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

0:02 He so um I know this isn't like D. Best time to bring this up. Did you bring the thumb drive with the Who Got the Truth MP three for the sound crew? No, why would I bring a th I did

0:17 Email that. Probably like three weeks ago though. Uh Well, um There's six thousand people out there.

0:26 Waiting to hear it. Look, uh the team is really great. I'm sure they'll think of something. Yeah. Fight Winning!

1:26 Cause I don't know. What's going on in the world I'm Francisco! Tell me welcome to the stage

1:33 Gaters up in the quiet podcast! Big kill, but David rose it though! Oh Yeah!

1:50 Say it Another story on the way Fruit! Yeah.

1:56 Who got the truth? Yeah! Who got Demands!

2:11 We didn't need the thumb drive. We didn't need the thumb drives. Welcome to this episode of Acquired. The podcast about Welcome to Acquired Live at the Chase Center!

2:27 Well. This is uh Oh Wow, this is unbelievable. Thank you all for coming. Uh

2:38 We have A very Very special guest. And surprise. To welcome us all here tonight.

2:47 The CEO. Of JP Morgan Chase. Jimmy Damon. Hello, acquired listeners.

2:54 Welcome to the Chase Center. And to acquired live. I'm Jamie Diamond, Chairman and CO of JP Morgan Chase. I'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.

3:07 between JP Morgan payments and acquired Storytelling and educating about some of the greatest companies In the world. For many of them.

3:17 We're thrilled to call you friends and partners of the firm. Sorry I couldn't be there in person tonight. I hope everyone enjoys the show. Ben and David, over to you. Thanks, Jamie.

3:30 Mm. Well, 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, longtime listener who's been like really the driving force behind this whole thing, and his truly world class marketing team, Hannah, Nick, Vinny, 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. So Thank you for an amazing partnership.

4:02 Ben and I Did not put this on ourselves today. Uh I said, what are we doing tonight? Well

4:10 As you all know. Mark Zuckerberg is in the house. Woo So tonight we'll actually have three acts. Not one. Uh Mark will be our third act after intermission.

4:25 But we bought a lot of great segments. You know, in our first two acts here and uh some more f fun surprises sprinkled in in the middle. So um David, what is the format? Like is this an acquired episode? Well um

4:39 Amazingly, shockingly, we we tell you all all the time. That we make 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

4:52 Into Three or four or five hours that you all hear. Um And we thought Yeah, that's probably not gonna play here, but you keep asking us, you keep emailing us. So we want to put this

5:03 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.

5:13 Mm. I've been trying to do a better job getting airflow in here while we're recording. Cause I think 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, so L let me finish this thing and then we'll take a bathroom break.

5:33 I had a similar thought. What? More champagne. Sorry about that. Hey, blue angels. Only nine minutes and forty seconds of bullshitting before we actually started. It's pretty good for us. It's a new record.

6:09 This is 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.

6:26 Got that. Skip it. 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 thirty-five to forty minutes into this episode and nothing has happened. I think I would actually feel better and more in the flow. Cause right now I'm like, what did we cover? What did we not?

6:47 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. I don't remember the last thing you said. I don't either. Uh I think I've been like

7:03 Interrupting No, I think it's great. I no please keep doing No I don't I I don't find it annoying at all. No, the goal is like make the best stuff. I actually quite like how this is puzzling in. Second. You gotta stop making that face.

7:19 Oh B? For that banking face? And take it without the um. Um Uh Uh

7:27 Uh Uh Totally. Totally. Totally.

7:33 Totally. Totally. Totally. Oh. Go for it.

7:42 Mm. Dude, it is so hard to keep all this information in our heads. Like I feel like I'm like out of RAM. Clear What's going on? Just heard a beep on your end.

7:58 Okay, well that wasn't one of their best episodes. That is how the sausage is made. Ha. I think that actually is a good way to end it. So Are are you done or DMR?

8:13 I'm done. Mm. 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. Yes. So obviously, not only are we not doing that, we literally can't.

8:35 Um David. What are we doing? Well tonight we thought We are going to take the acquired. Playbook.

8:41 And we're gonna throw it out the window. We are gonna throw a party. Instead. Uh It is a celebration.

8:48 Of technology. Uh Will. San Francisco.

8:55 Yeah. Uh Some of the most important businesses of our time and most importantly It's a celebration of of you all. We say you all on the show. Uh usually you're not here. You're here.

9:09 So tonight, you know, normally we study the the past, often the far past. Tonight We're gonna kinda 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 uh Yeah, we're gonna indulge tonight.

9:25 Indeed we are. So to start We wanted to spend a couple minutes at the top of the show here in our um First act. Uh

9:35 Just giving you all an update on the state of acquired. It has been Quite a year. For us. You and I

9:42 We've both had kids. Um The Wall Street Journal wrote about us. Yeah. And

9:52 We've experienced some some pretty amazing growth. Yeah, and so we were thinking like Yeah. David kind of pitched this to me. I'm like, what are we going to stand up and give a keynote on like the state of the union of acquire? That's not that doesn't feel right. But a conversation would be great if we were s you know the right person to have a conversation with and we were like who is a big acquired listener and kind of gets what we're all about, everyone in the audience is gonna be like, Oh yeah, that person's one of us.

10:14 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.

10:25 The CEO and founder of Spotify Daniel Eck. Uh. Thank you so much. Danielle! Wow, this is pretty insane, guys.

10:53 Uh I think this Probably ought to be like the biggest recording of a podcast in the world. It's a little kinda like a kind of an echoey studio.

11:04 Yeah, yeah we w you guys 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. This is gonna be a video for sure. All right. And you know, it it's it's really amazing for me To be here. And just see

11:23 You know, this and All of you guys success. I remember Listening to you guys. Uh As a fan, I I think starting twenty nineteen and

11:33 See that we're now Five years later. Uh from a small base going to something like this. It's

11:42 And I I don't know about you guys, but I I thought maybe to commendate this moment, uh it'd be pretty fun Yeah, I I know you don't want to tout your success, so I I thought maybe I could do that for you. So uh maybe we can have a look at some of the amazing stats and achievements you guys have accomplished.

