also referred to as: meta
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268 statements across 170 episodes · 85 bullish · 70 bearish · 105 people on the record · first statement Jul 15, 2017 by Benedict Evans · said 1,640 times in 415 episodes since 2017 · across every show →
Mentions by year, the whole family
brought up most by Benedict Evans (236), Chris Dixon (103), Marc Andreessen (80), Ben Horowitz (58), Balaji Srinivasan (58), Kyle Russell (57), Connie Chan (48), Anu Hariharan (46)
tap a year for its mentions
2026 71 mentions in 26 episodes 3 per episode
- Why AI Agents Could Finally Reinvent the Credit Card
- The Biggest Bottlenecks For AI: Energy & Cooling
- The Economics of AI Usage and What's Next For SaaS | Benedict Evans on a16z
- Why Balaji Srinivasan Thinks the SaaS Apocalypse Is Overhyped | The a16z Show
- Why AI Demand Is Outrunning Compute Supply
- Why Top Founders Are Racing Into AI Infrastructure
- The New Rule for Picking AI Winners | The a16z Show
- OpenClaw, Claude Code, and the Future of Software | Peter Yang on The a16z Show
- 18 more episodes that year, every mention in 2026 →
2025 231 mentions in 58 episodes 4 per episode
- Marc Andreessen Reveals His Biggest Wins and Mistakes at a16z
- Tech vs. Media: Balaji Srinivasan on the Battle Shaping Our Future
- AI Eats the World: Benedict Evans on the Next Platform Shift
- Dylan Patel on GPT-5’s Router Moment, GPUs vs TPUs, Monetization
- Steven Sinofsky & Balaji Srinivasan on the Future of M&A, AI & Tech
- Why Creativity Will Matter More Than Code | Kevin Rose and Anish Acharya
- AI Content and the War for Your Attention
- Marc & Ben on the Collapse of Traditional Media - Podcasts, Politics & the New Media Playbook
- 50 more episodes that year, every mention in 2025 →
2024 79 mentions in 21 episodes 4 per episode
- Politics & the Future of Tech
- Marc Andreessen & Andrew Chen Talk Creative Computers
- The Quest for Community-Trained Open Source AI Models
- Why Human Data is Key to AI: Alexandr Wang from Scale AI
- The 2025 AI Search Race
- Mark Casey (Capital Group): Public Market and Macro Perspectives
- Zach Perret (Plaid) & Simon Khalaf (Marqeta): New Applications in Fintech
- AI, Robotics & the Future of Manufacturing
- 13 more episodes that year, every mention in 2024 →
2023 87 mentions in 32 episodes 3 per episode
- Marketplace Breakout Strategies: Take Rates, Defensibility, Payments | Field Notes by Connie Chan
- Marketplace Tactics: Metrics, Growth vs. Focus, Business Strategy | Field Notes by Connie Chan
- The State of Apps with Olivia Moore
- Building Hardware and Taking on the Phone Giants with Carl Pei
- The Rise of the Exponential Organization with Peter Diamandis and Salim Ismail
- Safety in Numbers: Keeping AI Open
- Welding Yourself to Early Customers with Marqeta's Jason Gardner
- Building for Tomorrow with Jason Feifer
- 24 more episodes that year, every mention in 2023 →
2022 24 mentions in 5 episodes 5 per episode
2021 4 mentions in 3 episodes 1 per episode
2020 9 mentions in 4 episodes 2 per episode
2019 982 mentions in 223 episodes 4 per episode
- a16z Podcast | Bots and Beyond
- a16z Podcast | QR. AR. VR.
- a16z Podcast | Messaging is the Medium
- a16z Podcast | Not all Network Effects Are Created Equal
- a16z Podcast | Getting Network Effects
- a16z Podcast | Enough with the Old Stuff -- Time for New Questions in Mobile
- a16z Podcast | Platforming the Future
- a16z Podcast | Reinventing Media
- 215 more episodes that year, every mention in 2019 →
2018 84 mentions in 23 episodes 4 per episode
- 10 Years Too Early: On a Tech Career, Business, and Investing
- Crypto and Decentralization: Building Blocks
- The End of the Beginning
- The Case Study of BuzzFeed Tasty and the Evolution of Brand
- When Advertising Isn't Enough
- 3 Common Myths People Have About Crypto
- Distribution, Channel & Partnerships
- An Intro to Crypto: Decentralization, the Big Picture
- 15 more episodes that year, every mention in 2018 →
2017 69 mentions in 20 episodes 3 per episode
- Mobile Is Eating the World, 2016
- 10 Year Futures (vs. What's Happening Now)
- Culture and Revolution
- AI, Deep Learning, and Machine Learning: A Primer
- Mobile Is Eating the World, 2015
- What Happens When Mobile (Really) Hits the Wallet
- A Whirlwind Tour Through Tech Trends in China
- On Career Moves and Business Leadership
- 12 more episodes that year, every mention in 2017 →
Everything said about Facebook, oldest first
Jul 15, 2017 positive
Jul 15, 2017 neutral
Evans: Combined GAFA revenues remain smaller than TV and advertising
“Even Google, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon combined there, or GAFA, as the telecoms industry tends to call them add up to less than TV business or advertising and are much, much smaller than mobile or proper, proper industries like cars or clothes.”
Jul 15, 2017 positive
Jul 15, 2017
Jul 15, 2017 positive
Jul 15, 2017
Jul 15, 2017 positive
Jul 15, 2017 neutral
Jul 16, 2017 bearish
Jul 16, 2017 positive
Jul 28, 2017 positive
Mars: Tech giants are building future data centers around deep learning
“Deep learning is absolutely the bet that companies are making, right? So Google has put a lot of resources into deep learning you know, Facebook. We're designing future data centers and future infrastructures around this one technique, and it's primarily becau…”
Jul 29, 2017 negative
Jul 29, 2017 negative
Horowitz: Proprietary Deep Learning Breakthroughs Are Hard Due to Open-Source AI
“So everything out of academia is going into open source and then everything out of Google is being open sourced, and Facebook, and so forth. So it's really hard To do a proprietary breakthrough, like, you know, in, like, ok, I've got something that's, whatever…”
Dec 5, 2017 neutral
Evans: Dominant Tech Giants Always Look Invulnerable Right Before They Fall
“The winners always look invulnerable until they don't. So, IBM looked invulnerable, then Microsoft, Intel, Nokia did, then the internet giants of the last bubble, now Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon look invulnerable, but all the previous ones fell, and it was…”
Dec 5, 2017 neutral
Dec 15, 2017 positive
Conde: Facebook reduced clinical trial patient recruitment costs by 96%
“So Facebook, for example, as I mentioned earlier, is using their social network to help us identify and recruit patients for clinical trials. And in fact, they did a pilot project with the Michael J. Fox foundation where they were able to reduce the cost and t…”
Mar 7, 2018 positive
Mar 7, 2018 bullish
May 5, 2018 positive
Xie: Crypto lets users own identity without centralized platform control
“Something that's particularly relevant today with what we've been seeing with what's happening with Facebook is that you can now have people Own their own identity and reputation data without having this to be in the control of centralized parties.”
