The Mark Zuckerberg Interview

David Rosenthal 0:00 So how many interviews with Mark do you think you watched before tonight?

Ben Gilbert 0:04 [chuckles] Oh, to prepare?

David Rosenthal 0:06 Yeah.

Ben Gilbert 0:06 [chuckles] Uh, th- thirty to forty? Uh, the, 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.

David Rosenthal 0:21 Totally. And, uh, I think we might have witnessed the beginning of a new era right in front of us on stage.

Ben Gilbert 0:27 [chuckles] Oh, yes, absolutely.

David Rosenthal 0:29 All right, should we do this?

Ben Gilbert 0:31 Let's do it.

Speaker 0:32 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?

Ben Gilbert 0:49 Welcome to the Fall 2024 season of Acquired, the podcast about great companies and the stories and playbooks behind them. I'm Ben Gilbert.

David Rosenthal 0:57 I'm David Rosenthal.

Ben Gilbert 0:59 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.

David Rosenthal 1:07 Ooh!

Ben Gilbert 1:08 Mark is the iconic founder CEO of our time, and this conversation was just too good to hold onto any longer, so we are getting it out quickly before we release the full video of the entire show.

David Rosenthal 1:20 Which, speaking of the full show, [chuckles] 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 ninety minutes of content beyond just this Mark interview. We should have that out in the next couple weeks, so stay tuned for that.

Ben Gilbert 1:49 First, though, a huge thank you to our partners this season. You know our presenting partner, J.P. Morgan Payments.

David Rosenthal 1:56 And we are also pumped to have two more great returning sponsors this season: Statsig, the world's first product acceleration platform that thousands of companies, from OpenAI to Series A startups, rely on to ship fast, learn more, and make smart decisions. You can find out more about them at statsig.com/acquired.

Ben Gilbert 2:13 Sounds a lot like Meta.

David Rosenthal 2:15 [chuckles]

Ben Gilbert 2:16 And Crusoe, which is the world's best climate-aligned AI cloud and data center operator that is leading the industrial build-out of AI. Find out more about them at crusoe.ai/acquired. As always, come discuss this afterwards with us in the Slack, acquired.fm/slack. And if you wanna be notified when every new episode drops, sign up at acquired.fm/email.

David Rosenthal 2:40 All right, one more thing before the interview. We need to say a huge, huge thank you to the entire J.P. Morgan Payments team for securing the Chase Center [chuckles] for this, for orchestrating the entire evening. Our partnership this year has been absolutely incredible and gone, I think, way beyond what either of us ever could have imagined.

Ben Gilbert 3:02 Yeah, for those who don't know about J.P. Morgan Payments, they empower businesses to accept money, hold money, send money, protect money from fraud, and gain unique insights from money flows to help your company grow.

David Rosenthal 3:13 Yep, and the payments business specifically, like most things at J.P. Morgan, is the largest and most trusted payments provider in the entire world. They move ten trillion dollars a day. That's almost twenty-five percent of all US dollar payment flows in the global economy. Pretty much every single company that we cover on Acquired works with J.P. Morgan Payments in some way. You can never outgrow them. They partner with startups and small companies like us, [chuckles] like you would be, Ben, all the way up to the largest enterprises in the Fortune 500.

Ben Gilbert 3:42 Yeah, we've got more to share about their new payments products and technology this season, like the pay-by-face biometric payments that we saw live at Chase Center.

David Rosenthal 3:49 Yeah, that was super cool.

Ben Gilbert 3:51 Yep, so that you can learn which may be the right fit to solve your payments challenges and grow your business.

David Rosenthal 3:57 The other thing we gotta say is, like, 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.

Ben Gilbert 4:13 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, uh, what happened at Chase Center is really the physical embodiment of that.

David Rosenthal 4:26 Thank you guys for being the best partners we could ever imagine, and a very special shout-out to Dustin Sedgwick, J.P. Morgan Payment 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 J.P. Morgan.

Ben Gilbert 4:47 Yep. So please enjoy our conversation with Mark Zuckerberg, and to take us in, the chairman and CEO of J.P. Morgan Chase, Jamie Dimon.

Speaker 4:57 Hello, Acquired listeners. Welcome to the Chase Center and to Acquired live. I'm Jamie Dimon, chairman and CEO of J.P. 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 J.P. 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.

David Rosenthal 5:31 Mark. [audience cheering]

Ben Gilbert 5:31 Hey!

David Rosenthal 5:33 It's great to have you here. [audience cheering]

Mark Zuckerberg 5:34 It's great to be here. You know, I was watching, 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 gonna have to apologize for that I'm gonna say tonight." [laughing]

David Rosenthal 5:47 [laughing] For what?

Mark Zuckerberg 5:47 Nah, just kidding.

David Rosenthal 5:48 Well, uh-

Mark Zuckerberg 5:49 I don't apologize anymore. [laughing]

Ben Gilbert 5:53 We've noticed. [chuckles]

David Rosenthal 5:55 Uh, well, okay, wait, wait, here's the question: If you knew what you knew today...

Mark Zuckerberg 5:58 What's that?

David Rosenthal 5:59 If you knew what you know today, would you have started Facebook?

Mark Zuckerberg 6:03 ... Oh, God! Um, I mean, I, look, I, I think-

Ben Gilbert 6:06 Coming out hot, David. [chuckles]

Mark Zuckerberg 6:07 Yeah, no, I mean-

David Rosenthal 6:08 Wait, he started it. [chuckles] Literally.

Mark Zuckerberg 6:11 I, I think there's something to Jensen's original sentiment, which is that n- the entrepreneurial journey is very challenging, especially the early days when you're running a startup and, you know, there's this sense that what you're doing could just die at any moment, and, you know, the volatility, everything is just getting thrashed so much. And it's, it's not, you know, you, you obviously, you look back, and 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, 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: "Yeah, I get that." Right? It's like I think, I, I think there are l- like, a lot of people for whom, you know, if you knew how painful, uh, 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. [audience laughing]

David Rosenthal 7:15 Well, um, [chuckles] on that topic, we have a lot to talk about.

Mark Zuckerberg 7:20 Yeah.

David Rosenthal 7:21 I think this is actually very appropriate. First, we have to ask you about your shirt and what you're wearing. [audience laughing]

Mark Zuckerberg 7:28 Yeah. You know, I, um, I started, uh, working with people to design some of my own clothes. And, um, [audience laughing] so I figure, you know, look, we're gonna design eyewear, we're gonna design other stuff that people wear. Let's get, let's get good at this. And, um, so, so this one, I actually... I worked with this great fashion designer, Mike Amiri, and, um, he's got a great story. So I, I, 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, I've kind of started working on this series of shirts with my, some of my favourite classical sayings on them. So this one is pathemathos, uh, learning through suffering. [audience laughing] It's a little family saying, and- [laughing]

David Rosenthal 8:22 [chuckles]

Ben Gilbert 8:22 [chuckles]

Mark Zuckerberg 8:23 ... also Aeschylus.

David Rosenthal 8:25 [chuckles] Was, uh, w- was that your family saying growing up, or is that your family now?

Mark Zuckerberg 8:29 Oh, no.

David Rosenthal 8:29 No.

Mark Zuckerberg 8:29 I'm just saying my sister's saying. [laughing]

David Rosenthal 8:32 [chuckles] L- uh-

Ben Gilbert 8:34 Well, no, let's, let's pull that thread.

Mark Zuckerberg 8:36 Yeah.

Ben Gilbert 8:38 Uh, no pun intended, I promise. Uh-

David Rosenthal 8:40 [chuckles]

Ben Gilbert 8:41 What does learning through suffering mean to you?