12:02 Well thanks. Yeah, I know uh you pulled some data, we pulled some data. Uh this is the updated version. up here of uh 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. Um 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

12:32 tells one other one other listener every year, hey, you should listen, and that person sticks. And that's kinda the whole Thing. Yeah, I mean it 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? Uh yeah, bigger on the boss.

12:55 The uh So so we did the math. Ben did the math as he usually does. I believe that is over four hundred years of acquired. That was we feel like it was four hundred years making the episodes in the last year. Uh but that was listened to in the past year. Yeah, what what is the i is the Nintendo one the longest one you guys have done?

13:16 I think Microsoft Volume 2 was our last event. But I thank you for pulling this. So the reason the way this came to be is we asked Daniel, hey, you know, you have access to data that um all podcasters 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 uh about this chart. Is that Even though acquired Uh Here's how many downloads an episode gets isn't like

13:40 celebrity status. Like it's not the craest, biggest in the world. Because of the volume of our episodes, we all spend a lot of time together. Like thank you for lending us your ears for all of those moments'cause that that's That's what that chart is to me is all the time we spend together. Yeah, but w w what's really cool for me too is just seeing the fandom. of the show. So one thing is is you know obviously seeing the sort of total numbers, but also seeing the fandoms. And you guys

14:06 uh added more than two hundred and fifty thousand followers And that tripled last year too. So it's over two hundred and fifty thousand followers on Spotify alone now on the quiet show, which again is pretty remarkable. To see that kind of growth. Oh. Um yeah there

14:23 There's there's two I'm like a reformed venture capitalist, so I can't help but like point out things on charts. Uh there's two things that are interesting about that chart. One is we've had like ridiculous subscriber growth on Spotify. I mean it's just been uh Uh you guys entering the industry has created a ton of net new audience of people who did not listen to to podcasters before. The second thing is uh if if you pull the chart back up again, you can see the Wall Street Journal article in May in that insane uh expression. I know we keep talking about it, but

14:54 This literally has never happened in the decade of acquired where A single Event. Uh and that we see you guys see it. It's crazy.

15:04 Well it's word of mouth in a new way. But the other part that was really cool to me, uh 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. You guys have truly gr grown worldwide. Um so you know look at some of this stuff. Like you have Mexico growing five times uh Hong Kong, Israel, Singapore.

15:30 Acquired is global. Uh so it's amazing to see here in in San Francisco that we got six thousand people in one place, but uh I'm pretty sure you guys should take this on the road and we'll see if we can make it in all the places too. Oh yeah, you can't take that on the road. Could be. Could be. Well you know, it's maybe a timing question. You guys should be like the new rock stars that tort around. That would be the the great thing to do. And you know, it it it's And by way of context, I think that's a good idea.

16:05 Just a put put it put this in perspective in twenty nineteen Uh you know, when we got into podcasts, uh the world around podcast listening in Spotify, there was a few million people uh listening to this, and you mentioned this, but like our goal was to sort of broaden the uh, uh, the uh, the uh, the this whole medium and today there's over a hundred and fifty million people listening to podcast on Spotify and obviously your show is a huge success. Uh and something that people kind of attracts people to the medium because it's both pretty broad these days, but also very, very deep.

16:38 Like w w what do you think contributed to that success? Well, you guys entering the industry, for sure. Um But I think you hit on it with like Broadway when Ben and I started this

16:51 We thought, you know, we used to talk about what our TAM was. We were venture capitalists. Like, what's the TAM for acquire? Not that we even thought about it as a business or a product, but um And we're like, I don't know, maybe there's What 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

17:13 Maybe it's you know, everybody who ever wanted to go to business school or was interested in like okay, like what what's that cap out that like A million people, maybe a million felt like R Tam. And What's happened to us and um I'm I'm curious, I think you guys have have probably seen the same thing, is that even though we think we're super nerds and we tell these very esoteric stories.

17:34 Great stories. Right. And people of all Types want to listen to them. And the growth of the medium. Like we just have this ridiculous tailwind where we we we got lucky and picked right in twenty fifteen. We stayed with it, we got better at the craft. But like it turns out people are super interested thanks to all the wireless headphones that exist now and uh I don't know, it's just this weird cultural norm that's

17:59 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 twenty tens. So one of the things you obviously have done is um you know added video to the format. And uh this is my plug of hopefully getting you guys to finally add video to Spotify as well. But um w w what do you think is next for the show uh when it comes to that? Like what what do you see the big innovation uh of a quart will be in the future? So I think our total addressable market is at least ten 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.

18:40 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 Y you have massively expanded what Spotify does since the original vision. Uh how should we have a original vision with your music on Facebook.

19:02 the 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 and I I think it starts with your audience, right? And knowing your audience. So like for instance, we we launched audiobooks uh about a year ago, but the uh sort of untold story about that audiobooks launch is What happened in Germany is all the record companies uh started uploading audiobooks to the service. So they started hacking uh 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 you know, most amazing things tend to start with

19:44 people kind of suggesting things or maybe even doing things. So it'd be interesting to kind of like figure out what people are doing in and around acquired already, and that will probably be your sort of adjacency. I think the other you know Video. Ben and I talk a lot. We'll talk more about video throughout the evening here. Um You know, we've just always sort of been of the belief of like nobody wants to And

20:11 Um But we've started to ask the question of like is there For certain companies we cover is there a r rich Visual tapestry. That we could

20:22 that we try and create an audio tapestry. four hours on the entire multi hundred year history of AirMez and it was just audio. But it was an amazing show, though. Thank you. But audio is this like magic thing where I'm gonna drag my We're gonna end up doing more video, but I'm gonna drag my feet kicking and screaming all the way there because I feel very passionately that

20:46 Th 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. Uh I I like Yeah. I remain unconvinced that we would work as a four hour video product.

