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Facebook

also referred to as: facebook inc. · facebooks · meta

includes Facebook Messenger, Facebook Ads, Facebook Connect, Facebook Live, Facebook News Feed, Facebook Watch, Facebook Platform, Facebook Home, Facebook Page Insights, Facebook Shops, Facebook Stores, Facebook AI Research and 14 more

511 statements across 292 episodes · 170 bullish · 149 bearish · 246 people on the record · first statement Jan 18, 2015 by David Hornik · said 2,758 times in 681 episodes since 2015 · across every show →

Mentions by year, the whole family

brought up most by Harry Stebbings (853), Alex Schultz (57), Rory O'Driscoll (46), Jason Lemkin (41), Cliff Weitzman (27), Solly Solomou (23), David Cahn (22), Brian Hale (22)

tap a year for its mentions
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2025 433 mentions in 83 episodes 5 per episode
2024 316 mentions in 81 episodes 4 per episode
2023 479 mentions in 79 episodes 6 per episode
2022 278 mentions in 62 episodes 4 per episode
2021 142 mentions in 35 episodes 4 per episode
2020 106 mentions in 39 episodes 3 per episode
2019 143 mentions in 38 episodes 4 per episode
2018 145 mentions in 50 episodes 3 per episode
2017 152 mentions in 51 episodes 3 per episode
2016 170 mentions in 63 episodes 3 per episode
2015 82 mentions in 33 episodes 2 per episode

every mention, scene by scene, with the transcript →

Everything said about Facebook, oldest first

Jan 18, 2015 neutral
Insight
Hornik: Big tech giants are slowly morphing into the same company
“I think that if you look at what Amazon is doing, what Google is doing, what Facebook is doing, they all are slowly but surely, and in many ways Apple, they're all slowly but surely morphing into the same company.”
David Hornik Jan 18, 2015 ▶ 21:15 20 VC 004: David Hornik on the Magic of Stanford and Startups
Feb 2, 2015 neutral
Disclosure
Floyd: Emergence Capital primarily backs founders from Salesforce, Facebook, Google, Oracle
“If you look at the entrepreneurs that we fund here at Emergence, you know, primarily a lot of them come out of the same few companies. Salesforce, Facebook, Google, Oracle.”
Joe Floyd Feb 2, 2015 ▶ 4:56 20 VC 009: Red Flags, Saas and becoming a VC with Joe Floyd
Feb 20, 2015
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Meehan: Only tech giants can afford proper two-factor authentication
“Only the very big guys, the Googles and Facebooks, et cetera, can afford to implement, like, proper two-stage authentication, which I didn't know, but is very, very expensive, so, which is why the only big guys do it”
Frank Meehan Feb 20, 2015 ▶ 13:34 20 VC 013: Frank Meehan Series A, Spark Labs and The Future of The Asian Tech Market
Apr 2, 2015 negative
Assertion Not checkable as stated
No platform has successfully cracked social stock market trading yet
“The social element, I think it's something nobody really cracked so far. I mean, I hardly see anybody using Facebook or other social networks really talking about trading and the stock market. I mean, the people who are already deep into this world, I mean, it…”
Marc Bernegger Apr 2, 2015 ▶ 16:26 20 VC 024: Financing Finch with Marc Bernegger of Orange Growth Capital
Apr 2, 2015 neutral
Prediction Partly held up
Major telcos will launch mobile payments to compete with Facebook and Snapchat
“I think there are much more other big players offering similar services in the next few months, including a lot of the big telcos, because they're not really interested just to let the Facebooks and Snapchats taking away this interesting interaction to the end…”
Marc Bernegger Apr 2, 2015 ▶ 11:36 20 VC 024: Financing Finch with Marc Bernegger of Orange Growth Capital
Apr 6, 2015
Assertion Partly supported
Christian Hernandez advised Summly while serving as Head of Facebook EMEA
“That was through it was through a guy called Christian Hernandez, who ran Facebook for EMEA at the time, and he was an angel investor and advisor to the company.”
John Henderson Apr 6, 2015 ▶ 4:04 20 VC 025: Finding the Right VC and The Evolution of Summly with John Henderson of White Star Capital
Jun 4, 2015
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Altucher secured meetings at Google, Facebook, and LinkedIn through personal writing
“I visited Google, Facebook, and LinkedIn, you know, with high up people at each company just because of my people knew me for my writing.”
James Altucher Jun 4, 2015 ▶ 4:06 James Altucher: Ideas, Investing and Entrepreneurs
Jul 3, 2015
Disclosure
Stebbings Discovered VC at Age 12 Watching The Social Network
“I was sitting in the cinema watching The Social Network with Jesse Eisenberg, and I saw Peter Thiel and Clarion Capital investing in Facebook in that film, and I thought, that looks like a pretty, pretty sweet deal. And, you know, actually I think I was about …”
Harry Stebbings Jul 3, 2015 ▶ 3:37 Founders Friday 002: Balderton's James Wise interviews 20VC Founder, Harry Stebbings
Jul 29, 2015 positive
Opinion
New York's rational financial mindset limits growth compared to Bay Area ambition
“One of the big differences between the financial mindset of New York is and in the Bay Area, New York starts off with, well, you know, this is as big as you possibly can get, and this is what's rational for, you know, what could happen in the Bay Area is still…”
David Wu Jul 29, 2015 ▶ 7:01 20 VC 058: 10 Key Traits To Be A Successful Founder with David Wu, General Partner @ Maveron
Aug 12, 2015
Disclosure
Playfair Capital provides portfolio startups with a free in-house technical recruiter
“We've taken on a head of talent who was formerly at Facebook and Google before that, who's a technical recruiter. And we are deploying them amongst portfolio companies to hire CTOs, front-end, back-end, full-stack devs entirely engineering-focused at our cost …”
Fede Pirzio-Biroli Aug 12, 2015 ▶ 14:23 20 VC 062: Shaking Up London's VC Scene with Fede Pirzio-Biroli, Founder @ Playfair Capital
Sep 14, 2015 negative
Opinion
First-time founders build the most important companies, not repeat founders
“I think if you look at some of the biggest, most important companies over the last 10 years, they're first time founders, you know including Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook. So, you know, I don't I don't think repeat founders are always the best founders.”
Nicholas Chirls Sep 14, 2015 ▶ 12:57 20 VC 071: Pre-Seed Investing, Why Now Is The Best Time with Nicholas Chirls @ Notation Capital
Sep 18, 2015
Assertion Supported
Shift built ad tech for Facebook apps before direct ads existed
“So what we were doing is we built ad technology to go inside Facebook applications So when you're playing games on Facebook, we were actually serving ads there because you couldn't programmatically serve ads directly on Facebook yet.”
James Borow Sep 18, 2015 ▶ 8:53 FF 013: 'Make Bets And Believe In What You Are Doing' with James Borow @ Shift & Brand Networks
Sep 21, 2015 positive
Disclosure
Treskow: Accel invested early in Facebook despite an unquantifiable market size
“So, so Facebook is, is a great example. You know, when we invested early on, you know, what's, what's the size of Facebook's market, right?”
Michael Treskow Sep 21, 2015 ▶ 11:01 20 VC 073: Life Inside Accel Partners with Michael Treskow @ Accel
Sep 28, 2015 bullish
Insight
Nathoo: VCs hunting power-law returns should invest at almost any valuation
“At the end of the day, the investors want to be investing in the next Google, the next Airbnb, the next Facebook, and if they believe that this company is going to be that, then They should want to put their money in at pretty much any price, because it's a sl…”
Kirsty Nathoo Sep 28, 2015 ▶ 16:37 20 VC 075: Y COMBINATOR WEEK: Kirsty Nathoo, CFO @ Y Combinator
Oct 12, 2015 neutral
Insight
Hartman: Network architecture drives Twitter to news and Facebook to friends
“The difference between Facebook and Twitter is a bi-directional arrow, basically. So if the follow versus friend model actually creates these totally different ecosystems, it's kind of like DNA replicating, and it turns into a different type of organism. Well,…”
Matt Hartman Oct 12, 2015 ▶ 8:06 20 VC 078: BETAWORKS WEEK: Matt Hartman, Director of Seed Investments @ Betaworks
Oct 26, 2015 positive
Assertion Supported
Major tech companies scaled without traditional sales or marketing
“There's a bunch of companies like PayPal, Airbnb, Facebook, Hotmail, Twitter, LinkedIn, Dropbox, WhatsApp, Quora, Reddit. A bunch of companies who've gotten really big, really fast, without doing any traditional sales or marketing.”
Matt Lerner Oct 26, 2015 ▶ 10:22 20 VC 082: 500 Startups Week: Growth Hacking 101: How To 10x Your Conversion with Matt Lerner, Head of Distro Dojo London
Oct 28, 2015 negative
Insight
Liao: Using M&A as R&D fails for most large tech companies
“I mean M&A is hard in, in general. I think most big companies are not good at M&A. I think like Cisco used to have a good reputation for doing good M&A. Boy, Facebook I think has done a great job. I think in the last week they'll be done. But outside of that, …”
Marvin Liao Oct 28, 2015 ▶ 22:11 20 VC 083: 500 Startups Week: New Funds, Startup Mentoring and Dave's Masterplan with Marvin Liao, Partner @ 500 Startups
Nov 27, 2015 positive
What-if
Workable could not have hired its first 20 engineers in SF
“It, it's more the fact that the kind of people that came to join Workable in the beginning, you know, our first 20 engineers, We're the kind of engineers that would probably be working at Facebook or Google if we were in in San Francisco. We wouldn't be able t…”
Nikos Moraitakis Nov 27, 2015 ▶ 9:48 20 VC FF 024: Raising $33m in VC Funding with Nikos Moraitakis, Founder & CEO @ Workable
Jan 11, 2016 negative
Assertion Supported
NYC tech ecosystem lacks a mega-scale anchor company
“The negative of what's happened here in the past seven years is you haven't seen the true emergence of a destination company, right? We have incredible companies that are building incredible foundations here. Some have went, went public already. Some will go p…”
David Tisch Jan 11, 2016 ▶ 5:03 20 VC: David Tisch @ Box Group on The Future of Consumer Mobile, Developing Pattern Recognition and FOMO
Jan 11, 2016 neutral
Prediction Not checkable as stated
West Coast tech hubs in NYC risk stifling local giants
“All the big companies from the West Coast have set up product offices here over the past five years, and I think that that might on one hand prevent the emergence of a standalone New York A monster, but it also brings more talent here, and so you've seen what …”
David Tisch Jan 11, 2016 ▶ 6:53 20 VC: David Tisch @ Box Group on The Future of Consumer Mobile, Developing Pattern Recognition and FOMO
Jan 22, 2016 neutral
Insight
Going public resets a startup's progress to zero for the founders
“Any company that goes public, it's, it, for the founders, the entrepreneurs, the leaders in that company, for the entire company, it's kind of like it all starts over again. It resets to zero. Now you've got to prove the world that prove the world wrong all ov…”
James Beshara Jan 22, 2016 ▶ 17:31 20 VC FF 031: James Beshara @ Tilt on Crowdfunding For A Mobile World, Finding The Perfect Co-Founder & Beer Pong!
Feb 5, 2016 negative
Assertion Supported
Only 8% of millennials trust banks for financial guidance
“Another, another kind of ridiculous stat, in my opinion, is also from this Facebook research report, which I'm happy to send you, is that eight percent of millennials trust banks and financial institutions for guidance.”
Kelly Peeler Feb 5, 2016 ▶ 11:13 20 VC FF 034: What Fintech Can Learn From Uber and The Shift From Financial Organisation To Financial Efficiency with Kelly Peeler, Founder & CEO @ NextGenVest
Mar 2, 2016 neutral
Insight
Breakout consumer tech success is 80% luck and timing
“Number 10, which unfortunately you and I have very little control over, is luck and timing. And that's about 80%, right? You have to do all these amazing things, have the right vision, have the right team, have the right culture, have the right marketing, you …”
Jim Scheinman Mar 2, 2016 ▶ 16:18 20VC: Building a Game Changing Consumer Startup and Hunting His 4th Unicorn with Jim Scheinman @ Maven Ventures
Mar 2, 2016 bearish
Opinion
Facebook and Twitter monopolies make scaling new mobile consumer apps nearly impossible
“But the truth is it's going to be really hard to scale another consumer app in the mobile shop. I mean, it's just mature. It's a mature market. And the big players that have a monopoly like Facebook and Twitter are not opening their platforms anymore.”
Jim Scheinman Mar 2, 2016 ▶ 13:56 20VC: Building a Game Changing Consumer Startup and Hunting His 4th Unicorn with Jim Scheinman @ Maven Ventures
Mar 9, 2016 neutral
Assertion Partly supported
Facebook generated $80 million in revenue within three years of its launch
“Three years after Launching in a dorm room, Facebook was making about eighty million dollars and quickly jumped to over three hundred million dollars and then took off.”
Christian Hernandez Mar 9, 2016 ▶ 15:34 20VC: Christian Hernandez on The Importance of Mobile and The Relationship Between Growth vs Revenue
Mar 9, 2016 negative
Insight
Consumer startups cannot rely exclusively on mobile apps without a web presence
“Mobile will be a strong component of any consumer facing offering. I don't believe in mobile only. I actually think, and we saw it even at Facebook with Instagram, and we saw it with Path, we saw it with others. You do need to have a landing point on the web a…”
Christian Hernandez Mar 9, 2016 ▶ 12:18 20VC: Christian Hernandez on The Importance of Mobile and The Relationship Between Growth vs Revenue
Mar 11, 2016
Insight
De Masi: Venture Capital Cannot Survive Without Power-Law Outlier Winners
“If you study the way venture portfolios are built, they would not be in business if they didn't have the one Uber winner. Without the Googles and Facebooks, they would not be in business at all.”
Niccolo De Masi Mar 11, 2016 ▶ 3:29 20VC: Niccolo De Masi on The Bursting Of The Tech Bubble and What It Takes To Be A Celebrity Partner with Glu Mobile
Apr 8, 2016
Opinion
Biyani: Uber and Amazon have far weaker network effects than Facebook
“Uber certainly has some, and Amazon has some, but they're not nearly as strong as the network effects of, say, a Facebook.”
Gagan Biyani Apr 8, 2016 ▶ 7:52 20VC: Sprig's Gagan Biyani on The 3 Principles Of Fundraising and Building The World's Largest Restaurant
Apr 11, 2016
Assertion Supported
Y Combinator classes were only 10 to 15 companies in 2006
“When I started 10 years ago, Google and Facebook were still buying a lot of small companies. YC classes were only 10, 15 companies.”
Aydin Senkut Apr 11, 2016 ▶ 11:56 20VC: Felicis' Aydin Senkut on Scaling Felicis From $4m to $120m, Doing Venture Differently and Why Being A VC Is Like A Jamaican Bobsled Team!
Apr 13, 2016 bearish
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Proprietary data access is the primary bottleneck in machine intelligence development
“At least today, access to the data is the limiting factor. Which means, by the way, not only do companies like Facebook and Google have an advantage, but pretty much every old industrial incumbent, if it has a way of getting at its data and making use of it, a…”
Roy Bahat Apr 13, 2016 ▶ 10:57 20VC: Why Machine Intelligence Will Eat The World Of Software with Roy Bahat, Head of Bloomberg Beta
Apr 18, 2016 negative
Disclosure
Battery Ventures lost early social market lead with Friendster to Facebook
“Battery was an investor in Frencer way back in the day, and I think they were way ahead, but unfortunately grew too fast, they couldn't keep up, and Facebook ultimately won that market, which is unfortunate for us.”
Neeraj Agrawal Apr 18, 2016 ▶ 18:13 20VC: The Best Determinant Of Product Market Fit & Why Prior Experience Is Not Required For Founder Success with Neeraj Agrawal, General Partner @ Battery Ventures
May 4, 2016 positive
Assertion Partly supported
Early Facebook reached 90% college penetration within weeks
“One thing was really unique about Facebook, and it was there from really the early days, and that was the rate at which they got to full penetration in these schools. It would take a couple weeks for them to get 90% plus penetration in a school.”
Brian O'Malley May 4, 2016 ▶ 23:08 20VC: Accel's Brian O'Malley On The Prioritisation Of Growth, The Metrics That Show True Customer Retention & Why The Most Interesting Companies Create A Market
Jun 6, 2016 neutral
Opinion
Facebook is more likely to acquire breakout products than build them
“There's a higher chance that there's a breakout that Facebook wants to buy than Facebook creates themselves.”
Bijan Sabet Jun 6, 2016 ▶ 17:58 20VC: Spark's Bijan Sabet on Investing in Twitter, Tumblr and Foursquare & Why First Time Founders Are So Exciting
Jun 22, 2016 bullish
Opinion
Kadavy: Facebook and Google hold a massive data advantage in AI bots
“I absolutely believe that. I think that you look, you just look at this sheer scale of Facebook Messenger and Google specifically. And while I think that others may be able to compete, the scale is, is just so vast.”
Annie Kadavy Jun 22, 2016 ▶ 23:53 20VC: Why Bots Are The New Black, Conversational Interface Is The Next of For Consumerisation and The Determinants Of A Successful Marketplace with Annie Kadavy, General Partner @ CRV
Jul 13, 2016 bearish
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Big Tech Dominance Makes Creating New Consumer Web Unicorns Difficult
“We're now in a world where, you know, we're seeing really dominant market power, Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, you know, creating a new set of unicorns in the face of that market power is going to be very difficult, certainly in the consumer-facing web serv…”
Brad Burnham Jul 13, 2016 ▶ 14:04 20VC: USV's Brad Burnham on Co-Founding USV with Fred Wilson, What They Look For In Potential Partners & Whether We Are Entering a Period of Consolidation or Expansion
Jul 27, 2016 bearish
Opinion
Flynn: Conversational bot hype serves platform defensibility over user value
“I think this one is probably more hype than reality, at least at this stage. It makes a ton of sense why the big messaging platforms, Facebook, Kik, and others would want to, you know, turn their ecosystem into a development platform, right? I totally get why …”
Sean Flynn Jul 27, 2016 ▶ 16:02 20VC: Mythbuster: Is Mobile Dying? Is AR/VR Overhyped? Is The Excitement Around Bots Justified with Sean Flynn, Partner @ Shasta Ventures
Aug 24, 2016 bullish
Prediction Didn’t hold up
Chad Byers Predicts Facebook or Amazon Will Hit $1 Trillion First
“So I think it's Facebook. You know, my second answer, although this is kind of cheating, would probably be Amazon. So Facebook or Amazon, I don't think it's Apple. I don't think it's Google. I think it's going to be one of those two.”
Chad Byers Aug 24, 2016 ▶ 21:25 20VC: Why Raising A Fund Is Like Raising A $25m Seed Round with No Product & Why Not All LP Money Is Equal with Chad Byers, General Partner @ Susa Ventures
Sep 5, 2016 bullish
Prediction Held up
Ben Lerer: Legacy retail and media will heavily acquire DTC startups
“The last few weeks in retail, I mean, just look at the jet and dollar shave acquisitions. You're seeing, these are the first dominoes in what will be a bunch of dominoes falling. I believe in consolidation where the traditional guys in retail, the traditional …”
Ben Lerer Sep 5, 2016 ▶ 19:22 20VC: Lerer Hippeau's Ben Lerer on 'Investing With Imagination', Strategies To Avoid Fomo & Develop Pattern Recognition As An Investor and Why We Have Seen The Rise of Direct To Consumer Business & Will This Continue With Further M&A
Sep 9, 2016 positive
Assertion Partly supported
Giphy powers the native GIF buttons inside Twitter, Facebook, and Slack
“We actually power that button. We power the gift button inside of Twitter. We power the gift button in Facebook. We power gifts in Slack.”
Adam Leibsohn Sep 9, 2016 ▶ 21:27 20VC: Giphy's Adam Leibsohn on From Being Homeless To Founding a Multi Hundred Million Dollar Startup & The Challenges of Creating One of The World's Largest Search Engine
Sep 12, 2016 positive
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Tunguz: Top data teams at Facebook and Zendesk focus on internal education
“The first is they have a data team, and there's this data, and that, this exists at Facebook, it exists at Zendesk, and these data teams, they, they're structured a little bit differently, but they all basically do the same thing. They're the experts. They kno…”
Tomasz Tunguz Sep 12, 2016 ▶ 6:41 20VC: Redpoint's Tom Tunguz on Winning with Data: How To Gain A Competitive Advantage & Dominate Markets with Data and 5 Steps To Create A Data Driven Company
Sep 28, 2016 neutral
Disclosure
Morin Founded Slow Ventures in 2009 While Still at Facebook
“I started Slow in late 2009, actually while I was still at Facebook.”
Dave Morin Sep 28, 2016 ▶ 3:15 20VC: Dave Morin on Why Building A Fund Is Like A Company, Why Venture Is A Craft & The Journey To Establish Slow Ventures
Oct 21, 2016
Insight
Regulated startups must move fast without breaking things to avoid regulatory ruin
“The motto we mentioned here is sort of a play on, on the Facebook motto of move fast and break things. Our motto is move fast without breaking things because, you know, you can't afford to break things when you're regulated.”
Nav Athwal Oct 21, 2016 ▶ 10:34 20VC: Why Adaptability Is Key To Fundraising, Why Supply Is Always The First Priority In Marketplaces & Why Sometimes You Have To Hire Fast & Fire Fast with Nav Athwal, Founder & CEO @ RealtyShares
Oct 28, 2016 bullish
Opinion
Ryan Holmes Was Extremely Bullish on Snapchat's 10 Billion Daily Views
“Oh man, no, I, I'm hugely bullish on Snapchat. Ten billion views daily. Facebook's at eight billion. Huge audience. Very engaged audience. Recently, this, yesterday, memories coming out. That all of a sudden is, is really interesting seeing your archive of Sna…”
Ryan Holmes Oct 28, 2016 ▶ 21:33 20VC: Hootsuite's Ryan Holmes on Optimising Productivity in Meetings, Creating An Ownership Culture & Lessons From Running A Pizzeria!
Oct 31, 2016 positive
What-if
Hamid: VCs Return More by Holding Winners for Decades
“And in many cases, you don't even want to distribute in those eight years because think about how much you would have made if you would have stayed in, in, in Amazon or Facebook or Google over the course of time it probably would have been much better for thos…”
Mamoon Hamid Oct 31, 2016 ▶ 8:14 20VC: Social Capital's Mamoon Hamid on Disrupting The Venture Model & Advancing Humanity By Solving The World's Toughest Problems
Nov 9, 2016
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Future data ownership will be a hybrid favoring consumer control
“I think reality will be that data will remain proprietary to a certain extent. You know, you have entire ecosystems around Google and Uber and Facebook where they're effectively AI companies leveraging the large data sets, but you'll also see this push from co…”
Rudina Seseri Nov 9, 2016 ▶ 7:39 20VC: Who Will Own The Data? Is There An Incumbency Advantage in AI? When Will Artificial Super Intelligence Come To The Forefront with Rudina Seseri, Founder and Managing Director @ Glasswing Ventures
Nov 16, 2016 negative
Assertion Partly supported
Accel's returns were not top-tier prior to its Facebook investment
“Excel's returns prior to the Facebook fund weren't the best in the industry, and so some analyst types in the LP community were like, well, you know, should I stay in Excel or not?”
Paul Martino Nov 16, 2016 ▶ 26:49 20VC: Investing In Sectors That Were Cool 2 Years Ago, What Accel's Facebook Fund Taught a Generation of LPs & Why LPs Need A New Discovery Process with Paul Martino, Founding Partner @ Bullpen Capital
Nov 16, 2016 negative
Insight
Fear of missing outliers traps LP capital in underperforming legacy funds
“This has now trained a generation of LPs to be scared to death to cut off funds that aren't performing well, because they could be just around the corner from Facebook. And as a result, a lot of that money that should be going to new and innovative funds gets …”
Paul Martino Nov 16, 2016 ▶ 27:07 20VC: Investing In Sectors That Were Cool 2 Years Ago, What Accel's Facebook Fund Taught a Generation of LPs & Why LPs Need A New Discovery Process with Paul Martino, Founding Partner @ Bullpen Capital
Dec 14, 2016 neutral
Assertion Supported
Peter Thiel wrote his $500K Facebook check while starting Palantir
“I got the call from Peter saying, hey, come on down, and we're starting a company. We'd like you to be one of the first engineers and flew down to have dinner with him about the same time that he wrote the 500,000 dollar check to Facebook.”
Garry Tan Dec 14, 2016 ▶ 3:48 20VC: Garry Tan on The Biggest Takeaways From Advising 700 Companies @ Y Combinator & Why Now Is The Golden Age For The Early Stage?
Jan 2, 2017 bullish
Insight
O'Donnell: Waste processing has greater addressable scale than phone-based software
“Not every human being on the face of the earth has a phone yet, but every single human being on the face of the earth produces organic waste.”
Charlie O'Donnell Jan 2, 2017 ▶ 26:09 20VC: Why Companies Going Bust Is Part Of The Plan, Why Most VCs Are Later Stage Than They Think & Why Venture Capital Is Humbling with Charlie O'Donnell, Founder @ Brooklyn Bridge Ventures
Jan 16, 2017 bearish
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Chang: Data-poor AI startups will be acqui-hired by major tech incumbents
“If startups can't train on massive proprietary data sets, then they'll never get that advantage on their algorithms. And then they're really targeted for, you know, acqui-hire by Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Google, et cetera.”
Tim Chang Jan 16, 2017 ▶ 13:55 20VC: Why We Will See A Big Series B Crunch? Why Proprietary Data Pools & AI Talent Will Be The New Limited Natural Resources? Why Now Is The Closest Thing To A New Normal with Tim Chang, Managing Director @ Mayfield Fund
Jan 18, 2017
Assertion Not publicly verifiable
MTV Networks offered Facebook a Series A term sheet at $45M valuation
“We put a term sheet on Facebook series eight, a forty five million dollar post.”
Rishi Garg Jan 18, 2017 ▶ 5:10 20VC: How To Test The Strength Of Co-Founder Relations, The Dangers Of Raising A Large Series A & Why The Biggest Challenge For Consumer Companies Is Finding The Second Big Hit with Rishi Garg, Partner @ Mayfield Fund
Jan 25, 2017 negative
Insight
Guo: Startups Using Public Internet Data Face Incumbent Risk From Big Tech
“If your plan as a company is to take internet accessible data sets and do something interesting with them on the machine learning side and productize them, if it's an area that Google and Facebook care deeply about, you're on dangerous ground, right? They, tho…”
Sarah Guo Jan 25, 2017 ▶ 11:41 20VC: Preparing For The Next Big Trend, Why Conversational Will Be The Next Big Thing & How Entrepreneurs Should View Market Size with Sarah Guo @ Greylock Partners
Feb 6, 2017 bullish
Assertion Supported
Maltz: Facebook successfully transitioned from desktop to mobile revenue post-IPO
“When the company went public on basically desktop revenues and, you know, the market massively changed to mobile and Facebook had done so much investing around mobile in their platform and in their technology and in their advertising that they made this incred…”
Jules Maltz Feb 6, 2017 ▶ 13:38 20VC: What Does It Take To Gain A Late Stage Cheque Today? The Fundamental Mistakes CEOs Make In The Scaling Process & The Importance Of Building The Next S Curve For Founders with Jules Maltz, General Partner @ IVP
Feb 10, 2017
Assertion Not checkable as stated
NatureBox pre-sold 100 boxes via Facebook ads before the product existed
“The first thing that we did is we put a landing page up that was Naturebox.com, it showed a picture of what the box looked like, and then you could click a buy now button. And if you clicked that buy now button, you actually got sent to PayPal, where you could…”
Gautam Gupta Feb 10, 2017 ▶ 5:53 20VC: How Startups & VCs Can Build Relationships with Potential Corporate Acquirers? The Challenge Of Operating Both A B2B & B2C Business Model & Why Fundraising Is The One Element Founders Cannot Control with Gautam Gupta, Founder & CEO @ NatureBox
Mar 13, 2017 neutral
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Grady: Big Tech will be the biggest beneficiary of the next platform shift
“In the next platform shift, that will also be true. The biggest beneficiary is likely to be Google or Facebook or Apple or Amazon.”
Pat Grady Mar 13, 2017 ▶ 14:16 20VC: Sequoia Partner, Pat Grady on Why Data Is The New Oil, Why We Will See The Return of The Apprenticeship Model in VC & The Defining Characteristics of The Next Generation of Great Software
Mar 24, 2017 bullish
Insight
Network-connected software is the next major evolution in B2B enterprise
“The thing we saw very early on was in the consumer world, we were all moving to networks. This idea that cloud was going to be about the same applications as we had on our desktop, but delivered through the browser was breaking down and we saw a whole new gene…”
Christian Lanng Mar 24, 2017 ▶ 3:12 20VC: How To Raise $200m In Any Economic Climate, Scale From Garage To Global In Record Time & The Biggest Startup You Have Not Heard About with Christian Lanng, Founder & CEO @ Tradeshift
May 26, 2017 neutral
Insight
Sean Rad says top tech companies begin as passion projects, not missions
“Evan Spiegel in, in starting Snapchat or Uber and Twitter and all these companies that tend to have an impact on society. Or Facebook, they start out as little passion projects. They don't start out as missions to kind of change the world.”
Sean Rad May 26, 2017 ▶ 8:03 20VC: Tinder's Sean Rad on Why Humility Is The Key Trait For Founders To Have, Why Today's Incumbents Are Stronger Than Any Before Them & How Leaders Need To Scale With The Scaling Of Their Company
Jun 26, 2017 negative
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Levine: Consumer distribution is controlled entirely by Facebook, Apple, and Google
“And today, virtually all consumer distribution is controlled by only three companies, Facebook, Apple, and Google.”
