Meta
also referred to as: facebook · facebook inc. · the facebook
includes Facebook News Feed, Facebook Platform, Facebook Marketplace, Facebook Messenger, Facebook Connect, Facebook Events, Facebook Live, Facebook Poke, Facebook Ads, Facebook Gaming, Facebook Advertising
204 statements across 19 episodes · 85 bullish · 25 bearish · 10 people on the record · first statement Oct 19, 2021 by Ben Gilbert · said 1,278 times in 51 episodes since 2021 · across every show →
Mentions by year, the whole family
brought up most by Ben Gilbert (600), David Rosenthal (549), Mark Zuckerberg (49), Ben Thompson (37), Daniel Ek (9), Brendan Eich (5), Sam Bankman-Fried (4), Packy McCormick (4)
tap a year for its mentions
2026 2 mentions in 2 episodes 1 per episode
2025 97 mentions in 8 episodes 12 per episode
- Google Part II: Alphabet (Audio) · Acquired
- Google Part III: The AI Company. Google is amazingly well-positioned... will they win in AI? (Audio) · Acquired
- Google Part I: Origins of Search. How the Best Business in Human History Happened (Audio) · Acquired
- Indian Premier League Cricket (Audio) · Acquired
- TSMC · Acquired
- 10 Years of Acquired (with Michael Lewis) · Acquired
- The Steve Ballmer Interview · Acquired
- The Jamie Dimon Interview: How JP Morgan Became an $800 Billion Bank · Acquired
- every mention in 2025, scene by scene →
2024 992 mentions in 9 episodes 110 per episode
- Meta (Audio) · Acquired
- The Mark Zuckerberg Interview · Acquired
- Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg) · Acquired
- Microsoft Volume II: The Complete History and Strategy of the Ballmer Years (Audio) · Acquired
- IKEA (Audio) · Acquired
- Mars Inc. - The Chocolate Story (Audio) · Acquired
- Novo Nordisk (Ozempic) · Acquired
- Microsoft Volume I: The Complete History and Strategy of founding through Windows 95 (Audio) · Acquired
- 1 more episode that year, every mention in 2024 →
2023 68 mentions in 12 episodes 6 per episode
- Nvidia Part III: The Dawn of the AI Era (2022-2023) (Audio) · Acquired
- Spotify CEO Daniel Ek · Acquired
- NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang · Acquired
- Benchmark’s Mitch Lasky and Blake Robbins on The Art of Business in Gaming · Acquired
- Visa (Audio) · Acquired
- Costco (Audio) · Acquired
- Porsche (with Doug DeMuro) · Acquired
- Lockheed Martin (Audio) · Acquired
- 4 more episodes that year, every mention in 2023 →
2022 102 mentions in 15 episodes 7 per episode
- Stratechery (with Ben Thompson) · Acquired
- Benchmark Part I · Acquired
- The Browser (with Brendan Eich, Chief Architect of Netscape + Mozilla and CEO of Brave) · Acquired
- Nvidia: The Machine Learning Company (2006-2022) · Acquired
- Amazon Web Services · Acquired
- Altimeter (with Brad Gerstner) · Acquired
- Howard Marks & Andrew Marks: Something of Value · Acquired
- ACQ Sessions: Jason Calacanis · Acquired
- 7 more episodes that year, every mention in 2022 →
2021 17 mentions in 5 episodes 3 per episode
- FTX with Sam Bankman-Fried & Mario Gabriele (Extended Cut) · Acquired
- Not Boring (with Packy McCormick) - Extended Cut · Acquired
- Standard Oil Part II (Extended Cut) · Acquired
- Michael Mauboussin Master Class — Moats, Skill, Luck, Decision Making and a Whole Lot More · Acquired
- Standard Oil Part I · Acquired
- every mention in 2021, scene by scene →
Everything said about Meta, oldest first
Oct 19, 2021 negative
Oct 19, 2021 negative
Rosenthal: Facebook leadership repeated Standard Oil's mistake responding to press scrutiny
“And I think about not all the big tech companies, but, again, to pick on Facebook, like, this really seems to, on the outside, to be the case with Facebook right now and, like, the Facebook files and everything going on with the Wall Street Journal, like, it r…”
Mar 7, 2022 bullish
Only Apple has the balance sheet to rival Meta in VR
“I think Meta is investing just gobs and gobs of money and talent and everything into the next five versions of the, you know, MetaQuest and everything that's gonna come after that, and I don't know, at this point I'm not sure there's a balance sheet deep enoug…”
Mar 15, 2022 bullish
Mar 15, 2022 positive
Gerstner: The belief that companies cannot innovate in public markets is nonsense
“This idea that you can't innovate in the public markets is nonsense, right? Jeff Bezos innovated plenty in the public markets, Facebook in the public markets. You know, look at what Marc Benioff has done in the public markets. And so I think that that the publ…”
Apr 6, 2022
Additive Direct Network Effects Strongly Drive Winner-Take-All Market Outcomes
“A direct network effect is where your joining has an immediate value impact on somebody that's sort of on the same side. So I joined Facebook because I'm your friend, and those effects are strong because they're additive. So another friend's join, it doesn't s…”
Apr 20, 2022 bullish
Sep 28, 2022
Friendster CEO Tim Koogle blocked Benchmark from investing in Facebook's Series A
