Meta, every mention
1,278 scenes, the whole family · ← back to Meta
tap a year for its mentions
every year anyone Ben Gilbert 600David Rosenthal 549Mark Zuckerberg 49Ben Thompson 37Daniel Ek 9Brendan Eich 5Sam Bankman-Fried 4Packy McCormick 4Brad Gerstner 4Mitch Lasky 2
Verbatim, from the transcripts: the passages where Meta comes up
Mars Inc. - The Chocolate Story (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 3:29:34 David Rosenthal This is like the Facebook internationalization where they have
IKEA (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 1:21:06 Ben Gilbert They were founded by a team of engineers at Meta who wanted to build a complete set of data and engineering tools like those that powered the growth at Facebook and make all of those available to anyone at any company.
- ▶ 2:22:56 David Rosenthal I think I talked before on the meta episode about how much I love Facebook Marketplace and Craigslist before that.
- ▶ 2:23:32 David Rosenthal Well, my hack for quite a number of apartments and houses was just buy secondhand IKEA on Craigslist and Facebook Marketplace and be cool with it.
- ▶ 2:40:24 Ben Gilbert Meta didn't use much of their cash, otherwise you could say Meta's this example, but they have a lot of other, Mark is not the only shareholder the way that Ingvar was.
- ▶ 2:55:10 Ben Gilbert It's kind of like what we were talking about with Meta.
- ▶ 3:11:42 David Rosenthal Meta is an N of one company.
Meta (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 0:30 David Rosenthal So, I have been listening in the last 24 hours to 50 Cent Into Club, because that came out my freshman year of college, same year as the Facebook.com and, like,
- ▶ 0:41 David Rosenthal Man, 50 cent, facebook.com, can't get any better than that.
- ▶ 1:24 Ben Gilbert Today, we are studying a company whose products are used by more humans than any other company in history, Meta, of course, formerly known as Facebook.
- ▶ 1:39 Ben Gilbert Meta has four billion monthly active users.
- ▶ 2:31 Ben Gilbert In the over 20 years since its founding, Meta truly has connected humanity through its apps.
- ▶ 2:36 Ben Gilbert Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger, and now Threads.
- ▶ 2:36 Ben Gilbert Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger, and now Threads.
- ▶ 2:43 Ben Gilbert There's been a lot of ink spilled writing about Facebook over the years, and for its first 10 years, most of that writing focused on the many benefits to society with breathless exuberance over milestone after milestone.
- ▶ 2:56 Ben Gilbert And for the past 10 years, it's kinda seemed like Meta could do nothing right.
- ▶ 3:05 Ben Gilbert Incredible controversies surrounding the company.
- ▶ 3:07 Ben Gilbert And while we will, of course, discuss these events as part of our story and analysis, our goal today on this podcast episode is really to understand how it is that Meta became the dominant fabric that connects the human race and why…
- ▶ 3:27 Ben Gilbert No matter what you think of the company, it is undeniably one of the most important institutions in the world.
- ▶ 3:33 Ben Gilbert And their global scale is no accident.
- ▶ 3:54 David Rosenthal Like, it's the biggest company that has ever existed.
- ▶ 4:09 Ben Gilbert They speed ran their startup phase, they swerved through multiple disruptive technology waves, they battled fierce competitors, they invented, or maybe discovered, one of the greatest business models ever, and they're now trying to pull…
- ▶ 4:31 Ben Gilbert Facebook.
- ▶ 5:57 David Rosenthal I can make up, you know, Roman Empire, classics, Aeschylus, whatever t-shirt saying Mark has this day of the week, but Facebook has always started and ended with Mark Zuckerberg.
- ▶ 7:51 David Rosenthal And pretty much in that order of importance, both to him personally and the future course of Facebook and Meta.
- ▶ 19:13 David Rosenthal Like, everybody here is gonna be just like the two of us, and that person is Adam D'Angelo, future CTO of Facebook.
- ▶ 24:55 Ben Gilbert Facebook's first CTO.
- ▶ 28:02 Ben Gilbert Which is what tied their hands and why they could not pursue an investment in Facebook.
- ▶ 28:11 Ben Gilbert Not that I think that was a real possibility anyway, because things were kind of moving so fast, but you never hear them in any of the discussion about who was pursuing Facebook and who was iced out.
- ▶ 28:29 Ben Gilbert And of course, Matt was an early executive at Facebook.
- ▶ 30:36 David Rosenthal On the other hand, it is both absolutely true about Mark that he always gets way too lucky and Facebook and Meta always gets way too lucky.
- ▶ 30:54 David Rosenthal Meta and Facebook get lucky over the years.
