Meta CFO Susan Li on headcount vs. GPU allocation, “free cash flow” hats, and almost becoming a PM

Susan Li of Meta—the youngest chief financial officer of a Fortune 100 company—joins John Collison to talk about capital allocation, managing investors, and how Mark Zuckerberg has changed over the 17 years of working together. Full episode transcript https://cheekypint.transistor.fm/2/transcript Timestamps (00:00) Intro (01:20) Early education and career (02:15) Lessons from Michael Grimes at Morgan Stanley (03:12) Leadership traits and succession planning at Meta (06:05) Mark Zuckerberg’s leadership and culture of feedback (09:06) Financial forecasting and capital allocation (14:18) ROI on Meta’s portfolio of bets (15:05) Investor sentiment in 2022 (17:49) The story behind the “free cash flow” hats (18:58) CapEx trends in the AI era (21:48) A memorable earnings call (24:16) Challenges of allocating compute vs headcount budgets (26:55) AI’s impact on productivity and operations

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00John Collison?

  Joke people have that Instagram if the ads are better than the content.

• 0:02Speaker 01

  As someone who bought like 25 umbrellas that change color in the rain off of ads.

• 0:07John Collison?

  They work?

• 0:07Speaker 01

  They do. They are a source of real delight. Headcount's really easy to account for because you have org church. GPs don't have that property. In fact, you often want to build out your infrastructure.

• 0:16John Collison?

  You can have shenanigans.

• 0:17Speaker 01

  For it to be very fungible.

• 0:20John Collison?

  Susan Lee joined Facebook in 2008. She became CFO in 2022. It's a really interesting time for this discussion because Meta has a core business that's firing on all cylinders. And Susan's had a front row seat for the growth of the company. Cheers.

• 0:36John Collison?

  You went to high school at 11, college at 15, Morgan Stanley at 19, and you're now the youngest CFO of Fortune 100 company. So just what's, what's good? Like, was this you? Was this your parents? What's going on there?

• 0:52Speaker 01

  Well, you know, some might say, because I started kindergarten when I was four and I graduated from college when I was 19, that having 15 years of formal education is, you know, I'm woefully undereducated, as it were. So I'm really just having to make up for, you know, that rough start. But if I remember right, you are also done with formal education at the age of 19, 20.

• 1:17John Collison?

  But that's kind of dropped out. Like, I wasn't early in progressing through the milestones. I just quit. Whereas you actually got your bachelor's.

• 1:22Speaker 01

  Well, it seems like we shared the same disdain for sort of getting out of the schooling system as soon as possible.

• 1:26John Collison?

  This is your interview, not mine.

• 1:30Speaker 01

  I was in a school system that identified when kids were bored in school and then just gave you opportunities to keep moving ahead. And my parents always, always took them. When I showed up at Morgan Stanley for my first day, I was on the trading floor in the big Broadway headquarters at 1585. And the equivalent of an HRBP basically got the intention of everyone on the trading floor.

• 1:53John Collison?

  Because this investment banking, which is known for being an inclusive and nurturing culture.

• 1:57Speaker 01

  Very, very much so. And so she wanted everyone on the floor to stop and look at me and know that no one was to serve me any alcohol at any company gathering. So it was exactly the way you think about sort of beginning your career on Wall Street, you know, by being mortified.

• 2:12John Collison?

  And it's just, but it improved from there.

• 2:14Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:16John Collison?

  You worked under Michael Grimes at Morgan Stanley. He, for people who don't know, he's been leading tech investment banking at Morgan Stanley for 20 years. And he's just a Phenom, like I don't know how to describe me, just one of the most energetic people I've ever met. What did you learn from working with Michael?

• 2:35Speaker 01

  Grimes is extraordinarily sort of, like you said, very high energy, applies that to a whole host of things. You go talk to Michael about tech companies, about banking, about parenting, about why there should be more undergraduate sales programs in colleges in the country. He's got a point of view on everything and he's endlessly curious. He is going to outwork you and outlearn you and it's actually a pretty spectacular thing as a young person starting in your career to see what really excellence at this looks like.