Mark Zuckerberg 8:45 Um, 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 mean, I think that that is sort of, that's the journey, right? I mean, that's the, the entrepreneurial journey. It's also, I think, part of the beauty of building things. And, um... But, you know, this is something that Jensen talks a lot about, too, right? It's like I, I, 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.

Ben Gilbert 9:37 Hmm.

David Rosenthal 9:39 Well, um, speaking of facing challenges, we wanna talk about a number of those because I, I m- w- we counted, by our count, I think you have faced more existential challenges than any meaningful company in history through your first twenty years. First, though-

Mark Zuckerberg 9:55 It's a dubious distinction. [chuckles]

Ben Gilbert 9:58 We, we will make our case to you of why-

David Rosenthal 10:00 Well-

Ben Gilbert 10:01 ... w- and enumerate them.

David Rosenthal 10:02 You're still here.

Mark Zuckerberg 10:02 That's good.

David Rosenthal 10:02 Um-

Ben Gilbert 10:03 But first-

David Rosenthal 10:04 But first-

Mark Zuckerberg 10:04 I, 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.

David Rosenthal 10:14 So, um, w- thanks to you guys, I got a pair of these this summer, um, and I genuinely love them. Tell us the story of how these came to be.

Mark Zuckerberg 10:28 Yeah, so... Thanks. I'm, I'm, I'm excited about them, too. [chuckles]

Ben Gilbert 10:35 [laughing]

David Rosenthal 10:35 [chuckles]

Mark Zuckerberg 10:35 So, you know, we, at Meta, we've been building social experiences for twenty years now, and originally it took the form of a website, then mobile apps. But the thing is, I, I, I never thought about us as a social media company. Right, we're not a social app company, we are a, a social connection company, right? I mean, I, I, we talk about what we're doing as building the future of human connection. And that's not only gonna 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, I wanna be able to build what I, 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, like, what is actually, if you can think from first principles, what is the ideal social experience? So I, I think what you would like to have is not a phone that you look down at, um, 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'd ideally have is glasses-... and through the glasses, um, 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 on a phone screen. You know, in the, in the not-so-distant future, you can imagine, um, because you guys have demoed some of the stuff that we, that we, that we've done, a like a, 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 y- th- 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? And people like to intellectualize everything, but a lot of our experience is very physical, and th- this physical sense of presence that you are with another person, doing things in the physical world, is something that you're gonna be able to do through holograms, through glasses, um, without being taken away from, you know, whatever else you're doing, just kind of have that mixed in with the rest of the world. Um, it's gonna be, I think, the ultimate digital social experience, and I think it's also gonna be the ultimate incarnation of AI because you're gonna have conversations where it's like, all right, there's some people. It's like, maybe like I'm physically here. There's, like, a person. You're, you're like a hologram there. There's an AI that is kind of embodied as someone who's there, and the glasses will enable this. So, okay, so how are we going after this, building this? This is like some, some huge project. We've been working on it for ten years, um, and there are a lot of different challenges to solve to get there. There's like, you have to build a novel display stack, right? It's not-- these aren't just screens, like the kind that are in phones. There's this long lineage. They, they, they're connected to the screens that have been in TVs and monitors and things for a long time. There's been this massive optimization 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 miniaturised. And the-- you also, in the glasses, need to fit chips, microphones, um, you know, speakers, cameras, eye tracking, to be able to understand what you're doing, batteries to make it last all day.

Ben Gilbert 14:46 Operate on-

Mark Zuckerberg 14:47 Like, okay, so then there's like-

Ben Gilbert 14:48 New, novel RF protocols.

Mark Zuckerberg 14:50 Yeah, it's, 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, and we, we've been working on that for a while, and we're pretty close to being able to show off, um, 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, um, a lot to pack into a form factor 'cause 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, EssilorLuxottica. 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. And, you know, I, I actually, I kinda thought when we were getting started with those, that it was almost like a practice project for like, for the, the ultimate AR.

Ben Gilbert 15:45 Which, let's be clear, that's what you thought Facebook was.

Mark Zuckerberg 15:48 That's true. That's true. [chuckles] Yeah, I did.

Ben Gilbert 15:50 Like, for your real start-up someday.

Mark Zuckerberg 15:51 That's true. Yeah, no, this is... Yeah, let's go on a tangent there for a second.

Ben Gilbert 15:54 [chuckles]

Mark Zuckerberg 15:54 When, when, so I started Facebook in school, came out to Silicon Valley with Dustin and, and a handful of people working on it at the time, and we did that because Silicon Valley is where all the start-ups 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. The-- 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, S- surely the project that we're working on now is not a company. It's like-

Ben Gilbert 16:22 And Facebook had, like, some scale at this point.

Mark Zuckerberg 16:25 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. Um, but anyhow, um- [laughing] Uh, yeah, I mean, a lot of hard work, obviously, but, but it's, but I, I just at the time, I was kinda like: Yeah, no, I don't, I don't think this is it. Um...

David Rosenthal 16:44 Well, that's your answer of would you have started-

Mark Zuckerberg 16:47 Would I have started-

David Rosenthal 16:47 You actually didn't try to start Facebook. [chuckles]

Mark Zuckerberg 16:48 Yeah, [chuckles] I didn't, no. Um, so yeah, so I mean, the, the, the glasses, though, you know, we thought that this was like, all right, we, we wanna get working with EssilorLuxottica, 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 in AI.

Ben Gilbert 17:05 So-

Mark Zuckerberg 17:05 And, and I, I remember-

Ben Gilbert 17:06 Let's, let's, for listeners, let's just be really clear. You guys shipped this product that I'm holding before LLMs, or at least before the-

Mark Zuckerberg 17:15 Yeah

Ben Gilbert 17:15 ... public consciousness was aware of-

Mark Zuckerberg 17:18 Yeah

Ben Gilbert 17:18 ... you know, the ChatGPT moment.

Mark Zuckerberg 17:19 Yeah.

Ben Gilbert 17:19 And these were not manufactured and shipped as an AI device.

Mark Zuckerberg 17:23 Yeah.

Ben Gilbert 17:23 That came later when they were already in market.

Mark Zuckerberg 17:26 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 gonna 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, I remember calling Alex Himmel, the, the guy who runs the product group that-

Ben Gilbert 17:50 That's exactly the story

Mark Zuckerberg 17:50 ... running it, and I'm like: Hey, you know, I, I think we should probably pivot this and make it so that, um, 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 gonna be a very successful product.

David Rosenthal 18:05 He told us a much more high-stakes version of that story. [laughing]

Ben Gilbert 18:09 He's 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?

Mark Zuckerberg 18:24 Yeah, that's, that tracks. That's what I just said. [laughing]

David Rosenthal 18:29 [laughing]

Mark Zuckerberg 18:31 Sounds right.

Ben Gilbert 18:32 [laughing] Okay, so thank you for opening up with a story.

Mark Zuckerberg 18:40 [chuckles]

Ben Gilbert 18:40 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 le- 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.

David Rosenthal 19:07 Uh, MySpace, Twitter gen one-

Ben Gilbert 19:11 Yep.

David Rosenthal 19:11 Um, Instagram, Snapchat, WhatsApp, TikTok.

Ben Gilbert 19:19 Apple app-

David Rosenthal 19:19 ATT

Ben Gilbert 19:20 - tracking transparency.

David Rosenthal 19:20 You could put in its own whole category. Um, and now ChatGPT. That's nine.

Ben Gilbert 19:26 And, like, there is a widely held public narrative every single time Snapchat discovers stories, or the- 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?

