Meta Platforms, every mention
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Verbatim, from the transcripts: the passages where Meta Platforms comes up
Google Part III: The AI Company. Google is amazingly well-positioned... will they win in AI? (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 25:54 David Rosenthal Was Chris Cox, who's the chief product officer at Meta.
- ▶ 25:58 David Rosenthal That was kind of how he got his start in all of this and AI and obviously Facebook and Meta are going to come back into the story here in a little bit.
Google Part II: Alphabet (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 1:17:54 Ben Gilbert That's a way worse business than, say, Google search ads or Facebook, who, you know, Facebook has influencers on their platforms, too, all the meta platforms, Instagram, and their rev share, if it's anything, sure isn't 50%.
- ▶ 1:27:52 David Rosenthal Now that, you know, Meta and TikTok exist.
- ▶ 1:28:03 Ben Gilbert We don't open apps anymore to look at what our friends are posting, a place where Google has no presence, but you open Meta's most important property.
- ▶ 1:28:31 David Rosenthal Yeah, this was, you know, the big denouement to our meta episode last fall was, hey, social networking, such as
- ▶ 3:27:20 David Rosenthal And he's remaking essentially, you know, Facebook into what meta would become of like, hey, what we used to think of as social networking has bifurcated into two things, public media, i.e., you know, YouTube, Instagram, UGC, and private…
Epic Systems (MyChart) · Acquired
- ▶ 49:06 David Rosenthal It's the same thing as Microsoft or Google or Meta or what have you.
- ▶ 3:30:42 Ben Gilbert Zuckerberg is 21 years into Facebook.
TSMC · Acquired
- ▶ 3:18 Ben Gilbert If you're excited at all about Nvidia, AMD, Qualcomm, or even any of the chips that Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook, Apple are making,
Mars Inc. - The Chocolate Story (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 1:34:16 David Rosenthal So we said on the meta episode that we thought Facebook was the first open office.
- ▶ 1:44:49 Ben Gilbert But as we've talked about from Ikea to our business here at Acquired, complete ownership, or at least board control in Meta's case, is freedom.
- ▶ 3:22:31 Ben Gilbert I mean, on the meta episode, the takeaway was their growth came from product and not from marketing.
IKEA (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 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.
Meta (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 4:06:46 David Rosenthal We've covered both of those pretty fully on separate episodes that you can go listen to, but I think ultimately what they represent, and obviously Snap was more a competitor and WhatsApp turned into an acquisition and is now a big part of…
- ▶ 4:07:13 David Rosenthal As the core of the company's product strategy in 2019, which was the default social behavior was moving from town square, which was the old Facebook paradigm of like, hey, we're all in this together.
- ▶ 4:45:25 Ben Gilbert David, to your point, really what happened is the Trump 20 16 campaign just actually took meta platforms seriously and got really, really good at using the tools.
- ▶ 4:58:01 Ben Gilbert So, this whole privacy issue, the five billion dollar settlement, all this stuff that just happens with Meta, it has big ripples for the whole tech industry.
- ▶ 5:31:40 Ben Gilbert So we are gonna do a seven powers analysis of what enables Meta to achieve persistent differential returns, or, you know, to put it another way, to be more profitable than their closest competitor and do so sustainably.
- ▶ 5:32:01 Ben Gilbert Ultimately, they are in the business of selling advertising, so I think their closest competitor is Google.
- ▶ 5:32:43 Ben Gilbert Like you almost kind of want to do a seven powers analysis on the user side also of why would someone pick a meta product over a snap product?
- ▶ 5:33:05 Ben Gilbert They probably don't have much counter positioning in the current state of meta, and hold on AI for the moment.
- ▶ 5:34:03 Ben Gilbert Think about the experience of being an engineer at Meta and the thousand engineer years of work that comes out of that company every year on making the developer experience of working there better.
- ▶ 5:36:25 Ben Gilbert It blew my mind when someone from Facebook came and gave a talk at Microsoft in 2014 on how they ship product, and how it rolls out, and it, not only the feature flagging elements of it, but they can sort of, like, watch performance, auto…
- ▶ 5:37:05 Ben Gilbert I mean, that was like real voodoo that only Facebook did for feels like a decade.
