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

0:02Hey, so I know this isn't like the best time to bring this up, but Did you bring the thumb drive with the who got the truth MP3 for the sound crew? No, why would I bring a thunt? I did email that It's probably like three weeks ago though Well There's 6,000 people out there waiting to hear it Look, the team is really great. I'm sure they'll think of something.

1:30We didn't need the thumb drive. We didn't need the thumb drive Welcome to this episode of acquired the podcast about Welcome to acquired live at the chase center Wow Wow, this is unbelievable. Thank you all for coming. We have a very, very special guest and surprise to welcome us all here tonight. The CEO of JP Morgan Chase, Jamie Diamond. Hello, acquired listeners. Welcome to the Chase Center and to acquired live. I'm Jamie Diamond, chairman and CEO of JP Morgan Chase.

3:01I'm happy to kick off the show tonight and welcome all of you to one of my favorite arenas. It's been a great partnership all year between JP Morgan Payments and acquired, storytelling and educating about some of the greatest companies in the world. For many of them, just like many of you in the crowd, we're thrilled to call you friends and partners of the firm. Sorry I couldn't be there in person tonight, but I hope everyone enjoys the show. Ben and David, over to you. Thanks Jamie.

3:31Well, a special shout out and a huge thank you to JP Morgan and the whole payments team, especially Dustin Sedgwick, the CMO of JP Morgan Payments. A long time listener who's been like really the driving force behind this whole thing and his truly world class marketing team. Hannah, Nick, Vinnie, Amy and Carly, David and I for the first time really now understand what it is like to have a glimpse of what a sort of real built out team would look like and not just two guys in their basement.

4:00Thank you for an amazing partnership. Ben and I did not put this on ourselves tonight. So what are we doing tonight? Well, as you all know, Mark Zuckerberg is in the house. So tonight will actually have three acts, not one. Mark will be our third act after intermission. But we've got a lot of great segments. In our first two acts here, some more fun surprises sprinkled in in the middle.

4:33So, David, what is the format? Like, is this an acquired episode? Well, amazingly, shockingly, we tell you all all the time that when we make an episode, we sit in our houses in our studios. We record all day for nine hours. We turn that nine hours into three or four or five hours that you all hear. And we thought, yeah, that's probably not going to play here. But you keep asking us, you keep emailing us. So we want to put this request this question to bed. Once and for all, here tonight, here is what you are missing in the full nine hours of an acquired recording session. I'm gonna try to do a better job getting air flow in here while we're recording because I get dumber at the end of episodes or at least I get like, I should get exhausted and I think part of it's the lack of oxygen. It's really hot in here. And we've been going for five and a half hours. Let me finish this thing and then we'll take a bathroom break.

5:33All right, similarly, I thought, or some more champagne. Sorry about that. Hey, Blue Angels. Great. Only nine minutes and 40 seconds of bullshitting before we actually started. It's pretty good for us. It's a new record. Is this two in the weeds? Let me take a stab at making it more loosey-goosey. I think I can simplify all this. We gotta advance the story more. The pacing's too slow. Oh, this doesn't make any sense. Okay, great. We can cut all that then. Cut that. Just cut it. Let's cut all that. Cut that. Skip it.

6:27Let's skip it. Yeah, let's skip it and keep moving. Uh, okay. I think one of us has our timelines wrong. We've been so stop and start. Do you think we should just restart the whole thing? We're 35 to 40 minutes into this episode and nothing has happened. I think I would actually feel better and more in the flow. Because right now I'm like, what did we cover? What did we not? I think what you're saying is replace all of what we did before. I'm gonna go re-record at least the first part, maybe that whole thing. I don't recall exactly how we started, though.

6:56I don't remember the last thing you said. I don't either. I think I've been in erupting. No, I think it's great. Please keep doing it. No, no. I don't find it annoying at all. No, the goal is make the best stuff. I actually quite like how this is puzzling in. You're gonna stop making that face. Oh, beef was that making your face? And take it without the arm.

7:30Totally. Totally. Totally. Totally. Totally. Totally. Go for it. Dude, it is so hard to keep all this information in our heads. Like, I feel like I'm like out of RAM. What's going on? I just heard a beep on your end. Okay, well, that wasn't one of their best episodes. That is how the sausage is made. I think that actually is a good way to end it. So... Are you done with DMR?

8:13I'm done. Thank you all for indulging us. I was not sure if that would play in an arena. This is what Steven has to deal with every month. So obviously not only are we not doing that, we literally can't. There's just fire marshal issues. So David, what are we doing? Well tonight we thought we are going to take the acquired playbook and we're going to throw it out the window and we are going to throw a party instead.

8:47It is a celebration of technology, of the San Francisco Bay Area, of, woo, San Francisco. Yeah. Some of the most important businesses of our time, and most importantly, it's a celebration of you all. We say you all on the show. Usually you're not here. You're here. So tonight, you know, normally we study the past, often the far past. Tonight, we're gonna kind of look at the present. It's a little unacquired, but like, you know, once every two and a half years or however often we do a live show, we want to indulge. So, yeah, we're gonna indulge tonight. Indeed we are. So, to start, we wanted to spend a couple minutes at the top of the show here in our first act. Just giving you all an update on the state of acquired, it has been quite a year for us. You and I have lived a lot of life in one year. We both had kids.

9:47The Wall Street Journal wrote about us. And we've experienced some pretty amazing growth. Yeah. And so we were thinking, like, you know, David kind of pitched this to me. And I'm like, what would we stand up and give a keynote on the state of the union of acquired? That's not. That's not feel right. But a conversation would be great if we were the right person to have a conversation with. And we were like, who is a big acquired listener? Kind of gets what we're all about. Everyone in the audience going to be like, oh, yeah, that person's one of us. And is, like, you know, the world expert on podcasting. Fortunately, for us and all of you tonight, we're here to welcome all the way from Stockholm, the CEO and founder of Spotify, Daniel Eck. Daniel! Wow, this is pretty insane, guys. I think this probably ought to be like the biggest recording of a podcast in the world. It's a little like an echoey studio.

11:05Yeah, yeah, you guess should use this as the studio every time I think Well, you've been after us to do more video for years That is true. Here you are. It's gonna be a video for sure All right, well love that love that and you know, it's it's it's really amazing for me to be here and just see you know this and all of you guys success or remember listening to you guys as a fan I think starting 2019 and see that we're now five years later, from a small base going to something like this. It's pretty remarkable to see. And I don't know about you guys, but I thought maybe to commemorate this moment, it'd be pretty fun. I know you don't want to tell your success, so I thought maybe I could do that for you. So maybe we can have a look at some of the amazing stats and achievements you guys have accomplished.

12:02Well, thanks. Yeah, I know you pulled some data. We pulled some data. This is the updated version up here of the kind of classic acquired chart that we've been showing, which basically shows from when we started in 2015, the kind of like organic doubling year over year over year all the way through today. And basically, since we don't market the show or we don't do any paid marketing, the only way the show grows is we make an episode, a friend tells, you know, someone tells their friend about it. And on average, Every listener tells one other listener every year Hey, you should listen and that person sticks and that's kind of the whole thing Yeah, I mean, it's pretty remarkable and on Spotify alone you guys have now done over five million hours and it tripled in the last year pretty remarkable, right? So so we did the math or Ben did the math as usually does

13:01I believe that is over 400 years of acquired. That was... We feel like it was 400 years making the episodes in the last year, but that was listened to in the past year. Yeah, what is the... It's the Nintendo one, the longest one you guys have done?

