. That sig was literally founded by an x meta team who wanted to help everyone build like the best and bring the same tools to the market. Today, many of the world's leading tech companies rely on stat sig, including OpenAI, microsoft, notion, anthropic, H I G ma plus thousands of early stage startups.

David, every time we work with that sag, this list gets more and more impressive. Like now what is purely you know, a list companies is awesome.

So if you're ready to accelerate your growth and democratized product building at your company, go to static dom slash acquired. And when you get in touch, just tell them that benin David sent you. Thanks that sag. And now for crucial, crucial is a climate aligned cloud platform built specifically for A I 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 admitted as Greenhouse gases.

It's crazy when acquired for started working with crucial, this was a cool idea. Now they're like one of the most important companies in the world with an ai cloud that superior to the hyper scales and a whole bunch of the largest companies in the world trusting their A I infrastructure to them.

Yep, it's easy to think about A I is like, oh, that's a bunch of P, H, D, S, T, meta, open a eye and thrown c or whatever, you know, tinkering with model weight in their office and hitting compute. But there is this whole other industrial side of A I that everything that happens after you press go on the model training and that energy, cooling, construction, all the physical infrastructure behind A I and crucial .

is powering that by producing or replace ursin huge amounts of power. We are talking gigolos in their development pipeline, which is nuclear reactor amounts of power for less cost than other providers and was zero or in some cases, actually negative emissions. It's super important if you listen to suck and others talk about what the bottle neck to A I progress is, it's actually not compute. But energy and crucial 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. So either through their managed A I cloud, which is great for startups and enterprises who want to complete and end platform for A I or directly as a data center customer, which several of the largest companies in the world are now doing. So just going over the crucial that A I slash acquired, that C R U S O E, that A I slash acquired, or click the link in the shootouts and tell them that benin 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 this team, you know, people kept saying we don't really do this. Mark doesn't really do this and I kept thinking, yeah kind of does because he's one of these podcast this year and .

he didn't facebook meta connect like he's done big events before, of course.

right? 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.

no retakes. Yeah, right.

But Martin, like automatic, exactly, 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.

Two, a bunch of the board members were there. A lot of people important.

mark.

where there his family came. They made IT an event.

right? I thought this was a big deal for us. I was kind of shock to the degree that mark also thought I was a big deal for him.

which was A B, L, G.

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 manically focused on the future and in our conversations to prep with him before the event, he was like, I think if you guys as a history pod, do you know let's talk about the future and like, okay, okay, but we wanted grounded in history and he showed up and was totally ready to go back. And I think that made the talking about the president in the future even Better.

totally, because you could create these three lines. I mean, that is 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 over? Should we be watching for a pattern here? Or are you very different today than you are historically? The way that he was talking about that stuff on stage felt very authentic, and I just haven't heard him speaking in that way before, at least publicly.

I think he was also a great way to let us all get a go into his psyche, which kind of brings us to another point, which is like he is still in IT. Oh, what other founders of companies like that mean this? Jenson, who else? You know, it's the two of them. 牙线。

the casual observer to metal might observe. Like, you know, Marks been running IT for twenty years. And most of the time these founders kind of like go do something else, they become executive chairman or they like stepped into a board role or they own four percent of the companies.

They're some pattern there. And for mark, I think he was plain as day on stage. Uh, he is more in IT than ever.

And I don't think he thinks he's like halfway through his journey. I don't think his twenty years in h at forty, 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 appreciated 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 metal episode, I think he gave us a regret, not a criticism, but we were alive on stage in front of six thousand people. And it's it's not really the right form at for that.

Yep.

totally that 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 hundred percent. It's just within matter.

I'm glad you caught this to other big tech CEO founders have their moment earning the company. They take a board role, they go do another thing and often times it's big, important for the world and capital intensive. And mark is doing that.

But inside meta, with reality labs, I think they'll be super fascinating twenty to fifty years from out 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 can currently or you know, step down from wonder on the other. For mark, I can 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 is clearly a guy who who values have a lot of degrees of freedom and and doesn't like being boxed in.

I love dear turn base strategy game. Oh, get more turn, learn more on to turn. Like then starcraft pro player want to win there? Yes.

but will be interesting to see the the not on effects of having reality labs in the metal organization versus as a new venture.

Totally, all of that brings me that you know Frankly, just my biggest overwhelming take away from the whole experience, which is then you've developed a really great research interview question that you use on all the sources that we talk to. Now what is you ask? What is the one thing that is most misunderstood about this company, this organization? That and everybody that met a 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. Is that a true super power of the company? Is that IT is architected from top to bottom, legally, financially, organisationally, culturally, culturally, to reflect and amplify his immense .

strength, which I think is probably true of like apple, Steve jobs, bill gates, microsoft and video anson. But we are right up close to the ways in which meta is a sort of an amplifier, almost like gets a way for youtube. Take the gain on mark output and turn IT up. You know, ten thousand x yes. And I think what was .

so striking about IT to me where this year, absolutely right. All those other companies, IT is generally accepted in the public narrative about apple understeer jobs, about invidia under genson. That that is the case.

I don't think this is about my 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 oc production? I'll see myself out well.

but there we go. Um well, listeners.

thank you so much for joining us on this journey. Come talk about IT with us in the slack acquired df m slash slack would 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 again, to be the first to know about that god, if we already similar that again, we've got a merge store check IT out on acquired data m. We've got to our second show where we are always interviewing earlier stage companies then ma, but where we think there are great, insightful conversations with founders and CEO. And David, I know you ve .

got some thing one last thing final. Thank thank you to mark. Thank you to basically the entire meta executive team who helped with the evening. Thank you to maz for dressing us, which was my favorite easter egg of the night.

Yes, so fun. Thank you to jie diamond japan and chase and James Morgan payments for making IT all possible. IT was truly a dream come true, and that is because of our incredible .

partnership that 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. The truth, easy you with you, easy you who we got the true.