• 3:12John Collison?

  You've been at Meta for a very long time. You joined in 2008.

• 3:17Speaker 01

  2008.

• 3:19John Collison?

  So you joined in 2008 and one thing I've observed before is just the senior leadership at Meta are all very tenured and often have kind of done multiple things around the company or grown up around the company. What traits do the successful leaders at Meta have in common?

• 3:36Speaker 01

  Oh, that's a good question. Infinite patience. No, it's more than that. So I joined as an IC4 in finance, so really actually pretty far away from the center of the...

• 3:50John Collison?

  A few rungs down from the CFO.

• 3:51Speaker 01

  Yes, and also far away from like the core of engineers building newsfeed, right? I mean, when you kind of talk to some of the folks now, they've always been at the sort of very heart of what the product was, you know, building or doing. But what I think is unique about Meta is we have a pretty strong culture of internal succession planning and trying to identify people who are talented quite early in their careers, actually, and think about a many-year runway in which you're going to grow and develop them.

• 4:24John Collison?

  How did Meta succession plan you?

• 4:27Speaker 01

  So I started off my career doing mostly revenue forecasting, which was kind of like the mathiest part of finance. And at some point I had done that probably for about five-ish years and I was trying to figure out what to do next. And the two kind of paths in front of me were I was talking to some folks actually in newsfeed about whether I should just go do something totally different and go be a PM in newsfeed. Or the other option was to broaden my scope in finance, to take on sort of more traditional finance responsibilities that I really had had not that much exposure to. And I remember sitting down with David Ebersman, who was our CFO at the time, and he looked at me and said, "Look, I know you're considering these options,

• 5:12Speaker 01

  and I can tell you, I think doing that newsfeed PM job would be really fun, and I think it'd be a great learning experience for you. I totally get it. But I also want you to know that I think you could be, you know, a CFO of this company someday." And to have someone who I admired as much as David Ebersman say that about me was an extraordinarily confidence, you know, building thing. And I will remember that conversation forever, very viscerally. So I've had managers who I think have really invested in me by pushing me to take on things that I wouldn't have said, "Oh, I'm..." I wouldn't have said, "Hey, can I please go do this thing next?" It wouldn't have made obvious intuitive sense to me. But I think they thought it would be a good opportunity and that I was ready for it.

• 5:57Speaker 01

  And, you know, and I think, and I think they were right.

• 6:01John Collison?

  That's really cool. In the 17 years you've been at Meta, how has Mark changed as a leader?

• 6:09Speaker 01

  You know, there are ways in which you clearly see someone evolve over 17 years. You know, Mark has done all hands for all of those 17 years. And he clearly has become now a truly excellent public speaker. Mark is really good at giving feedback. Like, really world-class at it. And maybe you should try to get yourself into a position where you can get some feedback.

• 6:30John Collison?

  I'm sure Mark already has feedback for me, yeah.

• 6:33Speaker 01

  So you can experience it. But he's, it's very timely, it's very direct, it's very respectful. But the sort of direct and respectful, it's never mean, it's never like belaboring some point. But you cannot be mistaken after you have received the feedback.

• 6:50John Collison?

  Yes, yes.

• 6:51Speaker 01

  He's really good at it. Kind of walks that line between being direct but kind in an extremely good way. You know, one of the things people will often ask me is like, you know, what is, you know, what, what kind of skills do you need to stay at a company for 17 years? Or whatever it is. And when I think about it, I go back to I, um, when I, when I was IC4 and I joined in 2008, I'm building these first revenue models and the, you know, I'd gone from banking, which is super organized, super structured. They don't even need to know your name. Like they just train you to immediately figure out how to find the backup to everything so that two years later, someone else can do this and so on and so forth. To, there was no infrastructure, right? So I'm like hunting down the exact engineer who has built some ad server so that he can

