Meta
also referred to as: facebook
includes Facebook News Feed, Facebook Platform, Facebook Messenger, Facebook Connect, Facebook Marketplace, Facebook Auth, Facebook Login, Facebook Pixel
90 statements across 50 episodes · 31 bullish · 21 bearish · 44 people on the record · first statement Aug 16, 2016 by Mark Zuckerberg · said 551 times in 144 episodes since 2016 · across every show →
Mentions by year, the whole family
brought up most by Craig Cannon (45), Cory Doctorow (38), Michael Seibel (28), Gustaf Alströmer (24), Paul Buchheit (22), Ed Baker (22), Tom Blomfield (18), Sam Altman (18)
tap a year for its mentions
2026 23 mentions in 8 episodes 3 per episode
- Alexandr Wang: “This is a Once-in-a-Civilization Opportunity” · Y Combinator
- Zynga Founder: Consumer Is Not Investible Right Now - Thats Why You Should Build It · Y Combinator
- Sam Altman: "Never a Better Time to Do a Startup" · Y Combinator
- Inside Claude Code With Its Creator Boris Cherny · Y Combinator
- Multi-GPU Kernels, Intelligence per Watt, Heterogeneous Inference, and More | YC Paper Club · Y Combinator
- How Two French Engineers In New York Built The Company That Monitors The Entire Cloud · Y Combinator
- Inside YC's AI Playbook · Y Combinator
- Tokenmaxxing: How Top Builders Use AI To Do The Work Of 400 Engineers · Y Combinator
- every mention in 2026, scene by scene →
2025 27 mentions in 14 episodes 2 per episode
- Vibe Coding Is The Future · Y Combinator
- Fei-Fei Li: Spatial Intelligence is the Next Frontier in AI · Y Combinator
- Anthropic Head of Pretraining on Scaling Laws, Compute, and the Future of AI · Y Combinator
- The Truth About The AI Bubble · Y Combinator
- Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity's Race to Build Agentic Search · Y Combinator
- Legendary Consumer VC Predicts The Future Of AI Products · Y Combinator
- From Pivot Hell To $1.4 Billion Unicorn · Y Combinator
- The Best Consumer Startup Ideas Were Impossible Until Now · Y Combinator
- 6 more episodes that year, every mention in 2025 →
2024 35 mentions in 8 episodes 4 per episode
- Consumer Startup Metrics | Startup School · Y Combinator
- Twitter vs. X: Product Lessons For Startup Founders · Y Combinator
- The 10 Trillion Parameter AI Model With 300 IQ · Y Combinator
- How To Build The Future: Sam Altman · Y Combinator
- How To Find A Co-Founder | Startup School · Y Combinator
- How Do Billion Dollar Startups Start? · Y Combinator
- How Nothing Founder Carl Pei Built A Multi-Million Dollar Smartphone Brand In Just 2 Years · Y Combinator
- Startup Experts Discuss Doing Things That Don't Scale · Y Combinator
- every mention in 2024, scene by scene →
2023 29 mentions in 8 episodes 4 per episode
- Silicon Valley's Cargo Culting Problem · Y Combinator
- The Secrets To Setting Smarter Goals · Y Combinator
- Does Your Startup Need To Be In San Francisco? · Y Combinator
- Tips For Technical Startup Founders | Startup School · Y Combinator
- B2B Startup Metrics | Startup School · Y Combinator
- How to Apply And Succeed at Y Combinator | Startup School · Y Combinator
- The Best Way To Launch Your Startup | Startup School · Y Combinator
- The Cult of Conformity in Silicon Valley · Y Combinator
- every mention in 2023, scene by scene →
2022 25 mentions in 12 episodes 2 per episode
- How To Compete With Amazon and Google · Y Combinator
- Why You Should Leave Your FAANG Job · Y Combinator
- How to Get Your First Customers | Startup School · Y Combinator
- Why Investors Can’t Fix Your Company – Dalton Caldwell and Michael Seibel · Y Combinator
- Things That Don't Scale, The Software Edition – Dalton Caldwell and Michael Seibel · Y Combinator
- Startup Business Models and Pricing | Startup School · Y Combinator
- How To Talk To Users | Startup School · Y Combinator
- Advantages Of A First-Time Founder · Y Combinator
- 4 more episodes that year, every mention in 2022 →
2020 2 mentions in 1 episode
2019 121 mentions in 22 episodes 6 per episode
- Cory Doctorow and Joe Betts-Lacroix on Adversarial Interoperability · Y Combinator
- Tracking Political Manipulation Through Social Media - Samantha Bradshaw · Y Combinator
- Advice on Organizing and Running Growth Teams from Dan Hockenmaier and Gustaf Alströmer · Y Combinator
- Vidit Aatrey on Building Meesho, India's Top Reselling Platform, with Adora Cheung · Y Combinator
- Gustaf Alströmer - Growth for Startups · Y Combinator
- EconTalk Host Russ Roberts on Key Economic Concepts for Founders · Y Combinator
- Software Engineer Turned Youtuber - Jarvis Johnson · Y Combinator
- Matt Cutts on the US Digital Service and Working at Google for 17 Years · Y Combinator
- 14 more episodes that year, every mention in 2019 →
2018 126 mentions in 42 episodes 3 per episode