13:16I think Microsoft volume two was our longest single episode. But thank you for pulling this. So the way this came to be is we ask Daniel, hey, you have access to data that all podcasts are sort of dream of. What is the most interesting insights you can kind of pull out of it? And the thing that's the craziest to me about this chart is that even though acquired, here's how many downloads an episode gets, isn't like celebrity status. Like it's not the craziest biggest in the world.

13:44because of the volume of our episodes, we all spend a lot of time together. Thank you for lending us your ears for all of those moments, because that's what that chart is to me, is all the time we spend together. Yeah, but what's really cool for me, too, is just seeing the fandom of the show. So one thing is obviously seeing the total numbers, but also seeing the fandoms. And you guys added more than 250,000 followers.

14:10And that trip will last year, too. So it's over 250,000 followers on Spotify loan now on the choir show, which, again, is pretty remarkable to see that kind of growth. There's two, I'm like a reformed venture capitalist, so I can't help but point out things on charts. There's two things that are interesting about that chart. One is we've had ridiculous subscriber growth on Spotify. I mean, it's just been You guys entering the industry has created a ton of net new audience of people who did not listen to podcasters before the second thing is If you pull the chart back up again, you can see the Wall Street Journal article in May in that insane You know, I know we keep talking about it, but this literally has never happened in the decade of acquired where a single Event caused a kink in the chart and that we see you guys see it it's crazy

15:04Well, it's word of mouth in a new way. But the other part that was really cool to me as I was looking through the data, I kind of expected this to be sort of an English language thing only, maybe the US, maybe UK, that kind of thing. But you guys have truly grown worldwide. So, you know, look at some of this stuff, like you have Mexico growing five times, Hong Kong, Israel, Singapore.

15:30A quiet is global. So it's amazing to see here in San Francisco that we got 6,000 people in one place, but I'm pretty sure you guys should take this on the road and we'll see if we can make it in other places too. When you see the whole arc of the show tonight, I think you'll say, yeah, you can't take that on the road. Yeah. It could be. Well, you know, it's maybe a timing question. You guys should be like the new rock stars that tore around. That would be the great thing to do. And you know, it's... I want to really...

16:00kind of maybe take the moment here and ask you guys how all of this happened. And by way of context, just to put this in perspective. In 2019, when we got into podcasts, the world around podcasts listening and Spotify, there's a few million people listening to this. And you mentioned this, but like our goal was to sort of broaden this whole medium.

16:23And today, there's over 150 million people listening to podcasts on Spotify. And obviously, your show is huge success. And something that attracts people to the medium, because it's both pretty broad these days, but also very, very deep. What do you think contributed to that success? Well, you guys entering the industry, for sure. But I think you hit on it with broad, but when Ben and I started this, We thought, you know, we used to talk about what our tam was. We were venture capitalists. We're like, what's the tam for acquired? Not that we even thought about it as a business or a product, but we're like, I don't know, maybe there's... What's the population of students in business schools out there? Maybe that's our tam. And then we were like, well, I don't know, maybe it's a little bigger than that. Like maybe it's, you know, everybody who ever wanted to go to business school or was interested in like, okay, like, what's that cap out of that?

17:20A million people, maybe a million, a million felt like RTM. And what's happened to us, and I'm curious, I think you guys have probably seen the same thing, is that even though we think we're super nerds and we tell these very esoteric stories, they're just great stories. And people of all types want to listen to them. Right.

17:41and the growth of the medium. We just have this ridiculous tailwind where we got lucky and picked right in 2015. We stayed with it. We got better at the craft. But it turns out people are super interested thanks to all the wireless headphones that exist now. I don't know, it's just this weird cultural norm that's kind of come into fruition, that it's okay to spend hours and hours and hours with someone in your ears talking about something that is interesting to them. And I just don't actually think that was a thing in the early 2010s.

18:09So, one of the things you obviously have done is, you know, added video to the format and this is my plug of hopefully getting you guys to finally add video to Spotify as well. But, what do you think is next for the show when it comes to that? Like, what do you see? The big innovation of a quad will be in the future. So, I think our total dressable market is at least 10 times bigger than it currently is today with our exact same product if we just keep Doing the work and making the product better and shipping one episode a month and the question is like How much more can we do without killing the golden goose like how do you keep the main thing actually? Can I turn this back on you like? You have massively expanded what Spotify does since the original vision How should you use your music on Facebook? Yeah, how should founders think about like

19:02The only reason that you are allowed to exist is because you're really good at this one core thing. But everyone, you should do other things. Well, I mean, I think it starts with your audience, right? And knowing your audience. So like, for instance, we launched audiobooks about a year ago. But the sort of untold story about that audiobooks launches. What happened in Germany is all the record companies started uploading audiobooks to the service.

19:28So they started hacking the system for all these other things. And when they ran out of that, they actually started uploading podcasts. So podcasts turned out to be the easier medium for us to start with, but eventually we added sort of audiobooks too. So I think, you know, most amazing things tend to start with people kind of suggesting things, or maybe even doing things. So be interested to kind of like figure out what people are doing in and around acquired already. And that will probably be your sort of adjacency.

19:56I think the other, you know, video, Ben and I talk a lot. We'll talk more about video throughout the evening here. You know, we've just always sort of been of the belief of like nobody wants to sit and watch us in our studios as talking heads going, yack, yack, yack. But we've started to ask the question of like, is there, for certain companies we cover, is there a rich, visual tapestry that we could do at the same level?

20:24that we try and create an audio tap history. It's an absolute crime that we did four hours on the entire multi-hundred-year history of Hermes and it was just audio. But it was an amazing show, though. Thank you. But audio is this like magic thing where I'm going to drag my, we're going to end up doing more video, but I'm going to drag my feet kicking and screaming all the way there because I feel very passionately that the reason that the caliber of person in this room with all the busy things that you have in your life, the reason that you're open to spending all this time with us, is because we don't take your full undivided attention. You can run, you can mow the lawn, you can drive, you can, you know, everything that everyone does while they listen to acquired, I like, I remain unconvinced that we would work as a four hour video product. Yeah, I mean, look,

21:14I don't know to be honest, I think this is probably the biggest thing that surprised me is that the world just keeps evolving constantly. So you talked about video and on Spotify it's been a huge growth.

21:28thing. I would have said to you as well, people probably mostly, why would you want to watch any video? But I think younger consumers, especially, they don't know what the difference is. They just want to feel close repressions to the person. And I mean, we saw it already with the bloopers, right? It's like, this is fun. What you guys are doing, and people have a relationship to you guys too, hence why so many people are showing up here tonight. And I think video is just a way to express that, whether or not they're watching the full four hours or whether they're diving in and out over a particular type of segment. I think just giving the consumer the choice is sort of one of the big things. And that's kind of what we're leaning into as well is just allowing the creator and the consumer to more directly interact in more and novel ways. It's funny. Your question was what's next for acquired?

22:23We're going to do a normal episode after this. After tonight, that normal episode probably will focus on a Menlo Park based technology company. And one of the lessons that we're already starting to learn from that. We can take that back now. This is live. This is live. It's just not holding the current state of things and vision of what you are too tightly.

