The Mark Zuckerberg Interview

Mark is the iconic founder CEO of our time. At Chase Center on September 10, 2024, he did an unprecedented thing: a live conversation in front of 6,000 people on Meta’s company strategy, sharing stories from early Facebook history, and his thoughts on the future of AI, VR, and AR. Mark was remarkably candid in our discussion, and gave us a window into his real and intense daily demeanor leading Meta. (And his other life endeavors!) We can't wait to release the complete video of the whole night, including our surprise conversations with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, and cameo appearances from Jensen Huang and Mike Taylor (the incredible singer of “Who Got the Truth?”). That’s coming in a couple weeks, but for now: enjoy this conversation with Mark Zuckerberg. *Links:* - Mike Amiri (who designed Mark’s shirt!): https://amiri.com *More Acquired:* - Get email updates https://www.acquired.fm/email and vote on future episodes! - Join the Slack http://acquired.fm/slack - Check out the latest swag in the ACQ Merch Store https://www.acquired.fm/store! _Photo Credit: Mark Zuckerberg by Jeff Sainlar / Meta_ _Note: Acquired hosts and guests may hold assets discussed in this episode. This podcast is not investment advice, and is intended for informational and entertainment purposes only. You should do your own research and make your own independent decisions when considering any financial transactions._

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

• 0:00David Rosenthal?

  So how many interviews with Mark do you think you watched before tonight?

• 0:04Ben Gilbert?

  Oh, to prepare?

• 0:05David Rosenthal?

  Yeah.

• 0:09Ben Gilbert?

  30 to 40. The best ones are the 04 to 06 vintage, but they're all so different. It's almost like every three to four years is a new era that is markedly different from all the previous eras.

• 0:21David Rosenthal?

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

• 0:27Ben Gilbert?

  Oh, yes, absolutely.

• 0:29David Rosenthal?

  All right, should we do this?

• 0:31Ben Gilbert?

  Let's do it.

• 0:39Ben Gilbert?

  Welcome to the fall 2024 season of Acquired, the podcast about great companies and the stories and playbooks behind them. I'm Ben Gilbert.

• 0:57David Rosenthal?

  I'm David Rosenthal.

• 0:59Ben Gilbert?

  And we are your hosts. Listeners, we have something very special for you today. Our interview with Mark Zuckerberg from Acquired, live at Chase Center.

• 1:07David Rosenthal?

  Ooh.

• 1:08Ben Gilbert?

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

• 1:20David Rosenthal?

  Which, speaking of the full show, was utterly amazing. We had surprise appearances from Jensen Huang, Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, and of course, we had the one and only Mike Taylor, the artist who sings Who Got the Truth, performing live. It was incredible. We've got basically a whole film production that's now happening behind the scenes with another 90 minutes of content beyond just this Mark interview. We should have that out in the next couple of weeks, so stay tuned for that.

• 1:49Ben Gilbert?

  All right, listeners, now is a great time to tell you about a longtime friend of the show, Vanta. AI has scrambled the whole security picture. It used to be that you proved that you were secure once a year on audit or a static PDF, then everyone would nod and you're done. But in an AI-first world, that doesn't hold up anymore.

• 2:08David Rosenthal?

  Yep, your risk surface changes every week now. A vendor turns on an AI feature, or someone writes in a new model without telling IT, and your posture is different than it was last week, let alone at your last audit. Vanta's own research found that around 70% of companies have this quote-unquote "shadow AI" running with no security review at all.

• 2:29Ben Gilbert?

  Right, and that's where Vanta comes in. They're the leading agentic trust platform, meaning they've built the thing that closes the gap, and the way that they close that gap is Vanta Agent. Think of it as a GRC engineer, that's Governance, Risk and Compliance, except that it's software and it doesn't sleep. It finds the issues, drafts the fixes, and cuts the time that you'd spend on vendor assessments in half.

• 2:51David Rosenthal?

  In half, which is exactly why more than 16,000 companies today run on Vanta. Companies like Ramp, Cursor, and Snowflake all stay audit-ready and catch the risks that crop up between audits across every vendor, every AI tool, the whole environment.

• 3:09Ben Gilbert?

  And that's the real value. Trust has to be continuous now, which is why Vanta automates your security, your compliance, and the work to earn and prove trust. We're huge fans of Vanta over here, and literally hundreds of Acquired listeners have become Vanta customers at their companies over the years. So you can get $1,000 off Vanta at vanta.com/acquired. That's V-A-N-T-A dot com slash acquired for $1,000 off, and just tell them that Ben and David sent you. As always, come discuss this afterwards with us in the Slack, acquired.fm/slash-slash. And if you want to be notified when every new episode drops, sign up at acquired.fm/email.

• 3:49David Rosenthal?

  All right. One more thing before the interview. We need to say a huge, huge thank you to the entire JP Morgan Payments team for securing the Chase Center for this, for orchestrating the entire evening. Ben and I really worked side by side all year with their incredible team to make this evening happen, and we really got to know them. Max, Umar, Dustin, Hannah, Vinnie, Nick, Amy, Carly, and so many others. It's like we were one team. You guys rock.

• 4:18Ben Gilbert?

  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.

• 4:31David Rosenthal?

  Thank you, guys, for being the best partners we could ever imagine. And a very special shout out to Dustin Sedgwick, JP Morgan Payments CMO, who's a longtime listener of the show and a good friend of ours. And he's just been the driving force behind all of this. Without him, Chase Center wouldn't have happened. We're so grateful for our incredible relationship with you and all of JP Morgan.

• 4:53Ben Gilbert?

  Yep. So, please enjoy our conversation with Mark Zuckerberg. And to take us in, the chairman and CEO of JP Morgan Chase, Jamie Dimon.

• 5:03Speaker 02

  Hello, Acquired listeners. Welcome to the Chase Center and to Acquired Live. I'm Jamie Dimon, chairman and CEO of JP Morgan Chase. I'm happy to kick off the show tonight and welcome all of you to one of my favorite arenas. It's been a great partnership all year between JP Morgan Payments and Acquired, storytelling and educating about some of the greatest companies in the world. For many of them, just like many of you in the crowd, we're thrilled to call you friends and partners of the firm. Sorry I couldn't be there in person tonight, but I hope everyone enjoys the show. Ben and David, over to you.

• 5:36David Rosenthal?

  Mark?

• 5:37Speaker 03

  Hey.

• 5:38David Rosenthal?

  It's great to have you here.

• 5:40Speaker 03

  It's great to be here. You know, I was watching Jensen's video, Correcting the Record, and I was thinking to myself, we might need to book the next one of these for all the things I'm going to have to apologize for and everything I say tonight. Nah, just kidding.

• 5:54David Rosenthal?

  Well...

• 5:54Speaker 03

  I don't apologize anymore.

• 5:58Ben Gilbert?

  We've noticed.

• 6:00David Rosenthal?

  Well, OK, wait, wait. Here's the question. If you knew what you knew today...

• 6:04Speaker 03

  What's up?

• 6:04David Rosenthal?

  If you knew what you know today, would you have started Facebook?

• 6:08Speaker 03

  Oh, God. I mean, look, I think...

• 6:11Ben Gilbert?

  Coming out hot, David.

• 6:12Speaker 03

  Yeah, no, I mean...

• 6:13David Rosenthal?

  He started it. Literally.

• 6:16Speaker 03

  I think there's something to Jensen's original sentiment, which is that the entrepreneurial journey is very challenging, especially the early days when you're... Running a startup and you know, there's the sense that what you're doing could just die at any moment and the volatility, everything is just getting thrashed so much and it's not, you know, you obviously you look back, you have all these fond memories, but it was not the most fun part of the journey or you know, the part of my life that I like, wish I could go back and relive. So I mean, I do think that there's something to what Jensen was saying that I thought was very honest and that when I heard him say it the first time, I was like,

• 6:58Speaker 03

  yeah, I get that. Right. It's like, I think, I think there were like a lot of people for whom, you know, if you knew how painful it would be along the way, you wouldn't get started. But then, you know, I think that that's one of the things that's good about human nature is you can underestimate how painful things are going to be. So that way you can go and do good things.

• 7:20David Rosenthal?

  Well, on that topic, we have a lot to talk about.

• 7:25Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 7:26David Rosenthal?

  I think this is actually very appropriate. First, we have to ask you about your shirt and what you're wearing.

• 7:33Speaker 03

  Yeah, you know, I, um, I started, uh, working with people to design some of my own clothes. And, um, so I figure, you know, look, we're going to design eyewear, we're going to design other stuff that people wear. Let's get, let's get good at this. And, um, so this one, I actually, I worked with this great fashion designer, Micah Miri, and, um, he's got a great story. So I wouldn't be surprised if you're doing one of these with him one day. Um, and this one is, so I've, I've kind of started working on this series of shirts with my, some of my

• 8:15Speaker 03

  favorite classical sayings on them. So this one is Pathemathos, uh, learning through suffering.

• 8:25Speaker 03

  It's a little family saying and also escholus.

• 8:31David Rosenthal?

  Was that your family saying growing up or is that your family now?

• 8:34Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah. I'm just saying my sister said it.

• 8:39Ben Gilbert?

  Well, no, let's pull that thread.

• 8:43Ben Gilbert?

  No pun intended, I promise.

• 8:46Ben Gilbert?

  What does learning through suffering mean to you?

• 8:51Speaker 03

  Well, I think you learn what matters to you and what's important and kind of your place in the world through repeatedly hitting your head against different challenges. And I think that that is sort of, that's the journey, right? I mean, that's the entrepreneurial journey. It's also, I think, part of the beauty of building things.