Jeremy Levine Jun 26, 2017 ▶ 16:22 20VC: Bessemer's Jeremy Levine on Why We Are In A Fallow Period For Consumer, Why It Is Bogus That Operational VCs Can Add More Value & 2 Golden Rules To Always Tell Entrepreneurs Pre-Investment
Jul 3, 2017 bullish
Opinion
Tech Incumbents Are the Most Nimble in History, Says Feng
“They're not afraid to directly compete with companies, copy companies, do whatever it takes because they have grown up in this next wave of innovation, and they are the savviest Strongest, most nimble, fast-moving group of incumbents that I think the world has…”
Eric Feng Jul 3, 2017 ▶ 12:05 20VC: Kleiner Perkins GP, Eric Feng on How The Best Funds Use Tech and Data To Find Companies, Why Entrepreneurs Start The Fire and VCs Add The Rocket Fuel & Why Consumer Is Harder Than Ever Today
Jul 5, 2017 negative
Assertion Partly supported
Schuler: Facebook went public overpriced and took years to recover
“If you're overvalued, and they really kind of force the issue out, you can see problems like Facebook experienced, you know, when they went out overpriced problems in the market, and it took them a couple of years of performing well before they straightened it…”
Barry Schuler Jul 5, 2017 ▶ 7:30 20VC: How To Get Back To 200 Tech IPOs Per Year, Why We Are In A 'Bulge" Not A Bubble & The Impending Flat & Down Rounds To Come with Barry Schuler, Partner @ DFJ Growth
Jul 5, 2017 bearish
Prediction Held up
Schuler: Public multiple expansion after high private valuations is extremely rare
“In the old days, the momentum of the growth period of a stock happened in the public markets. They're happening in the private market. So to expect someone to have a huge multiple on the private phase and then go into the public markets and have a huge multipl…”
Barry Schuler Jul 5, 2017 ▶ 15:16 20VC: How To Get Back To 200 Tech IPOs Per Year, Why We Are In A 'Bulge" Not A Bubble & The Impending Flat & Down Rounds To Come with Barry Schuler, Partner @ DFJ Growth
Jul 10, 2017 positive
Insight
Lasky: VC Mega-Hits Generate Orders of Magnitude More Value Than Good Outcomes
“The value of hits like Facebook and Google in the venture business or the Star Wars movies or the Marvel franchise in the, in Hollywood create sort of orders of magnitude more gravity in our business than even good or very good results with other companies.”
Mitch Lasky Jul 10, 2017 ▶ 6:52 20VC: Benchmark's Mitch Lasky on The Snapchat Journey From Series A to IPO, Why Small Is Beautiful In Venture Partnerships & Why Venture Is Very Much Like Hollywood
Jul 12, 2017 positive
Assertion Supported
Wincek: Snap broke out without ever buying Facebook app install ads
“They never bought Facebook ads or, like, Facebook app installs to get there, but instead, they had this really viral product and a proprietary channel, which was actually a pretty old-school channel, right? Word of mouth.”
Roseanne Wincek Jul 12, 2017 ▶ 20:22 20VC: The Blurring of Early & Late Stage, Why Your Go To Market Strategy Is More Important Now Than Ever & Why Venture Is The Academia Of Tech with Roseanne Wincek @ IVP
Jul 19, 2017 negative
Opinion
The VC adage that you never regret paying high prices is bullshit
“Some VCs say that you never regret paying a high price for getting into a good company, but I think that that is a bullshit. I think that you never regret paying a high price for an extraordinary company like Facebook, but there's only really one like that eve…”
Jason Pressman Jul 19, 2017 ▶ 11:45 20VC: Why It Is BS That You Never Regret Paying A High Price To Get Into A Good Company, Why There Are Only 2 Price Points That Work in SaaS and Why eSports Will Be Bigger Than Traditional Sports in 5 Years Time with Jason Pressman @ Shasta Ventures
Jul 24, 2017
Disclosure
DST launched in 2009 with Facebook and expanded globally in 2011
“At that time, when, even before I had joined, you know, Yuri already had the vision of being global, which was a crazy idea at the time, and so we got started with DST only in, like, mid-二-thousand-nine or so, with a Facebook investment, and then we truly went…”
Rahul Mehta Jul 24, 2017 ▶ 3:41 20VC: Investing $200m In Facebook, The 3 Stages of Founder Development & Why Creating A New User Behaviour Can Be Unit Economics Inefficient with Rahul Mehta, Managing Partner @ DST
Jul 24, 2017
Disclosure
DST's initial $200M Facebook investment came directly from Mail.ru's balance sheet
“The first investment in Facebook actually happened from the mail balance sheet. And then when this was the first two hundred million dollar round that we did in May, 2009, that all came from the mail balance sheet.”
Rahul Mehta Jul 24, 2017 ▶ 4:08 20VC: Investing $200m In Facebook, The 3 Stages of Founder Development & Why Creating A New User Behaviour Can Be Unit Economics Inefficient with Rahul Mehta, Managing Partner @ DST
Aug 14, 2017 negative
Opinion
Calacanis: Facebook is on a jihad to kill Snapchat
“I mean, it's not inspired by Snapchat. They're on a jihad to kill Snapchat.”
Jason Calacanis Aug 14, 2017 ▶ 14:28 20VC: Jason Calacanis on The 4 Questions Investors Must Ask Founders, Whether YC Have Scaled Their Process Successfully & Why Early Founder Liquidity Is Good Not Bad
Aug 25, 2017 negative
Opinion
Abrams: Facebook Delivers Fake News and Nobody Has Solved Discovery
“What people are getting on Facebook, you know, it's a lot of fake news. It's a lot of clickbait news. I think that nobody still has solved this problem.”
Jonathan Abrams Aug 25, 2017 ▶ 26:07 20VC: Nuzzel's Jonathan Abrams on Why The Top VCs Do Not Have A PlayBook For Startup Success, Why Most Boards Are Not Successful & Why He Is Bored Of Hearing "I Fell Into VC"
Aug 30, 2017 bearish
Opinion
Cohen: Machine learning benefits tech giants, not early-stage AI startups
“Machine learning is a leveraged play on data, so So it's the Facebooks, the Apples, the Googles of the world that are getting the most benefit from it. It's not the early stage startups.”
Alina Cohen Aug 30, 2017 ▶ 13:48 20VC: Why AI Is More Artificial Than Intelligent, Why Engineering-centric Founders Are Able To Pivot Best & Why Startups Are Like Games with Alina Cohen, General Partner @ Initialized Capital
Nov 1, 2017 negative
Assertion Supported
Buchheit: Friendster failed by prioritizing an impossible six-degrees-of-separation feature
“Friendster, but they could have been maybe Facebook, but they got fixated on this idea that when you browse through profiles, it had to show you kind of the six degrees of separation between you and this person, and so that feature, it turns out, is sort of co…”
Paul Buchheit Nov 1, 2017 ▶ 17:10 20VC: Y Combinator's Paul Buchheit on Creating Gmail Version 1.0 & Leadership Lessons from Working With Zuckerberg and Larry Paige
Nov 8, 2017 negative
Assertion Supported
Ries: Facebook bought a VPN app to track competitor usage
“Facebook recently famously was revealed that they bought a VPN company so that they could watch The traffic to emerging apps and figure out who to copy.”
Eric Ries Nov 8, 2017 ▶ 10:59 20VC: The Lean Startup's Eric Ries on The Missing Function of Entrepreneurship in Most Companies, Creating A New Accountability Paradigm & How To Structure Promotions and Compensation In The New Structure
Nov 13, 2017
Insight
Point-of-Transaction Ads Outperform Facebook and Google Advertising
“What's the best place to advertise in the world? It's actually not when somebody's driving on the freeway and sees a big ad. It's not on Facebook. It's not on Google. It's often when people are in, they're actually buying something because, you know, the best …”
Alex Rampell Nov 13, 2017 ▶ 20:44 20VC: a16z's Alex Rampell on The Struggle Between Innovation vs Distribution, When How To Determine Whether An Application is Optimised Through Centralised or Decentralised Networks & Why Most ICOs Today Are Ridiculous
Dec 11, 2017
Insight
Carlson-Wee: Companies launching tokens must stop extracting direct network revenue
“The second thing is that if you are launching a token and you're a private company, you should be ready to stop extracting any revenue from your network. So however you were extracting revenue from the network, whether this was advertising or paid subscription…”
Olaf Carlson Wee Dec 11, 2017 ▶ 15:51 20VC: Inside The World's Leading Crypto Fund, The Future Exit Environment for Crypto Assets & The Beauty Of Benevolent Dictatorship with Olaf Carlson-Wee, Founder @ Polychain Capital
Dec 13, 2017
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Currier: Google was 8th to market and Facebook was 156th
“You know, then you look at your next great success, Google, they were the eighth to market. You look at Facebook, they were the 156th to market with the same five features.”
James Currier Dec 13, 2017 ▶ 5:57 20VC: How To Balance Between Vision and Stubbornness, Why Speed Is The Most Important Startup Superpower & The Main Role of A Startup Founder Today with James Currier, Managing Director @ NFX
Jan 3, 2018 negative
Opinion
Thau: Facebook lacks Twitter's strong brand persona
“Even a product like Facebook is one of the most impressive companies and products of all time. It doesn't really have as much of a brand persona as a Twitter does, and I think it's because of all those little, little things.”
Kevin Thau Jan 3, 2018 ▶ 15:50 20VC: Why VC Is A Game of Maximising Serendipity, How VCs Can Characterise Their Approach To Working & Product Lessons from Jack Dorsey & Sonos' John MacFarlane with Kevin Thau, General Partner @ Spark Capital
Mar 5, 2018
Assertion Contradicted
Most consumer apps around 2007 and 2008 plateaued at 50 million MAUs
“When they hit around fifty million MAUs, They realized that most apps in that era, around 2007 and eight, had plateaued at fifty million MAUs.”
Anu Hariharan Mar 5, 2018 ▶ 17:00 20VC: Why, How and When To Think About Growth Teams, The Right Way To Think About Network Effects & Scaling from Phase 1 To Phase 2 of Startup Life with Anu Hariharan, Partner @ YC Continuity Fund
Mar 5, 2018 neutral
Assertion Contradicted
Facebook delayed expanding beyond Harvard for 18 months to ensure retention
“They first launched in Harvard, and there was a lot of craze about the app. A lot of schools demanded that Facebook be available in those schools, yet they did not launch it for almost 18 months, and the simple reason being, the one metric they measured was ho…”
Anu Hariharan Mar 5, 2018 ▶ 11:02 20VC: Why, How and When To Think About Growth Teams, The Right Way To Think About Network Effects & Scaling from Phase 1 To Phase 2 of Startup Life with Anu Hariharan, Partner @ YC Continuity Fund
Mar 12, 2018 neutral
Assertion Supported
Taussig: Google and Facebook capture ~90% of recent ad growth
“Something like 89 or 90% of growth in advertising dollars In the last year or so was inside of Google and Facebook.”
Alex Taussig Mar 12, 2018 ▶ 14:34 20VC: Lightspeed's Alex Taussig on VC Risk Mentality, The Current State of Retail & The Mechanics of Cash Flow
Mar 26, 2018 neutral
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Loftus: Major tech corp dev teams are perpetually overwhelmed by deal flow
“Corporate development teams across the Silicon Valley, including at Facebook and Google, are small compared to the opportunity set that they're evaluating. There's just so many companies out there all the time to evaluate, and if you're even at Square, you kno…”
James Loftus Mar 26, 2018 ▶ 11:17 20VC: How Great VCs Handle Themselves In An M&A Process, Why M&A Has Become The Primary Method of Exit & How The Best M&A Teams Operationalise Their Process with James Loftus, Corporate Development Lead @ Square
Mar 26, 2018
Assertion Supported
Loftus: Big Tech Buyer Softening Has Kept Startup Acquisition Prices Moderate
“So I haven't seen a ton of price increase, but I do think that's because in my view, even though you've seen new entrants into the market, There's been softening at the other end of the market from the Google, Facebook, Apple, Amazon end.”
James Loftus Mar 26, 2018 ▶ 10:10 20VC: How Great VCs Handle Themselves In An M&A Process, Why M&A Has Become The Primary Method of Exit & How The Best M&A Teams Operationalise Their Process with James Loftus, Corporate Development Lead @ Square
Apr 6, 2018 negative
Insight
Spreadsheet-Focused VCs Will Miss the Next Category-Defining Company
“There are a lot of other venture capitalists that don't necessarily want to have a vision. They want to view every market opportunity and every business opportunity as something they can read from day one on a spreadsheet. And that's just a very, very differen…”
Darian Shirazi Apr 6, 2018 ▶ 15:33 20VC: Why Facebook Will Be The Company To Succeed in Crypto, Why Founders Should Be Actively Angel Investing & Commonalities of Great Leadership From Mark Zuckerberg to Mark Pincus with Darian Shirazi, Founder & CEO @ Radius
Apr 6, 2018 positive
Assertion Not publicly verifiable
Mark Zuckerberg Carved 'Fortune Favors the Bold' Into His Apartment Wall
“Mark actually carved into the wall in his apartment, fortune favors the bold”
Darian Shirazi Apr 6, 2018 ▶ 6:25 20VC: Why Facebook Will Be The Company To Succeed in Crypto, Why Founders Should Be Actively Angel Investing & Commonalities of Great Leadership From Mark Zuckerberg to Mark Pincus with Darian Shirazi, Founder & CEO @ Radius
Apr 6, 2018
Assertion Supported
Darian Shirazi Was Facebook's First External Engineering Hire
“And prior to Radius, Darian has enjoyed roles such as first external engineering hire at Facebook and working on the sell your item team at eBay.”
Harry Stebbings Apr 6, 2018 ▶ 0:45 20VC: Why Facebook Will Be The Company To Succeed in Crypto, Why Founders Should Be Actively Angel Investing & Commonalities of Great Leadership From Mark Zuckerberg to Mark Pincus with Darian Shirazi, Founder & CEO @ Radius
Apr 6, 2018 bullish
Prediction Didn’t hold up
Facebook Will Launch a Crypto Coin and Become Bitcoin's Main Competitor
“Now, I will say also that on crypto, I think that there's a high probability that the company that will really succeed in crypto will be Facebook, and the reason is that for them to launch their own coin and for them to distribute that coin and allow developer…”
Darian Shirazi Apr 6, 2018 ▶ 24:52 20VC: Why Facebook Will Be The Company To Succeed in Crypto, Why Founders Should Be Actively Angel Investing & Commonalities of Great Leadership From Mark Zuckerberg to Mark Pincus with Darian Shirazi, Founder & CEO @ Radius
Apr 6, 2018 neutral
Assertion Partly supported
Facebook Had Under Two Million Users When MySpace Had 80 Million
“MySpace was eighty million users. We were just shy of two, maybe actually less than two million at the time.”
Darian Shirazi Apr 6, 2018 ▶ 5:27 20VC: Why Facebook Will Be The Company To Succeed in Crypto, Why Founders Should Be Actively Angel Investing & Commonalities of Great Leadership From Mark Zuckerberg to Mark Pincus with Darian Shirazi, Founder & CEO @ Radius
Apr 20, 2018
Insight
Zappacosta: Home service pros require offline ads; creatives convert on Facebook
“Creative services, think photographers, DJs are very digitally savvy and tend to have Facebook pages about themselves and talk about themselves on social media. And so we can target them more easily on Facebook. Home service companies like plumbers, HVACs tend…”
Marco Zappacosta Apr 20, 2018 ▶ 18:00 20VC: Thumbtack's Marco Zappacosta on The 3 Core Elements To All Board Meetings, Raising $250m from Sequoia and Why You Have To Win Supply Side Acquisition First For Marketplace Success
Apr 23, 2018 bullish
Assertion Contradicted
Nationwide Insurance Employs More Software Engineers Than Facebook
“Companies like nationwide insurance, They have more engineers than Facebook has”
Chris Olsen Apr 23, 2018 ▶ 16:23 20VC: The Biggest Trend Of Our Lifetime Is The Decentralisation of Entrepreneurship Away From The Valley, The Biggest Lessons From Learnings The Craft of VC at Sequoia & The Benchmarks Required to Attract Growth Investors with Chris Olsen, Founding Partne
May 11, 2018
Insight
Dudum: Startups must balance micro-optimization with tracking macro platform shifts
“One of the areas that we really got good at with that company was small team iteration and market testing. We were constantly testing our positioning, our marketing, our channels, our price points, the demographics of the audiences. And weighing and balancing …”
Andrew Dudum May 11, 2018 ▶ 4:28 20VC: Hims' Andrew Dudum on The Scaling Playbook of The Fastest Growing Mens Wellness Brand, How To Be Truly Innovative In Today's World of Online Marketing & Raising at a $200m Valuation within Year 1
Jul 9, 2018 positive
Insight
Flint: Network effect businesses remain tremendously capital efficient
“Building sort of core, building business on top of core distribution platforms like Facebook and Google is just so much harder these days, but fundamentally, you look back over the sort of course of history and see these network effect businesses are tremendou…”
Pete Flint Jul 9, 2018 ▶ 18:22 20VC: Lessons From 2x $Bn Exits in Trulia and lastminute.com, 3 Leading Indicators That Suggest Potential Marketplace Success & Why We Are Going To See A Fundamental Change To The World of VC with Pete Flint, Managing Partner @ NFX
Jul 17, 2018
Assertion Not publicly verifiable
Elad Gil: Facebook Bought Ads Targeted at Specific Individuals' Names in Europe
“Facebook ultimately ended up doing the same thing where they were literally buying ads in Europe against individuals' names so that they could convert those people onto Facebook as a platform.”
Elad Gil Jul 17, 2018 ▶ 31:20 20VC: Elad Gil's High Growth Handbook on The Commonalities of The Truly Great CEOs, How To Hire The Very Best Execs, Why Cash is A Defensible Moat Today & The Pros and Cons of M&A and IPOs
Jul 20, 2018 positive
Disclosure
Steve Ballmer asked Lanman to bet his career on Facebook's $10B valuation
“I remember Steve Ballmer asked me if I'd bet my career on Facebook being worth ten billion, which is what my team and I had kind of come up with, and we didn't have much downside, so we were willing to take the bet”
Fritz Lanman Jul 20, 2018 ▶ 15:33 20VC: ClassPass CEO Fritz Lanman on Betting His Career Facebook Would Be A $10Bn Company, Lessons From Travis and Uber on Scaling A Global Marketplace & Whether Growth and Capital Efficiency Are Mutually Exclusive
Jul 23, 2018
Insight
Facebook ads easily scale brands to $50M, but rarely to $500M
“It's very easy these days to Scale a brand from zero to fifty million by using hyper-targeting on Facebook. It's very hard to take a brand from fifty million to five hundred million in an enduring way, and to create billions in equity value.”
Jason Stoffer Jul 23, 2018 ▶ 13:29 20VC: The Metrics That Matter In Early-Stage Consumer, Why Moats Matter More Than Brand Today and How VCs Deal with S*** Hit The Fan Moments with Jason Stoffer, Managing Partner @ Maveron
Jul 27, 2018 positive
Insight
Eddy Lu: Prime physical retail rent is equivalent to digital ad spend
“Well, for me, I don't think it impacts margin structure too much because while there's store overhead, if the store is in a Class A location, it's no different than spending money on Facebook marketing. Instead of spending it on digital ads, you're spending it…”
Eddy Lu Jul 27, 2018 ▶ 18:22 20VC: GOAT's Eddy Lu on Pivoting From Failing Social Dining App To The World's Largest Sneaker Marketplace, How The Best Founders Pick Their Investors & Why It Is Better To Be Hated than Unknown
Aug 6, 2018 bearish
Opinion
Brown: The era of building DTC brands purely on paid ads is over
“I think we are in probably the end of the bubble of brands or direct-to-consumer businesses that are purely building their businesses off paid channels. And by paid channels, I mean mainly Facebook and mainly a little bit of Google. I think that era is done. T…”
Nick Brown Aug 6, 2018 ▶ 7:08 20VC: 3 Core Considerations When Investing In Physical Product Co's, Are We In A Direct-To-Consumer Bubble & Why Many Sub $100m Funds Are Moving Earlier and Earlier with Nick Brown, Managing Partner @ Imaginary
Aug 31, 2018 neutral
Disclosure
Facebook and Google Are a Very Small Part of Casper's Marketing
“We were never overly reliant on just Facebook or just Google. In fact, those two channels specifically are a very small part of our mix because we knew the economics were going to get very tough.”
Philip Krim Aug 31, 2018 ▶ 13:33 20VC: Casper Founder Philip Krim on The Right Way To Think About Marketing Channel Diversification, When To Accept Strategic Investors & How To Successfully Build Out Your Exec Team
Sep 17, 2018 negative
Opinion
Frankel: Early-stage startups are ultimately working for Facebook and Google
“Ultimately you could say that all these startups are working for Facebook, Google, and, you know, the programmatic players.”
David Frankel Sep 17, 2018 ▶ 20:20 20VC: Lessons Learned Scaling PillPack from Seed to Amazon Acquisition, Why Investors Should Spend More Time Assessing Human Capital Risk Taken by Founders & The Right Way To Think About Capital Efficiency in Scaling with David Frankel, Managing Partner @
Oct 1, 2018 negative
Insight
Kaden: Paid ads on Google and Facebook enrich platforms, not startups
“I, you know, I think Peter Fenton's also making a comment on the acquisition landscape where most of paid acquisition is coming through these third party platforms like Facebook or Google, where you're actually largely boosting the equity value of the platform…”
Rebecca Kaden Oct 1, 2018 ▶ 7:24 20VC: USV's Rebecca Kaden on Whether Venture Returns Can Be Made At Scale In Consumer Today & How To Navigate Consumer Investing In A World of Amazon
Nov 9, 2018 negative
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Garg: Gobble reduced Facebook marketing dependency by 50% through channel diversification
“First thing she did is took our Facebook dependency down by 50% and started planting the seeds into other channels that are growing such that we can genuinely turn knobs up and down.”
Ooshma Garg Nov 9, 2018 ▶ 12:37 20VC: Being A Wartime Leader in a Time of Peace, Why Marketing Channel Diversification Is Like The Life of A Scientist and Why Small and Mighty Beats Loud and Weak with Ooshma Garg, Founder & CEO @ Gobble
Apr 1, 2019 negative
Insight
Tan: Google and Facebook alumni lack experience fighting for early users
“A lot of people, especially coming from very hollered halls like Google and Facebook, they've actually never been punched in the face because the overwhelming fire hose of users means that they've never had to fight and scrap for a user.”
Garry Tan Apr 1, 2019 ▶ 17:33 20VC: Initialized's Garry Tan on The Most Important Thing A Seed Investor Can Do For Founders, How Ownership Requirements Change With Evolution of Funds & Why There Is Not Too Much Capital Chasing Too Few Deals
Apr 1, 2019 positive
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Tan: Facebook was the only company beating Palantir for engineering talent
“If we had head-to-head offers out to software engineers, the only one we would lose to was Facebook.”
Garry Tan Apr 1, 2019 ▶ 26:29 20VC: Initialized's Garry Tan on The Most Important Thing A Seed Investor Can Do For Founders, How Ownership Requirements Change With Evolution of Funds & Why There Is Not Too Much Capital Chasing Too Few Deals
Apr 5, 2019 positive
Insight
Russakow: 200-500 person growth companies are the best early career environment
“When you're in a company that's maybe already gotten to a couple hundred people on its way to 1500, you get this wonderful middle ground where it's big enough that a lot of the systems and infrastructure is in place and mentors may exist within the company, bu…”
Jeff Russakow Apr 5, 2019 ▶ 8:40 20VC: One Question Founders Must Ask Themselves When Approaching Investor Selection, Why Series B Is One Of The Most Challenging Phases & What Makes For A Successful CEO Transition with Jeff Russakow, CEO @ Boosted
Apr 29, 2019 bullish
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Smith: Lime is the first company since Facebook to show such hyper-growth
“Lime is the first company I have seen since my time at Facebook showing that kind of sort of tornado of growth and insane momentum.”
Sarah Smith Apr 29, 2019 ▶ 19:47 20VC: Why Lead Lime's Series D Funding Round, Why Engineers Are Underpaid & Why 74% of US Venture Firms Still Do Not Have Female GPs
Apr 29, 2019
Insight
Smith: Send HQ veterans for 12 months to align new remote offices
“In opening remote offices, so at Facebook, I really helped open the Dublin, Austin, and Hyderabad offices, and sending a group of people from headquarters to For at least 12 months, to also include a office leader where people report remotely, I found really t…”
Sarah Smith Apr 29, 2019 ▶ 10:41 20VC: Why Lead Lime's Series D Funding Round, Why Engineers Are Underpaid & Why 74% of US Venture Firms Still Do Not Have Female GPs
Apr 29, 2019
Insight
Smith: Startups growing 1-2% weekly should avoid rigid processes and structures
“When a company is growing as fast as Facebook was or as Quora was, it's really important, I think, not to get tied too much to any team or process. Things are changing constantly when your company is growing one to two percent every single week. You shouldn't …”
Sarah Smith Apr 29, 2019 ▶ 10:13 20VC: Why Lead Lime's Series D Funding Round, Why Engineers Are Underpaid & Why 74% of US Venture Firms Still Do Not Have Female GPs
May 10, 2019 negative
Assertion Partly supported
Romanow: 40% of venture capital goes directly to Google and Facebook ads
“40% of venture capital dollars that are raised today end up going straight to Google and Facebook ads.”
Michele Romanow May 10, 2019 ▶ 8:13 20VC: Clearbanc's Michele Romanow on Why 40% of VC $ Raised Today Goes To Google and Facebook, How To Create A Financing Mechanism For The Repeatable Parts Of Your Business & Why We Need To Stop Celebrating Fundraises
May 10, 2019 positive
Insight
Romanow: Scalable growth channels should be funded with debt, not equity
“VC is true risk Capital. This, you know, zero to one risk that we describe. If you are building a crazy piece of AI and need 50 engineers or solving a disease, VC is the perfect fit for you. What I'm saying is, ClearBank, we're like, if you know that channels …”
Michele Romanow May 10, 2019 ▶ 14:19 20VC: Clearbanc's Michele Romanow on Why 40% of VC $ Raised Today Goes To Google and Facebook, How To Create A Financing Mechanism For The Repeatable Parts Of Your Business & Why We Need To Stop Celebrating Fundraises
Jun 3, 2019 positive
Assertion Not publicly verifiable
Coelius: Triggit grew from $1M to $30M in revenue in 12 months
“For my company, Trigger, it was like, we basically went from being a very broad sort of demand-side platform, and all those things we could do, to like, hey, we give you retargeting on Facebook. And the moment we did that, suddenly, Walmart, Best Buy, HomeDevo…”
Zach Coelius Jun 3, 2019 ▶ 23:24 20VC: Why Portfolio Construction Is Inefficient, Why The Only Thing That Matters In Venture Is Pricing & The Future of Venture; Bundled or Unbundled with Zach Coelius
Jun 10, 2019 negative
Insight
Kupor: Reliance on paid acquisition degrades startup unit economics over time
“So if this is a heavy paid marketing business, it's probably the case that those economists are going to degrade over time because, you know, your cost of acquisition, you know, through Google and Facebook and other paid channels may be difficult.”
Scott Kupor Jun 10, 2019 ▶ 6:21 20VC: a16z's Scott Kupor on The Biggest Learnings From Scaling a16z from $300m to $7Bn AUM, The Biggest Mistakes Entrepreneurs Make When Pitching VCs & Why VC Is Simply A Customer Service Business
Jun 17, 2019 positive
Insight
Jonathan Hsu: Tech giants dominate by creating superior products, not choking supply
“These companies are dominant, not because they choke off supply, but because they actually provide the best product for customers. That's true of Google. It's true for Facebook.”
Jonathan Hsu Jun 17, 2019 ▶ 22:34 20VC: Why Historical Loss Ratios Are Simply Too High, Why Data Is The #1 Most Important Piece When Evaluating Effective Reserve Allocation & Why Nothing Is Truly Defensible Today with Jonathan Hsu, Co-Founder and General Partner @ Tribe Capital
Jul 12, 2019 negative
Opinion
Major Social Platforms Intimidate Everyday People From Sharing Creative Work
“Today's dominant platforms, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, they don't really offer a path for folks like that. Folks like that feel like, oh, I'm embarrassed. I'm not going to post my thing on Instagram. Like, no one's going to like it.”
Joseph Gordon-Levitt Jul 12, 2019 ▶ 29:57 20VC: HitRecord's Joseph Gordon-Levitt on How Show Business Prepared Him For Life As An Entrepreneur, What Founders Should Look For Most In Their Investor Base & Why The Current Ad Model of Social Is Harming The World's Creative Spirit
Aug 26, 2019 positive
Insight
Vernal: Top tech startups differentiate through extreme focus and execution clarity
“As I meet companies today, like the ones that I think are just really head and shoulders above the rest are typically the ones that are just amazing at focus, have incredible clarity of thought about what are we trying to accomplish? What are the steps we need…”
Mike Vernal Aug 26, 2019 ▶ 6:52 20VC: Sequoia's Mike Vernal on His Biggest Lessons From 8 Years of Hyper-Growth at Facebook, Why The Strength of Data Moats Is Over-Rated Today and The Challenge of "Overthinking Investments" In Venture
Sep 9, 2019 positive
Insight
Mark Zuckerberg resets Facebook's top priorities every six months
“I think working with Mark, the thing that really struck me about him and how he runs his organization and what he pushes down through the ranks is we can only do so many things at once. And he's set up his company in a way that, you know, roughly every six mon…”
Ilya Sukhar Sep 9, 2019 ▶ 30:37 20VC: Matrix's Ilya Sukhar on How The Seed Ecosystem Could Be Optimised, Why The Bar For The Break-Out Series A Has Risen & The Art of Effective Referencing
Sep 9, 2019 negative
What-if
Parse sold to Facebook too early and would have survived independently
“Yeah, we sold early. I think we had a lot of momentum, something great going. One thing I think people don't realize is the venture market actually really didn't appreciate the type of thing we were doing in the same way that it appreciates it now. You look at…”
Ilya Sukhar Sep 9, 2019 ▶ 28:35 20VC: Matrix's Ilya Sukhar on How The Seed Ecosystem Could Be Optimised, Why The Bar For The Break-Out Series A Has Risen & The Art of Effective Referencing
Sep 16, 2019 negative
Insight
Shah: Platform maturity made consumer startups capital inefficient post-2016
“And so my intuition was a platform maturity of the iPhones, of the app store on iOS, of Facebook, of Google, of Snap and Pinterest kind of hit a ceiling where I felt the cost of acquiring these customers in the LTV, according to it, would make the businesses v…”
Semil Shah Sep 16, 2019 ▶ 31:50 20VC: Haystack's Semil Shah on Whether Founders Are Bypassing Seed Funds in Favour Of Less Dilutive Multi-Stage Funds, How Fund Strategy Changes With Fund Scaling & Why The Hardest Challenge is Price Discipline
Sep 27, 2019 positive
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Kapwing hired a software engineer using a $200 single-take Facebook video ad
“We recorded a video of Eric and I, just like a single take video with subtitles and posted it as a Facebook ad targeting software engineers, basically just telling people Here's who we are. Here's what a company does. Like, please come work for us. And that Fa…”
Julia Enthoven Sep 27, 2019 ▶ 27:22 20VC: Kapwing Founder Julia Enthoven on Why Marketing Innovation Is As Important As Product Innovation, Why Every Company Is Becoming A Media Company & The Benefits Of Not Raising Money Too Early
Oct 11, 2019 negative
Opinion
Carlson: Google and Facebook ad spend drives the US student debt crisis
“While I'm not a fan of the specifics of the Bernie free college plan, I wish more politicians were realizing the fact that a large percent of the student debt crisis is actually in the pockets of Google and Facebook.”