22:52You've learned a lot from Mark over the years. You all have been very close. Spotify started on Facebook. And here you are, you're the biggest podcasting platform in the world. So you didn't hold on to that vision too tightly. Can I turn that into a question? Please. I wanted to leave you some space before we ask the question. So a great partnership is all about.

23:22Do you remember so David and I have one way of growing which is make a good episode and hope people tell their friends? Do you remember in the early days of Spotify when you figured out? Oh Facebook is gonna be this unbelievable channel for us Yeah, I mean it's it's I think it starts like so many other things I think Mark and I would just struck this sort of friendship and we started talking about You know, the little told story is if I remember this correctly, I think Mark, even pre-Facebook, was trying to do a music startup. Oh yeah. And then he was like, yeah, this feels like a difficult thing. So I think he's like, I think pretty much every great entrepreneur in the Valley tried to do a music startup. And so he was definitely passionate about it. And then his idea obviously was,

24:16a social user product. And you know, we started talking about it. In the beginning, he started like he wanted mostly Spotify to be more social. And I kind of said, well, I don't know that. Do you remember how you got introduced? Cause Spotify was not like...

24:29Spotify the way what it is today. Yeah pillar of the world. Yeah, well, I got introduced to Mark through Sean Parker And so Sean kind of said to do suck like hey, you got to meet this entrepreneur from Sweden and I remember like Zack at the time was living in a very small house and we went for a barbecue at his house. This is probably 2008 or 2009, like one of those things. And then we kind of struck a friendship and we started jamming on various ideas around how to make music more social. And you weren't even live in the US yet, I don't think. We definitely were in live. So this sort of secret of Spotify was we sort of seeded one account at a time to get a bunch of influencers to kind of like it.

25:16Sean, in particular, he kind of used it as a social currency. So everyone came to him to kind of try to get all the invites. Oh, man. The currency of the Spotify invites. Yeah. It was a big, big thing for quite a few years before we launched where it was kind of the secret thing if you were in the club or if you weren't. And anyway, he got marked on it.

25:41And 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? That's just kind of the main thing. When can I get it? How can I do it? And yeah, then we started jamming around like what a social music product ought to be. And we had this sort of idea, wouldn't it be cool, sort of like with...

26:04You know, I secure at the time where you had the status updates like wouldn't be cool To be able to check out what your friends were listening to and we kind of got to work together build that product and coincided it with the Spotify us launch And this was when newsfeed was really young, right? So there was like, you'd be scrolling through your newsfeed and it would be giving 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've even seen it in a while. Maybe I just, it's still there. It's still there. Okay.

26:50But 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 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 audio books, but I don't think like, oh, it's a social listening. So at what point did you kind of like like let go of that precious idea and say, maybe the social is like important, but not that important. Well, 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

27:47While 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 so you see people do it at parties where you can literally join someone's jam and you can sort of all cue 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

28:29You 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, you know, definitely playing with the social concepts and trying to get that right.

28:48But I think, you know, 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. Oh yeah, you know. We remember that era. Yeah. I was at, uh, it was like north of 10% of Facebook's revenue at IPO was from. Was it? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. What, um, I mean, this is all fun history. I'm curious, though.

29:16We're going to talk to him 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. What have you taken from him that you brought in this modify and how you run the company?

29:38Many things, and I've learned so much from him and the rest of the team at Metta as well, but I think specifically from him, you know, he's probably the best learner I've ever seen. You know, you can have a conversation with him about a topic. I 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 and 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

30:30What 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 and 20 people still get people to be heard like he's he's very very good at that stuff and 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 a little bit more pointed? You are a kind person, you are a soft spoken person, but you are a fierce competitor. So we haven't told you this. When we interviewed you for 18, 24 months ago in Stockholm, I'd never been to Sweden before. I don't think you had either. And we left with thoughts just like,

31:26what a lovely country, what lovely people, Daniel is 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 is built Spotify. And 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?

31:55Well, I mean the rule I have with Mark is I don't try to go into a competition with them 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, well, it was the last time he sort of tore his ACL when someone, you know, rather than giving up.

32:21I feel like an end 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. If I were to characterize why Spotify worked, it feels like there's an incredible amount of tenacity and a willingness to run into a problem that a lot of people had tried and failed at before, but there is also this, you kind of buy 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.

32:50That's pretty much spot on, to be honest. That's one of the things we talk about a lot, that I don't say that much, but Gustav, who's backstage here, who's our product officer and CTO is...

33:04We say talk is cheap. Most people talk about execution, speed of execution. Let's move. Let's go. We actually spend a lot of time just discussing and talking. So the internal saying that's boughtifies 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.

33:30And 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. And we have our sort of ways of doing that. Now, 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. So you better be sure that you're right.

34:22when you're doing it. And this has kind of now become a thing in how we're doing stuff is we're probably not going to be the fastest and 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 an iterate. But we won't be the fastest now.

34:51which is funny coming back to podcasting. You didn't enter the business until 2019. I 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? I think it sort of depends on which markets are kind of looking at it.

35:17But 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. For launch. 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?

35:43We 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. It's a sort of hell-climb from the amount that we were on when we saw the sort of initial traction. But I think the contrarium that we did, unlike many others did, was, you know, at the time when we launched, it was sort of you 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.

36:13And for us, it's just listening. And what we realized is we should use this base of what was then several hundred million people in 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...

36:32Podcasts, so 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 audiobooks 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 like It might take away at least as though 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. Yeah, 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 what's so amazing with the platform is every time we try to do something that the leverage sort of top down, it's sort of fail.

37:28Most of the time, actually, what we see is the inclusions 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...

37:57you know, listen to music tracks, right? It was a music, it was clearly books, but it sort of made it all the way up to the top list, and surely thereafter we started showing up as the biggest book distributor in the country, but we weren't even trying.

38:13And 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 this sort of genesis for how we then were able to build and sort of expand. Awesome. Well, that's it for this segment. Are you going to stick around and watch the rest of the night? Yeah, for sure. I'm so excited. Awesome. Well, Daniel, thank you. Thank you so much for being here. All right, listeners.

38:44Now is a great time to talk about a new partner of ours here on Acquired. LaGora, the agentic operating system that is redefining how the world's best legal teams work. Yup, it's sort of obvious that AI is going to completely change the legal industry. I bet most of you listening have dropped a contract into some sort of AI chatbot out there. LaGora took that insight and asked the question, what if you really built something with that power from the ground up for the legal industry?

39:11So the founders did exactly what great founders do, operate with obsessive customer focus. They embedded inside a massive law firm for months. They sat with the lawyers just watching how the work really gets done. And that's how you get features that customers love, like tabular review where you.

39:31drop in a folder of hundreds of contracts and it pulls every key term into a grid a lawyer can actually work with. Lugora's bed here is interesting. Since it lets each lawyer handle more complexity, any given person can increase the quality of their work and do higher value work, and this means that the pie can grow even as each individual task takes less time.

39:50And they recently launched LaGora agent offering greater intelligence and performance. The agent lets lawyers set an objective. Then it can handle the planning and the execution and delivery of the final product. Legal teams get to maintain full control and transparency since they're still involved where judgment is required. And LaGora works where you already work. You can use it within Microsoft Word while redlining or drafting the early LaGora numbers essentially.