- The Path to $100B by Paul Buchheit · Y Combinator
- Gaming Studio Founders - Patrick Moberg and Holly Liu · Y Combinator
- Paul Buchheit - Startup Investor School Day 2 · Y Combinator
- Elad Gil Shares Advice from the High Growth Handbook, a Guide to Scaling Startups · Y Combinator
- SEO Advice from SurveyMonkey Director of SEO and Growth, Eli Schwartz · Y Combinator
- PR + Content for Growth by Kat Mañalac and Craig Cannon · Y Combinator
- Elad Gil and Pejman Nozad - Startup Investor School Day 3 · Y Combinator
- Starting a Startup After Business School - Reham Fagiri and Kalam Dennis of AptDeco · Y Combinator
- 34 more episodes that year, every mention in 2018 →
2017 106 mentions in 25 episodes 4 per episode
- Scaling Growth | Gustaf Alstromer, YC Partner (formerly Airbnb) & Ed Baker (formerly Uber) · Y Combinator
- Artist Lauren McCarthy Will Be Your Home's Brain · Y Combinator
- Team and Execution with Sam Altman (How to Start a Startup 2014: Lecture 2) · Y Combinator
- Microbes, Robots, and Ambition - Robin Sloan on His Novel Sourdough · Y Combinator
- Morgan DeBaun on Reaching 20M Millennials - With Kat Manalac at the Female Founders Conference · Y Combinator
- Content Marketing Tips from Experts at First Round Capital and Andreessen Horowitz · Y Combinator
- Your Whole Goal Is to Not Quit - Courtland Allen of Indie Hackers · Y Combinator
- At the Intersection of AI, Governments, and Google - Tim Hwang · Y Combinator
- 17 more episodes that year, every mention in 2017 →
2016 57 mentions in 4 episodes 14 per episode
Everything said about Meta, oldest first
Aug 16, 2016
Aug 16, 2016 positive
Zuckerberg: Facebook Runs Tens of Thousands of Live Product Variations Simultaneously
“At any given point in time, there aren't, there's not just one version of Facebook running in the world, right? There's probably tens of thousands of versions running because engineers here have the power to try out an idea and ship it to, you know, maybe 10,0…”
Aug 16, 2016
Aug 16, 2016
Zuckerberg: Social understanding required expression tools, not search indexing
“All that other content was just out there able to be indexed by, you know, search engines and other services, but in, in order to understand what's going on with people, you needed to build tools that made it so that they could express what was going on with t…”
Aug 16, 2016 neutral
Zuckerberg: Better internal expertise might have avoided buying Oculus
“When I look at things like, you know, we bought you know, the Oculus team for a lot of money, right? I actually view that as you know, if we'd done a better job of building up some of the expertise to do some of that stuff internally, then, you know, maybe we …”
Aug 16, 2016 positive
Aug 16, 2016 positive
Aug 16, 2016
Zuckerberg: 5-to-10-year corporate bets are harder than early buyout decisions
“Sometimes you have to bet on something and, you know, either, you know, bet the direction of the company or, you know, bet billions of dollars on something, and it's not going to be clear whether you're right for five or 10 years. And, you know, that, that I t…”
Aug 16, 2016 neutral
Aug 16, 2016
Aug 16, 2016 positive
Zuckerberg: Any company can replicate Facebook's growth group with data infrastructure
“There's no magic In the growth group that we that we built that other people can't replicate, you know, it's just being very rigorous with data, investing in data infrastructure, so that way you can process all these different experiments and learn what people…”
Oct 11, 2016 negative
Dennis: Early startups should scrap paid ads for free validation
“When you're starting a business, first of all, let's just scrap the advertising on Facebook and advertising on Twitter or wherever, and you really need to find out those scrappy free ways in order to see if your product is something that customers are respondi…”
May 17, 2017 neutral
Jun 23, 2017
Baker: Facebook Relied on Organic Growth While Uber Scaled Paid Acquisition
“So, Facebook, we didn't really do very much paid acquisition, but at Uber, we had an entire performance marketing team. Well, initially it was a one-person team, but ultimately became a team where we would actually spend money to acquire both riders and driver…”
Jun 23, 2017
Jun 23, 2017
Jun 23, 2017 neutral
Alströmer: Most companies achieve massive scale by mastering just one platform
“Most companies that go really, really large, they do it on figuring out one platform. So they are really good at online marketing, they're really good at SEO, they're really good at reality, or the Facebook platform, or something like that. It's rare that you …”
Jun 23, 2017 bullish
Jun 23, 2017
Jun 23, 2017 positive
Alströmer: Growth disciplines become vital when new platforms emerge
