Meta, every mention
102 scenes (2022), the whole family · ← back to Meta
tap a year for its mentions
every year 2022 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
Holiday Special 2022 · Acquired
- ▶ 10:24 Ben Gilbert When I start reading the New York Times many times a day, and going deep into many of the sections, I'm certainly not going to log into Facebook.
Stratechery (with Ben Thompson) · Acquired
- ▶ 16:14 Ben Thompson So I think probably Microsoft, either Microsoft or Facebook are probably my two biggest successes as far as an analyst.
- ▶ 19:19 Ben Thompson And so I was responsible for social media other than Facebook and Twitter.
- ▶ 27:45 Ben Thompson I mean, that was obviously a regular theme of mine about the centralization of advertising under Google and Facebook and that world of starting a blog and throwing up some Google ads was not going to be a viable one.
- ▶ 28:31 Ben Thompson And obviously Facebook does that at scale.
- ▶ 1:15:34 Ben Thompson Like I'm not passionate about like Meta's business prospect.
- ▶ 1:15:51 David Rosenthal You're not going to go work at Meta.
- ▶ 1:15:52 Ben Thompson I'm not going to work at Meta
- ▶ 1:15:55 Ben Thompson I mean, if Meta wants to buy me for like a hundred million dollars, I guess I'll earn out but, uh..
- ▶ 1:16:14 Ben Thompson 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…
- ▶ 1:16:40 Ben Thompson And I think that's what Facebook advertising has always been the best at.
- ▶ 1:23:13 David Rosenthal Oh, it was not long after the Facebook IPO, and it was a disaster.
- ▶ 1:23:16 Ben Thompson Yeah, Facebook was doomed.
- ▶ 1:23:45 Ben Thompson And then number four, Facebook is way more dominant and valuable than anyone thinks.
- ▶ 1:33:56 Ben Gilbert And I think an interesting place to start, because we've talked about him a bunch on this episode, is Meta.
- ▶ 1:34:00 Ben Gilbert You are the new CEO of Meta.
- ▶ 1:34:05 Ben Thompson Well, I think Meta is actually doing a fair number of things that they should now.
- ▶ 1:34:12 Ben Thompson 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…
- ▶ 1:34:31 Ben Thompson It appears that they've done a good job limiting the sort of the TikTok threat.
- ▶ 1:34:35 Ben Thompson TikTok's growth has sort of flattened out over the last few years, so I think they're actually
- ▶ 1:34:48 Ben Thompson I mean, they laid off 11,000 people, which only brings them back like nine months.
- ▶ 1:34:52 Ben Thompson They probably need a lot smaller, but it's also very destructive to company culture and morale.
- ▶ 1:34:56 Ben Thompson Do they still have the people that they need to pull that off?
- ▶ 1:35:05 Ben Thompson But I do think that the network effects of their products are
- ▶ 1:35:09 Ben Thompson I mean, everyone has in their head that they're shrinking and actually every product they have is still growing, which I think is underappreciated.
- ▶ 1:35:15 Ben Thompson So number one, I think they're kind of broadly on the right track.
- ▶ 1:35:24 Ben Thompson I think they need to close the loop on e-commerce and advertising.
- ▶ 1:35:29 Ben Thompson And again, I think that'd probably be bad generally, but I think it'd be very good for meta.
- ▶ 1:36:09 Ben Thompson And the reality is, is Facebook is a services company.
- ▶ 1:36:12 Ben Thompson It's a social network and everything about their strategy works against that to succeed.
- ▶ 1:36:17 Ben Thompson They not only need to sell headsets, they need to sell headsets at sufficient scale and into friend networks such that people can social network on the headsets.
- ▶ 1:36:25 Ben Thompson And so their place of winning is even further away than I think people think.
- ▶ 1:36:31 Ben Thompson And so I don't think strategically it's the best thing for them to be doing.
- ▶ 1:36:35 Ben Thompson And I've been pretty anti them doing from day one, they bought Oculus.
- ▶ 1:36:40 Ben Thompson And again, it's very hard to distinguish between, well, what are the prospects of this versus zooming out and should they even be doing this?
- ▶ 1:36:47 Ben Thompson But I think the market is overly down on Meta in part because the branding was too successful.
- ▶ 1:36:51 Ben Thompson This is still a powerhouse in social media and advertising and the amount of money they're spending on the metaverse is
- ▶ 1:37:01 Ben Thompson They're still, you know, have a five billion dollar profit a quarter.
- ▶ 1:37:05 Ben Thompson I would double down on what they are, and I would consolidate, not acquire Shopify, and spend three years fighting out in court, because I think the payoff would be worth it.
- ▶ 1:45:40 Ben Thompson No one trusts Facebook.