Rachel Carlson Oct 11, 2019 ▶ 6:34 20VC: Guild Education's Rachel Carlson on The Benefits of Scaling Startups Outside of Silicon Valley, Why Mission and Margin Are So Tightly Integrated & Why Mums Are The Most Under-Utilised Asset In The Economy
Oct 11, 2019 negative
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Carlson: Direct-to-consumer higher ed struggles with rising Google and Facebook CAC
“Our data shows that schools that are trying to acquire students in a B to C format today are struggling across the board, and I actually think while Lambda's newer to the game, you look at some of the older coding boot camps, they are also struggling as they'r…”
Rachel Carlson Oct 11, 2019 ▶ 8:05 20VC: Guild Education's Rachel Carlson on The Benefits of Scaling Startups Outside of Silicon Valley, Why Mission and Margin Are So Tightly Integrated & Why Mums Are The Most Under-Utilised Asset In The Economy
Oct 11, 2019 positive
Insight
Carlson: Early-stage startups win tech talent better in Denver than SF
“So you just have to think about it as a different funnel. So I think in San Francisco, the funnel is very, very wide, but your chance at winning at the bottom of the funnel when you're an early stage company is incredibly hard when you're competing with Google…”
Rachel Carlson Oct 11, 2019 ▶ 25:11 20VC: Guild Education's Rachel Carlson on The Benefits of Scaling Startups Outside of Silicon Valley, Why Mission and Margin Are So Tightly Integrated & Why Mums Are The Most Under-Utilised Asset In The Economy
Nov 11, 2019 positive
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Snap and Pinterest broke Google and Facebook's acquisition duopoly
“I think Snap and Pinterest have kind of broken through that duopoly, and therefore there's some heterogeneous ways to acquire customers, but not as many as you'd hope.”
Rick Heitzmann Nov 11, 2019 ▶ 27:06 20VC: Firstmark's Rick Heitzmann on The Rise of Pre-Emptive Rounds, His Biggest Learnings From The Pinterest Board, 2 Things VCs Can Do To Prepare Their Companies For The Downturn and Why Now Is A Good Time to Be Contrarian and Invest In Consumer
Nov 15, 2019
Insight
E-commerce spent a decade optimizing discovery but neglected transaction innovation
“Consumers have spent the last 10 years optimizing for discovery. We've put a lot of money into advertising, you know, Google and the Facebook business models and Instagram and getting people to click and go Go visit a site and look at a product, but there hasn…”
Dom Holland Nov 15, 2019 ▶ 11:57 20VC: Why Speed Is The Biggest Differentiator a Founder Can Have, How To Hire Seasoned Tier 1 Talent To An Early Stage Startup & How To Start, Scale and Manage Remote Teams with Domm Holland, Founder & CEO @ Fast
Nov 25, 2019 bearish
Assertion Supported
Every digital ad platform update makes user acquisition more expensive
“There's never been a single update in digital advertising that has made buying cheaper. The advertising algorithms on these major platforms like Facebook and Google are getting hyper-efficient, and every update just makes them more expensive.”
Josh Buckley Nov 25, 2019 ▶ 19:10 20VC: Why The Best Entrepreneurs Are Cockroaches, What Everyone Underestimates About Customer Acquisition & What You Don't But Need To Know About Payback Periods with Josh Buckley, Founder & Chairman @ Mino Games
Nov 25, 2019 negative
Assertion Contradicted
Digital advertising CPMs compound at approximately 40% per year
“The second force at play is essentially the market-wide, the CPMs are just compounding. The number we've seen is about 40% a year, and that's just because of a number of factors around the algorithms of new competitors coming into the market.”
Josh Buckley Nov 25, 2019 ▶ 16:35 20VC: Why The Best Entrepreneurs Are Cockroaches, What Everyone Underestimates About Customer Acquisition & What You Don't But Need To Know About Payback Periods with Josh Buckley, Founder & Chairman @ Mino Games
Jan 17, 2020
Insight
Generational tech giants become distribution channels rather than relying on them
“Yeah, honestly, the biggest and best companies ever, you know, generational businesses today, the Cisco's, Facebook's, Apple's, Amazon's of the world, they don't rely on those channels very much. Like, in fact, they do become those channels.”
Sumit Gajri Jan 17, 2020 ▶ 28:04 20VC: Portfolio Construction, Optimising SPVs, Opportunity Investing "Between Rounds", Being Distribution-Centric Over Product-Centric and Capital Concentration Within Funds With Sumeet Gajri, Chief Strategy Officer @ Carta
Jan 27, 2020 neutral
Assertion Partly supported
Stebbings: 43% of venture dollars go directly to Facebook, Google, and Amazon
“I think it's 43%, according to Clearbank. I might have to check that, but I believe 43% of venture dollars goes directly back to Facebook, Google, and Amazon, as a fun fact.”
Harry Stebbings Jan 27, 2020 ▶ 22:00 20VC: Moxxie Ventures' Katie Stanton on What It Takes To Raise A First Time Fund As A Solo GP, The Entrance of Multi-Stage Funds Into Seed Rounds and The Inverse Relationship of Those That Fund Diverse Managers and Those That Say They Do
Feb 14, 2020 bearish
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Digital ad duopoly will persist indefinitely without data monopoly intervention
“I think there needs to be something to be done about the data monopolies that underlie the duopoly. And unless something is done to kind of deconstruct that data monopoly, then this will persist ad infinitum because of the network effects involved.”
Gabriel Weinberg Feb 14, 2020 ▶ 10:13 20VC: How Founders Should Think Through Distribution and Customer Acquisition Today, The Challenges of the Digital Advertising Duopoly Currently & How To Structure Company Post Mortems Effectively with Gabriel Weinberg, Founder & CEO @ DuckDuckGo
May 18, 2020 neutral
Insight
Helmer: First-mover status is not synonymous with true strategic invention
“The fact that MySpace came before Facebook doesn't in the slightest in the way I think about creation diminish the creative act of all the things that Zuckerberg and others at Facebook have done to make Facebook a great company. So first mover and invention to…”
Hamilton Helmer May 18, 2020 ▶ 14:43 20VC: 7 Powers: The Foundations of Business Strategy: Deconstructing Economies of Scale, How To Assess True Market Size, Assessing Risk vs Uncertainty, What "Brand As Power" Really Means with Hamilton Helmer, Managing Partner and Chief Investment Offi
May 18, 2020 positive
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Helmer: The specific economic powers behind Apple, Amazon, Google, and Netflix
“So Facebook, obviously, network economies. Apple is, they're a variety. Brand switching costs, scale. Amazon is primarily scale. Netflix is primarily scale. Google is probably network economies.”
Hamilton Helmer May 18, 2020 ▶ 31:06 20VC: 7 Powers: The Foundations of Business Strategy: Deconstructing Economies of Scale, How To Assess True Market Size, Assessing Risk vs Uncertainty, What "Brand As Power" Really Means with Hamilton Helmer, Managing Partner and Chief Investment Offi
Jun 22, 2020 positive
Insight
Wilkinson: Direct customer relationships eliminate Google and Facebook platform risk
“In a technology business, there's no middleman, so there's no Google or Facebook risk. There's no algorithm between Us and the community or the customer.”
Andrew Wilkinson Jun 22, 2020 ▶ 10:16 20VC: Andrew Wilkinson on Building The Berkshire Hathway of Tech, Sustainable vs Unsustainable Growth and The Relationship Between Money and Freedom
Jul 10, 2020 negative
Opinion
Mather: Media companies should pay Facebook and Google, not demand payouts
“We should be paying Facebook and Google as media companies, not the other way around. If you can't make your business thrive in this world where Facebook and Google exist, that's on you.”
Alex Mather Jul 10, 2020 ▶ 27:57 20VC: The Future of Subscription Media, Why Startups Need To Stop Blaming Facebook and Google & How Founders Should Think Through Customer Acquisition Channel Dependencies with Alex Mather, Founder & CEO @ The Athletic
Jul 10, 2020 negative
Opinion
Mather: Social media platforms are an unbelievable negative for news consumption
“I think these platforms are a unbelievable negative for how people consume news for all the obvious reasons”
Alex Mather Jul 10, 2020 ▶ 34:49 20VC: The Future of Subscription Media, Why Startups Need To Stop Blaming Facebook and Google & How Founders Should Think Through Customer Acquisition Channel Dependencies with Alex Mather, Founder & CEO @ The Athletic
Jul 10, 2020 bullish
Disclosure
Mather: Paid Facebook acquisition works for subscription media, not ad models
“Frankly, the CAC has been very workable. When you're a subscription business, you know, you're generating revenue off your subscribers. And so it works for us. It may not work if you're an advertising driven business, but absolutely works for us.”
Alex Mather Jul 10, 2020 ▶ 30:41 20VC: The Future of Subscription Media, Why Startups Need To Stop Blaming Facebook and Google & How Founders Should Think Through Customer Acquisition Channel Dependencies with Alex Mather, Founder & CEO @ The Athletic
Jul 13, 2020
Prediction Open · timeframe Jul 2023
Palihapitiya predicts Facebook will acquire politically segmented platforms
“So I suspect what happens at Facebook specifically is you'll have certain properties that are much more right-leaning or libertarian, if you will, and other properties that are much more left-leaning. And I think that that's probably how for them to maintain m…”
Chamath Palihapitiya Jul 13, 2020 ▶ 12:14 20VC: Chamath Palihapitiya on Why IPOs and Direct Listings Are Broken, Turning Social Capital Into A Combination of Berkshire Hathaway, Koch Industries and The Red Cross, Why Forecasts Are Worthless, What Creates True Defensibility & Why You Have To Be Pr
Jul 13, 2020
Assertion Supported
Palihapitiya: Facebook's early growth team underestimated ultimate scale by 10x
“When we were trying to project the impact of some of the things that we did, we were frankly off by an order of magnitude. We thought success would be getting the product to a hundred million users plus. And lo and behold, the product now touches three billion…”
Chamath Palihapitiya Jul 13, 2020 ▶ 7:17 20VC: Chamath Palihapitiya on Why IPOs and Direct Listings Are Broken, Turning Social Capital Into A Combination of Berkshire Hathaway, Koch Industries and The Red Cross, Why Forecasts Are Worthless, What Creates True Defensibility & Why You Have To Be Pr
Jul 20, 2020 bearish
Opinion
Steve Blank: Facebook is the most likely entity to destroy democracy
“But of all the things that are probably going to destroy a democracy, it happens to be Facebook.”
Steve Blank Jul 20, 2020 ▶ 30:04 20VC: Steve Blank on Why The Startup Ecosystem is Partially A Ponzi Scheme, 3 Things That Determine Startup Survival in a COVID World & Facebook: Platform vs Publisher and Where Does Their Responsibility Lie?
Aug 21, 2020 negative
Insight
Standard growth playbooks fail on company-specific retention issues
“The tools that you have are probably good to inform 80% of your decision, but there's going to be a situation in which only you can actually come up with the infrastructure And the tooling to understand your problem. You're not going to be able to solve that p…”
Ben Rubin Aug 21, 2020 ▶ 9:14 20VC: Biggest Lessons From Scaling Houseparty To Millions of Users, Why Today's Metrics Are Insufficient To Determine Product Success & What Breaks with Scale From Team To Product with Ben Rubin, Co-Founder @ /talk & Houseparty
Oct 12, 2020 negative
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Social network Genie failed because Facebook expanded into users over 30
“The thesis behind Jeannie was that there would be a social network for people above 30. Unfortunately, Facebook Expanded into that segment. So that didn't work out.”
George Zachary Oct 12, 2020 ▶ 16:39 20VC: CRV's George Zachary on His Relationship To Money and How it has Changed Over Time, Why The Best Founders Have Often Experienced Parental or Home Instability and The Stories Behind Investing in Unicorns; PillPack, Yammer and Udacity
Oct 12, 2020 negative
Opinion
Venture capital fund sizes grew too large following Google and Facebook
“So I think in terms of fund size and returns, I do think fund sizes have gotten too large, and it really took off after Google and predominantly after Facebook.”
George Zachary Oct 12, 2020 ▶ 14:29 20VC: CRV's George Zachary on His Relationship To Money and How it has Changed Over Time, Why The Best Founders Have Often Experienced Parental or Home Instability and The Stories Behind Investing in Unicorns; PillPack, Yammer and Udacity
Oct 26, 2020 positive
Disclosure
Mike Vernal Brought Facebook's 'Check-Ins' Practice to Sequoia Capital
“Our get-togethers as an investor team, we start off with something called check-ins, which is something that Mike Vernal brought to us. It was something that the team had done at Facebook”
Roelof Botha Oct 26, 2020 ▶ 32:24 20VC: Sequoia's Roelof Botha on His Biggest Lessons Working Alongside Don Valentine, Mike Moritz and Doug Leone, Leading Sequoia's US Business and What Sequoia Do To Retain Their Edge at the Top & The Crucible Moments That Define Startup Success
Nov 23, 2020 negative
Assertion Supported
Facebook cutting Pinterest off its newsfeed shifted growth from exponential to linear
“I remember early on at Pinterest, there was a time when Facebook acquired Instagram. We were both growing exponentially. Pinterest and Instagram were growing exponentially at the time. They acquired Instagram, and then they shut Pinterest off the newsfeed. So …”
Sarah Tavel Nov 23, 2020 ▶ 7:33 20VC: Benchmark's Sarah Tavel on Why Chasing GMV Will Lead To The Wrong Direction, The 2 Crucial Tipping Points For Marketplace Adoption, Why UGC Plays Are Like Marketplaces & How To Determine Between Existential and Non-Existential Risk
Jan 18, 2021 bearish
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Silverman: E-commerce will consolidate into a tiny handful of winning platforms
“I find that thesis exceptionally unlikely. The brain can only remember a couple of brands, and so I think the world is consolidating around Fewer and fewer places to buy things online. I mean, if you're a tiny independent shop, you're going to recount on Googl…”
Josh Silverman Jan 18, 2021 ▶ 40:56 20VC: Etsy CEO, Josh Silverman on 2 Defining Traits of Great Leadership, The Danger of Attaching Happiness To Milestones, How To Structure Teams To Optimise for Experimentation and Agility &Whether You Learn More From Success Than Failure
Feb 4, 2021 neutral
Assertion Supported
Peter Thiel invested $500,000 for a 10% ownership stake in Facebook
“Peter ended up investing half a million dollars for like, 10% of the company.”
Justin Fishner-Wolfson Feb 4, 2021 ▶ 14:26 20VC: Why VCs Should Care More About Cost of Capital and Less About Ownership, Investing Lessons from working with Peter Thiel at Founders Fund, Why Liquidity Aligns Incentives Between Founders and Investors & Why It Is The Last Double That Matters in Ven
Feb 24, 2021 positive
Assertion Not publicly verifiable
Snapchat Became the Third Most Popular App in Norway in 2012
“In fact, it had become the number three most, most popular app in Norway at that time, so ahead of Instagram, ahead of Facebook, and so forth.”
Jeremy Liew Feb 24, 2021 ▶ 13:22 20VC: The Snapchat Memo: Lightspeed's Jeremy Liew on The 4 Key Elements To Consider When Evaluating A Consumer Social Product, What is Good/Great/World Class For Retention, Usage and Downloads in Consumer Social Today & The Core Insight Development of Eva
Feb 24, 2021
Insight
Young Women Are the Primary Early Adopters for Social Platforms
“Whether it be Facebook or Instagram or Pinterest or Vine or Tumblr back in the day or TikTok, you know, it's always been young women who've been that first set of early adopters”
Jeremy Liew Feb 24, 2021 ▶ 11:22 20VC: The Snapchat Memo: Lightspeed's Jeremy Liew on The 4 Key Elements To Consider When Evaluating A Consumer Social Product, What is Good/Great/World Class For Retention, Usage and Downloads in Consumer Social Today & The Core Insight Development of Eva
Feb 24, 2021 neutral
Assertion Partly supported
Top Social Platforms Were All Founded by People in Their Early Twenties
“If you look at Snap, if you look at Vine, if you look at Facebook, if you look at Instagram, if you look at Tumblr, they were all started by people who were, you know, in their early twenties.”
Jeremy Liew Feb 24, 2021 ▶ 21:06 20VC: The Snapchat Memo: Lightspeed's Jeremy Liew on The 4 Key Elements To Consider When Evaluating A Consumer Social Product, What is Good/Great/World Class For Retention, Usage and Downloads in Consumer Social Today & The Core Insight Development of Eva
Feb 24, 2021 positive
Assertion Supported
Snapchat Stories Became the Dominant Format Across All Social Networks
“And with that one insight, starting from first principles, thinking about how people interact with each other, he has changed the course of all social networks, because you can't find, you know, whether it's Twitter, or LinkedIn, or, you know, obviously, Whats…”
Jeremy Liew Feb 24, 2021 ▶ 27:01 20VC: The Snapchat Memo: Lightspeed's Jeremy Liew on The 4 Key Elements To Consider When Evaluating A Consumer Social Product, What is Good/Great/World Class For Retention, Usage and Downloads in Consumer Social Today & The Core Insight Development of Eva
Feb 24, 2021 negative
Assertion Not checkable as stated
The Dominant VC Narrative in 2012 Was That Consumer Social Was Dead
“And I think you also have to bear in mind that in 2012, the dominant narrative was that social was dead. Facebook and Instagram had run the table like there were no more new opportunities in social anymore.”
Jeremy Liew Feb 24, 2021 ▶ 16:55 20VC: The Snapchat Memo: Lightspeed's Jeremy Liew on The 4 Key Elements To Consider When Evaluating A Consumer Social Product, What is Good/Great/World Class For Retention, Usage and Downloads in Consumer Social Today & The Core Insight Development of Eva
Mar 22, 2021 negative
Opinion
Fried says being Meta CEO is the worst job on Earth
“I can't imagine anyone would want to trade places with Mark Zuckerberg right now. So, like, that must just be the worst job on the planet, actually. Even though he has so much power, it must be a terrible job.”
Jason Fried Mar 22, 2021 ▶ 13:37 20VC: Basecamp CEO Jason Fried on His Relationship To Risk, Money, Vulnerability and Self-Doubt, Fantasising About Being Fired, How To Optimise Decision-Making and Minimising Regret
Mar 24, 2021 negative
Insight
Levine: Publicizing Early VC Funding Rounds Hurts Long-Term Startup Prospects
“A lot of people, particularly around their early financings, like to go tell the world about it. It's validation. If nothing else, it's nice to have your mom read about you in TechCrunch. But the truth is, that does almost no value. It adds no value to your co…”
Jeremy Levine Mar 24, 2021 ▶ 37:33 20VC: The Pinterest Memo: Bessemer's Jeremy Levine on The Secret To Success within User Generated Content Plays, Where Most Investors Make Mistakes When Analysing Consumer Social and How The Pinterest Deal Wouldn't Have Happened without a Diverse Partners
Mar 26, 2021 positive
Disclosure
Nubank funded zero-fee products by reallocating marketing budgets from Google and Facebook
“We always, since the beginning said, we'll focus on building the absolutely best product that we can have the best experience and trying to, instead of investing money in marketing and giving that money to Google and Facebook, we'll leave those money in the po…”
David Vélez Mar 26, 2021 ▶ 19:11 20VC: Nubank CEO David Velez on Scaling Nubank to a $25BN Company, Why What Makes a Great Founder Does Not Make a Great CEO & The Responsibility Framework and How Leaders Can Use It To Drive Efficiency
Apr 19, 2021
Assertion Partly supported
LinkedIn, Facebook, and Roblox took between 8 and 17 years to IPO
“LinkedIn was eight to 10 years to going public. Facebook was 10 to 12. You know, Roblox, 17 years.”
David Sze Apr 19, 2021 ▶ 14:41 20VC: Greylock's David Sze on His Biggest Lessons Working with Mark Zuckerberg and Reid Hoffman, The Rise of Pre-Emptive Rounds, How To Think Through Price Discipline Today and How Truly Strong Venture Partnerships Function
Apr 19, 2021
Assertion Supported
Greylock's $500M Facebook valuation check faced intense internal and external criticism
“Facebook was very controversial, both internally and externally at Greylock when it was announced, because we invested at a five hundred million plus pre and wrote one of the biggest Checks that Gerlach had ever written at that time, and that was considered in…”
David Sze Apr 19, 2021 ▶ 9:24 20VC: Greylock's David Sze on His Biggest Lessons Working with Mark Zuckerberg and Reid Hoffman, The Rise of Pre-Emptive Rounds, How To Think Through Price Discipline Today and How Truly Strong Venture Partnerships Function
Sep 22, 2021 negative
Assertion Partly supported
Casey Winters: Facebook Open Graph changes temporarily killed Pinterest's viral user acquisition
“When Facebook changed the way the open graph worked, all of a sudden we stopped getting any new users.”
Casey Winters Sep 22, 2021 ▶ 30:47 Welcome 20Growth: How To Hire a Head of Growth? What are Signs of World-Class Talent? How To Structure the Process? How To Onboard Growth Teams? The Relationship Between Head of Growth and CEO and more with Casey Winters, Chief Product Officer @ Eventbrit
Sep 22, 2021 negative
Insight
Casey Winters: Enterprise SaaS companies should not copy Facebook's growth strategy
“So much of this is context-specific, and so few people in the startup community know even which context they're in. So they might, oh, I read Facebook does it this way, and it's like, great, you're an enterprise SaaS company. What Facebook does has, like, no m…”
Casey Winters Sep 22, 2021 ▶ 35:01 Welcome 20Growth: How To Hire a Head of Growth? What are Signs of World-Class Talent? How To Structure the Process? How To Onboard Growth Teams? The Relationship Between Head of Growth and CEO and more with Casey Winters, Chief Product Officer @ Eventbrit
Oct 5, 2021
Disclosure
Levy had a handshake deal to invest in Facebook at $5B valuation
“I had a full shot on goal, ready to go, handshake deal to invest in Facebook early on, which doesn't sound that early, but at a five billion dollar value.”
Anton Levy Oct 5, 2021 ▶ 35:51 20VC: The Two Largest Changes in the Investing Market Today, Why The Scarce Resource in Venture is Access & Why Investors Are Acting Mostly Rational and Upside Scenario Planning Needs To Change with Anton Levy, Co-President @ General Atlantic
Oct 11, 2021 negative
Opinion
Sacca considers Facebook to be a cancer
“Yeah, I think Facebook is a cancer”
Chris Sacca Oct 11, 2021 ▶ 1:06:05 20VC: Chris Sacca on Coming Out of Retirement To Unf**k The Planet with Lowercarbon, How Chris Evaluates His Relationship To Money Today, Why We Have Bred a Generation of Ass**** Kids, Do VCs Provide Any Real Value and The True Unfiltered Opinion on Faceb
Oct 18, 2021
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Fidji Simo: Her product launches averaged four to five iterations
“And a lot of the products that I launched, we went through, you know, four, five iterations of the product before we got the user need right.”
Fidji Simo Oct 18, 2021 ▶ 14:10 20VC: Instacart CEO Fidji Simo on Why You Need Sponsors Not Mentors, Where Management Skills Align with Good Parenting & The First 100 Days as CEO at Instacart; The Challenges, The Surprises and The Next Chapter
Oct 18, 2021
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Simo: Leading Facebook app was like managing 25 wrapped companies
“Even at Facebook, when I was leading the Facebook app, you know, it's fundamentally 25 companies like wrapped into one.”
Fidji Simo Oct 18, 2021 ▶ 16:28 20VC: Instacart CEO Fidji Simo on Why You Need Sponsors Not Mentors, Where Management Skills Align with Good Parenting & The First 100 Days as CEO at Instacart; The Challenges, The Surprises and The Next Chapter
Oct 18, 2021 negative
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Simo Led Facebook Mobile Monetization When Consensus Said It Was Impossible
“I was put in charge of monetizing mobile kind of right after the IPO when no one thought that Facebook could monetize mobile.”
Fidji Simo Oct 18, 2021 ▶ 9:34 20VC: Instacart CEO Fidji Simo on Why You Need Sponsors Not Mentors, Where Management Skills Align with Good Parenting & The First 100 Days as CEO at Instacart; The Challenges, The Surprises and The Next Chapter
Oct 18, 2021 positive
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Simo: Mark Zuckerberg's Decision-Making Was Unaffected by Facebook's IPO
“And I think, you know, I went through this transition at Facebook when we went IPO and I had a great role model in Mark where, you know, his decision-making wasn't affected by being public. It was really all about how do we sell people best and how do we sell …”
Fidji Simo Oct 18, 2021 ▶ 28:53 20VC: Instacart CEO Fidji Simo on Why You Need Sponsors Not Mentors, Where Management Skills Align with Good Parenting & The First 100 Days as CEO at Instacart; The Challenges, The Surprises and The Next Chapter
Oct 18, 2021
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Simo: Instacart CEO role requires far more external focus than Facebook
“That's actually a kind of a big difference from my prior role, which was a lot more internally focused. This role is a lot more externally focused”
Fidji Simo Oct 18, 2021 ▶ 27:47 20VC: Instacart CEO Fidji Simo on Why You Need Sponsors Not Mentors, Where Management Skills Align with Good Parenting & The First 100 Days as CEO at Instacart; The Challenges, The Surprises and The Next Chapter
Nov 15, 2021 positive
Assertion Supported
Thrive Capital Invested in Instagram Growth Round From $40M Fund
“The ambition of the team, which reached well beyond the forty million fund they had at the time would suggest. And even with that small fund, they were taking big swings, you know, be a big investor in a growth round in Instagram right before Facebook. Bought …”
Kareem Zaki Nov 15, 2021 ▶ 4:20 20VC: Thrive Capital's Kareem Zaki on The One Rule That Drives Investment Decision-Making and Focus at Thrive, Why Every Large Institution Will Enter Venture Capital Over the Next Decade and How To Create a Firm Culture That Attracts The Best Young Talent
Nov 17, 2021
Assertion Supported
One of Facebook's Best Early Growth Leaders Was a Physicist
“One of the best early growth leaders at Facebook was a physicist. He was trained as an experimental physicist.”
Andy Johns Nov 17, 2021 ▶ 9:40 20Growth: Top Growth Lessons from the Early Facebook, Twitter and Quora Days, The Most Important Question to Ask When Building Your Growth Team, How To Test For True Candidate Depth and Quality When Hiring for Growth with Andy Johns, Venture Partner @ Unu
Nov 17, 2021
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Chamath Palihapitiya Hired Andy Johns at Facebook Despite Being "Least Qualified"
“I was told I was the least qualified profile of everyone that had applied for this position, but that he appreciated the scrappy approach that I took to getting my career started.”
Andy Johns Nov 17, 2021 ▶ 3:45 20Growth: Top Growth Lessons from the Early Facebook, Twitter and Quora Days, The Most Important Question to Ask When Building Your Growth Team, How To Test For True Candidate Depth and Quality When Hiring for Growth with Andy Johns, Venture Partner @ Unu
Nov 22, 2021 negative
Opinion
Wei: Facebook's Friending Push Caused Long-Term News Feed Context Collapse
“If you think about Facebook encouraging people to follow everyone under the sun, That had huge downstream consequences for them in the, you know, types of context collapse that they're still struggling to deal with newsfeed.”
Eugene Wei Nov 22, 2021 ▶ 13:58 20VC: Eugene Wei on "Status as a Service", Why Networks Grow and Stop Growing, The Worst Design Choices Social Media Incumbents Have Made & The Next 10 Years of Media and the Metaverse
Nov 29, 2021 positive
Opinion
Foroughi: Facebook created the world's most elegant ad platform in 2014
“And at the same time, somewhere around 2014, Facebook became big on mobile, launched their ad platform, and really built maybe the world's most elegant advertising solution to the point where the recommendations were so powerful, they felt like content.”
Adam Foroughi Nov 29, 2021 ▶ 9:27 20VC: AppLovin's Co-Founder & CEO, Adam Foroughi on How AppLovin Might Be The Venture Capital Industry's Biggest Miss, How To Run a 1,000+ Organisation with Very Few Meetings & Balancing the Demands of Wall St with Long Term, Sustainable Growth
Nov 29, 2021 bullish
Prediction Didn’t hold up
Foroughi: AppLovin will become the third-largest digital ad marketplace
“Like if you just to size it, that's Facebook, Google one, two, or in whichever order I'd have to check, but that's the third biggest digital marketplace for advertising in terms of scale that will exist.”
Adam Foroughi Nov 29, 2021 ▶ 32:04 20VC: AppLovin's Co-Founder & CEO, Adam Foroughi on How AppLovin Might Be The Venture Capital Industry's Biggest Miss, How To Run a 1,000+ Organisation with Very Few Meetings & Balancing the Demands of Wall St with Long Term, Sustainable Growth
Dec 16, 2021
Assertion Supported
Facebook had 6,000 employees and 100 PMs in spring 2014
“This is about spring of 20 14. And when I joined Facebook, you know, I was, I think, one of a hundred PMs at that point. The company was only 6000 employees and they were still hiring in these kind of generalist pools.”
Bangaly Kaba Dec 16, 2021 ▶ 4:08 20Growth: The Biggest Growth Lessons from Leading Teams at Instagram & Instacart, How To Structure The Hiring Process for Growth Teams, How To Onboard Growth Reps Efficiently and The Relationship Between Growth and The Rest of the Org with Bangaly Kaba, H
Dec 16, 2021 negative
Assertion Supported
Instagram lacked basic registration flow data logging in 2016
“Even at the best companies, like when I joined Instagram, we literally did not have logging for all of the registration flow. It was incredible. We knew how many people started and how many people ended, but we did not know what was happening at every step of …”
Bangaly Kaba Dec 16, 2021 ▶ 19:48 20Growth: The Biggest Growth Lessons from Leading Teams at Instagram & Instacart, How To Structure The Hiring Process for Growth Teams, How To Onboard Growth Reps Efficiently and The Relationship Between Growth and The Rest of the Org with Bangaly Kaba, H
Jan 14, 2022 positive
Insight
Devin Finzer: NFTs capture value for creators unlike rent-extracting Web2 social platforms
“I think long run, you know, this does open up the playing field for really anyone to like directly tap into a fan base or people who want to support them. So I think long-term you're talking about kind of brand new business models and the different model than …”
Devin Finzer Jan 14, 2022 ▶ 25:17 20VC: Opensea Founder, Devin Finzer on Scaling GMV from $150M to $3BN in 18 Months, How Brands and Celebrities Will Harness NFTs To Change Their Business, The Impact of NFTs on Gaming & What is in Devin's Metamask Wallet?!