• 7:36Speaker 01

  tell me what the parameters mean. And of course, the next time he changes them, he's not going to tell me and I have to go find him again. It's like, oh, she's, she's coming, you know, if I don't look her way. But a few months in, I got a meeting invite for power users of SQL. And I thought, my gosh, like I'd been getting, you know, a good amount of feedback about how things could be better. And so here was finally this moment of recognition that like, I didn't even know how to write queries in SQL when I started. And I show up to this meeting and there are five other people and the meeting organizer tells us that we have been called because we are the five users of SQL who consume too much power. And we have just been churning with our massive joins tables, you know, through, uh,

• 8:19Speaker 01

  through the infrastructure. Basically, yes. But I often think back to this because this was a, um, this was a data analyst who didn't know any of us that well, but it just generated his reports of like, who's using the most infrastructure and looked at the top people on the list and, you know, thought, okay, this person in finance, it doesn't make sense why she's the third highest person on the list and called us in and then taught us to write better queries. And like, no one, I think specifically told him to do that. And I think it's a little awkward when you call people in to do this, but he did it because it would make us like all better at our jobs. And I think for 17 years, I have been the beneficiary of a lot of feedback that has made me better along the way. So when people

• 9:01Speaker 01

  ask me this question, I always say, just be a person who's good at receiving feedback.

• 9:06John Collison?

  Yeah. You've mentioned your experience in forecasting. And what I think is the central challenge of CFO in a large tech company is

• 9:17John Collison?

  It's so hard to put numbers around the core thing we do. And what I mean by that is like, if you're Boeing and you're producing the 787, you'd have a very clear model that we're going to spend this much manufacturing the 787, and then each one, we're going to make this much gross profit on. And then at the like component by component level, you know, we're going to change from hydraulic brakes to electric brakes, and it'll allow this much cost, it'll save this much fuel. It's all extremely quantified as a domain.

• 9:38Speaker 01

  Oh, you're dragging into the resource allocation questions. Yes, okay, here we go.

• 9:45Speaker 01

  We really think about it as there's stuff that we can rigorously measure, right? So that's a lot of the, you know, core family of apps work in terms of the impact on engagement, the impact on monetization. There's a lot of that stuff that is really finely tuned where...

• 9:59John Collison?

  And that really does seem extremely finely tuned. Like, I was looking at the numbers, and you doubled ARPU between 2015 and 2020, and then you doubled it again between 2020 and 2025. But like, Meta wasn't bad at monetization in 2020, and it's doubled over that five-year period.

• 10:16Speaker 01

  No, and you know what? I just, you know, did earnings two, three weeks ago now, and was, you know, doing all my investor callbacks. And one of our largest investors on the call, one of the portfolio managers, said, feeling pretty good. He goes, you know, "The ads are so good." And you know what? Five years ago, I would have told you that the ads were really good and that there was not really room for the ads to get better. But here we are, you know, five years later, and, you know, the ads are even better. And I mean...

• 10:49John Collison?

  The joke people have about Instagram is the ads are better than the content.

• 10:53Speaker 01

  Well, I have to tell you, as someone who bought like 25 umbrellas that change color in the rain off of an ad, that was not something I knew that I, not that I needed, but that my children and all their friends needed.

• 11:04John Collison?

  Do they work?

• 11:04Speaker 01

  They do. They are a source of real delight. So, you know, when the ads can be that good, that is an extraordinary thing. But getting back to your question. So there's this very sort of measurable part of the company, and we generally try to trade those things off against each other, you know, when we are thinking, when we're evaluating things within that bucket, and we generally try to fund the things that are positive ROI. And I'm usually the person who's trying to just make sure we understand, like, yes, for every individual experiment, the expected return is something, but that's where we are on the curve today. But what about 50 experiments later? Does the curve still have the same slope? And then there's a set of things, right? Which we constrain more in terms of, you know,

• 11:44Speaker 01

  there's some envelope of investment that we're willing to make that's not in this really ROI-driven bucket. It is very difficult to pencil out what the annual revenue forecast for Reality Labs is going to look like over the next 20 years. And so for bets like that, we sort of invert the problem. But when we talk about the return on the investment, the question that we pose as a finance organization to Mark is, and make sure that Mark and the board understand is, what does this have to be worth to pencil out at the end? And does that pass the sanity check?