May 15, 2018 positive
Chan: O2O 2.0 allows brick-and-mortar stores to act as logged-in digital platforms
“This O to O, two point O concept means you are logging into physical spaces, just like you log into Amazon, just like you log into Facebook. What this means is physical spaces now are using technology to fight back against this death of retail.”
Jul 15, 2018 positive
Stark: Big tech UX talent will solve crypto usability challenges
“Getting the folks that say maybe we're doing You exit, you know, Apple, Google, Facebook, and coming into this world that can really think through these problems and develop compelling user experiences, I think is going to be a big part of it.”
Jul 15, 2018 negative
Aug 20, 2018 negative
Zuegel: Web2 OAuth restricts developers through centralized platform gatekeeping
“And it doesn't give you all the information that you could possibly want because it's dependent on Google and Facebook and Twitter and so on, ah, to give you the information that they're willing to give, which is pretty limited.”
Oct 26, 2018
Dec 5, 2018 positive
Dec 5, 2018 neutral
Dec 8, 2018 bullish
Auto-Generated Shareable Videos Enable Organic Acquisition Without Paid Ads
“The nice thing is that what happens is every time you use the product, you're going with a group of friends. It's fun to take photos. You generate a video at the end of your experience that then you share to social media. And that means that this type of compa…”
Jan 2, 2019 neutral
Jan 2, 2019
Benedict Evans: On smartphones, the device itself is the platform
“The smartphone itself becomes a social platform, whereas Facebook, you know, whereas, you know, on the desktop you had the browser, and then inside the browser you had Facebook, and then inside Facebook you had a social platform, whereas on a smartphone that's…”
Jan 2, 2019 neutral
Chan: Calling companies the "Facebook of China" ignores distinct business models
“Business models and monetization, there's a lot of innovation happening out in China, and I think a big mistake that people make is they look at a company and they say, oh, this is the Facebook of China, this is the Yelp of China, this is the Groupon of China,…”
Jan 2, 2019 neutral
Jan 2, 2019 positive
Jan 2, 2019 negative
Jan 2, 2019
Evans: Desktop users navigate to daily sites by searching Google directly
“Google picks up that vast long tail of, and it probably, in fact, on the desktop internet, Google also picks up the 20 things that you use every day, because that's how you get to them. You just go into Google and you search for Facebook, or you go into Google…”
Jan 2, 2019 negative
Masters: Startups cannot match Google or Facebook compensation to recruit top talent
“And I think that's the only way that if you're a startup, that's the only way that you're going to, you know, you're not going to be able to pay as much as Google or Facebook at this point. And that's the only way to attract people. Probably.”
Jan 2, 2019 neutral
Dixon: VC regret comes from missing potential mega-outliers, not moderate successes
“If you pass on a company where, okay, that maybe they'll be successful. You don't stay up at night thinking about that. If you pass on the company that there's a one percent chance at the next Google and people are going to talk about this story for the next 3…”
Jan 2, 2019 neutral
Jan 2, 2019 negative
Jan 2, 2019 neutral
Jan 2, 2019 neutral
Madrigal: Facebook sends The Atlantic more traffic than the entire web combined
“And so we've been able to sort of back into a bunch of different types of experiments, and seeing natural experiments that are running and find that basically Facebook is sending more traffic to us than the entire rest of the internet that we can see combined.”
Jan 2, 2019 negative
Jan 2, 2019 positive
Madrigal: Repackaging an Atlantic Facebook post boosted traffic to one million readers
“We had a story about tattoos and why, how tattoos work, like, within your body, and it's like a health story, and we sold it once on Facebook and I think on Wednesday, and kind of nothing happened. You know, maybe we're talking a few thousand unique visitors t…”
Jan 2, 2019 neutral
Felten: Displacing incumbent cryptocurrencies requires superior utility to overcome network effects
“I think it's the case that if you can convince the community that your new thing is enough better in, along some dimension they really care about, then there will be a space for your currency to get a foothold. Maybe something that existed before falls away, r…”
Jan 2, 2019
Jan 2, 2019
Andreessen: Mark Zuckerberg had zero work experience before Facebook CEO role
“Like, Mark Zuckerberg did not have a job before he started Facebook. Like, his first job in the world was CEO of Facebook, right? Like, didn't work over the summer at McDonald's, like, nothing. Like, no experience, no nothing.”
