The Mark Zuckerberg Interview

So how many interviews with Mark do you think you watched before tonight? Oh, to prepare? Yeah. 30 to 40?

The best ones are the 04 to 06 vintage, but they're also different. It's almost like every three to four years is a new era that is markedly different from all the previous eras. Totally. And I think we might have witnessed the beginning of a new era right in front of us on stage.

No. Oh, yes. Absolutely. All right.

Should we do this? Let's do it. Welcome to the fall of 2024 season of acquired the podcast about great companies and the stories and playbooks behind them. I'm Ben Gilbert.

I'm David Rosenthal. And we are your hosts listeners. We have something very special for you today. Our interview with Mark Zuckerberg from acquired live at Chase Center.

Ooh. Mark is the iconic founder CEO of our time and this conversation was just too good to hold on to any longer. So we're getting it out quickly before we release the full video of the entire show, which speaking of the full show was utterly amazing. We had surprise appearances from Jensen Huang, 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.

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That's vanta.com. 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 Slack. And if you want to be notified when every new episode drops, sign up at acquired.fm slash email. All right. One more thing before the interview.

We need to say a huge, huge thank you to the entire JPMorgan payments team for securing the Chase Center for this, for orchestrating the entire evening. 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 the Max Umar, Dustin, Hannah, Vinnie, Nick, Amy, Carley, and so many others. It's like we were one team.

You guys rock. Yeah, for the first time we actually got to experience what it would be like if acquired was a large world-class organization and not just our little team. And what happened at Chase Center is really the physical embodiment of that. Thank you guys for being the best partners we could ever imagine.

And a very special shout out to Dustin Sedgwick, JPMorgan payments CMO, who's a longtime listener of the show and a good friend of ours. And he's just been the driving force behind all of this. Without him, Chase Center wouldn't happen. We're so grateful for an incredible relationship with you and all of JPMorgan.

So please enjoy our conversation with Mark Zuckerberg and to take us in the Chairman and CEO of JPMorgan Chase, Jamie Dimon. Hello, acquired listeners. Welcome to the Chase Center and to Acquired Live. I'm Jamie Dimon, Chairman and CEO of JPMorgan Chase.

I'm happy to kick off the show tonight and welcome all of you to one of my favorite arenas. It's been a great partnership all year between JPMorgan payments and acquired storytelling and educating about some of the greatest companies in the world. For many of them, just like many of you in the crowd, we're thrilled to call you friends and partners of the firm. Sorry I couldn't be there in person tonight.

I hope everyone enjoys the show. Ben and David, over to you. Mark. It's great to have you here.

It's great to be here. You know, I was watching, I was watching Jensen's video correcting the record. 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 at the same time. I don't apologize anymore.

We've noticed. Welcome, here's the question. If you knew what you knew today, what's up? If you knew what you know today, what you have started Facebook.

Oh, God. I mean, look, I think going out hot. He started it. Literally.

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 there's the sense that what you're doing could just die at any moment and the volatility. Everything's just going to thrash so much. It's not, you know, you obviously look back at all these fond memories, but it was not the most fun part of the journey or the part of my life that I wish I could go back and relive. I mean, I do think there's something to what Jensen was saying that I thought was very honest.

And when I heard him say it the first time, I was like, yeah, I get that. I think there were a lot of people for whom, if you knew how painful it would be along the way you wouldn't get started. But then 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 you can go and do good things. Well, on that topic, we have a lot to talk about.

I think this is actually very appropriate. First, we have to ask you about your shirt and what you're wearing. Yeah, you know, I started working with people to design some of my own clothes. And I figured, you know, look, we're going to design eyewear and design other stuff that people wear.

Let's get, let's get good at this. And so this one, I actually worked with this great fashion designer, Michael Miri. And he's got a great story. So I wouldn't be surprised if you're doing one of these with him one day.

And this one is, so I've kind of started working on this series of shirts with some of my favorite classical sayings on them. So this one is, Pothymathos, learning through suffering. It's a little family saying and also, esplas. Was that your family saying, growing up or is that your family?

No, I was thinking my sister. Well, no, let's pull that thread. No pun intended, I promise. What does learning through suffering mean to you?

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 the journey. That's the entrepreneurial journey. It's also part of the beauty of building things.