Mark Zuckerberg 19:49 Um, 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, 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. 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, and I, I was an engineer before I got started. I mean, I, like, mostly took, like, systems engineering-type classes when I was in college. So, you know, you talk about, like, Friendster and MySpace and all the scaling challenges they had doing the graph calculations of like, all right, uh, do you know this person? Should you show them-

Ben Gilbert 21:13 Friends of friends of friends.

Mark Zuckerberg 21:14 Yeah.

David Rosenthal 21:14 Yeah, actually, can you take us back? And, like, we wanna ask you the story of that time. I mean, um, it seems quaint now, Friendster, MySpace, but you studied computer science, graph networking, social graphs. That is a very-

Mark Zuckerberg 21:29 Yeah

David Rosenthal 21:29 ... very difficult computational calculation.

Mark Zuckerberg 21:30 So, so I think it's a combination of, of a, a product question and a technology question. I think you can define the product in a such a general way that the technology becomes basically impossible to solve. Um, so you wanna have a smart product definition, but then you wanna be competent and better than everyone else at the technology. And I, I think that that's something that we've held ourselves to and build a good organization around. And it's, it's one of the things that I, 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, right? It's like the, the companies I was talking about, it's like they, you know, they... the 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, I think one of the things that I've always been pretty careful about is I, I actually, like, want, like, the, a lot of the people on our, on our management team, it's like, you know, split mostly people running, um, either these big product groups who've 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 the company as engineers, then you're not a technology company. And I think that that also is important to the board, and, and I, I think just, like, in terms of how you weigh decisions and culturally, things inside the company matters a lot. But, but I, I, I think that that's one of the things that has been really fundamental, right? 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. Um, 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, for the people we're trying to serve, right? So i- if, 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 or early. We're going to, uh, have a good feedback loop. We're gonna get, 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 we, you ship so frequently. It's, um, you just, uh, you learn faster. So I think that's basically the formula: be a technology company-... build good foundation, like, learn from what, what people are, are kind of focused on in the world, and l- and just iterate as quickly as you can.

Ben Gilbert 24:28 In one of my research calls to prep for this, someone, uh, uh, described you as a master strategist, which, like, I, uh, it's- we, we all sort of acknowledge that at this point, but that the-

Mark Zuckerberg 24:38 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. It's- [chuckles]

Ben Gilbert 24:44 [chuckles]

Mark Zuckerberg 24:45 But you're very-

Ben Gilbert 24:46 Well, no, but that's the thing is, like-

Mark Zuckerberg 24:47 I, I... Part of it is like, okay, you, you wanna set up the game so that way you optimize- you create your luck.

Host 24:51 This is what Jensen 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...

Ben Gilbert 25:03 The comment that someone made to me was, "The reason Mark is such a good strategist is because he, 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?

Mark Zuckerberg 25:24 I, I do like turn-based strategy games. [chuckles]

Host 25:25 [chuckles]

Ben Gilbert 25:27 But it does kind of feel like the way that you make bets is like, I, uh... Well, if we have great engineering, then that can kind of take care of the speed part. That's like, m- you know, many iterations or multiple at bats. And then the, the-

Mark Zuckerberg 25:39 Well, great engineering, and speed, and iteration 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 know there's, there's a certain personality that goes with kind of taking your stuff and putting it out there before it's fully polished. And, and look, I, 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 a l- like, a long time, we're gonna polish it, we're gonna put it out. Um, and maybe for the stuff that they're doing, that works. Maybe that just fits with their culture. But for us, I, 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. Um, because you i- t- it's... You know, obviously, not, not in the sense that it's like... You know, y- 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, I do think a lot of the conversations that we have are, 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. And, and I, I, I do just think that, like, you wanna really have a culture that values shipping and, and getting things out and getting feedback, um, more than needing always to get great, positive accolades from people when you put stuff out. Because I, I think, like, if you wanna wait until you get praised all the time, you're missing a bunch of the time when you, you could have learned a bunch of useful stuff, and then incorporated that into the next version you were gonna ship.

Ben Gilbert 27:32 And it's just about making sure that the- 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.

Mark Zuckerberg 27:42 Well, I would, I would like to hope that it's not damaging to the brand, um, but, um-

Ben Gilbert 27:47 Well, but it, uh, innately, it is. Like, when you're like: Oh, I feel bad, 'cause I s- I shipped a product that wasn't good enough, you're, you're sort of-

Mark Zuckerberg 27:55 Yeah, no, I don't want to overstate it. I mean, I- we don't ship things that we think are bad, but we also don't take... We wanna 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 gonna 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, it's pretty clear that AI is going to be transformative for a lot of different things.

Ben Gilbert 28:16 Mm.

Mark Zuckerberg 28:17 It is actually less clear what are gonna be the initial use cases for, for a lot of these things that, that are, that are super valuable. And so, okay, part of it is like, okay, you've put something out, you wanna kind of collect feedback and, and what people are actually, what, what it's, um, you know, where it's resonating. Now, if, if what you put out is bad, then you're not gonna collect good data, because people aren't gonna use it for anything, 'cause it sucks. So, but, but I do think that you, you have hypotheses for what people might really want to use it for, and they're not all gonna be right, and you wanna kind of go early enough on that as, as more. Yeah.

Ben Gilbert 28:49 So I'm building to this question of, uh, 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-

Mark Zuckerberg 29:10 Yeah

Ben Gilbert 29:10 ... 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?"

Mark Zuckerberg 29:17 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, is going to resonate the most with people, right? I think if you, if you just do the latter, then I think you just don't have enough conviction to see through hard things. And if you just do the former, then you probably don't get to product market fit or optimize what you do, because you're not focused enough on your customers. So, um, I think, I think both probably matter. Yeah.

Ben Gilbert 30:02 Uh, the- I'm like, a- as I pore through all these historical examples, there's, uh, like the market discovers, some other participant in the market discovers the stories format, and suddenly the whole world is like-

Mark Zuckerberg 30:13 Yeah

Ben Gilbert 30:14 ... "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 y- you have products that have stories-

Mark Zuckerberg 30:24 Yeah

Ben Gilbert 30:24 ... they perform very well. Uh-... that's been discovered. But there's other times it feels like everything you're trying to do in Reality Labs, all, you know, 50 plus billion dollars that you've put into it is like, we're gonna freaking will this thing into existence-

Mark Zuckerberg 30:37 [chuckles]

Ben Gilbert 30:37 -because I have an idea of the way that I want the world to be. I'm not really, like, asking for that much feedback. I'm putting it in the world.

Mark Zuckerberg 30:45 Well, it's a combination. I, I mean, I, I think that there's, 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, right? The... Like, before that, social networks were basically profiles, and then we were like: Hey, like, people actually kinda wanna get the updates, and let's, like, show them that. And if we rank them, then we can... You know, there's so many updates that this can help people parse through that quickly. And today, it's, like, hard to imagine any social product without a feed. So I think that that's obviously, there are some of these things are sort of seminal, I- I don't wanna call it an invention, but, like, patterns that we, that we basically established first, and then some of them are ones that other people did, where we take pride in learning from what is working in, in the i- i- in the world. Um, you know, I, you know, we're not embarrassed about learning from things that other people, like, discovered that were good first, and, and then we build a better version of it. And, um- [audience laughing] [chuckles] I mean-

David Rosenthal 31:43 [chuckles] Damn.

Mark Zuckerberg 31:44 I think that that's... You know, no one company is gonna invent everything, right? I think if you don't invent anything, then it's hard to, to kind of be a successful company. But, um, but I, 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, from people in the community and customers about what they want you to be doing.

David Rosenthal 32:10 Which, uh, speaks to the thesis of Facebook as a technology company. Um-

Ben Gilbert 32:15 Meta.