“Specifically what happened was Benchmark had invested in Friendster, and so was conflicted out. Now you could argue that was an unavoidable mistake, you know, but like, boy does that hurt. And supposedly, I think it was Bob Kegel who was on the board of Friend…”
Sep 28, 2022 neutral
Sep 28, 2022 neutral
Sep 28, 2022 positive
Oct 4, 2022 positive
Dec 6, 2022 bullish
Thompson: Apple's privacy changes enhanced Meta's long-term ad moat
“The Apple changes were very devastating, and they're structurally devastating, and so they deserve a significant haircut on their valuation because of that, but I also think they were moat-enhancing in the long run, where I question whether any other company i…”
Dec 6, 2022 positive
Thompson: Meta's targeted ads are essential for niche online businesses
“And actually one of the reasons I actually am in general favorable towards meta is I think they're an essential component in the broader ecosystem of niche businesses, because if the entire world is your audience, how does the world find out about you? I'm luc…”
Apr 26, 2023 negative
Jun 13, 2023 bullish
Sep 6, 2023 bullish
Jul 22, 2024
Gilbert: Microsoft invested $240M in Facebook at $15B valuation in 2007
“So the terms of the deal are, in October, 2007, Microsoft invests two hundred and forty million dollars for 1.6% of Facebook. So for those trying to do the math at home, that is a fifteen billion dollar valuation on the deal. Microsoft will get the exclusive r…”
Jul 22, 2024
Gilbert: Microsoft offered $24B to acquire Facebook in 2007
“Microsoft puts an offer on the table. It's a very complex deal structure, but effectively what it does is it lets Facebook shareholders cash out over a long period of time as the company's value grew. So you're not taking all your money off the table today. An…”
Sep 18, 2024 bullish
Zuckerberg scaled AI and Reality Labs knowing investors would hate it
“Go double down on those things, and build out the AI infrastructure that we needed to, and scale up some of the Reality Lab stuff, and I knew that a lot of the investors would hate it, at least in the short term, before it's clearly the right thing to do.”
Sep 18, 2024
Zuckerberg: Facebook board tried to fire him after rejecting Yahoo's $1B offer
“In 2006, Yahoo wanted to buy the company for a billion dollars, and everyone on our management team wanted to sell it, and the board tried to fire me, and everyone, and basically in the next year, everyone else on the management team left because they, I hadn'…”
Sep 18, 2024
Zuckerberg: Overstaffing projects strips employee agency and repels top talent
“I think it also is problematic to have more people working on something than you should have for the stage that it's at, because then the people who are working on it don't have the agency to actually, like, make the changes and do the things that they need to…”
Sep 18, 2024
Zuckerberg: Facebook paused feature development for a year during mobile rewrite
“We basically took, I think it must have been like a year or something, we were just like, look, we're gonna pause feature development of the company, Because it's hard enough to do a rewrite, right? So if you look at, like, the history of the tech industry, th…”
Sep 18, 2024 negative
Zuckerberg: Companies lacking technical CEOs and boards are not tech companies
“You know, they, the CEO wasn't technical. The board of directors had no one technical on it. They had, like, one dude on the management team who was the head of engineering who was technical, and, like, everyone else wasn't. It's like, alright, if that's your …”
Sep 18, 2024 positive
Zuckerberg: Meta is not embarrassed to copy successful products from competitors
“We're not embarrassed about learning from things that other people, like, discovered that were good first, and then we build a better version of it, and I mean, I think that that's, You know, no one company is going to invent everything, right? I think if you …”
Sep 18, 2024 positive
Sep 18, 2024 neutral
Zuckerberg: Apple will be Meta's primary rival in ideological platform war
“I think Apple will have a place for sure. I expect them to be our primary competitor, and I think it will not be Just a product competition. I think it's like a, in some ways, very deeply values driven and ideological competition around what the future of the …”
Sep 18, 2024 positive
Zuckerberg: Open Compute saved Meta billions by standardizing supply chains
“So now you have, like, all these other, you know, cloud service platforms that, you know, basically use, Open compute, and because of that, the supply chain is standard around, standardized around our designs, which means that it's, like, way more supply, way …”
Sep 18, 2024 bullish
Sep 18, 2024 neutral
Sep 18, 2024 bullish
Sep 18, 2024 neutral
Zuckerberg: Meta's shipping culture is the opposite of Apple's polished approach