Jan 2, 2019 positive
Jan 2, 2019 positive
Jan 2, 2019
Jan 2, 2019
Viber reached 5 million Myanmar users, surpassing Facebook's 2.2 million
“Facebook has I mean, Facebook has about 2.2 million people online in, in Myanmar, Facebook users. But Viber announced just in August that they had five million users. And what's the difference? Well, you don't need an email address to sign up for Viber. All yo…”
Jan 2, 2019
Jan 2, 2019
Jan 2, 2019 negative
Jan 2, 2019 negative
Granger: Programming languages model computer hardware rather than human processes
“We have this weird case right now where our languages, Python, pick any language, right? Is actually designed to model computer interaction, right? It's designed to model how computers work. Like, I'm gonna send TCP messages, and so on and so forth. But if you…”
Jan 2, 2019
Jan 2, 2019 bullish
Evans: Facebook and Amazon will continue pushing into mobile operating systems
“But that doesn't mean that Facebook and Amazon are going to give up, because, you know, there is this sort of fundamental existential question, well, how do you find stuff? And how do you give just J stuff to your friends? And where does that happen within the…”
Jan 2, 2019 neutral
Jan 2, 2019 neutral
Jan 2, 2019 negative
Evans: Facebook Has Not Created New User Behavior Since News Feed
“Well, they haven't actually created any new behavior since the newsfeed. What they'done is they bought Instagram, and they bought it very early at what at the time everyone said was a ludicrously high price. At the time, it was, actually, it was a very good pr…”
Jan 2, 2019 neutral
Chris Dixon: Tech platforms and telecom carriers are entering total war
“It's now kind of just total war where everyone is fighting everyone, you know, Google and Facebook are building internet access and Verizon is getting into content and they're getting into TV and they're just, you know, so there's no, You know, in some ways, a…”
Jan 2, 2019
Chris Dixon: Ad tech startups must sell quickly during M&A consolidation waves
“My advice was always, when that happens, you gotta, like, It's like musical chairs. And if you don't get a seat, you know, you're probably screwed because now these guys are all part of, you now have your direct competitor is now part of Google and part of Fac…”
Jan 2, 2019
Evans: Global annual photos taken likely reaches 10 to 100 trillion
“Even if you just add up the numbers from Facebook and Snapchat, Facebook and Instagram and WhatsApp and so on, you get to about eight or nine hundred billion photographs taken last year. And that's just, sorry, shared. So if there were eight or nine hundred bi…”
Jan 2, 2019 positive
Evans: Startup failure costs $1M today versus $40M in 2000
“In 2000, if that failed, that was 50 to a hundred people, and 20, 30, forty million dollars gone. Today, exactly the same product. Is a hundred grand, 500 grand, a million dollars, three, four, five people who are out trying to get a good job at Google and Fac…”
Jan 2, 2019
Matei Zaharia interned at Facebook in 2007 when it had 300 employees
“I was a PhD student at UC Berkeley, and we actually started working with Hadoop users back in 2007. And I did, for example, an internship at Facebook when Facebook was only about 300 people and they were just starting to set up Hadoop.”
Jan 2, 2019
Daneshwar: Iranians routinely use VPNs to access blocked social media platforms
“Facebook advertisement is closed for Iranians, like Google AdWords as well, but the fact that people here are having the full access to Twitter, to Facebook, and Facebook is blocked by the government as well, but we are going through the VPNs, so everybody is …”
Jan 2, 2019 neutral
Jan 2, 2019 neutral
Jan 2, 2019
Jan 2, 2019 bullish
Andreessen: A near-future US presidential election will pivot entirely on social networks
“I think there is going to be an election in which the entire thing is going to pivot on social networks, and it's going to turn out that the candidate that most effectively used Facebook and Pinterest and Twitter and all these things is, is, is the one who win…”
Jan 2, 2019 bullish
Jan 2, 2019 negative
Pierce: Social networks force users to play curated, performative personas
“Social networks kind of necessarily become performant, right? Like, you're playing some sort of character, whether it's business character on LinkedIn, or you want to seem like you have a really fun life on Instagram, or, you know, your kid is adorable on Face…”
Jan 2, 2019 negative
Jan 2, 2019 positive
Janah: Mark Zuckerberg is not a social entrepreneur despite Facebook's social benefit
“While I don't think that makes Mark Zuckerberg and the Facebook co-founders social entrepreneurs, because I don't think they're Our first concern was social justice or improving improving Poverty outcomes, per se, or improving the lives of marginalized people.…”
Jan 2, 2019
Jan 2, 2019 negative
Jan 2, 2019
Jan 2, 2019 negative
Evans: Publishing via distribution platforms is a deal with the devil
“If you want to get read, you've got to be in some kind of a platform that's giving your audience, and increasingly that means Facebook, or it means Medium, or it means LinkedIn, or it means some other intermediate platform that kind of comes with an implicit a…”
Jan 2, 2019 negative
Weil: Conservative Enterprise Clients Block Slack, Remote Access, and Facebook
“And these, this big company said they could never put Slack into an organization where it stands now. They're still on Outlook, and they're not able to log in remotely. They also aren't allowed to access websites like Facebook and bring open that tab.”
Jan 2, 2019 positive
Jan 2, 2019 neutral
Evans: Apple, Google, and Facebook won the smartphone and messaging wars
“The sort of, the feeling you have in mobile right now is we're kind of at the end of one wave, and we haven't got another wave coming up yet, so we've kind of had the smartphone wars, and Apple and Google both kind of won, and we've had the messaging wars, and…”
Jan 2, 2019 neutral
Jan 2, 2019 bullish
Burbidge: Fintech startups will sell to big tech, not banks
“Your exit opportunities aside from staying independent and maybe going public or whatever is potentially on the buyout side. You may not be selling to a bank, you might be selling to Facebook, you might be selling to Amazon, you might be selling to Google as t…”
Jan 2, 2019 bearish
Khan: UK Lacks Multi-Billion Exits Needed for Capital Recycling
“We haven't had those major hit after hit of multi-billion dollar exits, whether in the private market or in the public markets, such as the Googles or the Facebook. So that trickle-down effect hasn't happened, and it'll be a while till it happens.”
Jan 2, 2019 neutral
Jan 2, 2019 positive
Evans: Apple, Google, and Facebook Won Initial Mobile and Messaging Wars
“The smartphone wars are now over, or at least the first smartphone war is over, and Apple and Google both won in different ways, and the kind of the first messaging app wars are now mostly over, and Facebook mostly won in sort of various ways”
Jan 2, 2019
Jan 2, 2019 positive
Jan 2, 2019 positive
Jan 2, 2019 positive
Instagram intentionally targeted photographers and designers at launch, says Bailey Richardson
“From my perspective of at least how we grew Instagram, we started out with this core audience of people that were photographers and designers, and that's actually who we went and spoke to when we released the app, and who we promoted right away, because we fel…”
Jan 2, 2019
Neistat outlines the rigid content expectations across major social media platforms
“If it's on Snapchat, it needs to be funny or cool or make me look cool. If it's on Instagram, it's gotta be beautiful. If it's on YouTube, it's gotta be meaningful. If it's on Facebook, it has to be something that my friends and peers really want to engage wit…”
Jan 2, 2019 positive
Jan 2, 2019
Jan 2, 2019 bullish
Jan 2, 2019 neutral
Jan 2, 2019 negative
Jan 2, 2019
Evans: Direct traffic accounts for only one-quarter of BuzzFeed content views
“There's a great chart from BuzzFeed, information from BuzzFeed on where people watch content on BuzzFeed. And, you know, it's one quarter is direct, and then it's YouTube and Facebook video and Facebook images and Snapchat.”
