Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)

25:38And anyway, he got Mark on it. And I think Mark kind of wrote this status update like Spotify is so good. And then, you know, everyone's like, how did you get this? This was kind of the main thing. When can I get it? How can I do it? And then we started jamming around what a social music product ought to be. And we had this sort of idea, wouldn't it be cool, sort of like with ICQ at the time where you had these status updates. Wouldn't it be cool to be able to check out what your friends were listening to? And we kind of got to work together, built that product, and coincided it with the Spotify US launch.

26:20and this was when news feed was really young, right? So there was like, you'd be scrolling through your news feed and it would be giving you these status updates of what your friends were listening to piped in directly from Spotify. Exactly right. So you could see all your friends. It actually still exists in Spotify product on desktop. So you can kind of see what your friends are listening to real time. It's one of our more popular legacy features that's been around now for like 13 years. It was the right sidebar, but I feel like I haven't seen it in a while. Maybe I just... It's still there.

26:48It's still there. Okay. But this gets at the point of like social music listening was this core insight that you had. Mark was on board to kind of build it together and let you, you know, use the, I mean, he got a lot out of it too, but let you use Facebook to distribute it. And yet everyone here who's a Spotify customer today, when I think Spotify, I think, oh, that's like the easy way to access music, podcasts, and now audiobooks. But I don't think like, oh, it's a social listening. So at what point did you let go of that precious idea and say, maybe the social is important, but not that important?

27:24Well, I still think social is hugely important. And for instance, we have a product now called Jam, which allows you to be with your friends and actually alter what you're listening to at the same time. And it's growing incredibly rapidly right now all over the world. So it's something that I think very much is a social product. But while I still think music is very social, I think what we got wrong in the product was this sort of notion that just seeing sort of what all of your friends are listening to may not be the sort of right social product. But if you instead sort of say, like, I want to work together with my friends and I want to have a shared listening, whether we're in the same place or not, that turns out to be a pretty amazing thing.

28:07So you see people do it at parties where you can literally join someone's jam and you can sort of all queue up songs together instead of taking my phone or your phone. We could all be sort of working together on something. But what we saw during the pandemic, and that's like where jam sort of started, was we started seeing that people were using this to stay connected as well by having sort of this shared, you know, consistent music listening where we're all listening to the same thing at the same time, even though we were sort of apart. It's like the best of linear TV brought to music. Yeah. So I think we're still sort of definitely playing with the social concepts and trying to get that right.

28:47But I think Facebook kind of moved off of this sort of presence -based social aspect for all things. So it wasn't just music, actually. People were doing it for games back then, too. So it was like, you know, I've created another Farmville. We remember that era. Yeah. What was it? north of 10 % of Facebook's revenue at IPO was from... With Zynga. Yeah. I mean, this is all fun history. I'm curious, though, we're going to talk to Mark later tonight. Are you doing research live on stage? Yeah, definitely. You've had a relationship, a pretty close relationship for 15 plus years as fellow founders in the trenches.

29:30is what have you taken from him that you've brought into Spotify and how you run the company? Many things. And I've learned so much from him and the rest of the team at Meta as well. But I think specifically from him, he's probably the best learner I've ever seen. You can have a conversation with him about a topic. He may not know very much about it. And then the next time, he would know more than, I would say, most experts about the subject. And it's really remarkable just how tenacious he is sort of about learning and staying curious about things. So that's definitely been a super inspiring thing for me.

30:16And I think that this sort of shines through with how he runs the company, too. He has a very sort of clear idea, but he also, you know, takes a lot of feedback and sort of iterates on that. And, you know, it's everything from one of the cool things for me has been seeing how he runs meetings. You know, for instance, I kind of like having relatively small meetings with people. Mark, the average meeting he has is like 15 to 20 people in the room. And how you make, you know, a product review or discussion productive with 15 or 20 people, still get people to be heard. Like he's very, very good at that stuff.

30:55And that's just a few of the things that I've learned, which has helped me as a leader as well. Can I ask, maybe this is a little bit more pointed. You are a kind person. You are a soft -spoken person. But you are a fierce competitor. Okay, so we haven't told you this. When we interviewed you, what, 18, 24 months -ish ago in Stockholm, I'd never been to Sweden before. I don't think you had either. And we left, we thought just like, what a lovely country, what lovely people. Daniel is like the most generous person we could imagine. You're here tonight. And that guy is a fierce competitor. And there is a reason why he has built Spotify.

31:46And very strategic. Like I think you see the chessboard. Mark is like that too. do you feel like your relationship, do you amplify each other? Well, I mean, the rule I have with Mark is I don't try to go into a competition with him because I know it'll end badly for both of us. So, you know, as you know, Mark likes sports. So one of the things I don't do with Mark is play sports for exactly this reason. You know, what was the last time he sort of tore his ACL when someone, you know, rather than giving up. So I feel like it ended pretty badly. So I like playing when I know I'll win. So I think it's a pretty good thing to not do that.

32:30If I were to characterize why Spotify worked, it feels like there's an incredible amount of tenacity and a willingness to run at a problem that a lot of people had tried and failed at before. But there is also this, you kind of bide your time, you kind of wait for the opening, and then you figure out a game you know that you can win, and then you go execute in that game. Yeah, that's pretty much spot on, to be honest. One of the things we talk about a lot that I don't say that much, but Gustav was backstage here, who's our product officer and CTO, is we say talk is cheap. Most people talk about execution, speed of execution, let's move, let's go.

33:10We actually spend a lot of time just discussing and talking. So the internal saying at Spotify is talk is cheap because we want to be really deliberate about what it is we're doing and how we're doing it. You mean that as a virtue, like talk is cheap, so let's talk a lot because it's inexpensive to waste those resources. Exactly right. It's more expensive to build than most people think. And so we actually spend a lot of time discussing and people get really confused when they sort of enter our culture. They're like, but why don't we just execute? And we're still sitting and debating and sort of game theorizing how this will play out and getting all the things working in a certain way.

33:46And we have our sort of ways of doing that now that we've sort of codified across the company, which I think is pretty unique at this point. But a part of that is also because, so to set the stage is because we had to. Because remember, everything, unlike many other products, when you're building a company, you can kind of sort of iterate and do stuff. We had to get the entire industry with us. So if we wanted to do something, we had to convince a bunch of people that it was the right thing to do. And in many cases, even making relatively simple changes could take one or two years for us to get licensed.

34:19So you better be sure that you're right when you're doing it. And this has kind of now become a thing in how we're doing stuff. We're probably not going to be the fastest in moving fast and breaking things. but we are going to be very deliberate and we're probably going to be more right when we actually do something. You're like the anti -fail fast, the anti -move fast and break things, the anti -ship and iterate. Well, I like to hope we can also ship and iterate. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But we won't be the fastest, no. Which is funny coming back to podcasting. You didn't enter the business until 2019.

35:00I assume you were thinking about it for a long time after that. And when, I'm sure you know, when did you become the market leader in podcasting? Oh, I think it sort of depends on which markets you're kind of looking at it. But we were pretty much, it started happening in quite a few markets already, 2020 and 2021. and in 2022 we were pretty much the market leader in most markets around the world. So three years. Yeah. Why? From launch. Why? Yeah, why? That's the question. And did you expect that it would be that fast given that you were so methodical and working so long to launch it? We don't always know how fast this will be but I think we had a pretty good sense that we could sort of iterate and improve our way and sort of hell climb from the amount that we were on.

35:55when we saw the sort of initial traction. But I think the contrarian bet we did, unlike many others did, was, you know, at the time when we launched, it was sort of viewed that you needed to have a different app for everything, right? Like you had to have a separate podcasting app and podcasting music were very different. And for us, it's just listening. And what we realized is we should use this base of what was then several hundred million people and today's way north of half a billion people and just serve them more stuff. And it turns out that like what we saw all the time, it wasn't like our music listeners weren't listening to podcasts.

36:32So why not use this experience and also recommend them great other stuff? And we went from there. And then a year ago, we also added audio books because that turned out to be another way to increase people's listening and that they were also spending time doing. But to your point on being like slow and methodical, okay, you had channel to people. Okay, they knew you're for listening, But if you're stuffing stuff in that channel that is not the thing that they want, then that blows up your core. And so I think my takeaway, at least, is you figured out a way to do it where you made sure that people were going to be open to using you for this new job.

37:11Yeah, of course. You're right. Obviously, just because you have the distribution advantage doesn't mean it'll work. But I think going back to it, what's so amazing with the platform is every time we try to do something deliberate, sort of top down, it's sort of fail. And most of the time, actually, what we see is the inklings of something already existing on the platform and then growing from there. So I mentioned this at the beginning, but Germany was sort of an early indicator for a lot of things for us, both in podcasting and in books. And what I realized even before we launched books, for instance, was around 2018, we started seeing books showing up on the top list in Germany of the most sort of, you know, listened to music tracks, right?

38:00It wasn't music. It was clearly books. But it sort of made it all the way up to the top list. And shortly thereafter, we started showing up as the biggest book distributor in the country. But we weren't even trying. and it was actually a pretty horrible experience to listen to books on Spotify. So when your product is being used in spite of it actually being a pretty terrible experience, you kind of know you've got something. So that was the sort of genesis for how we then were able to build and sort of expand. It's awesome. Well, that's it for this segment. Are you gonna stick around and watch the rest of the night?

38:34Oh yeah, for sure. I'm so excited. Awesome. Well, Daniel, thank you. Thank you so much for being here. All right, listeners, now is a great time to thank a new friend of the show, Coifin. And it's funny, they're new, but actually I've been using their product for years. My research project for every single new acquired episode involves Coifin. So when they reached out to sponsor the show, I thought, well, this is convenient. Indeed. So Coifin is a financial research tool loved by both individual investors and financial advisors. Individuals use it for stock research, graphing financials, and portfolio tracking, and financial advisors use it to build model portfolios and create client proposals.