• 9:12Speaker 03

  But this is something that Jensen talks a lot about too. It's like, I feel like you, you know, when you go to start a company, you, you know, everyone kind of writes down what they would like their values to be. But values are not what you write down on the wall. It's like your lived behaviors. And you only really learn what you care about when you have to make hard trade-offs and face challenges. So, yeah, you learn the most important things through facing challenges.

• 9:44David Rosenthal?

  Well, speaking of facing challenges, we want to talk about a number of those because we counted, by our count, I think you have faced more existential challenges than any meaningful company in history through your first 20 years. First, though...

• 10:00Speaker 03

  It's a dubious distinction.

• 10:04Ben Gilbert?

  We will make our case to you of why and enumerate them.

• 10:07David Rosenthal?

  You're still here.

• 10:08Ben Gilbert?

  But first...

• 10:09Speaker 03

  I kind of think my, you know, like that old Nike Michael Jordan ad where he's talking about how he's failed over and over and over again and that's how he succeeds? That one really resonates with me, too.

• 10:19David Rosenthal?

  So, thanks to you guys, I got a pair of these this summer. And I genuinely love them.

• 10:30David Rosenthal?

  Tell us the story of how these came to be.

• 10:33Speaker 03

  Yeah, so...

• 10:37Speaker 03

  Thanks, I'm excited about them too.

• 10:40Speaker 03

  So, you know, Meta, we've been building social experiences for 20 years now. And originally, it took the form of a website, then 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 social connection company. Right, I mean, we talk about what we're doing is building the future of human connection. And

• 11:09Speaker 03

  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, you know, when we got started, okay, we're like a handful of kids. You know, we weren't able, we didn't have the resources at the time to go define whatever the next computing platform is. And also, you know, Facebook originally got started around the same time as, you know, a bunch of the early smartphones and those platforms got started. So, we didn't really get to play any role in developing that platform. And one of the big themes, I think, for the next chapter of what we do is, I wanna be able to build what I think are sort of the ideal experiences. Not just what you're allowed to build on some platform that someone else built,

• 11:54Speaker 03

  but like, what is actually, if you can think from first principles, what is the ideal social experience? So, I think what you would like to have is not a phone that you look down at, that kind of takes your attention away from the things and the people around you, you know, not just a small screen. I think what you ideally have is glasses. And through the glasses, there's one part of it where the glasses, you can, they can see what you see and they can hear what you hear. And in doing so, they can be kind of the perfect AI assistant for you because they have context on what you're doing. But then, part of that is also that the glasses can project images, basically like holograms, out into the world.

• 12:36Speaker 03

  And that way, your social experiences with other people aren't constrained to these little interactions you can have on a phone screen. You know, in the not-so-distant future, you can imagine,

• 12:49Speaker 03

  because you guys have demoed some of the stuff that we've done, like a version of this where we're having a conversation like this, but you know, maybe like one of us isn't even here. 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 we're very physical beings, right? People like to intellectualize everything, but a lot of our experience is very physical. And this physical sense of presence that you're with another person, doing things in the physical world, is something that you're going to be able to do through holograms, through glasses, without being taken away from, you know, whatever else you're doing.

• 13:34Speaker 03

  Just kind of have that mixed in with the rest of the world.

• 13:39Speaker 03

  It's going to be, I think, the ultimate digital social experience. And I think it's also going to be the ultimate incarnation of AI, because you're going to have conversations where it's like, alright, there's some people. It's like, maybe like, I'm physically here, there's like a person. You're like a hologram there, there's an AI that is kind of embodied as someone is there. And the glasses will enable this. So, okay, so how are we going after this, building this? This is like some huge project. We've been working on it for 10 years.

• 14:10Speaker 03

  And there are a lot of different challenges to solve, to get there. There's like, you have to build a novel display stack, right? It's not, these aren't just screens, like the kind that are in phones. There's this long lineage. They're connected to the screens that have been in TVs and monitors and things for a long time. There's been this massive optimization of the supply chain. There's like, brand-new display stack around holographic displays that basically need to get created. And then they need to be put into glasses. They need to be miniaturized. And you also in the glasses need to fit chips, microphones, speakers, cameras, eye tracking to be able to understand what you're doing, batteries to make it last all day.

• 14:51Ben Gilbert?

  Operate on new novel RF protocols.

• 14:55Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's like, okay, it's a pretty big challenge. So we're like, all right, 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 kind of the first prototype that we have of that, and I'm really excited about that. At the same time, we also came at it from this lens of, all right, so that's like a lot of new technology that needs to get developed, a lot to pack into a form factor because the glasses have to be good looking, too. So what if we just constrain ourselves to like, we're gonna work with a great partner, Essilor Luxottica, they make Ray-Ban, they make a lot of the iconic glasses. Let's see what we can fit into glasses today and make them as useful as possible.

• 15:38Speaker 03

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

• 15:51Ben Gilbert?

  Which, let's be clear, that's what you thought Facebook was.

• 15:53Speaker 03

  That's true. That's true. Yeah, I did.

• 15:56Ben Gilbert?

  Like for your real startup someday.

• 15:57Speaker 03

  That's true. Yeah, no, this is, yeah, let's go on a tangent there for a second. When I started Facebook in school, came out to Silicon Valley with Dustin and a handful of people working on it at the time. And we did that because Silicon Valley is where all the startups came from. And I remember we got off the plane, we were driving down 101, we're like, wow, eBay, Yahoo, like, this is amazing, all these great companies. One day, we're, maybe we'll build a company like this. And I'd already started Facebook. And I was like, surely the project that we're working on now is not a company.

• 16:27Ben Gilbert?

  And Facebook had like some scale at this point.

• 16:30Speaker 03

  Oh, no, no, it was a great project. I just didn't have the ambition to turn it into a company at the time. That just kind of happened. But anyway.

• 16:41Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, a lot of hard work, obviously, but it's but I just at the time I was kind of like, yeah, no, I don't think this is it.

• 16:50David Rosenthal?

  Well, that's your answer of would you have started? You actually didn't try to start Facebook.

• 16:54Speaker 03

  I didn't know. So yeah, so I mean, the glasses, though, you know, we thought that this was like, all right, we want to get working with Estee Lauder Luxottica so we can start building more and more advanced glasses. And then, you know, they're really good. They look good. And then AI, like the massive transformation of AI. And I remember.

• 17:11Ben Gilbert?

  For listeners, let's just be really clear. You guys shipped this product that I'm holding before LLMs, or at least before the public consciousness was aware of, you know, the ChatGPT moment. And these were not manufactured and shipped as an AI device. That came later when they were already in market.

• 17:31Speaker 03

  Yeah, a few years ago, I would have predicted that AR holograms would have been available before kind of like full scale AI. And now I think it's probably going to be the other order. So now it's like, all right, great. Well, this is actually a great product because it's got it's got the cameras, so it can see what you see. It's got the microphone. It's got the speakers. You can talk to it. I remember calling Alex Himmel, the guy who runs the product group.

• 17:55Ben Gilbert?

  That's exactly the story.

• 17:56Speaker 03

  And I'm like, hey, you know, I think we should probably pivot this and make it so that that Meta AI is the primary feature of it. And then like, I remember I came in the next week and they'd built a prototype of it on Tuesday. And it was like, all right, good. Yeah, no, this is good. This is going to be a very successful product.

• 18:11David Rosenthal?

  He told us a much more high stakes version of that story.

• 18:14Ben Gilbert?

  He was like, so I was, I was on the highway with my kids and I get this call on a Saturday from Mark and he's like, those glasses, could we put Meta AI in them running on device and like ship that soon? So we can see if that's a good idea or not.

• 18:29Speaker 03

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

• 18:36Speaker 03

  Sounds right.

• 18:40Ben Gilbert?

  All right, listeners. Now is a great time to thank our longtime friend of the show, ServiceNow. If you are running a large enterprise, AI agents are likely spread across every team, and deploying them is no longer the hard part.

• 18:54David Rosenthal?

  Yeah, the hard part is knowing what permissions they have, what employees are using them for, or what decisions AI is making. AI security for an enterprise at scale is not a small concern. Like, the risks are real.

• 19:08Ben Gilbert?

  Exactly. And the challenge with AI is governing it, securing it, measuring it, and making sure that it actually delivers value. That is why ServiceNow built the AI Control Tower.

• 19:18David Rosenthal?

  Yep. AI Control Tower gives enterprises a single place to see, manage, govern, and optimize AI across the entire business. And it works with any AI, not just theirs. Every device on your network, every permission across every system, every AI agent visible and secure in one place.

• 19:35Ben Gilbert?

  And ServiceNow can do this because they've spent more than 20 years building the operational backbone of the enterprise. The workflows, governance, approvals, security controls, and institutional knowledge that power how work actually gets done across IT, HR, customer service, finance, and security.

• 19:52David Rosenthal?

  ServiceNow already runs more than 100 billion workflows annually, and trillions of transactions for more than 85% of the Fortune 500. So when companies need a place to govern AI at enterprise scale, they're building on a platform at the center of how their business already operates.

• 20:08Ben Gilbert?

  And in a future that isn't going to be one AI, it's going to be thousands of AI agents working across every function of the company. But the question is, who's managing them all?

• 20:17David Rosenthal?

  So if you're trying to turn AI ambition into real business outcomes and make it work safely, securely, at scale, go check out servicenow.com/acquired and tell them that Ben and David sent you.

• 20:28Ben Gilbert?

  Okay, so.