21:12 Yeah, I mean look uh I I don't know to be honest. I think this is probably the biggest thing that surprised me is that um The the world just keeps evolving uh constantly. So you talked about video and and you know on Spotify it's been a huge growth thing. U I would have said to you as well, people probably mostly Why would you want to l uh watch any video? But I think younger consumers especially, they don't know what the difference is. They just want to feel closer presence to the person. And I mean we saw it already with the bloopers, right? It's like this is fun. You what you guys are doing and people have a relationship to you guys too. Hence why

21:50 Um and I I think video is just a way to express that, whether or not they're watching the full four hours or whether they diving in and out over a particular type of segment. Um I I think just giving the consumer the choice um 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 in novel ways. It's funny, there's um

22:20 Your you know, your question was what's next for acquired. Uh We're gonna do a normal episode after this uh after tonight. Um that normal episode Probably we'll focus on a Menlo Park based technology company. Um And One of the lessons that we're already starting to learn. We can't take that back now. This is live. This is live.

22:45 It's just not not holding the current. state of things and vision of what you are too tightly. Uh and um Yeah, we want to talk well, uh you've learned a lot from Mark over the years. Uh you you all have been very close. Um

23:01 Spotify started on Facebook. Uh and here you are, you're the biggest podcasting platform in the world. So you didn't hold on to that vision too tightly. Um Yeah. Uh so tur Can I turn that into a question?

23:14 Uh please. I was actually going to I wanted to leave you some space before we asked. I appreciate that. That's what great partnership is all about. Do 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 figure out Oh, Facebook is gonna be this unbelievable channel for us. Yeah, I mean it it's it's

23:38 Um I I think it starts like so many other things. I think Mark and I we just struck this sort of friendship and we started talking about um You know, the the the little told story is um if I remember this correctly, I think Mark even Pre Facebook. was trying to do a music startup. Oh yeah. Yeah, yeah. Exactly. And and so I think he's like I think pretty much every great entrepreneur in the valley try to do a music startup.

24:09 Um and so He he was definitely passionate about it. And then um his idea obviously was A social music product. And he and I we started talking about it and I said in the beginning it started like he wanted mostly Spotify to be more social and I kinda said, Well I don't know that that's the thing. Spotify the way what it is today. Yeah. Well I I got introduced to Mark through Sean Parker.

24:36 Um and so s Sean kinda said to to suck like hey You gotta 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 I don't know, two thousand and eight or nine, like one of those things. And then We kind of struck a friendship and

24:59 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. Uh so the sort of secret of Spotify was Uh we sort of seeded one account at a time to get a bunch of influencers that kind of like it. And I think Sean in particular, he kind of used it as a social currency, so everyone came to him to kind of try to get the invites. The currency of the in the Spotify invites. Yeah. It was a big, big thing for 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 Um and um

25:39 Anyway he got Mark on it. And I think uh Mark kinda wrote this um status update like Spotify is so good. Uh and then you know Everyone's like, How did you get this? This was kind of the main thing. When can I get it? How can I do it? And Um yeah, and then we started jamming around like what a social music product ought to be and Uh we had this sort of idea, wouldn't it be cool, sort of like with um

26:04 Um you know ICQ at the time where you had these status updates, like wouldn't it be cool um to be able to check out what your friends were listening to? And we kind of got to work together, built that product, uh, 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 you these status updates of what your friends were listening to piped in directly from Spotify. Exactly right. So you could see all your friends. It actually still exists in Spotify product. Um 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 thirteen years or something. It was the right sidebar, but I feel like I haven't seen it in a while. Maybe I just have a But this gets at the point of like

26:51 Uh social music listening was this core insight that you had. Mark was on board to kind of build it together and and and let you, you know, use the I mean he he got a lot out of it too, but let you use Facebook to distribute it. And yet Everyone here who's a Spotify customer today, when I think Spotify, I think, oh, that's like the easy way to access music, podcasts, and now 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, uh maybe the social is like important, but not that important. Well I I I still think

27:26 Uh social is hugely important. And for instance, we have um we have a product now called Jam, which allows you to uh be with your friends and actually alter what you're listening to at the same time. And it's growing incredibly rapidly uh right now, uh all over the world. So it's it's something that, you know, I think very much is a social product, but Uh while I still think music is very social, I think what we got wrong in the product was This sort of notion that just seeing sort of what all of your friends are listening to may not be the sort of right social product product. But if you instead sort of say like I wanna work together with my friends and I wanna 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 l literally join someone's jam and you can sort of all queue up songs together instead of taking my phone or your phone. We could all be sort of working together on something.

28:19 But what we saw during the pandemic, and that's like where jam sort of started, was we we started seeing that people were using this to stay connected as well, by having sort of this shared Um you know, consistent music listening where we're all listening to the same thing at the same time, even though we were sort of apart. It's like the best of linear TV brought to music. Yeah. So I think we're still sort of Um You know, definitely playing with the social concepts, um

28:46 And trying to get that right. But I think you know Facebook kinda 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 I've uh created another farmville. Oh yeah, yeah. We remember that era. Yeah. It was like north of ten percent of Facebook's revenue at IPO was from Zinga. Yeah. Yeah. What um I mean

29:13 I'm curious though. Yeah, we're gonna talk to Mark later tonight. Um, Are you doing research live on stage? Yeah, yeah, definitely. Um You know y y you've had a relationship, a pretty close relationship for fifteen plus years as Fellow founders in the trenches.

29:31 What do you think What have you taken from him? That you've brought into Spotify. And how you run the company. Um man many things. And I've learned so much from him and the and the rest of the team at Meta um as well. But I think specifically from him, um you know, he's the probably the best learner I've ever seen.

29:52 Um you know, you can you can have a conversation with them about a topic. He may not know very much about it. And then the next time he would know more than I would say most experts about the subject. Uh and it's really remarkable. Just how tenacious he is uh sort 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 c sort of clear idea, but he also, you know, takes a lot of feedback and sort of iterates

30:26 uh on that. And you know, it's everything from O one of the cool things for me has been seeing how he runs meetings. You know, uh for instance, I kind of like having relatively small meetings with people. Mark the average meeting he has is like fifteen to twenty people in the room. And how you make um you know a product review or discussion productive with fifteen and twenty people, still get people to be heard. Like he he's

30:53 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. Hm. Can I ask maybe this is a little bit more pointed. Um

31:05 You are a a kind person, you are a soft spoken person. But you are a fierce competitor. Okay, we haven't told you this. What eighteen, twenty four months ago.

31:20 Uh in Stockholm. Um I'd never been to Sweden before. I don't think you had either. And we left, we thought just like What A lovely country.