39:16They have live market data and powerful analytics tools. So it's kind of like a Bloomberg terminal, except without the huge price tag, right? Yes, essentially. It's a web app, and it's totally self -serve. I've actually not talked to anyone at the company for the first few years that I used it. So Coifin is a product that the broader market like all acquired listeners would use, not just Wall Street investment bankers. It's where I pull things like growth rate or gross margins or the P .E. ratio or revenue multiples for every company we study. And you can compare these things over time with historical graphs or against other companies.

39:50It's often what I use when we're studying private companies, too, like Rolex or Mars or Ikea, to look at the comparables to estimate what these companies would be worth if they were public. They also have a screener that lets you filter across thousands of stocks so you can quickly surface investment ideas. Yep. So the general idea is if you're someone who's used to living in data, you should have that at your fingertips as you think about investing. Exactly. It's got these great graphs for data visualization wrapped around institutional grade data. So if you want to understand what assumptions are baked into the stock price today, Koyfin is for you.

40:23I was about to say that acquired listeners have a great offer, but Koyfin's free product is actually already really robust. Which is what I was using for years. I know, I know. But indeed, for Acquired listeners, and also for you, Ben, if you go to koifin .com slash acquired and you end up upgrading to paid, you'll get 20 % off your first year. Our thanks to koifin. That's K -O -Y -F -I -N dot com slash acquired or click the link in the show notes.

40:57Well, we've got a little more time before Mark comes on. And we have a couple more surprises planned. I think it's time to talk about the next one. Act two. Act two. So Dave and I are sitting around. We're planning tonight. We're like, what's the thing to do when we've got all these great folks in the room who love Acquired? And we're like, rather than ask them, hey, what should we do tonight? We just check our email and see what do people actually already want when we're not even asking. Episode requests. Episode requests. You go through the Acquired inbox, a lot of episode requests. The second biggest request is, hey, you did this episode, you were wrong, you need to fix it.

41:37Or you did this episode and like a lot has happened since and you need to do a follow -up on it. And so we thought, what if we pick like three or four of those and we speed run all of them with the acquired audience present? Yep. Update the acquired canon. And we thought, who could we do this with? and it just so happens that the perfect person to grill us on everything we got wrong and everything we need to update lives right here in san francisco please welcome from bloomberg and the circuit emily chang

42:18hi hello hi hux emily oh thank you so much

42:33Congratulations. Thank you. Thank you for being our guest. You guys, this is pretty awesome. Welcome to our recording studio. Welcome to our... Thank you. I'm glad to be here. I need to like mine you for some research. I know we have like a thing that we're doing here over the next 19 minutes, but you went wake surfing with Mark. Like the theme of tonight is researching. I tried. His 4th of July video, he is standing there in a tuxedo with an American flag drinking a beer. Everybody's seen it. Everybody's seen this. And the tuxedo's dry. Like, I've wake surfed a couple times. I start, you know, in the water, and you get pulled up.

43:12I would not, so how logistically, can he, like, step off the boat? As you could probably tell from the episode, I'm not a wake surfer, but I tried. And Mark is pretty good. And what I did not realize is that you can do a dry start where you, if you're so good, you can just ride the board right off the boat. And voila, tuxedo surfing video. And I can personally attest that I did see him do a dry start. And he can, I mean, I think it's real. I think. That or he had like a lot of tuxedos on that boat to get multiple trial runs. By the way, Priscilla's pretty awesome too. They can both shred. Just have to say that.

43:52Because she's here tonight too. All right, Emily, take us in. So right now, and A plus, you guys, for self -reflection, we're going to revisit some of your past episodes. And we decided on some episodes that maybe were a little controversial. In the early days, you would grade every company that you covered. And you made some good calls, but also some questionable calls sometimes. So I thought we would go down, do a little memory lane, and start with YouTube. which, David, you gave YouTube a C in 2016. This is the acquisition of YouTube by Google. And you, Ben, said it could be as bad as a C -.

44:37And I just question that a little bit. We were young. It was 2016. We didn't know what we were doing. We were misguided. But let's just twist the knife a little, because we have some quotes here. Ben, you said, I'm a little bit bearish on YouTube, primarily because it's not a destination. And David said, like, who goes to YouTube and discovers something? The sad part is that we actually said that and decided to revisit this. So I don't know. It may actually be the case that that wasn't a huge behavior yet. Like the algorithm hadn't become, I know I'm being defensive here, but like this is where we fall on our sword YouTube was like the utility that you uploaded a video to and then you could embed it on your site it's not like I would like start my day maybe I was weird but like I couldn't imagine starting my day and going to youtube .com and just watching whatever it served me the way that now like it's very easy to do that in the app well I think okay so for me there's a lot to talk about with YouTube that we got wrong this is the biggest thing that we've discovered since is I think literally as we were making that episode AI and social media feed recommenders were happening in that moment.

45:58And it was about to lead to everything that is happening today. And it was YouTube within Google and Meta, then Facebook, buying GPUs and building AI that turned feed recommenders into the ultimate destination site. And we just completely had no idea that that was happening. Right. AI had its moment a decade ago. We're all excited about it now, but the use case of recommending you something that should be the next item that you should consume was a killer use case for AI even then. We missed that. Well, today you have analysts saying if you pulled YouTube out of Google, it would be worth half a trillion dollars, which is almost double where Netflix is.

46:46it's on track YouTube TV to be the largest cable provider, cable provider in the United States. It has Sunday ticket. You know, I have a house full of kids in my house. It's the first and the second screen because we have YouTube TV. So the question is, can they really be everything to everyone? Right? Right. So here is, here is, I think our most legitimate defense. Google does not report YouTube profitability. They report YouTube revenue. So when we did the episode, YouTube was doing about $5 billion run rate revenue. It is now like 35 to 40 billion annual revenue run rate. And back then it was way losing money.

47:29Like it was a money pit. Yes, and it was losing a lot of money back then. Google does not report today. But here's what is unique about YouTube versus every other platform is they pay out 55 % of revenue. on long form and 45 % on shorts directly to creators. Which, you know, is great for creators, but that's a tough business to run when every dollar you're getting in, you're giving more than half out, you know. And it's a direct variable cost. $70 billion to creators over the last three years, which again is more than Netflix spends on content. So I'll go on record, YouTube was an A plus acquisition because of the strategic value.

48:06I mean, whether it's the second largest search engine, second to Google, or the second largest social media property. Strategically, very great thing to own, not to mention going into the land of AI training data. But as a business, it is not clear to me that YouTube makes money. Well, and I mean, my source is also, if they're making money, it's little to no money. But they could obviously change how much they're paying out to creators. They can turn the spigot on and off. And the durability that they're building and the affinity from creators, we'll talk about creators on the platform in a minute.

48:40Yes, there's a reason why so many creators want to graduate to YouTube. And this is it. Well, my show's on YouTube, your show's on YouTube. How do you feel about YouTube as creators? Strongly. For everyone listening, thank you for listening to the podcast feed where we have a direct relationship with you that is not intermediated by an algorithm. But honestly, it is the craziest thing to see these YouTubers who have built mass followings, tens of millions, hundreds of millions sometimes of subscribers, where subscribers and views are uncorrelated. Grade today? Grade today. Oh, A+. Still A+. So here's the other thing we didn't mention.

49:26And I think this was true back then, too. YouTube is both the second largest social media property in the world and the second largest search engine in the world. So, yeah, A+. The way that you should look at YouTube is not what is the discounted cash flow of YouTube as an independent business if you look at their profitability today. It's what was the existential risk to Google of not owning YouTube if YouTube became a thing somewhere outside of Google. And that is worth paying a lot for. Huge. All right, moving on. The next company we're going to talk about is LinkedIn. You covered it three days after they got bought by Microsoft.

50:03You both basically gave it an A. Ben quote. How are we both positive on this? I woke up Monday morning being like, what? Oh, yeah. And then we've got this other one. What about LinkedIn today? Yeah, that we said we had no idea how it went because it was too recent. I think the story with LinkedIn is it is it was super unclear that it had the running room ahead of it. Like, what are the numbers on YouTube today? Revenue wise on YouTube? I'm sorry, on LinkedIn. $16 billion plus in revenue today. They 5X'd revenue since they were bought eight years ago. Of which $5 billion comes from advertising and content, which for all intents and purposes didn't exist when the acquisition happened.

50:48They have built that into a real business. I mean, for us on Acquired, I actually went and looked in preparation for this. We have about a relatively equal number of followers on LinkedIn as a platform versus any of the other social platforms out there. But engagement is like 5, 10x on LinkedIn. I mean, it's our most important social platform. And if you had said that eight years ago, it would have been crazy. The reason why this was worth a revisit and why I think they've been so much more successful than anyone would have thought at the time of acquisition, they 5x'd in revenue, which over eight years is great, but not like three standard deviations, four standard deviations from the mean.

51:26It's not one of these crazy things in the world. But essentially, they created $100 billion of market cap. I mean, if you look at what a reasonable multiple would be for LinkedIn, if it were an independent company today, it's a big company. Like, it would be a hundred and, I don't know, over $100 billion market cap company today. And, like, it's just kind of hanging out inside Microsoft. Revisiting this was a little traumatic for me because this was, if you'll remember, this was an acquisition that, like, no one saw coming. There were no leaks, no reporting on this before it happened. And my producer was apparently like calling my phone nonstop in the morning.

52:03It was like the crack of dawn and I was not picking up. So she called my husband who came in and was like, Microsoft just bought LinkedIn and you have to interview Satya and Jeff Wiener in an hour. And I was like, what? So, yeah. So that's what I remember. Was it a good interview? I mean, I think so. I watched it. You said it? Yeah, it was good. It was great. My hair wasn't quite fully done, but we made it. We made it through. Okay. You have some new reporting. I do, actually, because I talked to Reid Hoffman, who, of course, is co -founder of LinkedIn. And, you know, it's interesting because Reid joined the board of Microsoft.

52:44He's still on the board of Microsoft. He was an early investor in OpenAI, on the board of OpenAI. Shocker, Satya Nadella is on the AI train early. Microsoft is the biggest backer of OpenAI now. And Kevin Scott is the CTO of Microsoft now, who came from LinkedIn. So Reed gave me a little quote. He said, Satya has run Microsoft as a type of founder. You could call it being a re -founder or even a late -stage co -founder. The re -founder doesn't need to have been in the garage from day one. He shifted the company's focus away from a cutthroat culture and competition -only practices towards embracing social networks, collaboration, cloud, and the next wave of AI.