- ▶ 5:37:21 Ben Gilbert I think OpenAI has so much former Facebook DNA and kind of thinks the same way that I think they do a lot of this sort of thing too.
- ▶ 5:37:40 Ben Gilbert There's no love for the brand meta.
- ▶ 5:38:29 David Rosenthal Uh, I actually think there are some cornered resources here within Meta.
- ▶ 5:39:09 David Rosenthal Meta's got that.
- ▶ 5:39:21 David Rosenthal 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…
- ▶ 5:39:50 Ben Gilbert Okay, so in looking at this, why does Meta do forty-seven billion dollars a year in operating income, and why do we all believe that's going to continue for a while?
- ▶ 5:40:18 David Rosenthal And they competed very successfully with Meta in doing so.
- ▶ 5:41:28 David Rosenthal And so, like, there is a very, very large minimum barrier to entry there that keeps going higher as ByteDance and Meta keep investing in it.
- ▶ 5:50:56 David Rosenthal And I think he has done incredibly well, and I think the story of Meta shows all throughout, even in the very, very beginning as a tiny project, not even a startup, where degrees of freedom were limited.
- ▶ 5:54:12 David Rosenthal I think that is right, and I think it is doubly so with Meta because of Sean Parker and because it was set up from the very, very beginning that nobody could ever get rid of Mark.
- ▶ 5:56:20 unnamed speaker I was actually talking about this with one of the execs at Meta the other day, and he brought this up and was saying that, like, this really feels like something very, very unique to Meta, and I thought about it for a minute, and I was…
- ▶ 5:57:22 unnamed speaker Here are all the battles where Meta has either won by buying the company, won by beating the company, won by copying,
- ▶ 5:58:54 unnamed speaker Obviously, Mark is incredibly driven to the goal of, you know, connecting all the people in the world and doing that through Meta.
- ▶ 5:59:09 unnamed speaker And that combination, I think, has led over and over and over again to these threats emerging, and Mark and the whole team there at Meta saying like, okay, what is the way that we can neutralize this threat or defeat it?
- ▶ 5:59:35 unnamed speaker I think Meta might look extremely different 20 years from now than it is today, almost, like, unrecognizably, because this company moves like water in response to whatever the new shape of the world is.
- ▶ 6:00:00 unnamed speaker Meta is a technology company through and through, and then they leverage that technology to be
- ▶ 6:01:25 unnamed speaker Completely distinct and brand new thing that Meta created.
- ▶ 6:01:32 unnamed speaker When I was a little bit more bearish on the future of Reality Labs, I was trying to come up with, has Meta ever successfully created something new that has become a profit center for them, that is, like, not adopted from someone else?
- ▶ 6:02:40 unnamed speaker And maybe all companies do, and, you know, there's not something distinct to meta here, and, and everybody learns from each other, and that's fine too, but that was something that I was racking my head on thinking through.
- ▶ 6:19:33 Ben Gilbert Jim Breyer, who led Excel's Series A investment in Facebook.
- ▶ 6:20:11 Ben Gilbert To Pete Hunt, early engineer who transferred from Facebook to Instagram post-acquisition.
- ▶ 6:20:22 David Rosenthal Longest tenured Meta employee at this point, besides Mark.
- ▶ 6:20:26 Ben Gilbert To Mike Vernal, former Meta VP of Product and Engineering, and former Sequoia partner Vijay Raji, former engineer and VP, now, of course, CEO of Statsig.
- ▶ 6:20:34 Ben Gilbert Aparna Rahmani, a VP in AI, data, and developer infrastructure at Meta.
- ▶ 6:20:39 Ben Gilbert To Owen Van Nada, Facebook's early COO.
- ▶ 6:20:45 David Rosenthal Yeah, a few from me to Adam D'Angelo, obviously Facebook's first CTO, Dan Rose, early partnerships at Facebook, and big, big final thank you that we owe to Chris Cox, Meta's chief product officer and leader of the entire family of apps…
- ▶ 6:21:25 Ben Gilbert Essentially, this episode came about because we had done too much research for the Mark interview, and we were like, we probably should do the actual meta episode, too.