But it's something that Jensen talks a lot about too. I feel like when you go to start a company, you never want to write down what they would like their values to be. But values are not what you write down on the wall. It's like you're lived behaviors.

And you only really learn what you care about when you have to make hard trade-offs and face challenges. So yeah, you learn the most important things through facing challenges. Well, speaking of facing challenges, we 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. Do you have a distinction? We will make our case to you of why and enumerate them. But first, I think my old Nike, Michael Jordan ad where he's talking about how he's failed over and over and over again.

That's how he succeeds. That one resonates with me too. So thanks to you guys. I got a pair of these this summer.

And I genuinely love them. Tell us the story of how these came to be. Yeah. So thanks.

I'm excited about them too. So, you know, we met at we've been building social experiences for 20 years now. And originally it took a 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 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, we got started. Okay. We're like a handful of kids.

We weren't able, we'd never resources the time to go define whatever next computing platform is. And also, you know, Facebook originally got started around the same time as a bunch of the early smart phones and those platforms got started. So we didn't really get to plan to roll into all of that platform. And one of the big themes I think for the next chapter of what we do is I want to be able to build what I think are sort of the ideal experiences.

Not just what you're allowed to build on some platform that someone else built, but what is actually if you can think from first principles, what is the ideal social experience? So I think what you'd like to have is not a phone that you look down at that kind of takes your attention away from the things 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. And that way your social experiences with other people aren't constrained to these little interactions. You can have an iPhone screen. In the not so distant future, you can imagine, because you guys have demoed some of the stuff that we've done, a version of this where we're having a conversation like this, but maybe one of us doesn't hear, they're just like 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, it's something you're going to be able to do through holograms, through glasses, without being taken away from whatever else you're doing.

Just kind of have that mixed in with the rest of the world. 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, all right, there's some people, it's like maybe like, I'm physically here, there's a person, you're like hologram there, there's an AI that is kind of embodied as someone is there. And the glasses one able.

So, how are we going after this building? This is like some huge project we've been working on it for 10 years. And there are a lot of different challenges to solve together. There's like, you have to build a novel display stack, 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 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. That's new novel RF protocols.

It's like, okay, it's a pretty big challenge. So, let's go try to go for the big thing. And we've been working on that for a while, and we're pretty close to being able to show off the first prototype that we have about it. And 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 it's a lot of stuff we've been looking to. So, what if we just constrained ourselves to, work with a great partner, they make Raybam, they make a lot of the iconic glasses. Let's see what we can fit into glasses today and make them as useful as possible. And I actually, I kind of thought when we were getting started with those, that it was almost like a practice project for the ultimate AR.

Which, let's be clear, that's what you thought Facebook was. That's true. That's true. Like for your real startup.

That's true. Yeah, no, let's go on a tangent there for a second. When it started Facebook in school, came out to Silicon Valley with Dustin and a handful of people working on it at the time. We did that because Silicon Valley's world of startups came from.

And I remember we got off the plane, we were driving down 101, we were like, wow, eBay, Yahoo, this is amazing. All these great companies, one day, maybe we'll build a company like this. And I'd already started Facebook. And I was like, surely the project we're working on now is not a company.

And Facebook had some scale at this point. 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, yeah, I mean, a lot of hard work obviously. But I just at the time, I was kind of like, yeah, I don't think this is it. Well, that's your answer. What do you have started?

You actually started Facebook. I didn't know. So yeah, so I mean, the glasses though, we thought this was like, all right, we want to get working with a solar luxotica, so we can start building more and more advanced glasses. And then they're really good.

They look good. And then AI, like a massive transformation of AI. So 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 the Chachiki T-moment.

And these were not manufactured and shipped as an AI device. That came later when they were already in market. Yeah, a few years ago, I would have predicted that AR holograms would have been available before kind of like full scale AI. And now I think it's probably going to be the other order.

So now it's like, great. Well, this is actually a great product because it's got the cameras so we can see what you see. It's got the microphone. It's got the speakers.

You can talk to it. I remember calling Alex Kimmel, the guy who runs the product group. And I'm like, hey, you know, I think we should probably pivot this and make it so that that AI is the primary feature of it. And then like, I remember I came in the next week and they built a prototype of it on Tuesday.