31:28 What lovely people Daniel is like the you know, most generous person we could imagine. You're here tonight. And

31:38 That guy. is a fierce. And there is a reason. Why? He has built Spotify. And and very strategic. Like I think you're you you see the chessboard.

31:50 Mark is like that too. Do you feel like your relationship do you amplify each other? Well I mean the the rule I have with Mark is I don't try to go into a competition with him because I know it'll end badly for both of us. So you know, as you know, Mark likes sports. Uh so one of the things I don't do with Mark is play sport for exactly this reason. You know, uh What was the last time he sort of

32:15 uh toward his A Cl when someone uh you know rather than giving up. So I I feel like it it ended pretty badly. So I I I l I like playing when I know I'll win, so I think it's a pretty good thing to not do that. Yeah, you see I mean uh if I were to characterize like why Spotify worked. It feels like there's an incredible amount of tenacity and a willingness to run at a problem that like a lot of people had tried and failed at before. But there is also this like

32:42 You kinda bide your time, you kinda wait for the opening, and then you figure out a game you know that you can win and then you go execute in that game. Yeah. That that's that's pretty much spot on, to be honest. That's that's One of the things we talk about a lot, uh that I don't say uh that much, but Gustave who's backstage here, who's our uh product officer and CTO is We we say talk is cheap. Most people talk about execution and 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 Spotify's 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.

33:29 Um and so we actually spent a lot of time discussing and and people get really confused when they sort of enter our culture. They're like, but uh why don't we just execute? And we 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 that we've sort of codified across the company, which I think is pretty unique at this point. But a part of that is also because So to set the stage is because we had to. Because remember, everything, unlike many other products, when you're building a company, you can kind of sort of iterate and do stuff. We had to get the entire industry with us. So if we wanted to do something, we have to convince a bunch of people that it was the right thing to do. Um and many in many cases even making relatively simple changes could take one or two years for us to get a license. So you better be sure that you're right. when you're doing it. And this has kind of now become a thing in how we're doing stuff.

34:27 probably not going to be the fastest as in you know moving fast and breaking things, but uh 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, like Well I'd like to hope we can also ship an iterate, but I'm not going to be able to But but we won't be the fastest, no. Hm.

34:53 Which is funny. Coming back to podcasting. Um You didn't enter the business until twenty nineteen. Uh I assume you were thinking about it for a long time after that. And When

35:05 I'm sure you know. Uh When did you become the market leader in podcasting? Oh wow. Um I th I think it sort of depends on which markets you're kinda looking at it. Um But um we were pretty much it started happening in in quite a few markets already twenty twenty and twenty twenty one. And in twenty twenty two we were pretty much the market leader in most markets around the world. So three years. Yeah.

35:32 From launch. Yeah, why? And and did you expect that it would be that fast given that you were so methodical and working so long to launch it. We we don't always know how fast this will be, but I I think we had a

35:47 pretty good sense that we could sort of iterate and improve our way as sort of hill climb from the mountain we were on when we saw the sort of initial traction. But I think the the contrarian bat we did, unlike many others did, was You know, at the time when we launched its Uh it was sort of viewed that you needed to have a different app for everything, right? Like you had to have a separate podcasting app and podcasting music were very different. And for us it's just listening. And what we realised is we should use this base of what was then several hundred million people and today's way north of half a billion people and just serve them more stuff.

36:26 And it turns out that like what we saw all the time, it wasn't like our music listeners weren't listening to Podcast. 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 but to your point on being like slow and methodical. Uh okay, you had channel to people, okay, they knew you're for listening, but i if you're stuffing stuff in that channel that is not the thing that they want.

36:59 Then that blows up your core. And so I think like My takeaway at least is the you you figured out a way to do it where you made sure that people were gonna be open. Yeah, of of course, you're right. Obviously just because you have the distribution advantage doesn't mean it'll work.

37:17 Um but I think Going back to it, what's so amazing with the platform is every time we try to do something deliberate sort of top down It sort of failed and Most of the time actually what we see is the inklings of something already existing on the platform and then growing from there. So I mentioned this at the beginning, but Germany was sort of an early indicator

37:40 both in podcasting and in in books. And uh what I realized even before we launched books for instance uh was uh around twenty eighteen we started seeing books showing up on the top list in Germany. Uh of the most Uh sort of you know uh listen to music tracks

37:59 Right. It wasn't music. It was clearly books, but it sort of made it a w all the way up to the top list. And Um shortly thereafter we started showing up as the biggest book distributor in the country. But we weren't even trying. And it was actually a pretty horrible experience to listen to books on Spotify. So when your product is being used in spite of it actually being a pretty terrible experience, you kinda know you've got something. So that was the sort of genesis for how we then were able to build and sort of expand. It's awesome.

38:30 Well That's it for this segment. Are you gonna stick around and watch the rest of the night? Yeah, for sure. So excited. Awesome. Well Daniel. Thank you.

38:38 Thank you so much for being here. All right. Listeners. Now 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.

38:54 Yep. It's sort of obvious that AI is gonna completely change the legal industry. I bet most of you listening have dropped a contract into some sort of AI chat bot out there. Legora took that insight and asked the question, what if you really built something with that power from the ground up for the legal industry? So 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.

39:26 And that's how you get features that customers love, like tabular review where you Drop in a folder of hundreds of contracts and it pulls every key term into a grid a lawyer can actually work with. Legor'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. And 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 speak for themselves. When they have a head to head pilot with their top competitor, they win seventy percent of the time. Legora now has over a hundred thousand lawyers on the platform from twelve hundred legal teams in fifty countries.

40:31 And crazily, they went from one million to a hundred million in ARR. In about Eighteen months.

40:39 truly insane numbers. And that is the real test. Plenty 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 Lagora.com slash acquired And just tell'em that Ben and David sent you.

41:06 Well We've got a little more time before Mark comes on. And we have a couple more surprises planned. Um I think it's time to talk about the next one. Act two.

41:17 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 who love acquire and were like

41:26 Mat rather than ask them hey. What should we do tonight? We just check our email and see like what do people actually already want when we're not even asking. Episode requests. Lot of episode requests.

41:41 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.