Jan 19, 2022 positive
Insight
Rob Schutz: Early startups should max working channels before diversifying
“It's actually one piece of advice I give to early stage founders, which is like, don't worry about diversifying. Like, this is maybe controversial in this day and age. If Facebook is working for you, and your LTV to CAC is good, and your payback is good, crank…”
Rob Schutz Jan 19, 2022 ▶ 7:26 20Growth: The Biggest Lie in Startup Growth and Marketing, Why You Do Not Need To Diversify Customer Acquisition Channels in the Early Days & When and How To Build Your Growth Team with Rob Schutz, Co-Founder and Chief Growth Officer @ Ro
Jan 20, 2022 negative
Opinion
Chris Sacca calls Facebook a "cancer" and claims its leadership knows it
“Yeah, I think Facebook is a cancer, and they know it.”
Chris Sacca Jan 20, 2022 ▶ 1:14:57 Chris Sacca's True Unfiltered Opinion on Facebook and Softbank | Full Interview · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Jan 28, 2022 positive
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Sandell: Robinhood poached executives from Facebook more often than losing to them
“And when we would talk about how hiring was going for this position or that position, it was more likely that they were poaching some senior executive from Facebook rather than losing a competition to get somebody from Facebook.”
Scott Sandell Jan 28, 2022 ▶ 20:15 20VC: The Robinhood Memo: The Early Metrics That Showed Robinhood was a Breakout Company, The Cost Structure of Robinhood in the Early Days and Why it is a More Efficient Business than eTrade & How Vlad Has Developed as a Leader Over Time with Rick Yang a
Feb 16, 2022
Assertion Partly supported
Ed Baker: Facebook and Uber growth leaders reported directly to CEO
“And in both of those cases, they had separate growth teams where the growth leader reported directly to the CEO. And these teams were structured cross-functionally.”
Ed Baker Feb 16, 2022 ▶ 15:13 20Growth: Five Key Functions of a Growth Team, The Biggest Lessons Starting Uber's Growth Team and Scaling Facebook's, How To Structure The Hiring Process for Growth and What Separates Good From Great in Growth Leaders with Ed Baker, Former VP of Growth @
Feb 16, 2022
Assertion Supported
Ed Baker: Facebook's North Star metric was monthly active users
“Well, so at Facebook, when I was there, the North Star metric was monthly active users.”
Ed Baker Feb 16, 2022 ▶ 9:50 20Growth: Five Key Functions of a Growth Team, The Biggest Lessons Starting Uber's Growth Team and Scaling Facebook's, How To Structure The Hiring Process for Growth and What Separates Good From Great in Growth Leaders with Ed Baker, Former VP of Growth @
Feb 16, 2022 positive
Assertion Supported
Reframing invites as announcements enabled Facebook to surpass Mixi in Japan
“Japan went from one of our slowest growing countries to one of our fastest growing countries. Shortly after that, we surpassed our local competitor in Japan.”
Ed Baker Feb 16, 2022 ▶ 7:03 20Growth: Five Key Functions of a Growth Team, The Biggest Lessons Starting Uber's Growth Team and Scaling Facebook's, How To Structure The Hiring Process for Growth and What Separates Good From Great in Growth Leaders with Ed Baker, Former VP of Growth @
Mar 16, 2022
Insight
Rachitsky: Big Tech PMs often fail when transitioning to startups
“And similarly, if your PM's been a PM at like Google or Facebook, they're just like really good at PMing at Google and Facebook. There's like a very specific way of building product at these big companies, and you shouldn't assume that they're going to be good…”
Lenny Rachitsky Mar 16, 2022 ▶ 21:04 20 Product: Lenny Rachitsky on The 3 Key Roles of the Product Manager, 5 Skills All The Best PMs Have, When To Hire Your First PM, How to Structure the Hiring Process for PMs & What Leaders Can Do to Make Their PMs Successful
Mar 23, 2022 negative
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Big Tech Product Managers Focus Too Heavily on Strategy and Numbers
“In terms of hiring PMs, the biggest pool of PMs today are coming from like the fan companies, Facebook, Google, et cetera. And they tend to be Strategy and numbers focused.”
Grant LaFontaine Mar 23, 2022 ▶ 6:57 20VC: Startups Fail Because They Do Not Take Enough Risk, Why A/B Testing is Inefficient and Slows You Down, Why It is Impossible To Hire Good PMs so Stop Trying & 3 Key Signals The Best Engineers Present with Grant LaFontaine, Founder & CEO @ Whatnot
Mar 25, 2022
Insight
Rob Schutz: Early-stage startups should not diversify channels prematurely
“Don't worry about diversifying. This is maybe controversial this day and age, but like, if Facebook is working for you, and your LTV to CAC is good, and your payback is good, crank it. Do it as much as you can, because That might not be available to you next w…”
Rob Schutz Mar 25, 2022 ▶ 23:49 20VC The Memo: Inside the Growth Engines of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Instacart with the Growth Leaders Who Built Them; How Instagram Went from 440M to 1BN, How Twitter Changing Their Signup Flow was a Needlemover and How Removing Card Payment Requ
Apr 6, 2022 positive
Disclosure
Creating a dedicated login team inside Facebook's growth org drove massive impact
“One of the teams, and it took us a long time, honestly, Facebook, to, like, really figure out that we needed to have an explicit login team inside growth, but when we did, it was fantastically impactful.”
Brian Hale Apr 6, 2022 ▶ 16:28 20 Growth: Why Retention Defines Product Market Fit, What is Good Retention Levels Today, The Most Counterintuitive Elements of Product and Growth & Why So Many Startups Mess Up Hiring For Growth Teams with Brian Hale, Head of Consumer Product & Growth @
Apr 6, 2022 positive
Assertion Supported
Facebook allowed its growth teams to modify other departments' codebases
“So it really worked at Facebook pretty well because there was a culture that other teams were allowed to touch other people's code.”
Brian Hale Apr 6, 2022 ▶ 25:18 20 Growth: Why Retention Defines Product Market Fit, What is Good Retention Levels Today, The Most Counterintuitive Elements of Product and Growth & Why So Many Startups Mess Up Hiring For Growth Teams with Brian Hale, Head of Consumer Product & Growth @
Apr 6, 2022 positive
Assertion Partly supported
Facebook's active advertiser base grew hundreds of percent in one year
“And lo and behold, it did, and we were able to massively increase the number of active advertisers, like, from almost no growth to multiple hundred percent growth year on year after one year.”
Brian Hale Apr 6, 2022 ▶ 12:59 20 Growth: Why Retention Defines Product Market Fit, What is Good Retention Levels Today, The Most Counterintuitive Elements of Product and Growth & Why So Many Startups Mess Up Hiring For Growth Teams with Brian Hale, Head of Consumer Product & Growth @
Apr 6, 2022
Disclosure
Facebook specifically recruited product managers who knew SQL for growth roles
“When we look for product growth people at Facebook, we tried to find people who knew SQL. You would try to get PMs who know SQL, and you would try to get a lot of data scientists and data engineers in these teams.”
Brian Hale Apr 6, 2022 ▶ 18:08 20 Growth: Why Retention Defines Product Market Fit, What is Good Retention Levels Today, The Most Counterintuitive Elements of Product and Growth & Why So Many Startups Mess Up Hiring For Growth Teams with Brian Hale, Head of Consumer Product & Growth @
Apr 6, 2022 negative
Insight
Startups must not build dedicated growth teams before finding product-market fit
“In the very, very early days, the first thing you need to know about having a growth team, I feel really strongly about this, you should not have a growth team set up the way Facebook does or conceptualize it that way until you have product market fit.”
Brian Hale Apr 6, 2022 ▶ 8:21 20 Growth: Why Retention Defines Product Market Fit, What is Good Retention Levels Today, The Most Counterintuitive Elements of Product and Growth & Why So Many Startups Mess Up Hiring For Growth Teams with Brian Hale, Head of Consumer Product & Growth @
Apr 6, 2022 positive
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Changing Facebook's ad button to 'Boost Post' increased purchases by 17%
“So then we changed it to say boost post, and that increased dramatically. I think I said this publicly so I can talk about it. It increased people buying ads by 17%. So just changing the word on the button was a 17% increase.”
Brian Hale Apr 6, 2022 ▶ 29:03 20 Growth: Why Retention Defines Product Market Fit, What is Good Retention Levels Today, The Most Counterintuitive Elements of Product and Growth & Why So Many Startups Mess Up Hiring For Growth Teams with Brian Hale, Head of Consumer Product & Growth @
Apr 6, 2022 positive
Insight
Facebook's biggest innovations were organizational rather than product features
“A lot of the things that Facebook did that really, really mattered were like sort of organizational innovations or inventions about how the company was set up.”
Brian Hale Apr 6, 2022 ▶ 6:16 20 Growth: Why Retention Defines Product Market Fit, What is Good Retention Levels Today, The Most Counterintuitive Elements of Product and Growth & Why So Many Startups Mess Up Hiring For Growth Teams with Brian Hale, Head of Consumer Product & Growth @
Apr 8, 2022 negative
Opinion
Liaw: Regulatory fear has chilled M&A for Meta, Google, Amazon, and Apple
“I think that probably the bigger challenge is for a lot of the biggest mega cap tech companies, fear of regulation and regulatory authority intervention is probably causing a lot of them to say, this is probably not worth our time, right? So it's kind of a fun…”
Eric Liaw Apr 8, 2022 ▶ 11:53 20VC: What Happens To Growth Rounds in this New Environment? Where is the Funding Crunch? How Does This Impact M&A and Going Public? How do Crossover Funds Respond? What Does it Mean For Early Stage and more with Eric Liaw, General Partner @ IVP
May 6, 2022
Disclosure
Lemkin: Most of my top investments lacked blue-chip tech pedigree
“I would say most of my best investments did not, and those have not seen the same level of pre-seed inflation, but they have seen enough that can break the seed model.”
Jason Lemkin May 6, 2022 ▶ 28:02 20VC: Why the Traditional Seed Fund Model No Longer Works, Why Multi-Stage Funds Investing at Seed Bring Signaling Risk but also Less Pressure, The One Criteria All Potential Sales Hires Need to Have and The Clear Signs of 10x Sales Hires with Jason Lemki
May 18, 2022 negative
Insight
Recent Facebook growth veterans often lack zero-to-one startup scaling experience
“Like if you were at Facebook in the last five years, you might not have learned how to do zero to one growth. You might've learned how to do a hundred to a million growth, much higher level.”
Darius Contractor May 18, 2022 ▶ 28:41 20Growth: Five Signs of Top Growth Talent and How to Detect Them, How to Structure and Conduct the Most Efficient Customer Discovery Process & The Framework to Determine Your North Star and When To Change it with Darius Contractor, Former VP Growth @ Airt
May 18, 2022 positive
Opinion
Facebook, Pinterest, and LinkedIn are the premier tech growth talent pools
“In general, I think people at Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn, a few other companies maybe, like, really do know growth. They know how to run these successive experiments. So all those companies, I think, have, like, really great growth culture where people have…”
Darius Contractor May 18, 2022 ▶ 29:32 20Growth: Five Signs of Top Growth Talent and How to Detect Them, How to Structure and Conduct the Most Efficient Customer Discovery Process & The Framework to Determine Your North Star and When To Change it with Darius Contractor, Former VP Growth @ Airt
May 18, 2022 positive
Opinion
Pinterest and Facebook possess the tech industry's best growth tracking infrastructure
“I think Pinterest has one of the best, like, systems of growth. A list of all the current growth experiments, you automatically run reports on it, etc. I think the only other company that really has that system is Facebook”
Darius Contractor May 18, 2022 ▶ 29:09 20Growth: Five Signs of Top Growth Talent and How to Detect Them, How to Structure and Conduct the Most Efficient Customer Discovery Process & The Framework to Determine Your North Star and When To Change it with Darius Contractor, Former VP Growth @ Airt
Jun 10, 2022
Disclosure
Early Facebook trashed its 2006 Davos invite, mistaking it for UC Davis
“We received an invitation from Davos and I think it was the year, And we all just trashed the invitation thinking it was an invitation from the University of Davies, not understanding the import of this invitation. And it's funny. And if you think about that, …”
Ruchi Sanghvi Jun 10, 2022 ▶ 58:54 Ruchi Sanghvi: My Job Interview with Mark Zuckerberg; Deep Dive on DAOs | 20VC #895 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Jun 10, 2022 positive
Opinion
Sanghvi: Mark Zuckerberg's incredible rate of learning is a developed muscle
“The thing that makes him so special is his rate of learning. The rate at which Mark absorbs information, processes information, and learns about different topics is just incredible. And, you know, he wasn't always like that. Like, everybody imagines, like, Mar…”
Ruchi Sanghvi Jun 10, 2022 ▶ 58:06 Ruchi Sanghvi: My Job Interview with Mark Zuckerberg; Deep Dive on DAOs | 20VC #895 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Jun 20, 2022 bullish
Disclosure
Gary Vee has never sold a single share of his Facebook stock
“I've never sold a share of Facebook since the day I invested almost 15 years ago.”
Gary Vaynerchuk Jun 20, 2022 ▶ 3:35 Gary Vee: My First 3 Angel Investments; Why I Changed My Mind on Facebook Video | 20VC #899 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Jun 20, 2022 positive
Disclosure
Gary Vee's first three angel investments were Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr
“The first three companies I invested in, in my entire life as an investor were Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr.”
Gary Vaynerchuk Jun 20, 2022 ▶ 3:22 Gary Vee: My First 3 Angel Investments; Why I Changed My Mind on Facebook Video | 20VC #899 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Jun 20, 2022 bullish
Assertion Partly supported
Gary Vee says post-iOS 14 ad pullbacks created organic arbitrage on Facebook
“I changed my mind on how big of a platform Facebook is. One of the coolest things for me right now is that I'm back into being obsessed with content on Facebook because the map of supply and demand of attention on it has flipped aggressively with iOS, 14 updat…”
Gary Vaynerchuk Jun 20, 2022 ▶ 30:39 Gary Vee: My First 3 Angel Investments; Why I Changed My Mind on Facebook Video | 20VC #899 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Jun 20, 2022 bullish
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Gary Vee invested his entire 20s savings into Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr
“Saving my money in my twenties And then deciding to spend all of it in a one year period on Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr based on at that .10 years of very hard work, diligence of saving and not wasting my money and looking for the opportunity to strike.”
Gary Vaynerchuk Jun 20, 2022 ▶ 6:42 Gary Vee: My First 3 Angel Investments; Why I Changed My Mind on Facebook Video | 20VC #899 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Jul 11, 2022 bullish
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Mullenweg: The web will become weirder and offer users more control
“So my hope in 20, twice having it over the next five years is that the web is a lot more creative, a lot weirder that people have a lot more control over it versus just being another profile on Twitter or Facebook and more fun.”
Matt Mullenweg Jul 11, 2022 ▶ 58:31 Matt Mullenweg: How I Founded WordPress; Storytelling Tips; How to Give Feedback | 20VC #905 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Jul 13, 2022 positive
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Levesque: Building Messenger Kids was his team's biggest win at Facebook
“I had a variety of teams at Facebook, but the one that was the biggest win for us was building messenger kids and engaging an entirely new segment of the population and by building this kind of safe family messaging product.”
Luc Levesque Jul 13, 2022 ▶ 6:13 Luc Levesque: The Biggest Mistakes Founders Make When Hiring for Growth | 20VC #906 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Jul 13, 2022 neutral
Assertion Partly supported
Levesque: Facebook's key growth metric was daily active engaged users
“For Facebook, it was daily active people engaged on the product”
Luc Levesque Jul 13, 2022 ▶ 9:12 Luc Levesque: The Biggest Mistakes Founders Make When Hiring for Growth | 20VC #906 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Jul 13, 2022
Insight
Harry Stebbings: Top founders seamlessly shift between high-level vision and operational details
“I think with founders, actually, for me, the best founders have the ability to move from the 5000 foot meta vision to like last Wednesday's Facebook ad spend and how it converted.”
Harry Stebbings Jul 13, 2022 ▶ 34:11 Luc Levesque: The Biggest Mistakes Founders Make When Hiring for Growth | 20VC #906 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Jul 13, 2022 neutral
Opinion
Levesque: Facebook growth hires often struggle without internal company scaffolding
“If this person's from Facebook, they'll have a very specific set of knowledge because they're supported with a lot of scaffolding at Facebook.”
Luc Levesque Jul 13, 2022 ▶ 15:42 Luc Levesque: The Biggest Mistakes Founders Make When Hiring for Growth | 20VC #906 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Aug 12, 2022 bullish
Insight
Claure: Entry valuation is irrelevant for companies targeting massive addressable markets
“The key is to determine in advance if it's a company where price matters or it doesn't. For some companies with an immense opportunity, think of Alibaba, think of Facebook, think of Google, think of Amazon, whatever. It was worth coming in at almost any price …”
Marcelo Claure Aug 12, 2022 ▶ 3:12 20VC: 13 of the Great Investing Minds on When to Pay Up vs When To Remain Disciplined and Walk Because the Price is too High: The Ultimate Guide to Price Sensitivity
Sep 7, 2022 negative
Insight
Mignano: Social graphs are commoditized and inefficient for content distribution
“The social graph, as I said, is completely commoditized. Now, every social product that comes out can instantly have a social graph just by ingesting your contacts list, right? So you and I meet on the street somewhere. You say, Hey, Mike, what's your phone nu…”
Mike Mignano Sep 7, 2022 ▶ 30:15 Michael Mignano: How I Founded Anchor; Why TikTok could be a $2 TRILLION Company | 20VC #923 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Sep 7, 2022 bullish
Opinion
Mignano: Bullish on tools giving creators direct business models outside algorithms
“And so I'm excited about platforms That enable influencers or creators to take control over their entire their entire business and not be reliant on algorithms and advertising that comes out of those algorithms to get paid because as we've seen now, Meta can j…”
Mike Mignano Sep 7, 2022 ▶ 37:30 Michael Mignano: How I Founded Anchor; Why TikTok could be a $2 TRILLION Company | 20VC #923 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Sep 7, 2022 neutral
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Mignano: Meta has equal chance to displace TikTok within 24 months
“I think Meta has just as good a chance as them or anyone else to displace them Over the next couple of years. So I think this battle sort of will be won over the next, let's call it, 24 months.”
Mike Mignano Sep 7, 2022 ▶ 33:40 Michael Mignano: How I Founded Anchor; Why TikTok could be a $2 TRILLION Company | 20VC #923 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Sep 7, 2022 bullish
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Mignano: Facebook's pivot to recommendation media creates room for new social giants
“And I think as a result, there's going to be sort of this vacuum of social experiences, true social experiences. And so I think if ever there was a time for a new startup to emerge, to create a great new groundbreaking social network or social experience, now …”
Mike Mignano Sep 7, 2022 ▶ 19:49 Michael Mignano: How I Founded Anchor; Why TikTok could be a $2 TRILLION Company | 20VC #923 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Sep 7, 2022 neutral
Insight
Mignano: Social networks need novel toolsets to delay incumbent copycats
“And so I think the key for a new social network to break out is it has to do something different That is hard for another platform to travel to, and arguably no platform did this better than TikTok, right? They built a new tool set which ended up creating a ne…”
Mike Mignano Sep 7, 2022 ▶ 22:46 Michael Mignano: How I Founded Anchor; Why TikTok could be a $2 TRILLION Company | 20VC #923 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Sep 21, 2022
Disclosure
Lieb: 20% of Bump app opens were accidental taps meant for Facebook
“We thought we were like hot shit because everybody's using our app, but turns out like 20% of the time it was accident. They didn't mean to use it.”
David Lieb Sep 21, 2022 ▶ 29:26 David Lieb: How I Founded Google Photos & Bump; Why I Left Google | 20VC #927 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Sep 23, 2022
Disclosure
Vasconcellos passed on Snapchat's seed round due to Facebook conflict concerns
“I'd say the biggest miss I had was not investing at the seed round of Snapchat... Facebook conflicts committee said, oh, and you guys can't invest this because it could potentially be competitive... We said, oh, this whole like disappearing messages thing does…”
Julio Vasconcellos Sep 23, 2022 ▶ 42:02 Julio Vasconcellos: Scaling to $100M and 1,200 Employees and then Cratering | 20VC #928 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Sep 23, 2022
Assertion Partly supported
Facebook had 1M Brazil users vs Orkut's 35M in early 2010
“Facebook had something around a million users at that time in Brazil, ah, and our biggest competitor, which was Google's social network, Orkut, had over thirty five million users.”
Julio Vasconcellos Sep 23, 2022 ▶ 2:35 Julio Vasconcellos: Scaling to $100M and 1,200 Employees and then Cratering | 20VC #928 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Oct 10, 2022 negative
Insight
Gerstner: The bottom 20-40% of tech and VC workforces dilute results
“I would say the vast majority of organizations, ok, and I'm talking from Facebook and Twitter, all the way down to, ah, GPs. They would be well served, right, to be much smaller, to be essentialists in the people that they have. Because it's very likely that y…”
Brad Gerstner Oct 10, 2022 ▶ 1:02:23 Brad Gerstner: How I Pick Companies; Lessons from Warren Buffet; Chamath vs Gurley | E935 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Oct 26, 2022 negative
Assertion Supported
Sahgal: Zynga spammed users with notifications until Facebook altered platform rules
“The worst habit I would say is we burnt out so many fucking channels. And what I mean by that is Facebook in the early days opened up notifications for the first time for developers. So you could, as a developer, just send literally hundreds of push notificati…”
Vaibhav Sahgal Oct 26, 2022 ▶ 6:53 Vaibhav Sahgal: How We Scaled Reddit to 55M Users; Lessons from Zynga | 20VC #942 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Nov 7, 2022 positive
Assertion Supported
Coinbase public status unlocked deals with BlackRock and Meta
“We've been able to close deals with, you know, BlackRock, the largest asset manager in the world, and, you know, Meta, formerly Facebook, like we're now, especially with our Coinbase cloud business and things like that, we're now able to power things with Fort…”
Brian Armstrong Nov 7, 2022 ▶ 23:12 Brian Armstrong: Coinbase’s Failed NFT Launch, Thoughts on SBF & FTX, Crypto Winter | 20VC #946 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Nov 9, 2022 positive
Disclosure
Hugo Barra: Oculus Quest achieved unprecedented user retention at launch
“One year later, after Oculus Go, we launched Oculus Quest, which was our second product, and that product delivered perfectly on those two user needs and had a terrific launch library. It was an instant success absolutely phenomenal retention. In fact, retenti…”
Hugo Barra Nov 9, 2022 ▶ 21:03 Hugo Barra: How I Built Hardware for Android, Xiaomi, and Oculus | 20VC #947 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Nov 9, 2022 positive
Opinion
Meta builds manager culture better than any other tech company
“I really do think that Facebook or Meta does an outstanding job of building manager culture better than anything I've seen or heard of in any company.”
Hugo Barra Nov 9, 2022 ▶ 9:47 Hugo Barra: How I Built Hardware for Android, Xiaomi, and Oculus | 20VC #947 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Nov 9, 2022 negative
Disclosure
Meta's Oculus Go failed due to atrocious user retention
“That product was called Oculus Go. It was a 200 dollar VR headset that was built to be kind of your everyday, you know, VR device, and it sold really well, but had absolutely atrocious retention, which means it obviously failed. And, you know, it was basically…”
Hugo Barra Nov 9, 2022 ▶ 20:13 Hugo Barra: How I Built Hardware for Android, Xiaomi, and Oculus | 20VC #947 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Nov 14, 2022 positive
Assertion Supported
Wood: Meta maintains 3B+ users and 67% DAU/MAU engagement ratio
“So daily average users over monthly average users, 67% hasn't changed. Has three billion plus users.”
Cathie Wood Nov 14, 2022 ▶ 50:31 Cathie Wood: Elon & Twitter; Why Facebook is a Value Stock Now; ARK's Performance | 20VC #949 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Dec 9, 2022 bullish
Assertion Partly supported
Pittman: iHeartMedia radio reaches 90% of Americans monthly
“Our radio group alone reaches 90% of Americans every month. Only two companies come close to that, and they don't surpass it. It's Facebook and Google. Everybody else, the biggest TV network in the US reaches about 35% of Americans. Biggest cable network reach…”
Bob Pittman Dec 9, 2022 ▶ 39:46 Bob Pittman: How I Went from Creator of MTV to CEO of iHeartMedia | 20VC #958 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Dec 16, 2022 positive
Disclosure
Partovi Secured Early Facebook Advisor Equity at a $10 Million Valuation
“I ended up becoming an advisor, which was actually slightly better than investing because I ended up getting in at the, at a ten million dollar valuation rather than a hundred mil valuation”
Hadi Partovi Dec 16, 2022 ▶ 16:50 Hadi Partovi: How I Became an Advisor to Mark Zuckerberg; Lessons from Steve Ballmer | 20VC #961 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Dec 16, 2022 neutral
Assertion Supported
Facebook Had Nine Employees When Accel Offered a $100 Million Valuation
“Facebook at this time was nine people. It was a nine person company. They were in a hundred different colleges and it was called the Facebook, not, it wasn't yet Facebook. And we met the day they got their term sheet from Excel you know, for the a hundred mill…”
Hadi Partovi Dec 16, 2022 ▶ 14:53 Hadi Partovi: How I Became an Advisor to Mark Zuckerberg; Lessons from Steve Ballmer | 20VC #961 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Dec 16, 2022 negative
Insight
Partovi: 'Move fast and break things' fails for multi-billion-dollar tech giants
“This works well, if you're small, the Facebook and you move fast and break things, you know, this idea of shoot first aim later that works well when the consequences are smaller or when you can undo the mistakes. Cause then you correct them. It doesn't work wh…”
Hadi Partovi Dec 16, 2022 ▶ 30:06 Hadi Partovi: How I Became an Advisor to Mark Zuckerberg; Lessons from Steve Ballmer | 20VC #961 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Jan 16, 2023 positive
Insight
Jordan: Startups must separate experimental marketing budgets from core spend
“I love the companies that have a, they segregate an experimental budget from their core, core acquisition budget, just to, because if you bundle them together, it, It's a barrier against experimentation. If you're constantly optimizing Google and Facebook, but…”
Jeff Jordan Jan 16, 2023 ▶ 38:16 a16z GP Jeff Jordan: The Ultimate Guide to Two-Sided Marketplaces | 20VC #966 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Jan 18, 2023
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Native gas station ads outperformed celebrity endorsements for Acorns' user acquisition
“We also do a bunch of like very native ads. Someone go to gas station and then just pump, pump gas and say acorns help them. Like the ordinary person gas station version works much better than a celebrity.”
Hila Qu Jan 18, 2023 ▶ 6:23 Hila Qu: The Ultimate Guide to Product Growth at Your Startup | 20VC #967 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Jan 18, 2023 neutral
Insight
Snapchat and Pinterest ad channels cannot scale like Meta or Google
“Snapchat, Pinterest, those work, but those are hard to scale. Like you don't get large scale, similar to Facebook and Google.”
Hila Qu Jan 18, 2023 ▶ 10:01 Hila Qu: The Ultimate Guide to Product Growth at Your Startup | 20VC #967 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Jan 23, 2023 neutral
Opinion
Wenger: TikTok, Twitter, and Facebook must be user-programmable
“I don't feel different about TikTok than I feel about Twitter or Facebook for that matter. These systems need to become programmable. If they're not programmable, we're being programmed by them.”
Albert Wenger Jan 23, 2023 ▶ 44:25 Albert Wenger: Elon & Twitter; Impact of SBF; Income Inequality; Will they ban TikTok? | 20VC #969 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Jan 24, 2023 negative
Assertion Supported
Jordan: TikTok Buys Users at Scale Unlike Early Google or Facebook
“That's not a categorical rule, because TikTok buys users at monstrous scale. But, you know, Google really didn't buy many users, Facebook didn't buy many users, you know, tick, tick, tick, tick.”
Jeff Jordan Jan 24, 2023 ▶ 9:28 The Ultimate Guide for Building a Two-Sided Marketplace | a16z's Jeff Jordan · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Feb 16, 2023
Assertion Supported
Duboe: Facebook's growth team directly managed the early standalone Messenger app
“I know that one of the things they actually put the growth team on was when they spun out Messenger from the core app. It was the growth team that actually ran the product on that early on.”
Mike Duboe Feb 16, 2023 ▶ 29:32 Mike Duboe: Top 5 Lessons Scaling Stitch Fix to IPO; Why CAC/LTV is a BS Metric | 20VC #978 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Feb 22, 2023 positive
Opinion
Systrom: Facebook's key legacy is teaching PMs scientific growth methods
“The one thing that I think Facebook should be remembered for as a professional development, like, incubator. Is its ability to teach young PMs the scientific method of growth. How do you grow things? Maybe to a fault, by the way.”
Kevin Systrom Feb 22, 2023 ▶ 45:59 Kevin Systrom & Mike Krieger: The Founders of Instagram Reveal their New Project "Artifact" | E981 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Feb 27, 2023 bearish
Opinion
Stebbings: Big tech spinouts raising $5M-$7M seeds are my worst investments
“And so they're my single worst investments. Those are my worst ones when they've spun out of any great company and they've raised five to seven. Because they're inherently slower because they're used to the processes of Twitter, of Facebook, the HR, the polici…”
Harry Stebbings Feb 27, 2023 ▶ 31:20 David Tisch: The 3 Most Important Variables When Raising Your Seed Round | 20VC #983 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Mar 7, 2023 negative
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Schultz: Facebook App Confusion Damaged WhatsApp During Privacy Policy Update
“When we did the WhatsApp privacy policy and said, now your data will be shared with Facebook Inc. For the limited amount of data, which is shared just for analytics purposes with all the constraints, because WhatsApp is hyper private. Even in that case, people…”
Alex Schultz Mar 7, 2023 ▶ 32:40 Meta CMO Alex Schultz: Competing Against TikTok & Snap; Why Reels Failed at First | E985 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Mar 7, 2023
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Schultz: Meta Holds Weekly Cross-App Analytics Reviews With Product VPs
“We then do reviews with the VPs, the product group leaders across the company every week, where we show Interesting insights from analytics, like every single week we do this.”
Alex Schultz Mar 7, 2023 ▶ 34:43 Meta CMO Alex Schultz: Competing Against TikTok & Snap; Why Reels Failed at First | E985 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Mar 7, 2023 neutral
Assertion Supported
Schultz: Facebook Stopped Growing in 2007, Prompting Growth Team Creation
“We stopped growing in 22,007, and that's why we created the growth team.”