And it was like, all right, good. Yeah, now this is good. This is going to be a very successful product. He told us a much more high stakes version of that story.

I was on the highway with my kids and I get this call on a Saturday from Mark and he's like, those classes, could we put meta AI in them running on device and like ship that soon so we can see if that's a good idea or not? Yeah, that's that tracks. That's what I just said. Sounds right.

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But the question is, who's managing them all? 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 slash acquired and tell them that Ben and David send you. Okay, so thank you for opening up with the story. The question that I would like to try to answer tonight is why has meta worked as spectacularly well as it has?

I mean, one of the most valuable companies in the world through multiple iterations, multiple technology waves, fighting off, you know, maybe let's name all the waves in which people said, oh, Facebook and meta are so screwed. And yet that is not the way it looks today. MySpace, Twitter Gen1, Instagram, Snapchat, WhatsApp, TikTok, ATT, putting its own whole category. And now chat GPT.

And like there is a widely held public narrative every single time Snapchat discovers stories or there's something where people like, oh, the cool thing that Facebook the company did is just obsolete now and they're going to go away. You're very much having gone away. What do you think is the through line of the DNA of the company that allows you to keep winning? I think it's that we're a technology company that is focused on human connection, not a specific type of app.

So 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 or where they actually physically are is the natural continuation of the kind of apps that we build today. But it depends on how you define what you are. And then you need to figure out how do you build yourself the competence to actually go do that.

And that's where I think being a strong technology company comes in. Because a lot of companies, I think, think about themselves too narrowly in terms of, okay, we're this kind of one thing. And the reason why we can build all these things is because we 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 systems engineering type classes when I was in college. So you talk about friends during my space and all the scaling challenges they had doing the graph calculations of like, all right, do you know this person? Do you want to ask the story of that time?

It seems quaint now, friends during my space, but you study computer science, graph networking, social graphs that is a very difficult combination of a product question and a technology question. I think you can define the product in a general way that the technology becomes basically impossible to solve. So you want to have a smart product definition. And then you want to be competent and better than everyone else at the technology.

And I think that's something that we've held ourselves to build a good organization around. And it's one of the things that I observed as soon as I came out to the valley. That all these companies that called themselves technology companies were not really set up that way. The companies I was talking about, the CEO wasn't technical, the board of directors had no one technical on it.

They had one dude on the management team who was the head of engineering who was technical and everyone else wasn't. 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 want a lot of people on our management team. It's like, you know, splits mostly people running either these big product groups to come up through different technical pathways of the company.

And I think that there's a balance. You don't want everyone to be an engineer because there's other things that matter too. But if you don't have enough of your kind of share of the company as engineers, then you're not a technology company. And I think that that also is important to the board.

And I think in terms of how you weigh decisions and culturally things inside the company matters a lot. But I think that that's one of the things that has been really fundamental. 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 are pretty curious and learning focused organization where 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. So I define our strategies, we can learn faster than every other company. We're going to win. We're going to build a product than everyone else because we're going to get it out first.

Early, we're going to have a good feedback loop. We're going to get a bunch of feedback. We're going to 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 and they're not even just three versions because we ship so frequently, it's, you just, you learn faster.

So I think that's basically the formula. Be a technology company, build good foundation, like learn from what people are kind of focused on in the world and sit around this quickly as you can. In one of my research calls to prep for this, someone described you as a master strategist, which we all sort of acknowledge that at this point. Except for like all the stuff that I just thought was not going to be that important, that ended up actually being less important.

But that's the thing. But that's the thing is, you want to set up the game so that way you optimise, you create your life. This is what Jensen told us. Like the apple's going to fall from the tree in some direction.

And if you just set up the game that you have a hand close enough to catch it, the comment that someone made to me was the reason Marcus 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 that? But it does kind of feel like the way that you make that is like, well, if we have great engineering, then that can kind of take care of the speed part. That's like, you know, many iterations are multiple at bats.

And then the, well, great engineering and speed and duration are actually two different values. They're not necessarily at odds, but I think like there are a lot of great engineering organisations that try to build things that are super high quality and have good confidence around that. But 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 going to take a long time.

We're going to polish it. We're going to put it out. And maybe for the stuff that they're doing that works, maybe that just fits with their culture. But for us, I think there are a lot of conversations that we have internally where you're almost at the line of being embarrassed about what you put out.