53:25The question is, did he listen to our Microsoft series? I don't know. You wonder if the AI wars would have played out differently. Okay, we're going to keep moving quickly because I really want to make sure we get to the last one. But SpaceX, one of your most popular episodes ever. Luckily, you're in the clear because you didn't grade them. We stopped grading at some point. But obviously, Starlink is a juggernaut, Ben. and you talked about it being potentially a $30 billion business at the time. Can you grade SpaceX today, knowing that Starlink is just even bigger? Okay, so, yeah, the company was valued at $36 billion in May of 2020 when we did the episode.

54:03At that time, they had 26 successful launches that year. Last year, they did 96 launches, and they're planning to do 118 this year, which is over two a week. It's like an insane... They're doing one every three days. But on top of the launch business... Yeah, the launch business is not the interesting part of the business. They now have Starlink, which is estimated to do $6 .5 billion in 2024, and they are reportedly profitable as a business. I'm pretty sure the 7 ,000 Starlink satellites that are in orbit represent two -thirds of the total satellites orbiting the Earth. And it's not just like, oh, we'll see if people want Starlink.

54:42People want Starlink. I mean, the business itself, I think, I'm looking at the subscriber count, it's something like 3 million subscribers and it's only been 3 years since it launched so when we did the episode Starlink was like pie in the sky literally there was nothing and now I'm pretty sure Starlink is the entire SpaceX was valued at 36 billion when we did the episode Starlink itself is worth way more than 36 billion today it's a beast, total beast and by the way, nobody else could have saved those astronauts right like fight words yeah yeah yeah well russia maybe but that's complicated and we don't even know if china could dock at the iss i mean i think that's okay to say sorry i will say it's uh so the starlink execution is just more remarkable than like i i think 99 of people would have guessed.

55:42Yeah. Okay. So now to you, your most requested revisit ever, the arena queen, uh, you gave her an A plus, but that was two years ago before the era's tour. So I think you're going to have to invent a new category. So certainly, or stop grading. That's the real answer. The, um, the context on this is it's a little weird because there's no enterprise value of Taylor out there that you can calculate. We're not talking about Twitter. Friday and slip. There's no enterprise value of Taylor. The closest thing was when we did the episode, Forbes estimated her net worth at $550 million. Yeah. Not woo. Yeah.

56:36Wow. By our calculations, we're pretty sure she generated on the order of $550 million of free cash flow this past year. This year. Last 12 months. That's a woo. So is she more than a billionaire? So David's got an argument on this. So walk us through your perceived financial breakdown of Swift Incorporated. Yes, Taylor Swift Inc. So the big piece that I actually think is the most interesting piece that we got wrong in our episode, Ben did a fantastic primer on the music industry and, you know, all the challenges for artists and et cetera, et cetera. And like it's getting better and Spotify is doing great and Daniel's doing great and all that.

57:22The latest sort of reported talked about numbers was that Taylor was making like less than $5 million a year from streaming. There was this myth that streaming doesn't pay. This myth that streaming doesn't pay. Last year, Taylor made over, well over. Reported, reported, this is reported. Well over $100 million from Spotify streaming alone. Alone. doesn't include any of the other platforms. So gross that up. And by nature of what she has been doing that we talked about in that episode, redoing her master's, you think about what of the percentage of those streams that are happening, are they on where she owns all the rights?

58:13That is a very, very, very high gross margin number that is coming to Taylor every year. Of that high hundred plus million dollar streaming number, she actually keeps quite a bit of it because of this strategy that she's so the amount that she's getting just from streaming like eras tour aside movie aside she is getting paid more every year than any hollywood actor probably any athlete in the world um she could just sit at home okay but then she doesn't but then but then she did an eras tour which is like the most unbelievable tour that any artist has ever conceived of or executed. How much money did that make last year, David?

58:51So last year, the Eras tour in calendar year 2023 grossed, I think, $1 .1 billion. Wow. Which is a gross. And tours are expensive. There's a lot of things involved in making shows. Yes, there are. The previous record for highest grossing tour ever, I believe, was a billion dollars so taylor eclipsed that over multiple years that that was earned so not only did she set the record for highest grossing tour she did it within 12 months obviously the tour has continued yeah but let's say she operates like a very high uh you know a high margin touring business let's assume she's very efficient at it call it a 30 35 operating margin on the business a lot of artists actually lose money touring because it's a you know anyway uh that's another $300, $350 million in cash flow every year.

59:48Yep. Or at least last year. During the eras to where she is making that. When she is actively touring. And then... And then there's the movie. Right. So the movie grossed $267 million at the box office. Highest grossing concert film of all time. Taylor went direct to the theaters with the movie. So paying less middlemen. Less middlemen. Then she did the direct deal with Disney for the streaming rights. That was another $75 million on top of that. So well over $300 million from the movie. Obviously, you're not going to make a movie every year. So David, you're kind of getting to the point of your $550 million number of cash flow last year may actually be conservative.

1:00:32I think that is conservative for last year. I think if you were to say, okay, what is a smoothed out steady state over a three -year rolling average for Taylor Inc.? Oh, you did used to be an investment banker. Half a billion plus. cash flow every year. So I re -listened to the Taylor podcast with my kids driving to Tahoe, and they loved it. You have a potential Gen Alpha audience. It's our gateway drug. In case you're getting nervous. But here's a question. Is it possible that we're at peak Taylor? Okay, so this is the most important debate to all of this, which is if you're trying to value the enterprise of Taylor, what multiple do you put on that cash flow?

1:01:12Right? Right? Do you believe it is a durable business like some of the great content businesses of all time, like the one that you put in our model, which is Disney? Yes. Disney trades at 20x free cash flow. Taylor is 550 million in free cash flow. That's a $11 billion enterprise value for Taylor. Forbes currently estimates her net worth at 1 .1, I think. And now she's in her NFL era. Like, how do you value that? Right. So, okay, but here's the good, I think Ben and I differ a little bit on this. I would argue Disney is the right comp. Oh, boy. To look at the single greatest, like, IP holder in the world that has proven over, you know, a century that it can stay relevant and apply that multiple to a single artist with no diversification who has had this unbelievable ascent and you're taking that multiple off of this extreme outlier year.

1:02:14Like, I'm not saying, you know, it should trade at one or two X, but like 20 X, David is a little, but, but your point I think is a very interesting one, which is when people are looking at, oh, net worth of a person like this, they sort of foolishly don't consider it an enterprise. Their multiple they're using is one. Right. Like, why are you assuming that they're worth the cash in their bank when clearly they can produce these incredible returns year over year over year? So I think that's the slept on thing in Taylor. Are we at peak Taylor? I think to me, I mean, I think the song that played before we started the movie and walking out here was start me up by the rolling stones taylor is the rolling stones of this generation yeah that's my argument or just beginning i'm gonna say no just because that seems like a safe bet when you're talking about taylor yeah yeah uh for my own safety i'm gonna say we are not at peak taylor all right you heard it here for the record um i think you guys need another taylor episode that's the verdict i think for the fans thank you guys so much and congratulations and I can't wait to keep listening.

1:03:22Thanks Emily. Thank you so much.

1:03:38All right listeners it's time to talk about another one of our favorite companies Statsig. Since you last heard from us about Statsig, they have a very exciting update. They raised their Series C, valuing them at $1 .1 billion. Yeah, huge milestone. Congrats to the team. And timing is interesting because the experimentation space is really heating up. Yes. So why do investors value Statsig at over a billion dollars? It's because experimentation has become a critical part of the product stack for the world's best product teams. Yep. This trend started with Web 2 .0 companies like Facebook and Netflix and Airbnb.

1:04:16Those companies faced a problem. How do you maintain a fast, decentralized product and engineering culture while also scaling up to thousands of employees? Experimentation systems were a huge part of that answer. These systems gave everyone at those companies access to a global set of product metrics, from page views to watch time to performance. And then every time a team released a new feature or product, they could measure the impact of that feature on those metrics. So Facebook could set a company -wide goal like increasing time in app and let individual teams go and figure out how to achieve it.

1:04:50Multiply this across thousands of engineers and PMs and boom, you get exponential growth. It's no wonder that experimentation is now seen as essential infrastructure. Yep. Today's best product teams like Notion, OpenAI, Rippling, and Figma are equally reliant on experimentation. But instead of building it in -house, they just use Statsig. And they don't just use Statsig for experimentation. Over the last few years, Statsig has added all the tools that fast product teams need, like feature flags, product analytics, session replays, and more. So if you would like to help your team's engineers and PMs figure out how to build faster and make smarter decisions, go to statsig .com slash acquired or click the link in the show notes.

1:05:32They have a super generous free tier, a $50 ,000 startup program and affordable enterprise contracts for large companies. Just tell them that Ben and David sent you. All right. So, David, we've had Jamie Dimon. We've had Daniel Ek. We've had Emily Chang. Yep. What is going to possibly have up our sleeve before Mark? We won't keep you waiting too, too much longer, but we do have one more special guest, one more surprise update. So one of the things that happened in the insane, you know, year that we've had was that we had this, like, viral clip from an episode. This never happened in the land of Acquired.

1:06:10And it got, like, tens of millions of views, and it got picked up by Forbes and Fortune and the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. It actually went so nuts that we felt like it was kind of misunderstood and we felt bad. We pulled the clip down because we felt like it just wasn't really explaining what the person meant correctly. And so we wanted to correct the record and have that person back via video to kind of say it straight and say what he meant. So everyone, Jensen Huang. Hi, everybody. It's great to join you at Acquired Live. Wow, this is really something. I still remember when I met Dave and Ben, they interviewed me right here on this stage at NVIDIA's headquarters.