Jan 2, 2019 bullish
Jan 2, 2019 positive
Jan 2, 2019 positive
Khanna: Average Facebook user's international friends rose to 15-16%
“If you look at the number of, for example, international friends that people have on Facebook, it used to be only, you know, four or five percent of an average person's friends were from another country, and now it's risen to like 15 or 16%.”
Jan 2, 2019 positive
Jan 2, 2019 neutral
Jan 2, 2019 neutral
Jan 2, 2019
Jan 2, 2019 positive
Hariharan: Facebook's DAU/MAU ratio rose to 57% in its first 18 months
“The one metric that he really focused on in the first two years was Retention, and the way he measured retention was daily actives by monthly actives, and if you see their chart in the first 18 months, it kept going from 52% to 55% to 57%.”
Jan 2, 2019
Jordan: Zuckerberg pre-populated Facebook by hacking Harvard house directories
“He hacked the directories in each of the houses, and so he pre-populated everyone on the Harvard campus into Facebook and then let people claim their identities, but you could then friend, it was populated when the first person showed up.”
Jan 2, 2019 positive
Jan 2, 2019 positive
Jordan: Premier networks like Facebook and WhatsApp skip paid user acquisition
“A lot of the best networks that are platformed here aren't spending anything on, on acquisition. I mean, it's just, it's kind of an interesting thing in marketplace. Facebook, no. WhatsApp, no. Medium, no. You know, just OpenTable, no. Just, you know, just, th…”
Jan 2, 2019
Jan 2, 2019 positive
Jan 2, 2019 neutral
Benenson: Facebook Reactions Generate Highly Effective Sentiment Training Data
“What's really interesting about Facebook reactions is, you know, you think you're saying, I love this thing, or I'm sad about this, or I'm angry about this, but what you're actually doing in conjunction with that Is giving Facebook really great label data for …”
Jan 2, 2019
Jan 2, 2019 neutral
Currier: Messaging Network Effects Will Outlast Social Networks Like Facebook
“Facebook may be around in 10 years, but it might not be, but it's pretty clear that messaging will be around because we're always going to be able to scan text with our eyes. That's a good interface for us. And so messaging is probably a longer term thing for …”
Jan 2, 2019
Jan 2, 2019
Jan 2, 2019
Unicode Voting Power Concentrated Among US Tech Giants, SAP, and Oman
“No, so of those 12, so of those 12, nine are U.S. Multinational tech companies. Oracle, IBM, Google, Yahoo, Adobe, Facebook, Microsoft, and Symantec. Then of the other three full voting members, one is the German software company SAP, another is the Chinese te…”
Jan 2, 2019 neutral
Jan 2, 2019 bearish
Cockcroft: Open source from Big Tech makes proprietary software startups harder
“So what you're seeing now is Twitter and Facebook and Netflix and Google and LinkedIn producing the stuff you actually want to use, which has already been tested at volume. And then it's actually much harder to build a proprietary software company because you'…”
Jan 2, 2019 bearish
Jan 2, 2019 negative
Jan 2, 2019 positive
Jan 2, 2019 negative
Schuler: Aside from tech giants, major corporations lack an AI strategy
“Pretty much everyone has missed the boat on an AI strat, like everybody. There's a handful of companies, Google, Microsoft, Facebook that are doing it, but Everybody, I mean, I talk to companies with 15, twenty billion in revenue, they go, we don't have an AI …”
Jan 2, 2019 neutral
Chan: Photo tools benefit from unbundling, social networks require single apps
“It makes sense for a photo editing company to break that up into multiple apps because from a user metric standpoint, I will download four or five of them. But for a company like Facebook, I only want one if it's the same exact network of people.”
Jan 2, 2019 negative
Wroblewski: Copying big tech design without internal data is dangerous
“So you just run a dangerous game when you say, oh, Google did this. Facebook did this. Snapchat did this. Because you're not in there. You don't know why they're doing it. You don't have the data. And without that information, you're just kind of guessing that…”
Jan 2, 2019
Wroblewski: Facebook's early iOS app suffered from using HTML web views
“When their iOS app, they literally had like an HTML web view, JavaScript rendering pseudo browser, making the feed. They hadn't, didn't write it in native code and the thing would crash and it was slow and memory was just a zoo.”
Jan 2, 2019 negative
Jordan: Early PayPal and Facebook social commerce partnerships failed to gain traction
“PayPal did a few deals in back at the beginning of the decade with the Facebook and, you know, felt like, okay, there you have money there. You have social graph. We have social commerce, right? Well, it just, it hasn't worked that way.”