Because you, you know, obviously not in the sense that it's like, you know, you want to put stuff out early enough so you can get good feedback. You obviously want to test things that are reasonable in offices. So if it's 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 another couple of months or whatever. And I do just think that you want to really have a culture that values shipping and getting things out and getting feedback more than needing always to get great positive accolades from people when you put stuff out. Because I think if you want to wait until you get praised all the time, you're missing a bunch of the time when you could have learned a bunch of useful stuff and then incorporated that into the next version of your ship. And it's just about making sure that what the thing that the company's known for is brand can withstand all the little damage that you do to it by shipping stuff that's not quite ready.

Well, I would like to hope that it's not damaging to the brand. But, well, but it innately it is. Like when you're like, oh, I feel bad because I shipped the product that wasn't good enough. You're sort of, yeah, I don't overstate it.

I mean, we don't ship things that we think are bad, but we also don't take, and we want to make sure that we're shipping things that that are kind of early enough that we can get good feedback to see what they're going to be most used for. Like, I think a lot of the AI stuff that we're building out, for example, it actually, 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 where it's resonating.

Now, if you put out as bad, then you're not going to collect your data because people aren't going to use it for anything because it sucks. But I do think that you have hypotheses for what people might really want to use it for. And they're not all going to be right. And you want to kind of go early enough on that as more.

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

I mean, I think it's a combination. I think you're basically taking some kind of values, either kind of like values that you have or a value for something that you believe should exist in the world and trying to build something that's aligned with that while trying to match it up with what is going to resonate the most with people. But 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. I'm like, as I pour through all these historical examples, there's like the market discovers, some other participant in the market discovers the story's format. And suddenly the whole world is like, oh my God, that is the way that we all, that's the social interaction mechanism.

And that's like a pretty pure discovery where you have products that have stories, they perform very well. That's been discovered. But there's other times it feels like everything you're trying to do in reality labs, all 50 plus billion dollars that you've put into it, he's 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. What's a combination? I mean, I think that there's certainly a lot of things that we've invented or created for the first time. I mean, in 2006, when we built the first version of News Feed, before that social networks are basically profiles.

And then we're like, hey, people actually want to get the updates. And let's show them that. And if we rank them, then we can, 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's obviously there's some of these things are sort of seminal, I don't know what to call an invention, but patterns that we basically established first. And then some of them are ones that other people did where we take pride in learning from what is working in the world. We're not embarrassed about learning from things that other people like 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. I think if you don't invent anything, then it's hard to kind of 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. Which speaks to the thesis of Facebook as a technology company. Better as a technology company. We'll get to that later.

Ben and I have been having a conversation. I want to take this to open source. And open source technology and it's important to you. And Ben posited first to me and 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.

I'm curious if you would agree with that and if you would comment on your relationship to open source. I think almost all of the major technology companies at this point are primarily using open source stacks. So yeah, I mean, I 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, 1990s or something.

For us, open source has been important and valuable. I mean, you were the first big company built on the lamp stack. Yeah. Yeah.

No, it's great. It 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. 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 it wasn't going to help us compete with Google for any of the stuff that we were doing to have that technology.

But what we were able to do with things like open compute, we're getting it to become the industry standard. So now you have like all these other, you know, cloud service platforms that 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, 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, we're in love. This is where we were going with this.

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 through too much stuff with the other platforms to fully depend on anyone else. And we're 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 or ecosystems. They get better when other people use them.

So for us, there's a huge amount of good. And it philosophically lines up with where we are. We're like, I mean, look, I definitely have a lot of experiences. We were like trying to build stuff on mobile platforms.

The platforms are just like, now you can't build that. That's frustrating. Can we take a real quick detour? I really want to ask you.

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

Wait, did you really grab in the wheel? Is this connected or did you just decide that it was your turn to talk? I'm sorry. I was like really like wound up.

I know. I think it's related. I really genuinely do. Facebook on mobile is HTML5.

In 2012. Yeah. Yeah. I want to ask you what you were thinking going into the IPO with Facebook on mobile being HTML5.

And what happened to your $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 a different technical issue?

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 we have to build different ones for each phone.

And you have to go through approval to get it shipped. We have to wait weeks before it can ship. It sucks. So we have an idea.