“I think in a lot of ways we're like the opposite of Apple, and clearly their stuff has worked really well too, right? But I mean, they take this approach, it's like, we're gonna take a, like, a long time, we're gonna polish it, we're gonna put it out and maybe…”
Sep 18, 2024 negative
Zuckerberg: Accepting blame during political crises only invites more attacks
“If you take responsibility for things, because you think it's a corporate crisis, not a political crisis and your view is like, okay, I'm, like, I'm gonna take responsibility for all this stuff. Like, and people are basically, like, blaming social media and th…”
Sep 18, 2024 neutral
Zuckerberg: Meta's 2016 political mistake will take another 10 years to resolve
“I think that the political miscalculation was a 20 year mistake. And so it started in 2016... And I think it's going to take another 10 years or so for us to kind of fully work through that cycle before our brand and all of that is back to kind of the place th…”
Sep 18, 2024
Sep 30, 2024 negative
Zuckerberg: Meta might be twice as profitable if it owned mobile platforms
“You know, we did this calculation or estimate at some point where it's like, how much money do we lose from our core family of apps to the various, like, taxes that the platforms have to, like, when they tell us we can't run the ad business the way that we thi…”
Sep 30, 2024 neutral
Zuckerberg: Meta's shipping philosophy is the opposite of Apple's long-cycle polish
“I think in a lot of ways we're like the opposite of Apple, and clearly their stuff has worked really well too, right? But I mean, they take this approach, it's like, we're gonna take a, like, a long time, we're gonna polish it, we're gonna put it out and maybe…”
Sep 30, 2024 positive
Zuckerberg: Open Compute supply chain standardization saved Meta billions of dollars
“Because of that, the supply chain is standard around, standardized around our designs, which means that it's, like, way more supply, way cheaper to produce. We've saved billions of dollars, and the quality of the stuff that we get to use goes up.”
Sep 30, 2024 positive
Zuckerberg: Meta deliberately stacks its management team with technical leaders
“I think one of the things that I've always been pretty careful about is I actually, like, want, like, the, a lot of the people on our management team, it's like, You know, split. It's mostly people running either of these big product groups who come up through…”
Sep 30, 2024 bullish
Sep 30, 2024 positive
Ek: Zuckerberg runs productive product review meetings with 15 to 20 people
“Mark, the average meeting he has is like 15 to 20 people in the room and how you make you know, a product review or discussion productive with 15 and 20 people still get people to be heard. Like he's very, very good at that stuff.”
Sep 30, 2024 bullish
Zuckerberg: AR and AI smart glasses will become completely ubiquitous
“I'm pretty sure glasses and kind of, like, holographic presence and AR is going to be a completely ubiquitous Product, right? It's just like everyone who had a phone before replaced it with a smartphone, and then a lot of more people got smartphones. If all we…”
Sep 30, 2024 positive
Sep 30, 2024 neutral
Sep 30, 2024 positive
Sep 30, 2024 neutral
Sep 30, 2024 bullish
Zuckerberg: If Meta learns and iterates faster than competitors, it will win
“So like I define our strategies. We can learn faster than every other company. We're going to win. We're going to build a better product than everyone else because we're going to get it out first or early. We're going to have a good feedback loop. We're gonna …”
Sep 30, 2024 positive
Daniel Ek: Mark Zuckerberg is the best learner I have ever seen
“Specifically from him you know, he's the, probably the best learner I've ever seen. You know, you can have a conversation with him about a topic, he may not know very much about it, and then the next time, he would know more than, I would say, most experts abo…”
Sep 30, 2024 neutral
Zuckerberg: Meta open-sourced infrastructure because Google already held proprietary compute advantage
“Google was the first of the great companies that built this distributed computing infrastructure. So they came first. They were like, all right, let's keep this proprietary because it's a big advantage for us. And then we're like, all right, we need that too. …”
Sep 30, 2024 negative
Zuckerberg: Overstaffing projects destroys employee agency and repels top talent
“It also is problematic to have more people working on something than you should have for the stage that it's at, because then the people who are working on it don't have the agency to actually, like, make the changes and do the things that they need to, Which …”
Sep 30, 2024 negative
Sep 30, 2024 bullish
Zuckerberg: Goal for next 10-15 years is building winning open platforms
“Part of my goal for the next 1015 years, the next generation of platforms, is to build the next generation of open platforms and have the open platforms win. And I think that that's going to lead to a much more vibrant tech industry.”