1:06:56And now this podcast has attracted an incredible audience. And so I'm really proud of them. And one of the questions that they asked me was, if I knew what I know now, I think, or something like that, would I start NVIDIA all over again? And I said, absolutely not. Of course, it was taken out of context because I was asked about that several times after that. And of course, I would start the company if I knew it would turn out this way. The reason why I said what I said was, has everything to do with being an entrepreneur. Building a company is insanely hard. The number of things that you have to know, the amazing people that you have to surround yourself with, the adversaries and all the smart things that they're going to do, and the adversities that you're going to be confronted with over time.

1:07:59The mountain of it in the course of 31 years, if I were to take all of that, all the challenges and all the hardship and all the pain and suffering of the last 32 years, and I would have compressed it into the brain of a 29 -year -old, there is no way that that person would have started the company. And my point there is the super point of entrepreneurs, which is your superpowers are partly your ignorance, that you don't know how hard it is. and so I mean that's what I meant everybody Jensen Wong

1:08:43nice to have that fixed yes yes we can officially correct the record on that one yes all right we have finally arrived the main event tonight is featured some incredible founder led companies Jensen from Nvidia Daniel from Spotify And next we have the iconic founder CEO of our time, Mark Zuckerberg.

1:09:14Hey. Let's go, man. Let's go. Yeah.

1:09:30Mark. Hey. It's great to have you here. It's great to be here. You know, I was watching Jensen's video correcting the record, and I was thinking to myself, we might need to book the next one of these for all the things I'm going to have to apologize for that I'm going to say tonight. Nah, just kidding. I don't apologize anymore.

1:09:53We've noticed. Well, okay, wait, wait. Here's the question. If you knew what you knew today... What's up? If you knew what you know today, would you have started Facebook? Oh, God. I mean, look, I think... Coming out hot, David. Yeah, no, I mean, he started it. Literally. I think there's something to Jensen's original sentiment, which is that the entrepreneurial journey is very challenging, especially the early days when you're running a startup and there's the sense that what you're doing could just die at any moment and the volatility, everything is just getting thrashed so much. And it's not, you know, obviously you look back, you have all these fond memories, but it was not the most fun part of the journey or, you know, the part of my life that I, like, wish I could go back and relive.

1:10:44So, I mean, I do think that there's something to what Jensen was saying that I thought was very honest. And that when I heard him say it the first time, I was like, yeah, I get that. I think there are a lot of people for whom if you knew how painful it would be along the way, you wouldn't get started. But then I think that that's one of the things that's good about human nature is you can underestimate how painful things are going to be. So that way you can go and do good things.

1:11:17Well, on that topic, we have a lot to talk about. I think this is actually very appropriate. it. First, we have to ask you about your shirt and what you're wearing. Yeah, you know, I started working with people to design some of my own clothes. And so I figured, you know, look, we're going to design eyewear, we're going to design other stuff that people wear, let's get good at this. And so this one, I actually, I worked with this great fashion designer, Micah Miri. And he's got a great story. So I wouldn't be surprised if you're doing one of these with him one day. And this one is... So I've kind of started working on this series of shirts with some of my favorite classical sayings on them.

1:12:12So this one is Pathé Mathos, learning through suffering.

1:12:19it's a little family saying and also escalates was uh was that your family saying growing up or is that your family now now

1:12:34well no let's let's pull that thread uh no pun intended i promise uh what does learning through suffering mean to you?

1:12:46Well, 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 entrepreneurial journey. It's also, I think, part of the beauty of building things. But this is something that Jensen talks a lot about too, right? I feel like when you go to start a company, 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.

1:13:21And you only really learn what you care about when you have to make hard tradeoffs and face challenges. So, yeah, you learn the most important things through facing challenges. Speaking of facing challenges, we want to talk about a number of those because we counted, by our count, I think you have faced more existential challenges than any meaningful company in history through your first 20 years. First, though. It's a dubious distinction. We will make our case to you of why and enumerate them. You're still here. But first. I kind of think my, you know, like that old Nike Michael Jordan ad where he's talking about how he's failed over and over and over again, and that's how he succeeds?

1:14:07That one really resonates with me, too. So thanks to you guys, I got a pair of these this summer, and I genuinely love them. Tell us the story of how these came to be. Yeah, so thanks. I'm excited about them, too. So, you know, at Meta, we've been building social experiences for 20 years now. And originally, it took the form of a website, then mobile apps. But the thing is, I never thought about us as a social media company. We're not a social app company. We are a social connection company. I mean, we talk about what we're doing is building the future of human connection. and that's not only going to be constrained over time to what you can do on a phone, right, on a small screen.

1:15:03So when you think about, you know, when we got started, okay, we were like a handful of kids. You know, we weren't able, we didn't have the resources at the time to go define whatever the next computing platform is and also, you know, Facebook originally got started around the same time as, you know, a bunch of the early smartphones and those platforms got started. So we didn't really get to play any role in developing that platform. and one of the big themes I think for the next chapter of what we do is I want to be able to build what I think are sort of the ideal experiences not just what you're allowed to build on some platform that someone else built but like what is actually if you can think from first principles what is the ideal social experience so I think what you would like to have is not a phone that you look down at that kind of takes your attention away from the things and the people around you, you know, not just a small screen.

1:15:58I think what you ideally have is glasses. And through the glasses, there's one part of it where the glasses, they can see what you see, and they can hear what you hear. And in doing so, they can be kind of the perfect AI assistant for you because they have context on what you're doing. But then part of that is also that the glasses can project images, basically like holograms, out into the world. And that way, your social experiences with other people aren't constrained to these little interactions you can have on a phone screen. In the not -so -distant future, you can imagine, because you guys have demoed some of the stuff that we've done, a version of this where we're having a conversation like this, but maybe one of us isn't even here.

1:16:44They're just like a hologram, and we have glasses. and it really, there's the question of delivering a realistic sense of presence. There's something magical in the realm of building social experiences around the feeling of human presence and like being there with another person and this physical perception, right, where we're very physical beings, right? People like to intellectualize everything, but a lot of our experience is very physical. And this physical sense of presence that you are with another person doing things in the physical world is something that you're going to be able to do through holograms, through glasses, without being taken away from whatever else you're doing, just kind of have that mixed in with the rest of the world.

1:17:26It's going to be, I think, the ultimate digital social experience. And I think it's also going to be the ultimate incarnation of AI because you're going to have conversations where it's like, all right, there's some people. It's like maybe like I'm physically here. There's a person. You're like a hologram there. There's an AI that is kind of embodied as someone is there. And the glasses will enable this. So, okay, so how are we going after this, building this? This is like some huge project. We've been working on it for 10 years. And there are a lot of different challenges to solve to get there.

1:18:01There's like you have to build a novel display stack, right? It's not, these aren't just screens, like the kind that are in phones. There's this long lineage. They're connected to the screens that have been in TVs and monitors and things for a long time. There's been this massive optimization of the supply chain. There's like brand new display stack around holographic displays that basically need to get created. And then they need to be put into glasses. They need to be miniaturized. And you also in the glasses need to fit chips, microphones, speakers, cameras, eye tracking to be able to understand what you're doing, batteries to make it last all day.

1:18:39Operating new novel RF protocols. Yeah, it's like, okay, it's a pretty big challenge. So we're like, all right, let's go try to go for the big thing. And we've been working on that for a while, and we're pretty close to being able to show off kind of the first prototype that we have of that, and I'm really excited about that. At the same time, we also came at it from this lens of, all right, so that's like a lot of new technology that needs to get developed, a lot to pack into a form factor, because the glass has to be good -looking too. so what if we just constrain ourselves to like we're going to work with a great partner, SLR Luxottica, they make Ray -Ban, they make a lot of the iconic glasses let's see what we can fit into glasses today and make them as useful as possible and I actually I kind of thought when we were getting started with those that it was almost like a practice project for the ultimate AR Let's be clear, that's what you thought Facebook was.

1:19:41That's true. That's true. Yeah, it did. Like for your real startup someday. That's true. Yeah, no, this is, let's go on a tangent there for a second. So I started Facebook in school, came out to Silicon Valley with Dustin and a handful of people working on it at the time. And we did that because Silicon Valley is where all the startups came from. And I remember we got off the plane, we were driving down 101, we're like, wow, eBay, Yahoo, like this is amazing. all these great companies. One day, maybe we'll build a company like this. And I'd already started Facebook. And I was like, surely the project that we're working on now is not a company.

1:20:15And Facebook had some scale at this point. Oh, no, no. It was a great project. I just didn't have the ambition to turn it into a company at the time. That just kind of happened. But anyway.

1:20:27Yeah. I mean, a lot of hard work, obviously. But at the time, I was kind of like, I don't think this is it. Well, that's your answer of would you have started. You actually didn't try to start Facebook. I didn't know. So, yeah, so, I mean, the glasses, though, you know, we thought that this was like, all right, we want to get working with Estelore Luxottica so we can start building more and more advanced glasses. And then, you know, they're really good. They look good. And then AI, like the massive transformation in AI. So for listeners, let's just be really clear. you guys shipped this product that I'm holding before LLMs, or at least before the public consciousness was aware of the chat GPT moment, and these were not manufactured and shipped as an AI device.

1:21:14That came later when they were already in market. Yeah, a few years ago, I would have predicted that AR holograms would have been available before kind of like full -scale AI. And now I think it's probably going to be the other order. So now it's like, all right, great. Well, this is actually a great product because it's got the cameras so it can see what you see. It's got the microphone. It's got the speakers. You can talk to it. I remember calling Alex Himmel, the guy who runs the product group. That's exactly the story. And I'm like, hey, you know, I think we should probably pivot this and make it so that meta AI is the primary feature of it.

1:21:48And then like, I remember I came in the next week and they'd built a prototype of it on Tuesday. And it was like, all right, good. Yeah, no, this is good. This is going to be a very successful product. He told us a much more high -stakes version of that story. I was on the highway with my kids, and I get this call on a Saturday from Mark, and he's like, those glasses, could we put meta AI in them running on device and ship that soon so we can see if that's a good idea or not? Yeah, that tracks. That's what I just said.