40:18speak for themselves. When they have a head-to-head pilot with their top competitor, they win 70% of the time. Legora now has over 100,000 lawyers on the platform from 1200 legal teams in 50 countries. And crazily, they went from 1 million to 100 million in ARR in about 18 months. Truly insane numbers. And that is the real test.

40:43Plenty of things demo well, but the question is whether a busy associate actually reaches for it during crunch time, or whether a partner trusts it before going into a conversation with a major client. If your legal team wants to check it out, whether you're a law firm or you're in house at a company, you can learn more at logora.com slash acquired and just tell them that Ben and David sent you. Well, we've got a little more time before Mark comes on and we have a couple more surprises planned.

41:14I 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 one. Yep. 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, or 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 speedrun all of them with the acquired audience present? Yep. Add it, update the acquired canon, and we thought who could we do this with? And it just so happens that the perfect person

42:11to 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. Oh, thank you so much. Congratulations. Thank you. Thank you for being our guest. You guys, this is pretty awesome. Welcome to our recording studio. Welcome to our, yeah. 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 recent, too. His fourth 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. I would not, so how logistically can you like step off the boom?

43:27As 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.

43:54That 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 because she's here tonight too. Yeah. All right, Emily. Take us in.

44:08Right 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.

44:38in 2016. This is the acquisition of YouTube by Google. And you, you, you Ben said it could be as bad as a C minus. And I, I just, I just, I have to, I just questioned that a little bit. We were young. It was 2016. We know 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.

45:07And David said like who goes to YouTube and discover 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 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 by 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

46:04media feed recommenders were happening in that moment. And 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.

46:33that that was happening. Right. AI had its moment a decade ago where I was all excited about it now but like 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.

46:57It's on track YouTube TV to be the largest cable provider, cable provider in the United States. 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? So here is, I think, our most legitimate defense. Google does not report YouTube profitability.

47:27They 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. Like it was a money pit. Yes, and it was losing a lot of money back then. Google does not report today, but here is 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.

47:56which, 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. I mean, whether it's the second largest search engine, second to Google, or the second largest social media property, you know, strategically very great thing to oh not to mention going into the land of AI training data but like as a business it is not clear to me that YouTube makes money. Well and I mean my sources also if they're making money it's little to no money but they could they could obviously change how much they're paying out to creators they can you know turn the spick it on and off with it and the durability that they're building and the affinity from creators will we'll talk about creators on the platform in a minute yes is is there's a reason why

48:52So 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.

49:17these YouTubers who have built mass followings, tens of millions, you know, hundreds of millions, sometimes of subscribers, where subscribers and views are uncorrelated. Yeah. Great today. Great today. Oh, A plus. Still the A plus. Okay, okay, okay. So here's the other thing we didn't mention, and 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 plus. 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? 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. You both basically gave it an A. Bed and quote.

50:18How 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, the we said we had no idea how it went, because it was too recent. I think the story with LinkedIn 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. On LinkedIn. 16 billion plus in revenue.

50:46today. They've five X revenue since they were bought eight years ago. Of which five billion comes from advertising and content, which for all intents and purposes didn't exist when the acquisition happened. They have built that into a real business. I mean, for us, it's unacquired. You know, actually went and looked in preparation for this. We have about relatively equal number of followers on LinkedIn as a platform versus any of the other social platforms out there. But engagement is like, five ten X 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 five X-ten revenue, which, you know, over eight years is great, but not like three standard deviation for standard deviation from the mean. It's not one of these crazy things in the world.

51:39But 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. It would be over $100 billion market cap company today. And it's just kind of hanging out inside Microsoft. Revisiting this was a little traumatic for me because this was...

52:02If 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 non-stop in the morning. It was like the crack of dawn and I was not picking up so she called my husband. Okay. And it was like, Microsoft just bought LinkedIn and you have to interview Satya and Jeff Weiner in an hour. And I was like, what? So yeah, so that's what I remember.

52:32Was it a good interview? I mean, I think so. I actually watched it. Yeah, it was good. My hair wasn't quite fully done, but we made it. We made it through. You have some new reporting. I do, actually, because I talked to Reid Hoffman, who, of course, is co-founder of LinkedIn. It's interesting because Reid joined the board of Microsoft. He's still in the board of Microsoft. He was an early investor in OpenAI on the board of OpenAI.

52:59Shocker Satya Nadella is on the AI train early Microsoft is the biggest backer of open AI now and Kevin Scott is the CTO of Microsoft now who came from LinkedIn So read give me a little quote. He said Satya has run Microsoft as a type of founder you could call it being a refounder or even a late stage co-founder. The refounder 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 way, wave of AI. The 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

53:46I 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. You talked about it being potentially a $30 billion business at the time. Can you grade SpaceX today knowing that Starlink is just...

54:08Even bigger. Okay, so yeah, the company was valued at 36 billion in May of 2020 when we did the episode. At that time, they had 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.

54:27It'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 six and a half billion dollars 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.

54:53People want Starlink. I mean, the business itself, I think, I'm looking at the subscriber count. It's something like 3 million subscribers. 3 million subscribers? Yeah. And it's only been three years since it launched. So it is. 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, like...

55:16SpaceX 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... I mean, NASA didn't have a choice. Yeah. Yeah. Well, Russia may be, 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 so.

55:43I will say it's so that Starlink execution is just more remarkable than like I think 99% of people would have guessed. Yeah. Okay, so now to your most requested revisit ever, the arena queen, you gave her an A+. But that was two years ago before the era's tour. So I think you're gonna have to invent a new category. So, certainly.

56:11or stop grading. That's the real answer. 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. There's no enterprise value of Taylor. The closest thing was when we did the episode Forbes estimated her net worth at $550 million. Not Wu. 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 Wu. So is she more than a billionaire? So David's got like an argument on this. So walk us through the, you're perceived

57:09financial 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, been did a fantastic primer on the music industry and you know, all the challenges for artists and et cetera and et cetera and like it's getting better and just Spotify's doing great and Daniel's doing great and all that. The 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. The myth that streaming doesn't pay. Last year, Taylor made over, well reported, this reported, well over $100 million from Spotify streaming alone. Alone doesn't include any of the other platforms, so gross that up.

58:07And by nature of what she has been doing that we talked about in that episode, redoing her masters, like you think about what of the percentage of those streams that are happening are they on...

58:21Where she owns all the rights like that is a very very very very high gross margin number that is coming between right so so that of that high hundred plus million dollar streaming number She actually keeps quite a bit of it because of this strategy that she's not the amount that she's getting just from streaming like but eras Taurus side movie aside She is getting paid more every year than any Hollywood actor Probably any athlete in the world She could just sit at home, okay, but then 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? So last year, the eras tour in calendar year 2023 grossed, I think, $1.1 billion. Wow. The previous, which is a gross, gross or expensive, like a lot of things involved in making shows. Yes, they're up.

59:21The 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, you know.

59:42a 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. That's another $350 million in cash flow every year. Yep. Or at least last year. During the era is to where she is making that. When she is actively touring. 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.