Sep 30, 2024 bullish
Zuckerberg: Meta scaled AI and Reality Labs knowing investors would hate it
“What we knew was gonna be really painful, you know, to go double down on those things, and build out the AI infrastructure that we needed to, and scale up some of the Reality Lab stuff. And I knew that a lot of the investors would hate it. At least in the shor…”
Sep 30, 2024 positive
Zuckerberg: Prioritizing praise over rapid shipping wastes critical product learning time
“I do just think that, like, you want to really have a culture that values shipping and getting things out and getting feedback more than needing always to get great positive accolades from people when you put stuff out. Because I think, like, if you want to wa…”
Sep 30, 2024 neutral
Zuckerberg: Adding features during platform rewrites risks projects never finishing
“We basically took, I think it must have been like a year or something, we were just like, look, we're gonna pause feature development of the company, because it's hard enough to do a rewrite, right? So if you look at, like, the history of the tech industry, th…”
Sep 30, 2024 positive
Ek: Social music works via shared co-listening, not passive friend-watching
“While I still think music is very social, I think what we got wrong in the product was this sort of notion that just seeing sort of what all of your friends are listening to may not be the sort of right social product. But if you instead sort of say like, I wa…”
Sep 30, 2024 positive
Zuckerberg: Meta is unashamed to adopt and improve competitors' innovations
“We're not embarrassed about learning from things that other people, like, discovered that were good first, and then we build a better version of it, and I mean, I think that that's, You know, no one company is going to invent everything, right? I think if you …”
Sep 30, 2024 bullish
Zuckerberg: Holographic smart glasses will be the ultimate form of AI
“It's going to be, I think, the ultimate Digital social experience, and I think it's also going to be the ultimate incarnation of AI, because you're going to have conversations where it's like, alright, there's some people, it's like maybe like, I'm physically …”
Sep 30, 2024 negative
Zuckerberg: Apple is Meta's primary competitor in ideological open-vs-closed race
“I expect them to be our primary competitor, and I think it will not be Just a product competition. I think it's like a, in some ways, very deeply values driven and ideological competition around what the future of the tech industry should be”
Sep 30, 2024 bullish
Zuckerberg: Meta must build AI and hardware platforms to avoid mobile gatekeeper dependence
“We've just been, we've been through too much stuff with the other platforms to fully depend on, on anyone else, and we're a big enough company at this point that, like, we don't have to, right? We can build our own core technology platforms, whether that's gon…”
Sep 30, 2024
Zuckerberg: Facebook board tried firing him over $1B Yahoo offer
“In 2006, Yahoo wanted to buy the company for a billion dollars, and everyone on our management team wanted to sell it, and the board tried to fire me, and everyone, and basically in the next year, everyone else on the management team left because they, I hadn'…”
Oct 28, 2024 neutral
Oct 28, 2024 neutral
Oct 28, 2024 positive
Sandberg Bet on Mobile Because Zuckerberg's Control Prevented His Firing
“And when they sort of arrived at this plan of, we are going to forego a lot of desktop revenue to basically bet it all on figuring out mobile revenue, she said, well, Mark, nobody can fire you, and only you can fire me, so if you're in, I'm in.”
Oct 28, 2024 bullish
Gilbert: Mobile in-feed ads proved far more valuable than desktop sidebar ads
“Because the ads are front and center, the value per ad is actually higher. So they ended up creating a much, much more valuable ad unit than they ever had on desktop purely because of this incredible attention on them when you're scrolling in feed on mobile.”
Oct 28, 2024 neutral
Oct 28, 2024
Oct 28, 2024 positive
Oct 28, 2024 negative
Oct 28, 2024 negative
Oct 28, 2024 negative
Oct 28, 2024 positive
Gilbert: In September 2005, Facebook held one-third of US college students at 70% DAU
“By September of o' five, they were at five million users. That was 10 X their user base just a year ago in September of o' four, and almost a third of all U.S. College students Were included in that five million. So by September of oh five, they had a third of…”
Oct 28, 2024 neutral
Meta Devoted Zero Minutes to Core Social Apps at Connect 2024 Keynote
“Meta held a multi-hour keynote at Connect in September, 24. And of those multiple hours, zero minutes were dedicated to their core products of social media apps, their hundred billion dollar business of selling advertisements on these social media products.”
Oct 28, 2024 positive
Oct 28, 2024
Rosenthal: Yann LeCun required open source and NYU professorship to join Meta
“And Jan says like, well, I'm flattered that you would want me to come work here. That's interesting. But like, I live in New York. I teach at NYU. I don't want to leave. I don't want to quit teaching at NYU. And I'm pretty darn committed to open source and pub…”
Oct 28, 2024 negative
Facebook Avoided First-Day IPO Crash Only Due to Underwriting Bank Intervention
“Facebook shares end the day at 38 dollars and 23 cents, up 23 cents from the IPO price, but only because all of the underwriting banks in the IPO stepped in to buy shares and support the price, which was totally crashing throughout the day.”
