The Exchanges

Q No pun intended, I promise. Uh, what does learning through suffering mean to you?

A Um, well, I think you learn what matters to you, and what's important, and kind of your place in the world through repeatedly hitting your head against different challenges. And, I mean, I think that that is sort of, that's the journey, right? I mean, that's the, the entrepreneurial journey. It's also, I think, part of the beauty of building things. But, you know, this is something that Jensen talks a lot about too, right? It's like, I, I feel like, You, you know, when you go to start a company, you, you know, everyone kind of writes down what they would like their values to be, but values are not what you write down on the wall. It's like your lived behaviors, and you only really learn what you care about when you have to make hard trade-offs and face challenges. So, yeah, you learn the most important things through facing challenges.

AI assessment note: “you learn what matters to you... through repeatedly hitting your head against different challenges”

Q that he learns more from each turn than the next player does. Do you feel like that encapsulates, like, Meta's product development? But it does kind of feel like the way that you make bets is like, I, uh, well, if we have great engineering, then that can kind of take care of the speed part. That's like, you know, many iterations or multiple at bats, and then the, the...

A Well, great engineering and speed and iteration are actually two different values. They're not necessarily at odds, but I think, like, there are a lot of great engineering Organizations that try to build things that are super high quality and have good competence around that, but I know there's, there's a certain There's a personality that goes with kind of taking your stuff and putting it out there before it's fully polished. And, and look, I'm not saying that our strategy or approach on this is the only one that works. 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, um, and maybe for the stuff that they're doing that works, maybe that just fits with their culture. But for us, I, I think that there are a lot of conversations that we have internally where you're almost at the line of being embarrassed about what you put out, um, because you, it's, you know, obviously not, not in the sense that it's like, you know, you want to, You want to put stuff out early enough so you can get good feedback. You obviously want to test things that are reasonable hypotheses. So if it's like so ineffective, then you're not testing a good hypothesis. That doesn't work. But I do think a lot of th…

AI assessment note: “you want to really have a culture that values shipping. And, and getting things out”

Q want to ask you what you were thinking going into the IPO with Facebook on mobile being HTML five and what happened you IPO at a hundred billion dollar market cap over the next three months. You have a 50% drawdown. Probably because of that. Um, but I, I guess the related question to what we're talking about now is how much is that informing your approach here with AI?

A It was a pretty different, different technical issue. So, I mean, our legacy was building on web for websites, and we were very used to building one thing and being able to continuously deploy it, and it fits with our iteration style and all that, so now all of a sudden this, like, app model comes along, and it's like, we have to build, like, different ones for each phone, and, like, you have to go through approval to get it shipped, and we have to wait, like, weeks before it can ship. It's like, this sucks. So, we're like, alright, we have an idea. Let's build this platform where we can get a web-based platform, so you basically build a native shell, and you build this web-based platform in it, and we'll be able to just update our apps every day, and we'll ship one thing once, and we'll update our apps across Android, and iPhone, and Blackberry, and Windows Mobile, and all the stuff that existed at the time, because it hadn't gotten consolidated yet, and, um, like, that's gonna be, that's, we're like, basically, whatever downside we Are gonna have, from not having the most native thing, we're gonna make up for in velocity, and by having, like, way more of our energy focused on one platform. Well, we were wrong. It turned out that, you know, having the native integration was actually critical for having the interactions feel good, and And that, so we basically went through this…

AI assessment note: “whatever downside we Are gonna have... we're gonna make up for in velocity”

Q you've set up, you just can't. And I think, you know, in doing all the research for this, a thesis we've developed is that like, that is just one of the core fundamental advantages that Meta has. Um, so as you were setting up the company, you know, when you were so young, even when you went public, you were so young, like, why was that so important to you?

A Well, 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't done a good job communicating, I mean, I don't want to blame them, I, like, I hadn't done a good job communicating the long-term vision because I didn't, I wasn't thinking about that at the time. I, like, wasn't thinking in terms of this as a company. I was like, this is a great project. It's awesome. Like, a lot of people, Like what we're doing. I think this will probably continue for a while. I think it's going to be pretty important in the world. Um, but I didn't, I didn't like know how to think in terms of, you know, like long-term financial plans or, um,

AI assessment note: “In 2006, Yahoo wanted to buy the company for a billion dollars”

Q You've got AI going on, you've got AR going on, you've got VR going on, um, would you pick the name Meta if you were going to rename the company today?

A I like Meta. It's a good name. You know, finding good short names I mean, this actually was a thing that we talked about for a while, because it was pretty clear that, you know, Facebook is continuing to grow in importance in the world, which I think a lot of people don't appreciate, and it's kind of mind-boggling at the scale that it's at. But the, the others, I mean, you know, we went through a period where it's like, we had Facebook and a handful of small apps, and now we have, like, you know, four apps that have a billion people or more using them, you know, hopefully in the next few years, five with threads, if that continues scaling. And, um, This was a conversation that we had a bunch, where it's like, does it make sense for the name of the company to be one of the apps as the other apps, as it's really becoming a family of apps? And it was important to me, this was also coinciding with a lot of A lot of the challenges that we were having, right? The political brand challenges, different things, and a lot of people were proposing that from the perspective of running away from the Facebook brand, right? They were like, oh, well, like, is the, does the Facebook brand have issues? Do we need a new brand? And I was like, we don't run away from that.

AI assessment note: “I like Meta. It's a good name.”

Q builders in the audience tonight, a lot of founders. Uh, we're in probably the most interesting technology environment since the early mobile days in terms of opportunity. It's been 20 years, you might have to go back a little bit, but what advice do you have for founders today on something that's different than trying to pattern match Mark Zuckerberg from 2004, given we live in a different world today?

A Yeah, I don't know, I mean, just do something that you care about, and, and, I mean, if, if you're trying to run our strategy, try to learn as quickly as you can, but, but, I mean, if there's, like, I think part of what I'm trying to say is, I think there are different ways to build stuff, right? It's like, our way worked for me, and our team, you know, it's, uh, different things have clearly worked for other companies. I don't know. One day, one day my daughter went to, we went to, took her to a Taylor Swift concert, and she, she was like, you know, Dad, I kind of want to be like Taylor Swift when I grow up.

AI assessment note: “just do something that you care about, and, and... try to learn as quickly”