1:00:37So David, you're kind of getting to the point of like you're 550 million number of cash flow last year may actually be conservative. I think that is conservative for last year. I think if you were to say like, okay, what is a smoothed out steady state over a three year rolling average for Taylor Inc? Well, you did used to be an investment factor. Half a billion plus cash flow every year. So I...

1:00:58Re-listen to the Taylor podcast with my kids driving the tile, 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? Right? Right? Do you believe it as a durable business?

1:01:27like some of the great content businesses all the 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.

1:01:57Oh boy. To look at this single greatest like IP holder in the world that has proven over 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. Like I'm not saying.

1:02:25It should trade at one or two X, but like 20X, David, is a little. 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. They're multiple. They're using as 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.

1:02:55Are we a Pete Taylor? I think to me, I think the song that played before we started the movie and walking out here was Start Me Up by The Rolling Stones. Yeah. Taylor is The Rolling Stones. This generation? Yeah. Pete Taylor or Justin again. I'm gonna say no just because that seems like a safe bet when you're talking about Taylor. Yeah. Yeah.

1:03:18For my own safety, I'm going to say we are not at peak Taylor. I think you guys need another Taylor episode. That's the verdict for the fans. Thank you guys so much and congratulations and I can't wait to keep listening. Thanks Emily. Thank you so much. All right, listeners. Now is a great time to tell you about a longtime friend of the show, Vanta. AI has scrambled the whole security picture.

1:03:57It used to be that you proved that you were secure once a year on audit or a static PDF, then everyone would not, and you're done. But in an AI first world, that doesn't hold up anymore. Yep, your risk surface changes every week now. A vendor turns on an AI feature or someone writes in a new model without telling IT, and your posture is different than it was last week, let alone at your last audit.

1:04:20Vanta's own research found that around 70% of companies have this quote-unquote shadow AI running with no security review at all. Right. And that's where Vanta comes in. They're the leading-agentic trust platform, meaning they've built the thing that closes the gap. And the way that they close that gap is Vanta agent. Think of it as a GRC engineer, that's governance, risk, and compliance, except that it's software and it doesn't sleep. It finds the issues drafts the fixes and cuts the time that you'd spend on vendor assessments in half. In half!

1:04:51Which is exactly why more than 16,000 companies today run on Vanta companies like ramp cursor and snowflake all stay audit ready and catch the risks that crop up between audits across every vendor every AI tool the whole environment and that's the real value.

1:05:10Trust has to be continuous now, which is why Vanta automates your security, your compliance, and the work to earn and prove trust. We're huge fans of Vanta over here, and literally hundreds of acquired listeners have become Vanta customers at their companies over the years. So you can get $1,000 off Vanta at Vanta.com slash acquired. That's V-A-N-T-A dot com slash acquired for $1,000 off and just tell them that Ben and David sent you. All right, so David, we've had Jamie Diamond.

1:05:40We've had Daniel Eck, we've had Emily Chang. Yep. What is going to possibly have up our sleeve before Mark? We won't keep you waiting 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, gear that we've had was that we had this like viral clip from an episode. This never happened in the land of acquired, and 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.

1:06:39Wow, 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. And now this podcast, it's attracted an incredible audience. And so I'm really proud of them. And one of the questions that they asked me was, you know, if I knew what I know now, I think there's something like that, you know, when I start NVIDIA all over again.

1:07:08And 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's insanely hard. The number of things that you have to know, the amazing people that you have to surround yourself with, the adversaries that and all the smart things that they're gonna do and the adversities that you're gonna be confronted with over time. The 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.

1:08:06And I want to compress 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 superpoint of entrepreneurs, which is your superpowers, are partly your ignorance, that you don't know how hard it is. And so that's what I meant. Everybody, just move on.

1:08:37Nice 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. Mark.

1:09:26It's great to have you here. It's great to be here. You know, I was watching... 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. I'm going to say time. Well, I'm just kidding. Well, I don't apologize anymore. We've noticed. Well, okay, wait a minute. 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?

1:09:56Oh, God. I mean, look, I think... Come on out. Hot, David. Yeah. You know, 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, you know, there's the sense that what you're doing could just die at any moment and the volatility, everything is just going to thrash so much and it's not...

1:10:26You obviously look back at all these fond memories, but it was not the most fun part of the journey, or the part of my life that I wish I could go back and relive. So 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, you know, 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 you can go and do good things. Well, on that topic, we have a lot to talk about. Yeah. I think this is actually very appropriate. First, we have to ask you about your shirt and what you're wearing. Yeah, you know.

1:11:26I started working with people to design some of my own clothes. And so I figured, 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 worked with this great fashion designer, Micah Meary. And he's got a great story. So I wouldn't be surprised if you were doing one of these with him one day.

1:11:56This one is so I've kind of started working on this series of Shirts with my some of my favorite classical sayings on them. So this one is Pate Matos learning through suffering It's a little family saying and also escolas Was it was that your family saying growing up or is that your family now?

1:12:28Well, no, let's pull that thread. No pun intended, I promise. What does learning through suffering mean to you? Well, I think you learn what matters to you and what's important and kind of your place in the world through repeatedly hitting your head against different challenges. And I 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.

1:12:58Yeah, there's some that Jensen talks a lot about too, right? It's like I feel like you, you know, when you go to start a company, you, you know, everyone kind of writes down what they would like their values to be, but values are not what you write down on the wall. It's like you're lived behaviors. And you only really learn what you care about when you have to make hard trade-offs and face challenges. So, yeah, you learn the most important things through facing challenges.

1:13:28Speaking 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 good. But first. I kind of think my, you know, like that.

1:13:54old Nike Michael Jordan ad where he's talking about who he's failed over and over and over again and that's how he succeeds that 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 we met a 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. 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.

1:14:57When you think about, when we got started, we're like a handful of kids. We weren't able, we'd love the resources, the time to go to find whatever the next computing platform is. And also, Facebook originally got started around the same time as 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 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. I think what you ideally have is glasses and

1:15:56through 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. They're just a hologram and we have glasses. 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.

1:16:51Being there with another person, and this physical perception, where we're very physical beings. 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.

1:17:20it'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 like a person. You're like, hologram there. There's an AI that is kind of embodied as someone who is there. And the glasses will enable us. 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.

1:17:49And there are a lot of different challenges to solve to get there. You have to build a novel display stack, or 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 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.

1:18:19And you also, in the glasses, need to fit chips, microphones, you know, speakers, cameras, eye tracking, to be able to understand what you're doing, batteries to make it last all day. Right on the... There's like, 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 gonna work with a great partner, Essela or Laxatica, they make Rayban, they make a lot of the iconic glasses. Let's see what we can fit into glasses today.

1:19:16and make them as useful as possible. And, you know, I actually, I kind of thought when we were getting started with those, that it was almost like a practice project for, like, for the ultimate AR. Which, let's be clear, that's what you thought Facebook was. That's true. That's true. Yeah, I did. Like, for your real startups someday. That's true. Yeah, no, this is, yeah, let's go on a tangent there for a second. When, so a 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. They're all these great companies one day.

1:20:01Maybe we'll build a company like this and I'd already started Facebook and it was like surely the project that we're working on now is not a company and Facebook had like some scale at this 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 anyhow Yeah, I mean a lot of hard work obviously, but but it's but I just at the time I was kind of like yeah, I don't think this is it Well, that's your answer would you have started?