Alex Schultz Mar 7, 2023 ▶ 54:06 Meta CMO Alex Schultz: Competing Against TikTok & Snap; Why Reels Failed at First | E985 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Mar 7, 2023 neutral
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Schultz Reveals the Primary User Retention Drivers for Meta and eBay
“So for Facebook, it's friending. The whole thing's about friends. For WhatsApp, it's about sending a message to somebody. You know, for Instagram, it's still following. And for eBay, it was placing a bid or buying an item.”
Alex Schultz Mar 7, 2023 ▶ 9:38 Meta CMO Alex Schultz: Competing Against TikTok & Snap; Why Reels Failed at First | E985 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Mar 7, 2023
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Schultz: Meta Achieved Higher Conversion and LTV by Lengthening User Flows
“There are flows where we made them longer. By giving people more targeting options where we got a higher conversion rate and a higher lifetime value. Whereas the growth standard is shorten the flow and take out steps.”
Alex Schultz Mar 7, 2023 ▶ 25:56 Meta CMO Alex Schultz: Competing Against TikTok & Snap; Why Reels Failed at First | E985 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Mar 7, 2023 negative
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Schultz: Facebook Branding Prevented VR Innovations From Building Corporate Value
“All the innovative stuff that was going inside the company was really being blocked from flowing to the company brand. Because when people saw the company brand, they were so dominated by the name that defines social media that if we're doing something really …”
Alex Schultz Mar 7, 2023 ▶ 33:12 Meta CMO Alex Schultz: Competing Against TikTok & Snap; Why Reels Failed at First | E985 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Mar 7, 2023 positive
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Schultz: Meta Is Past the Catch-Up Phase With Reels
“I think we've got a bunch of stuff now where we're starting to innovate. I can't really talk about it, but I think like we, we're in, we're through the catch up phase and now we're in the competing on innovation on this particular format.”
Alex Schultz Mar 7, 2023 ▶ 19:19 Meta CMO Alex Schultz: Competing Against TikTok & Snap; Why Reels Failed at First | E985 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Mar 7, 2023
Assertion Supported
Schultz: Facebook Lost Messaging Market Share to WhatsApp During Mobile Transition
“We were actually losing market share because the web was declining. Faster than mobile was growing for us, and then WhatsApp and iMessage and all of these things were coming along, and actually the shift of platforms meant even though we were growing mobile me…”
Alex Schultz Mar 7, 2023 ▶ 13:07 Meta CMO Alex Schultz: Competing Against TikTok & Snap; Why Reels Failed at First | E985 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Mar 7, 2023 positive
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Schultz: Changing 'Advertise' to 'Create an Ad' Boosted Growth by 40%
“Instead of advertise, when we translated it to French, we said, create an ad. And in France, we had a much larger rate of advertiser growth, like really much rather a larger rate, like 30, 40%. We were doing an analytics test with a vendor, and they found that…”
Alex Schultz Mar 7, 2023 ▶ 23:26 Meta CMO Alex Schultz: Competing Against TikTok & Snap; Why Reels Failed at First | E985 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Mar 7, 2023 neutral
Disclosure
Schultz Sponsored LGBTQ+ Features and Serves as Meta's Pride ERG Sponsor
“Now obviously I've done lots of stuff with, whether it's the rainbow filter or whether it's same-sex relationships on the product or, you know, other gender options or various things where I've helped sponsor that happening in our product because of the commun…”
Alex Schultz Mar 7, 2023 ▶ 48:19 Meta CMO Alex Schultz: Competing Against TikTok & Snap; Why Reels Failed at First | E985 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Mar 7, 2023 positive
Assertion Supported
Schultz: Resurrections and Churn Drove Meta's Scaling, Not New Registrations
“When we implemented it, we thought it was registrations minus a bit of churn. What we didn't realize was that the churn number and the resurrection number were massively bigger than the registration number. And so we hadn't realized how big a lever Reducing ch…”
Alex Schultz Mar 7, 2023 ▶ 6:37 Meta CMO Alex Schultz: Competing Against TikTok & Snap; Why Reels Failed at First | E985 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Mar 7, 2023 negative
What-if
Schultz: Meta Moved Too Slowly on Product Rollouts and It Was My Fault
“Personally, I think we took too long, and if I went back and did it again, I would have moved a lot faster, which is weird for a meta executive to say, but I actually think we moved too slowly, and in many ways it was my fault.”
Alex Schultz Mar 7, 2023 ▶ 16:25 Meta CMO Alex Schultz: Competing Against TikTok & Snap; Why Reels Failed at First | E985 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Mar 7, 2023 bullish
Prediction Held up
Schultz: Meta Aims to Make Reels a Major Monetization Engine
“I think that we want to turn reels into a really major monetization engine, not just an engagement engine.”
Alex Schultz Mar 7, 2023 ▶ 56:13 Meta CMO Alex Schultz: Competing Against TikTok & Snap; Why Reels Failed at First | E985 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Mar 7, 2023 positive
Assertion Partly supported
Schultz: Meta Jumped From 49th to 4th in PwC Future Potential Rankings
“Pricewaterhouse releases this report every year, and we've gone from, like, 49 to fourth.”
Alex Schultz Mar 7, 2023 ▶ 37:22 Meta CMO Alex Schultz: Competing Against TikTok & Snap; Why Reels Failed at First | E985 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Mar 7, 2023
Insight
Schultz: Being Second to Market Works if You Out-Innovate Later
“Personally, I think generally it's okay to be second, and we're totally fine being second. Catching up on the basics, and then trying to out-innovate. Like step, step, step. Like launch, catch up, overtake with innovation. I think is a very, very good model. Y…”
Alex Schultz Mar 7, 2023 ▶ 18:00 Meta CMO Alex Schultz: Competing Against TikTok & Snap; Why Reels Failed at First | E985 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Mar 7, 2023 positive
What-if
Schultz: Reels Succeeded Only After Multiple Failed Iterations
“We wouldn't be here if we hadn't iterated two or three times.”
Alex Schultz Mar 7, 2023 ▶ 19:07 Meta CMO Alex Schultz: Competing Against TikTok & Snap; Why Reels Failed at First | E985 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Mar 7, 2023
Disclosure
Schultz: Every Employee I Have Fired Was Ultimately Relieved
“I've never actually had a conversation, for example, where I fired someone where that person hasn't been relieved”
Alex Schultz Mar 7, 2023 ▶ 30:16 Meta CMO Alex Schultz: Competing Against TikTok & Snap; Why Reels Failed at First | E985 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Mar 7, 2023
Assertion Partly supported
Schultz: Facebook Pioneered MAU Metrics When Competitors Tracked Registered Users
“Meta, back when it was Facebook, innovated by moving from activated confirmed registered users to monthly active users. And no one talked about that before. They were still talking about their registered user base back then. That's what MySpace talked about.”
Alex Schultz Mar 7, 2023 ▶ 39:48 Meta CMO Alex Schultz: Competing Against TikTok & Snap; Why Reels Failed at First | E985 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Mar 7, 2023 neutral
Insight
Schultz: Teams Should Change Goals and Metrics Very Infrequently
“You should change your goals and your metrics very infrequently. You should know what their flaws are, you should know what their drawbacks are, but you should aspire to not change them very often.”
Alex Schultz Mar 7, 2023 ▶ 41:41 Meta CMO Alex Schultz: Competing Against TikTok & Snap; Why Reels Failed at First | E985 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Mar 7, 2023
Disclosure
Schultz Crashed His Car Due to Anxiety Over Layering an Employee
“I had to tell someone I was layering them, and I crashed my car on the way into work because I was so worried about the conversation. I still had the conversation.”
Alex Schultz Mar 7, 2023 ▶ 28:56 Meta CMO Alex Schultz: Competing Against TikTok & Snap; Why Reels Failed at First | E985 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Mar 15, 2023
Assertion Partly supported
Hotel Tonight Was Facebook's First Mobile Ads Customer
“I was working with the Facebook product team and was the first customer to use mobile ads on, on Facebook.”
Adam Grenier Mar 15, 2023 ▶ 3:51 Adam Grenier: The Inside Story to Uber’s Hypergrowth; How We Spent $1B/mo in China | E989 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Mar 15, 2023 neutral
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Local Uber Teams Ran Facebook Ads on 200 Personal Credit Cards
“At any given time, there were probably, like, 200 personal credit cards buying ads on Facebook, and it used to drive me mad, and, like, initially I went out with, like, a very, like, firm grip on, like, you can't do that, like, stop doing that, like, we have i…”
Adam Grenier Mar 15, 2023 ▶ 47:53 Adam Grenier: The Inside Story to Uber’s Hypergrowth; How We Spent $1B/mo in China | E989 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Mar 15, 2023 negative
Insight
Full Marketing Channel Attribution and Consistent CAC Metrics Are Impossible
“I agree. I think it's bullshit. I think it's a really, as, like, a, the expectation that it's going to be a consistent metric across channels, and having, like, a full view of everything that could be included in that is, is impossible. Like, it's not, Unlikel…”
Adam Grenier Mar 15, 2023 ▶ 55:24 Adam Grenier: The Inside Story to Uber’s Hypergrowth; How We Spent $1B/mo in China | E989 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Mar 15, 2023
Assertion Supported
Ed Baker Imported Facebook's Growth Organizational Structure to Uber
“Uber was really the first place that we called it growth, right? I was hired by Ed Baker. He brought over the kind of Facebook structure that they had built at Facebook.”
Adam Grenier Mar 15, 2023 ▶ 1:46 Adam Grenier: The Inside Story to Uber’s Hypergrowth; How We Spent $1B/mo in China | E989 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Mar 29, 2023 bearish
Opinion
Duggal: Media tech and ad tech have consolidated and played out
“Media tech and ad tech had kind of played itself out. And I had been on both sides. I had worked for Google and Facebook. I had worked for a challenge, a challenger startup, but the game had kind of consolidated.”
Jag Duggal Mar 29, 2023 ▶ 3:12 Jag Duggal: How We Scaled Nubank to 80M Users; Google's Brutal Hiring Practices | E995 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Mar 29, 2023 positive
Insight
Duggal: Facebook's execution speed stems from immediate escalation of disagreements
“And the speed of escalation, it wasn't like, I think X, you think Y, let's come back in a week, discuss it some more, and then in a week after that, we're going to escalate. It was like, I think X, you think Y, by the end of day, we're going to agree if we can…”
Jag Duggal Mar 29, 2023 ▶ 14:02 Jag Duggal: How We Scaled Nubank to 80M Users; Google's Brutal Hiring Practices | E995 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Apr 5, 2023 negative
Insight
Salguero: Blanket Facebook ads and influencer marketing no longer work
“The old tactics, like we're just gonna blanket Facebook and do influencer. It doesn't work anymore.”
Mike Salguero Apr 5, 2023 ▶ 0:05 Mike Salguero: How I Grew ButcherBox to $600M/year in Revenue; Tips for Influencer Marketing | E998 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Apr 14, 2023 negative
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Marcus: Regulators killed Libra because they distrusted Facebook leading internet money
“It was just really hard for regulators and others to accept that Facebook would be at the center of a protocol for money for the internet, and that's why we devolved so much power into this consortium that we didn't control, that we're just a member of, but th…”
David Marcus Apr 14, 2023 ▶ 0:33 David Marcus: How I Came to Lead PayPal; Why FB's Crypto Failed; How AI Fixes Inequality | E1001 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
May 3, 2023 neutral
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Hankes: Best AI Talent Remains Heavily Clustered in Big Tech
“If you think about where the best talent in AI is right now, I think it's OpenAI, And then I think you'd, everyone would tell you it is Google and Facebook and Microsoft and Amazon. And maybe there are folks that have kind of dripped their way into the startup…”
Vince Hankes May 3, 2023 ▶ 25:18 Vince Hankes: Why We Put $300M into OpenAI; Sam Altman's Pitch; Lessons from Josh Kushner | E1009 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
May 12, 2023 positive
Disclosure
Meta, Bloomberg, and Grammarly Are Paying Enterprise Customers of Hugging Face
“3000 companies are paying us for that, including Meta, including Bloomberg, including Grammarly and companies like that.”
Clément Delangue May 12, 2023 ▶ 24:02 Clem Delangue: The Ultimate Guide to Investing in AI; Elon's Threat to Sue OpenAI | E1013 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
May 12, 2023 neutral
Opinion
Delangue: VC Interest in AI Lags Behind Years of Massive Usage
“The VC and the mainstream interest is kind of like a catch up on the reality. Because if you look at usage of AI, it's been massive and it's been growing massively for the past, you know, three years, right? Even before, before ChatGPT, even before like, you k…”
Clément Delangue May 12, 2023 ▶ 5:25 Clem Delangue: The Ultimate Guide to Investing in AI; Elon's Threat to Sue OpenAI | E1013 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
May 15, 2023 bullish
Opinion
LeCun: DeepMind, Meta FAIR, and Cohere are best positioned for AGI
“In my opinion, the outfits that are best positioned for this are Claire from on one side and the new DeepMind now, which is, you know, DeepMind plus Google brain. There are a lot of people there who are interested in that question, and I think they are probabl…”
Yann LeCun May 15, 2023 ▶ 1:03:20 Yann LeCun: Meta’s New AI Model LLaMA; Why Elon is Wrong about AI; Open-source AI Models | E1014 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
May 15, 2023 neutral
Assertion Not checkable as stated
LeCun: Meta and Google lagged OpenAI due to risk, not tech
“It's just that they didn't have the pressure to produce new products, completely new products that had a lot of risk attached to them.”
Yann LeCun May 15, 2023 ▶ 31:44 Yann LeCun: Meta’s New AI Model LLaMA; Why Elon is Wrong about AI; Open-source AI Models | E1014 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
May 15, 2023 neutral
Disclosure
LeCun: Key Creators of Meta's LLaMA Have Left for Startups
“Some of the people who produced Llama, the open source LLMs from Meta. So the key people have left already. Okay, to do startups.”
Yann LeCun May 15, 2023 ▶ 1:02:14 Yann LeCun: Meta’s New AI Model LLaMA; Why Elon is Wrong about AI; Open-source AI Models | E1014 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
May 15, 2023 neutral
Assertion Partly supported
LeCun: Meta overhauled News Feed algorithm in 2017 to eliminate propaganda
“The main news feed algorithm was completely changed so that, you know, there was no clickbaits anymore. There was no, like, you know, news Outlets that could like push their content. That was propaganda, basically, you know, much more effort to take down false…”
Yann LeCun May 15, 2023 ▶ 51:02 Yann LeCun: Meta’s New AI Model LLaMA; Why Elon is Wrong about AI; Open-source AI Models | E1014 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
May 17, 2023 bullish
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Mostaque: Meta holds the best training data for conversational AI
“But who is best for a chatbot? Who has the most data for a chatbot? Meta.”
Emad Mostaque May 17, 2023 ▶ 1:05:15 Emad Mostaque: These 5 Companies Will Win the AI War; Why We Need National Data Sets | E1015 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
May 17, 2023 neutral
Prediction Open · timeframe May 2028
Mostaque: Only five or six foundation model companies will survive
“I think that there's only going to be five or six foundation model companies in the world in three years, five years. ... I think it's going to be us, NVIDIA Google, Microsoft OpenAI, and Meta and Apple probably are the ones that train these models.”
Emad Mostaque May 17, 2023 ▶ 45:46 Emad Mostaque: These 5 Companies Will Win the AI War; Why We Need National Data Sets | E1015 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
May 17, 2023 bearish
Opinion
Mostaque: Meta's pursuit of the metaverse was a complete waste
“Because the metaverse, obviously, is a complete waste.”
Emad Mostaque May 17, 2023 ▶ 1:05:01 Emad Mostaque: These 5 Companies Will Win the AI War; Why We Need National Data Sets | E1015 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Jun 2, 2023 bearish
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Hanks: Top AI talent remains heavily concentrated in big tech
“If you think about where the best talent in AI is right now, I think it's open AI. And then I think everyone would tell you it is Google and Facebook and Microsoft and Amazon. And maybe there are folks that have kind of dripped their way into the startup ecosy…”
Vince Hankes Jun 2, 2023 ▶ 8:03 20VC: Who Wins the AI Race; Startups or Incumbents & Does Having Proprietary Data Really Matter For Startups Today?
Jun 7, 2023 positive
Insight
Liu: Execution speed carries a 10x premium in fast-changing markets
“Move fast and break things. Like the idea that you don't have to be perfect, but sometimes, especially in a fast changing market, speed is at a 10 X premium.”
Rich Liu Jun 7, 2023 ▶ 3:55 Rich Liu: Sales in 2023; How to Onboard, Manage and Scale Reps; PLG vs Enterprise Growth | E1023 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Jun 19, 2023 neutral
Assertion Supported
Mark Zuckerberg Cancels Meetings Missing 24-Hour Advance Prep Memos
“He prepared really well every meeting, so you have to send in advance, like a short note about why, what decision you are expecting from him. If you fail to send his document, 24 hours, you know, by the minute before your meeting gets cancelled.”
Alex Lebrun Jun 19, 2023 ▶ 4:57 Alex Lebrun: Why the EU's AI Regulation is a Disaster; How Zuck Prepares for Meetings | E1027 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Jun 19, 2023 negative
Insight
Incentives and Legal Fears Kept Google and Meta From Leading LLMs
“Nobody could predict that LLMs would be so useful and powerful before you train one at this scale. And who in the Google org chart had the incentive to invest five hundred million dollars and just to see this without any business benefit for the company? If yo…”
Alex Lebrun Jun 19, 2023 ▶ 25:52 Alex Lebrun: Why the EU's AI Regulation is a Disaster; How Zuck Prepares for Meetings | E1027 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Jun 26, 2023
Insight
Babayigit: Startup situations are never as bad or good as they seem
“And the biggest thing I learned at Facebook actually is things are never as bad as they seem and never as good as they seem.”
Akin Babayigit Jun 26, 2023 ▶ 12:20 Akin Babayigit: How Tripledot Studios Became #1 Fastest-Growing Company in Europe | E1030 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Jun 26, 2023
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Babayigit: 35% of early Facebook mobile revenue came from three Russian developers
“There was a period of time when I think 30 Five percent of Facebook's mobile revenue was coming from like three developers in Russia at the time”
Akin Babayigit Jun 26, 2023 ▶ 15:59 Akin Babayigit: How Tripledot Studios Became #1 Fastest-Growing Company in Europe | E1030 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Jun 26, 2023 positive
Assertion Not publicly verifiable
Babayigit: Over 90% of Facebook revenue comes from mobile app ads
“And Facebook invented a new type of ad unit called the mobile app, mobile ads at the time, but really it was mobile app ads. And fast forward to this day is 90 plus percent of Facebook's revenue is, is coming from that.”
Akin Babayigit Jun 26, 2023 ▶ 13:27 Akin Babayigit: How Tripledot Studios Became #1 Fastest-Growing Company in Europe | E1030 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Jun 26, 2023 negative
Disclosure
Babayigit worked only two hours a day late in his Facebook career
“When I was working two hours a day towards the tail end of my career at Facebook. By all measures, it was supposed to be super comfortable and, you know, whatever. I was cruising, right? I was Barely doing any work at all.”
Akin Babayigit Jun 26, 2023 ▶ 35:56 Akin Babayigit: How Tripledot Studios Became #1 Fastest-Growing Company in Europe | E1030 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Jun 26, 2023 negative
Opinion
Babayigit: Facebook became overly bureaucratic and designed products by committee
“I left Facebook because I was frustrated how big it was and how bureaucratic everything was Getting, and, you know, there's a saying called, you know, a camel is, is a horse designed by a committee, and Facebook was designing, you know, camels all the time”
Akin Babayigit Jun 26, 2023 ▶ 17:49 Akin Babayigit: How Tripledot Studios Became #1 Fastest-Growing Company in Europe | E1030 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Jun 30, 2023 neutral
What-if
Douwe Kiela: The open-source AI ecosystem exists solely due to Meta's LLaMA
“This whole flourishing that you see right now of open source models that basically comes from Meta's generosity in giving Lama away for free. And if they hadn't done that, then you wouldn't see that.”
Douwe Kiela Jun 30, 2023 ▶ 32:10 Douwe Kiela: Why Data Size Matters More Than Model Size; Why Open Source Isn't Going to Win | E1032 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Jun 30, 2023 bullish
Insight
Douwe Kiela: Data size matters more than model size for AI performance
“It's just that data size matters even more than model size. And I think the Lama paper out of Meta really brilliantly showed this. Where if you train a smaller model on more data for longer, then you get a better model. So you get more bang for your buck if yo…”
Douwe Kiela Jun 30, 2023 ▶ 16:37 Douwe Kiela: Why Data Size Matters More Than Model Size; Why Open Source Isn't Going to Win | E1032 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Jul 19, 2023 negative
Insight
Isford: Consumer growth expertise does not translate directly to B2B SaaS
“One mistake I've seen is assuming that best growth practices and experience in consumer will translate to SaaS and the other way around. That risk was taken on me when I started at Airtable. I actually came from Meta, and so I was jumping from consumer to SaaS…”
Lauryn Isford Jul 19, 2023 ▶ 39:07 Lauryn Isford: Product Growth Secrets from Facebook, Airtable, BlueBottle, Dropbox & Notion | E1037 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Jul 19, 2023
Insight
Isford: Most tech companies build products with an unconscious Western bias
“I find that especially in technology, many businesses build with a Western bias and it's important to Really understand if you're serving all customer needs, especially when you have a big international customer base.”
Lauryn Isford Jul 19, 2023 ▶ 6:32 Lauryn Isford: Product Growth Secrets from Facebook, Airtable, BlueBottle, Dropbox & Notion | E1037 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Jul 24, 2023 positive
Prediction Open · timeframe Jul 2028
Meta Will Build an Instagram-Threads Social Graph Sync Option
“We will build over time, I think, a graph sync option. So if you want Just to have the same graph, you can, and we can make sure that stays in sync for you.”
Adam Mosseri Jul 24, 2023 ▶ 42:23 Adam Mosseri: Why Video Is Bad For Business; Does Feed Matter Anymore? | E1039 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Jul 24, 2023 positive
Opinion
TikTok Is the Most Well-Executing Competitor Meta Has Ever Faced
“They're, I think they still are the most well-executing competitor I think we've ever faced. There's a couple others that are up there, but they're, I think, at the top of that.”
Adam Mosseri Jul 24, 2023 ▶ 34:59 Adam Mosseri: Why Video Is Bad For Business; Does Feed Matter Anymore? | E1039 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Jul 24, 2023 positive
Disclosure
Threads Launch Targeted Fashion, Music, and Sports Over News or Tech
“We weren't going after tech, we weren't going after news, we weren't going after politics. We were focused on musicians. We're focused on fashion. We're focused on athletes. We're focused on beauty”
Adam Mosseri Jul 24, 2023 ▶ 51:34 Adam Mosseri: Why Video Is Bad For Business; Does Feed Matter Anymore? | E1039 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Jul 24, 2023 positive
Assertion Supported
Frequent Profile Picture Updates on Early Facebook Inspired Photo Sharing
“Early Facebook days, before we had photos, people just kept changing their profile picture. Like every day, multiple times a day. I'm like, oh, sounds like people want to share photos. Maybe we should build that.”
Adam Mosseri Jul 24, 2023 ▶ 38:51 Adam Mosseri: Why Video Is Bad For Business; Does Feed Matter Anymore? | E1039 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Jul 24, 2023
Assertion Supported
Facebook's Safety Team Was Larger Than Instagram's Total Headcount
“The safety and integrity work, we were running too much of our own stuff and not leveraging the much larger teams at Facebook and in the central teams. I think there were more engineers that worked on safety and integrity at the company at the time that then w…”
Adam Mosseri Jul 24, 2023 ▶ 16:39 Adam Mosseri: Why Video Is Bad For Business; Does Feed Matter Anymore? | E1039 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Jul 24, 2023 positive
Disclosure
Prior Facebook and Instagram Video Products Hurt User Connection
“And so the fact that video, growing video has massively grown sends, which is a pure friend-to-friend interaction, even not even, even if you take out the real shares, because they start conversation, I might send you a funny, you know, football clip, and then…”
Adam Mosseri Jul 24, 2023 ▶ 47:26 Adam Mosseri: Why Video Is Bad For Business; Does Feed Matter Anymore? | E1039 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Jul 24, 2023
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Facebook's Retention Benchmark Was 6 Friends in Japan, 106 in Indonesia
“That number for Facebook back in the day varied wildly by country. Like in Japan it was like six, and in Indonesia it was a 106 or something bonkers.”
Adam Mosseri Jul 24, 2023 ▶ 1:00:55 Adam Mosseri: Why Video Is Bad For Business; Does Feed Matter Anymore? | E1039 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Jul 24, 2023 neutral
Opinion
Meta Adopts Competitor-Pioneered Formats When They Become Industry Standards
“I think we're very good at optimizing things, and I think that we are willing to, when somebody pioneers a new format, to go and adopt that format if we think it's going to become an industry standard.”
Adam Mosseri Jul 24, 2023 ▶ 36:12 Adam Mosseri: Why Video Is Bad For Business; Does Feed Matter Anymore? | E1039 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Jul 24, 2023 neutral
Disclosure
Meta Did Not Pay Influencers or Celebrities to Join Threads
“No. We talked about it, but no.”
Adam Mosseri Jul 24, 2023 ▶ 52:08 Adam Mosseri: Why Video Is Bad For Business; Does Feed Matter Anymore? | E1039 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Jul 24, 2023 negative
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Only One in Eight Meta Employees Reads Leadership's Internal Posts
“We make a post Internally, and one out of eight employees reads it, and we move on with our lives, and we're surprised when the whole company doesn't move along with us”
Adam Mosseri Jul 24, 2023 ▶ 7:39 Adam Mosseri: Why Video Is Bad For Business; Does Feed Matter Anymore? | E1039 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Jul 24, 2023 neutral
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Early Facebook Design Team Had 8 to 12 Independent Designers
“When I first started, We had this amazingly talented group of designers, I don't know how many there were, eight, somewhere between eight and 12 of us, and they just did whatever they wanted.”
Adam Mosseri Jul 24, 2023 ▶ 4:04 Adam Mosseri: Why Video Is Bad For Business; Does Feed Matter Anymore? | E1039 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Jul 24, 2023
Disclosure
Meta Built Threads With Only 50 Engineers and Three Product Managers
“The team really properly formed a little less than five months ago, or five months ago. We started working on it a little before, but the team didn't really form properly until maybe five months ago. Dozens. Fifty-something engineers. Three PMs, three designer…”
Adam Mosseri Jul 24, 2023 ▶ 1:05:28 Adam Mosseri: Why Video Is Bad For Business; Does Feed Matter Anymore? | E1039 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Jul 28, 2023
Disclosure
King consulted Mark Zuckerberg on IPO challenges before going public
“We spent time with Mark Zuckerberg before we went public. It was like a year after his IPO, and he shared these lessons about his IPO, which was very challenging, right? His stock went on 50% after the IPO.”
Stephane Kurgan Jul 28, 2023 ▶ 19:47 Stephane Kurgan: Lessons Scaling King from 100 Employees to 2,400; How to Find Great Talent | E1041 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Aug 11, 2023 bullish
Opinion
Lessin: The most obvious AI bets are Facebook, Amazon, and Microsoft
“It's like, you want to bet on AI? Bet on Facebook. Bet on Amazon. Bet on Microsoft. It's so obvious.”
Sam Lessin Aug 11, 2023 ▶ 0:05 DEBATE: State of Seed Investing w/ Jason Lemkin, Sam Lessin, Frank Rotman & Harry Stebbings | E1047 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Aug 16, 2023
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Balfour: 70% of early growth leaders came from Facebook social gaming
“I made my way into growth where I would say, like, 70% of, like, the growth OGs made into growth, which was the early Facebook platform social gaming. Days. If you look at like some of the top people in growth, there's like a lineage. It's like almost like a c…”
Brian Balfour Aug 16, 2023 ▶ 0:42 Brian Balfour: Startup Growth Secrets from HubSpot; Distribution Stratagies; Impact of AI | E1049 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Aug 16, 2023 bearish
Prediction Didn’t hold up
Stebbings: Threads will stall at 5M DAU while Twitter grows
“I would say threads does not work. Maybe it teases along at five million DAU with hardcore small numbers. And I would say Twitter has modest growth to Two 75, 300 with election spikes.”
Harry Stebbings Aug 16, 2023 ▶ 1:03:47 Brian Balfour: Startup Growth Secrets from HubSpot; Distribution Stratagies; Impact of AI | E1049 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Aug 16, 2023 bullish
Opinion
Balfour: Facebook is the strongest and least vulnerable tech incumbent
“So I think this is a little topic du jour, but I think you got to go Facebook for a few reasons. One is that they still have the OG growth talent that, that they did from. 15 years ago Javier, Alex Schultz, right? Like those people are still There, right? Like…”
Brian Balfour Aug 16, 2023 ▶ 1:01:11 Brian Balfour: Startup Growth Secrets from HubSpot; Distribution Stratagies; Impact of AI | E1049 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Sep 13, 2023 neutral
Opinion
Dash: Facebook is an execution machine, not a copy machine
“No. I think they're an execution machine.”
Suchit Dash Sep 13, 2023 ▶ 57:24 Suchit Dash: Scaling Dubsmash to 43M Users, Battling TikTok & Joining Reddit | E1060 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Sep 13, 2023 negative
Opinion
Dash: Threads rigged the platform in favor of established Instagram creators
“And I think the challenge here with threads was, on day one, if you're completely porting over the graph, it's very hard for someone to suddenly say, hey, now I'm gonna, I wanna start from zero and become really large on threads. Because already the game is ri…”
Suchit Dash Sep 13, 2023 ▶ 32:14 Suchit Dash: Scaling Dubsmash to 43M Users, Battling TikTok & Joining Reddit | E1060 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Sep 13, 2023
Assertion Supported
Dash: TikTok's 2019 Ad Spend on Facebook and Snap Cannibalized Their Users
“The ad targeting at this point in 2019 had gotten so granular You could actually get to, like, a city level, a user demographic level, and TikTok leveraged all of that. And Facebook and Snap all benefited because they saw tons of money coming in in the form of…”
Suchit Dash Sep 13, 2023 ▶ 38:51 Suchit Dash: Scaling Dubsmash to 43M Users, Battling TikTok & Joining Reddit | E1060 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Sep 13, 2023 positive
Insight
Suchit Dash: Connecting users around content vectors holds untapped potential
“And I think people, and actually oftentimes products, take sometimes lazy approaches to say, well, we need people to connect, so let's just make sure to put in a You know, a Facebook connection in here, or an address book connection in here, and actually more …”
Suchit Dash Sep 13, 2023 ▶ 33:29 Suchit Dash: Scaling Dubsmash to 43M Users, Battling TikTok & Joining Reddit | E1060 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Sep 18, 2023 bullish
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Grimshaw: AI applications will capture massive value and pull through infrastructure
“I think in the arc of time if it is a shift like the internet was in many ways the applications, Which might not look like an applications, right, in the way that we think of them, but might look more like, you know, this control center idea will have profound…”
Miles Grimshaw Sep 18, 2023 ▶ 1:23:54 Miles Grimshaw: The 5 Pillars of Venture Capital & Why Co-Pilot is an Incumbent Strategy | E1061 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Sep 22, 2023 neutral
Assertion Supported
Kleinerman: Meta's Llama 2 license restricts competitor training and massive-scale deployment
“For example, LAMA II is very significant as a development in the industry. But they were very clear. Thou shall not use LAMA-II for training other models. Thou shall not use LAMA-II for, I think it's seven hundred million user use cases.”