Jan 2, 2019 positive
Jan 2, 2019 neutral
Harari: Corporations and governments will soon understand individuals better than themselves
“What we will see with regard to the individual is that at a certain point, external entities, whether it's corporations or whether it's governments, they will have enough data, especially biometric data, and enough computing power to be able to understand me b…”
Jan 2, 2019
Harari: Algorithmic authority's major breakthrough will rely on biometric data
“I think the big breakthrough will come with biometric data. So far, most of these algorithms, whether it's Amazon or Netflix or whatever, they work mainly on the basis of data external to my body. They follow me around in space, see where I go, which places I …”
Jan 2, 2019 negative
Jan 2, 2019
Jan 2, 2019 positive
Eghbal: Tech giants have replaced academia in funding major software breakthroughs
“You still need people to think about, like, why are we building it this way, or what does the actual system look like? And that role is actually kind of being filled lately by companies like Google or Facebook that have the resources to make big strides the wa…”
Jan 2, 2019 neutral
Russell: Facebook brain-computer interfaces will track emotional reactions over typing speed
“What wouldn't shock me, despite the lofty goals of getting this hundred words per minute, You know, kind of success rate. I have a strong feeling that what we're actually going to see is kind of getting ground truth reactions to, for instance, posts on social …”
Jan 2, 2019
Russell: Facebook trained ML models on celebrity photos to generate avatars
“Facebook made the system that they made a giant data set of celebrity photos plus bitmojis associated with those faces to train a machine learning model that then generalized to Regular people, and so it looks at your profile photo, then makes a kind of cartoo…”
Jan 2, 2019 negative
Chan: Chatbot adoption failed due to missing use cases, not discovery
“My concern is that the issue around bot usage and adoption is not actually the discovery piece. It's that the great use cases for the bots haven't been created yet. And that's more a function of Facebook educating developers or developers coming up with the ri…”
Jan 2, 2019 bullish
Russell: Current BCI tech will allow seamless thought-controlled computer actions
“And now with this current generation, it seems like between Elon, Facebook, probably something from Google that We're actually going to start to see these things that kind of invisibly actually just let you think something and have some kind of action show up …”
Jan 2, 2019 negative
Russell: Facebook was a poor steward of Messenger's early developer platform
“My kind of read on this has been that Facebook hasn't been, let's say, the best steward of Messenger as a platform, for instance, for the first six to nine months of it, other than the kind of Bots that Facebook itself specifically highlighted and linked to in…”
Jan 2, 2019 negative
Russell: Public metrics turn Instagram and Facebook feeds into happiness theater
“So a little bit of a counterpoint or pushback against that is, you know, if you look at Instagram or Facebook, the nature of having metrics publicly exposed to people and comment counts and things like that means that content typically can devolve into somethi…”
Jan 2, 2019 neutral
Sinofsky: Facebook operates WhatsApp, Instagram, and Oculus as independent entities
“You know, between WhatsApp and Instagram, Oculus, and so on, that are run as very distinct entities, and they don't overlay some grand strategy about what's going to go where, and who's going to do what, when, and tie all the pieces together.”
Jan 2, 2019 positive
Evans: Facebook transformed its core product five times by following user behavior
“Facebook has been like five different things over the length of its life. You know, there was a time when it was all about filling in information on your home profile. You know, who goes to a Facebook profile now? Right. And that's in a sense been directed by …”
Jan 2, 2019
Jan 2, 2019 positive
Jan 2, 2019 negative
Ehrsam: Ethereum throughput is 20,000x short of running Facebook
“And if you look at what Ethereum is capable of in terms of just throughput of the network, it can't handle more than about twenty-ish transactions a second right now, which means that you're about 20,000 X off being able to run Facebook on the chain.”
Jan 2, 2019 bearish
Jan 2, 2019
Jan 2, 2019 negative
O'Reilly: Native content shift undermines Google's core strategic advantage
“It seems to me to the extent that Google says, well, we're going to deliver this service directly with native content, with Google native content, versus bringing it from an ecosystem of outside providers, they're losing touch with one of their key strategic a…”
Jan 2, 2019
Jan 2, 2019 neutral
Evans: Machine learning strengthens tech incumbents rather than shifting market power
“Machine learning is like this new foundational technology that, in a sense, will enable a bunch of new stuff and new companies, but it makes Google better Google, and it makes Facebook stronger, Facebook and Amazon maybe stronger Amazon. It doesn't unlock, it …”
Jan 2, 2019 bearish
Jan 2, 2019 neutral
Jan 2, 2019 positive
Conde: Facebook recruitment reduced Parkinson's trial acquisition costs by 96%
“A great data point that I heard recently was a partnership that Facebook made with the Michael J. Fox foundation to find ways to pilot the use of social networks to recruit patients for Parkinson's disease trial using social media. They were able to reduce the…”
Jan 2, 2019 neutral
Jan 2, 2019
Jan 2, 2019 negative
Jan 2, 2019 bullish
Dixon: Most Big Tech talent moving into crypto builds on Ethereum
“At least what I'm seeing is lots of teams leaving GAFA companies, Google, Facebook, et cetera, and getting into this, and like really good teams. People with real, you know, strong engineering and product backgrounds. And I think for me, at least, it's the vas…”
Jan 2, 2019 negative
Shankar: Post-Oculus acquisition VR forecasts were wildly hyper-inflated
“Back when Facebook bought Oculus, that's when expectations of VR started to get wildly away from reality. Oh, by 2016, there's gonna be 20, fifty million headsets out there. There might be a hundred million headsets by 2017. Some analysts definitely blew a lot…”
Jan 2, 2019 negative
Jan 2, 2019 positive
Jan 2, 2019 negative
Jordan: Past investment mistakes stemmed from short-lived Facebook ad arbitrage
“When I made a couple investment mistakes where the paid acquisition looked really good, and actually what they were doing, or they're arbitraging something like Facebook's early mobile attempts, where the people who participate in Facebook mobile ads early Got…”
Jan 2, 2019 neutral
Jan 2, 2019 positive
Jan 2, 2019 negative
Zuegel: OAuth is centralized, janky, and limited by tech monopolies
“OAuth as a tool that people can use as you're building a little side project. You don't want to have to build a whole complicated login system. You plug in OAuth. This is a huge step forward, but it is not really sufficient for everything. It's Centralized. It…”
Jan 2, 2019 negative
Jesse Walden: Open source creates structural asymmetry favoring large tech firms
“Also, also just, like, raw engineering power, like, Facebook has hundreds of engineers to deploy something like MySQL, you know, and then the weekend hacker has to do it themselves, and it's just, like, there's an asymmetry in terms of, like, how you leverage …”
Jan 2, 2019 positive
Jan 2, 2019 negative
Wilson: Web2 users deserve financial equity for building platform value
“It's just not right, particularly for a lot of these businesses where the user is the product. Right? Facebook users made Facebook. Twitter users made Twitter. You know, YouTube users made YouTube, right? It's just not right that the people who make the produc…”
Jan 2, 2019 negative
Wiener: Simply streaming linear TV sports feeds on Facebook fails
“MLB, their idea of broadcasting baseball games with Facebook was to just put the broadcasting And put it on Facebook. And I don't think that that works. Like the people that are on Facebook, they know that the game is on TV. They're just not turning it on. So …”
Jan 2, 2019 negative
Dixon: Centralized platforms inevitably capture all value from third-party developers
“You would never build on top of, you know, a centralized protocol, because people have now learned, after 2030 years of this, that when you do that, that the platform changes the rules, and you ask everyone who built on top of, you know, Twitter, all these dev…”
Jan 2, 2019 negative
Dixon: Snapchat's growth was severely capped by Facebook cloning its features
“I think it definitely had, I mean, I think it had, like look, look at Snapchat's a great example, right? That was a, I mean, you know they really invented sort of a new media type, right? I mean, that type of, you know, whatever, the vertical short video with …”
Jan 2, 2019 bullish
Andreessen: Winning tech companies in 20 years will be 100x larger than Google
“The winning companies, you know, the winning entrepreneurial companies 20 years from now that win are going to be Staggeringly large. Like, they're going to be like, I don't know, 10 or a hundred times the size of Google and Facebook.”