“Growth kind of becomes important when they have new platforms. So you have Facebook platform, you have the mobile platform, you have Google, SEO, there's a bunch of larger platforms that makes people actually care about investing in them.”
Jun 23, 2017 positive
Jun 23, 2017
Jun 23, 2017 positive
Sep 4, 2017 positive
Laura Behrens Wu: Turnkey tools removed the need for custom e-commerce infrastructure
“It's easier than ever today to build your e-commerce store online. You don't have to be a developer. There is less upfront cost because you don't need to invest into a physical retail location. Everything's online. You get Shopify, you get Stripe, you get. Lik…”
Sep 4, 2017 neutral
Sep 4, 2017 negative
McCarthy: Facebook 2014 Study Proved News Feed Content Influences User Moods
“Facebook is like, did this study about mood manipulation where they were showing people either positive or more negative content, and then showing that this would cause the person themselves to make more positive or negative posts with the conclusion that they…”
Sep 8, 2017 positive
Bernstam: Facebook shutting down Parse was a remarkably graceful sunset
“The company did an amazing job with that. I think it was one of the best shutdowns of a company that I've seen. So often, users are really angry and, like, but this was a really graceful, long, like, over a year notice that we were gonna be shut down. Open sou…”
Oct 13, 2017 negative
Choksi: Repurposing the same content across every platform is a mistake
“I think people make the mistake of thinking marketers love this dream of repurposing. I'm gonna repurpose it on every platform, and it's like, actually, no, because what you do, what works on YouTube, what works on SoundCloud, what works on Twitter, what works…”
Nov 8, 2017 bullish
Nov 29, 2017 bearish
Sloan predicts Facebook updates and Instagram photos will be gone by 2050
“I would not bet against everything that we're pouring into kind of the vast digital box, you know, like everything, the Facebook updates, the Instagram photos, all of it basically being gone in 2060, 20, 50. Like, I hope that's not the case, and I mean, it see…”
Nov 29, 2017 neutral
Robin Sloan: Social media has not yet reshaped long-form fiction
“I don't really think so, not yet, and I think that's for a couple reasons if I had to kind of just guess. One is the truth is that the readership for books I mean, it's obviously diverse, and like, there's a lot of young people who read books. There's also a l…”
Nov 29, 2017 negative
Jan 3, 2018 positive
Mar 7, 2018 positive
Mar 8, 2018 neutral
Mar 30, 2018 positive
Ravisankar: Top '10x' developers are distinguished by strong business acumen
“The other thing that I'm starting to see happen across a lot of different companies, and even Hackerank has incorporated this, is the business acumen the level of business acumen that you have as a developer. Usually it is, it's always developers or builders. …”
Apr 20, 2018 positive
McDonnell: Facebook's Managing Bias training makes company inclusion training easier
“Facebook has an online training called Managing Bias. That's basically about, well, managing bias. So it's an inclusion training. And one of our team members, Isaac, has adapted that training for the company and given it in a few different ways, and it's great…”
Apr 27, 2018 neutral
Apr 27, 2018
Apr 27, 2018
May 16, 2018
Preskill: STEM education should prioritize critical reasoning over workforce training
“That STEM education, we shouldn't think of it as, we're going to need this technical workforce, and so we better train them. I think the key thing is, we want the general population to be able to reason effectively. You know, and to recognize when an argument …”
Jul 27, 2018
Gil: Early Facebook was mediocre at hiring but excelled at firing quickly
“Other companies like Facebook were known as not as good at hiring early on, although they'd gotten much better over time, but in the very early days they were known as not great at hiring, but they were very good at actually letting people go if they didn't wo…”
Jul 27, 2018
Sep 5, 2018 positive
Seibel: Primary startup KPI must be revenue or daily active users
“Almost always, if you ever are going to charge money to your customers, this number should be revenue. Almost always. If you are never going to charge your customers money, like Facebook, then maybe it should be a usage based metric. Like how often do your cus…”
Sep 6, 2018
Sep 12, 2018 neutral
Sep 19, 2018 positive
Cannon: Remarketing to website visitors is the cheapest Facebook ad audience
“What this is going to do is capture who's hitting your site, who's logged into Facebook, so then you can later remarket at them, and this is going to be much cheaper than any other kind of Facebook audience that you can create.”