Let's build this platform where we can get a web based platform. So you build a native shell and build this web based platform in it. And we'll be able to update our apps every day. And we'll ship one thing once.

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 that's going to be, basically, whatever downside we are going to have from not having the most native thing, we're going to make up for velocity by having way more of our energy focused on one platform. Well, we were wrong. It turned out that having the native integration was actually critical for having the interactions feel good.

And that, so we basically went through this period where we had to go rewrite our apps from scratch. And that coincided with mobile growing dramatically. And mobile, we didn't have any ready. Because it may seem like it's pretty similar, but there's a very different 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. Let's be clear, the feed ad had not been invented. Yeah.

And advertisers have specific formats that they like working with. And now your ad is going to look like a feed story. It was a big challenge for advertisers. And the idea that now for people, you're going to have this organic feed that was the most important part of the product.

Now we're just going to start putting ads in it was a challenge for the people using the product. So we need to figure that out. And we need to get the apps to be better. And we basically took, I think it must have been like a year or something.

We're just like, look, we're going to pause feature development to the company because it's hard enough to do a rewrite. If you look at the history of the tech industry, there are all these examples like Netscape and these things that they tried to do a rewrite, they needed to reestablish the technical platform. And they also tried to add features. They basically just never terminated.

So it's a real risk. When you're completely changing your underlying platform, that you're going to miss it. I was like, all right, we've got to minimize the chance that that happens. So we're not going to ship any new features.

We're just going to rewrite it, make it faster. But while we're doing this, basically mobile's growing. So the percent of our traffic that is monetizable is shrinking. Because web is basically shrinking.

And that's the only business model. Yeah. And you're now recently. You know, that thing is actually pretty clear what we needed to do.

I think strategically, a lot of the time it's somewhat harder to know what to do when you're winning. When stuff is going well, it's like, what is the next move to 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, do you have the pain tolerance to go do it?

So a lot of us was like, all right, the team was like, okay, 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 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 it 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 in your own one local hill and you need to jump to another hill, that's a stuff that's really culturally hard. But this one, I think was it was not fun. There were a series of periods throughout the company that were not, I don't know, not the most fun periods.

But that one in retrospect is pretty good in retrospect. It's like, not bad. It's like, your market cap only got cut in half or a year and a half. Like, great.

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Can I follow that thread that you just said? 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 criticisms that have happened over the years, which do you believe is the most legitimate and why? I mean, there's so many things that we've messed up that there are many criticisms that are legitimate. But if that was a year and a half mistake, I think, one of the things I reflected on over the last 10 years or so was the political environment just changed dramatically. It's like before 2016, there was not a month that went by except for maybe the S sophistication around.

I think I just fundamentally misdiagnosed the problem. So I think that there was this basic challenge. There were a lot of things. I don't want to simplify this too much.

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 they were asserting that we were doing wrong or were responsible for, that I don't actually think we were. And 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 take ownership for it. 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 to be fixed, and there are people who are just looking for someone to blame. And I think to some degree, 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 going to take responsibility for all this stuff. People are basically blaming social media in the tech industry for all these different things in society. And if we're saying, okay, we're going to really do our part to go fix this stuff.

I know there were a bunch of people who just took that and were like, oh, you're taking responsibility for that? Let me 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. 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.

And so it started in 2016, and I think that we had 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 multiply across all these places around the world. 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. And I think it's going to take another 10 years or so for us to fully work through that cycle before our brand and all of that is back to kind of the place that it maybe could have been if I hadn't messed that up in the first place. So look, and the grand scheme of things, 20 years isn't that bad either.

And I think we'll come out stronger, but I do think that is one of the kind of more interesting critiques that I think 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 know, you kind of bought into too much of the stuff that you shouldn't have. And yeah, I think it's going to take us a long time to dig out of that.

Do you have a reasonable framework at this point where like, okay, here's the stuff where I feel like we actually do want to take responsibility for it. Here's the stuff where like, no, that's not our fault. Yeah, I mean, at this point, I think a lot of the stuff has been studied. So I mean, I don't want to go rehash all the different things.

But I think at this point, there's been like years of academic research on a lot of these things. And part of the thing that's challenging is 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 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, but what has worked over time is like, 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. So I think that like, or it's, you know, so I know that's, I know that it's kind of cuts both sides. To me, this brings up another topic we wanted to talk about with you. And you just, you said, that's 20 years isn't that long.