Feb 26, 2019
Jordan: Tech's biggest winners initially look like non-obvious niche ideas
“Most of the huge winners are lightning strikes. Facebook was the second or third social network, but you know, no one was thinking social networks when they talk about a trillion dollar company. EBay was Collectibles online, weird Facebook, hot or not, you kno…”
May 8, 2019 negative
Carlson-Wee: Web2 ad business models create adversarial relationships with users
“Today, yes, Facebook loves its users, but also it wants to put as many ads in front of the users as it possibly can, which actually disrupt the user experience. So it's yeah, it's an odd relationship, I think, that these web two platforms have with their user …”
May 16, 2019
Jun 14, 2019
The two cardinal sins of venture capital investing
“There's kind of two big cardinal sins in this business. One is you miss one of those companies. You don't invest in them. The other is that you invest in it, but you don't own enough of it so that when it gets to be Facebook, it still doesn't meaningfully chan…”
Jun 24, 2019 positive
Aug 29, 2019 bearish
Sep 2, 2020
Jul 27, 2022 positive
Hirsch: Healthcare platforms must optimize for outcomes, not time spent
“Remember I came from the world of social. Like I was at Facebook and Yahoo where time spent was like the God metric. It was like, oh my God, we just care about as many eyeballs and as much time as we can. And it could actually, it's less about time spent. It's…”
Nov 9, 2022
Karen X Cheng Predicts AI Platform Consolidation via Startup Acquisitions
“Most companies will have different strengths, and then they'll continue to be able to differentiate by sort of specializing in that, but I do imagine that some of these companies are gonna buy other companies, and then so they'll like, you know, kind of have m…”
Nov 9, 2022
Karen X Cheng: Video Virality Shifted From Tech Press to Algorithms
“So back in, like, 2000, like, 12, up until around 2016, you could make videos go viral just by coming up with something clever that would be a good headline, cold emailing, like, 300 reporters, getting them to write about it, and then it would almost guarantee…”
Nov 16, 2022 positive
Jan 12, 2023 negative
Mar 23, 2023 bullish
Chan: Incumbent social platforms will expand into e-commerce to drive ad revenue
“I think a lot of these large Platforms are all going to figure out they want to dabble into commerce, and there's so many benefits if they do that. It actually drives their advertising engines, because now that you have a commerce layer, the supply generally i…”
Apr 12, 2023
Early Facebook Marketplace tracked user frequency instead of transactions to measure success
“One of the things we did for Facebook marketplace was we, at first, our first metric wasn't transactions because we couldn't measure them. It was how often people were coming. It was weekly to monthly actives because as a classifieds marketplace, you know, you…”
May 25, 2023 positive
Ismail: Tech winners like Apple and Google succeeded by becoming platforms
“Yahoo, BlackBerry, Nokia all failed to become platforms, right? Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon all successfully became platforms, and that business model basically carries you through because now you wire yourself into the infrastructure.”
Jul 7, 2023 negative
Meta Internal Studies Show In-Office Employees Outperform Native Remote Hires
“Some studies are sort of coming out meta is sort of saying like they've noticed that people are back at the office three days a week are more effective, or if they've already been in the office for a while before they went out on remote versus native remote”
Jul 21, 2023 bullish
Kim: Meta's AI creative tools will restore the efficacy of paid ads
“Facebook or Meta is investing heavily on You know, AI side of it, so that all, sometimes all you need to do is just say, hey, like I have this idea, here's like the base creative. And now they're able to like change what, how it looks, add different, you know,…”
Sep 25, 2023 neutral
Ghodsi: Hype around the largest LLMs mirrors 2000s focus on Cisco
“So I think it's a little bit like right now like that. Who has the largest LLM? Obviously whoever can build the largest one that can train it the most obviously will own all of AI and all the future of humanity. But just like the internet, someone will show up…”
Sep 25, 2023 positive
Ghodsi: AI progress would be far behind without Meta releasing Llama
“If the original Llama was never released, What would the state of the world and our view of AI be right now? We would be way further behind, right? And A, it was a big model you know, by what existed in open source and it was open sourced. And both of those th…”
Sep 25, 2023 bullish
Dec 28, 2023 positive
Jan 13, 2024 neutral
Horowitz: Tech companies no longer restrict engineering hiring to elite universities
“I think Facebook, you're on the board of Meta. They used to only hire people from Stanford and MIT, or I think, or Harvard, Stanford, MIT. Like they had like strict rules on them. Nobody has that role anymore. Like that role's gone. Like, I don't know any comp…”
Feb 28, 2024 negative
Mar 5, 2024
Mar 20, 2024 bullish
D'Angelo: Frontier AI model providers will maintain strong profit margins
“And so it's, you know, right now it's OpenAI, Google, maybe Anthropic. Maybe, maybe Meta can be there. Those who can get there, I think it's going to be good business. You'll be able to make a lot of money. You can have good profit margins. You'll have to work…”
Apr 2, 2024 positive
Horowitz: Meta open-sources AI to prevent monopolies, mirroring Google's Android strategy
“The way Meta is thinking about this and the way that they're actually behaving and executing is very similar to how Google thought about Android where, you know, their main concern was that Apple not have a monopoly on the smartphone. You know, not so much tha…”
May 2, 2024 positive
Horowitz: Early Facebook growth success hinged on low team turnover
“One of the keys to Facebook at the time's growth team was that they had the exact, not just that they had a growth team, but they had the exact same people on it for years and years and years. The reason was the work they were doing was fairly alchemistic in n…”
May 2, 2024 positive
Horowitz: Meta's early onboarding drove long-term high product output
“Zuck did an amazing job in the early days for sure at Meta on that where, you know, their onboarding program was so good that they were able to just Keep turning out, you know, massive numbers of very high quality products for a really long time.”