Oct 28, 2024 negative
Oct 28, 2024 neutral
Rosenthal: Facebook skipped the 'startup phase' to build a global empire directly
“It's quite ironic that Facebook became the prototypical startup, given that the goal was never to be a startup. The goal was first to be a project, and then to build, like, a very profitable business. The largest empire in the world. Yes. There was no in-betwe…”
Oct 28, 2024
Gilbert: Startups seeking complete market dominance should extinguish their hardest competitor first
“If you're okay splitting the market, you go for the white space, and then you say, let's see how much of the low-hanging fruit we can easily get. But if you're Facebook, you're gonna say, let's go to the hardest possible competitor, Extinguish them. And then w…”
Oct 28, 2024 bullish
Meta Enjoys Guaranteed Profitable ROI on AI Hardware via Ad Optimization
“It's one of the fundamental advantages that Facebook has today relative to all other AI companies is that they are guaranteed profitable ROI on all of their AI spend. All of their research, all their infrastructure, all their GPUs, they have highly, highly pro…”
Oct 28, 2024 positive
Oct 28, 2024
Oct 28, 2024 neutral
Facebook Does Not Sell User Data, It Sells Access to Targeting
“In part, you know, you can see why Facebook massively prefers the ad based business model of, we never even expose any information to you, advertiser. You target, and then we just deliver the ads. You never get to know anything about who the users are on our p…”
Oct 28, 2024 positive
Oct 28, 2024 positive
Oct 28, 2024 negative
Oct 28, 2024 positive
Oct 28, 2024 positive
Rosenthal: Almost no company can match Meta's global integrity and anti-spam scale
“So, while probably, you know, YouTube, to a certain extent, TikTok, perhaps, also have similar strengths here, I doubt there is any other company in the world capable of actually operating privacy, integrity, and security, and within that is also anti-spam stu…”
Oct 28, 2024
Gilbert: Original 'Facebook Guy' Header Image Was J. Geils Band Singer Peter Wolf
“There's a great Quora post about this where there's unmistakably the photo of Peter Wolf that Facebook guy is based on. They just sort of pixelated it and You know, made it duotone instead of the original photograph.”
Oct 28, 2024
Oct 28, 2024 bullish
Oct 28, 2024 neutral
Oct 28, 2024
Oct 28, 2024 neutral
Meta Requires Tight Engineering Coupling Unlike Amazon's Decoupled API Interfaces
“Amazon uses interface so teams don't have to talk to each other. At Meta, they require incredibly tight communication. It's a very different organizational philosophy where they're like, no, no, no, not only do we not have external customers, we want this insa…”
Oct 28, 2024 positive
Oct 28, 2024 positive
Oct 28, 2024 neutral
Oct 28, 2024 positive
Gilbert: Microsoft is the true strategic and operational comparison for Meta
“The real comp for this company is Microsoft. That was actually my next one. They do iterative product development. They put the first version out just to kind of get feedback and see how they need to rev it and get better for the future. The early days are cha…”
Oct 28, 2024 neutral
Facebook Acquired Onavo to Track Competitor Network Traffic and App Usage
“Well, in 2013, Facebook acquired a small Israeli company called Onavo, and Onavo was exactly what you just said, Ben. A VPN, actually, I think it initially started as, like, a data compression tool, so if you were worried about your data plan, which was Really…”
Oct 28, 2024 positive
WhatsApp Has Surpassed 100 Million Monthly Active Users in the US
“WhatsApp has a hundred million now in the US, which this is sort of a big narrative violation that WhatsApp will never catch on in the US, and iMessage is dominant, and even after that it's, you know, text message. This is crazy. A hundred million people a mon…”
Oct 28, 2024 neutral
Gilbert: Early Facebook high school signups required college student invitations
“You had to log into hs.facebook.com, and it looked mostly the same. It had slightly different features, but there was this weird thing where somebody who was already in college had to invite you. It's not like anyone could sign up for high school Facebook. You…”
Oct 28, 2024 neutral
Oct 28, 2024
Oct 28, 2024 neutral
Gilbert: WTI loaned Facebook $600,000 with warrants in 2004–2005
“Yeah, and so they basically invented venture debt, and so they make a 300,000 dollar loan, it's like, I think like a revolving credit line, in the fall of 2004, and that comes with warrants, that if the company ever goes public, that they can then exercise The…”
Oct 28, 2024 bullish
Rosenthal: GPU-driven feed recommenders create a rising barrier to entry