1:22:21Sounds right. Okay, so thank you for opening up with a story. The question that I would like to try to answer tonight is why has Meta worked as spectacularly well as it has? I mean, one of the most valuable companies in the world through multiple iterations, multiple technology waves, fighting off, you know, maybe let's name all the waves in which people said, oh, Facebook and Meta are so screwed. And yet that is not the way it looks today. MySpace, Twitter Gen 1, Instagram, Snapchat, WhatsApp, TikTok. Apple app tracking transparency you could put in its own whole category and now chat GPT that's mine there is a widely held public narrative every single time Snapchat discovers stories or there's something where people are like the cool thing that Facebook the company did is just obsolete now and they're going to go away you very much haven't gone away what do you think is the through line of the DNA of the company that allows you to keep winning

1:23:41I think it's that we're a technology company that is focused on human connection not a specific type of app so we never thought about ourselves as a website or a social network or anything like that for me building this kind of glasses to enable the future of people being able to feel present with another person no matter where they actually physically are is the natural continuation of the kind of apps that we build today. But it depends on how you define what you are. And then you need to figure out, well, how do you give yourself the competence to actually go do that? And that's where I think being a strong technology company comes in.

1:24:26Because a lot of companies, I think, think about themselves too narrowly in terms of, okay, well, we're this kind of one thing. And the reason why we can build all these things is because we have a really strong technology foundation. And some of that is just me and how I think about stuff. I mean, I was an engineer before I got started. I mean, I mostly took systems engineering type classes when I was in college. So you talk about like Friendster and MySpace and all the scaling challenges they had doing the graph calculations of like, all right, or do you know this person? Friends of friends of friends.

1:25:04Yeah, actually, can you take us back? And we want to ask you the story of that time. I mean, it seems quaint now, Friendster, MySpace, but you study computer science, graph networking, social graphs, that is a very, very difficult computational calculation. So I think it's a combination of a product question and a technology question. I think you can define the product in such a general way that the technology becomes basically impossible to solve. So you want to have a smart product definition, but then you want to be competent and better than everyone else at the technology. And I think that that's something that we've held ourselves to and build a good organization around.

1:25:44And it's one of the things that I observed as soon as I came out to the valley, that all these companies that called themselves technology companies were not really set up that way. Like the companies I was talking about, But it's like, the CEO wasn't technical. The board of directors had no one technical on it. They had one dude on the management team who was the head of engineering who was technical. And everyone else wasn't. It's like, all right, if that's your team, then you're not a technology company. So I think one of the things that I've always been pretty careful about is I actually want a lot of the people on our management team, it's like, you know, split.

1:26:27it's mostly people running either these big product groups who come up through different technical pathways at the company. And I think that there's like a balance, right? It's like, you don't want everyone to be an engineer because there's other things that matter too. But if you don't have enough of your kind of share of the company as engineers, then you're not a technology company. And I think that that also is important to the board. And I think just like in terms of how you weigh decisions and culturally things inside the company matters a lot. But I think that's one of the things that has been really fundamental.

1:27:01We're able to kind of go from platform to platform and do these different things because we've invested and cared about the underlying technology. The product experiences that we build on top of that are an implementation and they matter. And for that, I think, we also, I think, are a pretty curious and learning -focused organization. where I view the product strategy less as any one specific thing and more as how do we iterate and learn as quickly as possible how to make each thing better for the people we're trying to serve. So I define our strategy as we can learn faster than every other company.

1:27:41We're going to win. We're going to build a better product than everyone else because we're going to get it out first or early. we're going to have a good feedback loop. We're going to get a bunch of feedback. We're going to learn what people like better than other people. And then over time, by the time you get to, whether it's version 3 or 4 or 5, I mean, they're not even discrete versions because you ship so frequently. You learn faster. So that's basically the formula. Be a technology company. Build good foundation. Learn from what people are kind of focused on in the world and just iterate as quickly as you can.

1:28:17In one of my research calls to prep for this, someone described you as a master strategist, which we all sort of acknowledge that at this point. Except for all the stuff that I just thought was not going to be that important that ended up actually being the most important. But you're very generous. But that's the thing. Part of it is like, okay, you want to set up the game so that way you optimize, you create your luck. This is what Jensen told us. The apple's going to fall from the tree in some direction, and if you just set up the game that you have a hand close enough to catch it. The comment that someone made to me was the reason Mark is such a good strategist is because he plays the company as if it's a turn -based strategy game and he just makes sure he gets more turns than anybody else and he makes sure that he learns more from each turn than the next player does.

1:29:10Do you feel like that encapsulates meta -product development? I do like turn -based strategy games. But it does kind of feel like the way that you make bets is like, well, if we have great engineering, then that can kind of take care of the speed part. That's like many iterations or multiple at -bats. And then the... Well, great engineering and speed and iteration are actually two different values. They're not necessarily at odds, but I think 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 don't know, there's a certain personality that goes with kind of taking your stuff and putting it out there before it's fully polished.

1:29:52And 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 like a long time. We're gonna polish it. We're gonna put it out. and maybe for the stuff that they're doing that works maybe that just fits with their culture but for us 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 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.

1:30:36But I do think a lot of the conversations that we have are like, okay, well, we can get this to be a lot better if we work on it for like another couple of months or whatever. And I do just think that like you want to really have a culture that values shipping and getting things out and getting feedback more than needing always to get great positive accolades from people when you put stuff out. Because I think like if you want to wait until you get praised all the time, you're missing a bunch of the time when you could have learned a bunch of useful stuff and then incorporated that into the next version you're going to ship.

1:31:12And it's just about making sure that what the thing that the company is known for or its brand can withstand all the little damage that you do to it by shipping stuff that's not quite ready. Well, I would like to hope that it's not damaging to the brand. Well, but innately it is. Like when you're like, oh, I feel bad because I shipped a product that wasn't good enough. Yeah, no, I don't want to overstate it. I mean, we don't ship things that we think are bad, but we also don't take, we want to make sure that we're shipping things that are kind of early enough that we can get good feedback to see what they're going to be most used for.

1:31:48Like, I think a lot of the AI stuff that we're building now, for example, it actually, you know, it's pretty clear that AI is going to be transformative for a lot of different things. It is actually less clear what are going to be the initial use cases for a lot of these things that are super valuable. And so, okay, part of it is like, okay, you put something out, you want to kind of collect feedback and what people are actually, where it's resonating. Now, if what you put out is bad, then you're not going to collect good data because people aren't going to use it for anything because it sucks.

1:32:19But I do think that you have hypotheses for what people might really want to use it for, and they're not all going to be right, and you want to kind of go early enough on that as more. So I'm building to this question of, to you, is product creation an act of invention or discovery? Like, is David always inside that marble, and you just need the very best tooling and ability to get things in market and get feedback to discover the statue of David? Or do you conceive of David in your head, and I'm like, I'm going to make this and put it in the world? Does it have to be one or the other? I mean, I think it's a combination.

1:32:59I think you're basically taking some kind of values, either kind of like values that you have or a value for something that you believe should exist in the world and trying to build something that's aligned with that while trying to match it up with what is going to resonate the most with people. Right, I think if you just do the latter, then I think you just don't have enough conviction to see through hard things. and if you just do the former, then you probably don't get to product market fit or optimize what you do because you're not focused enough on your customers. So I think both probably matter.

1:33:39Yeah. As I pour through all these historical examples, there's like the market discovers, some other participant in the market discovers the stories format and suddenly the whole world is like, oh my God, that is the way that we all, that's the social interaction mechanism and that's like a pretty pure discovery where you have products that have stories, they perform very well, that's been discovered. But there's other times, it feels like everything you're trying to do in reality labs, all 50 plus billion dollars that you've put into it is like, we're gonna freaking will this thing into existence because I have an idea of the way that I want the world to be.

1:34:17I'm not really like asking for that much feedback. I'm putting it in the world. Well, it's a combination. I mean, I think that there's certainly a lot of things that we've invented or created for the first time. I mean, like in 2006 when we built the first version of News Feed, right? Before that, social networks were basically profiles. And then we were like, hey, people actually kind of want to get the updates. And let's show them that. And if we rank them, then there's so many updates that this can help people parse through that quickly. And today, it's hard to imagine any social product without a feed.

1:34:48So I think that's obviously there's some of these things are sort of seminal, I don't want to call it an invention, but like patterns that we basically established first. And then some of them are ones that other people did where we take pride in learning from what is working in the world. You know, we're not embarrassed about learning from things that other people like discovered that were good first. And then we build a better version of it. and I mean, I think that that's, you know, no one company is going to invent everything, right? I think if you don't invent anything, then it's hard to kind of be a successful company.

1:35:31But I do think that there's a mix of this. There are more smart people outside of your company than inside your company. If you're not learning from what's going on in the market, then you're missing a lot of opportunities to get valuable signal from people in the community and customers about what they want you to be doing. Which speaks to the thesis of Facebook as a technology company. Meta. Meta is a technology company. We'll get to that later. Ben and I have been having a conversation. I want to take this to open source and open source technology and its importance to you. And Ben posited, first to me and then to many other people in our calls over the last couple weeks, that Meta has been the largest beneficiary of open source technology in the modern world.

1:36:23And I'm curious if you would agree with that and if you would comment on your relationship to open source. I think almost all of the major technology companies at this point are primarily using open source stacks. So, yeah, I mean, we wouldn't have been able to get built without open source. I think probably that's true for any new company that's been created since, like, I don't know, the late 1990s or something. For us, open source has been important and valuable. I mean, you were the first big company built on the LAMP stack. Yeah, yeah, no, and it's great. It makes it super easy to develop stuff quickly and iterate quickly.

1:37:05But we've also had an interesting relationship with this because sequentially, as a company, we came after Google. So Google was the first of the great companies that built this distributed computing infrastructure. So they came first. They were like, all right, let's keep this proprietary because it's a big advantage for us. And then we're like, all right, we need that too. But we built it. And then we're like, okay, not an advantage for us because Google already has that. So we might as well just make it open. And by making it open, then you basically get this whole community of people building around it.