Christian Kleinerman Sep 22, 2023 ▶ 34:07 Christian Kleinerman: Do OpenAI and Anthropic Have a Sustaining Moat? Who Wins the AI Wars? | E1063 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Sep 27, 2023
Assertion Partly supported
Lanng: Meta's open-source model matched ChatGPT-3.5 locally within 9 months
“But nine months later, I was running on my laptop a model that was as powerful as ChatGPT three and a half that was released as open source by Facebook.”
Christian Lanng Sep 27, 2023 ▶ 55:07 Christian Lanng: "How Being a Founder Almost Killed Me" | E1065 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Oct 4, 2023 negative
Insight
Rosenberg: Never hire early sales leaders with big tech pedigree
“Harry, don't hire anybody from Google. Okay. Don't hire anybody that says on their LinkedIn, ex Google, ex Amazon, ex Facebook. Okay. When they put that on their LinkedIn, they're associating themselves with the success of the business. And it is almost imposs…”
Matt Rosenberg Oct 4, 2023 ▶ 14:10 Matt Rosenberg: Why You Should Not Hire Sales Leaders From Big Companies | E1068 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Nov 3, 2023 neutral
Assertion Contradicted
Hoffman: 22 of Facebook's first 25 employees left within four years
“I think 22 out of the first 25 people at Facebook left after, within the first three or four years.”
Auren Hoffman Nov 3, 2023 ▶ 42:20 Roundtable #5 with Jack Altman, Auren Hoffman, Jason Lemkin, Harry Stebbings | E1077 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Nov 3, 2023 neutral
Insight
Auren Hoffman: Employee Retention Rates Do Not Reflect Company Performance
“Just because everyone's leaving, like in Facebook's case, where so many of the first 25 people left early doesn't mean that's a bad company. It turned out to be an amazing company. Just because everyone's staying doesn't mean it's a good company.”
Auren Hoffman Nov 3, 2023 ▶ 43:08 Roundtable #5 with Jack Altman, Auren Hoffman, Jason Lemkin, Harry Stebbings | E1077 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Nov 17, 2023 positive
Opinion
Quinn: Facebook paying 10% of its market cap for WhatsApp was justified
“Was it worth 10% of Facebook's market cap to buy WhatsApp? Absolutely.”
Nicole Quinn Nov 17, 2023 ▶ 20:16 Roundtable #6 with Rebecca Kaden, Nicole Quinn, Eurie Kim, Harry Stebbings | E1083 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Nov 20, 2023 positive
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Eight Sleep reduced Facebook and Google acquisition costs by 75%
“Facebook or Google CAC now is probably, I think it's like, 75% lower than what it used to be two years ago.”
Matteo Franceschetti Nov 20, 2023 ▶ 12:36 Matteo Franceschetti: The Ultimate Hiring Playbook: Five Questions to Ask Every New Hire | E1084 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Nov 22, 2023 bearish
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Seibert: Large language models will inevitably become commoditized
“I certainly think we will. And this may not be a popular position. Obviously, opening eyes, charging ahead, sort of leading the way right now. I think the market forces at work I mean, there's just immense energy to have an open source equivalent. Meta appears…”
Jeff Seibert Nov 22, 2023 ▶ 21:31 Jeff Seibert: Why OpenAI Will Become an Infrastructure Play | E1085 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Nov 24, 2023 bearish
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Seibert: Foundational AI models will inevitably be commoditized
“I certainly think we will, and this may not be a popular position, Obviously, opening eyes, charging ahead, sort of leading the way right now. I think the market forces at work mean there's just immense energy to have an open source equivalent. Meta appears to…”
Jeff Seibert Nov 24, 2023 ▶ 2:12 The Ultimate AI Roundtable: What Happens Now in AI, Why Google are Vulnerable | E1085 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Nov 24, 2023 bearish
Prediction Didn’t hold up
Mostaque: Only 5 or 6 foundation model companies will exist in 3-5 years
“I think that there's only going to be five or six foundation model companies in the world in three years, five years. I think it's going to be us, Nvidia, Google, Microsoft OpenAI, and Meta and Apple probably are the ones that train these models.”
Emad Mostaque Nov 24, 2023 ▶ 0:55 The Ultimate AI Roundtable: What Happens Now in AI, Why Google are Vulnerable | E1085 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Nov 27, 2023 negative
What-if
Rabois: LinkedIn should have been more valuable than Facebook
“LinkedIn by any measure was Yeah, pretty successful. Certainly impact, you know, acquisition, twenty four billion or so. Truthfully, probably hit somewhere between five and 20% of its, you know, potential because it didn't do some of these things. Like, I, in …”
Keith Rabois Nov 27, 2023 ▶ 34:56 Keith Rabois & Mike Shebat: Creating an Olympian Mindset to Work Ethic| E1087 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Dec 6, 2023 negative
Insight
PMs From Facebook and Google Often Lack Strong Product Intuition
“I've oftentimes you have PMs from, you know, the Facebooks and Googles of the world that are actually just good at testing. And moving metrics, but their intuition oftentimes isn't actually locked into customer research and actual customers.”
Geoff Charles Dec 6, 2023 ▶ 46:41 Geoff Charles: How To Hire Product Teams & Increase Product Velocity | E1091 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Dec 6, 2023 negative
Opinion
Facebook and Stripe Have Struggled to Expand Beyond Core Markets
“Whether it's like Facebook trying to enter the B to B space, whether it's Stripe trying to actually go from like developers and SME to finance teams in, in, in the enterprise. It's hard. And we actually haven't seen that much success.”
Geoff Charles Dec 6, 2023 ▶ 40:25 Geoff Charles: How To Hire Product Teams & Increase Product Velocity | E1091 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Jan 8, 2024 negative
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Tomaino: Big tech engineers enter crypto in bull markets, leave in bear
“They always come during bull markets and then leave during bear markets.”
Nick Tomaino Jan 8, 2024 ▶ 25:29 Crypto Roundtable with Nick Tomaino & Kyle Samani: US Elections, NFTs, and Trump | E1100 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Jan 10, 2024 negative
What-if
Sim: Meta's acquisition of Kustomer would not be approved by regulators today
“Fuck no. No way. And by the way, it had nothing to do with anything other than they hated Zuckerberg, right?”
Ed Sim Jan 10, 2024 ▶ 27:33 Ed Sim & Jamin Ball: Did Figma Kill M&A Markets & 3 Requirements to IPO in 2024 | E1101 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Jan 10, 2024 negative
Assertion Partly supported
Sim: Meta's acquisition of Kustomer took 16 months due to antitrust regulations
“I sat through the customer thing. It took us 16 months from signing to sell to Meta because of antitrust regulations, right?”
Ed Sim Jan 10, 2024 ▶ 27:20 Ed Sim & Jamin Ball: Did Figma Kill M&A Markets & 3 Requirements to IPO in 2024 | E1101 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Feb 9, 2024 positive
Insight
Tisch: Small stakes in outlier companies outperform strict ownership targets
“Every VC's math works if you fund great companies. And so it's not about This, like, ownership threshold. If anybody owned one percent of Facebook, one percent of Uber.1% of Coinbase, your math works. Your math works really well, and it scales.”
David Tisch Feb 9, 2024 ▶ 22:53 20VC: Doug Leone, Bill Ackman, Bill Gurley and Orlando Bravo on "Does Price Matter"; When to Pay Up vs When to Stay Disciplined, The Biggest Lessons on Price Discipline from 8 of the World's Best Investors
Feb 21, 2024
Insight
Williamson: Scaled growth PM is 80% science; startup product is 80% art
“If you're a growth PM at Facebook, you got shit tons of data, the path Math for the product is pretty clear. You're mostly just running a B test. Maybe it's more like 80, 20, 90, 10 data to art. If you're a startup, you have very little data at your disposal. …”
Scott Williamson Feb 21, 2024 ▶ 5:03 Scott Williamson: Hiring the Best Product People in Five Steps, Why the Best PMs are Writers | E1118 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Mar 6, 2024 bullish
Disclosure
Wagner still holds much of his Facebook stock from Accel days
“I still hold a lot of our Facebook investment, you know, back from you know, the Excel days.”
Peter Wagner Mar 6, 2024 ▶ 50:20 Peter Wagner: 27 Years of Investing Lessons of Picking Founders, Price Discipline & Reserve | E1123 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Mar 11, 2024 positive
Insight
Lonsdale: Venture Investors in Great Tech Companies Should Hold Shares Longer
“The lesson was that I probably should have held everything for an extra 10 or 15 years, and I, and Peter Thiel had the same lesson, and I've learned a lot from Peter, and he obviously sold out of Facebook too soon, too”
Joe Lonsdale Mar 11, 2024 ▶ 47:58 Joe Lonsdale: The Future of TikTok; Is it a Danger to US National Security? | E1125 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Mar 13, 2024
Disclosure
Facebook's Advertiser Growth Team Targeted Headcount Over Direct Revenue
“For example, I'll take the example of Advertiser Growth. In Advertiser Growth that Facebook in the advertisers, we decided not to move The revenue metric, but decided to move the advertiser growth metric, because that's a metric that we actually could tangibly…”
Chandra Narayanan Mar 13, 2024 ▶ 23:14 Chandra Narayanan: Top 5 Lessons from Leading Analytics at Facebook | E1126 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Mar 13, 2024
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Narayanan: Facebook chose MAU as North Star to match its mission
“For example, at Facebook at that time that we were there, it was like making the world open and connected. So naturally was you wanted to get everyone in the world on it. So it just naturally meant that you wanted to get the largest number of people to use a p…”
Chandra Narayanan Mar 13, 2024 ▶ 22:06 Chandra Narayanan: Top 5 Lessons from Leading Analytics at Facebook | E1126 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Mar 13, 2024 positive
Insight
Narayanan: Growth teams must use counter metrics to balance competing goals
“One of the things that we don't do enough is counter metrics, and I think I saw that at PayPal and at Facebook, where you would grow a metric like at PayPal, for example, there were two teams. One was growing revenue, and then one was actually stopping revenue…”
Chandra Narayanan Mar 13, 2024 ▶ 1:19:27 Chandra Narayanan: Top 5 Lessons from Leading Analytics at Facebook | E1126 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Mar 13, 2024
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Facebook's Chris Cox Required Storytelling, Not Raw Data, to Be Influenced
“For example, Harvey, you go to try to influence Harvey. You just throw the data. Don't give me anything other than just data. Just tell me the data. Don't tell me the story. You got a Chris Cox. Don't just throw data at me. Tell me the story, please.”
Chandra Narayanan Mar 13, 2024 ▶ 45:12 Chandra Narayanan: Top 5 Lessons from Leading Analytics at Facebook | E1126 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Mar 13, 2024
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Narayanan Almost Got Fired at Facebook for Presenting Uncomfortable Data
“And it ended up being that the senior leadership that did not like what I was saying and I almost got fired for it. And, but that's when I think people like Harvey and Alex at Facebook actually backed me up.”
Chandra Narayanan Mar 13, 2024 ▶ 4:42 Chandra Narayanan: Top 5 Lessons from Leading Analytics at Facebook | E1126 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Mar 13, 2024 negative
Insight
Fast Hiring Dilutes Talent Density From A-Plus to A Players
“One thing, if you add more people, what happened is you, the A plus players becomes A and so on. And very fast, you need to get to grow very slowly so you can reach equilibriums very slowly and then keep The value of the entire team high. So do not hire very f…”
Chandra Narayanan Mar 13, 2024 ▶ 20:13 Chandra Narayanan: Top 5 Lessons from Leading Analytics at Facebook | E1126 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Mar 13, 2024
Assertion Partly supported
Mark Zuckerberg Wrote Facebook's S-1 in One Sitting on a Phone
“I mean, I think he wrote his S one in one sitting on a mobile phone.”
Chandra Narayanan Mar 13, 2024 ▶ 1:22:37 Chandra Narayanan: Top 5 Lessons from Leading Analytics at Facebook | E1126 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Mar 13, 2024 positive
Insight
Zuckerberg Spent 80% of His Time at Facebook Outside Comfort Zone
“Mark once said in a Q and A in internal to Facebook that he said that he, and a lot of the reasons why we do that is because of how secure we are as people. And he would basically say that Something like, I don't know what exact number, but he said like, 80% o…”
Chandra Narayanan Mar 13, 2024 ▶ 10:04 Chandra Narayanan: Top 5 Lessons from Leading Analytics at Facebook | E1126 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Mar 13, 2024
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Severe Winter Weather Directly Increases US Facebook Time Spent
“We found that there's certain parts of America which had an increase in time spent, and we didn't know what happened. And we kept looking and said, what is all this? And we kept digging deep, and it ended up being winter. Very cold winters. People stay in at h…”
Chandra Narayanan Mar 13, 2024 ▶ 31:55 Chandra Narayanan: Top 5 Lessons from Leading Analytics at Facebook | E1126 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Mar 13, 2024
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Facebook's Early Growth Marketing Team Operated With Only 6 to 8 People
“And it was like a seven people team or a six people team. And I would think like, how can six or seven or eight people have such enormous output?”
Chandra Narayanan Mar 13, 2024 ▶ 18:46 Chandra Narayanan: Top 5 Lessons from Leading Analytics at Facebook | E1126 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Mar 13, 2024
Assertion Supported
Instagram Acquisition Forced Facebook to Switch Metrics From MAU to DAU
“When Instagram came along to Facebook, we still had the MEU as our goal. And so when we had the MEU as a goal, I mean basically Kevin's system was like, what? We are now in the mobile world. People use the phones all the time. We should be doing we do DAUs. We…”
Chandra Narayanan Mar 13, 2024 ▶ 23:48 Chandra Narayanan: Top 5 Lessons from Leading Analytics at Facebook | E1126 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Mar 13, 2024 neutral
Opinion
Chris Cox Excelled at Scaling Facebook, Not Turnarounds
“I mean, Chris Cox, excellent exec. For going from, at Facebook, Kristoff is excellent at good to great. I don't think he was good at okay to bad to okay”
Chandra Narayanan Mar 13, 2024 ▶ 1:12:15 Chandra Narayanan: Top 5 Lessons from Leading Analytics at Facebook | E1126 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Mar 20, 2024 positive
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Lemieux: AI will unbloat tech teams and redistribute engineers to critical sectors
“I think companies are going to unbloat and we're going to distribute programmers, right? Like there's, we've got a global, you know, lack of procreation happening. We're going to have less and less people who can build technology where we need it. Like we need…”
Jean-Michel Lemieux Mar 20, 2024 ▶ 52:11 Jean-Michel Lemieux: Three Product Decisions Every Team Needs to Make | E1129 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
May 6, 2024
Opinion
Tavel: Frontier AI models will remain closed source unless Meta shifts market
“If you want a model that's on the frontier, that's going to be closed source. Now, look, every, as I mentioned, every month it feels different with what Meta's doing with Llama, that may actually fundamentally change the game. If Meta is willing to make that h…”
Sarah Tavel May 6, 2024 ▶ 38:09 Sarah Tavel: Will Foundation Models Be Commoditised? | E1149 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
May 8, 2024 bearish
Opinion
Hulme: Expecting AI researchers to build profitable businesses is ridiculous
“The idea that they can all go out and create highly profitable, fast moving businesses seems ridiculous.”
Tom Hulme May 8, 2024 ▶ 53:30 Tom Hulme: Lessons from a 24x Angel Track Record, 275x on Robinhood & Making Billions on Uber |E1150 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
May 8, 2024 neutral
Prediction Held up
Hulme: Mark Zuckerberg will own 14% of world's H100s by year-end
“He'll have 350,000 H-one hundreds by the end of this year. That is 14% of the world's H-one hundreds, and he's going to open source the result.”
Tom Hulme May 8, 2024 ▶ 45:55 Tom Hulme: Lessons from a 24x Angel Track Record, 275x on Robinhood & Making Billions on Uber |E1150 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
May 8, 2024 negative
Insight
Hulme: AGI hype correlates directly with founders' capital fundraising needs
“I think there is a Correlation between how aggressively people predict AGI is coming and how much capital they need to raise. So you've got Emodi from Anthropic, you've got Altman, OpenAI, Musk, XAI, all of these guys are saying that it's just around the corne…”
Tom Hulme May 8, 2024 ▶ 1:11:38 Tom Hulme: Lessons from a 24x Angel Track Record, 275x on Robinhood & Making Billions on Uber |E1150 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
May 17, 2024 bullish
Disclosure
Stebbings: Mark Zuckerberg is underrated; I aggressively buy Meta stock
“I think that Zuck is probably consistently the most underrated CEO. I'm like the biggest buyer of Meta stock that there could be.”
Harry Stebbings May 17, 2024 ▶ 57:53 Jiaona Zhang: Why All Product Teams Should Have a Scorecard & How to Use It | E1154 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
May 20, 2024
Insight
Arora: Top tech companies achieve product-market fit for unexpected reasons
“Very rarely is it that your first incarnation of your product has perfect product market fit. That's very rare. You really, you know, if you look at the largest companies today, they were all created for a different reason and they ended up getting product mar…”
Nikesh Arora May 20, 2024 ▶ 13:41 Nikesh Arora: Lessons from $102BN Market Cap & How to Create & Sustain Competitive Advantage | E1155 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
May 22, 2024 positive
Opinion
Levie: Zuckerberg is one of the best entrepreneurs of our time
“I think my read on this is you have you know, one of the best entrepreneurs of our time that has basically all of the right underlying resources for AI. So lots of compute, incredible engineers, you know, billions of users, i.e. Lots of data.”
Aaron Levie May 22, 2024 ▶ 49:30 Aaron Levie: How the Business Model of SaaS Changes Forever & Startups vs Incumbents:Who Wins?|E1155 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
May 29, 2024
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Schroepfer: Meta's 2013 thesis predicted computing moving to AR, VR, AI
“Our analysis was, no, it's gonna both be more integrated into my real world, you know, smart glasses and immersive in VR, and it's gonna be smarter. It's gonna be AI.”
Mike Schroepfer May 29, 2024 ▶ 21:55 Mike Schroepfer: Former Meta CTO on "Why The Best Leaders are Like Music Conductors" | E1158 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
May 29, 2024 positive
Assertion Supported
Schroepfer: Meta built 10 million square feet of data centers in 10 years
“Built ten million square feet of data center in, like, less than 10 years, and they, they're going on trajectories above that.”
Mike Schroepfer May 29, 2024 ▶ 53:00 Mike Schroepfer: Former Meta CTO on "Why The Best Leaders are Like Music Conductors" | E1158 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
May 29, 2024
Assertion Partly supported
Schroepfer: Myspace was larger than Facebook in 2008 and bleeding cash
“My space was bleeding cash and was actually bigger than Meta at the time or Facebook.”
Mike Schroepfer May 29, 2024 ▶ 21:17 Mike Schroepfer: Former Meta CTO on "Why The Best Leaders are Like Music Conductors" | E1158 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
May 29, 2024 positive
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Schroepfer: Meta's early AI lab built the skills that powered Llama
“We built an AI lab at Meta and it was kind of like, huh, this AI thing is going to be pretty big. Let's like start building the skill set. And that's why you see Meta doing Lama now and a bunch of other things, because they, we had all the people, we had all t…”
Mike Schroepfer May 29, 2024 ▶ 19:17 Mike Schroepfer: Former Meta CTO on "Why The Best Leaders are Like Music Conductors" | E1158 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Jun 5, 2024 negative
Opinion
Srinivas: Meta's integration of AI search into WhatsApp is flawed
“I have. It's not the right way to do it. Why? I'm not going to WhatsApp to search for anything. I'm going to WhatsApp to text people or reply to my WhatsApp.”
Aravind Srinivas Jun 5, 2024 ▶ 56:37 Aravind Srinivas:Will Foundation Models Commoditise & Diminishing Returns in Model Performance|E1161 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Jun 5, 2024 negative
Opinion
Srinivas: Competing with OpenAI on base models is a terrible arena
“If there are companies that are working on Foundation model competitor to OpenAI. It is definitely like one of the worst arenas to be part of. Almost like I think there are five men standing today sort of thing. Google, and Anthropic, Meta Mistral, and you can…”
Aravind Srinivas Jun 5, 2024 ▶ 22:50 Aravind Srinivas:Will Foundation Models Commoditise & Diminishing Returns in Model Performance|E1161 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Jun 10, 2024 positive
Opinion
Mark Zuckerberg Is One of Tech's Best Meta-Strategists
“So one, Zuckerberg is one of the best meta strategists And I don't, I deliberately pun on meta, but meta strategists, like, kind of like, what is the game we're playing, you know, of any technology leader on the planet? Like, I learned from him on this, he's s…”
Reid Hoffman Jun 10, 2024 ▶ 1:00:56 Reid Hoffman: The Future of TikTok and The Inflection AI Deal | E1163 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Jun 17, 2024 positive
Disclosure
Index Ventures acquired significant secondary Facebook stock from Owen Van Natta
“He ended up selling us some pretty significant secondary of, and so it turned out to be a great investment for index.”
Danny Rimer Jun 17, 2024 ▶ 54:02 Danny Rimer: The Biggest Lessons from Missing Snap, Airbnb, Spotify and Facebook | E1166 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Jun 17, 2024
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Index capped social platform valuations at $1B after Instagram sale
“At the time, we thought the peak amount that a social platform would be worth Was a billion dollars because Instagram sold to Facebook for a billion dollars.”
Danny Rimer Jun 17, 2024 ▶ 52:10 Danny Rimer: The Biggest Lessons from Missing Snap, Airbnb, Spotify and Facebook | E1166 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Jun 17, 2024 positive
Insight
Danny Rimer: Accumulating secondary stock in winners beats hunting new investments
“That was a brilliant understanding of where to double down on value and where to spend your time.”
Danny Rimer Jun 17, 2024 ▶ 55:16 Danny Rimer: The Biggest Lessons from Missing Snap, Airbnb, Spotify and Facebook | E1166 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Jun 17, 2024
Disclosure
Index Ventures offered Facebook $50M at a $5B valuation
“We offered them what we thought was an incredible term sheet, which was to put in fifty million at five billion.”
Danny Rimer Jun 17, 2024 ▶ 53:13 Danny Rimer: The Biggest Lessons from Missing Snap, Airbnb, Spotify and Facebook | E1166 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Jun 21, 2024 positive
Opinion
Revolut belongs in the top 0.01% alongside SpaceX and Meta
“I think what a lot of people forget is that Revolut is like that company that's at the 0.01%. You know, it's like a SpaceX, Facebook Meta. I think all these companies are very similar.”
Val Scholz Jun 21, 2024 ▶ 35:22 Val Scholz: How Revolut Acquired Their First 10M Users: Tips, Tactics & Strategies | E1168 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Jun 21, 2024 negative
Assertion Supported
Uber, Airbnb, Meta, and Revolut didn't use event tracking early on
“I actually think that if you look at Uber, Airbnb, Meta, they don't use events, or at least not in the early days. We didn't use events at Revolut.”
Val Scholz Jun 21, 2024 ▶ 47:03 Val Scholz: How Revolut Acquired Their First 10M Users: Tips, Tactics & Strategies | E1168 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Jul 12, 2024 positive
Disclosure
HubSpot rejected a $3M Facebook deal at $3M ARR to maintain focus
“I mean, I think we're at two, three million in revenue at HubSpot and one rep brought Facebook to the table as a customer. It was like a three million dollar contract. It would have doubled our revenue. And he said, no, we were being pulled, said no.”
Mark Roberge Jul 12, 2024 ▶ 36:08 Mark Roberge: The Framework for How Startups Should Scale into the Enterprise -Stage 2 Capital|E1176 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Jul 31, 2024 bearish
Opinion
Mollick: Meta open-sources AI models to spoil competitors' businesses
“So Meta doesn't really want to make money from models. So they're going to spoil, you know, their rivals, right?”
Ethan Mollick Jul 31, 2024 ▶ 17:10 Ethan Mollick: Why OpenAl Abandons Products, The Biggest Opportunities They Have Not Taken | E1184 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Aug 14, 2024 positive
Opinion
Nejatian: Mark Zuckerberg and Meta are incredibly underappreciated
“Meta and Mark are both underappreciated. Like, incredibly underappreciated.”
Kaz Nejatian Aug 14, 2024 ▶ 20:54 Kaz Nejatian: How Shopify Built a $90BN Business to Last 100 Years | E1189 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Aug 14, 2024 positive
Opinion
Nejatian: Hiring leaders from Meta works out exceptionally well
“I have found that hiring people from Meta Generally has worked out very well for most people because just as a training program is just exceptionally good.”
Kaz Nejatian Aug 14, 2024 ▶ 1:00:38 Kaz Nejatian: How Shopify Built a $90BN Business to Last 100 Years | E1189 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Aug 14, 2024 negative
Opinion
Kaz Nejatian: Meta's worst mistake was neglecting external public relations
“The worst decision Meta probably made was Not being more publicly celebratory of Mark personally and Meta generally. I think Meta allowed, because the company was so focused on execution internally, it didn't spend that much time worrying about its reputation …”
Kaz Nejatian Aug 14, 2024 ▶ 23:19 Kaz Nejatian: How Shopify Built a $90BN Business to Last 100 Years | E1189 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Aug 14, 2024 bullish
Opinion
Nejatian: Critics are realizing they were wrong to mock Meta's AR/VR bet
“The incredible bet they're taking on AR VR which I think people mocked and are starting to realize they were wrong about mocking.”
Kaz Nejatian Aug 14, 2024 ▶ 22:18 Kaz Nejatian: How Shopify Built a $90BN Business to Last 100 Years | E1189 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Aug 30, 2024
Assertion Supported
Uber manually onboarded its first million drivers without major digital ad spend
“For probably the first million drivers that we onboarded, a lot of our processes were manual, right? So we weren't doing a lot of like paid spend on Facebook. We were doing a little bit on Craigslist. We weren't doing a ton on Google, but it was really the ope…”
Scott Gorlick Aug 30, 2024 ▶ 7:19 Scott Gorlick: How Uber Acquired 1M Drivers & The Uber’s Expansion Playbook | E1196 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Sep 9, 2024 negative
Opinion
Sean Rad: Facebook retains users by hacking desires to sell ads
“Facebook and social media is really good at retaining users and almost against your free will and hacking your desires and keeping you there. And they do that because they make money through advertising. And the more time they have with you, the more ads they …”
Sean Rad Sep 9, 2024 ▶ 18:38 Sean Rad: Lessons Scaling Tinder to the Fastest Growing Consumer Social App in History | E1199 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Sep 13, 2024 positive
Opinion
Hudack: Facebook is the best-run company I've ever worked at
“Facebook is still very much the best run company I have ever worked at.”
Mike Hudack Sep 13, 2024 ▶ 3:28 Mike Hudack: How Facebook, Monzo and Deliveroo Build Great Products | E1201 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Sep 13, 2024
Insight
Hudack: Logistics apps ship fast for brand promises, not growth metrics
“At Facebook you may ship really quickly because you believe that shipping really quickly is the best way to make the graph go up. At a real time logistics company, which is moving food for people who get cranky if it doesn't arrive in 32 minutes, or 15 minutes…”
Mike Hudack Sep 13, 2024 ▶ 27:33 Mike Hudack: How Facebook, Monzo and Deliveroo Build Great Products | E1201 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Sep 13, 2024 negative
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Hudack: 99% of Facebook users opening the "dive bar" did so by accident
“I think something like 75% of Facebook users opened the dive bar, and so, There was an argument to be made that it was a great surface to ship into. The thing is that like, 99% of those people opened it by accident.”
Mike Hudack Sep 13, 2024 ▶ 38:02 Mike Hudack: How Facebook, Monzo and Deliveroo Build Great Products | E1201 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Sep 13, 2024 positive
Assertion Partly supported
Hudack: 99% of people in Spain used WhatsApp when Facebook acquired it
“When Facebook bought WhatsApp, I think 99% of people in Spain had WhatsApp. It was some of the most incredible market penetration ever.”
Mike Hudack Sep 13, 2024 ▶ 23:28 Mike Hudack: How Facebook, Monzo and Deliveroo Build Great Products | E1201 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Sep 13, 2024 negative
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Hudack: Facebook's Audience Insights required novel tech but was just nice-to-have
“It turned out to be incredibly difficult to build. It required a huge amount of novel technology. And, you know, it, like, it was a nice to have.”
Mike Hudack Sep 13, 2024 ▶ 14:02 Mike Hudack: How Facebook, Monzo and Deliveroo Build Great Products | E1201 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Sep 13, 2024 positive
Insight
Hudack: Developer focus time is worth far more than $100 tech accessories
“They understood that the value of the time that you were spending that day, like your focus and writing code at that moment, Was more valuable than the hundred dollars that the headphones cost. I've never seen anyone else do that, you know, before or since, bu…”
Mike Hudack Sep 13, 2024 ▶ 4:29 Mike Hudack: How Facebook, Monzo and Deliveroo Build Great Products | E1201 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Sep 13, 2024
Insight
Hudack: Revitalize underperforming teams by rapidly shipping quality on unloved products
“I kind of looked around and tried to find something unloved without a team on it, where we could just very rapidly ship something where the only thing that was necessary, it didn't need to Even be successful was that everybody in the organization would say, oh…”
Mike Hudack Sep 13, 2024 ▶ 5:51 Mike Hudack: How Facebook, Monzo and Deliveroo Build Great Products | E1201 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Sep 13, 2024 positive
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Hudack: Mark Zuckerberg personally reviewed code diffs from entry-level engineers
“Mark was always in founder mode, you know. I remember once he, like, commented on a diff. Somebody was making a change to the composer on the web, and he commented on the diff and was like, I don't like this change. It was like a, You know, he's like an entry-…”
Mike Hudack Sep 13, 2024 ▶ 3:50 Mike Hudack: How Facebook, Monzo and Deliveroo Build Great Products | E1201 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Sep 20, 2024 negative
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Phil Carter: Ladder's Facebook and Google ads failed completely during pandemic
“They tried during the pandemic to just run Facebook and Google ads like everyone else. And it didn't work at all. It was an abysmal failure.”