“I think the only way that this new paradigm exists is because of AI and because of GPUs specifically, and I'm not even talking about generative AI, I'm talking about, like, feed recommender systems and personalization systems. And so, like, there is a very, ve…”
Oct 28, 2024 neutral
Oct 28, 2024
Facebook Had 425M Mobile Users but Zero Meaningful Mobile Revenue Pre-IPO
“We had more than four hundred and twenty five million monthly active users who used Facebook mobile products in December 2011. We anticipate that the rate of growth in mobile users will continue to exceed the growth rate of our overall MAUs for the foreseeable…”
Oct 28, 2024 positive
Facebook grew from 100M users in August 2008 to 350M by late 2009
“They go from like just barely getting to a hundred million users in August of 2008 to almost a hundred and fifty million by the end of the year. So 50% growth in the last four months of the year. And then 2009 is just like lights out. They grow 250% in 2009 to…”
Oct 28, 2024 neutral
Oct 28, 2024 positive
Gilbert: Meta reached four billion users via engineered growth tactics, not virality
“It would be easy to look at this company and say, wow, what a viral product. What a universally applicable product. That is not the case. It is unnatural to have connected four billion humans. This is a freak of nature. This is not just something that people a…”
Oct 28, 2024
Oct 28, 2024 positive
Oct 28, 2024 positive
Oct 28, 2024 neutral
Oct 28, 2024 bearish
Gilbert: TikTok stealing users was a bigger existential threat than Apple's ATT
“The interesting thing is, at this time, the real threat wasn't actually ATT. The biggest of those three threats was TikTok stealing users. The whole ATT thing is about how much money can we make off of an ad because it is so well targeted? That's an optimizati…”
Oct 28, 2024
Oct 28, 2024
Oct 28, 2024
Oct 28, 2024
Oct 28, 2024 bullish
Oct 28, 2024
Oct 28, 2024 neutral
Rosenthal: Facebook IPO raised $16B at $104B cap, ranking third all-time
“They raise sixteen billion dollars at a one hundred and four billion dollar market cap, making it, I think, the third largest IPO of all time at that point behind Visa and, ironically, General Motors coming out of the bankruptcy during 2008.”
Oct 28, 2024 positive
Zuckerberg Negotiated Facebook's $1B Instagram Acquisition Over a Single Weekend
“Not to mention, on top of it all, we're not gonna go into it here because we had a whole episode on Facebook and Instagram, but this was done over two days, over the course of a weekend. Mark didn't do a whole lot of socializing this before pulling the trigger…”
Oct 28, 2024
Oct 28, 2024 neutral
Rosenthal: Beacon activity collapsed after Facebook shifted to opt-in
“Ultimately, after a few weeks, they do acquiesce, and they say like, okay, we will turn Beacon off, we'll make it opt-in, as opposed to opt-out, and You can have a way to, like, completely turn off all beacon tracking permanently from your profile. A lot of pe…”
Oct 28, 2024
Oct 28, 2024 positive
Oct 28, 2024
Zuckerberg Pitched Steve Jobs on Integrating Facebook's Platform Directly Into iOS
“The next year, in 2008, when the iPhone SDK was launching and people were building apps, Mark and Facebook actually go to Apple and meet with Steve, and they pitch Steve on exactly what you were just talking about, Ben. Like, hey, how about you let us bring ou…”
Oct 28, 2024 negative
Oct 28, 2024 positive
Oct 28, 2024
Oct 28, 2024
Oct 28, 2024 positive
Gilbert: Early Facebook remains the cultural archetype for modern startup culture
“I mean, to this day, early Facebook is still What most startup culture is aspiring to be. I think often without knowing it, I mean, everything from the sort of posters on the walls with your mantras and your values, to almost having like an employment brand th…”
Oct 28, 2024 positive
Oct 28, 2024
Oct 28, 2024 neutral
Rosenthal: Facebook mobile hit 53% of revenue in Q4 2013 while desktop shrank
“Facebook announces that mobile advertising is now 53% of revenue, and total ad revenue for the company grew 76% year over year in the fourth quarter, which of course is the most important quarter of the year, which means, I did all the math on that, that means…”
Oct 28, 2024 negative
Gilbert: Facebook July 2018 Drop Wiped $119B, Setting a Historic Record
“The company announces in their July, 20 18 earnings call that they're gonna be more focused on user privacy, and that revenue may slow as they make this intense focus. They dropped 19% in one day. They wiped out a hundred and nineteen billion dollars in market…”
Oct 28, 2024
Oct 28, 2024 neutral
Oct 28, 2024 positive
Rosenthal: Mark Zuckerberg expanded Facebook to Columbia specifically to test head-to-head competition
“And he specifically chooses Columbia because, Ben, as you said, there was an existing competitor there. And he's like, I want to see how Facebook competes. And like, I want to know right away, can we displace it?”