• 20:31Ben Gilbert?

  Thank you for opening up with a story. The question that I would like to try to answer tonight is why has Meta worked as spectacularly well as it has? I mean, one of the most valuable companies in the world through multiple iterations, multiple technology waves, fighting off, you know, maybe, let's name all the waves in which people said, oh, Facebook and Meta are so screwed, and yet, that is not the way it looks today.

• 21:02David Rosenthal?

  MySpace, Twitter Gen 1, Instagram, Snapchat, WhatsApp, TikTok.

• 21:12Ben Gilbert?

  Apple app tracking transparency.

• 21:14David Rosenthal?

  ATT, you could put in its own whole category, and now ChatGPT.

• 21:19Ben Gilbert?

  And like, there is a widely held public narrative every single time Snapchat discovers stories, or there's something where people are like, oh, the cool thing that Facebook, the company, did is just obsolete now, and they're gonna go away. You very much haven't gone away. What do you think is the through line of the DNA of the company that allows you to keep winning?

• 21:45Speaker 03

  I think it's that we're a technology company that is focused on human connection, not a specific type of app. So, like, we never thought about ourselves as a website, or a social network, or anything like that. For me, building this kind of glasses to enable the future of people being able to feel present with another person, no matter where they actually physically are, is the natural continuation of the kind of apps that we build today. 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.

• 22:30Speaker 03

  Because, you know, a lot of companies, I think, think about themselves too narrowly in terms of, okay, well, we're this kind of one thing, 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 mean, I mostly took like systems engineering type classes when I was in college. So you talk about like Friendster and MySpace and all the scaling challenges they had doing the graph calculations of like, all right, do you know this person? Friends of friends of friends. Yeah.

• 23:08David Rosenthal?

  Yeah, actually, can you take us back? And like, we want to ask you the story of that time. I mean, it seems quaint now, Friendster, MySpace, but you study computer science, graph, networking, social graphs. That is a very, very difficult computational calculation.

• 23:25Speaker 03

  So I think it's a combination of a product question and a technology question. I think you can define the product in such a general way that the technology becomes basically impossible to solve. So you want to have a smart product definition, but then you want to be competent and better than everyone else at the technology. And I think that that's something that we've held ourselves to and build a good organization around. And it's 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 companies I was talking about, it's like, they, you know, they, the

• 24:05Speaker 03

  CEO wasn't technical, the board of directors had no one technical on it, they had like one dude on the management team who was the head of engineering who was technical and like everyone else wasn't. It's like, all 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 want like a lot of the people on our, on our management team, it's like, you know, split mostly people running either these big product groups who come up through different technical pathways at the company. And I think that there's like a balance, right? It's like, you don't want everyone to be an engineer because there's other things that matter too. But if you don't have enough of your kind of share of

• 24:46Speaker 03

  the company as engineers, then you're not a technology company. And I think that that also is important to the board. And I think just like in terms of how you weigh decisions and culturally things inside the company matters a lot. But I think that's one of the things that has been really fundamental. Where it's like, we're able to kind of go from platform to platform and do these different things because we've invested and cared about the underlying technology. The product experiences that we build on top of that are an implementation and they matter. And for that, I think, we also, I think, are a pretty curious and learning-focused organization.

• 25:24Speaker 03

  Where, you know, I view the product strategy less as any one specific thing and more as how do we iterate and learn as quickly as possible how to make each thing better for the people we're trying to serve. Right? So, like, I define our strategies, if we can learn faster than every other company, we're gonna win. We're gonna build a better product than everyone else because we're gonna get it out first, early. We're going to have a good feedback loop. We're gonna get a bunch of feedback. We're gonna learn what people like better than other people. And then, over time, by the time you get to, you know, whether it's version three, or four, or five, I mean, they're not even discrete versions because you ship so frequently.

• 26:06Speaker 03

  It's, you just, you learn faster. So, I think that's basically the formula. Be a technology company, build good foundation, like, learn from what people are kind of focused on in the world and iterate as quickly as you can.

• 26:22Ben Gilbert?

  In one of my research calls to prep for this, someone described you as a master strategist, which like, it's, we all sort of acknowledge that at this point, but that the-

• 26:32Speaker 03

  I mean, except for like, all the stuff that I just thought was not gonna be that important, that ended up actually being the most important. But you're very generous.

• 26:40Ben Gilbert?

  But that's the thing is-

• 26:41Speaker 03

  Part of it is like, okay, you wanna set up the game so that way you optimize, you create your luck.

• 26:45David Rosenthal?

  This is what Jetson told us. Like, the apple's gonna fall from the tree in some direction, and if you just set up the game, that you have a hand close enough to catch it.

• 26:55Ben Gilbert?

  The comment that someone made to me was, the reason Mark is such a good strategist is because he plays the company as if it's a turn-based strategy game, and he just makes sure he gets more turns than anybody else, and he makes sure that he learns more from each turn than the next player does. Do you feel like that encapsulates like Meta's product development?

• 27:17Speaker 03

  I do like turn-based strategy.

• 27:20Ben Gilbert?

  But it does kind of feel like the way that you make bets is like, I, well, if we have great engineering, then that can kind of take care of the speed part. That's like, you know, many iterations or multiple at bats. And then the...

• 27:33Speaker 03

  Well, great engineering and speed and duration are actually two different values. They're not necessarily at odds, but I think like, there are a lot of great engineering organizations that try to build things that are super high quality and have good competence around that. But I don't know, there's a certain personality that goes with kind of taking your stuff and putting it out there before it's fully polished. And look, I'm not saying that our strategy or approach on this is the only one that works. I think in a lot of ways, we're like the opposite of Apple, and clearly their stuff has worked really well too. Right? But I mean, they take this approach, it's like, we're gonna take like a long time, we're gonna polish it, we're gonna put it out. And maybe for the stuff that they're doing that works, maybe that just fits with their

• 28:18Speaker 03

  culture. But for us, I think that there are a lot of conversations that we have internally where you're almost at the line of being embarrassed about what you put out. Because you, it's, you know, obviously not in the sense that it's like, you know, you wanna, you wanna put stuff out early enough so you can get good feedback. You obviously wanna test things that are reasonable hypotheses, so if it's like so ineffective, then you're not testing a good hypothesis, that doesn't work. But I do think a lot of the conversations that we have are like, okay, well, we can get this to be a lot better if we work on it for like another couple of months or whatever.

• 29:00Speaker 03

  And I do just think that like you wanna really have a culture that values shipping and getting things out and getting feedback, more than needing always to get great positive accolades from people when you put stuff out. Because I think like if you wanna wait until you get praised all the time, you're missing a bunch of the time when you could have learned a bunch of useful stuff and then incorporated that into the next version you were gonna ship.

• 29:26Ben Gilbert?

  And it's just about making sure that what the thing that the company's known for or its brand can withstand all the little damage that you do to it by shipping stuff that's not quite ready.

• 29:36Speaker 03

  Well, I would like to hope that it's not damaging to the brand, but...

• 29:41Ben Gilbert?

  Well, but innately it is. Like when you're like, oh, I feel bad because I shipped a product that wasn't good enough. You're sort of...

• 29:48Speaker 03

  Yeah, no, I don't want to overstate it. 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 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 AI stuff that we're building now, for example, it actually... You know, it's pretty clear that AI is going to be transformative for a lot of different things. It is actually less clear what are going to be the initial use cases for a lot of these things 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 what people are actually... What it's... You know, where it's resonating. Now, if what you put out is bad, then you're not going to collect good data because people aren't going to use it for anything because it sucks.

• 30:33Speaker 03

  So, but I do think that you have hypotheses for what people might really want to use it for, and they're not all going to be right, and you want to kind of go early enough on that is more. Yeah.

• 30:43Ben Gilbert?

  So I'm building to this question of, uh, to you, is product creation an act of invention or discovery? Like, is David always inside that marble? And you just need the very best tooling and ability to get things in market and get feedback to discover the statue of David? Or do you conceive of David in your head and I'm like, I'm going to make this and put it in the world?

• 31:11Speaker 03

  Does it have to be one or the other? I mean, I think it's a combination. I think you're basically taking some kind of values, either kind of like values that you have or a value for something that you believe should exist in the world and trying to build something that's aligned with that while trying to match it up with what is going to resonate the most with people. Right? I think if you just do the latter, then I think you just don't have enough conviction to see through hard things. And if you just do the former, then you probably don't get to product-market fit or optimize what you do because you're not focused enough on your customers. So I think both probably matter. Yeah.

• 31:56Ben Gilbert?

  As I pour through all these historical examples, the market discovers, some other participant in the market discovers the stories format. And suddenly, the whole world is like, "Oh, my God. That's the way that we all..." That's the social interaction mechanism. And that's like a pretty pure discovery where you have products that have stories. They perform very well. That's been discovered. But there's other times, it feels like everything you're trying to do in reality labs, all $50-plus billion that you've put into it is like, "We're going to freaking will this thing into existence because I have an idea of the way that I want the world to be. I'm not really asking for that much feedback. I'm putting it in the world."