41:52 And you need to do a follow up on it. And so we thought What if we pick like three or four of those? We spied run. All of them with the acquired audience present. Yep.

42:03 At it. Update the acquired canon. And we thought who could we do this with? And it just so happens. That the perfect person

42:11 to grill us on everything we got wrong and everything we need to update lives right here in San Francisco. Please welcome. From Bloomberg and the circuit. Emily Chang. Thank you so much.

42:43 Congratulations. Thank you. Thank you for being our guest. You guys. This is pretty awesome. Welcome to our uh recording studio. Welcome to our thank you, I'm glad to be here. I'm I need to like mine you for some research. I know we have like a thing that we're doing here over the next nineteen minutes, but Um

43:01 You went wakesurfing with Mark. Like the theme of tonight is researching. Um His 4th of July video, he is standing there in a tuxedo with an American flag drinking a beer. Everybody's seen it. Everybody's seen this. Uh And The tuxedo's dry.

43:17 Like I've wakesurf a couple of times. I start, you know, in the water and you get pulled up. I would not so how logistically Yeah. Can he like step off the boat? As you could probably tell from the episode, I'm not a wake surfer, but I tried.

43:32 Um And Mark is pretty good. 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. En voila

43:44 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.

43:53 I think. That or he had like a lot of tuxedos on that boat to get multiple trial runs. By the way, Priscilla's pretty awesome too. They can both shred. Just have to say that. Yeah. All right, Emily. Take us in.

44:08 Right now, and I uh A plus you guys for self reflection, we're gonna revisit some of your past episodes. And uh 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 Some questionable calls sometimes. So I thought we would go down do a little memory lane and start with YouTube. Which David

44:36 You gave YouTube a C In twenty sixteen. This is the acquisition of YouTube by Google. Right. And you you you Ben said it could be as as That is a C minus. And I I just I just I have to

44:51 I just question that a little bit. We were young. It was twenty sixteen. We didn't know what we were doing, we were misguided. But let's just twist the knife a little because we have some quotes here. Ah, Ben, you said I'm a little bit bearish on YouTube. Primarily because it's not a destination. And David said, like who goes to YouTube?

45:13 And discover something. Mmm. The sad part is that we actually Said that and and decided to revisit this. I so I don't know. It it may actually be the case that that wasn't a huge behavior yet.

45:29 Like the algorithm hadn't become I know I'm being defensive here, but like This is where we fall on our sorts. 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 g maybe I was weird, but like I 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. 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

46:01 A I And social media feed recommenders. were happening in that moment. And it was about to lead to everything that is happening today. Oh yeah. And it was

46:15 And Meta than Facebook. Buying GPUs. And building AI that turns

46:25 feed recommenders into You're the ultimate destination site, and we just completely had no idea. That that was happening. AI had its moment a decade ago. We're all talk 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.

46:46 Well Today You have analysts saying if you pulled YouTube out of Google, it would be Worth half a trillion dollar. Which is almost double.

46:55 Where Netflix is. It's on track YouTube TV to be the largest cable provider cable provider in the United States. Um I send the ticket. Зіно, аусфол кид і май. It's the first and the second screen because we have YouTube TV.

47:11 Um So the question is can they really be everything to everyone? Right. So here is here is I think our most legitimate defense. Um

47:23 Google does not report YouTube profitability. They report YouTube revenue. So when we did the episode, YouTube was doing about five billion dollar run rate. revenue. Um it is now like thirty five to forty billion annual revenue run rate, which is 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.

47:43 Google does not report today, but here is what is unique about YouTube versus every other platform is They pay out fifty five percent of revenue. on long form and forty five percent on shorts. directly to creators. Which

47:57 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. Seventy billion dollars 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, uh you know it strategically very great thing to own, 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 source is also

48:34 Uh 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 spigot on and off. With the and the durability that they're building and the affinity from creators. We'll we'll we'll we'll talk about creators on the platform in a minute. Um Yes is. There's a reason why So many creators want to

48:54 graduate to YouTube. Uh and this is it. Well, your cre your sho my shows on YouTube, your shows 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 uh by an algorithm. But like honestly It is the craziest thing to see these YouTubers who have built mass followings, tens of millions, you know, hundreds of millions sometimes of uh subscribers, where subscribers and views are uncorrelated.

49:28 Great today. Uh great today. Oh, A plus. Okay, okay. Well 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. uh 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 the discounted cash flow of YouTube as an independent business if you look at their profitability today. It's What was the existential risk to Google of not owning YouTube?

49:59 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 gonna talk about is LinkedIn.

50:10 You covered it three days after they got bought by Microsoft. You both basically gave it an A. Bend quote. How are we both positive on this? I woke up Monday morning being like What?

50:23 Uh Oh yeah and then we've got this other one. What about LinkedIn today? Yeah, that we said we had no idea how it went because it was too recent. I think the story with LinkedIn is it is it was super unclear that it had the running room ahead of it. Like

50:38 What are the numbers on YouTube today revenue wise? On YouTube? I'm sorry, on LinkedIn. Sixteen billion plus in revenue. Today. Comes from advertising and content.

50:53 Which For all intents and purposes, didn't we? exist when the acquisition happened. into a real business. Um

51:02 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

51:14 five ten X on LinkedIn. I mean it's our most important social platform. And if you had said that Eight years ago the w would have been crazy. The the reason why I this was worth a revisit and that why I think they've been so much more successful than anyone would have thought at the time of acquisition. They five Xed in revenue, which, you know, uh over eight years is great, but not like three standard deviation, four standard deviation from the mean. It's not one of these crazy things in the world.

51:38 Um but essentially they created a hundred billion dollars of market cap. I mean if you look at what a reasonable multiple would be for LinkedIn if it were an independent company today, it's a big company. Like it would be a hundred and I don't know, over a hundred billion dollar. Um Market cap. company today and like it's just kinda hanging out inside Microsoft.

52:02 If you'll remember this was an acquisition that like no one saw coming, there were no leaks. No reporting on this before it happened. And My producer was apparently like calling my phone nonstop in the morning. It was like the crack of dawn and I was not picking up, so she called my husband And it was like. Microsoft just bought in.