Oct 24, 2018
Buchheit: Social networks succeed by serving the network over individual users
“It's almost like the, it's not the end user who you have to please, it's the network. Because they understood that the most important feature of a social network is that your friends are there. And so sometimes there's actually a tension between like what's go…”
Oct 24, 2018 neutral
Buchheit: A giant social network was inevitable even if Facebook never existed
“Even if like Facebook didn't exist, I guarantee someone would have built a giant social network, right? Like Facebook was sitting on top of that exponential change, and they were the ones who were most able to like capture it, that position and hold on to it. …”
Oct 24, 2018
Dec 14, 2018 positive
Jan 23, 2019
Disinformation actors target locally dominant platforms like WhatsApp in India
“The people who want to manipulate public opinion, they're gonna go to where the people are, and the platforms that the people are using. So in the US, we tend to see a lot of these campaigns on Twitter and Facebook, because that's the platforms that the majori…”
Jan 23, 2019
Fake Facebook accounts hold more influence because users expect authenticity
“Because it's so hard to create fake accounts on Facebook, the accounts that are fake might actually be a little bit more powerful because people don't expect there to be as many fake people on Facebook as they do Twitter, and so they might actually have more o…”
Jan 23, 2019
May 8, 2019
May 15, 2019 bullish
Best: Newsletters will replace social feeds for news within five years
“I think the answer is it won't replace the social network aspect of it. The thing that Facebook and the social networks are great at is having the relationship between you and like the people, you know, in real life... The part of it that should absolutely be …”
May 22, 2019 bearish
Jun 19, 2019 positive
Jun 26, 2019 negative
Hockenmaier: Early big tech growth playbooks mislead startups without product-market fit
“I actually think like the legacy of that growth team, and then like Twitter and LinkedIn and the others that followed is actually maybe problematic when we think about some of the applications of growth later on, because they were applied in this case of like …”
Jul 10, 2019 positive
Nahm: Facebook shifted Silicon Valley to see young founders as innovators
“And my freshman class at Stanford was the first class to start with Facebook. And I think that that really changed so much in Silicon Valley where young people now were seen as people that could innovate and that could bring kind of game changing ideas to mark…”
Aug 7, 2019 negative
Roberts: Public markets trap founders on a treadmill of perpetual growth
“The stock market doesn't feel that way. The stock market includes many people who bought it recently who didn't get to enjoy those romantic idealistic times. They expect future growth. And that's a treadmill. That's the hamster wheel that, you know, I think ma…”
Nov 27, 2019 neutral
Doctorow: Facebook targets behavioral correlates, not mind control
“What Facebook is mostly good at is finding people. You know, if you're a refrigerator salesman, you know, you've had this conundrum all your life, as have all your forebears since the dawn of refrigeration, because the median person buys one or fewer refrigera…”
Nov 27, 2019 negative
Doctorow: Facebook allowed non-members to scrape group membership lists
“She discovered that you could enumerate the membership of any Facebook group. Even if you weren't a member of it. And when she reported it to Facebook, they said that is a feature request, not a bug report. We will send it off to the product team. And when she…”
Nov 27, 2019 negative
Doctorow: Big Tech's calls for regulation are bids for state monopoly
“And, you know, Facebook is positioning itself to become a state monopoly like the Bell system was, as is Google, as is Apple, right? All of these companies, they want to be, when they say, please regulate us, right? When they say, please make rules to tell us …”
Nov 27, 2019 bearish
Feb 16, 2022 neutral
Caldwell: Early Facebook scaled by duplicating separate code and databases per school
“The way they scaled Facebook was to have a completely separate PHP instance running for every school that they copy and pasted the code to. They would have a separate MySQL server for every school, and they would have like a memcache instance for every school.”