- ▶ 31:27 David Rosenthal This was the stew that Facebook is about to come out of.
- ▶ 31:48 Ben Gilbert Three of the four of those names are names you may know as the founders of Facebook.
- ▶ 32:04 Ben Gilbert People talk about, oh, there's the one Facemash thing that he did that led to Facebook.
- ▶ 35:09 David Rosenthal So, we should probably spend a minute and talk about what a Facebook was before Facebook.
- ▶ 40:17 David Rosenthal So Mark doesn't end up getting kicked out of Harvard, but he does kind of end up becoming, like, the Harvard computer celebrity, even before Facebook.
- ▶ 41:39 David Rosenthal I'm pretty sure Princeton had one, too, when I was there, pre-Facebook.
- ▶ 42:36 David Rosenthal In addition to, technically, because of open source and the LAMP stack, and also socially because of AIM and everything going on, the world sorta, for the first time, something like Facebook being able to be built for no money and no…
- ▶ 45:15 David Rosenthal So later, after thefacebook.com blew up, Mark told the Harvard Crimson in an interview, I don't really know what the next big thing is, because I don't spend my time making big things.
- ▶ 45:36 David Rosenthal And that's what the Facebook.com ends up being.
- ▶ 46:12 David Rosenthal And for like, you know, a year or two, however long the Facebook guy was at the header, everybody's like, who is the Facebook guy?
- ▶ 46:22 David Rosenthal Do you know who the Facebook guy was?
- ▶ 46:54 Ben Gilbert There's this great Quora post, which we should say, Adam D'Angelo, founder and CEO of Quora, after Facebook.
- ▶ 47:01 Ben Gilbert There's a great Quora post about this where there's unmistakably the photo of Peter Wolf that Facebook guy is based on.
- ▶ 47:15 David Rosenthal So, on the evening of February fourth, 2004, after final exams, right when students are coming back, getting into the mode for the new semester, starting to shop for spring semester courses, Mark Zuckerberg launches the facebook.com.
- ▶ 47:43 David Rosenthal So, the registration page reads, you can use the Facebook to search for people at your school, find out who are in your classes, course match, look up your friends' friends, BuddyZoo, see a visualization of your entire social network,…
- ▶ 48:03 David Rosenthal Of every page is the famous Copyright, the Facebook, a Mark Zuckerberg production.
- ▶ 48:34 Ben Gilbert But no Facebook events, no photos other than your profile photo.
- ▶ 49:38 Ben Gilbert The people who are signing up for Facebook
- ▶ 49:50 Ben Gilbert An authentic identity is a part of the company from its first moment.
- ▶ 51:07 David Rosenthal Formalizing your relationship status for the first time here on thefacebook.com.
- ▶ 51:41 Ben Gilbert The Facebook grows tremendously in functionality over time, but everything is like a natural outcropping out of authentic identity, user-submitted content, trust that the people who are seeing this content are people in your sort of…
- ▶ 52:40 David Rosenthal Within two weeks, over half of the entire undergraduate population is active on Facebook.
- ▶ 52:57 David Rosenthal That not only sets the norms for how you're gonna behave on Facebook going forward,
- ▶ 53:38 David Rosenthal When you join the Facebook, even though it's limited to just Harvard students,
- ▶ 53:50 Ben Gilbert Almost nobody can use the Facebook, but for the people who can, it's an unbelievably great experience.
- ▶ 54:04 David Rosenthal That's basically always true, and the moments when Facebook stops growing is when that's not true, and then they sort of refocus on it, and then that gets the growth back.
- ▶ 54:15 David Rosenthal Here's another thing that I think was really important about this seeding of Facebook, was actually that it happened at Harvard.
- ▶ 54:41 David Rosenthal This was really important as Facebook expanded because it had this patina to it.
- ▶ 54:47 David Rosenthal Especially as they grew, there were clones, there were lots of other Facebook copies out there.
- ▶ 55:00 David Rosenthal Nobody else could ever invade Facebook's turf, but they could invade other people's turf.
- ▶ 55:15 David Rosenthal Facebook could really easily go into Germany, and people in Germany would be like, oh, Facebook, I've heard of that, this is interesting.
- ▶ 56:29 Ben Gilbert Once you start combing through the Facebook, it was very easy to keep going.
- ▶ 58:25 David Rosenthal 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 one-third of the company, and Eduardo sets up…
- ▶ 58:55 David Rosenthal And he's like, I want to see how Facebook competes.