David Rosenthal 32:16 Meta is a technology company. Uh, we'll get to that later. Um, Ben and I have been, uh, having a conversation. I wanna take this, uh, to open source, um, 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 weeks, that Meta has been the largest-

Ben Gilbert 32:41 Beneficiary

David Rosenthal 32:43 ... 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-

Ben Gilbert 32:50 Hmm

David Rosenthal 32:50 ... your relationship to open source.

Mark Zuckerberg 32:53 Well, 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... 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. Um, for us, open source has been important and valuable, um, partially-

David Rosenthal 33:20 I mean, you were the first big company built on the LAMP stack.

Mark Zuckerberg 33:23 Yeah. Yeah, no, and it's, it's great. Makes it super easy to develop stuff quickly and iterate quickly. But we've also had an interesting relationship this, with this, because sequentially, as a company, we came after Google. So Google was the first of the g- uh, great companies that built this distributed computing infrastructure. So they came first, so they were like: All right, let's keep this proprietary, 'cause 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, uh, 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 gonna help us compete with Google for any of the stuff that we were doing to, to have that technology, but what we were able to do with things like Open Compute were, um, get it to become the industry 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 standard around- 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, 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. Um, I think open source is, 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.

David Rosenthal 34:49 Yeah. Well, okay, this is where we were going with this.

Mark Zuckerberg 34:51 Yeah, it's, um, you know, sim- similar deal. Um, you know, we wanna make sure that we have access to a leading AI model, right? I think just like we wanna 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, for us, it's like we've just been- we've been through too much stuff with the other platforms to, to fully depend on, 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 gonna be AR glasses or mixed reality or AI. So I think that's somewhat of an imperative for us to, to go do that. But, you know, these things are not like pieces of software that are monolithic, they're 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, where like... I mean, look, I, I, I, 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."

David Rosenthal 35:53 Well, okay, uh-

Mark Zuckerberg 35:54 That's frustrating. So-

David Rosenthal 35:55 Can we take a real quick detour?

Mark Zuckerberg 35:57 What's that?

David Rosenthal 35:57 I really wanna ask you something.

Mark Zuckerberg 35:58 We can, we can take a detour.

David Rosenthal 35:59 Okay.

Mark Zuckerberg 35:59 Yeah.

David Rosenthal 35:59 You took a detour, we're gonna take a detour. Um, help us with our research here. Uh, the eve of the IPO.

Mark Zuckerberg 36:07 Yeah, this is a quite a detour. [audience laughing]

Ben Gilbert 36:09 Wait.

David Rosenthal 36:09 Quite a detour.

Ben Gilbert 36:10 Wait, David, you-

David Rosenthal 36:11 I know, I know.

Ben Gilbert 36:11 Did you just-

Mark Zuckerberg 36:11 You're really grabbing the wheel here. I'm sorry.

Ben Gilbert 36:12 Is this connected, or did you just decide that it was your turn to talk? [audience laughing]

David Rosenthal 36:18 I'm sorry.

Mark Zuckerberg 36:18 I was, like, really, like, wound up.

David Rosenthal 36:20 I know!

Ben Gilbert 36:21 I was like-

Mark Zuckerberg 36:21 Open source and AI-

David Rosenthal 36:22 We'll get back. It's gonna tough-

Ben Gilbert 36:23 We are right in Mark Zuckerberg house

David Rosenthal 36:23 ... tough to get back to this. [chuckles] I think it's related.

Mark Zuckerberg 36:26 All right, let's do it.

David Rosenthal 36:26 I do. I really genuinely do.... Facebook on mobile is HTML5.

Mark Zuckerberg 36:32 Uh-huh.

Ben Gilbert 36:33 In twenty-

Mark Zuckerberg 36:34 Yeah.

Ben Gilbert 36:34 Twelve.

David Rosenthal 36:35 Twelve.

Ben Gilbert 36:35 May of twenty twelve.

David Rosenthal 36:35 May twenty twelve.

Mark Zuckerberg 36:36 Yeah.

David Rosenthal 36:36 Yeah. I wanna ask you what you were thinking going into the IPO with Facebook on mobile being HTML5, and what happened? You IPO at a hundred billion dollar market cap, over the next three months, you have a fifty percent drawdown, probably because of that.

Mark Zuckerberg 36:53 Mm-hmm.

David Rosenthal 36:54 Um, but I, the, I guess the related question to what we're talking about now is: how much is that informing your approach here with AI?

Mark Zuckerberg 37:04 Well, it was a pretty different, different technical issue. So, I mean, our legacy was building on web for websites, and we were very used to building one thing and being able to continuously deploy it, and it fits with our iteration style and all that. So now, all of a sudden, this like 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 s- approval to get it shipped, and 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, 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, it hadn't gotten consolidated yet. And, um, we're like, that's gonna be... That's w- w- we're like, basically, whatever downside we are gonna have from not having the most native thing, we're gonna 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, a- 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, um, because it may seem like it's pretty similar, but there's a very big difference. On, on desktop, you basically have the app, and you have a column on the side that we could put ads. And on mobile, we needed to figure out, what does it mean to put ads into the experience, right? So-

Ben Gilbert 38:52 The, like, let's be clear, the feed ad had not been invented yet.

Mark Zuckerberg 38:54 Yeah.

Ben Gilbert 38:54 Like, the ad unit of our time.

Mark Zuckerberg 38:55 No, that was, yeah, one of the things that the team did. Yeah, and it's, and like advertisers have like specific formats that they like working with, and the idea that we were just gonna be like: All right, 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, for, 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 of the company because it's hard enough to do a rewrite, right? It's if you look at, like, the history of the tech industry, there are all these examples like Netscape and, you know, all 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, a real risk, right? When you're like, r- like, completely changing your underlying platform, that there's n- you're, you're gonna miss it. Um, it's like, all right, 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. Um, 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, and mobile's growing.

David Rosenthal 40:15 And that's your only business model.

Mark Zuckerberg 40:17 Yeah, and I was like, all right, like, okay-

Ben Gilbert 40:18 And you're now recently quarterly reported-

Mark Zuckerberg 40:20 You know, but the thing is, it was actually pretty clear what we needed to do.

Ben Gilbert 40:22 Oh.

Mark Zuckerberg 40:23 Yeah, I think strategically, a lot of the time, it's, um, 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? Um, but when you're losing, it's usually pretty clear what you have to do. [laughing]

David Rosenthal 40:39 Yeah. [laughing]

Mark Zuckerberg 40:40 And, and I think a lot of it is like, is, is just, do you have the pain tolerance to go do it? So a lot of this was like, all right, the team was like: Okay, um, well, we're going public, and, you know, it's-- investors really aren't gonna like this if we are, like, 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, 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, I, I think like people inside the company, it felt a lot better sooner because it was pretty clear to people that we were doing the right thing. Um, and they, they knew that we were executing it in a responsible way, um, and, and, and basically focused, and we're doing the right thing. But I, I think it's actually when you have something that's working well, and you're on one local hill, and you need to jump to another hill, that's the stuff that's really culturally hard. Um, but this one I think was... It was, it was not fun. There have been a period, a, a series of periods throughout the company that were not, I don't know, not, not the, not the most fun periods, but, um... Although that one, in retrospect, is, you know, looks pretty good in retrospect. [laughing] 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! [laughing]

David Rosenthal 42:01 [laughing]

Mark Zuckerberg 42:01 Great. Yeah, I'll take that. Um- [laughing]

Ben Gilbert 42:04 [laughing]

Mark Zuckerberg 42:04 Anyway, where were we?