• 12:27Speaker 01

  The intuition about what the size of these markets can be, based on maybe some comparisons to markets that exist today. But of course, in another 10, 20 years, you expect that the world will look different and maybe those markets should be bigger or smaller for whatever reason. And that's kind of the guide, which is like, hey, for this thing to succeed at the rate at which we're investing, it needs to be worth this at the end. And does that make sense?

• 12:54John Collison?

  So in a way, investors may underestimate your ambition in some of these new areas where it's like, this is not a hobby. This is us investing in markets that are worth a huge amount of money if we create a new platform here. But the thing people may miss is that the upside case you're considering is really serious.

• 13:15Speaker 01

  Yes, and we're only building because we think that that not only exists, but it's compelling. And it's compelling for financial reasons, but also strategic reasons why we want that version of the world to exist. And this is a place where I've got to be honest with you. Like, I was one of the last people at the company to hand my BlackBerry over for an iPhone.

• 13:37John Collison?

  So you're maybe not the...

• 13:39Speaker 01

  I am not a tech visionary.

• 13:42Speaker 01

  There are many things I'm good at, but sort of envisioning the future of the world and what I want it to be like is not one of them. I'm a very happy beneficiary of the technology built by the world around me.

• 13:54John Collison?

  Yes.

• 13:55Speaker 01

  But Mark very much has a vision for what he wants that world to be, right? And so I think, and for him, I think the sort of strategic imperative is that we have to be building these sort of next states of the world, you know, for us to, again, be a good business, but also just be a compelling company that builds technology and puts it out in the world and, you know, builds incredible experiences for people. I remind people in the finance organization all the time is like, you know, we are very good at skeptically evaluating each bet, right? But the point is not that we have to look at every bet and be like, this bet is going to work. The point is there is a portfolio of bets, right? And some of them are going to pay off massively beyond,

• 14:39Speaker 01

  in fact, what sort of the case on paper looks like when you make the bet. And many of them are going to not work out, but the ones that pay off are going to more than sort of justify the overall investment strategy or the overall sort of roadmap that you're building toward. And if we just allowed ourselves to nix everything that sort of, you know, the paper case didn't seem high confidence, then we would never make a lot of the important bets that are, I think, that have been really important over the history of the company.

• 15:05John Collison?

  When did you take over?

• 15:06Speaker 01

  November 1st, 2022.

• 15:08John Collison?

  Okay, yeah, so the...

• 15:10Speaker 01

  Good timing.

• 15:11John Collison?

  The day you took over, the market cap troughed as $230-ish billion.

• 15:18Speaker 01

  A real sign of market confidence in me, as you can tell.

• 15:21John Collison?

  You probably remember what the number was. So I think it was around $230 billion. And so that means the day that you took over as CFO, one could have bought Facebook, or sorry, Meta, excuse me, as an investor for three times 2025 net income. And that's like coal plant territory. I mean, that's sort of, it's a very easy way to make money is to buy good and growing businesses for three times net income.

• 15:46Speaker 01

  Well, I hope you did.

• 15:47John Collison?

  I did not, and this is why I'm not in the investing business. There was something that people deeply misunderstood at that point about Meta. What did they misunderstand so much?

• 16:01Speaker 01

  Well, there's a bit here, by the way, something I'm going to ask you. You know, how you feel about having public, you know, public market investors someday, and when will that day be?

• 16:10John Collison?

  Do my interviews.

• 16:12Speaker 01

  But more to the point, you know, that sort of October 22 moment happened at a, like, there were multiple things going on, if you kind of rewind the clock. There were sort of two big revenue headwinds. One was that the sort of platform changes with ATT had kind of rolled through from 2021, which went on.

• 16:32John Collison?

  It was Apple changing their policies around what tracking was permissible inside of apps.

• 16:37Speaker 01

  Yes, exactly. So that was one thing. And then the second thing was just this sort of COVID-fueled e-commerce avalanche was pulling back. And both of those things very.