52:23 And you have to interview Satya and Jeff Wiener in an hour. And I was like, What? Um So yeah, so that's what I remember. Was it a good interview? Yeah, I I mean I think so. I watched it. You said it, yeah, it was good. My hair wasn't quite fully done, but we made it. We made it through. Um Okay. I do actually, because I talked to Reed Hoffman, um who of course is co-founder of LinkedIn. And

52:51 You know, it's interesting because Reed joined the board of Microsoft. He's still on the board of Microsoft. He was an early investor in OpenAI on the board of OpenAI. Shocker Satya Najella is on the AI train early. Microsoft is the biggest backer. of open AI now and I'm and Kevin Scott is the CTO of Microsoft now. Who?

53:09 Came from LinkedIn. So Reed gave me a little quote. He said Satya has read Microsoft as a type of founder. You could call it being a re founder or even a late stage co-founder. The re founder doesn't need to have Have been in the garage from day one. He shifted the company's focus away from a cutthroat culture and competition only practices towards embracing social networks, collaboration. Cloud. And the next wave of AI. The question is, did he listen to our Microsoft series?

53:39 You wonder if the AI wars would have played out differently. Um okay, we're gonna keep moving quickly because um I really want to make sure we get to the last one, but SpaceX, one of your most popular epis episodes. Ever. Luckily you're in the clear because you didn't grade them. Um We stopped greeting at some point, uh yeah.

53:57 But obviously Starlink is a juggernaut, Ben. You talked about it being potentially thirty billion dollar business at the time. Can you grade SpaceX today, knowing that Starlink is just Even bigger. Okay, so yeah, the company was valued at thirty six billion in May of twenty twenty when we did the episode. At that time they had had twenty-six successful launches that year. Uh last year they did ninety six launches.

54:21 And they're planning to do a hundred and eighteen this year, which is over two a week. It's like an insane. They're doing one every three days. But on top of the launch business. Yeah, the launch business is not the interesting part of the business. They now have Starlink, which is estimated to do 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. People want Starlink. I mean the business itself, I I I think

54:56 I'm looking at the subscriber count, it's something like three million subscribers. And it's only been three years since it launched. So it is a when we did the episode, uh st Starlink was like Lake pie in the sky, literally. Th there w there was nothing. Uh and now I'm I'm pretty sure Starlink is The entire

55:15 Like SpaceX was valued at thirty six billion when we did the episode. Starlink itself is worth way more than thirty six billion today. It's a beast, total total beast. And by the way Nobody else could have saved those astronauts. Right.

55:29 Like Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Well, Russia maybe, but that's complicated and we don't even know if China could dock at the ISS. I mean I think that's okay to say so. Well I will say it's uh so the Starlink execution is just more remarkable then

55:48 Like I re I think ninety-nine percent of people would have guessed. Yeah. Okay, so now To you m your most requested Revisit.

55:58 Ever The arena queen. Uh You gave her an A plus. But that was two years ago.

56:05 Before the Eras tour. So I think you're gonna have to invent a new category. So certainly. Or stop breeding. Okay.

56:14 The um The context on this is it it's a little weird because There's no like um enterprise value of Twitter out there of uh

56:24 We're not talking about it. There's no enterprise value of Taylor. The closest thing was when we did the episode, Forbes estimated her net worth at Five hundred and fifty million dollars. Um

56:43 Yeah, w Not Wu. By our calculations, we're pretty sure she generated on the order of five hundred and fifty million dollars of free cash flow this past year. This year. Last twelve months. Uh that's a woo. So so is she more than a billionaire? So this is David's got like an argument on this. So walk us through the y your perceived

57:09 financial breakdown of Swift Incorporated. Taylor Swift Inc. So The big piece that I actually think is the most interesting piece that we Got wrong. Ben did a

57:22 fantastic primer on the music industry. Uh and You know, all the challenges for artists and et cetera, et cetera. And like it's getting better and Spotify's doing great and Daniel's doing great and all that. Um the latest sort of reported talked about numbers was that Taylor was making like less than five million a dollars a year from streaming. There was this myth that streaming doesn't pay.

57:46 Uh Last year Taylor made Over. Well reported. Reported, reported. This is reported.

57:54 Um well over a hundred million dollars. From Spotify streaming alone. Alone. doesn't include any of the other platforms, so you know, gross that up.

58:06 Um And by nature of what she has been doing that we talked about in that episode. Uh Like you think about what of the percentage of those streams that are happening.

58:20 Are they on where she owns all the rights. Like that is a very, very, very high gross margin number that is coming to take it. Right. So every year. Of that high hundred plus million dollar streaming number, she actually keeps quite a bit of it because of this strategy that she's So it's not the amount that she's getting just from streaming. Like but AerosTore aside. Movie aside She is getting paid more every year than any Hollywood actor. Probably any athlete in the world.

58:45 Um Mm. Okay, but then it's not a good thing. But then. She did an heiress tour.

58:53 Yeah. 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 Aras Tor. In calendar year twenty twenty three. Gross.

59:08 I think one point one billion dollars. Wow. Which is a gross. And tours are expensive. Things. A lot of

59:20 Yes, there are. The previous record for Highest grossing tour ever. I believe was a billion dollars. So Taylor eclipsed that. over multiple years that that was earned. So not only did she set the record for highest grossing tours, she did it within twelve months. Obviously the tour has continued. Yeah but let's say she operates like a very high

59:40 Uh You know. a high margin touring business. Let's assume she's very efficient at it, call it a thirty, thirty five percent operating margin on the business. A lot of artists actually lose money touring because it's a you know anyway. Uh That's another.

59:54 Three hundred. Three hundred fifty million dollars in cash flow every year. Or at least last year. During the eras to where she is making. And then There's the movie. So

1:00:07 The movie Grossed uh Two hundred and sixty seven million dollars. at the box office. Highest grossing concert film of all time. Um

1:00:19 Taylor. Went direct to the theaters. With the movie. So paying less middlemen. Less middle men. Uh then she did the direct deal with Disney for the streaming rights. That was another seventy five million dollars on top of that.

