Mar 7, 2023 · 57m · news
Meta CMO Alex Schultz: Competing Against TikTok & Snap; Why Reels Failed at First | E985 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
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gold bands on the timeline = statements, start to end. Hover to read, click to jump. CC turns on captions
This video features an in-depth interview with Meta's Chief Marketing Officer, Alex Schultz, who discusses growth accounting, product iteration strategies, and performance management, alongside personal reflections on his career and diversity in tech.
How this conversation actually went
Every chapter scored 0–10 on four independent dynamics. Hover any point for the reasoning behind the score. Harry holds 25.5% of the talking time here. How this is scored →
Harry as informed peer 3.6 Guest teaching 6.7 Guest disagreement 2.1 Harry pushing back 2.4
speaking balance: gold is Harry, purple is the guest (3 minute bins)
Sharpest disagreement ▶ 15:48 Alex rejects host's framing on tech company existential risk
Alex forcefully rejects host's argument that product iterations aren't sink-the-boat decisions, pointing to Microsoft's decade-long languishing as proof that missing technology waves can cripple giant tech firms.
Hardest push from Harry ▶ 16:50 Harry challenges the necessity of speed over second-mover advantageHarry explicitly refuses Alex's premise that speed is always paramount, arguing that second movers can learn more, perfect the product, and win, citing Instagram Stories copying Snapchat.
Biggest teaching moment ▶ 43:10 Alex dismantles host's team metric liveWhen Harry shares his team's KPI of meeting 20 companies per week, Alex immediately dissects how easily the metric can be gamed and instructs him on designing effective counter-metrics.
Harry holds his own ▶ 43:20 Harry pushes back on VC decision-making dynamicsHarry demonstrates strong domain expertise by challenging Alex's assumption about investment partner consensus, explaining why non-consensus single-check decisions yield top venture returns like Twitch and Canva.
the scores for every segment, with the reasoning behind each
| Chapter | Topic | Harry as informed peer | Guest teaching | Guest disagreement | Harry pushing back | Why |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Career Lessons at eBay and the Transition to Facebook | 3 | 6 | 1 | 1 | Host asks basic background questions and shares personal anecdotes about raising funds without a deck. Guest educates the host on Facebook's core growth accounting formula (registrations + resurrections - churn) and how it shifted company strategy to retention. | |
| Action-Oriented Retention: Finding the "Magic Number" | 4 | 7 | 1 | 2 | Host asks relevant follow-up questions referencing growth experts. Guest schools host on retention mechanics, explaining how changing eBay's core optimization metric from confirmed users to activated users transformed landing page strategies. | |
| Social Graph vs. Content Discovery and the Debate on Binary Opinions | 5 | 6 | 3 | 4 | Host cites Spotify executive Mike Mignano's theory regarding the shift from social graphs to content discovery graphs. Guest counters the binary framing, showing how platforms like TikTok and YouTube still heavily rely on social graphs. | |
| The Strategy Behind the Facebook Messenger App Split | 2 | 6 | 1 | 1 | Host asks broad product questions regarding the Messenger split. Guest provides a detailed walkthrough of messaging expectations, user research, and country-level rollout testing. | |
| Risk Mitigation, Decision Making, and Speed in Large Tech Companies | 7 | 7 | 5 | 7 | Host actively pushes back on guest's risk narrative, citing Bezos's two-way door framework and questioning whether speed actually matters over second-mover iteration (citing Instagram Stories vs Snapchat). Guest vigorously defends speed and iteration cycles, citing Microsoft's stagnancy and Reels' evolution. | |
| Product Postmortems and Building an Influential Analytics Team | 3 | 6 | 1 | 1 | Host asks how to institutionalize learnings from failures. Guest explains how analytics functions as an influence discipline and outlines the concept of being 'patiently right' to build organizational authority. | |
| Admitting Mistakes: When Data Leads to Slow Decisions | 4 | 6 | 2 | 2 | Host prompts guest for data mistakes and transition stories. Guest reframes host's false dichotomy of direct sales versus self-serve, explaining how Meta built a blended SMB funnel, and highlights a French translation fix that step-changed growth. | |
| Experimentation, Psychology, and Why Founders Should Not Predict Behavior | 3 | 7 | 2 | 1 | Host asks for advice on managing an underperforming team member. Guest mentors host on evaluating skill versus will, direct candor, and shares a personal story about crashing his car due to anxiety over layering an employee. | |
| Radical Candor in Performance Management | 2 | 7 | 1 | 1 | Host admits personal discomfort with delivering tough performance reviews. Guest counsels host that directness is the highest form of care for an employee. | |
| The Strategic Rebrand from Facebook to Meta | 3 | 7 | 3 | 2 | Host asks about the motivations behind the rebrand to Meta. Guest uses mild sarcasm regarding media narratives before explaining consumer confusion between the core app and the corporate parent. | |
