Meta CMO Alex Schultz: Competing Against TikTok & Snap; Why Reels Failed at First | E985
Alex Schultz (guest), Harry Stebbings (host), Narrator
In this episode of The Twenty Minute VC, featuring Alex Schultz and Harry Stebbings, Meta CMO Alex Schultz: Competing Against TikTok & Snap; Why Reels Failed at First | E985 explores meta CMO Alex Schultz on Reels, retention, and redefining Facebook’s future Alex Schultz, CMO of Meta, traces his journey from monetizing a teenage paper-airplane website to driving growth at eBay and then Facebook/Meta, where he helped scale the platform to billions of users.
Meta CMO Alex Schultz on Reels, retention, and redefining Facebook’s future
Alex Schultz, CMO of Meta, traces his journey from monetizing a teenage paper-airplane website to driving growth at eBay and then Facebook/Meta, where he helped scale the platform to billions of users.
He explains how rigorous, data-inspired growth models, an obsession with retention, and rapid iteration shaped major product decisions like Reels and the controversial Facebook Messenger split.
Schultz details the evolution from direct sales to self-serve ads, how Meta thinks about metrics, goals, experimentation, and cultural practices that encourage learning over blame.
He also speaks candidly about Meta’s rebrand, the Metaverse narrative, his experience coming out as a gay man in tech, and his philosophy on leadership, feedback, and being “long‑term kind.”
Key Takeaways
Retention beats acquisition as the core growth driver.
Growth accounting at Facebook showed that churn and user resurrection massively outweighed new registrations, shifting focus from pure acquisition to retaining and reactivating users as the real growth engine.
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Identify and optimize the ‘activation action’ that predicts retention.
Across products (friending on Facebook, following on Instagram, bidding/buying on eBay), a single key user action strongly correlates with long-term retention; you find it through simple correlation plus common sense, then design flows to get users to that action quickly.
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Speed plus iteration creates an edge, even if you’re not first.
Meta’s first Reels iteration failed, but shipping early, learning fast, and iterating allowed them to catch up and then compete on innovation against TikTok and others; it’s “launch, catch up, then out‑innovate.”
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Measure success with carefully chosen metrics—and know their flaws.
Every metric is an imperfect proxy for a goal (from registered users to MAUs), so leaders must understand Goodhart’s Law, use counter‑metrics to prevent gaming, and layer common sense on top of dashboards.
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Cultivate a culture where experimentation is safe and learning is enforced.
Meta uses strong analytics teams, post‑mortems without blame, and “patiently right” data leaders who communicate clearly, track whether decisions follow the data, and build credibility over time—even including polite ‘I told you so’ moments.
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Self-serve tools plus targeted sales create powerful ad ecosystems.
Making it trivially easy to ‘create an ad’ or ‘boost a post’ unlocked millions of small advertisers; sales then focus on the highest‑potential accounts and advanced formats, creating a hybrid growth engine for Meta’s ads business.
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Being direct and ‘long‑term kind’ is essential for leadership and inclusion.
Schultz argues the kindest thing managers can do is give honest feedback, even when uncomfortable, and shares how visible support and psychological safety were pivotal for him coming out at work and for broader LGBTQ+ inclusion.
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Notable Quotes
“Retention is king.”
— Alex Schultz
“You don't celebrate shipping, you celebrate succeeding.”
— Alex Schultz
“Common sense is the least common of all senses.”
— Alex Schultz (quoting his boss Javi)
“The saddest thing is when a team fails having hit all its goals on the way down.”
— Sheryl Sandberg (as recalled by Alex Schultz)
“The kindest thing you can do is be direct and honest with somebody.”
— Alex Schultz
Questions Answered in This Episode
How should an early-stage startup with limited data practically apply growth accounting and retention-focused thinking without over-engineering its metrics?
Alex Schultz, CMO of Meta, traces his journey from monetizing a teenage paper-airplane website to driving growth at eBay and then Facebook/Meta, where he helped scale the platform to billions of users.
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
What specific product innovations does Meta believe now differentiate Reels from TikTok, beyond simply copying a short‑form video format?
He explains how rigorous, data-inspired growth models, an obsession with retention, and rapid iteration shaped major product decisions like Reels and the controversial Facebook Messenger split.
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
How can leaders balance moving fast on big bets (like Messenger or Reels) with the desire for more complete data and risk mitigation?
Schultz details the evolution from direct sales to self-serve ads, how Meta thinks about metrics, goals, experimentation, and cultural practices that encourage learning over blame.
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
In designing metrics and counter‑metrics, how do you spot and correct for subtle forms of metric gaming before they distort company behavior?
He also speaks candidly about Meta’s rebrand, the Metaverse narrative, his experience coming out as a gay man in tech, and his philosophy on leadership, feedback, and being “long‑term kind.”
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
What concrete steps can tech companies take to make LGBTQ+ employees, especially trans employees, feel as safe and supported as Schultz eventually did at Meta?
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
Transcript Preview
We were out before YouTube. We were out before anyone except TikTok, with our competitor there, faster than Snap who also cloned and copied TikTok, despite everything they've said about that.
(laughs)
But, like, we were out faster than everyone else and we got a couple, our first iteration failed. Second and third, we learnt a lot. Now, we're actually innovating and adding really cool things that people aren't trying other than us. We wouldn't be here if we hadn't iterated two or three times.
Alex, I'm so excited to make this happen. I have been pestering Shak, Julien Cordonnieu, for many months, but thank you so much for agreeing to do this.
Thank you. It's an honor to be here.
Now, I wanna start, uh, Shak actually sent me some videos of paper airplanes. (laughs)
(laughs)
And I watched them before, and o- other than you being a naturally gifted presenter, I thought, well how-
And according to the comments, I have old lady hands.
Oh. (laughs) Yeah.
When I was, when I was 18.
I actually skipped those comments, clearly. Um, but how did you go from paper airplanes, first, to eBay?
Oh, I- I, so I was doing Natsci at Cambridge, specializing in physics. And I was trying to pay my way through university on my own without taking any money from my parents because we'd, um, you know, we'd gone through a- a- a dip as a family and, um, that mattered to me. And I was running these paper airplane sites. Originally, I did GeoCities, before you were born, and, um, on GeoCities, they had Cape Canaveral area and I had fun science projects and I had paper airplanes and I had F Formula One. And paper airplanes did well on AltaVista. The way ... So I got super excited about learning how to rank in SEO, and the way you ranked back then was you just said "paper airplanes" a lot on your page.
(laughs)
In white, five pages down, which was how I ranked. So then I built a paper airplane website, and I stopped being just interested in traffic and became interested in monetizing it. And so I started to learn how to make money online. And it was interesting, Google back in the day, they had PageRank, which was using the backlinks. What was the most important face for backlinks? Yahoo Directory.
Huh.
You get a link number one in Yahoo Directory, you instantly ranked first in, uh, Google. So I got that link, I ranked first, and then I started trying to make money online. I made it via these ad products, and then I started doing affiliate marketing for eBay. Buying money with my credit, buying ads with my credit card on Google, reselling them to eBay for a profit. Maxing out my credit card. I knew nothing about the fact that you could ask for a higher limit or I would have made a lot more money.
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