1:00:31 So Well over three hundred million dollars from the movie. Obviously you're not gonna make a movie every year, but um So David, you're you're kind of getting to the point of like your five hundred and fifty 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.? Oh you did used to be an investment bank. Cash flow every year. Uh so I

1:00:58 We listened to the Taylor podcast with my kids driving to Tahoe and they loved it. You you have a potential gen alpha audience. Um in case you're getting nervous. But here's the question. І зво That we're at peak tailor.

1:01:13 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? Uh Do you believe it is a durable business? Like some of the great content businesses of all time, like the one that you put in our model, which is Disney.

1:01:32 Disney trades at twenty X free cash flow. Taylor is five hundred and fifty million in free cash flow, that's a eleven billion dollar enterprise value for a Taylor. Forbes currently estimates her net worth at one point one, I think. And now she's in her NFL era. Like how do you value that? Right.

1:01:50 So okay, but here's the I think Ben and I differ a little bit on this. I would argue Disney is the right comp. Oh boy. I to look at the single Greatest. Like I P

1:02:04 holder in the world that has proven over you know a a century that it can stay relevant and apply that multiple to a single artist. With no diversification. who has had this unbelievable ascent.

1:02:20 And you're taking that multiple off of this extreme outlier year. you know, it should trade at one or two X, but like twenty X, David, is a little But but your point I think is a very interesting one, which is when people are looking at uh oh net worth of a person like this. They sort of foolishly don't

1:02:40 Their multiple they're using is one. Right. Like why are you assuming that they're worth the cash in their bank when clearly they can produce these incredible returns year over year over year? So I think that's the slept on thing. In Taylor. Are we a peak tailor?

1:02:57 I think to me, I mean, I think I think the song that played before we started the movie I'm walking out here was Start Me Up. By the Rolling Stones. Taylor is the Rolling Stones. Yeah. So that's my idea.

1:03:11 I'm gonna say no just because that seems like a safe bet when you're talking about Taylor. Yeah. Uh Uh for my own safety, I'm gonna say we are not at Peak Taylor. All right, you are it here for the record. Um 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.

1:03:34 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. It used to be that you proved that you were secure once a year on audit or a static PDF, then everyone would nod and you're done. But in an AI first world, that doesn't hold up anymore.

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1:05:36 Alright, so uh David We've had Jamie Diamond. We've had Daniel Eck, we've had Emily Chang. Yep. What else could we possibly have up our sleeve before Mark? We won't keep you waiting too too much longer.

1:05:48 But we do have one. More special guest. Surprise update. So one of the things that happen in the insane You know.

1:05:57 Year that we've had. uh 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

1:06:16 'Cause 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. To kinda Say it straight and say what he meant. So

1:06:31 Everyone Jensen Huang. Hi everybody. It's great to join you at Acquired Live. Wow, this is this is really something I I still remember when I met

1:06:43 Dave and Ben. Uh They interviewed me right here on this stage. Uh at Nvidia's headquarters. And now

1:06:50 This Podcast. It's attracted an in incredible audience. Man, so I'm really proud of him.

1:07:01 You know, if I if I knew what I know now I think, or something like that. You know what I start N video all over again. And I said absolutely not.

1:07:10 Of course I It was taken out of context. Uh Because I was asked about that. Several times after that.

1:07:18 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 Was has everything to do with being an entrepreneur.

1:07:30 Building a company is insanely hard. Uh the the number of things that you have to know. Uh the The amazing people that you have to surround yourself with. Um the add

1:07:41 Adversaries. Uh that and all the smart things that they're gonna do. Uh and And uh and the adversities. Uh that you're gonna You're gonna

1:07:50 uh be confronted with over time. The mountain of it. In the course of thirty one years If I were to take All of that.

1:08:00 Um All the challenges and all the hardship and all the pain and suffering. Of the last thirty two years. And I would have compressed it into the brain of A twenty nine year old.

1:08:10 There is no way. That that person would have started the company. And And I my point there is is the super point of of um entrepreneurs which is your superpowers are partly

1:08:23 your ignorance that that you don't know how hard it is. And Sony, that's what I meant. Mm-hmm. Everybody judge one. Nice to have that fixed.

1:08:38 Yes. We can officially correct the record on that one. We have finally arrived. The main event. Tonight is featured. Some incredible

1:08:50 founder led companies. Jensen from NVIDIA Daniel From Spotify. And next we have V iconic. Founder CEO of our time.

1:09:02 Mark Zuckerberg. Yeah. Mike. It's great to have you here.

1:09:28 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 gonna have to apologize for that I'm gonna say tonight. I don't apologize anymore.

1:09:46 We've noticed. Well okay, wait, wait, here's the question, if you knew what you knew today. What's up? If you knew what you know today, would you have started Facebook? Oh god. I mean I look I I think Coming out hot, David. Yeah, no, I mean he started it.

1:10:02 Mm-hmm. Literally. I I think there's something to Jensen's original sentiment. Which is that Mm. The entrepreneurial journey is very

1:10:11 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 And the volatility, everything's just getting thrashed so much and It's it's not

1:10:26 No, you you obviously you look back, you have all these fond memories, but It was not the most fun part of the journey, or you know, the part of my life that I like wish I could go back and relive. So I mean I I do think that there's something to what Jensen was saying that I thought was very honest. And

1:10:44 But when I heard him say it the first time, I was like, Yeah. I get that. I think I I think there are l like a lot of people for whom You know, if you knew how

1:10:54 Painful. Uh 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 that way you can go and do good things. Yeah.

1:11:09 Well um Yeah. On that topic. We have a lot to talk about. Yeah. I think this is actually very appropriate.

1:11:16 First We have to ask you about Your shirt and what you're wearing. Yeah, you know. I um

1:11:26 I started uh Working with people to design some of my own clothes. And um So I figure you know, look.

1:11:36 We're gonna design eyewear, we're gonna design other stuff that people wear. Let's get let's get good at this. And um So so this one I actually I Fashion designer Mike Amiri.

1:11:48 And um he's got a great story. So I I I wouldn't be surprised if you're doing one of these with him one day. Um and This one is so I I've I've I've kinda started working on this series of shirts with my some of my favorite classical sayings on them. So this one is

1:12:07 Pathe Matos. Uh learning through suffering. Uh Little family saying and Also Askelus.