Feb 16, 2022 neutral
Apr 8, 2022 negative
Facebook's Custom Audiences Launch Pushed Perfect Audience to Sell
“When Facebook announced that they were going to launch custom audiences and sell this themselves directly, Facebook was now a competitor And they own the platform. They wrote all the code. They control pricing. So that's a time when you should worry about comp…”
Apr 20, 2022 negative
May 6, 2022 positive
Seibel: Amazon succeeded by strictly accepting its low-margin reality
“This is one of the dirty little secrets behind Amazon. They've always known that they were in a low margin business, and they've always run their company that way. And I'm sure they were so tempted to look at a Google or a Facebook and say, why don't we do tho…”
Dec 29, 2022 negative
Alströmer: Startups cannot easily learn from users acquired via Google and Facebook
“You can't learn from users if the first thousand or first hundred customers are brought in through Google and Facebook. Those people are not the kind of people that you can easily get on a 30 minute phone call with.”
Feb 5, 2023 negative
Big Tech is now a conventional prestige industry like finance and medicine
“Today, I might argue that big tech has become put itself solidly in that list, right? It is amongst the finance and consulting and legal and medicine. You know, college kids today obsess with getting jobs at Facebook and Google. They study how they interview J…”
Jun 30, 2023 negative
Jun 30, 2023 negative
Dec 15, 2023 negative
Jan 6, 2024 bearish
Oct 11, 2024 negative
Nov 21, 2024 positive
Lieb: News Feed was the single best product change Facebook ever made
“Probably the single biggest change that Facebook, the product ever made for the better was moving to this newsfeed where basically anytime someone would modulate their wall, it would show you the content that you had chosen to see.”
Jul 1, 2025 positive
Sep 30, 2025
Anthropic built custom distributed training to scale beyond Facebook's infrastructure
“We don't want to outsource this to some package because A, we're about to go to a bigger scale, like PyTorch, for instance, they had a package for doing this. But we were going to go to a bigger scale than Facebook had been to. And you don't want to have a dep…”
Nov 28, 2025 negative
Dec 22, 2025 bullish
Jun 25, 2026 positive
Pincus: Social networks require a container of trust like .edu to succeed
“The thing I got wrong with Tribe was trust. So, so first of all, the thing that I built a social network before Facebook and I managed to fail, and I just got the trust component wrong, that for people to put themselves on the web, they first had to feel this …”
Jun 25, 2026 bullish
Jun 25, 2026 neutral
Pincus: Early backers sold Facebook stock because none foresaw its ultimate scale
“I don't think Reed or I Ever imagined how, I know none of us ever imagined how big this, Peter Thiel, all of us, we all sold our stock in Facebook, so we voted with our shares, you know, none of us could have ever described how big this all got.”
Jul 29, 2026 bullish
Wang: Billions of people will have tailored personal superintelligences
“We believe that everybody in the world, you know, all the billions of people in the world are going to have a super intelligence that is adapted and tailored to them, that is, enables them to accomplish their goals, knows their context, and ultimately is an ex…”
Jul 29, 2026 bullish
Jul 29, 2026 neutral
Wang: Meta rebuilt frontier AI lab from scratch after Llama 4 stalled
“Lama four wasn't on the trajectory that was needed for Meta. And so I got in there and we kind of did a zero based build of how do you know, build an entire frontier lab you know, in some ways kind of from scratch, obviously using a lot of what we had and move…”
Jul 29, 2026 bullish
Wang: Meta Agent Swarms Outperform Teams of 100 Engineers
“Like, I think we've seen, internally in meta cases where if you can develop the right agentic loop and you have the right eval or the right metric for the agents to optimize, you can have a swarm of agents accomplish more than, like, a team of a hundred engine…”
Jul 29, 2026 positive
Wang: Meta will soon release its own developer harness
“Today the easiest way is to use open code. We have, like, onboarding on the website, and then soon we'll have a harness of our own, and ultimately, I think we want great models that plug into all of the available harnesses and empower as much, you know sort of…”