1:20:30You actually tried 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 Estelora Luxatica 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, I remember. For listeners, let's just be really clear. You guys shipped this product that I'm holding before LLMs.

1:20:58or at least before the public consciousness was aware of the Chatchee PT moment. And these were not manufactured and shipped as an AI device. That came later when they were already in market. A few years ago, I would have predicted that AR holograms would have been available before 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.

1:21:28the microphone, it's got the speakers, you can talk to it. I remember calling Alex Himmel, the guy who runs the product group, running it 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. And then like, I remember I came in the next week and they 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.

1:21:54I 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 like ship that soon so we can see if that's a good idea or not Yeah, that's that tracks. That's what I just said Sounds right All right listeners Now is a great time to thank our longtime friend of the show, ServiceNow. If you are running a large enterprise, AI agents are likely spread across every team, and deploying them is no longer the hard part. Yeah, the hard part is knowing what permissions they have, what employees are using them for, or what decisions AI is making. AI security for an enterprise at scale is not a small concern, like the risks are real.

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1:23:33billion workflows annually and trillions of transactions for more than 85% of the Fortune 500. So when companies need a place to govern AI at enterprise scale, they're building on a platform at the center of how their business already operates. And in a future that isn't going to be one AI, it's going to be thousands of AI agents working across every function of the company. But the question is, who's managing them all? So if you're trying to turn AI ambition into real business outcomes and make it work safely, securely at scale, go check out servicenow.com slash acquired and tell them that Ben and David sent you. Okay, so thank you for opening up with the 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

1:24:33And 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 traffic, transparency, putting its own whole category. And now ChatGPT. That's mine. Like, there is a widely held public narrative every single time.

1:25:02Snapchat discover stories, or there's something where people are like, oh, the cool thing that Facebook the company did is just obsolete now, and they're gonna 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? I think it's that we're a technology company that is focused on human connection, not a specific type of app.

1:25:35So like 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 or 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 build, 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. Because, you know, 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 are have a really strong technology foundation. And some of that is just...

1:26:28Me and how I think about stuff. I was an engineer before I got started. I mostly took systems engineering type classes when I was in college. Talking about friends during my space and all the scaling challenges they had during the graph calculations of like, all right, do you know this person, do you show them friends? Yeah. Can you take us back? We want to ask you the story of that time. It seems quaint now, friends during my space, but you study computer science.

1:26:57Graph, networking, social graphs, that is a very difficult concentration. 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.

1:27:22And I think that that's something that we've held ourselves to and built a good organization around. And 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. The companies I was talking about, it's like, the CEO wasn't technical, the board of directors had no one technical on it. They had like, One dude on the management team 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, split mostly people running.

1:28:11Either 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 and I think it just like in terms of how you weigh decisions and Culturally things inside the company matters a lot but but I think that's one of the things that has been really fundamental. We're able to 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 think are pretty curious in learning-focused organization where I view the product strategy less as any one specific thing.

1:29:10and 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. I define our strategies, we can learn faster than every other company. We're going to win. We're going to build a better product than everyone else because we're going to get it out first. 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. Then over time, by the time you get to you know, whether it's version three or four or five, I mean, they're not even discrete versions because you ship so frequently. It's, you just, you learn faster. So, I think that's basically the formula. Be a technology company, build good foundation, like learn from what people are kind of focused on in the world, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and

1:30:06We all sort of acknowledged that at this point, but that the... I mean, except for like all the stuff that I just thought was not going to be that important, that ended up actually being the most important. But that's the thing. It's like, okay, you want to set up the game so that way you optimize, you create your luck. This is what Jetson told us. Like, the Apple is 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. Do you feel like that encapsulates that metastronically? I do like turn-based strategy. But it does kind of feel like the way that you make bets is like...

1:31:01Well, if we have great engineering, then that can kind of take care of the speed part. That's like, you know, many iterations or multiple at bats. And then the... Well, great engineering and speed and duration are actually two different values. They're not necessarily at odds, but I think like, there are a lot of great engineering organizations that try to build things that are super high quality and have good competence around that. But... I know there's a certain...

1:31:28personality that goes with kind of taking your stuff and putting it out there before it's fully polished. And look, I'm not saying that our strategy or approach on this is the only one that works. I think in a lot of ways we're like the opposite of Apple and clearly their stuff has worked really well, too. 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 so ineffective, then you're not testing a good hypothesis that doesn't work.

1:32:19I 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. And 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.

1:33:10And lately, it is. Like when you're like, oh, I feel bad because I shipped a product that wasn't good enough, you're sort of, yeah, no, I don't know overstated. I mean, we don't ship things that we think are bad, but we also don't take, and 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. Like, 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.

1:33:40is 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, what it's where it's resonating. Now, if what you put out is bad, then you're not going to collect good data because people are going to use it for anything because it sucks. But 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.

1:34:09Not as more. Yeah. 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?

1:34:40I mean, I think it's a combination. I think you're basically taking some kind of values, either kind of 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. 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. Yeah. As I pour through all these historical examples, there's like the market discovers some other participant in the market discovers the story's format. And suddenly the whole world is like, oh my god.

1:35:35That 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. I'm not really asking for that much feedback, I'm putting it in the world.

1:36:04What's a combination? I mean, I think that there's, 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 newsfeed, right? Like before that social networks are basically profiles and then we're like, hey, like people actually kind of want to get the updates and let's like show them that. And if we rank them, then we can, you know, there's so many updates that this can help people parse through that quickly. And today it's like hard to imagine any social product without a feed. So I think that that's obviously there's some of these things are sort of seminal

1:36:35I 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, no one company is going to invent everything. I think if you don't invent anything, then it's hard to be a successful company. But 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.

1:37:30It 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 it's important 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 and 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, I don't know 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

1:38:29I 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 Lampstack. Yeah. Yeah, knowing it's great makes it super easy to develop stuff quickly and iterate quickly. But 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, OK, 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. So it wasn't going to help us compete with Google for any of the stuff that we were doing to have that technology.

1:39:25But what we were able to do is 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. We 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's sort of makes sense for us because of our position in the market. And the same for AI. I mean, around a lot. This is where we were going with this. Yeah, it's similar deal. We want to make sure that we have access to a leading AI model. I think just like we want to build

1:40:21the hardware so that we can build the best social experiences for the next 20 years. I don't think that for us it's like we've just been through too much stuff with the other platforms to fully depend on anyone else and we're 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. I think that's somewhat of an imperative for us to go do that.

1:40:51These 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. I mean, look, I definitely, first hand, have a lot of experiences. We were trying to build stuff on mobile platforms. The platforms are just like, nah, you can't build that. That's frustrating.

1:41:15Can we take a real quick detour? What's up? I really want to ask you. 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. Okay, this is quite a detour. Wait, quite a detour. Did you just really grab in the wheel here? Is this connected or did you just decide that it was your turn to talk?

1:41:37I'm sorry. I was like really like well done. I know. Open source and AI. I think it's related. I do. I really genuinely do. Facebook on mobile is HTML5. Uh-huh. In 20. Yeah. 12. May 2012. Yeah. Yeah. I want to ask you what you were thinking going into the IPO with Facebook on mobile being HTML5 and what happened to IPO at a $100 billion market cap over the next three months.

1:42:09you 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 a... It was a pretty different technical issue. So, I mean, our legacy was building on web for websites and...