1:37:36So it wasn't going to help us compete with Google for any of the stuff that we were doing to have that technology. But what we were able to do with things like Open Compute were get it to become the industry standard. So now you have all these other cloud service platforms that basically use Open Compute. And because of that, the supply chain is standardized around our designs, which means that it's way more supply, way cheaper to produce. we've saved billions of dollars, and the quality of the stuff that we get to use goes up. So, all right, that's like a win -win. But I think in order for this to work, we do a lot of open source stuff.

1:38:15We do a lot of closed source stuff. I'm not like a zealot on this. I think open source is very valuable, but I also think it sort of makes sense for us because of our position in the market. And the same for AI. I mean, around Lama. Okay, this is where we were going with this. Yeah, it's a similar deal. we want to make sure that we have access to a leading AI model. I think just like we want to build the hardware so that we can build the best social experiences for the next 20 years, I don't think that... For us, we've been through too much stuff with the other platforms to fully depend on anyone else.

1:38:53We're a big enough company at this point that we don't have to. We can build our own core technology platforms, whether that's going to be AR glasses or mixed reality or AI. So I think that's somewhat of an imperative for us to go do that. But, you know, these things are not like pieces of software that are monolithic. They're ecosystems. They get better when other people use them. So for us, there's a huge amount of good, and it philosophically lines up with where we are. We're like, I mean, look, I definitely, you know, firsthand have a lot of experiences. We were like trying to build stuff on mobile platforms, and the platforms are just like, nah, you can't build that.

1:39:32That's frustrating. Can we take a real quick detour? What's up? I really want to ask you something. We can take a detour. Okay, you took a detour. We're going to take a detour. Help us with our research here. The eve of the IPO. Yeah, this is quite a detour. Wait. Quite a detour. David, I'm really grabbing the wheel here. Is this connected, or did you just decide that it was your turn to talk? I'm sorry. I was really wound up. I know. Open source and AI. We are right in Mark's wheelhouse. I think it's related. I do. I really genuinely do. Facebook on mobile is HTML5. Uh -huh. In 2012. May 2012.

1:40:13Yeah. Yeah. I want to ask you what you were thinking going into the IPO with Facebook on mobile being HTML5. And what happened to you IPO at $100 billion market cap over the next three months. you have a 50 % drawdown, probably because of that. But I guess the related question to what we're talking about now is, how much is that informing your approach here with AI? I think it was a pretty 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.

1:40:55So now all of a sudden this app model comes along and it's like we have to build different ones for each phone. And you have to go through approval to get it shipped and we have to wait weeks before it can ship. It's like, this sucks. So we're like, all right, 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.

1:41:35And we're like, that's going to be, we're like, basically, whatever downside we are going to have from not having the most native thing, we're going to make up for in velocity and by having way more of our energy focused on one platform. Well, we were wrong. It turned out that having the native integration was actually critical for having the interactions feel good. And so we basically went through this period where we had to go rewrite our apps from scratch. And that coincided with mobile growing dramatically. And mobile, we didn't have any revenue because it may seem like it's pretty similar, but there's a very big difference.

1:42:17On desktop, you basically have the app and you have a column on the side that we could put ads. And on mobile, we needed to figure out what does it mean to put ads into the experience, right? Like, let's be clear, the feed ad had not been invented. Yeah, no, that was the thing that the team did. Yeah, and like advertisers have like specific formats that they like working with. And the idea that we were just going to be like, all right, now your ad is going to look like a feed story was a big challenge for advertisers. And the idea that now for people, you were going to have this organic feed that was the most important part of the product.

1:42:50And now we're just going to start putting ads in it. was a challenge for the people who were using the product. So we needed to figure that out, and we needed to get the apps to be better. And we basically took, I think it must have been like a year or something, where we were just like, look, we're going to pause feature development of the company because it's hard enough to do a rewrite. If you look at the history of the tech industry, there are all these examples like Netscape and all these things that they tried to do a rewrite. They needed to reestablish their technical platform, and they also tried to add features.

1:43:23They basically just never terminated. So that's a real risk when you're completely changing your underlying platform that you're going to miss it. I was like, all right, we've got to minimize the chance that that happens, so we're not going to ship any new features. We're just going to rewrite it, make it faster. But while we're doing this, basically mobile is growing, so the percent of our traffic that is monetizable is shrinking because web is basically shrinking and mobile's growing. And that's your only business model. Yeah, and I was like, all right, okay. And you're now recently quarterly reporting.

1:43:57You know, but the thing is, it was actually pretty clear what we needed to do. You know, I think strategically, a lot of the time, it's somewhat harder to know what to do when you're winning. Like when stuff is going well, it's like, what is the next move to like go from winning to winning more? But when you're losing, it's usually pretty clear what you have to do. And I think a lot of it is like, is just, do you have the pain tolerance to go do it? So a lot of this was like, all right, the team was like, okay,

1:44:27well, we're going public, and investors really aren't going to like this if we are not making money for a year and a half, and it's like, well, a year and a half is short in the grand scheme of things. Let's do this, and we did it, and it was a painful year and a half, and then we came out of that, and we were in great shape. So I think people inside the company had felt a lot better sooner because it was pretty clear to people that we were doing the right thing. And they knew that we were executing it in a responsible way and basically focused and we're doing the right thing. But I think it's actually when you have something that's working well and you're on one local hill and you need to jump to another hill.

1:45:11That's the stuff that's really culturally hard. but this one I think was it was not fun there have been a period a series of periods throughout the company that were not I don't know not the most fun periods but although that one in retrospect is you know looks pretty good in retrospect it's like not that bad it's like your market cap only got cut in half for a year and a half like great

1:45:38great yeah I'll take that now is a great time to thank good friend of the show, ServiceNow. We have talked to listeners about ServiceNow's amazing origin story and how they've been one of the best -performing companies the last decade, but we've gotten some questions from listeners about what ServiceNow actually does. So today, we are going to answer that question. Well, to start, a phrase that has been used often here recently in the press is that ServiceNow is the quote -unquote AI operating system for the enterprise. But to make that more concrete, ServiceNow started 22 years ago focused simply on automation.

1:46:18They turned physical paperwork into software workflows, initially for the IT department within enterprises. That was it. And over time, they built on this platform going to more powerful and complex tasks. They were expanding from serving just IT to other departments like HR, finance, customer service, field operations, and more. And in the process over the last two decades, ServiceNow has laid all the tedious groundwork necessary to connect every corner of the enterprise and enable automation to happen. So when AI arrived, well, AI kind of just by definition is massively sophisticated task automation.

1:46:57And who had already built the platform and the connective tissue within enterprises to enable that automation? ServiceNow. So to answer the question, what does ServiceNow do today? We mean it when they say they connect and power every department. IT and HR use it to manage people, devices, software licenses across the company. Customer Service uses ServiceNow for things like detecting payment failures and routing to the right team or process internally to solve it. Or the Supply Chain org uses it for capacity planning, integrating with data and plans from other departments to ensure that everybody's on the same page.

1:47:30No more swivel chairing between apps to enter the same data multiple times in different places. And just recently, ServiceNow launched AI agents so that anyone working in any job can spin up an AI agent to handle the tedious stuff, freeing up humans for bigger picture work. ServiceNow was named to Fortune's World's Most Admired Companies list last year and Fast Company's Best Workplace for Innovators last year. And it's because of this vision. If you want to take advantage of the scale and speed of ServiceNow in every corner of your business, go to servicenow .com slash acquired and just tell them that Ben and David sent you.

1:48:03Thanks, ServiceNow. So David asked, hey, can you help us with our research? Can I follow that thread that you just said, hey, that one wasn't so bad? There's been a lot of amazing things the company has done. There's also been a lot of criticism. If you were to be self -critical of your own company, of your own creation, of all the criticisms that have happened over the years, which do you believe is the most legitimate and why? I mean, there's so many things that we've messed up. that there are many criticisms that are legitimate. But if that was a year and a half mistake, I think, you know, one of the things I reflect on over the last, like, 10 years or so was, you know, the political environment just changed dramatically, right?

1:48:46It's like before 2016, there was, like, not a month that went by, except for maybe this IPO period, where the sentiment about the company was anything but positive. And then after 2016, after the election, basically there was not a month for a while where the sentiment about the company was positive. And I think so much of this stuff is correctly understanding your place in the world and in history. And so I think we talked about before how it's like, I think we understood that we are a technology company and that you have to be a technology company to build this kind of thing. I think we understood that we're not a social network company, we're a human connection company, and that will take different forms over time.

1:49:30The political environment, I think, I didn't have much sophistication around, and I think I just fundamentally misdiagnosed the problem. So I think that there was this basic challenge, and there were a lot of things. I don't want to simplify this too much. There were a lot of things that we did wrong, there were some things that we did right, But I think one of the things that I look back on regret is I think we accepted other people's view of some of the things that they were asserting that we were doing wrong or were responsible for that I don't actually think we were. And, you know, there were a lot of things we did mess up and we needed to fix.

1:50:15but I think that there's this view where when you're a company and someone says that there's an issue I think the right instinct is to take ownership for it maybe it's not all our thing but we're going to fully own this problem we're going to take responsibility for it, we're going to fix it but when it's a political problem I actually think a lot of the time sometimes there are people who are operating in good faith who are identifying a problem that wants something to be fixed, and there are people who are just looking for someone to blame. And I think to some degree, if you take responsibility for things because you think it's a corporate crisis, not a political crisis, and your view is like, okay, I'm going to take responsibility for all this stuff.

1:51:04People are basically blaming social media and the tech industry for all these different things in society. And if we're saying, okay, we're going to really do our part to go fix this, like this stuff. I know there were a bunch of people who just took that and were like, oh, you're taking responsibility for that? Let me like kick you for more stuff. And honestly, I think we should have been firmer about and clearer about which of the things we actually felt like we had a part in and which ones we didn't. And my guess is if the IPO was a year and a half mistake, I think that the political miscalculation was a 20 -year mistake.