Oct 28, 2024 negative
Gilbert: Facebook overcomplicated advertising instead of offering display ads
“The obvious thing is show an image that people can click on and take them to a website. It's display ads. And like, I don't understand why they needed to try to way overthink it and say our ad format has to be something that no one's ever thought of before. Li…”
Oct 28, 2024 neutral
Rosenthal: Only giant platforms like Meta can afford to commoditize AI models
“Only a company of the scale of Meta can kind of run this playbook, playbook in quotes, because no startup is going to be like, oh, okay, what is my strategy to make sure that OpenAI and Anthropic don't get leverage over me?”
Oct 28, 2024 positive
Oct 28, 2024 positive
Oct 28, 2024 bullish
Excluding China, Less Than Six Percent of Internet Users Escape Meta
“That leaves about four hundred and fifty million people, or six percent of the human population, Who have access to the internet, but are not yet meta monthly actives. That doesn't mean they're not meta users. That just means they weren't monthly active users …”
Oct 28, 2024 neutral
Gilbert: Early Facebook prioritized raw intelligence over industry experience in hiring
“The other thing that was basically true is they were not really interested in recruiting industry veterans, especially on the technical side. And Mark says this in early talks, that he was just prioritizing raw intelligence over experience.”
Oct 28, 2024
Oct 28, 2024 neutral
Oct 28, 2024
Oct 28, 2024 neutral
Facebook Handled No Native Ad Targeting When Sheryl Sandberg Joined
“And when she comes on board, like you referenced this earlier, Ben, there's Basically no ad targeting that's happening natively on Facebook. Like there probably is targeting that's happening through the third party Microsoft advertising network, but none of th…”
Oct 28, 2024 negative
Oct 28, 2024 negative
Oct 28, 2024 positive
Oct 28, 2024 neutral
Rosenthal: Microsoft pursued Facebook in 2007 after missing search to Google
“Microsoft, perhaps obvious now in retrospect to everybody, really just wants to buy the company. But Mark's, of course, not gonna do that after the whole Yahoo experience, etc. Microsoft is also happy, though, to just keep the partnership going and expand it, …”
Oct 28, 2024
Zuckerberg Rejected Yahoo Acquisition After Terry Semel Lowered $1B Offer
“So Mark actually agrees to the Yahoo deal. Billion dollars. It's gonna be all in stock. Yahoo's gonna buy the company. In the interim between when they shake hands on the deal and while the docs are being drafted, Yahoo announces their quarterly earnings, and …”
Oct 28, 2024
Oct 28, 2024 neutral
Gilbert: Facebook Settled with FTC for $5B with 20-Year Oversight
“The whole settlement here was not specifically about Cambridge Analytica. There were a bunch of other things that are privacy related, but the number is five billion dollars. And David, there is one thing that it comes with, and that is a 20 year window that t…”
Oct 28, 2024 neutral
UK probe found Facebook told Cambridge Analytica to delete data in 2015
“The conclusion was that the quiz was taken by 320,000 people. Since those people had access to friends, the total surface area was the public profile data of eighty-seven million Facebook users. They also found that Facebook had requested that Cambridge Analyt…”
Oct 28, 2024 positive
Oct 28, 2024 bullish
Oct 28, 2024 positive
Segmenting by School Solved Friendster's Server-Crashing n-Squared Problem
“Friendsters out there trying to compute second degree friends of friends, which is this crazy hard computer science problem, especially as the global number of people growing, it's an n squared problem. And Facebook is over here, or the Facebook at the time, i…”
Oct 28, 2024
Gilbert: Incumbents must copy new interaction mechanics to prevent network migration
“I think when someone invents a new interaction paradigm, it's one of these things where, like, you have to adopt it because otherwise people are just going to flee, and of course your business depends on you adopting it because you can't let someone use this n…”
Oct 28, 2024 positive
Rosenthal: Great companies retain homegrown or long-tenured senior executives
“This is almost always true, really is true in every great company that I can think of. The core senior most executive team are all people who came up in the company Or have been there for a very, very long time. It's not a whole bunch of mercenaries there at t…”
Oct 28, 2024 positive
Meta Open-Sources AI to Commoditize Complements and Lower Long-Term Costs
“When you think about it, it's actually a form of operating leverage, where he's basically saying there's a big fixed cost I am willing to bear in order to bootstrap this ecosystem and commoditize all of these complements, commoditize all of these other closed …”
Oct 28, 2024 neutral
Oct 28, 2024 bearish
Oct 28, 2024 positive
Oct 28, 2024 neutral
Gilbert: Zuckerberg's post-2016 leadership mirrors Gates staying through DOJ antitrust fallout
“Zuck, after all the 2016 election fallout, and the shift in public perception, and having to do all this testifying, Is like watching an alternate future for Microsoft where Bill Gates had decided to stay at the helm instead of leaving after the DOJ case.”