Ben Gilbert 42:06 Well, w- maybe could I, uh, so could I connect? So D- so David asked: Hey, can you help us with, with our research? Can I follow that thread that you just said, "Hey, that, that one wasn't so bad." Um, there's been a lot of amazing things the company has done. There's also been, like, 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?

Mark Zuckerberg 42:32 ... I mean, there's so many things that we've messed up, um, that there are many criticisms that are legitimate. Um, but if that was a year-and-a-half mistake, uh, I think, you know, one of the things I reflect on over the last, like, ten years or so was, you know, the, 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, 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, I think we understood that we are a technology company, and that you have to be a technology company to build this kind of thing. Um, 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. Um, the political environment, I think I, I didn't have much sophistication around, and I think I just fundamentally misdiagnosed the problem. So I, I, I, I think that there was this basic challenge, and there were a lot of things. I don't want to simplify this too much. I mean, there were, 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, I look back on and regret is, um, 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 think we were. And, you know, uh, that's-- it's, um... There were a lot of things we did mess up, and we needed to fix. But I, 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 gonna fully own this problem, we're gonna take responsibility for it, we're gonna 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, 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, I think to some degree, if you, i- if, if you take responsibility for things because you think it's a corporate crisis, not a political crisis, um, and your view is, like: "Okay, I'm, like, I'm gonna take responsibility for all this stuff." Like, if people are basically like, like blaming social media and the tech industry for, like, all these different things in society, and if we're saying: "Okay, we're gonna really, like, do our part to go fix this, like, 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, like, kick you for more stuff." And, and honestly, I think we should have been firmer about, and, 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 twenty-year mistake. And I... 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 kind of what the right tone is for navigating what is a very kind of 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, and like, like, what, what, what the principles are, like, where we think we need to improve stuff, but where, um, you know, 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 gonna take another ten years or so for us to kind of fully work through that cycle before our brand and all of that is back to kind of the place that it maybe could have been if I hadn't messed that up in the first place. So, but look, in the grand scheme of things, twenty years isn't that bad either. [laughing]

David Rosenthal 46:41 [laughing]

Mark Zuckerberg 46:42 And we'll get through it. Um, and, and I think we'll come out stronger. Um, but I do think that is one of the kind of 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, um, but I, I think certainly there's one line of critique, which is, you know, you, you kind of bought into too much of the stuff that you shouldn't have. And, um, yeah, I think it's gonna take us a long time to dig out of that.

Ben Gilbert 47:09 Do, 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.'"?

Mark Zuckerberg 47:19 Yeah. I mean, at this point, I think a lot of this stuff has been studied.

Ben Gilbert 47:22 Hmm.

Mark Zuckerberg 47:23 So, I mean, I don't want to go rehash all the different things, but, um, but I, 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." [laughing] Um, you know, it's, like... So, uh, but what has worked over time is like, you know, you do the research in advance and, 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.

Ben Gilbert 48:04 Hmm.

Mark Zuckerberg 48:05 So I, I, I think that, like... Or, or it's, you know-- So I, I think that's, um, I think that it's, it's, it kind of cuts, it cuts both ways.

David Rosenthal 48:13 To me, this brings up another topic we wanted to talk about with you, [chuckles] and you just, you know, you said, "That's, uh, twenty years isn't that long." [chuckles] Um-

Mark Zuckerberg 48:21 I'm young.

David Rosenthal 48:22 Well, you're young, you're young. [chuckles] Uh, we all are, um-

Ben Gilbert 48:25 This is the advantage of being a college dropout founder on one company.

Mark Zuckerberg 48:26 Yeah, no, it is. When you start when you're nineteen-

David Rosenthal 48:28 Yeah

Mark Zuckerberg 48:28 ... it's like, hopefully, we have more than twenty years left.

Ben Gilbert 48:30 And hopefully, you have, like, Buffett duration.

Mark Zuckerberg 48:32 Yeah, uh, yeah.

David Rosenthal 48:33 You-

Mark Zuckerberg 48:34 Hopefully.

David Rosenthal 48:35 You set up the company-

48:37 ... in a, especially at the time, truly unique way, ah, where you can operate the company and take that, you know, take that approach. Um-

Ben Gilbert 48:48 Do you mean super voting shares?

David Rosenthal 48:49 Super voting shares is like, you know, the technical aspect of it. There are- I think there are a bunch of technical aspects to it that we're not gonna 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, 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. Um, so as you were setting up the company, [chuckles] you know, when you were so young, even when you went public, you were so young, like, why was that so important to you?

Mark Zuckerberg 49:26 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 everyone-- and basically, in the next year, everyone else on the management team left because they, I hadn't done a good job communic-- I mean, I don't want to blame them. I, 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 just 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. Um, but I didn't, I didn't, like, know how to think in terms of, you know, like, long-term financial plans or, um, um-

Ben Gilbert 50:07 Like, make a case to them why it would be worth more than a billion.

Mark Zuckerberg 50:09 Yeah, yeah. Or, or just like: Look, we're doing this for the long term. We're not planning on selling the company. So it's like, w- 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. Um, because I, 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, um, we're gonna do this. So, um, so after that, I was like: All right, well, I don't want to get fired- [laughing]

David Rosenthal 50:47 [laughing]

Mark Zuckerberg 50:47 ... from my own company for wanting to build it, so let's, uh-

David Rosenthal 50:51 [laughing]

Mark Zuckerberg 50:51 -try to set up a governance structure that makes it somewhat harder to do that. Um, so-

David Rosenthal 50:58 Wow!

Mark Zuckerberg 50:59 Learning through suffering. [laughing]

David Rosenthal 51:03 [laughing] Wow.

Ben Gilbert 51:04 A- and being very cash generative very early, such that you had a very real going concern on your hands, and you just-

Mark Zuckerberg 51:11 Yeah

Ben Gilbert 51:12 ... didn't, didn't need to cut off your arm and sell it to someone in order to-

Mark Zuckerberg 51:15 Yeah

Ben Gilbert 51:16 ... build your business.

Mark Zuckerberg 51:17 Yeah, absolutely.

Ben Gilbert 51:18 Like, I think, I think this is a fundamentally misunderstood thing about-

David Rosenthal 51:21 Oh, yeah

Ben Gilbert 51:23 ... uh, Facebook, the startup. I- it is the-

David Rosenthal 51:26 The iconic startup

Ben Gilbert 51:27 ... prototypical startup.

David Rosenthal 51:28 You are the iconic startup founder.

Ben Gilbert 51:30 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.

Mark Zuckerberg 51:46 Yeah, I mean, I think we're having a lot more fun now. [laughing]

David Rosenthal 51:50 [laughing]

Mark Zuckerberg 51:51 Like, I get to work on all this stuff. It's awesome!

Ben Gilbert 51:54 But, uh, like, what is your advice to all these founders who sort of romanticize the idea of, of starting a company and kind of-

Mark Zuckerberg 52:00 I, I don't know

Ben Gilbert 52:00 ... raising all this money and-

Mark Zuckerberg 52:01 Obviously, starting a company is not bad, right? I mean, I, I think that there's different schools of thought on how to do it. I think some people think: Okay, I wanna go start a company, so I'm gonna, 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 g- gonna be the company early on was 'cause when I was in school, I built, like, twelve different things, right, that I-- 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 upkeep this one. But I had, like, a bunch of other ideas for stuff I was gonna build, too. So I just, like, I didn't, I didn't, like, know how to think about what a company was gonna be. And, and it was... So, um, I think there's something about maintaining flexibility that's, that's helpful. Um, you know, once you hire a bunch of people, you know, it's a lot easier when you can just have meetings in your own head about what direction you wanna go in. [laughing] 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 gonna 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, just... So I, I, I do think that that's a thing, where you wanna, like, keep things lean and, 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, the leanest version of a large company is that we can, we can be. But, um, but I do know there's something to that, where it's like y- y- it's obviously, it's not, it's not super fun not having the resources to do what you wanna 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, I do think you've gotta, you just have to dial it right.