• 16:47John Collison?

  We're buying fewer color-changing umbrellas.

• 16:49Speaker 01

  Sadly, for the children of the world, yes. And so both of those things had the effect of, unfortunately, having for us at the same time. So we really, like, you know, went from this e-commerce-fueled heyday in 2021 to now, like, negative year-over-year growth for the first time, which is obviously very alarming.

• 17:05John Collison?

  Right.

• 17:06Speaker 01

  And so, you know, those stars kind of aligned in that stock price low kind of way in October 2022. And I think what you've seen since then is a few things. One is that, yes, there are these two exogenous factors that happened that were bad for revenue at the time, but the fundamental sort of underlying, like, business, which is, can we show the best possible ads to the right people at the right time across, you know, the surface of consumer experiences that we are building? That continued to be very strong, right? And then the second thing is, I think we demonstrated as a company that we are, in fact, able to turn the ship on costs in a, you know, very, very meaningful and very quick way.

• 17:49John Collison?

  Speaking of that, you have to explain the free cash flow hat. And thank you for the hat, by the way.

• 17:53Speaker 01

  Oh, yes. Well, you're welcome. Everyone really should have one. I think they are underworn out in the world.

• 18:01Speaker 01

  The joke is, the story is that Mark at one point gave me an EBITDA hat, which was a very kind gift from him to help me sort of...

• 18:10John Collison?

  It really sends a message, like I hope you went and prominently wore it or in many of the budgetary review meetings that you were in.

• 18:16Speaker 01

  I did.

• 18:17John Collison?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 18:17Speaker 01

  I did, and I...

• 18:18John Collison?

  This is the EBITDA hat that Mark gave me.

• 18:20Speaker 01

  Yes, and I had it in my background, you know, my Zoom background for a long time. But I realized pretty quickly that we actually, as a company, should be wearing free cash flow hats instead. Because of course, the D of EBITDA is a number of growing importance, you know, through our financials. And so I didn't want Mark to misinterpret and feel like, you know, EBITDA was going to be the end all be all financial metric for us. So I'm now, there's only one EBITDA hat. There are many free cash flow hats. I give them out like candy and try to make sure that people really understand that this is the hat that matters.

• 18:58John Collison?

  You know, Charlie Munger had the joke that anytime you hear EBITDA, you should substitute it with bullshit earnings. And so you similarly, for a capex intensive business, you want to make sure people are not forgetting about the capex.

• 19:07Speaker 01

  Yes, exactly.

• 19:09John Collison?

  Where does capex go for not just Meta, but the tech industry broadly? Because all of Microsoft, Google, and Meta have gotten more capex intensive over the past few years compared to their prior steady states. Like, do we continue spending this fraction of revenues on capex over a five or 10 year period? Does this, do we somehow get some kind of amazing compute gains? Are we ultimately like robotic on power? And so you just can't keep growing capex at this rate because you can't plug the data centers into anything. But where does capex go at an industry-wide level?

• 19:42Speaker 01

  That is the question that I assume that all of my counterparts at these companies and I are all, are all thinking about. For us, there are, you know, the drivers of kind of the way we're investing in capex today. Of course, we have, first of all, just a massively scaled consumer business and core, you know, AI infrastructure that powers all the ranking and recommendations work and so on and so forth. So that's always been a reasonably big number for us, but also one because it was getting more mature that we were sort of driving. To be more efficient over time. And then now you have, among many of our peers and ourselves, this big investment to train what we all aspire to be frontier models. And then if you use those models to build great and scaled consumer experiences,

• 20:27Speaker 01

  then how much inference, you know, computer are you going to need on top of that? If just compute required continues to scale up in this way forever, then you're going to run into some true problems of physics. But hopefully, there will be different kinds of research innovations along the way that will unlock things like being able to distribute the training so you don't need sort of one extremely large cluster somewhere, and that will help with a lot of the energy and other challenges. So there's some question about just what that looks like over time. And then there's this question about, you know, great, you can build all this capacity. And what do you do with them if it turns out you don't need as much compute for either training or inference as you thought? And I think a lot of us have different backup use cases, right? So up to some point, we would use a lot of compute very happily still,

• 21:11Speaker 01

  you know, in the core business and what we expect the core business to be three years from today. But frankly, we'd use more compute in the core business. Now, that doesn't scale forever, right? So like, the real question is what happens in like two years if you've built so much compute that you cannot envision a reasonable ROI on the backup use case if your, what you're building doesn't come to fruition? And that's something I think we're all going to learn in the next few years.