• 32:39Speaker 03

  Well, it's a combination. I think that there's certainly a lot of things that we've invented or created for the first time. I mean, like in 2006, when we built the first version of News Feed. Before that, social networks were basically profiles. And then we were like, "Hey, people actually kind of want to get the updates. And let's show them that. And if we rank them, there's so many updates that this can help people parse through that quickly." And today, it's hard to imagine any social product without a feed. So I think that that's, obviously, some of these things are sort of seminal, I don't want to call it an invention, but like patterns that we basically established first. And then some of them are ones that other people did, where we take pride in learning

• 33:20Speaker 03

  from what is working in the world. We're not embarrassed about learning from things that other people discovered that were good first, and then we build a better version of it. And, I mean, I think that that's... You know, no one company is going to invent everything, right? I think if you don't invent anything, then it's hard to be a successful company. But I do think that there's a mix of this. There are more smart people outside of your company than inside your company. If you're not learning from what's going on in the market, then you're missing a lot of opportunities to get valuable signal from people in the community and customers about what they want you to be doing.

• 34:04David Rosenthal?

  Which speaks to the thesis of Facebook as a technology company.

• 34:08Ben Gilbert?

  Meta.

• 34:10David Rosenthal?

  Meta is a technology company. We'll get to that later.

• 34:15David Rosenthal?

  Ben and I have been having a conversation. I want to take this to open source and open source technology and its importance to you. And Ben posited, first to me and then to many other people in our calls over the last couple of 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 and if you would comment on your relationship to open source.

• 34:46Speaker 03

  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 know, we wouldn't have been able to get built without open source. I think probably that's true for any new company that's been created since like, I don't know, 19, the late 1990s or something. For us, open source has been important and valuable.

• 35:12David Rosenthal?

  I mean, you were the first big company built on the Lamp stack.

• 35:17Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, no, and it's great, makes it super easy to develop stuff quickly and iterate quickly. But we've also had an interesting relationship with this because sequentially, as a company, we came after Google. So, Google was the first of the great companies that built this distributed computing infrastructure. So, they came first, they were like, "All right, let's keep this proprietary because it's a big advantage for us." And then we're like, "All right, we need that too." But we built it and then we're like, "Okay, not an advantage for us because Google already has that, so we might as well just make it open." And by making it open, then you basically get this whole community of people building around it. So, you know, it wasn't going to help us compete with Google for any of the stuff that we were doing to have that technology.

• 35:59Speaker 03

  But what we were able to do with things like Open Compute were get it to become the industry's standard. So, now you have like all these other, you know, cloud service platforms that, you know, basically use Open Compute. And because of that, the supply chain is standardized around our designs, which means that it's like way more supply, way cheaper to produce. We've saved billions of dollars and the quality of the stuff that we get to use goes up. So, all right, that's like a win-win. But I think in order for this to work...

• 36:30Speaker 03

  We do a lot of open source stuff. We do a lot of closed source stuff. I'm not like a zealot on this. I think open source is very valuable, but I also think it sort of makes sense for us because of our position in the market. And the same for AI. I mean, around Llama.

• 36:43David Rosenthal?

  Okay, this is where we were going with this.

• 36:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's, you know, similar deal. You know, we want to make sure that we have access to a leading AI model. Right? I think just like we want to build the hardware so that we can build the best social experiences for the next 20 years. I don't think that, you know, for us, it's like, we've just been, we've been through too much stuff with the other platforms to fully depend on anyone else. And we're a big enough company at this point that like, we don't have to, right? We can build our own core technology platforms, whether that's going to be AR glasses or mixed reality or AI. So I think 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. They're ecosystems.

• 37:29Speaker 03

  They get better when other people use them. So for us, there's a huge amount of good. And it philosophically lines up with where we are. We're like, I mean, look, I definitely, you know, firsthand have a lot of experiences. We were like trying to build stuff on mobile platforms. The platforms are just like, nah, you can't build that. Okay, that's frustrating.

• 37:49David Rosenthal?

  Can we take a real quick detour?

• 37:51Speaker 03

  What's up?

• 37:51David Rosenthal?

  I really want to ask you something.

• 37:52Speaker 03

  We can, we can take a detour.

• 37:53David Rosenthal?

  Okay, you took a detour. We're going to take a detour. Help us with our research here. The eve of the IPO.

• 38:01Speaker 03

  Okay, this is quite a detour.

• 38:03Ben Gilbert?

  Wait.

• 38:03David Rosenthal?

  Quite a detour. I really am grabbing the wheel here.

• 38:06Ben Gilbert?

  Is this connected or did you just decide that it was your turn to talk?

• 38:11Speaker 03

  I'm sorry. I was like really like wound up.

• 38:15Ben Gilbert?

  Open source and AI.

• 38:16Speaker 03

  It's gonna be tough to get back to this.

• 38:19David Rosenthal?

  I think it's related. I do. I really genuinely do.

• 38:23David Rosenthal?

  Facebook on mobile is HTML5.

• 38:26Speaker 03

  Uh huh.

• 38:27Ben Gilbert?

  In 2012.

• 38:28David Rosenthal?

  Yeah. Yeah.

• 38:32David Rosenthal?

  I want to ask you what you were thinking going into the IPO with Facebook on mobile being HTML5. And what happened, you IPO at $100 billion market cap over the next three months, you have a 50% drawdown, probably because of that. But I guess the related question to what we're talking about now is, how much is that informing your approach here with AI?

• 38:58Speaker 03

  It was a pretty different technical issue. So, I mean, our legacy was building on web for websites. And we were very used to building one thing and being able to continuously deploy it. And it fits with our iteration style and all that. So now all of a sudden, this app model comes along. And it's like, we have to build like different ones for each phone? And like, you have to go through approval to get it shipped? Do we have to wait like weeks before it can ship? It's like, this sucks. So we're like, all right, we have an idea. Let's build this platform where we can get a web-based platform. So you basically build a native shell and you build this web-based platform in it. And we'll be able to just update our apps every day.

• 39:40Speaker 03

  And we'll ship one thing once and we'll update our apps across Android and iPhone and BlackBerry and Windows Mobile and all the stuff that existed at the time because it hadn't gotten consolidated yet. And we're like, that's going to be, that's, we're like, basically, whatever downside we are going to have from not having the most native thing, we're going to make up for in velocity and by having like way more of our energy focused on one platform. Well, we were wrong. It turned out that, you know, having the native integration was actually critical for having the interactions feel good. And

• 40:17Speaker 03

  And that, so we basically went through this period where we had to go rewrite our apps from scratch. And that coincided with mobile growing dramatically. And mobile, we didn't have any revenue. Because it may seem like it's pretty similar, but there's a very big difference. On desktop, you basically have the app and you have a column on the side that we could put ads. And on mobile, we needed to figure out, what does it mean to put ads into the experience?

• 40:45Ben Gilbert?

  Like, let's be clear, the feed ad had not been invented yet.

• 40:48Speaker 03

  Yeah. No, that was the thing that the team did. Yeah. And advertisers have like specific formats that they like working with. And the idea that we were just gonna be like, alright, now your ad is gonna look like a feed story, was a big challenge for advertisers. And the idea that now for people, you were gonna have this organic feed that was the most important part of the product, and now we're just gonna start putting ads in it, was a challenge for the people who are using the product. So, we needed to figure that out, and we needed to get the apps to be better. And we basically took, I think it must have been like a year or something, we're just like, "Look, we're gonna pause feature development at the company, because it's hard enough to do a rewrite." Right? If you look at like the history of the tech industry, there are all these examples like

• 41:32Speaker 03

  Netscape, and you know, these things that like, they tried to do a rewrite, they needed to reestablish their technical platform, and they also tried to add features, they basically just like never terminated. So, that's a real risk, right? When you're like completely changing your underlying platform, that you're gonna miss it. I was like, alright, we gotta minimize the chance that that happens, so we're not gonna ship any new features, we're just going to rewrite it, make it faster. But while we're doing this, like basically, mobile's growing, so the percent of our traffic that is monetizable is shrinking, because web is basically shrinking and mobile's

• 42:09David Rosenthal?

  And that's your only business model.

• 42:11Speaker 03

  Yeah, and I was like, alright, like...

• 42:12Ben Gilbert?

  And you're now recently...

• 42:13Speaker 03

  You know, but the thing is, it was actually pretty clear what we needed to do. Yeah, I think strategically, a lot of the time, it's somewhat harder to know what to do when you're winning. Like, when stuff is going well, it's like, what is the next move to like go from winning to winning more? But when you're losing, it's usually pretty clear what you have to do. And I think a lot of it is like, is just, do you have the pain tolerance to go do it? So, a lot of this was like, alright, the team was like, okay.

• 42:44Speaker 03

  Well, we're going public and investors really aren't going to like this if we are not making money for a year and a half. And it's like, well, a year and a half is short in the grand scheme of things. Let's do this. And we did it. And it was a painful year and a half. And then we came out of that and we were in great shape. So I think like people inside the company had felt a lot better sooner because it was pretty clear to people that we were doing the right thing. And they knew that we were executing in a responsible way. And it basically focused and we're doing the right thing. But I think it's actually when you have something that's working well, and you're on one local hill, and you need

• 43:26Speaker 03

  to jump to another hill. That's the stuff that's really culturally hard. But this one, I think, was it was not fun. There have been a period, a series of periods throughout the company that were not, I don't know, not the not the most fun periods. But although that one, in retrospect, is, you know, looks pretty good in retrospect. It's like, not that bad. It's like your market cap only got cut in half for a year and a half. Like, great.

• 43:55Speaker 03

  Great. Yeah, I'll take that.

• 43:57Ben Gilbert?

  All right, listeners. Now is a great time to talk about a new partner of ours here on Acquired, Logora, the agentic operating system that is redefining how the world's best legal teams work.

• 44:10David Rosenthal?

  Yep. It's sort of obvious that AI is going to completely change the legal industry. I bet most of you listening have dropped a contract into some sort of AI chatbot out there. Logora took that insight and asked the question, what if you really built something with that power from the ground up for the legal industry?