Ben Gilbert 53:57 You're spending a gajillion dollars on Reality Labs. [laughing]

David Rosenthal 54:01 [chuckles]

Mark Zuckerberg 54:01 [chuckles] It's a technical term.

Ben Gilbert 54:02 It's not making that much money. So I'm gonna, I'm gonna play mark-

Mark Zuckerberg 54:06 Yeah

Ben Gilbert 54:06 ... back to you-

Mark Zuckerberg 54:06 Sure

Ben Gilbert 54:07 ... of, it's not appropriate to have all these people and resources working on things for more than the stage warrants.

Mark Zuckerberg 54:12 Mm-hmm.

Ben Gilbert 54:12 I'm being a little facetious here, but I'm curious how you th- w- why you categorize it differently.

Mark Zuckerberg 54:17 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 wanna do over the next ten to twenty years? And what do you think are gonna 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 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 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 who already 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, um, and I think it's gonna go a lot further than that. So another is that, there is the thing about controlling our own destiny. Um, 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, um, I, 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. But even, like, now, I've learned a thing or two since the Yahoo days, so now I at least am able to like, like, um... I might not be able to convince the- all the investors that we should be investing to the extent that we are in Reality Labs 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, o- one of the shifts, and th- this is sort of like a value shift, um, over time, is... You know, one of the things that, um, and one- some of the early Oculus guys used to say to me, that there's a difference between building good things and awesome things. And, 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, is just like this uplifting thing about humanity. And so I, I, I think a lot of what we've done with social media so far is, is very good, where we've got- we've built these products, more than three billion people use them on a, you know, near-daily basis. Right? It's like, it's-

Ben Gilbert 57:14 It's like three point three-

Mark Zuckerberg 57:15 Yeah

Ben Gilbert 57:15 ... billion on a daily basis.

Mark Zuckerberg 57:16 Yeah, d- yeah. So yeah, and so that's- And they use it because it is useful in their life, right? And in, in, 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, 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-to-day basis who get out of bed and are like, "Fuck yeah, social media!" [laughing] Like, it's like that's- right? It's, I mean, that's not like, um... So [chuckles] I, I kinda think for the next, for my next stage, right, for the next stage of the company, the next, like, fifteen years, I want us to build more things that are awesome in addition to things that are good. And I think that they both matter, um, 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 gonna be in that bucket. Um, a lot of the AI stuff that we're doing, I think is gonna be in that bucket. There are a bunch of things in the apps that are gonna be in that bucket, too, um, new apps, too. But, um, but I don't know. I think that there's, there's just something that's, like, fundamentally pretty good about that. And that's- M- maybe it's also just, like, where I am in my life, right? I'm, I'm, like, like to think I'm young. I'm a little older, right? But it's, but it's like, I, I, 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, you know, so there's the personal version of this. It's, like, I get to work on, you know, i- 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 world, right? It's like I am-

Ben Gilbert 59:16 Statues.

Mark Zuckerberg 59:17 S- yeah, sculpture-

Ben Gilbert 59:18 [chuckles]

Mark Zuckerberg 59:18 ... of, of my wife. Bring back the Roman tradition of designing sculptures of people you love. Um-

Ben Gilbert 59:25 I'm not at all being facetious. Like-

Mark Zuckerberg 59:26 Yeah, no, I-

Ben Gilbert 59:27 ... really cool!

Mark Zuckerberg 59:27 No, I, 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, like, starts with, like, it's, it's awesome. We got, we got this steer, Chunk. He's like, he's- [laughing]

Ben Gilbert 59:56 Chunk.

Mark Zuckerberg 59:56 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. [laughing] But I feel like that's the kind of bull that you want to make the highest quality beef in the world. [clapping] And we're just working with, you know, trying to do really high quality, awesome things with awesome people. That's like, if, if that's what I get to do for the next fifteen or twenty years, then, like, it's gonna be a good fifteen or twenty years.

Ben Gilbert 1:00:32 I- 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?

1:00:44 ... and we just couldn't see the real Mark?

Mark Zuckerberg 1:00:47 I don't know. I, I think that there might have been something around the way the company shifted in operations around COVID. I mean, it's like the, you know, 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- i- 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, I kind of got that, and I- it was a time of reflection, um, where I, I was able to think about this stuff. And we were also going through this very difficult political time in the country, and, 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 Labs stuff that we started in 2014, really. Um, the FAIR stuff around, you know, fundamental AI research, um, the, yeah-

Ben Gilbert 1:01:57 2012, '13?

Mark Zuckerberg 1:01:58 2012 to '13.

David Rosenthal 1:01:58 Alex Net-ish time frame.

Mark Zuckerberg 1:02:00 Sometime around then. These things, they, 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 think that 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. Um, 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. Um, so that, like, really, it's like, I mean, look, like, like, you learn who you are through challenges, right? It's like we, we had, like, a really... You know, it's like, okay, like, losing half of your market cap is, is quaint compared to losing eighty percent of your market cap- [chuckles] ... or whatever it was, right? It's, um, you know, so, um, but so, I mean, these are all intentional decisions, right? It's like, I mean, there were 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. I- th- 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!

David Rosenthal 1:03:39 Oh, wow. [audience applauding]

Ben Gilbert 1:03:46 We're, we're start- we're starting to enter, uh, looking at the clock like conclusion, lightning round territory.

Mark Zuckerberg 1:03:54 All right.

Ben Gilbert 1:03:54 I've had one, like, lurking in the back of my head.

Mark Zuckerberg 1:03:56 Yeah.

Ben Gilbert 1:03:57 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. L- let's imagine you were going to rebrand it today.

Mark Zuckerberg 1:04:08 Yeah.

Ben Gilbert 1:04:08 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?

Mark Zuckerberg 1:04:17 I like Meta. [chuckles] [audience laughing] 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 it's kind of mind-boggling at the scale that it's at. But the, the other is, I mean, when it- you know, we went through a period where it's like we had Facebook and a handful of small apps, and 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, um, 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, 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? 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, they were like: Oh, well, like, is the- 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, w- 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: All right, we're here. 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.

Ben Gilbert 1:06:06 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, 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.

Mark Zuckerberg 1:06:35 Yeah.

Ben Gilbert 1:06:36 It seems like I would pick a brand that almost doesn't pigeonhole me into a specific future. I, I might be looking for something that's more like: Look, I, I want to maximize my, uh, maneuverability.

Mark Zuckerberg 1:06:49 Yeah.... I get it. Um, but [clapping] I don't know. That's just, I, 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.

Ben Gilbert 1:07:06 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, we-

Mark Zuckerberg 1:07:11 Yeah

Ben Gilbert 1:07:11 ... we believe in it."

Mark Zuckerberg 1:07:11 No, I, I mean, we're, we're a company that, like, puts a flag down around what we're doing, and we're gonna go do it. It's like, put a wall in front of us, there's gonna be a Mark-shaped hole in the wall. [laughing]

Ben Gilbert 1:07:22 [laughing]

David Rosenthal 1:07:25 Uh, [chuckles] speaking of lightning rounds and Mark-shaped holes, um, you are accelerating what used to be your annual challenges. I always... I mean, when, when we were all kids, uh, [chuckles] and, and, and we didn't know each other, I mean, I was so inspired. You would do your annual challenges-

Mark Zuckerberg 1:07:42 Mm-hmm

David Rosenthal 1:07:42 ... you would post about them, and I was like: Wow, that's, like, pretty damn cool. And then we all get a little older-

Mark Zuckerberg 1:07:48 Mm-hmm

David Rosenthal 1:07:49 ... and we all have kids on the stage now, and we all have companies on the stage now, and there's-

Ben Gilbert 1:07:56 Some large, some small

David Rosenthal 1:07:57 ... 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. How?