May 16, 2024 negative
May 16, 2024
Jun 11, 2024 negative
Olivia Moore: One-shot AI generation tools are gimmicky and unfit for deep work
“In some ways, it's a little bit of a, and I say this lovingly, like, gimmicky product, because you might use it as like a fun thing to send to a friend or to post on Twitter or something, but you're not likely to do deep work in it.”
Jun 19, 2024 neutral
Jun 19, 2024 negative
Andreessen: Media narratives about tech jump directly from useless to evil
“And then basically within like five years, it was like Facebook is like the living demon incarnate on earth and destroying everything. Right? It went from like useless to evil in one step. Right? You know, the headline never gets never just like, oh, this is k…”
Jun 19, 2024 neutral
Andreessen: Journalist advised Zuckerberg to accept $1B Yahoo acquisition offer
“Facebook got just tons of, you know, it's just like this is the most trivial, stupid, useless, you know, thing that doesn't matter, you know, Facebook, there was almost a deal for Facebook to get bought by Yahoo early on, and I remember a certain very prominen…”
Jun 19, 2024 negative
Andreessen: Boomers are most vulnerable to social media manipulation
“The person most prone to be really screwed around with social media would seem to me to be somebody with no mimetic defenses at all, which is like a boomer, right? And so, you take, like, somebody raised on, like, Walter Cronkite, and you, like, inject them on…”
Jun 20, 2024 negative
Khalaf: Merchants complaining about card interchange fees ignore massive ad tech costs
“So regarding the payment rails, I agree with Zach. It's a yes, but the but is bigger than the yes, because if you look at, ah, all the folks that are honestly complaining about the interchange. Okay, let's talk about it. These are the same people who are payin…”
Jun 20, 2024 bullish
Khalaf: Payment cards have wider reach than Google, Facebook, and clean water
“Because if you think about a payment card, it's the most adopted technological product ever invented. More distribution than Google and Facebook combined. More distribution than clean water. And it's still a piece of plastic for many.”
Jul 23, 2024
Casey regrets not trimming Meta at $380 before it fell to $90
“The twenty-twenty-two period was rough and, you know, I kinda, my big mistake in twenty-twenty-two was not trimming a lot of stocks at the end of twenty-twenty-one. You know, I looked at Netflix at 6:30 then, and Amazon at one 80, and Facebook at three 80, Fac…”
Sep 24, 2024 bullish
Wang: Big Tech will easily recoup AI capex through core product improvements
“If, yeah, Facebook, Google, they make their advertising systems a little bit better. They can recoup billions of dollars just by the... Better performance there. Apple can easily recoup the investments if it drives an upgrade cycle. I mean, these are things th…”
Sep 24, 2024 negative
Oct 1, 2024
Schmidt: Fewer than ten organizations worldwide can train Llama-scale AI models
“Yeah, I mean, I would, it would probably be in the number of ones on my hand and it probably wouldn't use all my fingers, you know. Yeah, I mean, you basically have, OpenA, Anthropic, Meta, X, Google, and then you have a few Mistral, and then Deep Seek and a c…”
Dec 9, 2024 positive
Dec 9, 2024 bullish
Feb 6, 2025 neutral
Apr 24, 2025 bullish
Apr 24, 2025 bullish
Apr 24, 2025 negative
Bosworth: Facebook failed early in mobile by non-natively porting web code
“A lot of people failed early in mobile, including us by just taking our web stuff and putting on the mobile phone and being like, oh, like, the mobile phone, it's just like, we'll just put the web there. But because it wasn't native to what the phone was, and …”
Apr 24, 2025 bullish
Apr 24, 2025 bullish
Bosworth: Meta's Orion prototype proves post-smartphone computing is achievable
“That's why I said like the, Orion was the first thought time I thought Me. Like, the first, Orion, like, putting that in my head, I was like, okay, like, it could happen. Like, there does exist, like, a life for us as a species past the phone.”
Apr 24, 2025 neutral
Apr 24, 2025
Apr 24, 2025 neutral
Apr 24, 2025 bullish
Apr 24, 2025
Bosworth says augmented reality won't happen automatically without massive capital and effort
“There's a lot of people in tech who are like, yeah, AR will eventually happen. That's not how it fucking works, man. You have to stop And put the money and the time and do it. Like somebody has to stop and do it.”
Apr 24, 2025
Apr 29, 2025 positive
Horowitz: a16z top partners outperform executive teams at Meta, Google, and Apple
“If you look at the top people, you know, if you look at Martine Cassato and Chris Dixon and Alex Rampell and David Ulovich and so forth, like that team is better, like IQ wise capability wise than the executive teams of Meta or Google or Apple or any of them.”
May 31, 2025 bullish
George: Consumer AI reached one billion users faster than any predecessor
“We've now gotten to the point where there's about a billion monthly active users of consumer AI applications, and this has grown significantly faster than predecessor companies, Google, Facebook, TikTok, and in the case of TikTok, they actually grew through, t…”
Jun 2, 2025 neutral
Andreessen: Facebook's early revenue came from Bing remnant banner ads
“They had ad revenue early on, but early on it was like remnant ad revenue. They didn't have targeted ads yet, so it was literally, the early ad revenue of Facebook literally was selling remnant banner ads from the Bing ad network and so it was like these super…”
Jun 2, 2025
Marc Andreessen: Russian Facebook ad spend during 2016 election was only $80,000
“I think the result of it was, I think it was a result of 80,000 dollars of ad spend by the Russians in, in the relevant period of the election. It was like a total of like a 140,000, but during the actual run of the election, it was 80,000 dollars, and so the …”
Jun 2, 2025 neutral
Jul 9, 2025
Jul 16, 2025 neutral
Ulevitch: Meta contracted nearly all power from Constellation's reactivated nuclear reactor
“I mean, I think that Constellation just turned up a new nuclear reactor, or is reactivating a reactor, and I think Meta immediately sucked up all of the power that they're going to generate, or nine 10th of it, or something from the new Constellation reactor t…”
Jul 25, 2025 negative
Horowitz: Facebook internal probe found virtually no evidence of Russian hacking
“You know, what they found in terms of the quote-unquote Russian hacking was just about effectively nothing. Like, there was nothing. And so, but the dominant media narrative Was that Facebook had been hacked by the Russians, and I think like probably half the …”
Jul 30, 2025 bearish
García Martínez: Facebook is running out of new human users
“And I can see that the ad tech industry is completely rapacious towards the end of chaos monkeys, or I think in the like afterward that I wrote in the second edition or whatever it was, I mentioned that like Facebook is running out of people, right?”