- ▶ 1:51:42 Ben Thompson Whereas he thinks a lot of other journalists aren't, but what's the line between that and being like you favor Facebook because that's not the case at all.
- ▶ 1:51:59 Ben Thompson That's not a reason, but then it was really annoying because Facebook had that bad earnings call and their stock went down and I like crap.
Benchmark Part II: The Dinner · Acquired
- ▶ 1:33:33 Peter Fenton around the time he presented Facebook to us at Excel, he knew immediately that he was going to be in the venture business.
ACQ Sessions: Jason Calacanis · Acquired
- ▶ 13:59 Ben Gilbert Because he was at Facebook.
- ▶ 15:22 Jason Calacanis You know, confident, you know, even maybe more confident than both of us should be, but, um, and so I kind of introduced Chamath to the world by convincing him to come on the pod, which he was, like, reluctant to do when he was on…
Benchmark Part I · Acquired
- ▶ 2:25:22 David Rosenthal And then the third miss that is not directly related to the international expansion, but I think is more symptomatic perhaps of the sort of taking your eye off the ball, but a Google size miss is they miss Facebook and
- ▶ 2:25:39 David Rosenthal Well, so we know Sequoia is out for Facebook because of Sean Parker, the pajama pitch, you know, all that, the bad blood.
- ▶ 2:25:45 David Rosenthal Sequoia can't do Facebook.
- ▶ 2:26:06 David Rosenthal For the Series A, for the one hundred million dollar valuation of Facebook, you know, very similar to that Google round.
- ▶ 2:26:49 David Rosenthal Tim blocked Benchmark from pursuing Facebook.
- ▶ 2:26:52 Ben Gilbert Did they know about Facebook?
- ▶ 2:27:23 David Rosenthal No Facebook.
- ▶ 2:28:06 David Rosenthal So finally, after all this, and I don't know if this was before or after Excel doing Facebook, but right around the same time, legend has it at one of the Menlo Park Monday partners meetings, I think it was Kevin Harvey who finally kind of…
- ▶ 2:30:26 David Rosenthal So, kind of that 2004, 2005 era, you know, post Facebook, they do that.
- ▶ 2:34:19 David Rosenthal And Peter joins from Excel, which had just done Facebook.
- ▶ 2:34:24 David Rosenthal And Peter wasn't directly involved in the Facebook investment, but it was part of that relationship with DNA.
- ▶ 2:37:56 David Rosenthal He brings Brett Taylor of Google Maps and then Facebook fame into Benchmark as an EIR.
- ▶ 2:38:03 Ben Gilbert And Peter Fenton had been an investor in FriendFeed when Brett Taylor started that before Brett sold that to Facebook.
- ▶ 2:38:15 David Rosenthal He made the journey from Google and Google Maps to Facebook.
- ▶ 2:41:11 David Rosenthal From Facebook.
- ▶ 2:41:12 David Rosenthal And this is still when Facebook is a private company, leaves Facebook as a private company, having been employee number five at Facebook.
- ▶ 2:41:51 David Rosenthal Matt had been at LinkedIn and then had been at Facebook.
- ▶ 2:42:25 Ben Gilbert To sell to Facebook.
- ▶ 2:42:26 Ben Gilbert And due to the court documents, there was a, uh, conversation leaked about Kevin strategizing over AIM with a very strategic advisor about how to position the sale to Facebook.
- ▶ 2:42:37 Ben Gilbert And of course, who would know Mark Zuckerberg psychology and what Facebook would and wouldn't do better than employee number five at Facebook.
- ▶ 2:43:12 David Rosenthal That all of a sudden became true at that moment in time, thanks to AWS, thanks to the Facebook platform, and where you could now do these series A's, these still early stage quote unquote investments, where there was no product risk, there…
- ▶ 2:48:26 Ben Gilbert Like, when someone thinks it could be the next Facebook, like, that's why Clubhouse gets done at a hundred million immediately, and then shortly thereafter, billion.
- ▶ 2:51:26 Ben Gilbert You had Matt Kohler, who literally helped create the DNA of the modern social media company as an early Facebook employee.
- ▶ 3:26:35 David Rosenthal It was the, the other existing partners when he joined were like, you're the new guy, your initiation ritual, you're coming from Facebook.
Amazon Web Services · Acquired
- ▶ 2:20:09 Ben Gilbert I do know Facebook uses AWS.
- ▶ 2:20:13 Ben Gilbert So Facebook has their own first party data centers that they operate because they obviously at such massive scale where that makes sense.
- ▶ 2:20:20 Ben Gilbert But then they also use AWS for some stuff.