1:51:39and so it started in 2016 and I think that we have been working super hard to fix a lot of issues and to figure out kind of what the right tone is for navigating what is a very kind of fraught political dynamic across both the country and multiplied across all these places around the world and I think we've sort of found our footing on like what the principles are like where we think we need to improve stuff but where you know where people make allegations about the impact of the tech industry or our company, which are just not founded in any fact, that I think we should push back on harder. And I think it's going to take another 10 years or so for us to kind of fully work through that cycle before our brand and all of that is back to kind of the place that it maybe could have been if I hadn't messed that up in the first place.

1:52:30So, but look, in the grand scheme of things, 20 years isn't that bad either. And we'll get through it. and I think we'll come out stronger. But I do think that is one of the kind of more interesting critiques that I think people get. And we get critiques on both sides on that. There are people who don't think we've taken enough responsibility. But I think certainly there's one line of critique, which is you kind of bought into too much of the stuff that you shouldn't have. And yeah, I think it's going to take us a long time to dig out of that. Do you have a reasonable framework at this point for like, Like, okay, here's the stuff where I feel like we actually do want to take responsibility for it.

1:53:09And here's the stuff where, like, no, that's not our fault. Yeah. I mean, at this point, I think a lot of this stuff has been studied. So, I mean, I don't want to go rehash all the different things. But I think at this point, there's been, like, years of academic research on a lot of these things. And, you know, part of the thing that's challenging is, and one of the things that we've learned, is we actually should be trying to support more academics and doing more of this research ahead of time. because when you get to a point where you're being accused of something, you're not super credible just standing up yourself and being like, I don't think we did this one.

1:53:41But what has worked over time is you do the research in advance and you get third -party academics, respected folks who get to debate all these different issues. And then it's like, oh, no, actually the evidence just does not show that social media is correlated with this kind of harm at all. so I think that like or it's you know so I think that's it kind of cuts both ways to me this brings up another topic we wanted to talk about with you and you just you know 20 years isn't that long I'm young you're young we all are this is the advantage of being a college dropout founder when you start when you're 19 hopefully we have more than 20 years and hopefully you have like Buffett duration Yeah, hopefully.

1:54:28You set up the company in a, especially at the time, truly unique way, where you can operate the company and take that approach. Do you mean super voting shares? Super voting shares is the technical aspect. I think there are a bunch of technical aspects to it that we're not going to get into in this conversation. But effectively, you can take that perspective in a way that if you are a CEO, non -founder, you know, without a structure that 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.

1:55:10So 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? 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 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 It's like, this is a great project.

1:55:45It'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. But I didn't, like, know how to think in terms of, you know, like, long -term financial plans or... Like, make the case to them why it would be worth more than a billion. Yeah, yeah. Or just like, look, we're doing this for the long term. We're not planning on selling the company. So it's like, without having made that case, it was understandable that basically Yahoo comes around. a lot of people, it's like, this is like all their startup dreams come true.

1:56:14You got to take this offer. Because I just wasn't in a place where I had the sophistication to basically articulate a lot of the stuff around where we were going longer term. It probably wasn't super confidence inspiring to them when I was like, hey, I think we should turn this down because we're going to do this. So after that, I was like, all right, well, I don't want to get fired from my own company for wanting to build it. So let's try to set up a governance structure that makes it somewhat harder to do that. So, wow. Learning through suffering.

1:56:56Wow. And being very cash -generated very early, such that you had a very real going concern on your hands and you just didn't need to cut off your arm and sell it to someone in order to build your business. Like, I think this is a fundamentally misunderstood thing about Facebook the startup. It is the prototypical startup. You are the iconic startup founder. Of this century. And there's a lot of people that want to start a startup for a lot of the glamorous reasons of starting a startup. You hated being a startup and wanted to stop being a startup, as fast as possible and be a going concern. Yeah, I mean, I think we're having a lot more fun now.

1:57:45If I get to work on all the stuff, it's awesome. What is your advice to all these founders who sort of romanticize the idea of starting a company and kind of raising all this money? Obviously, starting a company is not bad, right? I mean, I think that there's different schools of thought on how to do it. I think some people think, okay, I want to go start a company, so I'm going to go dive into this idea. And I just think that that's a little bit dangerous. because there's this issue, which is you have to be able to be nimble and pivot around until you can figure out what works. I mean, part of the reason why I didn't think Facebook was going to be the company early on was because when I was in school, I built like 12 different things that were just things that I wanted to exist.

1:58:23And I was like, all right, this is fun. Okay, let's build another thing. It's like, okay, this one's fun. People are still using that. I'll help upkeep this one. But I had a bunch of other ideas for stuff I was going to build too. So I didn't know how to think about what a company was going to be. And so I think there's something about maintaining flexibility that's helpful. Once you hire a bunch of people, it's a lot easier when you can just have meetings in your own head about what direction you want to go in. And there's a lot less pride and people dug in when you're just like, okay, I'm going to change direction.

1:58:57It's like people haven't invested their ego in like, no, we were going in this direction and now I must be convinced. It's like, nah. So I do think that that's a thing where you want to keep things lean and be able to do that. And that's one of the reasons why we tried to get the company back to being whatever the leanest version of a large company is that we can be. But I do think that there's something to that where it's like, obviously, it's not super fun not having the resources to do what you want to do. but I think it also is problematic to have more people working on something than you should have for the stage that it's at because then the people who are working on it don't have the agency to actually make the changes and do the things that they need to, which is less fun, and then you can't attract the best people to go work on those things because it's less fun.

1:59:46So I do think you just have to dial it right. You're spending a gajillion dollars on reality labs. It's a technical term. it's not making that much money. So I'm going to play Mark back to you of it's not appropriate to have all these people and resources working on things for more than the stage warrants. I'm being a little facetious here, but I'm curious why you categorize it differently. I mean, well, I think some of the stuff by the time you're at the scale that we're at is also just about like, what do you want to do over the next 10 to 20 years? And what do you think are going to be important?

2:00:19And we were talking about making your own luck and all that and how, So I think there are some broad strokes that we can have a sense of where things are going. I'm pretty sure glasses and kind of like holographic presence and AR is going to be a completely ubiquitous product. It's just like everyone who had a phone before replaced it with a smartphone, and then a lot of more people got smartphones. If all we get is all the people in the world who already have glasses upgrading to glasses that have AI in them, then this is already going to be one of the most successful products in the history of the world.

2:00:51And I think it's going to go a lot further than that. So I know there's that. There is the thing about controlling our own destiny. It's strategically valuable. We did this calculation or estimate at some point where it's like, how much money do we lose from our core family of apps to the various taxes that the platforms have to when they tell us we can't run the ad business the way that we think we should be able to, when they tell us we can't ship certain products so that way people use the things less or like them less. And it's hard to exactly estimate it, but I think we might be like twice as profitable if we own the platform or something.

2:01:29So I think from that perspective, that's worth a lot. Just from like a pure like dollars perspective, which is not primarily how I come at this stuff, but even like now I've learned a thing or actually since the Yahoo days. And now I at least am able to like, I might not be able to convince all the investors that we should be investing to the extent that we are in Reality Labs if I didn't control the company, but at least I can sort of articulate a case for why I am confident that it's going to be good over time. But for me, it's always been way more about the product experience and what you can enable and build.

2:02:04And one of the shifts, and this is sort of like a values shift over time, is one of the things that some of the early Oculus guys used to say to me that there's a difference between building good things and awesome things. And good is good, right? It's helpful, it's useful, it's things that people use on a day -to -day basis because it adds something to their lives. But awesome is different. Awesome is uplifting and inspiring and just leads you to just be way more optimistic about the future, and is just like this uplifting thing about humanity. And so I think a lot of what we've done with social media so far is very good.

2:02:56We've built these products. More than 3 billion people use them on a near daily basis. It's like 3 .3 billion on a daily basis. Yeah, and they use it because it is useful in their life. in all these different ways. Obviously, people vary. People use it for different things. But it's useful. And it helps people stay connected. It helps people build businesses. It helps people form communities. It's good. There aren't that many people on a day -to -day basis who get out of bed and are like, fuck yeah, social media. I mean, that's not like... So, I kind of think for the next, for my next stage, For the next stage of the company, the next 15 years, I want us to build more things that are awesome in addition to things that are good.

2:03:52And I think that they both matter. But to me, this is like a little bit of the next stage of what I want our company to stand for and be. And so I think a lot of the Reality Lab stuff that we're doing is going to be in that bucket. a lot of the AI stuff that we're doing I think is going to be in that bucket. There are a bunch of things in the apps that are going to be in that bucket too. New apps too. But I don't know. I think that there's just something that's fundamentally pretty good about that. And maybe it's also just where I am in my life. I like to think I'm young. I'm a little older. But it's like, I do think that at this point, it's not just a meta thing.

2:04:38also you know in my like personal life a lot of what i personally value is doing things that are inspiring with people who i find inspiring all right and now so there's the personal version of this it's like i get to work on you know interesting science problems with like priscilla and my wife and like and a bunch of awesome people you know i get to design shirts with like some of the best fashion designers in the world, right? It's like I am... Statues. Yeah, sculpture of my wife. Bring back the Roman tradition of designing sculptures of people you love. I'm not at all being facetious. Like, it's really cool.

2:05:18No, but I mean, I think Daniel Arsham is like a really talented guy. And I was like, that's a person who I'd love to work with on something. Let's go find a project. You know, building... You know, I have one of my side projects is, you know, we have this cattle ranch in Kauai. and I'm trying to see if we can raise the highest quality beef in the world. And there's like all this stuff. It starts with like, it's awesome. We got this steer, Chunk. He's like, he's just the man. He's the man. We're having a hard time keeping him on the ranch because every time we put him in a steel enclosure and he sees a female cow, he busts through the steel enclosure.

2:06:01but I feel like that's the kind of bull that you want to make the highest quality beef in the world.

2:06:10And we're just working with, you know, trying to do really high quality, awesome things with awesome people. That's like, if that's what I get to do for the next 15 or 20 years, then like, it's going to be a good 15 or 20 years. Was there a moment, like, what changed? Like, when did this become your priority and why? I can't, it feels so radical that it, how could it have possibly been gradual? Or was this just like Mark all the time and we just couldn't see the real Mark? I don't know. I think that there might've been something around the way the company shifted in operations around COVID. I mean, it's like the COVID, like all these tech companies went remote temporarily and it was an interesting period to just like get some more time, like a step back.