Aug 1, 2025 positive
Balaji Srinivasan: Musk's Twitter acquisition liberated Meta and YouTube from censorship
“X-Day was also the liberation of Meta and liberation of YouTube, right? All the countries that these racial fanatics at the NYT had occupied, right? All the networks they had occupied. That was like, you know how, like, the Nazi empire was at, like, its peak, …”
Aug 1, 2025
Balaji Srinivasan: US newspaper revenue collapsed post-2008 as tech advertising spiked
“This shows that essentially newspaper revenue rose to like, seventy billion dollars in the year 2000. And then right after the financial crisis, it just suddenly collapsed over the course of like four or five years and Google went vertical and Facebook went ve…”
Aug 4, 2025 positive
Dwarkesh: Meta paying $100M for top AI researchers is ROI positive
“If you pay an employee a hundred million dollars and they're a great AI researcher and they make your compute your training or your inference one percent more efficient. Zuck is spending on the order of like eighty billion dollars a year on on compute. That's …”
Aug 8, 2025 neutral
Srinivasan: Tech platforms replaced government agencies as functional industry regulators
“The actual regulator of taxis is Uber or Lyft because they have real-time tracking. They have star ratings on both sides. Or your you know, some, you know, the FCC or something like who issued licenses. Well, the actual regulator of speech or what have you sai…”
Aug 18, 2025 neutral
Aug 18, 2025 bearish
Patel: Microsoft's custom AI silicon lags behind Amazon, Google, and Meta
“Microsoft, their custom silicon kind of sucks but the other three, they're really upping their orders massively over the last year. You know, Amazon is making millions of Tranium. Google's making millions of TPUs. TPUs clearly are like a hundred percent utiliz…”
Aug 22, 2025 negative
Casado: a16z avoids lesser-known SOTA AI model startups due to heavy subsidies
“So the state-of-the-art model market, this is like the, you know, the Anthropics and the Open AIs it's incredibly competitive, and it's very heavily subsidized, right? I mean, like with Meta and like Google, et cetera, and so kind of our view is, is you have t…”
Aug 23, 2025 negative
Horowitz: Media praised Facebook under Obama, called it dangerous under Trump
“The funny thing was like, if you go back to 2008, All the stories on how Obama got elected were Facebook. Like, he mastered Facebook. He got elected on Facebook. Facebook's the greatest thing. It's making the world more democratic. Arab Spring. Wow, this is so…”
Sep 17, 2025 negative
Rampell: Google and Facebook captured most value from DTC boom
“Well, I mean, ultimately, if it's a one and done transaction, you don't really make the product like, you know, Casper didn't make the mattress, right? Like there's probably some OEM in China that made the mattress and they put their little logo and they calle…”
Oct 16, 2025 bearish
Rabois: Social graphs are no longer defensible moats for platforms
“Well, I don't think the graph is defensible. I think there are other assets that are. I think the graph has kind of been weakened by, like TikTok has kind of shown that on social products, The graph may, certainly isn't, is not indispensable to success. It may…”
Oct 22, 2025 neutral
Oct 30, 2025 bullish
Nov 6, 2025 positive
Nov 7, 2025 positive
Nov 21, 2025 negative
Rampell: Fintech startup capital is mostly wasted on Google and Meta ads
“I like to say, especially in financial services, with that high bar to having a relationship you should probably just buy Google stock or Facebook stock versus investing in most companies because, like, that's where all the money goes. It's like you, like, you…”
Dec 3, 2025 positive
Dec 12, 2025 negative
Evans: Zuckerberg's plan to resell excess AI capacity is flawed
“I saw a slightly strange quote from Mark Zuckerberg saying, well, if it turns out that we've over invested, we can just resell the capacity. And I thought, let me just like stop you there, Mark, because if it turns out that you can't use your capacity, everybo…”
Dec 12, 2025 bearish
Dec 29, 2025 negative
Jan 7, 2026 bearish
Andreessen: The EU AI Act has largely killed AI development in Europe
“The EU passed this bill called the AI Act, I don't know, whatever, two years ago, and it basically has killed AI development, and, well, it's actually killed AI development in Europe to a large extent and then it even, it is so draconian that even, Even big Am…”
Jan 26, 2026 positive
Mar 10, 2026
Apr 14, 2026 bullish
Horowitz: Blockchain will be essential infrastructure to verify real content vs AI deepfakes
“Are you gonna trust Google? Are you gonna trust Meta? Are you gonna trust the US government? I think you wanna trust the kind of mathematical game theoretic properties Of the blockchain. So I think that's going to be just a very, very important part of the inf…”
May 4, 2026 negative
Rogers: Previous administration pressured Twitter and Meta to censor posts
“Under the prior administration included things like global engagement center censorship efforts that were the subject of the Murphy Supreme Court litigation, where the State Department Along with other organs of the executive branch would contact Twitter or Me…”
May 27, 2026
May 29, 2026 bullish
Jun 8, 2026 positive
Evans: AI integration is driving ad revenue gains at Google and Meta
“Which is, of course, why you see the ad numbers and the, you know, the conversion rates shooting up in the, every quarter from Google and Facebook. Because they're rolling all of this into their ad systems, and their recommendation engines, and their predictio…”
Jun 8, 2026
Jun 8, 2026
Jul 17, 2026
Aug 5, 2026 neutral
Sep 3, 2026 bearish
Sep 9, 2026 negative
Chi: Meta Llama 4 Underperformed on Private Benchmarks Despite Public Scores
“One of the early indications of that you saw was when Meta released Lama four that was a bit of a disaster, and interestingly, what we saw is that on our held out private benchmarks, the model is actually underperforming, but on all of the major public benchma…”
Sep 10, 2026
Kha: GPs are fired for missing winners while LPs fear bad investments
“A GP can get fired for missing out, you know, the next, you know, Facebook, the next Uber, right? Like, that is error of omission, and like, that's fireable. But LPs on the flip side only get fired if you invest into a mentor. So in some respects, like, the in…”