• 21:36John Collison?

  And sorry, when you say the primer versus backup use cases, the primer use case is new products like Llama and stuff, and the backup use case is ads optimization.

• 21:45Speaker 01

  Yes, exactly.

• 21:46John Collison?

  You mentioned just doing earnings. Is there a specific anecdote that you can or want to discuss?

• 21:54Speaker 01

  In the October 22 period, so we had an earnings call at the end of October. And as usual, I'm doing investor callbacks. And, you know, it was a pretty, you know, the investors were not... Shy about their feedback.

• 22:08John Collison?

  Yes.

• 22:08Speaker 01

  And in fact, one of the calls.

• 22:09John Collison?

  Investor callbacks, I don't know what this is. This is where you call the, this is like one on ones, basically.

• 22:14Speaker 01

  Yes, it's pretty standard after earnings calls where you touch base with like some number of your largest investors. Sadly, it is not one on one. It's, you know, one of you and many, many people from their teams.

• 22:26John Collison?

  Yep.

• 22:26Speaker 01

  And most of the time, they just ask you to, you know, clarify things. Obviously, everything is, you know, reg FD compliant. But it mostly takes the form of questions. And, you know, in October 2022, for the first time, there were sometimes no questions. I mean, there was a call where basically one of the portfolio managers said, we actually don't have any questions for you today. We just want you to hear, you know, feedback from us.

• 22:48John Collison?

  Wow, more of a comment than a question.

• 22:50Speaker 01

  Yes, it was, it was actually very memorable. And one of the things.

• 22:53John Collison?

  It was blunt feedback, I presume.

• 22:54Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 22:55John Collison?

  Yeah.

• 22:55Speaker 01

  And one of the things that really stuck with me from one of those conversations is someone said, look, I, I get that you're building the next, you know, the future of computing and the next mobile platform and all of that. And that is great. And I am glad someone wants to do it and I am rooting for you.

• 23:14Speaker 01

  But why should I invest in your stock today? Like, why don't I just wait for your, you know, your phone equivalent, you know, your scaled consumer product to come out, you know, and invest in you then? And you tell me that that's going to be like years away. And the way that question was framed actually really stuck with me. And, you know, is the way that frankly, now Mark and I think about this, which is like, great, we've got a lot of these bets. And, you know, the bets are technologically exciting. People can get excited about them and the vision of the world. But as investors, they're like, cool, why don't I just wait for your bets to like be ready, be on, you know, be ready to succeed before I come.

• 23:56Speaker 01

  We need people to invest with us along the way. And when we think about the financial outlook of the company, you know, a large part of it is not just, okay, cool, you're building the next, you know, massive platform out here in some decades. It's why would you hold our shares until then? And what do we need to keep delivering in terms of consolidated results?

• 24:17John Collison?

  I found it really interesting how when the AI revolution started really ramping up. People realized, oh, we need a ton of GPUs to train leading-edge foundation models. You guys had done a huge GPU scale-up because you're just doing a lot of AI in the core feed. And so I think there's some interesting optionality in being a scaled infra and AI player, where we are very good at putting GPUs towards their highest and best use. And you have seen that we're very good at allocating compute. And that is why you should invest. And that's quite different from the pitch maybe 10 years ago,

• 25:02John Collison?

  where we're good at scaling social products.

