Meta (Audio)

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

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

[laughing]

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

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

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

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

[laughing]

All right, let's do it.

Let's do it.

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?

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

I'm David Rosenthal.

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

And daily active users are over three billion.

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

Yeah, makes sense.

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

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

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