I'm young, you're young. We all are. This is the advantage of being a college dropout. When you start when you're 19, it's like, hopefully we have more than 20 years.

And hopefully you have like, off iteration. Yeah, I don't know. Hopefully, you set up the company in a, especially at the time, truly unique way. Where you can operate the company and take that approach.

Do you mean super voting shares? Super voting shares is like, you know, the technical aspect. I think there are a bunch of technical aspects too 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, at least as we've developed, is that like, that is just one of the core fundamental advantages that Meta has. So as you were setting up the company, you know, when you were so young, even when you went public, you were so young, like, why was that so important to you? Well, in 2006, Yahoo wanted to buy the company for a billion dollars and everyone on our management team wanted to sell it. And the board tried to fire me.

And basically, in the next year, everyone else on the management team left because they, I hadn't done a good job communicating. I don't want to blame them. I hadn't done a good job communicating the long-term vision because I wasn't thinking about that at the time. I 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 going to be pretty important in the world. But I didn't know what I think in terms of, you know, like long-term financial plans or... We'll make a case to them, why it would be worth the money. Or just like, look, we're doing this for a long-term, we're not planning on selling the company.

So it's like without having made that case, so it's understandable that basically, Yahoo comes around. A lot of people, it's like, this is like all their startup dreams come true. You got to 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, okay, I think we should turn this down because we're going to do this. 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 that makes it somewhat harder to do that. So learning through suffering.

Wow. And being very cash-dentered and very early, such that you had a very real-going concern on your hands and you just didn't need to cut off your arm and sell it to someone in order to build your business. I think this is a fundamentally misunderstood thing about Facebook, the startup. It is the prototypical startup.

You are the iconic startup founder of this century. And there's a lot of people that want to start up 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 like, building concern. Yeah, I mean, I'm grabbing a lot more fun now.

Think of the work and all this stuff. It's awesome. What is your advice to all these founders who sort of romanticize the idea of starting a company and kind of reasoning? I don't know.

I'm starting a company. I'm not bad. I mean, I think that there's different tools 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'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 figure out what works. Part of the reason I didn't think Facebook was going to be the company early on was because when I was in school, I built 12 different things. I wanted to exist.

This is fun. This is fun. People are still using that to help keep this on. I had a bunch of other ideas for stuff I was going to build too.

I didn't know how to think about what a company was going to be. I know there's something about maintaining flexibility that's helpful. Once you hire a bunch of people, it's a lot easier when you can just have meetings in your head about what direction you want to go in. There's a lot less pride and people dug in when you're just like, okay, I'm going to change direction.

People haven't invested their ego and like, no, we were going in this direction. Now I must be convinced. It's like, nah, I do think that's a thing where you want to keep things lean and be able to do that. That's one of the reasons we tried to get the company back to being the leanest version of a large company is that we can be.

But I do know there's something to that. 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 make the changes and do the things that they need to, which is less fun.

And then you can attract the best people to go work on those things because it's less fun. And so I do think you just have to dial it right. You're spending a gajillion dollars on reality labs. It's a technical term.

It's not making that much money. So I'm going to play Mark back to you. Sure. 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 why you categorize it differently. Well, I think some of the stuff by the time you're at the scale that we're at is also just about what you want to do over the next 10 to 20 years. And what do you think are going to be important? And we're talking about making your own luck and all that and how it's like I think there are some broad strokes that we can have a sense of where things are going.

I'm pretty sure glasses and kind of like holographic presence and AR is going to be a completely ubiquitous product. Right. It's just like everyone on phone before replaced with a smartphone and 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. So, another is that there is the thing about controlling our own destiny. It's strategically valuable. We did this calculation at an 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, the way people use the things less or like them less.

And it's hard to exactly estimate it, but I think we might be like twice as profitable if we own the platform or something. So, I think from that perspective, that's worth a lot just from like a pure like dollars perspective, which is not primarily how I come at this stuff, but even like now I've learned a thing or since the other days and now I'm at least able to like, I'm not able to convince all the investors that we should be investing to the extent that we are in reality labs, but we can sort of articulate a case for why I'm confident that it's going to be good over time. But for me, it's always been way more about the product experience and what you can enable and build. And you know, one of the shifts, and this is sort of like a value shift over time is one of the things that some of the early popular 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 daily 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 it's just like this uplifting thing about humanity.