• 25:04Speaker 01

  Yes, I think there's definitely an interesting point there. You know, as part of not wanting to miss the boat, you know, we built out enough capacity for Reels, but also for like future things. And we found that we were in fact able to put that capacity towards, you know, very good use, exactly as you said. So I do think an interesting question in the future will be, I think allocating compute as a resource, that's something we... It's a muscle we've built later as a company, right? Because we, you know, had gotten very good at allocating headcount as a resource. And headcount's really easy to account for because you have org charts. So you know exactly this person reports to this person, to this person, that this person is incontrovertibly working on Facebook Marketplace, for example. GPUs don't have that property. In fact, you often want to build out your infrastructure...

• 25:49John Collison?

  You can have shenanigans.

• 25:50Speaker 01

  For it to be very fungible. Because you want it to, you need to divert capacity to where suddenly something has happened in India and you want a lot of compute to be available to be used there. So it's not all like this GPU is labeled for Facebook Marketplace and this is labeled for... And so it's actually quite a bit more difficult to account for, you know, where the capacity is being used at any given point in time. And that means it's harder to manage. And it's harder to create the incentives around like, are you using GPUs efficiently?

• 26:18John Collison?

  You allow people to trade between people and GPUs, right?

• 26:22Speaker 01

  In the budgeting process, we have allowed people to trade. And not too surprisingly, even though you'll find that groups are often asking for compute, when that particular trade is on offer... People almost never trade for compute for exactly the reason I described, which is that if they get allocated 100 new headcount, there is no chance that 26 of those headcount will accidentally be working for something else.

• 26:52John Collison?

  Yes, I see. So again, it's harder to account for. But you could joke that AI has shown up everywhere except in the large company hiring plans. And when I talk to startups, sometimes they are actually delivering, they're having a huge amount of impact with a very small number of people. And they plan to grow headcount slower than maybe the generation of startups that came before them. How do you think AI productivity actually shows up as more established companies like Stripe or like Meta that just have a larger installed base?

• 27:25Speaker 01

  Yes. You know, when we think about AI for productivity at Meta, I think there are two dimensions. So one is how do you make the most operational parts of people's jobs less so and more interesting? And I say that as a person who is like a very expensive machine learning model for approving expenses, right? I'm not certain that when I approve expenses, I'm really adding a lot of deep human intelligence to this process. I'm scanning for a fairly checklistable set of things, and yet I get multiple expenses every day. And so how do you take that part of people's jobs? Those are concerning, yes. Some of them have taken me down some really interesting rat holes. But so how do you basically make those parts of people's jobs automated so they can do more interesting things?

• 28:09Speaker 01

  And the second thing is, you know, there are actually things we don't do enough of today because right now they're pretty low ROI to do, right? And so like the kind of canonical example is everyone knows someone who has gotten locked out of their Facebook or Instagram account. It is a pain to get back in. We know it is a pain to get back in, but it's super laborious, the process of like verifying that you're a real person, you have real friends on the platform. It's a hard problem. If we could actually make that more efficient and more productive and enable a currently sort of a human reviewer or customer service agent to go from, you know, reviewing, I'm making up these numbers, but five a day to 50 a day, you know, unlocking 50 accounts a day,

• 28:54Speaker 01

  you can actually make this a pretty high ROI thing to do that you would invest in on an ROI basis alone. So I think there is a bit where, you know, I think everyone is sort of worried about the world where like the machines, you know, have come for all of our jobs. Definitely my expense approval job and maybe more. But I think there's actually a window before that where I think it's really about making humans substantially more productive than they are today.

• 29:18John Collison?

  And makes new kinds of things possible that weren't economic or just kind of possible.

• 29:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 29:23John Collison?

  Yeah. I've kept you for way too long. Thank you.

• 29:26Speaker 01

  Thank you so much for having me. I really look forward to seeing that free pack full head everywhere in the wild. It is the perfect photo accessory.

• 29:33John Collison?

  There we go.

• 29:33Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 29:34John Collison?

  It's a good look.

• 29:34Speaker 01

  And it's green.

• 29:35John Collison?

  And it's green, exactly. Thank you. It's very culturally on brand.

• 29:38Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 29:39John Collison?

  Alrighty.

• 29:39Speaker 01

  Thank you.