Phil Carter Sep 20, 2024 ▶ 1:22:12 Phil Carter: Growth Loops, CAC + LTV Benchmarks, Pricing, Discounts, Paywalls... | E1204 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Sep 20, 2024 negative
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Carter: Spending Under $10,000 Monthly on Facebook Ads Is Inefficient
“Like they're spending 5000 dollars a month, 10,000 dollars a month on Facebook. That's just not enough to get an efficient outcome.”
Phil Carter Sep 20, 2024 ▶ 28:38 Phil Carter: Growth Loops, CAC + LTV Benchmarks, Pricing, Discounts, Paywalls... | E1204 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Sep 23, 2024
Assertion Partly supported
Dmitry Gurski: Flo team achieved six startup exits including Google and Facebook
“We had six exits up to this moment. We had exit to Google, exit to Facebook, ah, we started several companies, ah which have has revenue in a 100,000,050 million.”
Dmitry Gurski Sep 23, 2024 ▶ 6:44 Dmitry Gurski: From Potato Farm to $200M in Revenue: The Never-Before-Told Story of Flo Health|E1205 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Sep 23, 2024
Disclosure
Gurski: Proceeds from MSQRD's Facebook sale financed Flo Health
“We sold to we sold to Facebook, and then we used part of this money to finance Floor.”
Dmitry Gurski Sep 23, 2024 ▶ 1:19:08 Dmitry Gurski: From Potato Farm to $200M in Revenue: The Never-Before-Told Story of Flo Health|E1205 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Oct 4, 2024 positive
Opinion
Facebook's intense feedback culture was a great school for employee calibration
“No, I think it's actually was a great school because what it does is it really pushes you to calibrate and think about, okay, how do you what type of feedback do you lean into and which one you don't?”
Maria Angelidou Oct 4, 2024 ▶ 9:17 Maria Angelidou:Product Lessons Leading Facebook App Monetisation Team to Billions in Revenue |E1210 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Oct 4, 2024 neutral
Assertion Contradicted
Facebook had 3,000 employees and under 100 PMs when Angelidou joined
“Gosh, I want to say maybe 3000 people. Yeah. Something like that. And the product team was very, very small. Maybe, I mean, a hundred, no less, less than a hundred.”
Maria Angelidou Oct 4, 2024 ▶ 3:02 Maria Angelidou:Product Lessons Leading Facebook App Monetisation Team to Billions in Revenue |E1210 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Oct 9, 2024 positive
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Wang: AI generates $15 billion in incremental EBIT for Meta
“We estimate that it's not just delivering revenue. I think it's already delivering about fifteen billion of incremental EBIT, EBIT for Meta, right?”
Jeff Wang Oct 9, 2024 ▶ 47:23 Jeff Wang: Sequoia Capital's $9BN Global Equities Fund on The Future for NVIDIA, Google & Meta|E1212 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Oct 23, 2024 positive
Insight
AJ Tennant: Sales skills are entirely learnable, not innate personality traits
“I fundamentally believe they can be learned. You know, I think a lot of people would say it's innate, you know, you, you're born with it, it's that your personality, someone that's outgoing, but my philosophy is that pretty much humans can learn anything if th…”
AJ Tennant Oct 23, 2024 ▶ 0:58 AJ Tennant: How to Build a Sales Machine and Where Most Go Wrong | E2118 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Oct 28, 2024 positive
Opinion
Stebbings: Meta open-sources Llama because its true value is proprietary data
“Why does Facebook open source Lama? Because the values in the data that they have. A hundred percent.”
Harry Stebbings Oct 28, 2024 ▶ 4:25 Daniel Khachab: "We Are in the Middle of a Cold War for AI Talent" | E1220 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Nov 15, 2024 bearish
Opinion
Malik: Apple privacy changes killed Meta ads as a core scaling channel
“I mean, I think especially with all the latest Apple changes, I don't know how anyone is going to make Instagram or Facebook ads efficiently work at scale as like a core growth channel.”
Raman Malik Nov 15, 2024 ▶ 54:25 Raman Malik: Inside Perplexity’s Growth Machine: What Worked, What Did Not Work | E1226 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Nov 27, 2024 positive
Disclosure
Hommels Secured Early Facebook Shares via Benchmark Partner Matt Kohler
“And at that time I needed to figure out how I get into it, and then I, for two months, called everybody I knew in in In the valley, and I ended up with Matt Kohler, like a little coincidence, because I was at Benchmark as a VC, and he was with Benchmark, and s…”
Klaus Hommels Nov 27, 2024 ▶ 56:22 Klaus Hommels: Why "Portfolios are Merely a Construct to Make LPs Happy"? | E1231 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Dec 16, 2024 negative
Opinion
Hoffman: U.S. Should Ban TikTok Based on Commercial Reciprocity
“The right way, I think, to think about this from an American or any other perspective is to say China bans Competition in China from Meta, Twitter, etc. And so the right way to say is like, look, if you're banning our companies, we should ban yours. Commercial…”
Reid Hoffman Dec 16, 2024 ▶ 19:37 Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn & Paypal Founder: Trump Administration, Elon Musk and DOGE | E1239 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Jan 13, 2025 bullish
Disclosure
Pishevar sold all Facebook shares to bet everything on Uber secondary stock
“He allowed me to buy secondary shares from another early person, so I sold all my Facebook shares that had gone public at like, 53 bucks, 58 bucks a share, and I put it all I bet it all, everything I had, I put it all into Uber.”
Shervin Pishevar Jan 13, 2025 ▶ 13:25 Shervin Pishevar: What Really Happened in the Firing of Travis Kalanick | E1245 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Jan 17, 2025 positive
Disclosure
Facebook advertising fundamentally changed Monday.com's growth trajectory
“Facebook was amazing for us because I think it just changed the trajectory of the company.”
Eran Zinman Jan 17, 2025 ▶ 33:44 Eran Zinman, Co-Founder & Co-CEO @Monday.com: Going Upmarket, International and Multi-Product |E1247 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Jan 20, 2025 positive
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Kanji: Europe is on par with the US in AI for the first time
“When you look at what's happening in AI, you got DeepMind down the road in London, you got Meta running its AI stuff in Paris, like we are for the first time ever in European history on par from the company creation or technology creation as the US in not a ni…”
Hussein Kanji Jan 20, 2025 ▶ 53:42 Hussein Kanji, Founder @Hoxton Ventures: Why AI Means London Can Compete with the US | E1248 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Jan 29, 2025 positive
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Ross: DeepSeek Used Better Training Data Than Meta Via OpenAI Distillation
“Now, more recently, Meta has been training on more GPUs, but Meta hasn't been using as much good data as DeepSeq, because DeepSeq was doing reinforcement learning using OpenAI.”
Jonathan Ross Jan 29, 2025 ▶ 4:13 Jonathan Ross: DeepSeek Special - How Should OpenAI and the US Government Respond | E1253 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Jan 29, 2025 neutral
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Ross: Meta Will Not Scrape OpenAI Data Like DeepSeek Did
“The question is, are they willing to scrape open AI like DeepSeek did? And I don't think they are. I, they've been super careful on everything that they've been doing.”
Jonathan Ross Jan 29, 2025 ▶ 28:49 Jonathan Ross: DeepSeek Special - How Should OpenAI and the US Government Respond | E1253 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Jan 29, 2025 negative
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Ross: DeepSeek's ultra-low training budget claims are false marketing
“This model was supposedly trained on a smaller number of GPUs and a much, much tighter budget I think the way that it's been put is less than the salary of many of the executives at Meta, and that's not true. It's actually, there's an element of marketing invo…”
Jonathan Ross Jan 29, 2025 ▶ 3:27 Jonathan Ross: DeepSeek Special - How Should OpenAI and the US Government Respond | E1253 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Feb 14, 2025 bullish
Opinion
Solomou: TikTok and Meta are top social platform buys
“I would say TikTok, I would buy. Meta, I would buy on their big bets that they've made.”
Solly Solomou Feb 14, 2025 ▶ 1:10:48 Solly Solomou, Founder & CEO @ LADbible Group: From Penniless Shop Offices to Public Company | E1259 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Feb 14, 2025
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Solomou messaged Facebook's CTO on LinkedIn to restore deplatformed LADbible page
“We managed to get through to the CTO. So we spoke to the CTO at the time, who very kindly spoke, he didn't have to take the call, he took the call, and in fairness, a week later it was sorted.”
Solly Solomou Feb 14, 2025 ▶ 12:47 Solly Solomou, Founder & CEO @ LADbible Group: From Penniless Shop Offices to Public Company | E1259 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Feb 14, 2025
Disclosure
Solomou bought the original LADbible Facebook page for low thousands
“So he's in the low thousands. I won't say specifically how much, but he's in the low thousands.”
Solly Solomou Feb 14, 2025 ▶ 9:33 Solly Solomou, Founder & CEO @ LADbible Group: From Penniless Shop Offices to Public Company | E1259 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Feb 14, 2025 bullish
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Solomou: Snapchat will remain an innovative hub for Gen Z over 5-10 years
“I believe Snap is an interesting place over the next five to 10 years. Whether it can compete with the TikToks, and the Metas, and at this scale, I mean, these players are Huge. And we've seen what they've done in AI. We've seen what they're doing in e-commerc…”
Solly Solomou Feb 14, 2025 ▶ 1:09:57 Solly Solomou, Founder & CEO @ LADbible Group: From Penniless Shop Offices to Public Company | E1259 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Mar 3, 2025 positive
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Krieger: WeChat solved technical challenges on par with Facebook's scale
“People love talking about the, like the super app and we chat, and there was some technical challenges solved by those at scale that were of the same scale of challenges that Facebook was challenged was doing.”
Mike Krieger Mar 3, 2025 ▶ 32:40 Mike Krieger, Instagram CoFounder & Anthropic CPO: Where Will Value Be Created in an AI World?|E1265 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Mar 14, 2025 negative
Opinion
Stebbings: Meta's productization of Llama AI models has been very poor
“I would say that Facebook is the same like Lama and the productization around Lama has been bluntly very, very poor at the moment.”
Harry Stebbings Mar 14, 2025 ▶ 30:33 20Product: How to Design and Build Products in a World of Agents | Why AI Will Kill Many SaaS Products | What Products Will Thrive and Die in a World of 100M Developers with Matt Biilmann, Co-Founder and CEO @ Netlify
Mar 26, 2025 bullish
Assertion Contradicted
Green: ByteDance matches Meta in earnings while growing faster
“This is the same size business in terms of earnings grows faster.”
Mitchell Green Mar 26, 2025 ▶ 1:04:25 Mitchell Green, Founder @ Lead Edge Capital: Why Traditional VC is Broken · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Mar 26, 2025 neutral
Disclosure
Green: Only a few VCs can repeatedly back generational giants
“I put on one hand the amount of people that are capable of backing companies like Google's and Facebook's of the world, and doing it more than once. Like, it's a really, really, really small group. It sure as heck isn't me.”
Mitchell Green Mar 26, 2025 ▶ 56:43 Mitchell Green, Founder @ Lead Edge Capital: Why Traditional VC is Broken · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Apr 11, 2025
Disclosure
Nayak: Scale AI labeled e-commerce data for Meta, Instacart, and DoorDash
“Like I started the e-commerce team at scale where we were labeling e-commerce data, like from Meta, from Instacart, from DoorDash.”
Aatish Nayak Apr 11, 2025 ▶ 15:21 20Product: How Scale AI and Harvey Build Product | Why PMs Are Wrong: They are not the CEOs of the Product | How to do Pre and Post Mortems Effectively and How to Nail PRDs | The Future of Product Management in a World of AI with Aatish Nayak
Apr 25, 2025 positive
Insight
Gupta: Crypto growth relies on Discord and Reddit over Meta and Search
“Crypto lives and breathes and grows on social. So the people that I will find on Discord or Reddit and Twitter are very different from the people I will find on Meta and Instagram and or Search.”
Mayur Gupta Apr 25, 2025 ▶ 27:50 20Growth: Inside Kraken's $1.5BN Growth Playbook: What Works, What Doesn't and What No Founders Understand About Growth That Will Change Their Company with Mayur Gupta
Jun 5, 2025 bearish
Prediction Held up
O'Driscoll: Meta will not release a closed-source AI model this year
“Other than that, I see no reason to change the bet they're currently on, which has been the open source bet. So no, in the absence of DC intervention is my call.”
Rory O'Driscoll Jun 5, 2025 ▶ 1:20:52 Is DPI The Only Thing That Matters? with Sam Lessin, Jason Lemkin & Rory O’Driscoll · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Jun 5, 2025 bullish
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Lemkin: Meta will release a closed-source AI model to stay competitive
“And if releasing a fully closed source model brings, makes them more competitive, I think they will. I think it's more than 35%.”
Jason Lemkin Jun 5, 2025 ▶ 1:21:25 Is DPI The Only Thing That Matters? with Sam Lessin, Jason Lemkin & Rory O’Driscoll · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Jun 19, 2025 bearish
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Lemkin: Scale AI revenue will rapidly decline following Meta deal
“If only OpenAI is committed to maintaining that, As a partial presence, I assume the revenue will decline rapidly, right?”
Jason Lemkin Jun 19, 2025 ▶ 1:56 Chime IPO: Are IPOs Hotter Than Ever? · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Jun 19, 2025
Assertion Supported
O'Driscoll: Sequoia missed Facebook because Zuckerberg feared Mike Moritz replacing him
“Part of the reason that Sequoia aren't in Facebook is residual frustration with Mike Moritz for prior, you know, prior situations where they had in fact made a CEO change”
Rory O'Driscoll Jun 19, 2025 ▶ 29:51 Chime IPO: Are IPOs Hotter Than Ever? · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Jun 19, 2025 bearish
Opinion
O'Driscoll: Scale AI cannot sell to LLM providers competing with Meta
“Practically speaking, it's hard to imagine an independent, viable business selling to the LLMs who are the competitors to your 49% owner, where your founder and charismatic CEO is currently working.”
Rory O'Driscoll Jun 19, 2025 ▶ 20:28 Chime IPO: Are IPOs Hotter Than Ever? · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Jun 19, 2025 neutral
Assertion Supported
O'Driscoll: Meta took 49% non-voting Scale AI stake for $14 billion
“Facebook slash Meta announced a fascinating transaction whereby they, that definitely is a bit of a head scratcher, whereby they invested fourteen billion into scale AI, took 49% non-voting control, allowed the other investors to literally take that money back…”
Rory O'Driscoll Jun 19, 2025 ▶ 4:06 Chime IPO: Are IPOs Hotter Than Ever? · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Jun 26, 2025 bearish
Prediction Not checkable as stated
O'Driscoll: Meta won't build a major business selling LLaMA APIs
“It's not that they want to open source Lama and make money off it. They won't. It's not that they want to even have an API offering of Lama, something like, you know, a, an anthropic offering that just won't be big.”
Rory O'Driscoll Jun 26, 2025 ▶ 2:49 Navan Files to Go Public and Canva Pulls the Brakes: Why and What Happens? · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Jun 26, 2025 bullish
Assertion Supported
Lemkin: ChatGPT mobile downloads rival TikTok, Meta, and X combined
“It was ChatGPT over the last 28 days, 29.5 million downloads. ChatGPT, 29.5 million. Just mobile. That's just its mobile app. TikTok, Facebook, Instagram and X, thirty two million. So ChatGPT mobile downloads just about equal to all the social media guys combi…”
Jason Lemkin Jun 26, 2025 ▶ 5:55 Navan Files to Go Public and Canva Pulls the Brakes: Why and What Happens? · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Jun 26, 2025 negative
Opinion
O'Driscoll: Meta's Oculus acquisition and $60B VR spend was awful
“In one cynical sense, you know, the Oculus acquisition was awful. It was like you spend two billion, which wasn't that bad. And then you spend another sixty billion on top of it, which is pretty dreadful and you didn't get much”
Rory O'Driscoll Jun 26, 2025 ▶ 3:21 Navan Files to Go Public and Canva Pulls the Brakes: Why and What Happens? · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Jul 10, 2025 neutral
Assertion Supported
O'Driscoll: Meta is acquiring 49% of Gross and Friedman's NFDG fund
“I believe the terms are that overall, And this is matter will buy 49% of the fund, but each individual LP can put in to sell as much as little as they like, and then it just aggregates.”
Rory O'Driscoll Jul 10, 2025 ▶ 6:42 Daniel Gross and Nat Friedman: Acquired by Meta | Microsoft Layoff 9000 People | OpenAI's Bombshell · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Jul 21, 2025 positive
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Chen: Surge AI has more daily working PhDs than Big Tech combined
“Like if you think of all the PhDs, even at Google or Meta or Microsoft, we have way more than all of them combined doing work for us in a single day.”
Edwin Chen Jul 21, 2025 ▶ 40:23 Surge CEO & Co-Founder, Edwin Chen: Scaling to $1BN+ in Revenue with NO Funding · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Jul 31, 2025
Insight
Lemkin: Mature public tech companies are trapped by high margin expectations
“It is almost impossible for most public companies to actually spend the cash there they're generating. So Zuck's got a triple down here because he's getting also a hall pass. The market's saying it's okay to spend everything, right?”
Jason Lemkin Jul 31, 2025 ▶ 1:03:03 Why Apple Needs a Management Overhaul & Why Google is Catching Up with Hyperscalers · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Aug 4, 2025
Assertion Supported
Only 11 Venture-Backed IPOs Have Surpassed $50B in Market Cap
“There's been 11 fifty billion dollar IPOs ever. Venture backed. 11. Ok? The two largest venture backed IPOs ever, Or Facebook in 2012 and Alibaba in 2014.”
Miles Dieffenbach Aug 4, 2025 ▶ 39:53 Miles Dieffenbach: Inside Carnegie Mellon’s $4BN Endowment & The Math Behind DPI, TVPI, Illiquidity · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Aug 4, 2025
Assertion Partly supported
Big Four Tech Giants Generate $600B in Annual Operating Cash Flow
“You look at Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and Meta combined, I mean, they're doing six hundred billion of operating cash flow, just cash coming off the company every single year”
Miles Dieffenbach Aug 4, 2025 ▶ 1:11:57 Miles Dieffenbach: Inside Carnegie Mellon’s $4BN Endowment & The Math Behind DPI, TVPI, Illiquidity · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Aug 7, 2025 neutral
Opinion
O'Driscoll: Meta's strength stems from core ads, not AI
“This isn't a AI enabled success. This is, I have an awesome existing business, and it kicks off so much money that I'm allowed spend that money on building this great AI vision, and I can probably do that for as long as my existing business kicks off cash.”
Rory O'Driscoll Aug 7, 2025 ▶ 55:32 Figma's 250% Pop - The Greatest IPO Mispricing Ever? Meta & Microsoft Blowout Quarters: Broken Down · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Aug 7, 2025 negative
Opinion
Brian Halligan: Direct listings are risky unless you're Google or Facebook
“I think the direct listing is like, you're a little bit scared. You're not going to get those long loneliness. You're not going to properly market it to them. And it's seven percent to the bankers in the grand scheme of things. It's not that much. I think it's…”
Brian Halligan Aug 7, 2025 ▶ 16:47 Figma's 250% Pop - The Greatest IPO Mispricing Ever? Meta & Microsoft Blowout Quarters: Broken Down · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Aug 11, 2025 negative
Opinion
Mignot: Social media algorithms must be public and auditable
“I think it should be loud, but there should be a bigger conversation about social networks and about the openness of algorithms, which don't only apply to TikTok, but, you know, applies to X, applies to Facebook. I think those algorithms should be should be pu…”
Martin Mignot Aug 11, 2025 ▶ 38:53 Index Ventures Partner, Martin Mignot: Figma, Scale, Wiz: Inside Index’s Decacorn Factory · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Aug 28, 2025 bearish
Opinion
O'Driscoll: Meta has a tenuous link between core ads and LLMs
“They have a very tenuous link between their core business and their AI initiative. They talk about how AI is optimizing their core business, but even I think from the discussions they said, that's much more old school AI than any of the LLM stuff.”
Rory O'Driscoll Aug 28, 2025 ▶ 30:10 Anthropic's $10B Round, Klarna's IPO, Inside a16z's 72 Deal Seed Investment Machine ft. Marc Benioff · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Sep 4, 2025 bearish
Opinion
O'Driscoll: $4T AI infrastructure investment requires impossible $800B annual profit
“Four, let's do four billion dollars. You want a 20% return on equity. You gotta be generating eight hundred billion of profit a year. That's a lot of profit when, you know, Facebook met, all these guys make a couple hundred billion a year, right? So you've got…”
Rory O'Driscoll Sep 4, 2025 ▶ 49:12 Anthropic Raises $13BN & OpenAI Buys Statsig for $1.1BN All Stock · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Sep 5, 2025 bullish
Assertion Supported
Alex Schultz: 70% of Meta engagement is un-followed AI recommendations
“So five years ago, we were 100% content shown to you based on people you follow, or accounts you follow. 100%. People don't understand, like, TikTok was tiny, it was the beginning of the pandemic, like, it was very early on, so let's say five and a half years …”
Alex Schultz Sep 5, 2025 ▶ 51:46 20Growth: Meta CMO Alex Schultz on How All Founders Have to Change Their Marketing Playbook in a World of AI | Is AI Plateauing, What it Means if China Wins the AI Race and Why Zuck is a Generational Leader
Sep 5, 2025 negative
Assertion Contradicted
Alex Schultz admits Meta's Llama 4 missed the leading edge
“It's pretty clear Llama was not, like, Llama four wasn't leading edge where Llama three was. So, you know, our big release this year was not a slam dunk, but our big release last year was, and I'm pretty confident our next big release will be again.”
Alex Schultz Sep 5, 2025 ▶ 32:37 20Growth: Meta CMO Alex Schultz on How All Founders Have to Change Their Marketing Playbook in a World of AI | Is AI Plateauing, What it Means if China Wins the AI Race and Why Zuck is a Generational Leader
Sep 5, 2025 bullish
Assertion Supported
Alex Schultz: Meta click-to-messaging ads generate over $10 billion annually
“So click to messaging is north of a ten billion dollar business.”
Alex Schultz Sep 5, 2025 ▶ 57:30 20Growth: Meta CMO Alex Schultz on How All Founders Have to Change Their Marketing Playbook in a World of AI | Is AI Plateauing, What it Means if China Wins the AI Race and Why Zuck is a Generational Leader
Sep 5, 2025 positive
Assertion Partly supported
Alex Schultz: Meta shifted from a falling brand to a rising brand
“We've actually moved up tremendously in terms of brand sentiment. You think where we were five years ago, and think where we are today, people don't look at this stuff, obviously I do, and we were literally a falling brand, and now we're a rising brand.”
Alex Schultz Sep 5, 2025 ▶ 44:09 20Growth: Meta CMO Alex Schultz on How All Founders Have to Change Their Marketing Playbook in a World of AI | Is AI Plateauing, What it Means if China Wins the AI Race and Why Zuck is a Generational Leader
Sep 5, 2025 neutral
Assertion Partly supported
Alex Schultz: Meta spends less on marketing than its tech peers
“Apart from Apple, whose marketing is paid for by the carriers, we have the lowest percentage of operating income that we spend on the stuff, the media that we disclose in the XK”
Alex Schultz Sep 5, 2025 ▶ 1:01:21 20Growth: Meta CMO Alex Schultz on How All Founders Have to Change Their Marketing Playbook in a World of AI | Is AI Plateauing, What it Means if China Wins the AI Race and Why Zuck is a Generational Leader
Sep 5, 2025 neutral
Opinion
Alex Schultz: Meta may reconsider open-sourcing extreme AI capabilities
“We've said that when it gets to the cutting edge, like the absolute cutting edge, the bleeding edge, There, we don't think you should be necessarily releasing open source, and we'll think about that. So I think at the most extreme capabilities, I don't know th…”
Alex Schultz Sep 5, 2025 ▶ 33:22 20Growth: Meta CMO Alex Schultz on How All Founders Have to Change Their Marketing Playbook in a World of AI | Is AI Plateauing, What it Means if China Wins the AI Race and Why Zuck is a Generational Leader
Sep 5, 2025 negative
Disclosure
Alex Schultz opposed Meta building audio rooms to compete with Clubhouse
“I didn't agree with us doing the audio rooms thing. At the same time we were sticking reels at the top of everything, we also stuck audio rooms at the top of everything. And audio rooms failed.”
Alex Schultz Sep 5, 2025 ▶ 54:19 20Growth: Meta CMO Alex Schultz on How All Founders Have to Change Their Marketing Playbook in a World of AI | Is AI Plateauing, What it Means if China Wins the AI Race and Why Zuck is a Generational Leader
Sep 5, 2025 bullish
Assertion Supported
Alex Schultz: WhatsApp business verification revenue exceeds $1 billion annually
“And that's a north of a billion dollar business.”
Alex Schultz Sep 5, 2025 ▶ 59:59 20Growth: Meta CMO Alex Schultz on How All Founders Have to Change Their Marketing Playbook in a World of AI | Is AI Plateauing, What it Means if China Wins the AI Race and Why Zuck is a Generational Leader
Sep 5, 2025 positive
Disclosure
Alex Schultz: Meta supported Apple against UK government encryption backdoor demands
“That's why we came out in support of Apple. That's why other companies have come out in support of Apple in that situation. Despite the fact, as companies, we've had a lot of disagreements. We supported Apple in that.”
Alex Schultz Sep 5, 2025 ▶ 31:32 20Growth: Meta CMO Alex Schultz on How All Founders Have to Change Their Marketing Playbook in a World of AI | Is AI Plateauing, What it Means if China Wins the AI Race and Why Zuck is a Generational Leader
Sep 5, 2025 bullish
Assertion Open · timeframe Sep 2026
Alex Schultz: Meta's AI sticker click targets increase ad CTR by 6%
“When advertisers take advantage of that, they get a six percent boost in click-through rate and a commensurate increase in conversion rate.”
Alex Schultz Sep 5, 2025 ▶ 39:49 20Growth: Meta CMO Alex Schultz on How All Founders Have to Change Their Marketing Playbook in a World of AI | Is AI Plateauing, What it Means if China Wins the AI Race and Why Zuck is a Generational Leader
Sep 5, 2025
Insight
Alex Schultz: Tech employees naturally build products for power users
“The general company, in my experience, every company, whether you talk Amazon, whether you talk Google, whether you talk Meta, whether you talk Airbnb, they, as employees, tend to be power users of the product, and they, by nature, optimize for people like the…”
Alex Schultz Sep 5, 2025 ▶ 8:49 20Growth: Meta CMO Alex Schultz on How All Founders Have to Change Their Marketing Playbook in a World of AI | Is AI Plateauing, What it Means if China Wins the AI Race and Why Zuck is a Generational Leader
Sep 5, 2025
Assertion Supported
Alex Schultz: Less than 1% of Meta employees work on growth
“So across our nearly a 100,000 employees, we have less than one percent of the employees in the growth team.”
Alex Schultz Sep 5, 2025 ▶ 11:07 20Growth: Meta CMO Alex Schultz on How All Founders Have to Change Their Marketing Playbook in a World of AI | Is AI Plateauing, What it Means if China Wins the AI Race and Why Zuck is a Generational Leader
Sep 5, 2025 bullish
Disclosure
Alex Schultz: Meta is building a data center the size of Manhattan
“What we're doing in Louisiana, where we're building a data center the size of Manhattan”
Alex Schultz Sep 5, 2025 ▶ 16:15 20Growth: Meta CMO Alex Schultz on How All Founders Have to Change Their Marketing Playbook in a World of AI | Is AI Plateauing, What it Means if China Wins the AI Race and Why Zuck is a Generational Leader
Sep 8, 2025 neutral
Insight
Staniszewski: Tech giants pay for AI talent to acquire model architecture know-how
“As I think about meta and others, they are of course paying for the know-how as much as they are paying for the raw talent too, where getting those early people gets you some insight into the models and architecture that you can then bring across and accelerat…”
Mati Staniszewski Sep 8, 2025 ▶ 15:35 ElevenLabs CEO/Co-Founder, Mati Staniszewski:The Untold Story of Europe’s Fastest Growing AI Startup · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Sep 11, 2025 negative
Opinion
O'Driscoll: AI reverse acqui-hires are regulatory shams leaving dead target companies
“We actually, in both of those cases, that's a pure pretense to get the government off of us, right? Everyone knows both of these companies are toast because in the case of Scale AI, in theory, Meta owns 50% of it, and in theory, their business is selling to ev…”
Rory O'Driscoll Sep 11, 2025 ▶ 18:00 OpenAI’s $10BN Secondary Sale, Ramp Hits $1BN ARR & Brex Hits $700M · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Sep 22, 2025 negative
Opinion
Taneja: Meta isn't an enterprise company; Mistral leads Western open-source AI
“It's not meta. They're not an enterprise company. It really is in the West. It's really missed, missed trial today.”
Hemant Taneja Sep 22, 2025 ▶ 50:46 General Catalyst CEO, Hemant Taneja: Lessons Scaling GC to $40BN in AUM · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Sep 29, 2025 negative
Opinion
Ross: Amazon lacks AI DNA compared to Google, Meta, and Microsoft
“Amazon, I think doesn't have AI DNA. And they, like, if you compare them, so you didn't mention Meta, right? But Meta and Google always had the AI DNA, and Microsoft bought it with OpenAI, but that bought them time. Amazon still doesn't have that DNA, but they…”
Jonathan Ross Sep 29, 2025 ▶ 1:29:14 Groq Founder, Jonathan Ross: OpenAI & Anthropic Will Build Their Own Chips & Will NVIDIA Hit $10TRN · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Oct 2, 2025 negative
Insight
O'Driscoll: ChatGPT's real threat to Meta is stealing user attention
“The big picture comment is if you spend two hours a day on chat GPT, that's two hours a day that you are not spending on Facebook and we live and die on our attention.”
Rory O'Driscoll Oct 2, 2025 ▶ 56:59 Are Burn Multiples BS in an AI World? & Sam Altman Needs $1TRN of Energy · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Oct 2, 2025 bearish
Prediction Not checkable as stated
O'Driscoll: Meta's AI bet will mirror VR flop, not Instagram success
“If there was a Calci bet, and maybe I should check it that, you know, some version of this AI strategy will not produce meaningful revenue despite a twenty billion dollar burn and will look more like meta VR and less like Instagram and WhatsApp, two of the mos…”
Rory O'Driscoll Oct 2, 2025 ▶ 55:33 Are Burn Multiples BS in an AI World? & Sam Altman Needs $1TRN of Energy · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Oct 3, 2025
Insight
Slonimski: TikTok Requires Three Times More Ad Creatives Than Meta
“So on TikTok, you need to have three times more creatives. They're not meta.”