• 44:27Ben Gilbert?

  So the founders did exactly what great founders do, operate with obsessive customer focus. They embedded inside a massive law firm for months. They sat with the lawyers just watching how the work really gets done.

• 44:42David Rosenthal?

  And that's how you get features that customers love, like tabular review, where you drop in a folder of hundreds of contracts and it pulls every key term into a grid a lawyer can actually work with. Legora's bet here is interesting. Since it lets each lawyer handle more complexity, any given person can increase the quality of their work and do higher value work. And this means that the pie can grow even as each individual task takes less time.

• 45:06Ben Gilbert?

  And they recently launched Legora Agent, offering greater intelligence and performance. The agent lets lawyers set an objective, then it can handle the planning and the execution and delivery of the final product. Legal teams get to maintain full control and transparency since they're still involved where judgment is required.

• 45:25David Rosenthal?

  And Legora works where you already work. You can use it within Microsoft Word while redlining or drafting. The early Legora numbers essentially speak for themselves. When they have a head-to-head pilot with their top competitor, they win 70% of the time. Legora now has over 100,000 lawyers on the platform from 1,200 legal teams in 50 countries. And crazily, they went from 1 million to 100 million in ARR in about 18 months.

• 45:55Ben Gilbert?

  Truly insane numbers. And that is the real test. Plenty of things demo well, but the question is whether a busy associate actually reaches for it during crunch time, or whether a partner trusts it before going into a conversation with a major client. If your legal team wants to check it out, whether you're a law firm or you're in-house at a company, you can learn more at legora.com/acquired and just tell them that Ben and David sent you. So David asked, hey, can you help 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. There's also been a lot of criticism. If you were to be self-critical of your own company, of your own creation, of all the

• 46:37Ben Gilbert?

  criticisms that have happened over the years, which do you believe is the most legitimate and why?

• 46:43Speaker 03

  I mean, there's so many things that we've messed up that there are many criticisms that are legitimate.

• 46:54Speaker 03

  But if that was a year and a half mistake, I think, you know, one of the things I reflect on over the last like 10 years or so was, you know, the political environment just changed dramatically, right? It's like before 2016, there was like not a month that went by, except for maybe this IPO period, where the sentiment about the company was anything but positive. And then after 2016, after the election, basically, there was not a month for a while where the sentiment about the company was positive. And we, I think so much of this stuff is correctly understanding your place in the world and in history. And, you know, so I think, you know, we talked about before how it's like, I think we understood that we are a technology company and that you have to be a technology company to build

• 47:39Speaker 03

  this kind of thing. I think we understood that we're not a social network company, we're a human connection company, and that will take different forms over time. The political environment, I think, I didn't have much sophistication around, and I think I just fundamentally misdiagnosed the problem. So I think that there was this basic challenge, and there were a lot of things, I don't want to simplify this too much, and there were a lot of things that we did wrong, there were some things 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 that, you know, they were asserting that we were doing wrong or were responsible for that I don't actually

• 48:24Speaker 03

  think we were. And now, that's, it's, um, there were a lot of things we did mess up and we needed 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 instinct is to like take ownership for it, right? Say like, okay, like maybe, maybe it's not like, maybe it's not all our thing, but we're going to fully own this problem, we're going to take responsibility for it, we're going to fix it. But when it's a political problem, I actually think a lot of the time, sometimes there are people who are operating in good faith who are identifying a problem that wants something to be fixed, and there are people who are just looking for someone to blame. And I think to some degree, if you

• 49:10Speaker 03

  If you take responsibility for things because you think it's a corporate crisis, not a political crisis, and your view is like, "Okay, I'm gonna take responsibility for all this stuff." People are basically blaming social media and the tech industry for all these different things in society. And if we're saying, "Okay, we're gonna really do our part to go fixes this stuff," I think there were a bunch of people who just took that and were like, "Oh, you're taking responsibility for that? Let me kick you for more stuff." And honestly, I think we should have been firmer and clearer about which of the things we actually felt like we had a part in and which ones we didn't.

• 49:49Speaker 03

  And my guess is if the IPO was a year-and-a-half mistake, I think that the political miscalculation was a 20-year mistake. So it started in 2016, and I think that we have been working super hard to fix a lot of issues and to figure out what the right tone is for navigating what is a very fraught political dynamic across both the country and multiplied across all these places around the world. And I think we've sort of found our footing on what the principles are, where we think we need to improve stuff, but where people make allegations about the impact of the tech industry or our company, which are just not founded in any fact, that I think we should push back on harder.

• 50:34Speaker 03

  And I think it's gonna take another 10 years or so for us to fully work through that cycle before our brand and all of that is back to the place that it maybe could have been if I hadn't messed that up in the first place. But look, in the grand scheme of things, 20 years isn't that bad either. And we'll get through it, and I think we'll come out stronger. But I do think that is one of the more interesting critiques that I think people get. And we get critiques on both sides on that. There are people who don't think we've taken enough responsibility. But I think certainly there's one line of critique, which is you bought into too much of the stuff that you shouldn't have.

• 51:18Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think it's gonna take us a long time to dig out of that.

• 51:21Ben Gilbert?

  Do you have a reasonable framework at this point for like, okay, here's the stuff where I feel like we actually do want to take responsibility for it. And here's the stuff where we're like, no, that's not our fault.

• 51:30Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, at this point, I think a lot of this stuff has been studied. So I mean, I don't want to go rehash all the different things, but but I think at this point, there's been like years of academic research on a lot of these things. And you know, part of the thing that's challenging is, and one of the things that we've learned is we actually should be trying to support more academics and doing more of this research ahead of time, because like when you get to a point where you're being kind of accused of something, you're not super credible, just standing up yourself and being like, I don't think we did this one. You know, it's like, so, but what has worked over time is like, you know, you do the research in advance and you get kind of third-party academics, respected folks who get to debate all these different issues. And then it's like, oh, no, actually, like the evidence just does not show that social media is correlated with this kind of harm at all.

• 52:16Speaker 03

  So I think that like, or it's, you know, so I think that's, I think that's, it's, it kind of cuts, it cuts both ways.

• 52:24David Rosenthal?

  To me, this brings up another topic we wanted to talk about with you. And you just, you know, you said, 20 years isn't that long.

• 52:33Speaker 03

  I'm young.

• 52:34David Rosenthal?

  You're young. We all are.

• 52:36Ben Gilbert?

  This is the advantage of being a college dropout founder.

• 52:38Speaker 03

  Yeah, no, it is. And when you start when you're 19, it's like, hopefully, we have more than 20 years left.

• 52:42Ben Gilbert?

  And hopefully, you have like, buffer duration.

• 52:44Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 52:45David Rosenthal?

  You You set up the company in a, especially at the time, truly unique way. Where you can operate the company and take that, you know, take that approach.

• 52:59Ben Gilbert?

  Do you mean super voting shares?

• 53:00David Rosenthal?

  Super voting shares is like, you know, the technical aspect of there. I think there are a bunch of technical aspects to it that we're not going to get into in this conversation, but effectively, you can take that perspective in a way that if you are a CEO, non-founder, you know, without a structure that you've set up, you just can't. And I think, you know, in doing all the research for this, a thesis we've developed is that like, that is just one of the core fundamental advantages that Meta has. So as you were setting up the company, you know, when you were so young, even when you went public, you were so young, like, why was that so important to you? Well,

• 53:39Speaker 03

  In 2006, Yahoo wanted to buy the company for a billion dollars and everyone on our management team wanted to sell it and the board tried to fire me and everyone and basically in the next year, everyone else on the management team left because they I hadn't done a good job communicating. I mean, I don't want to blame them. I like I hadn't done a good job communicating the long-term vision because I didn't I wasn't thinking about that at the time. I like wasn't thinking in terms of this as a company. I was like, this is a great project. It's awesome. Like, a lot of people like what we're doing. I think this will probably continue for a while. I think it's gonna be pretty important in the world. But I didn't I didn't like know how to think in terms of, you know, like long-term financial plans or.

• 54:18Ben Gilbert?

  Like make the case to them why it would be worth more than a billion.

• 54:20Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. Or just like, look, we're doing this for the long term. We're not planning on selling the company. So it's like, without having made that case, it was understandable that basically Yahoo comes around, a lot of people, it's like, this is like all their startup dreams come true. You gotta take this offer. 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. It probably wasn't super confidence inspiring to them when I was like, hey, I think we should turn this down because we're gonna do this. So, so after that, I was like, all right, well, I don't want to get fired from my own company for wanting to build it. So let's try to set up a governance structure

• 55:04Speaker 03

  that makes it somewhat harder to do that. So.

• 55:10Speaker 03

  Learning through suffering.

• 55:15David Rosenthal?

  Wow.

• 55:16Ben Gilbert?

  And being very cash generative, very early, such that you had a very real going concern on your hands and you just didn't didn't need to cut off your arm and sell it to someone in order to.

• 55:27Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 55:27Ben Gilbert?

  Build your business.

• 55:28Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 55:29Ben Gilbert?

  Like, I think I think this is a fundamentally misunderstood thing about.

• 55:33David Rosenthal?

  Oh, yeah.

• 55:34Ben Gilbert?

  Facebook, the startup. It is the prototypical.

• 55:39David Rosenthal?

  The iconic startup.

• 55:40Ben Gilbert?

  Startup.

• 55:40David Rosenthal?

  You are the iconic startup founder.

• 55:42Ben Gilbert?

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

• 55:58Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, I think we're having a lot more fun now.