Mark Zuckerberg 1:08:11 What do you mean?

David Rosenthal 1:08:12 Well, you used to do annual challenges, and I feel like-

Mark Zuckerberg 1:08:14 Yeah, I know

David Rosenthal 1:08:14 ... you're now doing weekly challenges.

Mark Zuckerberg 1:08:15 I was doing annual challenges, but I stopped.

David Rosenthal 1:08:15 You're, you're designing T-shirts. You're making sculptures.

Ben Gilbert 1:08:17 I feel like you have a lot of challenges.

David Rosenthal 1:08:18 You're raising cattle. [chuckles]

Mark Zuckerberg 1:08:19 I, I just, like, I'm trying to, trying to do inspiring things. I mean, that's, uh, yeah, I don't know. Um, I'm also really competitive. [laughing]

David Rosenthal 1:08:30 [laughing] Who's your competition for this?

Mark Zuckerberg 1:08:33 What do you mean? Oh, I was just thinking about pr- uh, about, about other things that I'm doing. I'm like, what if I, what if I start 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, uh, there's- we face a lot of competition and a lot of different aspects of what we do. Um, some, 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 gonna be the closed, integrated Apple, m- a model that Apple has always done? Which again, I mean, like, there's multiple... There are multiple good ways to build things, right? So I, I think if you look at the different generations of computing, um, 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. Y- you know, I, I know that there are more Android phones out there, but I mean, but iPhone is sort of like the intellectual leader-

Ben Gilbert 1:09:51 True, probably

Mark Zuckerberg 1:09:51 ... and by far, like, has all the market share, pretty.

David Rosenthal 1:09:52 Let's take it as a country.

Mark Zuckerberg 1:09:53 Yeah.

David Rosenthal 1:09:54 Yeah.

Mark Zuckerberg 1:09:54 Um, and then there's the recency bias, and probably, like, almost everyone here has an iPhone. And right, I, I think 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, I, I don't actually think that's a given, right? In, 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 gonna lead to a much more vibrant tech industry. Now, there are advantages of, of doing a closed and integrated model. I think Apple will have a place for sure. I expect them to be our primary competitor, 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, you know, how open these platforms, whether it's things like Llama and AI or, um, 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.

Ben Gilbert 1:11:10 I've got a closing question-

David Rosenthal 1:11:11 Yeah [applauding]

Ben Gilbert 1:11:11 ... if you're-

David Rosenthal 1:11:12 Please. Thank you.

Ben Gilbert 1:11:15 So, so we have a lot of builders in the audience tonight and a lot of founders. Uh, we're in probably the most interesting technology environment since the early mobile days, in terms of opportunity. It's been 20 years, you may 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?

Mark Zuckerberg 1:11:44 Yeah, I don't know. I mean, just do something that you care about, and, and I mean, if, if you're trying to run our strategy, try to learn as quickly as you can. But, 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?

David Rosenthal 1:12:01 Yeah.

Mark Zuckerberg 1:12:01 It's like, our way worked for me and our team. You know, it's, uh, different things have clearly worked for other companies. I don't know. One time, one time, my daughter went to- we went to, took her to a Taylor Swift concert, and-

David Rosenthal 1:12:18 [laughing] [audience cheering]

Mark Zuckerberg 1:12:20 ... she, she was like-

David Rosenthal 1:12:20 True

Mark Zuckerberg 1:12:20 ... "You know, Dad, I kinda wanna be like Taylor Swift when I grow up."

David Rosenthal 1:12:25 Hell yeah.

Mark Zuckerberg 1:12:25 I was like: "You, you c- but you can't. That's not available to you." [laughing]

Ben Gilbert 1:12:29 [laughing]

David Rosenthal 1:12:29 [laughing]

Mark Zuckerberg 1:12:31 I was like, "But..." And she, and she thought about it, and she's like, "All right. When I grow up, I want people to want to be like August Chan Zuckerberg." [laughing]

David Rosenthal 1:12:40 [laughing] [applauding]

Mark Zuckerberg 1:12:41 And I was like: "Hell yeah. Hell yeah."

Ben Gilbert 1:12:45 [chuckles]

Mark Zuckerberg 1:12:45 So I, I think that that's, um... Yeah, I don't know. I, I think it's like, look, learn from other people's successes and failures, but do your own thing.

Ben Gilbert 1:12:57 Love that.

David Rosenthal 1:12:58 Great, love that. Well-

Ben Gilbert 1:12:59 Well-

Mark Zuckerberg 1:13:01 ... [audience applauding] That is the perfect place to leave things, um.

Ben Gilbert 1:13:06 W- w- we made you something that, you already have a very amazing, well-designed shirt. [audience laughing] Uh, I hope you have room in your life for more than one.

Mark Zuckerberg 1:13:15 I, I do. You know, I'm-

Ben Gilbert 1:13:17 So David-

Mark Zuckerberg 1:13:17 I used to only wear one type of shirt, now I've [chuckles] moved on. [laughing]

Ben Gilbert 1:13:23 So David and I made you a custom, one of one shirt-

Mark Zuckerberg 1:13:28 Aw!

Ben Gilbert 1:13:28 - that represents tonight.

Mark Zuckerberg 1:13:29 Thank you. [audience cheering]

Ben Gilbert 1:13:34 It is size Zuck.

Mark Zuckerberg 1:13:36 [laughing]

Ben Gilbert 1:13:37 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-

Mark Zuckerberg 1:13:43 GPS coordinates.

Ben Gilbert 1:13:44 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.

Mark Zuckerberg 1:13:52 Awesome.

Ben Gilbert 1:13:53 So thank you for joining us here tonight.

Mark Zuckerberg 1:13:54 Thank you for joining us. [audience applauding]

David Rosenthal 1:13:56 Wow! [chuckles] What a night.

Ben Gilbert 1:13:59 Absolutely crazy. I mean, Mark has done many interviews this year, both with other podcasts and in, in traditional press, but that felt different, if for no other reason than it happened live in front of a six thousand person audience in an arena. But I wasn't expecting it to feel that different.

David Rosenthal 1:14:15 Yeah. I mean, it was, I, I, I think, the wildest experience of my life, being up there. [laughing] I, I don't even know what else could compare.

Ben Gilbert 1:14:24 Pretty insane. Well, listeners, as you may have noticed, thanks to our sponsors, this conversation was uninterrupted, and we do wanna reflect a little bit and share some of our thoughts and our, you know, how we're feeling looking back on this conversation with you. But first, we do wanna share a word on Statsig and Crusoe.

David Rosenthal 1:14:44 So Statsig, so Mark's most famous catchphrase is probably, "Move fast and break things." But like we talked about with him, despite instilling this in Facebook's engineering culture, Facebook doesn't actually break very often. How?

Ben Gilbert 1:14:58 Certainly not anymore, and really, relative to its peers, not even throughout its past.

David Rosenthal 1:15:02 Yeah.

Ben Gilbert 1:15:03 Facebook invested hundreds of thousands of engineering hours in a set of internal tools. These tools let any engineer set up new metrics, ship new features, and measure performance in real time. That means anyone could just ship a new feature, but they always had metrics to use as guardrails, and they could always roll back a feature if anything broke.