Ketty Slonimski Oct 3, 2025 ▶ 35:27 20Growth: How to Use Influencers to Scale Growth Insanely Fast | How to Optimise User Onboaring for Growth | How the Best Growth Teams Create Organic Growth and Community | Why LTV/CAC Models are BS with Ketty Slonimsky
Oct 3, 2025 bearish
Opinion
Slonimski: Meta Is Overhyped Due to Worsening Ad Economics
“At the level of the channel, we don't really distinguish if it's Facebook, Instagram, or whatever, and I think it's overhyped as it's getting really tough to get to good user economics there.”
Ketty Slonimski Oct 3, 2025 ▶ 52:04 20Growth: How to Use Influencers to Scale Growth Insanely Fast | How to Optimise User Onboaring for Growth | How the Best Growth Teams Create Organic Growth and Community | Why LTV/CAC Models are BS with Ketty Slonimsky
Oct 16, 2025 neutral
Insight
O'Driscoll: Founder Loyalty Erodes When Offered Multi-Billion-Dollar Payouts
“In the face of unprecedented wealth, I'm shocked to discover that most people behave badly. The loyalty conversation erodes pretty quickly when you're, you know, when you're into the third comma.”
Rory O'Driscoll Oct 16, 2025 ▶ 16:58 Thinking Machines Co-Founder Joins Meta for $3.5BN, Industry Venture's $665M Acquisition · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Oct 20, 2025 bullish
Opinion
Bouaziz calls PaySpace acquisition Deel's equivalent of Facebook buying Instagram
“Long-term strategy of the company, the quality of the founders, of the people, of the product, and how much it helps from an infrastructure perspective, from a gross margin perspective, from an experience perspective, is probably, it's probably the Instagram t…”
Alex Bouaziz Oct 20, 2025 ▶ 55:29 Deel CEO, Alex Bouaziz on Raising $300M+ at a $17BN Valuation · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Oct 20, 2025 positive
Opinion
Stebbings considers Meta's Alex Schultz to be the world's best CMO
“The best CMO in the world to me is Alex Schultz from Meta.”
Harry Stebbings Oct 20, 2025 ▶ 27:03 Deel CEO, Alex Bouaziz on Raising $300M+ at a $17BN Valuation · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Oct 24, 2025 neutral
Insight
Diao: Meta provides virtually no organic reach for brand accounts
“For meta, if you're a brand, there's virtually no, We're very, very limited organic distribution for you, so paid is naturally kind of the way to go, and they really make that engine work”
Sandy Diao Oct 24, 2025 ▶ 48:55 20Growth: How to Build a Paid Marketing Machine: ROAS (Return on Ad Spend) 101 | The Rise of User Generated Content and How to Use It | TikTok Ads: Expectations vs. Reality | Hiring for Growth: When and Who with Sandy Diao
Oct 24, 2025 positive
Assertion Supported
Diao: Static Meta ads convert software downloads better than video ads
“Like one example I'll share with you actually is a lot of people really want to use video content for ads these days, but it turns out that for paid social platforms like Meta, static ads still actually do a better job of converting people into downloads or pe…”
Sandy Diao Oct 24, 2025 ▶ 27:03 20Growth: How to Build a Paid Marketing Machine: ROAS (Return on Ad Spend) 101 | The Rise of User Generated Content and How to Use It | TikTok Ads: Expectations vs. Reality | Hiring for Growth: When and Who with Sandy Diao
Oct 24, 2025 negative
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Diao: Meta's newly launched features and acquired apps lacked product interoperability
“That's something I wish we had at Meta when we rolled out new features or when we brought Apps into the fold of the company. They weren't very interoperable, meaning that you had these very separate surfaces.”
Sandy Diao Oct 24, 2025 ▶ 1:12:31 20Growth: How to Build a Paid Marketing Machine: ROAS (Return on Ad Spend) 101 | The Rise of User Generated Content and How to Use It | TikTok Ads: Expectations vs. Reality | Hiring for Growth: When and Who with Sandy Diao
Oct 27, 2025 bearish
Opinion
Cahn: Meta's $100M AI packages stem from underperformance
“And I think that Meta, you know, these hundred million packages are coming in large part from Meta because they haven't performed as well as they thought they were going to.”
David Cahn Oct 27, 2025 ▶ 8:19 Sequoia Partner, David Cahn on Who Wins in AI, Defence & The New $0–$100M Playbook · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Nov 3, 2025 positive
Opinion
Pineau: Mark Zuckerberg dives incredibly deep into AI technical details
“He is incredibly deep into understanding the work. Like, he does not coast, you know. When he started getting into AI, just the depth of the question that he'd ask, he just gets really interested in the topic and goes super deep, and that then just informs eve…”
Joelle Pineau Nov 3, 2025 ▶ 55:16 Cohere's Chief AI Officer, Joelle Pineau: Why Scaling Laws Will Continue & Future of Synthetic Data · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Nov 6, 2025 negative
Opinion
O'Driscoll: Meta spending $70 billion on AI is inefficient
“Doesn't appear to be the most efficient way to spend seventy billion dollars, as judged from the amount of infighting, but we'll see.”
Rory O'Driscoll Nov 6, 2025 ▶ 52:12 Is a $4.5BN Exit Enough in VC? & Harvey Raises $150M & Why Google is a Buy and Amazon is a Sell · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Dec 11, 2025 neutral
Assertion Contradicted
O'Driscoll: Meta and Google control 70% of all global advertising
“Facebook and Google have 70% of not just all digital advertising, but all advertising.”
Rory O'Driscoll Dec 11, 2025 ▶ 29:01 SpaceX Valued at $800BN & Harvey Raises $160M at an $8BN Price & Netflix Acquires Warner Brothers · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Dec 15, 2025
Assertion Contradicted
Google and Facebook user monetization grew sevenfold over the last decade
“10 years ago, Google and Facebook were monetizing their users at like one-seventh of what they are today.”
David George Dec 15, 2025 ▶ 50:44 a16z's David George on the Most Controversial Bet at a16z & Do Margins and Revenue Matter in AI? · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Jan 8, 2026 negative
Opinion
O'Driscoll: Manus is not an obvious product fit for Meta
“It's not obvious why a kind of B to B or individual knowledge worker work tool, which is what Manus is, is an obvious product to roll out, you know, three billion users on Facebook, most of whom don't do knowledge work.”
Rory O'Driscoll Jan 8, 2026 ▶ 18:14 Groq’s $20BN NVIDIA Deal | Why Sam Altman Doesn’t Care About Dilution & Invisible Unemployment 2026 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Jan 8, 2026
Insight
O'Driscoll: Corporate AI imperatives conflict with leaders skeptical of LLMs
“Once it became a corporate imperative for Meta to be competitive with OpenAI and Anthropic in the LLM space, having a guy running that product, running that project, whose first line is, I don't think this is important. We should do something else. Just causes…”
Rory O'Driscoll Jan 8, 2026 ▶ 30:44 Groq’s $20BN NVIDIA Deal | Why Sam Altman Doesn’t Care About Dilution & Invisible Unemployment 2026 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Jan 8, 2026 negative
Opinion
Lemkin: Mark Zuckerberg is investing heavily in AI out of spite
“It's CO spite about how they were forced to run companies in 20, 21. I think there's versions and I'm a big Sheryl Sandberg fan, but I think Zuck is spiteful. He was forced to run The company in a, in, in a certain way. I know a lot, I mean, Owen from Intercom…”
Jason Lemkin Jan 8, 2026 ▶ 34:41 Groq’s $20BN NVIDIA Deal | Why Sam Altman Doesn’t Care About Dilution & Invisible Unemployment 2026 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Jan 8, 2026 neutral
Assertion Supported
Stebbings: Meta acquired Manus for $2.5B at 25x ARR
“The price was two and a half billion dollars. It was a 25 X current ARR. They were at a hundred million of ARR, doing a hundred and twenty-five million run rate, including consumption.”
Harry Stebbings Jan 8, 2026 ▶ 16:52 Groq’s $20BN NVIDIA Deal | Why Sam Altman Doesn’t Care About Dilution & Invisible Unemployment 2026 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Jan 22, 2026 negative
Assertion Supported
O'Driscoll: Serving free ChatGPT users costs more than Google or Facebook
“And the cost to serve a free ChatGPT customer is higher than either Facebook or Google.”
Rory O'Driscoll Jan 22, 2026 ▶ 45:21 Elon Musk vs Sam Altman | The Implosion of Thinking Machines | Can VC Survive Public Pricing? · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Feb 2, 2026 positive
Disclosure
Apax Partners rejected Zeev's early pitch to invest in Facebook
“I, now, now I do have misses from the Apex days where I saw something that I wanted to do, but I knew that there was no way I could get it approved, including Facebook, by the way, in the very early days, you know, I saw it, I could have done it. I brought it …”
Oren Zeev Feb 2, 2026 ▶ 1:08:00 Oren Zeev: Why AI Growth Expectations Are BS & Won't Last? Why GPs Shouldn't Tell LPs Their Strategy
Feb 28, 2026 positive
Assertion Contradicted
Jerry Murdock: Meta rejected Nvidia GPUs to bet on custom ASIC chips
“I mean, look, you know, a lot of people like to criticize meta here and there about being behind the game, but they had the balls to say no to Jensen. Sorry, Jensen. We don't need you. So why did he do that? Because he's betting on a six chips. No question abo…”
Jerry Murdock Feb 28, 2026 ▶ 9:41 The SaaS Apocalypse: Who Lives & Who Dies | Insight Partners Co-Founder, Jerry Murdock · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Mar 7, 2026 bullish
Opinion
Mitchell Green: Mark Zuckerberg is right to bet big on AI spending
“Mark Zuckerberg deserves to go for it. Like, he's, it's his business. He built the damn business. Like, I don't think you really have much to say to be like, oh, don't bet on the guy. And by the way, he kind of has to because his competitors are doing the same…”
Mitchell Green Mar 7, 2026 ▶ 9:06 Mitchell Green: Why 50% of VCs Should Not Exist · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Mar 7, 2026 neutral
Assertion Supported
Green: Apple spends far less on AI CapEx than tech peers
“And, you know, like Apple's spending very little right now, you know, and those other three or four companies are spending insane amounts of money.”
Mitchell Green Mar 7, 2026 ▶ 8:41 Mitchell Green: Why 50% of VCs Should Not Exist · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Mar 12, 2026 bullish
Assertion Supported
Stebbings: Meta moves to absorb excess AI data center capacity
“Meta moves in to absorb the surplus AI data center capacity”
Harry Stebbings Mar 12, 2026 ▶ 0:13 Anthropic vs The Pentagon: Who Wins? | The Data Center Arms Race | The Ultimate Stock Picks · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Mar 14, 2026 bearish
Opinion
Verna: Meta ads deliver very little incremental growth for startups
“Meta... Just very little incrementality. Just a bunch of pass through views that don't materialize into anything.”
Elena Verna Mar 14, 2026 ▶ 1:08:42 Elena Verna: How Lovable Launches Product & Hacks Social to Go Viral · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Mar 16, 2026 positive
Assertion Supported
Rajaram: Zuckerberg refused to anonymize Facebook in Japan and won
“I remember when Facebook had to go into Japan, Japanese cultural norms were that all the Japanese social networks back then were incognito. You couldn't, for some reason, maybe saving face or something. You could not share your real name or your photo. So ever…”
Gokul Rajaram Mar 16, 2026 ▶ 46:24 Gokul Rajaram: How to Analyse for Durability and Defensibility in a World of AI · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Mar 16, 2026 positive
Opinion
Rajaram: Mark Zuckerberg is the greatest distribution genius in the world
“Mark, I think is Mark Zuckerberg is probably the best. I would say distribution genius in the world.”
Gokul Rajaram Mar 16, 2026 ▶ 3:00 Gokul Rajaram: How to Analyse for Durability and Defensibility in a World of AI · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Mar 19, 2026 neutral
Opinion
Lemkin: Meta and Atlassian layoffs are voluntary, not financially forced
“Neither of these companies has to lay off anybody. Okay. Atlassian has substantial free cashflow meta. I don't know. They're in the, their free cashflow is dip, but it's still like in the mid forties, right? They don't have to do this.”
Jason Lemkin Mar 19, 2026 ▶ 10:27 NVIDIA Predicts $1TRN in Revenue: Everything You Need to Know From GTC & Anduril Lands $20B Contract · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Mar 19, 2026 bearish
Prediction Held up
O'Driscoll: Meta will lay off employees to fund Nvidia hardware purchases
“And that depreciation is going to start hitting, and they're going to be firing people because they need to give it to Jensen.”
Rory O'Driscoll Mar 19, 2026 ▶ 15:53 NVIDIA Predicts $1TRN in Revenue: Everything You Need to Know From GTC & Anduril Lands $20B Contract · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Mar 19, 2026 bearish
Assertion Partly supported
O'Driscoll: Meta's free cash flow is near zero after accounting for CapEx
“Their operating margins are still 40%. The free cash flow, when you honestly account for the capex, is almost zero, right?”
Rory O'Driscoll Mar 19, 2026 ▶ 15:45 NVIDIA Predicts $1TRN in Revenue: Everything You Need to Know From GTC & Anduril Lands $20B Contract · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Apr 16, 2026 negative
Opinion
O'Driscoll: Meta's pivot to closed-source AI harms the ecosystem
“Also worth noting that they're talking about being much more closed source, which is a significant thing, because at some point someone's going to need the American version of open source, and Lama was that, and now they're pivoting more to be more closed sour…”
Rory O’Driscoll Apr 16, 2026 ▶ 43:39 SpaceX's Financials Leaked: Is it Worth $2TN | Meta Debuts Muse Spark: Are They Back in the AI Race? · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Apr 16, 2026 bullish
Assertion Supported
Lemkin: Google Search, Facebook, and Instagram are stronger than ever
“Fast forward today. These are record growth businesses now, right? Google search. We started the show talking about AI overviews and other things. Google search is a better business than it has ever been as is Facebook and Instagram.”
Jason Lemkin Apr 16, 2026 ▶ 46:28 SpaceX's Financials Leaked: Is it Worth $2TN | Meta Debuts Muse Spark: Are They Back in the AI Race? · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Apr 16, 2026
Assertion Supported
O'Driscoll: Meta lost $70B on VR after making $100B+ on Instagram
“Yeah, I mean, if you look at the, if you look at the big play scoreboard for that, it's like, bet a billion on Instagram, win a hundred billion plus, maybe four hundred billion. Bet seventy billion on Meta and VRAR, lose it all.”
Rory O’Driscoll Apr 16, 2026 ▶ 45:50 SpaceX's Financials Leaked: Is it Worth $2TN | Meta Debuts Muse Spark: Are They Back in the AI Race? · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Apr 16, 2026 positive
Opinion
Lemkin: Meta is the most ruthlessly competitive company on Earth
“Ruthless, this is as competitive a company as exists on planet Earth, right? This might be the most competitive company on planet Earth is Meta, right? Ruthless.”
Jason Lemkin Apr 16, 2026 ▶ 45:43 SpaceX's Financials Leaked: Is it Worth $2TN | Meta Debuts Muse Spark: Are They Back in the AI Race? · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Apr 30, 2026
Prediction Not checkable as stated
O'Driscoll: Manus-style cross-border tech acquisitions will never happen again
“What it really is doing is it's less about getting this thing back than it's preventing it from ever happening again. That's the first, last, and only one of these deals that anyone will do, right?”
Rory O'Driscoll Apr 30, 2026 ▶ 37:02 Anthropic Raises $45B but Falls Short on Compute & Thoma Bravo Hand Back Medallia Keys to Creditors · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Apr 30, 2026
Prediction Held up
O'Driscoll: Zero chance VCs return capital from blocked Manus deal
“The investors who've gotten their capital out, the chances of them having to or being willing to return that capital are zero.”
Rory O'Driscoll Apr 30, 2026 ▶ 35:58 Anthropic Raises $45B but Falls Short on Compute & Thoma Bravo Hand Back Medallia Keys to Creditors · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
May 7, 2026 bearish
Opinion
O'Driscoll: Meta's $150B AI CapEx to boost ad revenue is a mistake
“They've been using this justification For the LLM spend as being, it'll optimize our existing business, and I've always felt that's bullshit, because if it takes a hundred fifty billion in capex to give a 10% lift on a two hundred billion dollar business, it's…”
Rory O'Driscoll May 7, 2026 ▶ 23:19 Anthropic's Raise & What It Means for Potential IPO? Mag7: Google & Amazon Up, Meta & Microsoft Down · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
May 9, 2026 bullish
Opinion
Cliff Weitzman: Meta is one of the most underrated stocks right now
“Yeah, I think Meta is one of the most underrated stocks right now.”
Cliff Weitzman May 9, 2026 ▶ 31:08 Cliff Weitzman: What I Learned from 100 of the World’s Top CEOs & Why Tokens Will Outspend Salaries · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
May 9, 2026 bearish
Opinion
Weitzman: Meta is completely eating Snapchat's lunch
“I think they're overpaying creators, left, right, and center. And I just think that the lunch is completely eaten by meta at this point.”
Cliff Weitzman May 9, 2026 ▶ 1:04:30 Cliff Weitzman: What I Learned from 100 of the World’s Top CEOs & Why Tokens Will Outspend Salaries · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
May 9, 2026 positive
Opinion
Cliff Weitzman: Mark Zuckerberg is the world's best acquirer
“Zuck also has proven that he is the number one acquirer in the world. Like, no one acquires as well as Meta.”
Cliff Weitzman May 9, 2026 ▶ 31:44 Cliff Weitzman: What I Learned from 100 of the World’s Top CEOs & Why Tokens Will Outspend Salaries · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
May 9, 2026 bullish
Disclosure
Weitzman: Long Meta as AI software tools elevate distribution value
“Which is by the way, why I'm really long meta in a world where it's easy to do engineering and easy to do design, more things launch and go to market. It becomes the most important thing.”
Cliff Weitzman May 9, 2026 ▶ 1:49:54 Cliff Weitzman: What I Learned from 100 of the World’s Top CEOs & Why Tokens Will Outspend Salaries · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
May 18, 2026 neutral
Opinion
Browder: Meta's layoffs are driven by AI-powered engineer productivity
“With Meta, I think it's AI driven. There, it's clear that they're spending so much money on their data centers, and AI has made their engineering more productive. They need fewer engineers.”
Josh Browder May 18, 2026 ▶ 1:14:26 Turning Peter Thiel's $100K into $10M Angel Portfolio & Why VCs Can Be Sharks | Josh Browder · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
May 28, 2026 negative
Assertion Not checkable as stated
O'Driscoll: Meta Is Spending Billions on AI Without Demanding ROI
“There's no one at Facebook yet, or that might change, saying, are we getting value from our billions of dollars in AI? We just assume we are and keep going, right?”
Rory O'Driscoll May 28, 2026 ▶ 15:14 OpenAI & SpaceX S1 Drops | Layoffs at Cloudflare & ClickUp | OpenRouter & Polsia Raise Mega Rounds · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Jun 1, 2026 neutral
Assertion Open
Meta Offered an AI Candidate $20 Million Per Year in Cash
“There was someone I was hiring the other day, and he had an offer for twenty million dollars in cash per year from TBD, and like that's the kind of stuff we run into on a regular basis.”
Brendan Foody Jun 1, 2026 ▶ 1:03:48 Mercor CEO: Why Application Layer Companies Have No Moat & The Cost of Hiring AI Researchers · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Jun 1, 2026 neutral
Disclosure
Meta Paused Mercor Relationship After Hack While Other Labs Expanded
“I mean, I think that Meta you know, like, currently the relationship is still paused. Every other one of the Frontier Labs has grown their relationship with us since and the company has been crushing it but they're the only one that is paused, which is public.”
Brendan Foody Jun 1, 2026 ▶ 7:50 Mercor CEO: Why Application Layer Companies Have No Moat & The Cost of Hiring AI Researchers · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Jun 1, 2026 negative
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Foody: Handshake did not gain revenue from Meta shifting spend from Mercor
“That's not true.”
Brendan Foody Jun 1, 2026 ▶ 8:33 Mercor CEO: Why Application Layer Companies Have No Moat & The Cost of Hiring AI Researchers · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Jun 15, 2026 neutral
Assertion Supported
Meta plans to launch a $200-a-month AI product called Hatch
“Meta's trying to launch Hatch for 200 dollars a month.”
Aravind Srinivas Jun 15, 2026 ▶ 8:27 Perplexity CEO: Micron Will Be More Valuable Than Meta & How Export Controls Helped Not Hurt China · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Jun 15, 2026 bullish
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Micron might surpass Meta in valuation within 12 months
“It might not be inconceivable that Micron, the supplier of HPMs, might be more valuable than Meta in the next six to 12 months.”
Aravind Srinivas Jun 15, 2026 ▶ 38:23 Perplexity CEO: Micron Will Be More Valuable Than Meta & How Export Controls Helped Not Hurt China · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Jun 15, 2026
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Some Meta engineers spend $10 million annually on AI coding tools
“There are real engineers in meta and in other companies spending like ten million a year per engineer on, on, on, on these, you know, coding tools.”
Aravind Srinivas Jun 15, 2026 ▶ 16:46 Perplexity CEO: Micron Will Be More Valuable Than Meta & How Export Controls Helped Not Hurt China · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Jun 15, 2026 bullish
Prediction Open · timeframe Jun 2031
AI agents will generate more revenue than Google or Meta ads
“These products are not going to be used by you know, a hundred million people. But they will generate revenue that's going to be higher than the advertising revenue of Google or Meta. It's going to happen.”
Aravind Srinivas Jun 15, 2026 ▶ 18:44 Perplexity CEO: Micron Will Be More Valuable Than Meta & How Export Controls Helped Not Hurt China · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Jul 6, 2026 bullish
Opinion
Mignano: Suno has unlimited upside potential like YouTube or TikTok
“So we believe that Suno has, you know, I'm using this term loosely, but unlimited upside potential. You know, if you look back at the history of media on the internet, and you think about the generational platforms that truly democratized a medium, right? YouT…”
Mike Mignano Jul 6, 2026 ▶ 57:04 Why Now is the Time for the App Layer | Why Startups Should be TokenMaxxing | Mike Mignano, USV · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Jul 9, 2026 negative
Assertion Partly supported
O'Driscoll: Meta and SpaceX rented compute after failing to build AI assets
“Two companies Have done the same thing, which is buy a load of compute to build proprietary assets, fail to build those assets, and then bring that, and then decide instead to sell that compute to others, and both of them have had a very positive market recept…”
Rory O'Driscoll Jul 9, 2026 ▶ 34:33 Enterprises Fear Frontier Models | Sam Altman Offers Trump 5% of OpenAI | DeepSeek Builds Own Chips · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Jul 9, 2026 neutral
Assertion Supported
Lemkin: Meta invested $900M in CRED to hire WhatsApp head Kunal Shah
“Zuck also just paid essentially nine hundred million dollars to hire a head for WhatsApp, right? By investing nine hundred million dollars into cred, right?”
Jason Lemkin Jul 9, 2026 ▶ 38:58 Enterprises Fear Frontier Models | Sam Altman Offers Trump 5% of OpenAI | DeepSeek Builds Own Chips · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Jul 9, 2026 bullish
Prediction Open · timeframe Jul 2027
O'Driscoll: AI capex spending will be stopped by demand, not supply
“This isn't, this spending isn't going to stop because the supply side says stop. Facebook aren't going to say stop. Google isn't going to say stop. Microsoft isn't going to say stop. Really, it boils down to the demand side. As long as, and enterprise customer…”
Rory O'Driscoll Jul 9, 2026 ▶ 41:39 Enterprises Fear Frontier Models | Sam Altman Offers Trump 5% of OpenAI | DeepSeek Builds Own Chips · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Jul 20, 2026
Assertion Supported
Meta Has Been Building Custom Silicon Chips for Over Five Years
“I think Meta has been building their chips for more than five years, way more than five years.”
Lin Qiao Jul 20, 2026 ▶ 1:09:20 The Open-Source AI Reality | How Token Costs Will Fall 10X & Usage Will Explode 100X | Lin Qiao
Aug 7, 2026 bullish
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Frankel: OpenAI, Anthropic, and SpaceX Are Today's Metas and Googles
“And I think in, you know, OpenAI and Anthropic and SpaceX, we're seeing that already. Like these are the Metas and the Googles of our era, highly likely.”
David Frankel Aug 7, 2026 ▶ 20:24 The AI Boom Will Create Enormous Roadkill: Who Wins & Loses? | David Frankel
Aug 14, 2026 bullish
Insight
Startups can scale to $10M ARR using only Meta, Google, and lifecycle
“You want those three things spun up because you can scale to your first 1,000,010 million ARR, Just off of those three things. And then obviously, you know, you're investing into the site, you're investing into founder-led content. There's like the other thing…”
Matt Swulinski Aug 14, 2026 ▶ 6:26 How to Build a $100M Growth Engine: Lessons from Wispr Flow & Superhuman | Matt Swulinski
Aug 14, 2026 neutral
Insight
Swulinski: Paid Acquisition Usually Fails Due to Bad Conversion Tracking Setup
“If you have poor conversion tracking, Meta doesn't know who those people are, and it just randomly targets people, and you, you'll have a super high CAC, you'll say, ah, pay doesn't work for me. I'd say most of the time, people haven't done the actual setup co…”
Matt Swulinski Aug 14, 2026 ▶ 10:36 How to Build a $100M Growth Engine: Lessons from Wispr Flow & Superhuman | Matt Swulinski
Aug 14, 2026 neutral
Insight
Swulinski: A $100K Meta Budget Requires 400-500 New Creatives Monthly
“Like if you, let's say you have a hundred K meta budget, You probably need at least 400 to 500 new creatives a month. Otherwise, you're going to plateau. You're going to get out-competed.”
Matt Swulinski Aug 14, 2026 ▶ 16:28 How to Build a $100M Growth Engine: Lessons from Wispr Flow & Superhuman | Matt Swulinski
Aug 14, 2026 negative
Insight
Swulinski: Meta and Google Ad Algorithms Dislike Usage-Based SaaS Models
“The biggest differences are first in that, like, Meta and Google are not optimized for, like, B to B SaaS usage-based products. Like, they go absolutely nuts with a, so you're telling me there's a predictive revenue of a one person could be a 50,000, you know,…”
Matt Swulinski Aug 14, 2026 ▶ 14:19 How to Build a $100M Growth Engine: Lessons from Wispr Flow & Superhuman | Matt Swulinski
Aug 20, 2026 neutral
Opinion
O'Driscoll: Owning developers is 100% existential for Microsoft
“I don't think owning the developer is existential for AWS. I definitely don't think it's existential for Meta. It's a hundred percent existential over the medium term for Microsoft.”
Rory O'Driscoll Aug 20, 2026 ▶ 14:20 Stripe's $8B OpenRouter Bet | Anthropic's First Profit & The Math Behind Reaching $600B in Revenue?
Aug 24, 2026 bearish
Opinion
Investing in AI Labs Resembles Backing Quora Before Facebook Emerged
“I think right now, if you're going to invest in the new Neolab, you're basically investing, you know, in the Quora, in the stumble upon when Facebook X came about.”
Julien Bek Aug 24, 2026 ▶ 11:13 Inside Sequoia's Investment Committee | How the SpaceX & Citadel Deals Went Down | Julien Bek
Aug 29, 2026 bullish
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Reyes: Microsoft Will Win in AI Regardless of Which Model Succeeds
“The biggest thing that Microsoft has going for it is that infra. They own so many of these data centers. They're spending so much on build out. No matter what model runs on top of that, Microsoft is going to win.”
Eno Reyes Aug 29, 2026 ▶ 51:43 Should American Enterprises Work With Open-Source Chinese Models? | Only 10% of Neo-labs survive
Sep 5, 2026 bearish
Prediction Open · timeframe Sep 2031
Stebbings predicts Meta's stock price would rise if Mark Zuckerberg departed
“If Zuck expired, Meta's stock price would increase.”
Harry Stebbings Sep 5, 2026 ▶ 59:02 How to Build Your Own Data Center & Why Every Startup Should Do It
Sep 5, 2026 neutral
Opinion
Weitzman: Alex Karp inflates Palantir's P/E ratio while Zuckerberg depresses Meta's
“What Meta doesn't have is what Palantir has, which Palantir has the Alex Karp effect. Alex is really good at pumping up the PE ratio of the stock, and Zuck, I agree, is the opposite.”
Cliff Weitzman Sep 5, 2026 ▶ 59:25 How to Build Your Own Data Center & Why Every Startup Should Do It
Sep 5, 2026 bullish
What-if
Weitzman: Meta would be ripping without GDPR and US data regulations
“If GDPR didn't exist and the other laws in the US didn't exist, Meta would be ripping. They just can't train on their data properly.”
Cliff Weitzman Sep 5, 2026 ▶ 58:30 How to Build Your Own Data Center & Why Every Startup Should Do It
Sep 7, 2026 neutral
Prediction Held up
Greze: Meta will launch a personal AI assistant inside WhatsApp
“They're going to have a personal assistant that's going to come in WhatsApp. I don't know if they're launching it in a day or in three months, but it's coming.”
Jean-Denis Greze Sep 7, 2026 ▶ 7:54 Town vs Instinct vs GrokBot | Why the AI Assistant Market Is Not a Bubble
Sep 10, 2026 bullish
Opinion
Stebbings: Buy Meta due to its distribution moat for AI agents
“My take is actually it's why you buy Meta today, because you've got the most clear, unwavering PMF for this product. And Zuck is the one who owns the core distribution channel, and Zuck has been working on this product.”
Harry Stebbings Sep 10, 2026 ▶ 9:51 Jensen Huang Declares AGI Has Arrived | Tesla Launches Cybercabs | Index Pulls Out of Town
Sep 12, 2026 negative
Opinion
Franceschetti: Meta-reported CAC is probably 20% lower than true CAC
“If you look at the CAC on Meta, It's probably 20% lower than what the true CAC is”
Matteo Franceschetti Sep 12, 2026 ▶ 6:49 Labour, Engineering, Social Media, GrokBots, Cybercabs: 7 Predictions for How AI Changes the World
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