- ▶ 59:32 Ben Gilbert But if you're Facebook, you're gonna say, let's go to the hardest possible competitor,
- ▶ 1:00:07 David Rosenthal Andrew and Eduardo, the five co-founders of Facebook.
- ▶ 1:00:30 David Rosenthal So if you join the Columbia Facebook, you can't then go access all the profiles of Harvard students.
- ▶ 1:01:44 Ben Gilbert And Facebook is over here, or the Facebook at the time, in the land where they're keeping n small.
- ▶ 1:02:01 David Rosenthal This is such an interesting point because technology infrastructure advantage has always been a core part of Facebook, even back to this very beginning.
- ▶ 1:02:17 David Rosenthal As Facebook grows and eventually becomes open to everybody, their competitive advantage becomes their tech is so good and their infra is so good that they can do.
- ▶ 1:02:43 Ben Gilbert They're building the Facebook in such a way that the use cases don't require incredibly sophisticated technology to accomplish those feature sets.
- ▶ 1:03:26 David Rosenthal Do you know what else Mark does on the same evening that they launch Columbia?
- ▶ 1:04:33 David Rosenthal It is amazing how much influence Microsoft had on Facebook and on Mark.
- ▶ 1:04:43 David Rosenthal So, next couple days after Columbia launches, Facebook launches at Stanford, at Yale.
- ▶ 1:04:49 David Rosenthal By the end of the semester, they're in over a hundred schools in like, you know, what, three, four months?
- ▶ 1:04:54 David Rosenthal Like, the speed they're moving with is crazy.
- ▶ 1:04:56 Ben Gilbert And they start building these waitlists.
- ▶ 1:05:00 Ben Gilbert Common startup things that Facebook kind of invented.
- ▶ 1:05:05 Ben Gilbert They built tremendous demand before they would light up the network.
- ▶ 1:05:09 Ben Gilbert They knew that as soon as you're in Facebook, you want to quickly get to seven friends or 10 friends or whatever the metric is to create that sort of magic moment where you're like,
- ▶ 1:05:17 Ben Gilbert oh yeah, Facebook now works for me.
- ▶ 1:05:19 Ben Gilbert So they wanted to wait until they had sufficient demand to boom, open that school, and then once it's open,
- ▶ 1:05:26 Ben Gilbert Everybody should have the best possible experience, and so you're seeing Facebook basically say, okay, wherever there's really strong demand, that's where we'll open next, and we're not gonna open anywhere where we see, like, you know,…
- ▶ 1:05:59 David Rosenthal Eventually, the two twins sue Mark and Facebook.
- ▶ 1:06:03 David Rosenthal They settle for sixty-five million dollars, forty-five million of which is paid in pre-IPO Facebook stock.
- ▶ 1:06:44 David Rosenthal Let's go rent a house out in Palo Alto, move to Silicon Valley, and work on Facebook there for the summer.
- ▶ 1:07:27 Ben Gilbert Facebook is live at how many schools, David?
- ▶ 1:07:56 David Rosenthal On the other hand, he ends up with two percent of Facebook, so he's also fine.
- ▶ 1:08:07 Ben Gilbert That Eduardo Saverin goes from owning a third of this Florida-based LLC to something like two percent of this C-Corp that is a Delaware C-Corp based in California that goes on to become, or is, Facebook Inc.
- ▶ 1:08:42 Ben Gilbert He was a co-founder of Facebook, and then ended up with two percent and lived on a different coast.
- ▶ 1:08:49 Ben Gilbert They get really serious about the Facebook.
- ▶ 1:08:52 Ben Gilbert They actually are still working on something else called Wirehog concurrently within the same team, but they're starting to realize, ok, this, the Facebook thing really, really has legs.
- ▶ 1:09:11 David Rosenthal That person is the co-founder of Napster, Sean Parker, who would have a brief but very, very large impact on the company.
- ▶ 1:09:21 Ben Gilbert So before we tell the Sean Parker chapter of the Facebook, now is a great time to talk about our presenting partner, JP Morgan Payments.
- ▶ 1:12:41 Ben Gilbert Facebook did a ton of this.
- ▶ 1:14:10 David Rosenthal Pulls up the Facebook.com on her laptop, and it's kind of like the scene where this happens in the Social Network movie.
- ▶ 1:14:37 Ben Gilbert And it is kind of crazy to think about, unless you had a student show you on their computer this is what Facebook is, there's no real way for you to know other than the signup page.
- ▶ 1:14:52 David Rosenthal So, Sean, being the enterprising person that he is, he cold emails the company's business email address and asks to set up a meeting, and Eduardo Saverin replies to Sean, he's like, oh, cool, you're the co-founder of Napster, yeah.