David Rosenthal 1:15:24 Oh, man, there are legendary stories of engineers shipping features, like, in their first week at boot camp as interns or new hires at Facebook and Meta over the years. And you might wish that you could do the same on your team and build products like they build products at Facebook: ship fast, make database decisions, iterate rapidly, but you need the right tools, so you're stuck, right?

Ben Gilbert 1:15:46 Well, enter Statsig. Statsig has built the world's first product acceleration platform, combining tools like feature flags, product analytics, experimentation, and observability all in one place, helping you move faster and make smarter decisions.

David Rosenthal 1:16:01 Even better, Statsig was literally founded by an ex-Meta team, who wanted to help everyone build like the best and bring these same tools to the market. Today, many of the world's leading tech companies rely on Statsig, including OpenAI, Microsoft, Notion, Anthropic, Figma, plus thousands of early-stage start-ups.

Ben Gilbert 1:16:18 David, every time we work with Statsig, this list gets more and more impressive. Like, now it is purely, you know, A-list companies.

David Rosenthal 1:16:25 It's awesome. So if you're ready to accelerate your growth and democratize product building at your company, go to statsig.com/acquired, and when you get in touch, just tell them that Ben and David sent you.

Ben Gilbert 1:16:35 Thanks, Statsig.

David Rosenthal 1:16:36 And now for Crusoe. Crusoe is a climate-aligned cloud platform built specifically for AI workloads and powered by clean energy. They build and operate GPU data centers powered by low-cost, stranded energy that otherwise goes to waste or worse, gets emitted as greenhouse gases.

Ben Gilbert 1:16:52 It's crazy. When Acquired first started working with Crusoe, this was a cool idea. Now they're, like, one of the most important companies in the world, with an AI cloud that's superior to the hyperscalers and a whole bunch of the largest companies in the world trusting their AI infrastructure to them.

David Rosenthal 1:17:07 Yeah. It's easy to think about AI as like, "Oh, that's a bunch of PhDs at Meta or OpenAI or Anthropic or whatever," you know, tinkering with model weights in their office and hitting Compute. But there's this whole other industrial side of AI that's everything that happens after you press Go on the model training, and that's energy, cooling, construction, all the physical infrastructure behind AI.

Ben Gilbert 1:17:28 And Crusoe is powering that by producing or repurposing huge amounts of power. We are talking gigawatts in their development pipeline, which is nuclear reactor amounts of power, for less cost than other providers and with zero, or in some cases, actually negative emissions. It's super important. If you listen to Zuck and others talk about what the bottleneck to AI progress is, it's actually not compute, but energy, and Crusoe is solving that problem.

David Rosenthal 1:17:53 It's just an awesome company. We are super proud to work with them and to be investors in the company. You can work with Crusoe either through their managed AI cloud, which is great for start-ups and enterprises who want a complete end-to-end platform for AI, or directly as a data center customer, which several of the largest companies in the world are now doing. So just go on over to crusoe.ai/acquired, that's C-R-U-S-O-E.ai/acquired, or click the link in the show notes and tell them that Ben and David sent you.

Ben Gilbert 1:18:24 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, you know, people kept saying, "We don't really do this. Mark doesn't really do this." And, uh, I kept thinking, "Yeah, he kinda does," 'cause he's done all these podcasts this year, and-

David Rosenthal 1:18:42 He does Facebook Meta Connect, like, he's done big events before, of course.

Ben Gilbert 1:18:46 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.

David Rosenthal 1:19:14 There's no retakes, yeah.

Ben Gilbert 1:19:16 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.

David Rosenthal 1:19:26 A bunch of the board members were there, a lot of people important to Mark were there.

Ben Gilbert 1:19:30 His family came.

David Rosenthal 1:19:31 They made it an event.

Ben Gilbert 1:19:33 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.

David Rosenthal 1:19:39 Which is super cool. Totally agree.

Ben Gilbert 1:19:41 That's one. I was also surprised and delighted that he was willing to dive into history with us.

David Rosenthal 1:19:47 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 present and the future even better.

Ben Gilbert 1:20:10 Totally, 'cause 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, too, 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 on stage felt very authentic, and, uh, I just haven't heard him speak in that way before, at least publicly.

David Rosenthal 1:20:41 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.

Ben Gilbert 1:20:51 Oh!

David Rosenthal 1:20:52 What other founders of companies like that... I mean, there's Jensen. Who else? You know, it's the two of them.

Ben Gilbert 1:20:59 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 on stage. Uh, 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.

David Rosenthal 1:21:44 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." [laughing]

Ben Gilbert 1:21:54 [laughing] Yeah, that's a pretty illustrative comment.

David Rosenthal 1:21:56 Totally.

Ben Gilbert 1:21:57 I was appreciative that he engaged with us on the, "be critical of the company," 'cause 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 on stage in front of 6,000 people, and it's, i- it's not really the right format for that.

David Rosenthal 1:22:14 Yep, totally.

Ben Gilbert 1:22:15 That said, obviously a very interesting answer.

David Rosenthal 1:22:17 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.

Ben Gilbert 1:22:26 100%.

David Rosenthal 1:22:27 It's just within Meta.

Ben Gilbert 1:22:29 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, you know, step down from one to run the other?" For Mark, I kind of feel like, again, Meta is his vehicle for executing the things that he thinks are awesome products, and, of course, it's not just awesome products, but, like, things that could let him have more control over his universe. He's clearly a guy who, who values, uh, having a lot of degrees of freedom and, and doesn't like being boxed in.

David Rosenthal 1:23:28 I loved your, uh, turn-based strategy game of-

Ben Gilbert 1:23:31 Oh

David Rosenthal 1:23:31 ... get more turns, learn more on each turn. Like, oh, man. StarCraft, uh, pro player 101 there.

Ben Gilbert 1:23:38 Yes, but it'll be interesting to see the, the knock-on effects of having Reality Labs in the Meta organization versus as a new venture.

David Rosenthal 1:23:45 Totally. All of that brings me to, you know, 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, legally, financially, organizationally-

Ben Gilbert 1:24:35 Culturally

David Rosenthal 1:24:35 ... culturally, to reflect and amplify his immense strength.

Ben Gilbert 1:24:42 Which I think is probably true of, like, Apple, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Microsoft, NVIDIA, Jensen.

David Rosenthal 1:24:50 Yes.

Ben Gilbert 1:24:51 But we are right up close to the ways in which Meta is a sort of, uh, 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.

David Rosenthal 1:25:04 ... 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.

Ben Gilbert 1:25:23 Are you saying Meta is still very much a Mark Zuckerberg production? [chuckles] I'll see myself out. [laughing]

David Rosenthal 1:25:29 [laughing] Well put. There we go.

Ben Gilbert 1:25:31 Uh, well, listeners, thank you so much for joining us on this journey. Come talk about it with us in the Slack, acquired.fm/slack. 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.

David Rosenthal 1:26:13 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 Hermès for dressing us, which was my favorite Easter egg of the night.

Ben Gilbert 1:26:25 Yes, so fun. Thank you to Jamie Dimon, J.P. Morgan Chase, and J.P. Morgan Payments for making it all possible. It was truly a dream come true, and that is because of our incredible partnership.

David Rosenthal 1:26:35 Indeed, it was. Well, listeners, we'll see you next time.

Ben Gilbert 1:26:40 Yes, in a couple of weeks with the full show. We are pumped to drop it. We'll see you next time.

Speaker 1:26:45 Who Got the Truth? [singing] Is it you? Is it you? Is it you? Who got the truth now? Huh. [upbeat music]