• 56:03Speaker 03

  To get to work on all the stuff, it's awesome.

• 56:05Ben Gilbert?

  But what is your advice to all these founders who sort of romanticize the idea of starting a company and kind of raising all this money?

• 56:12Speaker 03

  Obviously, starting a company is not bad, right? I mean, I think that there's different schools of thought on how to do it. I think some people think, okay, I want to go start a company, so I'm going to like go dive into this idea. And I just think that that's a little bit dangerous because there's this issue, which is you have to be able to be nimble and pivot around until you can like figure out what works, right? It's, I mean, part of the reason why I didn't think Facebook was going to be the company early on was because when I was in school, I built like 12 different things, right? That were just things that I wanted to exist and it was like, all right, this is fun. Okay, let's build another thing. It's like, okay, this one's fun. People are still using that. I'll like help up, keep this one. But I had like a bunch of other ideas for stuff I was going to build too. So I just like, I didn't, I didn't like know how to think about what a company was going to be.

• 56:54Speaker 03

  And then it was so, um, I think there's something about maintaining flexibility that's, that's helpful. You know, once you hire a bunch of people, you know, it's a lot easier when you could just have meetings in your own head about what direction you want to go in. Um, and it's like, and there's a lot less pride and like people dug in when you're just like, okay, I'm going to change direction. It's like, you know, people haven't like invested their ego in like, no, we were going in this direction and like now I must be convinced. It's like, nah, I just, so I, I do think that that's a thing where you want to like keep things lean and, and be able to do that. And that's one of the reasons why we tried to get the company back to being, you know, whatever the leanest version of a large company is that we can, we can be.

• 57:34Speaker 03

  But, um, but I do think that there's something to that where it's like, it's obviously, it's not, it's not super fun not having the resources to do what you want to do. But I think it also is problematic to have more people working on something than you should have for the stage that it's at. Because then the people who are working on it don't have the agency to actually like make the changes and do the things that they need to, which is less fun. And then you can't attract the best people to go work on those things because it's less fun. And so I do think you got it, you just have to dial it right.

• 58:08Ben Gilbert?

  You're spending a gajillion dollars on Reality Labs.

• 58:12David Rosenthal?

  It's a technical term.

• 58:14Ben Gilbert?

  It's not making that much money. So I'm gonna, I'm gonna play Mark back to you.

• 58:18Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 58:18Ben Gilbert?

  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 categorize it differently.

• 58:28Speaker 03

  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 10 to 20 years? And what do you think are going to be important? And, you know, we were talking about like making your own luck and all that and how, you know, it's like, I think there were some broad strokes that we can have a sense of where things are going. I'm pretty sure glasses and kind of like holographic presence in AR is going to be a completely ubiquitous product. Right? It's just like everyone who had a phone before replaced it with a smartphone and then a lot of more people got smartphones. If all we get is all the people in the world where you have glasses upgrading to glasses that have AI in them, then like, this is already going to be one of the most successful products in the history of the world. So, and I think it's going to go a lot further than that.

• 59:13Speaker 03

  So another is that, there is the thing about controlling our own destiny. It's strategically valuable. You know, we did this calculation or estimate at some point where it's like, how much money do we lose from our core family of apps? To the various like taxes that the platforms have to like, when they tell us we can't run the ad business the way that we think we should be able to. When they tell us we can't ship certain products so that way like people use the things less or like them less. And I, it's hard to exactly estimate it, but I think we might be like twice as profitable if we own the platform or something. So I think from that perspective, that's worth a lot. Just from like a pure like dollars perspective, which is not primarily how I come at this stuff.

• 59:57Speaker 03

  But even like now, I've learned a thing or two since the Yahoo days. And now I at least am able to like, like, I might not be able to convince the, all the investors that we should be investing to the extent that we are in Reality Labs if I didn't control the company. But at least I can sort of articulate a case for why I am confident that it's going to be good over time. But for me, it's always been way more about the product experience and what you can enable and build. And, you know, one of the shifts, and this is sort of like a values shift.

• 1:00:29Speaker 03

  Over time is, you know, one of the things that some of the early Oculus guys used to say to me that there's a difference between building good things and awesome things. And like, good is good, right? It's helpful, it's useful, it's things that people use on a day-to-day basis because it adds something to their lives. But awesome is different. Awesome is uplifting and inspiring and just like leads you to just be way more optimistic about the future and is just like this uplifting thing about humanity.

• 1:01:10Speaker 03

  And so I think a lot of what we've done with social media so far is very good. We've got, we've built these products. More than 3 billion people use them on a near daily basis, right?

• 1:01:25Ben Gilbert?

  It's like 3.3 billion on a daily.

• 1:01:27Speaker 03

  Yeah, so, yeah, and so that's, and they use it because it is useful in their life. Right? And in all these different ways. I mean, obviously, people vary, people use it for different things, but it's useful. And it helps people and it helps people stay connected, helps people build businesses, it helps people form communities. It's good. There aren't that many people on a day-to-day basis who get out of bed and are like, "Fuck yeah, social media." Like, it's like, that's, right? It's, I mean, that's not like, um, so, I kind of think for the next, for my next stage, right? For the next stage of the company, the next like 15 years, I want us to build more things that are awesome in addition to things that are good.

• 1:02:12Speaker 03

  And I think that they both matter.

• 1:02:15Speaker 03

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

• 1:02:31Speaker 03

  A lot of the AI stuff that we're doing, I think, is going to be in that bucket. There are a bunch of things in the apps that are going to be in that bucket, too. New apps, too, but.

• 1:02:41Speaker 03

  But I don't know, I think that there's just something that's fundamentally pretty good about that. And that's, maybe it's also just like where I am in my life, right? I'm like, I think I'm young, I'm a little older, right? But it's, but it's like, I do think that at this point, you know, it's not just a meta thing. Also, you know, in my like, personal life, a lot of what I personally value is doing things that are inspiring with people who I find inspiring. All right. And now, so there's the personal version of this. It's like, I get to work on, you know, interesting science problems with like, Priscilla, my wife, and like, and a bunch of awesome people. You know, I get to, you know, design shirts with like, some of the best fashion designers in the

• 1:03:25Speaker 03

  world, right? It's like I-

• 1:03:27Ben Gilbert?

  Statues.

• 1:03:28Speaker 03

  Yeah, sculpture of my wife. Bring back the Roman tradition of designing sculptures of people you love.

• 1:03:36Ben Gilbert?

  I'm not at all being facetious, like-

• 1:03:38Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:03:38Ben Gilbert?

  It's really cool.

• 1:03:39Speaker 03

  No, but I mean, I think Daniel Arsham is like a really talented guy. And I was like, that's a person who I'd love to work with on something. Let's go find a project. You know, building, you know, I have, one of my side projects is, you know, we have this cattle ranch in Kauai. And I'm trying to see if we can raise the highest quality beef in the world. And there's like, all this stuff. It's like, starts with like, it's, it's awesome. We got, we got this steer, Chonk, he's like, he's, he's just the man. He's the man. We're having a hard time keeping him on the ranch because we, every time we put him in a steel enclosure and he sees a female cow, he busts through the steel enclosure.

• 1:04:22Speaker 03

  But I feel like that's the kind of bull that you want to make the highest quality beef in the world.

• 1:04:30Speaker 03

  And we're just working with, you know, trying to do really high quality, awesome things with awesome people. That's like, if that's what I get to do for the next 15 or 20 years, then like, it's gonna be a good 15 or 20 years.

• 1:04:43Ben Gilbert?

  Was, was there a moment, like, what changed? Like, when did this become your priority? And why? I can't, it feels so radical that it, how could it have possibly been gradual? Or was this just like, Mark all the time, and we just couldn't see the real Mark?

• 1:04:58Speaker 03

  I don't know. I think that there might have been something around the way the company shifted in operations around COVID.

• 1:05:06Speaker 03

  I mean, it's like the COVID, like all these tech companies went remote temporarily. And it was an interesting period to just like, get some more time, like a step back. I'm a pretty introverted person and I do think it's,

• 1:05:22Speaker 03

  I need to be careful where like I get a lot of value and energy and ideas from being around other people, but I also need time with myself. And with COVID, I kind of got that and it was a time of reflection where I was able to think about this stuff. And we were also going through this very difficult political time in the country and our company was at the center of a lot of those things. So that that was a cause of a bunch of reflection. And then I think that a bunch of the things that we'd spun up earlier, but at smaller scale, right? So the reality lab stuff that we started in 2014, really.

• 1:06:01Speaker 03

  The fair stuff around, you know, fundamental AI research.

• 1:06:08Speaker 03

  2012, 13? 2012, 13, sometime around then. These things, they kind of got started and they were growing. And it was, it kind of reached this moment, which is like, are we going to double down on this and do this? Or are we going to kind of like do this as a hobby? And I was like, no, I think we should do this. Right? So I mean, this is, I mean, this like, this is going to be a really important part of what we do. And we had to make a really important set of decisions where we knew it was going to be really painful, you know, to go double down on those things and build out the AI infrastructure that we needed to and scale up some of the reality lab stuff. And I knew that a lot of the investors would hate it, at least in the short term, before it's clearly the right thing to do.

• 1:06:53Speaker 03

  The, what I didn't know was that at the time, I thought they were going to not like it, but I thought it was going to be okay because I didn't think there was also going to be a recession at the same time. So that like, really, it's like, I mean, look, like, like you learn who you are through challenges, right? It's like, we had like a really, you know, it's like, okay, like losing half of your market cap is is quaint compared to losing 80% of your market cap or whatever it was, right? It's, you know, so.

