Meta (Audio)

1. BGBen Gilbert0:00

   All right, so I was up late last night. Late for me, as a dad, is, like, 11:00 PM. But I'm sitting here at my computer in my dark basement, you know, pulling notes together. David, what music did I have on? You have one guess.

2. DRDavid Rosenthal0:14

   Uh, oh, oh, I know exactly what you had on.

3. BGBen Gilbert0:16

   [laughing]

4. DRDavid Rosenthal0:16

   You had Trent Reznor, Social Network soundtrack. [laughing]

5. BGBen Gilbert0:20

   [laughing] It makes anything you're doing feel, uh, you know, twice as important and twice as revolutionary, and, uh, it just felt very apt for this episode.

6. DRDavid Rosenthal0:29

   Oh, man. So I have been listening, in the last twenty-four hours, to 50 Cent, In Da Club, because that came out my freshman year of college, same year as the facebook.com, and, like... Man, 50 Cent, facebook.com, can't get any better than that.

7. BGBen Gilbert0:45

   Perfect, match made in heaven. Well, I'll check out our Wall the Wall from the old days, and see if there are any posts about that. [laughing]

8. DRDavid Rosenthal0:53

   [laughing]

9. BGBen Gilbert0:53

   All right, let's do it.

10. DRDavid Rosenthal0:54

    Let's do it.

11. SPSpeaker0:55

    Who got the truth? [upbeat music] Is it you? Is it you? Is it you? Who got the truth now? Is it you? Is it you? Is it you? Sit me down, say it straight. Another story on the way. Who got the truth?

12. BGBen Gilbert1:12

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

13. DRDavid Rosenthal1:21

    I'm David Rosenthal.

14. BGBen Gilbert1:22

    And we are your hosts. Today, we are studying a company whose products are used by more humans than any other company in history, Meta, of course, formerly known as Facebook. So I figured I would contextualize [chuckles] these numbers a little bit. Meta has four billion monthly active users.

15. DRDavid Rosenthal1:42

    And daily active users are over three billion.

16. BGBen Gilbert1:46

    Yeah, nuts. There are only eight billion humans on Earth. So as I started to brainstorm what the closest competitors could be to serving half of the humans, I thought, "Surely I can find it in empires or governments from the past, where there is some larger percentage."

17. DRDavid Rosenthal2:03

    Yeah, makes sense.

18. BGBen Gilbert2:05

    Nope. The Roman Empire, at its peak, was only forty percent of humans, tops. You know, the data's a little bit hard to actually find from that period of time. But the British Empire, which we have a little bit better handle on, at its peak, was only twenty-three percent of the global human population. So no government, tech company, utility, et cetera, has ever addressed so much of the world.

19. DRDavid Rosenthal2:28

    It's just wild. There's no other way to put it.

20. BGBen Gilbert2:30

    In the over twenty years since its founding, Meta truly has connected humanity through its apps: Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger, and now Threads. So today, we're gonna study how they did it. There's been a lot of ink spilled writing about Facebook over the years, and for its first ten years, most of that writing focused on the many benefits to society, with breathless exuberance over milestone after milestone. And for the past ten years, it's kinda seemed like Meta could do nothing right. Reporting focused on its many stumbles, the massive mistakes, the incredible controversies surrounding the company, and while we will, of course, discuss these events as part of our story and analysis, our goal today, on this podcast episode, is really to understand how it is that Meta became the dominant fabric that connects the human race, and why they've been so successful at continuing to win over and over again. No matter what you think of the company, it is undeniably one of the most important institutions in the world, and their global scale is no accident. It is the result of careful actions from some of the most motivated and brilliant people in the world, who believe in one mission: connecting as many people as possible.

21. DRDavid Rosenthal3:46

    I hadn't thought about this till now, but almost sort of tautologically, this is, like, the most important episode we'll ever do, to try and understand this. [chuckles]

22. BGBen Gilbert3:55

    [chuckles]

23. DRDavid Rosenthal3:55

    Like, it's the biggest company that has ever existed. It's the biggest thing that's ever existed.

24. BGBen Gilbert4:00

    Yeah, by these measures that we're talking about right now.

25. DRDavid Rosenthal4:03

    Right.

26. BGBen Gilbert4:03

    Now, of course, the story of how we got here is nuts. It is the perfect Acquired stew, like you're saying, David. They speed-ran their startup phase, they swerved through multiple disruptive technology waves, they battled fierce competitors, they invented, or maybe discovered, one of the greatest business models ever, and they're now trying to pull forward the next technology generation through sheer force of will with AR, VR, and AI. So finally, listeners, we tackle one of the greatest corporate stories ever, Facebook, the Mark Zuckerberg production. So listeners, we have one big announcement for you today. It is time for our annual Acquired survey. If you have three to five minutes, please click the link in the show notes, or go to acquired.fm/survey to take it. We'll be raffling off a pair of shiny new Meta Ray-Bans-

27. DRDavid Rosenthal4:47

    Yeah

28. BGBen Gilbert4:47

    ... and giving away a bunch of ACQ dad hats as well. This is really our one big ask of you all year, and it helps us immensely with making the show better, to hear your suggestions, and also to help our sponsors understand just how impactful the Acquired audience is. So go to acquired.fm/survey, and David and I are both eternally grateful. After this episode, discuss it in the Slack, and check out ACQ2, our second show, where we just had Clem Delangue, the CEO of Hugging Face, on to talk about his view on how the open-source AI ecosystem will play out. And before we dive in, we wanna briefly thank our presenting partner, J.P. Morgan Payments.

29. DRDavid Rosenthal5:26

    Yes, just like how we say every company has a story, every company's story is powered by payments, and J.P. Morgan Payments is part of so many companies' journeys, from seed to IPO and beyond.

30. BGBen Gilbert5:36

    So with that, this show is not investment advice. David and I may have investments in the companies we discuss, and this show is for informational and entertainment purposes only. David, Roman Empire? Like-

Episode duration: 6:22:40