2:06:57I'm a pretty introverted person And I do think it's, I need to be careful where like, I get a lot of value and energy and ideas from being around other people, but I also need time with myself. And with COVID, I kind of got that. And it was a time of reflection where I was able to think about this stuff. And we were also going through this very difficult political time in the country. And our company was at the center of a lot of those things. So that was a cause of a bunch of reflection. And then I think that a bunch of the things that we'd spun up earlier, but at smaller scale, right? So the Reality Lab stuff that we started in 2014, really.

2:07:39The FAIR stuff around, you know, fundamental AI research.

2:07:462012, 13? 2012, 13, sometime around then. These things, they kind of got started, and they were growing. and it kind of reached this moment which is like, are we going to double down on this and do this? Or are we going to kind of like do this as a hobby? And I was like, no, I think we should do this. I mean, this is going to be a really important part of what we do. And we had to make a really important set of decisions where we knew it was going to be really painful to go double down on those things and build out the AI infrastructure that we needed to and scale up some of the reality lab stuff.

2:08:22and I knew that a lot of the investors would hate it, at least in the short term, before it's clearly the right thing to do.

2:08:33What I didn't know was that at the time, I thought they were going to not like it, but I thought it was going to be okay because I didn't think there was also going to be a recession at the same time. So that, like, really, it's like, I mean, look, like, you learn who you are through challenges, right? It's like we had, like, a really, you know, it's like, okay, Like, losing half of your market cap is quaint compared to losing 80 % of your market cap or whatever it was, right? But so, I mean, these are all intentional decisions, right? It's like, I mean, there are a lot of conversations that we had which are like, should we go forward with this?

2:09:07And the answer that I came out with is yes. This is what I believe in. I think this is going to be important for the world. I think it's going to work over time. We're no stranger to going through painful periods. in some ways it makes the company better. Let's do it.

2:09:32We're starting to enter, looking at the clock, like conclusion lightning round territory. I've had one lurking in the back of my head. It makes sense to me that you would rebrand the company something that is not Facebook, given how broad the family of apps was, that you've got, let's imagine you were going to rebrand it today. You've got AI going on, you've got AR going on, you've got VR going on. Would you pick the name Meta if you were going to rename the company today? 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 if Facebook is continuing to grow and importance in the world, which I think a lot of people don't appreciate and is kind of mind -boggling at the scale that it's at.

2:10:23But the others, I mean, we went through a period where it's like we had Facebook and a handful of small apps. And now we have like four apps that have a billion people or more using them, hopefully in the next few years, five with threads if that continues scaling. And 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 the challenges that we were having, the political brand challenges, different things.

2:11:01And a lot of people were proposing that from the perspective of running away from the Facebook brand. They were like, oh, well, does the Facebook brand have issues? Do we need a new brand? And I was like, we don't run away from that. It might make sense one day to not have Facebook be the lead brand for the company because we do so many different things, but I'm only going to do this when we come up with a brand that is going to be evocative of the future that we're trying to build because we run towards something. We don't run away from things. And when we got to Meta, then I was like, all right, we're here.

2:11:36And it was around the time when we were doubling down on the investment and where there was all the controversy. And it's like, look, if we're doing this, we're going to lean into this and we're going to do it. So let's do it. And if I were to make the case to you, I feel the core competency of meta is you are able to discover products in the world. You have great ideas, you work on them, you discover interesting products. And you, Mark, are not someone who wants to define yourself by anything. You want to have your hands on a bunch of great controls and maximize your degrees of freedom, see where the world's going, and then have the best freaking spaceship possible to go maneuver your way over there.

2:12:18It seems like I would pick a brand that almost doesn't pigeonhole me into a specific future. I might be looking for something that's more like, look, I want to maximize my maneuverability. Yeah. I get it. but I don't know that's just I we align around a vision and a mission of what we're trying to do and we run towards it that's always been how we've operated yeah and in many ways doing what I just suggested would kind of be running it's like well we don't believe in it that much and you're like no yeah no I mean we're a company that like puts a flag down around what we're doing and we're going to go do it it's like put a wall in front of us there's going to be a mark shaped hole in the wall

2:13:08speaking of lightning rounds and mark shape holes you are accelerating what used to be your annual challenges I mean when we were all kids we didn't know each other I mean I was so inspired you would do your annual challenges you would post about them and I was like wow that's like pretty damn cool and then we all get a little older and we all have kids on the stage now and we all have companies on the stage now and there's... Some large, some small? The demands on your time, like it for me especially, I think lots of people, that's like, that space gets sucked. And you have expanded it. How? What do you mean?

2:13:54Well, you used to do annual challenges and I feel like you're now doing weekly challenges. You're designing t -shirts, you're making sculptures, I feel like you have a week on the challenge. I'm trying to do inspiring things. Yeah, I don't know.

2:14:10I'm also really competitive. Who's your competition for this? What do you mean? I was just thinking about other things that I'm doing. I'm like, what have I started doing? I got into all these more extreme sports and fighting and stuff. I don't know. I mean, we face a lot of competition and a lot of different aspects of what we do. There's the social media competitors. There's the platform competitors. I think Apple is a bigger competitor than people realize. They kind of think, hey, they're doing a different type of thing. But I don't know. I think over the next 10, 15 years, I think that kind of like battle over, ideological battle over what should the architecture be of the next set of platforms?

2:14:55Are they going to be the closed integrated model that Apple has always done? Which, again, I mean, like, there's multiple good ways to build things, right? So I think if you look at the different generations of computing, PCs, mobile, they've all had sort of a closed integrated version and an open version. and the thing that I think there's just a ton of recency bias around is because iPhone basically won I know that there are more Android phones out there but iPhone is sort of like the intellectual leader and by far has all the rounds Let's take it as it can see I think there's the recency bias and probably almost everyone here has an iPhone and I think because of the recency bias there's sort of this view that's like oh no, this is just the superior way to do things But I don't actually think that's a given.

2:15:51In the PC era, Windows with the open ecosystem was the leader. And part of my goal for the next 10, 15 years, the next generation of platforms, is to build the next generation of open platforms and have the open platforms win. And I think that that's going to lead to a much more vibrant tech industry. Now, there are advantages of doing a closed and integrated model. I think Apple will have a place for sure. I expect them to be our primary competitor. And I think it will not be just a product competition. I think it's like a, in some ways, very deeply values -driven and ideological competition around what the future of the tech industry should be and how open these platforms, whether it's things like Llama and AI or the glasses or different things, should be for developers, like an individual, someone getting started in their dorm room like me to not have to ask for permission to go build the next set of awesome things.

2:16:52I've got a closing question here. Please. Thank you. So we have a lot of builders in the audience tonight, a lot of founders. 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? Yeah, I don't know. I mean, just do something that you care about. And I mean, if you're trying to run our strategy, try to learn as quickly as you can.

2:17:37But 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. Different things have clearly worked for other companies.

2:17:54I don't know. One day my daughter, we took her to a Taylor Swift concert and she was like, you know, Dad, I kind of want to be like Taylor Swift when I grow up. Hell yeah. I was like, but you can't. That's not available to you. I was like but and she thought about it and she's like alright when I grow up I want people to want to be like August Chan Zuckerberg and I was like hell yeah hell yeah so I think that that's yeah I don't know I think it's like look learn from other people's successes and failures but do your own thing I love that love that well that is the perfect place to leave things we made you something that you already have a very amazing well designed shirt I hope you have room in your life for more than one I do I used to only wear one type of shirt now I've moved on so David and I made you a custom one -of -one shirt that represents tonight.

2:19:12Thank you. Awesome. It is size Zuck. So no one else can, you know, they can never be made again. And we've got these coordinates on the back. The first one... GPS coordinates. GPS coordinates. The first one represents Kirkland House, where you wrote the first line of code for Facebook. And the second one is the Chase Center. Awesome. So thank you for joining us here tonight. Thank you for joining us. Thank you.

2:20:15Everyone, thank you so much. Thank you so much. Huge thank you to Mark Zuckerberg. Woo! Thank you all for making something tonight, something that we will never, ever forget. Ever. We have some thank yous. We have a whole lot of thank yous. Making tonight happen has taken our entire summer, it's taken the entire summer of dozens of people, there were about a thousand people working on tonight and i just want to give them all a big hand thank you so much uh thank you to mark and the entire meta executive team that we got to talk to to prep for this daniel and the spotify team uh emily and lauren from bloomberg and the circuit jensen myleen janine everyone from the whole nvidia team to hermes for dressing us tonight thank you quite presentable.

2:21:03To our families and our lovely wives, thank you so much. Most importantly, thank you to our wives. And of course, thank you to Jamie Dimon, JPMorgan Chase, JPMorgan Payments for making this whole evening possible. It's been a dream partnership. We are so grateful. Listeners, we will see you next time. And thank you, Mike Taylor! Woo!

2:21:38Thank you so much.

2:22:04Everybody's talking Nobody's listening These days I feel lost, man Lost in opinions Everybody's fighting Nobody's winning Take me home Cause I don't know what's going on in the world I'm living Everybody break, break, breaking up the dinner Oh, baby Through all the smoke I need to know Who got the truth? Is it you? You? You? Yeah, who got the truth now? Is it you? Is it you? Is it you? Sit me down Say it straight Another story on the way Who got the truth now? Not here for the cheap talk It slip -flopped like a seesaw Not free under these laws Now the world see what we saw People wonder what to do now It took a body cam to get the truth out Hit the streets trying to move out We got so much to lose now Everybody break, break, breaking up the dinner Oh baby Through all the smoke I need to know Who got the truth?

2:23:21Yeah Is it you, you, you, you, you Who got the truth now, now Is it you, you, you? Set me down, say it straight Another story on the way Who got the truth now? Who got the truth? Yeah! A choir live From the J Center

2:23:48Who got the truth? Yeah! Yeah! Let's get it.