• 1:07:25Speaker 03

  But so, I mean, these are all intentional decisions, right? It's like, I mean, there are a lot of conversations that we had, which are like, should we go forward with this? And the answer that I came out with is yes. 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, it makes the company better. Let's do it.

• 1:07:57Ben Gilbert?

  We're starting to enter, looking at the clock, like, conclusion, lightning round territory.

• 1:08:05Speaker 03

  All right.

• 1:08:06Ben Gilbert?

  I've had one lurking in the back of my head.

• 1:08:08Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:08:09Ben Gilbert?

  It makes sense to me that you would rebrand the company, something that is not Facebook, given how broad the family of apps was, that you've got, let's imagine you were going to rebrand it today. You've got AI going on, you've got AR going on, you've got VR going on. Would you pick the name Meta if you were going to rename the company today?

• 1:08:29Speaker 03

  I like Meta.

• 1:08:32Speaker 03

  It's a good name. You know, finding good short names. I mean, this actually was a thing that we talked about for a while, because it was pretty clear that, you know, Facebook is continuing to grow in importance in the world, which I think a lot of people don't appreciate, and is kind of mind-boggling at the scale that it's at. But the others, I mean, we went through a period where it's like, we had Facebook and a handful of small apps. So now we have like, you know, four apps that have a billion people or more using them. You know, hopefully in the next few years, five with Threads, if that continues scaling. And this was a conversation that we had a bunch, where it's like, does it make sense for the name of the company to be one of the apps as the other apps, as it's really becoming a family of apps? And...

• 1:09:20Speaker 03

  It was important to me, this was also coinciding with a lot of a lot of the challenges that we were having, right? The political brand challenges, different things. And a lot of people were proposing that from the perspective of running away from the Facebook brand, right? They were like, oh, well, like, does the Facebook brand have issues? Do we need a new brand? And I was like, we don't run away from that. Right? It's like, 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 going to do this when we come up with a brand that is going to be evocative of the future that we're trying to build. Because we run towards something. We don't run away from things. And when we got to Meta, then I was like, alright, we're here.

• 1:10:05Speaker 03

  And it was around the time when we were doubling down on the investment and where there was all the controversy. And it's like, look, like, if we're doing this, we're going to lean into this and we're going to do it. So let's do it.

• 1:10:16Ben Gilbert?

  And if I were to make the case to you, I feel the core competency of Meta is you are able to discover products in the world. You have great ideas, you work on them, you discover interesting products. And you, Mark, are not someone who wants to define yourself by anything. You want to have like, your hands on a bunch of great controls and maximize your degrees of freedom, see where the world's going, and then have the best freaking spaceship possible to go maneuver your way over there.

• 1:10:47Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:10:48Ben Gilbert?

  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 maneuverability.

• 1:10:59Speaker 03

  Yeah. I get it. But, I don't know, that's just, I, we align around a vision and a mission of what we're trying to do and we run towards it. That's always been how we've operated. Yeah.

• 1:11:17Ben Gilbert?

  And in many ways, doing what I just suggested would kind of be running. It's like, well, we don't believe in it that much. And you're like, no.

• 1:11:22Speaker 03

  Yeah, no, I mean, we're a company that like, puts a flag down around what we're doing and we're going to go do it. It's like, put a wall in front of us, there's going to be a Mark-shaped hole in the wall.

• 1:11:36David Rosenthal?

  Speaking of lightning rounds and mark-shaped holes,

• 1:11:42David Rosenthal?

  you are accelerating what used to be your annual challenges. I always, I mean, when, when we were all kids and we didn't know each other, I mean, I was so inspired, you would do your annual challenges, you would post about them. And I was like, wow, that's like, pretty damn cool. And then we all get a little older 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, and I think lots of people, that's like, that space gets sucked. And you have expanded it.

• 1:12:20David Rosenthal?

  How?

• 1:12:23Speaker 03

  What do you mean?

• 1:12:23David Rosenthal?

  Well, you used to do annual challenges and I feel like you're now doing weekly challenges. You're designing t-shirts, you're making sculptures. I feel you have a weekly challenge.

• 1:12:30Speaker 03

  I just like, I'm trying to, trying to do inspiring things. I mean, it's, yeah, I don't know.

• 1:12:39Speaker 03

  I'm also really competitive.

• 1:12:43David Rosenthal?

  Who's your competition for this?

• 1:12:44Speaker 03

  What do you mean? I was just thinking about, about, about other things that I'm doing. I'm like, what have I, what have I started doing? I like, got into all these like, more extreme sports and fighting and stuff. And like, I don't know, I mean, there's, there's, we face a lot of competition and a lot of different aspects of what we do.

• 1:13:03Speaker 03

  So I mean, there's the social media competitors, there's the platform competitors. I think Apple is a bigger competitor than people realize. They kind of think, hey, they're doing a different type of thing. But I don't know, I think over the next 10, 15 years, I, I think that kind of like battle over, ideological battle over what should the architecture be of the next set of platforms? Are they going to be the closed, integrated Apple, a model that Apple has always done? Which, again, I mean, like, there's multiple,

• 1:13:34Speaker 03

  there are multiple good ways to build things, right? So I think if you look at the different generations of computing,

• 1:13:43Speaker 03

  PCs, mobile, they've all had sort of a closed, integrated version and an open version. And the thing that I think there's just a ton of recency bias around is because iPhone basically won, you know, I know that there are more Android phones out there, but I mean, but iPhone is sort of like the intellectual leader and by far like has all the

• 1:14:04David Rosenthal?

  Let's take it as a conceit.

• 1:14:05Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:14:05David Rosenthal?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:07Speaker 03

  I think that there's the recency bias and probably like almost everyone here has an iPhone. And I think that because of the recency bias, there's sort of this view that's like, oh, no, this is just the superior way to do things. But I don't actually think that's a given. Right in the PC era, Windows with the open ecosystem was the leader. And part of my goal for the next 10, 15 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 doing a closed and integrated model. I think Apple will have a place for sure. I expect them to be our primary competitor.

• 1:14:50Speaker 03

  And I think it will not be just a product competition. I think it's like a, in some ways, very deeply values-driven and ideological competition around what the future of the tech industry should be and how open these platforms, whether it's things like Llama and AI or the glasses or different things, should be for developers, like an individual, someone getting started in their dorm room like me, to not have to ask for permission to go build the next set of awesome things.

• 1:15:21Ben Gilbert?

  I've got a closing question.

• 1:15:22Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:15:24David Rosenthal?

  Please. Thank you.

• 1:15:27Ben Gilbert?

  So, so we have a lot of builders in the audience tonight, a lot of founders. We're in probably the most interesting technology environment since the early mobile days in terms of opportunity.

• 1:15:42Ben Gilbert?

  It's been 20 years. You might have to go back a little bit, but what advice do you have for founders today on something that's different than trying to pattern match Mark Zuckerberg from 2004, given we live in a different world today?

• 1:15:56Speaker 03

  Yeah, I don't know. I mean, just do something that you care about. And I mean, if you're trying to run our strategy, try to learn as quickly as you can. But I mean, if there's like, I think part of what I'm trying to say is, I think there are different ways to build stuff, right? It's like our way worked for me and our team. You know, it's different things have clearly worked for other companies.

• 1:16:24Speaker 03

  I don't know. One day, my daughter went to, we went to, took her to a Taylor Swift concert. And she, she was like, you know, Dad, I kind of want to be like Taylor Swift when I grew up.

• 1:16:36David Rosenthal?

  Hell, yeah.

• 1:16:36Speaker 03

  I was like, you, you can't, but you can't. That's not available to you.

• 1:16:42Speaker 03

  I was like, but, and she, and she thought about it and she's like, all right.

• 1:16:47Speaker 03

  When I grow up, I want people to want to be like August Chan Zuckerberg.

• 1:16:52Speaker 03

  And I was like, hell, yeah. Hell, yeah. So I think that that's, um, yeah, I don't know. I think it's like, look, learn from other people's successes and failures, but do your own thing.

• 1:17:09Ben Gilbert?

  Love that.

• 1:17:09David Rosenthal?

  Love that. Well,

• 1:17:13David Rosenthal?

  that is the perfect place to leave things.

• 1:17:17Ben Gilbert?

  We made you something that you already have a very amazing, well-designed shirt.

• 1:17:25Ben Gilbert?

  I hope you have room in your life for more than one.

• 1:17:27Speaker 03

  I do. You know, I used to only wear one type of shirt. Now I've moved on.

• 1:17:35Ben Gilbert?

  So David and I made you a custom one-of-one shirt that represents tonight.

• 1:17:41Speaker 03

  Thank you.

• 1:17:45Ben Gilbert?

  It is size zuck. So no one else can, you know, there's, it can never be made again. And we've got these coordinates on the back. The first one.

• 1:17:55David Rosenthal?

  GPS coordinates.

• 1:17:56Ben Gilbert?

  GPS coordinates. The first one represents Kirkland House, where you wrote the first line of code for Facebook. And the second one is Chase Center.

• 1:18:04David Rosenthal?

  Awesome.

• 1:18:04Ben Gilbert?

  So thank you for joining us here tonight.

• 1:18:05David Rosenthal?

  Thank you for joining us.

• 1:18:08David Rosenthal?

  Wow. What a night.

• 1:18:11Ben Gilbert?

  Absolutely crazy. I mean, Mark has done many interviews this year, both with other podcasts and in traditional press, but that felt different, if for no other reason than it happened live in front of a 6,000 person audience in an arena. But I wasn't expecting it to feel that different.