- ▶ 2:47:31 David Rosenthal Carmack is, he's just one of those people that operates on a different level than most of humanity, at least in the technical realm, and it's very interesting that he did VR, and he was at Oculus, and part of Facebook and Meta, and the…
Howard Marks & Andrew Marks: Something of Value · Acquired
- ▶ 26:47 Ben Gilbert Or if you came to me 10 years ago and said Facebook bought Instagram and they're demonstrating their ability to constantly keep all the consumer attention
- ▶ 26:58 Ben Gilbert Yeah, Facebook won't figure it out this time, and so all the consumer attention is going to shift, and I'd just be like, you're wrong.
- ▶ 1:25:18 David Rosenthal That one of the earliest venture investors in Facebook, after the IPO, they distributed out the shares, and among the partnership, most of the general partners relatively quickly liquidated their Facebook shares.
Amazon.com · Acquired
- ▶ 2:38:50 Ben Gilbert That reminds me a lot of, uh, what did Facebook change from?
- ▶ 2:59:55 Ben Gilbert You know, it's like a Facebook ad.
Arena Show Part II: Brooks Running (with CEO Jim Weber) · Acquired
Arena Show Part I: Idea Dinner + YC Continuity · Acquired
- ▶ 18:00 Packy McCormick So, at forty three billion dollars, do you think, like, when he takes this thing public again in three years, that he can do that at, you know, a fifth of whatever Facebook's valuation is at that time?
Nvidia: The Machine Learning Company (2006-2022) · Acquired
- ▶ 51:44 David Rosenthal Jeff Hinton goes to Facebook.
- ▶ 53:36 David Rosenthal This is Google and Facebook and a whole list of other companies on the consumer side, and they're all dependent on NVIDIA.
- ▶ 1:44:15 David Rosenthal The Teslas, the Googles, the Facebooks, the Amazons, the Apples, and not just paying them a lot of money and getting, you know,
- ▶ 1:48:37 David Rosenthal It's not so easy, you know, like, yeah, Facebook and Tesla and Google and Amazon and Apple are capable of doing a lot, but we just told this whole story.
- ▶ 2:01:09 Ben Gilbert I think it's not as good as like Facebook and Google because they just run these, like.
Platforms and Power (with Hamilton Helmer and Chenyi Shi) · Acquired
- ▶ 1:07:52 Hamilton Helmer So I joined Facebook because I'm your friend, and those effects are strong because they're additive.
Altimeter (with Brad Gerstner) · Acquired
- ▶ 59:05 Brad Gerstner There was, if you were, as you recall, you know, Facebook famously, you know, building, you know, an HTML five, not building their, you know, not building an app.
- ▶ 59:15 Brad Gerstner I remember Facebook became our largest investment in 2012 when it went on the cover of Barron's at seven,
- ▶ 59:23 Brad Gerstner Yeah, because everybody said they'll never be able to monetize this, and if you did the work, and I remember being at Google Zeitgeist in Arizona at the time, talking to all these CMOs, and they were like, oh my god, the sandbox for…
- ▶ 1:07:26 Brad Gerstner Jeff Bezos innovated plenty in the public markets, Facebook in the public markets.
Super Pumped (with Brian Koppelman and Joseph Gordon-Levitt) · Acquired
- ▶ 1:00:36 Joseph Gordon-Levitt and oh, uh, Facebook's also breaking democracy, and uh, there's a rise in authoritarianism, and also
The Browser (with Brendan Eich, Chief Architect of Netscape + Mozilla and CEO of Brave) · Acquired
- ▶ 29:12 Ben Gilbert He then got hired by Facebook and built the original Facebook app.
- ▶ 29:16 Brendan Eich Blake Ross and Joe Hewitt founded Parakey and sold that to Facebook.
- ▶ 35:29 Brendan Eich He's very happy with the Facebook web app on desktop.
- ▶ 50:02 David Rosenthal Google changes YouTube algorithms, Facebook changes Instagram or Facebook algorithms, and like, it completely wipes the table of whole, you know, sectors of creators.
- ▶ 52:17 David Rosenthal Like Google, Facebook, they've got power.
- ▶ 54:59 Ben Gilbert Yeah, so I'm wondering how, I mean, I was definitely buying some ads on Facebook for startups I was involved with in 2015, 16, and it was unfreaking real, the level of targeting.
- ▶ 55:17 Ben Gilbert Of course, that's at the expense of the users, and Facebook has walked back a lot of this and made it more broad.
- ▶ 56:36 Brendan Eich Facebook said they could target that person and they could often, but sometimes there were fraud actors, not so much on their native apps, but on publisher pages.
- ▶ 1:11:28 Brendan Eich The old big tech guard aren't, though Facebook tried with Libra, now DM, but really got hurt.
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