I think a lot of what we've done with social media so far is very good. Where we've got, we built these products when 3 billion people use them on a near daily basis, right? It's like 3.3 billion on a daily basis. 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, it helps people build businesses, it helps people form communities, it's good. There aren't that many people on a day basis who get out of bed and they're like, buck yes, social media. So I kind of think for my next stage, for the next stage of the company, the next 15 years, I want us to build more things that are awesome in addition to things that are good.

And I think that they both matter. But to me, this is 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. A lot of the AI stuff that we're doing, I think it's 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 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, like, I think I'm young, a little older, right? But it's like, I do think that at this point, it's not just a meta thing. Also, in my personal life, a lot of what I personally value is doing things that are inspiring with people who I find inspiring. And so there's the personal version of this.

It's like I get to work on interesting science problems with like, Priscilla and my wife, and a bunch of awesome people. I get to design shirts with some of the best fashion designers in the world. It's like I am a sculpture of my wife. Bring back the Roman tradition of designing sculptures of people you love.

I'm not at all being facetious. Like, cool. No, I think Daniel Arsham is a talented guy. That's a person I'd love to work with on something.

Let's go find a project. One of my side projects is, 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 all this stuff.

It starts with like, it's awesome. We got the steer, chunk. He's like, he's just the man. We're having a hard time keeping him on the ranch because every time we put him in a steel enclosure and he sees a female cow, he busts through the steel enclosure.

But I feel like that's the kind of bull that you want to make the highest quality beef in the world. And we're just working with trying to do really high quality, awesome things with awesome people. That's what I get to do for the next 15 or 20 years. Then like, it's going to be a good 15 or 20 years.

Was there a moment? Like, what changed? Like, when did this become your priority and why? I can't, it feels so radical that it's, how could it have possibly been gradual?

Or was this just like, Mark all the time? And we just couldn't see the real Mark. I don't know. I think there might have been something around the way the company shifted and operations around COVID.

I mean, it's like the COVID, like all these tech companies went remote temporarily and it wasn't an interesting period to just like, get some more time, like stuff. I'm a pretty introverted person. And I do think it's, I need to be careful where like, I get a lot of value and energy and ideas from being around other people, but I also need time with myself. And with COVID, I kind of got that.

It was a time of reflection, where I was able to think about the 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. Like that was a positive bunch of reflection.

And then I think that a bunch of the things that we'd spun up earlier, but it's smaller scale. Right? So the reality lab stuff that we started in 2014, really, the fair stuff around, you know, fundamental AI research that, yeah. So these things, they kind of got started and they were growing.

And it was, it kind of reached this moment, which is like, we're going to double down on this and do this, or we're going to kind of like, do this as a hobby. And I was like, no, I think we should do this. Right? I mean, this is, 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. 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, you've learned 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 quaint compared to losing 80% of your market cap or whatever it was. Right? It's, you know, so, but so, I mean, these are all intentional decisions.

Right? It's like, I mean, there are a lot of conversations that we had, which are like, should we go forward with this? And the answer that I came out with is yes. 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. Oh, well. We're, we're starting, we're starting to enter, uh, looking at the clock, like conclusion, lightning round territory. I've had one like lurking in the back of my head.

It makes sense to me that you would rebrand the company, something that is not Facebook, given how 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. Um, would you pick the name meta if you were going to rename the company today? I like meta.

It's a good name. You know, finding good short names. I mean, this actually was a thing that we talked about for a while, because it was pretty clear that if Facebook is continuing to grow in importance in the world, which I think a lot of people don't appreciate in this kind of mind-boggling at the scale that it's at. But the, the others, I mean, you know, we went through a period where it's like we had Facebook and handful of small apps.

So now we have like, you know, more apps that have a billion people or more using them. You know, hopefully in the next three or years, five with threads, if that continues scaling, and um, this was a conversation that we had a bunch, where it's, it doesn't 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 it was important to me, this was also coinciding with a lot of, a lot of the challenges that we were having, right, of 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, is this the Facebook brand of issues? Do we need a new brand? And I was like, we don't run away from that. Right?