Oct 28, 2024 positive
Oct 28, 2024
Oct 28, 2024 bullish
Oct 28, 2024 positive
Turning Off Meta Ads Actually Reduces User Engagement in Some Markets
“There are markets in the world today where I think Meta has run this test, where if you turn off ads, In the, you know, meta family of apps products, engagement in those products actually goes down, which is just, like, freaking wild.”
Oct 28, 2024 neutral
TikTok Operates as Media, Rendering an Authenticated Social Graph Irrelevant
“TikTok and ByteDance, its parent company, as you point out, Ben, was so completely orthogonal to everything that Facebook had learned over the past 15 years. Because, yes, number one, most importantly, it's not social media. It's media. There's no social. And …”
Oct 28, 2024 neutral
Rosenthal: App install ads drove early native mobile revenue for Facebook
“A very large percentage of the inventory that they were selling, and especially the revenue of these native mobile ads in the beginning, was actually for app install ads that game developers and other folks were buying on Facebook.”
Oct 28, 2024 bullish
Oct 28, 2024
Oct 28, 2024 positive
Facebook Shifted From Product Innovator to Shameless Feature Copier
“For the first six or seven years of its life, Facebook was a change maker, defining what social networking was, and then after that, it became a change taker, and we'll talk about this when it happens, but like, again, the mental flexibility of Mark and the co…”
Oct 28, 2024 neutral
Oct 28, 2024 negative
Oct 28, 2024 positive
Oct 28, 2024
Oct 28, 2024 positive
Oct 28, 2024 bullish
Meta Built a Hyperscaler-Sized Data Center Footprint Exclusively for Internal Use
“They now last year spent twenty-eight billion dollars in capex, which you should mostly read as data centers. They operate a Hyper-scaler-sized data center footprint, give or take. You know, you think AWS, Azure, Microsoft, and Google Cloud. Meta is the fourth…”
Oct 28, 2024 neutral
Matching iPhone Cash Flows Would Leave Reality Labs Net Negative Until 2035
“Well, I did that napkin math, and if twenty-twenty-four, This year was Apple's 2007, so you just take all the iPhone's cash flows and you start the clock right now. Meta's cumulative cash flows from Reality Labs would be net negative until at least 2035.”
Oct 28, 2024 positive
Gilbert: Meta's core essence is its ability to move like water
“Ultimately, my big takeaway is the company moves like water. It is the company that has connected the world that will always gear up for the next battle and be whatever they need to be in the next era, and whether it's them defining the next generation of comp…”
Oct 28, 2024 neutral
Rosenthal: Mark Zuckerberg and Eduardo Saverin split initial Facebook ownership 66/33
“Eduardo invests a thousand dollars in infrastructure for the site. Mark invests another thousand dollars, so together there's 2000 dollars of investment in the facebook.com, and the deal they strike is that Mark gets two-thirds of the company, and Eduardo gets…”
Oct 28, 2024 positive
Gilbert: Facebook's Early Differentiator Was Authentic University-Verified Identity
“And that's what makes it different than all these other social networks. Myspace existed. Friendster existed. But anyone could sign up for these. And in part, that meant that they had more explosive growth, because there was no governor on the growth. And we'l…”
Oct 28, 2024 bullish
Dec 16, 2024 positive
Complete ownership enables suboptimizing short-term results for long-term horizons
“Complete ownership, or at least board control in Meta's case, is freedom. You can do things like invest for 10 years from now when it's gonna be a super lumpy period between now and 10 years from now. If you believe in the long-term vision, you can suboptimize…”
Mar 24, 2025 neutral
Mar 24, 2025
Aug 26, 2025 positive
Google Owns Eight Distinct Products With Over One Billion Users
“It is wild that this one company has eight products with over a billion users and started this era with just one search that didn't even have a billion users yet, but search, Android, Chrome, YouTube, Gmail, Maps, Drive, Photos, and then if you count the Play …”
Aug 26, 2025 negative
Google Glass and Meta Ray-Bans Share Features, but Google Ignored Fashion
“Meta Ray-Bans and Google Glass are the same thing, feature-wise. The gestures on the side, the fact that it could take a photo, I mean, Google Glass was a little more advanced, it could run these, like, very basic text-based apps, but I'm sure when Meta launch…”
Oct 6, 2025 bearish
Oct 6, 2025 positive