1:42:31We were very used to building one thing and being able to continuously deploy it and it fits with our iteration style and all that. So now all of a sudden this 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 a chip. Do 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.

1:42:58So you basically build a native shell, and you build this web-based platform in it, and we'll be able to just update our apps every day, and we'll ship one thing once, and we'll update our apps across Android, and iPhone, and BlackBerry, and Windows Mobile, and all the stuff that existed at the time, because it hadn't gotten consolidated yet. And we're like, that's going to be, we're like, basically, whatever downside we...

1:43:22are 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. So we basically went through this period where we had to go rewrite our apps with scratch. And that coincided with mobile growing dramatically.

1:43:53And mobile, we didn't have any revenue. Because it may seem like it's pretty similar, but there's a very big difference. On 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? Let's be clear, the feed ad had not been invented. Yeah, and advertisers have 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 are going to have this organic feed that was the most important part of the product, and now we're just going to start putting ads in it was a challenge for

1:44:36for the people who are using the product. So we need to figure that out, and we need to get the apps to be better. And we basically took, I think it must have been like a year or something. We're just like, look, we're going to pause feature development to 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.

1:44:57Netscape and you know these things that like they tried to do a rewrite they needed to reestablish their technical platform and they also tried to add features They basically just like never terminated so that's a real risk right when you're like like completely changing your underlying platform that there's no you're you're gonna miss it It's like all right. We got to minimize the chance that that happens so we're not gonna ship any new features We're just going to rewrite it make it faster But while we're doing this Like basically mobile is growing so the percent of our traffic that is monetizable Is shrinking because web is basically shrinking and and mobile and that's your only business model Yeah, I was like all right like and you're now recently You know pretty clear what we needed to do Yeah, I think strategically a lot of the time it's um 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 um

1:45:56But 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 paying tolerance to go do it? So a lot of this was like, all right, the team was like, okay, well, we're going public. And, you know, investors really aren't going to like this if we are like 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.

1:46:24And it was a painful year and a half and then we came out of that and we were in great shape. So I think like 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 in your own one local hill and You need to jump to another hill. That's a stuff that's really culturally hard. But this one I think was, it was not fun. There were been 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. Great.

1:47:21Yeah, I'll take that. All right, listeners. Now is a great time to talk about one of our favorite companies, Statsig. Yes, there is a reason why the best product teams rely on Statsig, whether they are iterating on their core product features or shipping AI-powered experiences at scale. Yep. In the crazy speed of today's AI world, shipping fast is just table stakes now. It's basically trivial to build and deploy your app constantly.

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1:48:13So if you want to make learning your competitive advantage, whether you're building new AI experiences or just evolving your existing core product, go to statsig.com slash acquired to get started. 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...

1:48:33amazing things the company has done there's also been like 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 ten years or so was, you know, the political environment just changed dramatically, right? It'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 we, I think so much of this stuff is correctly understanding your place in the world and in history.

1:49:29And, you know, so I think, you know, we talked about before how it's like, I think we understood that we are a technology company, in 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. The 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 are a lot of things that we did wrong. There are 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 now that's, it's,

1:50:30There are a lot of things we did mess up and we needed to fix. But 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. Right, say like, okay, maybe it's not all our thing, but we're gonna fully own this problem, we're gonna take responsibility for it, we're gonna 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 gonna take responsibility for all this stuff. People are basically blaming social media in the tech industry for like,

1:51:26all these different things in society, and if we're saying, okay, we're gonna really do our part to go fix this stuff. I know there were a bunch of people who just took that, and we're like, oh, you're taking responsibility for that? Let me kick you for more stuff. And honestly, I think we should have been firmer in 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. And 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

1:52:23improve stuff, but 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 fully work through that cycle before our brand and all of that, is back to the place that it maybe could have been if I hadn't messed that up in the first place. So, but look, in the grand scheme of things, 20 years isn't that bad either.

1:52:53And 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 got. 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 know, 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 about.

1:53:21Do you have a reasonable framework at this point where like, okay, here's the stuff where I feel like we actually do want to take responsibility for it. And here's the stuff where like, no, that's not our fault. Yeah, I mean, at this point, I think a lot of the 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 years of academic research on a lot of these things. And 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. But 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 harm at all.

1:54:17So, I think that, like, or it's, you know, so I think that's, I think that 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, you said, that's 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. Yeah, no it is. When you start when you're 19, it's like, Hopefully we have more than 20 years. Hopefully you have like boss iteration. Hopefully. You 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 like 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

1:55:09you 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. So as you were setting up the company, you know, when you were so young, even when you went public, you were so young, like, why was that so important to you?

1:55:39In 2006, Yahoo wanted to buy the company for a billion dollars and everyone on our management team wanted to sell it. And the board tried to fire me. and everyone, and basically in the next year, everyone else on the management team left because they, I hadn't done a good job communicating, I mean, I don't wanna blame them. I hadn't done a good job communicating the long-term vision because I wasn't thinking about that at the time. I wasn't thinking in terms of this as a company. I was like, this is a great project, it's awesome. A lot of people like what we're doing, I think this will probably continue for a while. I think it's gonna be pretty important in the world. But I didn't know how to think in terms of long-term financial plans or

1:56:18So it's a case to them why it would be worse 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 so it was understandable that basically Yahoo comes around a lot of people it's like this is like all their startup dreams come true. You got to take this offer Because I like 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 confident it's 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, it's 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 learning through suffering.

1:57:16Wow. And being very cash-generated and 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. Yeah. 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.

1:57:44And 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, like, going concern. Yeah, I mean, we're having a lot more fun now. I think it's working on all the stuff. It's awesome. But what is your advice to all these founders who sort of romanticize the idea of starting a company and kind of raising all the money? Obviously, starting a company is not bad.

1:58:15I think that there's different schools of thought on how to do it. I think some people think I want to go start a company so I'm going to go dive into this idea. I just think that that's a little bit dangerous because there's this...

1:58:27issue, which is you have to be able to be nimble and pivot around until you can figure out what works. 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 12 different things. That were just things that I wanted to exist. This is fun. Let's build another thing. This one's fun. People are still using that. I'll help up keep this one. But a bunch of other ideas for stuff I was going to build too. I didn't know how to think about what a company was going to be.

1:58:56There'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. There's a lot less pride and people dug in when you're just like, okay, I'm going to change direction. People haven't invested their ego in like, no, we were going in this direction. Now I must be convinced. It's like, no, I just...

1:59:23I do think that that's a thing where you want to keep things lean and be able to do that. That's one of the reasons where we try to get the company back to being whatever the leanest version of a large company is that we can be. But I do think there's something to that where it's 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 attract the best people to go work on those things because it's less fun. And so I do think you just have to dial it, right? You're spending a Gajillion dollars on reality labs. And it's a technical term. It's not making that much money. So I'm going to play Mark back to you. Sure.

2:00:18It'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? And we were talking about like making your own luck and all that and how, you know, it's like, I think there are some broad strokes that we can have a sense of where things are going. I'm pretty sure glasses

2:00:47and holographic presence in AR is going to be a completely ubiquitous product. Just like everyone 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 where you 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. I think it's going to go a lot further than that. Another is that there is the thing about controlling our own destiny.