Microsoft Volume II: The Complete History and Strategy of the Ballmer Years (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 3:50:58 David Rosenthal So every consumer service that is not owned by Microsoft or Meta or Google or Amazon runs on one of their clouds.
Microsoft Volume I: The Complete History and Strategy of founding through Windows 95 (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 4:12:47 David Rosenthal I was talking with the team at Meta about them.
Nvidia Part III: The Dawn of the AI Era (2022-2023) (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 9:28 David Rosenthal And what completely changed the fortunes of the internet, of Google, of Facebook, and certainly of NVIDIA, was they actually used old algorithms, a branch of computer science and artificial intelligence called neural networks, specifically…
Stratechery (with Ben Thompson) · Acquired
- ▶ 1:52:26 Ben Thompson Yes, it didn't look great that I just got an interview with Mark Zuckerberg and that I wrote a positive article, a contrarian positive article about meta three weeks later.
- ▶ 1:53:00 Ben Thompson Yeah, well, it's tough because, like I said, I'm super positive on Meta's advertising product because that's aligned with my passion.
- ▶ 1:53:05 Ben Thompson So I do find the Zuckerberg ones the most challenging just because I generally have a contrarian opinion about meta overall, and it's generally positive.
Benchmark Part I · Acquired
- ▶ 2:46:15 David Rosenthal I mean, they returned the fund on the investment, but, like, with the sale to Facebook.
- ▶ 2:46:55 David Rosenthal Asana, which was actually Matt's first investment, which was former folks from Facebook.
Howard Marks & Andrew Marks: Something of Value · Acquired
- ▶ 1:00:08 Howard Marks And if the person who finds Amazon can also find Google and can find Facebook and
Walmart · Acquired
- ▶ 6:27 Ben Miller Google, Facebook, all these companies, why would you sell when you're in public?
Nvidia: The Machine Learning Company (2006-2022) · Acquired
- ▶ 1:40:13 Ben Gilbert What they mean by Omniverse is pretty interesting.
- ▶ 2:09:23 David Rosenthal That's actually, that's a bull case for Facebook, right?
SONY (75 years of electronics history in 3 hours) · Acquired
- ▶ 2:36:18 David Rosenthal And with, you know, sentiment about, uh, Meta and, uh, Oculus.
- ▶ 2:36:28 Ben Gilbert Yeah, that said, 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…
- ▶ 2:36:56 David Rosenthal I'm sure we'll talk about that on the show a lot in years to come, but like, the Facebook portal, right, is by all accounts a great device, and using it as a webcam is awesome, but I just like, I just have a hard time about having a…
- ▶ 2:37:15 Ben Gilbert I think they're going to do a good enough job distancing the
- ▶ 2:37:19 Ben Gilbert MetaQuest five or whatever is gonna be the real consumer hit from any ickiness that people feel about what was once called Facebook.
The Browser (with Brendan Eich, Chief Architect of Netscape + Mozilla and CEO of Brave) · Acquired
- ▶ 47:50 Brendan Eich It's usually vendors that hire that do it, or Google, Facebook, and so on.
- ▶ 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.
Standard Oil Part II (Extended Cut) · Acquired
- ▶ 2:09:54 Ben Gilbert Like, Facebook is the most direct, comparable thing to Standard Oil.
- ▶ 2:11:36 Ben Gilbert Big tech, well, and they're gonna eat everything, you know, between Facebook and Amazon and Google and Apple and All the returns are accruing to scale in a way that's never happened in this industry before, and it's just gonna happen…
- ▶ 2:11:53 David Rosenthal The best you're going to be able to hope for is that Facebook buys you for a couple billion dollars.
- ▶ 2:16:54 Ben Gilbert Yeah, this is why I was saying that Facebook is the most similar thing to Standard Oil, and just to be extremely blunt about it, Facebook buying Instagram and WhatsApp is a lot like Standard Oil's Cleveland Massacre and, um, you know, the…
Michael Mauboussin Master Class — Moats, Skill, Luck, Decision Making and a Whole Lot More · Acquired
- ▶ 32:55 David Rosenthal Or like Amazon versus Facebook, right?