| Managing Silos and Sharing Learnings Across Brand Pillars | 5 | 7 | 3 | 5 | Host pushes guest on whether the rebrand creates internal silos and challenges the selection of 'Meta' given perceived metaverse hype decay. Guest outlines the clear brand promise taxonomy across Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Meta. | |
| Metrics vs. Goals and Goodhart's Law | 5 | 7 | 4 | 5 | Host questions whether early-stage startups need detailed metric frameworks. Guest pushes back, stating top founders are rigorous thinkers who understand Goodhart's law and know that incorrect metrics mislead teams. | |
| Personal Goals, Business Morale, and the Danger of Easy Metrics | 5 | 8 | 4 | 4 | Host shares a personal goal-setting dilemma regarding his team's KPI (20 meetings/week). Guest instantly schools host on how easily that metric is gamed under Goodhart's law and teaches counter-metrics, while host defends single-check VC decision-making. | |
| Alex's Coming Out Journey in the Tech Industry | 2 | 6 | 1 | 1 | Host asks guest about his coming-out journey in tech. Guest shares a personal account of going back into the closet at eBay and how public posts by Facebook colleagues inspired him to come out. | |
| Diversity Gaps and the Role of Family Values | 3 | 7 | 1 | 1 | Host asks about broader LGBTQ+ representation in tech. Guest points out the stark lack of gay executives and board members across the industry and shares lessons learned from his parents. | |
| Quickfire Round: Career Advice and Meta's Future | 2 | 7 | 1 | 1 | Host leads quickfire round. Guest provides memorable insights on growth culture, explaining why the growth team never rang a celebratory gong. |
Statements from this episode (34)
Schultz: Snap Cloned TikTok Despite Public Denials
“Faster than Snap, who also cloned and copied TikTok despite everything they've said about that.”
Schultz: Reels Succeeded Only After Multiple Failed Iterations
“We wouldn't be here if we hadn't iterated two or three times.”
Schultz Recalls Difficulties Being Closeted Early in Career at eBay
“It wasn't, I wasn't out. So it was very hard.”
Schultz Says eBay Was Run by Consultants During His Tenure
“And how to put together a very good deck, because it was run by consultants.”
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…”
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.”
Schultz: TikTok Is Focusing Heavily on Messaging and Friend Graphs
“You look at TikTok and what they're doing right now. They're focusing very heavily on messaging. They're focusing very heavily on friend graph.”
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…”
Schultz: Unbundling Messenger Caused an Initial Usage Dip Before Major Growth
“The first countries we did it in were Portugal, I think, and Romania, and we saw a tremendous increase in usage. Initially, there was a dip in usage, and then we saw a rebound and a tremendous increase because people had the expectation they'd get an instant r…”
Schultz: Big Strategic Tech Bets Cannot Be Decided by Data Alone
“In startup mode, you actually have to take a lot more bets without certain data. As a mature company, there are some massive bets you should make. Reels, virtual reality, where it turns out you're going to take a big risk to do that bet, but it's the right thi…”
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.”
Schultz: KakaoStory Launched a Stories Feature Before Snapchat
“But by the way, cacao stories launched before Snapchat stories launched.”
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…”
Schultz: The First Version of Instagram Reels Hard Failed
“The first version of Reels failed. We tried to put it in the stories spot, like we tried to integrate it that way, it hard failed.”
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.”
Schultz: Analytics Is Fundamentally an Influence Role
“Analytics is mostly an influence role. You need to analyze stuff and people need to believe you and then take action on what you say.”
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…”
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.”
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.”
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”
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…”
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 …”
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.”
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.”
Schultz: Unaddressed Metric Flaws Lead to Goodhart's Law
“There are flaws at every step of the way and if you don't acknowledge and understand the flaws, you will succumb to good arts law, where it's not a good measure anymore.”
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.”
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.”
Schultz: Meg Whitman Campaigned Against Gay Marriage in California
“Meg Whitman went and campaigned on banning gay marriage in California.”
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…”
Schultz: I Am Always the Only Openly Gay Person on My Boards
“In the senior teams I'm on, in the boards I've served on, like, I'm always the only gay guy.”
Schultz: Coming Out Forces Loved Ones to Mourn Their Envisioned Future
“When you come out, everyone around you has to mourn their version of your future.”
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.”