2:01:17It'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 like, 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. It's hard to exactly estimate it, but I think we might be twice as profitable if we own the platform or something. So I think from that perspective, that's worth a lot. Just from a pure dollar's perspective, which is not primarily how I come at this stuff. But even now, I've learned a thing, actually, since the other days. And now I at least am able to, 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 articulate a case for why I am confident that it's going to be good over time.

2:02:13But for me, it's always been way more about the product experience and what you can enable and build. And one of the shifts, and this is sort of like a value 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.

2:02:42And 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 it's just like this uplifting thing about humanity.

2:03:10So I think a lot of what we've done with social media so far is very good. We've built these products more than three billion people use them on a near daily basis. It's like 3.3 billion on a daily basis. Yeah, so yeah. And they use it because it is useful in their life. And in all these different ways, I mean, obviously people vary, people use it for different things, but it's useful.

2:03:40and it helps people stay connected, helps people build businesses, helps people form communities, it's good. There are not many people on a day-to-day basis who get out of bed and are like, fuck yeah, social media, like that's not like, so I kind of think for the next, for my next stage, right, for the next stage of the company, the next like 15 years, I want us to build more things that are awesome in addition to things that are good.

2:04:11And I think that they both matter. But to me, this is like a little bit of kind 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.

2:04:40But 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, right? I'm like, I think I'm young, I'm a little older, right? But it's like, I do think that at this point, it's not just a meta thing. Also, in my personal life, a lot of what I personally value is doing things that are inspiring with people who I find inspiring.

2:05:07So there's the personal version of this. It's like I get to work on interesting science problems with, like, Priscilla, my wife, and a bunch of awesome people. I get to design shirts with some of the best fashion designers in the world. It's like I am statues. A sculpture of my wife. Bring back the Roman tradition of designing sculptures of people you love.

2:05:35I'm not at all being facetious. Yeah, not cool. 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.

2:06:04He'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 stealing closure and he sees a female cow, he busts through the stealing closure. But I feel like that's the kind of bull that you want to make the highest quality people in the world. And 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 gonna be a good 15 or 20. 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 have been something around the way the company shifted in operations around COVID. I mean, it's like the COVID, like all these tech companies when,

2:07:09remote temporarily, and it was an interesting period to just like get some more time, like a step back. I'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 the stuff, and we were also going through this very difficult political time in the country and in our company was at the center of a lot of those things like that 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 it's smaller scale right so the reality lab stuff that we started in 2014 really The fair stuff around you know fundamental AI research Yeah

2:08:052012, 2013. 2012, 2013, and some time around then. These things, they kind of got started and they were growing and it was, it kind of reached this moment, which is like, are we gonna double down on this and do this? Or are we gonna kind of like do this as a hobby? And I was like, no, I think we should do this. All right, it's, I mean, this is like, this is gonna be a really important part of what we do. And we had to make a really important set of decisions. What we knew was gonna be really painful, you know, 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. And 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. What I didn't know was that at the time, I thought they were gonna not like it, but I thought it was gonna be okay, because I didn't think there was also gonna be a recession at the same time. So that, really, it's like, I mean, look, like,

2:09:04Like, you've learned 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? And the answer that I came out with is yes. This is what I believe in. I think this is gonna be important for the world.

2:09:33I think it's gonna work over time. We're no stranger to going through painful periods. In some ways it makes the company better. Let's do it. We'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. Finding good short names. This actually was a thing that we talked about for a while because it was pretty clear that if Facebook is continuing to grow an importance in the world, which I think a lot of people

2:10:39don't appreciate in this kind of mind-boggling at the scale that it's at. But the others, we went through a period where it's like, we had Facebook and a handful of small apps. And now we have four apps that have a billion people are 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?

2:11:09It was important to me, this was also coinciding with a lot of the challenges that we were having, the political brand challenges, different things. And 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.

2:11:41But I'm only going to do this when we come up with a brand that is going to be a vocative 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. And 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, like 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've 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 like 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. It seems like I would pick a brand that almost

2:12:40doesn'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. We align around a vision and a mission of what we're trying to do when we run towards it. That's always been how we've operated. Yeah.

2:13:07And 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 puts a flag down around what we're doing, and we're going to go different. It's like, put a wall in front of us, there's going to be a mark shaped hole in the wall. Speaking of lightning rounds and mark shaped holes, you are accelerating what used to be your annual challenges. I mean, when 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 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, for me, especially in lots of people, that space gets sucked.

2:14:06and you have expanded it. How? What do you mean? Well, you used to do annual challenges, and I feel like now doing weekly challenges. You're just adding t-shirts, you're making sculptures, you're raising the highlights. I'm trying to do inspiring things. Yeah, I don't know. I'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 like, more extreme sports and fighting and stuff, and like, I don't know. I mean, there's, there's, we face a lot of competition and a lot of different aspects of what we do. Something 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

2:15:11should the architecture be of the next set of platforms? Are they going to be the closed integrated model that Apple has always done? Again, there are multiple good ways to build things. I think if you look at the different generations of computing, PCs, mobile, they've all had a closed integrated version and an open version.

2:15:40The 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 power. Let's take it as it can see. I think there's the recency bias, and probably almost everyone here has an iPhone. Because of the recency bias, there's 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.

2:16:10In the PC or 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.

2:16:38I expect them to be our primary competitor. And I think it will not be just a product competition. I think it's 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 Lama 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.

2:17:07to go build the next set of awesome things. I've got a closing question. 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.

2:17:31It'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 but but I mean if there's like I think part of what I'm trying to say is I think there are different ways to build stuff, right? It's like our way worked for me and our team, you know, it's different things have clearly worked for other companies. I don't know. One day my daughter, we went to it, 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 grew up. Taylor, yeah. I was like, you can't, but you can't, that's not available to you. I was like, but...

2:18:33And she thought about it, and she's like, all right, 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. I love that. Well.

2:19:03That 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, you know. 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.

2:19:35It is size Zuck So no one else can you know, there's 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 he wrote the first line of code for Facebook and the second one is Chase Center awesome, so thank you for joining us tonight Everyone, thank you so much. You thank you to Mark Zuckerberg. Whoo Thank you all for making something Tonight, something that we will never, ever forget. 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. 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.

2:21:11Emily and Lauren from Bloomberg in the circuit, Jensen, Miley and Janine, everyone from the whole NVIDIA team to Air Mez for dressing us tonight. Thank you, Air Mez. So we're quite presentable. To 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, JP Morgan Chase, JP Morgan Payments for making this whole evening possible. It's been a dream partnership. We are so grateful listeners.

2:21:40We will see you next time and thank you Mike Taylor Everybody's talking Nobody's listening these days I feel lost man Lost in a pit in 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, break, breaking up the dinner Oh baby Who all the smoke I need to know? Who got the truth? Is it you, you, you? Yeah, who got the truth now, now? Is it you, is it you?

2:23:01Send me down, say it straight Another story, I don't know who got the truth now Not a head for the cheetah It should pop like a sea saw 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, break, breaking up the dinner Oh baby Through all the smoke I need to know Who got the truth? Yeah, is it you, you, you, you, you? Who got the truth now now? Is it you? You turn me down, say it straight Another story on the way Who got the truth now? Who got the truth? Yeah, we're quite alive From a trace set up at the truth Yeah, let's get it