• 1:18:27David Rosenthal?

  Yeah, I mean, it was, I think, the wildest experience of my life, being up there. I don't even know what else could compare.

• 1:18:35Ben Gilbert?

  Pretty insane.

• 1:18:37David Rosenthal?

  All right, listeners, now is a great time to talk about one of our favorite companies, Statsig.

• 1:18:43Ben Gilbert?

  Yes, there is a reason why the best product teams rely on Statsig, whether they are iterating on their core product features or shipping AI-powered experiences at scale.

• 1:18:54David Rosenthal?

  Yep. In the crazy speed of today's AI world, shipping fast is just table stakes now. It's basically trivial to build and deploy your app constantly. The real advantage is how quickly you learn what changes actually created value for customers and how fast you can use that signal to guide what you ship next.

• 1:19:14Ben Gilbert?

  This is where Statsig comes in. It brings experimentation, feature flags, and product analytics into one unified system so teams can ship safely, test rigorously, and directly link what they changed to how users actually behaved.

• 1:19:27David Rosenthal?

  So if you want to make learning your competitive advantage, whether you're building new AI experiences or just evolving your existing core product, go to statsig.com/acquired to get started.

• 1:19:38Ben Gilbert?

  Okay, so David, reflections on this conversation. The biggest thing that I kept thinking going into the night. As we're talking with Mark, as we're talking with his team, people kept saying, we don't really do this. Mark doesn't really do this. And I kept thinking, yeah, he kind of does because he's done all these podcasts this year.

• 1:19:56David Rosenthal?

  He does Facebook Meta Connect, like he's done big events before, of course.

• 1:19:59Ben Gilbert?

  Right. And he does a good number of in-person press interviews, too. It's not like he doesn't talk to the traditional press, even though that has kind of become a narrative. It's not really true. However, Mark has not done an external several thousand person live thing like this. This is a very unusual format and kind of an uncomfortable one, even for you and I. Like, we're so used to stopping, starting, being thoughtful in our answers and like, this is a show. You're performing. There are no breaks.

• 1:20:28David Rosenthal?

  There's no retakes. Yeah.

• 1:20:30Ben Gilbert?

  Right. But Mark and like all the Meta execs really embraced it. A bunch of the executive team came, like they took off this whole day. And actually, some stuff we did the night before, too.

• 1:20:40David Rosenthal?

  A bunch of the board members were there. A lot of people important to Mark were there.

• 1:20:43Ben Gilbert?

  His family came.

• 1:20:45David Rosenthal?

  They made it an event.

• 1:20:46Ben Gilbert?

  Right. I thought this was a big deal for us. I was kind of shocked to the degree that Mark also thought it was a big deal for him.

• 1:20:53David Rosenthal?

  Which is super cool. Totally agree.

• 1:20:54Ben Gilbert?

  That's one. I was also surprised and delighted that he was willing to dive into history with us.

• 1:21:01David Rosenthal?

  Yes, we totally did not expect that. He's so like, usually so maniacally focused on the future. And in our conversations to prep with him before the event, he was like, I think of you guys as a history podcast, you know? Let's talk about the future. I'm like, okay, okay, but we want to ground it in history. And he showed up and was totally ready to go back. And I think that made the talking about the president and the future even better.

• 1:21:24Ben Gilbert?

  Totally. Because you could create these through lines. I mean, as funny as your interjection on let's go back to the IPO moment was, it opened up the door to have like these comparative moments to is what Meta doing today? Is that similar to something that you've done over and over? Should we be watching for a pattern here? Or are you very different today than you were historically? The way that he was talking about that stuff onstage felt very authentic and I just haven't heard him speak in that way before, at least publicly.

• 1:21:54David Rosenthal?

  I think it was also a great way to let us all get a window into his psyche, which kind of brings us to another point, which is like, he is still in it.

• 1:22:05Ben Gilbert?

  Oh.

• 1:22:05David Rosenthal?

  What other founders of companies like that, I mean, there's Jensen, who else? You know, it's the two of them.

• 1:22:13Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah, I think the casual observer to Meta might observe like, you know, Mark's been running it for 20 years and most of the time these founders kind of like go and do something else, they become executive chairman, or they like stepped into a board role, or they own 4% of the companies. There's some pattern there. And for Mark, I think it was plain as day onstage, he is more in it than ever. And I don't think he thinks he's like halfway through his journey. Like, I don't think he's 20 years in, oh, at 40, I'll be done. I don't get that sense either. I think Meta is his vehicle by which he wants to live his entire life and he wants to make things with this group of people that he wants to make, period. And that is kind of the product strategy.

• 1:22:57David Rosenthal?

  I got chills when he said the 20-year mistake. And then I got even more chills when he said, but 20 years actually isn't that long.

• 1:23:07Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah, it's a pretty illustrative comment.

• 1:23:09David Rosenthal?

  Totally.

• 1:23:10Ben Gilbert?

  I was appreciative that he engaged with us on the be critical of the company because honestly, I was asking that as research for when we inevitably do our Meta episode. I think he gave us a regret, not a criticism, but we were live onstage in front of 6,000 people and it's, it's not really the right format for that.

• 1:23:28David Rosenthal?

  Yep, totally.

• 1:23:29Ben Gilbert?

  That said, obviously a very interesting answer.

• 1:23:31David Rosenthal?

  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.

• 1:23:39Ben Gilbert?

  100%.

• 1:23:41David Rosenthal?

  It's just within Meta.

• 1:23:42Ben Gilbert?

  I'm glad you caught this too. Other big tech CEO founders have their moment running the company. They take a board role, they go do another thing. And oftentimes it's big and important for the world and capital intensive. And Mark is doing that, but inside Meta with Reality Labs. I think it'll be super fascinating 20 to 50 years from now to reflect back and say, what were the unintended or perhaps intended outcomes of co-mingling multiple huge swings under one corporate umbrella versus having people who are either CEO of multiple companies concurrently or step down from one to run the other? For Mark, I kind of feel like, again, Meta is his vehicle for executing the things

• 1:24:26Ben Gilbert?

  that he thinks are awesome products. And of course, it's not just awesome products, but like things that could let him have more control over his universe. He's clearly a guy who values having a lot of degrees of freedom and doesn't like being boxed in.

• 1:24:42David Rosenthal?

  I loved your turn-based strategy game of get more turns, learn more on each turn. Like, oh, man, StarCraft pro player 101 there.

• 1:24:52Ben Gilbert?

  Yes, but it'll be interesting to see the knock-on effects of having Reality Labs in the Meta organization versus as a new venture.

• 1:24:59David Rosenthal?

  Totally. All of that brings me to frankly, just my biggest overwhelming takeaway from the whole experience, which is Ben, you've developed a really great research interview question that you use on all the sources that we talk to now, which is you ask, what is the one thing that is most misunderstood about this company, this organization, et cetera? And everybody at Meta for years always would say Mark. And I never totally got it until this evening. He's both a singular individual himself, but it's not just that. It's that. A true superpower of the company is that it is architected from top to bottom,

• 1:25:44David Rosenthal?

  legally, financially, organizationally.

• 1:25:48Ben Gilbert?

  Culturally.

• 1:25:49David Rosenthal?

  Culturally, to reflect and amplify his immense strengths.

• 1:25:56Ben Gilbert?

  Which I think is probably true of like, Apple, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Microsoft, Nvidia, Jensen.

• 1:26:04David Rosenthal?

  Yes.

• 1:26:04Ben Gilbert?

  But we are right up close to the ways in which Meta is a sort of an amplifier, almost like it's a way for you to take the gain on Mark's output and turn it up, you know, 10,000x.

• 1:26:18David Rosenthal?

  Yes, and I think what was so striking about it to me versus, you're absolutely right, all those other companies, it is generally accepted in the public narrative about Apple under Steve Jobs, about Nvidia under Jensen, that that is the case. I don't think it is about Meta and Mark. I don't think people understand that. I didn't understand that until this experience.

• 1:26:36Ben Gilbert?

  Are you saying Meta is still very much a Mark Zuckerberg production?

• 1:26:41Ben Gilbert?

  I'll see myself out.

• 1:26:43David Rosenthal?

  Well, but there we go.

• 1:26:45Ben Gilbert?

  Well, listeners, thank you so much for joining us on this journey. Come talk about it with us in Slack, acquired.fm/slashSlack. Would love to hear all of your thoughts as well. Join our email list, acquired.fm/email. That will let you basically know every single time a new episode drops, or when we are doing something like Chase Center again, to be the first to know about that. God, if we ever do something like that again. We've got a merch store, check it out on acquired.fm. We've got ACQ2, our second show, where we are always interviewing earlier-stage companies than Meta, but where we think there are great, insightful conversations with founders and CEOs. And David, I know you've got some thank yous.

• 1:27:26David Rosenthal?

  One last thing, final thank yous. Thank you to Mark. Thank you to basically the entire Meta executive team who helped with the evening. Thank you to Hermes for dressing us, which was my favorite Easter egg of the night.

• 1:27:38Ben Gilbert?

  Yes, so fun. Thank you to Jamie Dimon, JP Morgan Chase, and JP Morgan Payments for making it all possible. It was truly a dream come true, and that is because of our incredible partnership.

• 1:27:48David Rosenthal?

  Indeed it was. Well, listeners, we'll see you next time.

• 1:27:53Ben Gilbert?

  Yes, in a couple of weeks with the full show. We are pumped to drop it. We'll see you next time.

• 1:28:01Speaker 04

  Is it you, is it you, is it you? Who got the truth now? Huh?