1:12:18 Was that your family saying growing up or is that your family now? Well no, let's let's pull that thread. Yeah. No pun intended, I promise. Uh

1:12:34 What does learning through suffering mean to you? Um Well, I think you learn what matters to you and what's important and kind of your place in the world through repeatedly hitting your head against different challenges. And I mean I think that that is sort of that's the journey, right? I mean that's the the entrepreneurial journey. It's also I think part of the beauty of

1:12:56 Building things. Fine. This is something that Jensen talks a lot about too. It's like I I I feel like You you know, when you go to start a company, you And everyone kinda writes down what they would

1:13:08 like their values to be. But values are not what you write down on the wall. It's like your lived behaviors. And You only really learn what you care about. When you have to make hard trade offs and face challenges.

1:13:22 So Yeah. You learn the most important things through facing challenges. Speaking of facing challenges, we want to talk about A number of those because I

1:13:33 Any Dubious distinction. We will make our case to you of why it and enumerate them. But first kinda I I kinda think my old Nike Michael Jordan ad where he's talking about how he's failed over and over and over again and that's how he succeeds.

1:14:00 That one really resonates with me too. So um Thanks to you guys. I got a pair of these. This summer. Um

1:14:08 And I genuinely Love them. Tell us the story of how these came to be. Yeah, so I'm I'm I'm excited about them too.

1:14:22 So You know, we social experiences for twenty years now. And originally it took the form of a website.

1:14:33 Then mobile apps. But the thing is I I I never thought about us as a social media company. Right, we're not a social app company. We are a a social connection company, right? I mean I I we talk about what we're doing is building the future of human connection.

1:14:49 And That's not only going to be constrained over time to what you can do on a phone. Right on a small screen. So When you think about you know when we got started.

1:14:59 Okay, we're like a handful of kids. You know, we weren't able, we didn't have the resources, the time to go define whatever the next computing platform is. And also Yeah, Facebook originally got started around the same time as you know, a bunch of the early smartphones and those platforms got started. So we didn't really get to play any role in developing that platform.

1:15:17 And One of the big themes I think for the next chapter of what we do. is I I wanna be able to build what I what I think are sort of the ideal experiences. Not just

1:15:30 What you're allowed to build. on some platform that someone else built, but Like what is actually, if you can think from first principles, what is the ideal social experience? So I I think what you would like to have. It's not a phone that you look down at. Um that kinda takes your attention away from the things and the

1:15:48 People around you, you know, not just a small screen. I think what you ideally have is glasses. And Mm. Through the glasses.

1:15:58 Um there's one part of it where the glasses you can 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

1:16:12 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. You know, in the in the not so distant future, you can

1:16:27 Imagine Um Uh because you guys have demoed some of the stuff that that we that we've done. A like a a version of this where we're having a conversation like this. But you know, maybe like one of us isn't even here, they're just like a hologram and we have glasses and it really

1:16:41 Yeah, the question of Delivering a realistic sense of presence. There's something magical in the realm of building social experiences around The feeling of human presence and like being there with another person and

1:16:53 This physical perception, right, where We're very physical beings, right? People like to intellectualize everything, but a lot of our experiences very physical. And the this physical presence that you are with another person. doing things in the physical world. It's something that you're gonna be able to do through holograms. Through glasses.

1:17:12 Um without being taken away from you know whatever else you're doing, just kind of Have that mixed in with the rest of the world. Um It's gonna be I think the ultimate digital social experience.

1:17:25 I think it's also gonna be the ultimate incarnation of AI. Because you're gonna 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 you're like a hologram there, there's an AI that is kind of embodied as someone is there. And

1:17:41 The glasses will enable this. So Okay, so how are we going after this, building this? This is like some some huge project. We've been working on it for Ten years. Um And

1:17:52 There are a lot of different challenges to solve. to get there. There's like you have to build a novel display stack, right? It's not these aren't just screens like the kind that Or in phones there's this long lineage. They They're they're connected to the screens that have been in TVs and monitors and things for a long time. There's been this massive optimization of the supply chain. There's like brand new display stacker on holographic displays that basically need to get created. And then they need to be put into glasses, they need to be miniaturized.

1:18:19 And The you also in the glasses need to fit. Chips, microphones. Um speakers. cameras, eye tracking to be able to

1:18:29 Understand what you're doing. Batteries to make it last all day. Those like new novel RF protocols. Yeah, it's it's like okay, it's a pretty big challenge. So Try to go for the big thing. Right, and and we we've been working on that for a while.

1:18:45 And we're pretty close To being able to show off. um 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.

1:18:58 Um A lot to pack into a form factor, because the class has to be good looking, too. So What if we just constrain ourselves to like we're gonna work with a a great partner, Esslor Luxotica, they make Ray Ban, they make a lot of the iconic glasses.

1:19:13 Let's see what we can fit into glasses today. And make them as useful as possible. And Yeah, I I actually I kinda thought when we were getting started with those.

1:19:25 That it was almost like A practice project. for like for the the ultimate. Which let's be clear, that's what you thought Facebook was. That's true.

1:19:35 That's true. Like for your real startups. came out to Silicon Valley with Dustin and and a handful of the 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 and we were driving down one oh one, we're like, wow, eBay, Yahoo, like this is amazing. All these great companies, one day. We're maybe we'll build a company like this.

1:20:03 And I'd already started Facebook. And I was like, s surely the project that we're working on now is not a company. And Facebook had like some scale at this point. Oh no, no, it was a great project. I just didn't have the ambition to turn it into a company at the time. That just kind of happened. Um but anyway. Um Uh Yeah.

1:20:22 A lot of hard work, obviously. But but it's but I I just at the time I was kinda like, Yeah, no, I don't I don't think this is it. Well that's your answer. You actually didn't try to start Facebook. I didn't know. So yeah, so I mean the the the glasses though You know, we thought that this was like, all right, we we want to get working with Estelor Luxotica, so we can start building more and more advanced classes.

1:20:42 And then Yeah, they're really good. And then AI. Like the massive transformation in AI. So to let's for listeners, let's just be really clear. You guys shipped this product.

1:20:54 That I'm holding. Before Like. Or at least before the public consciousness was aware of you know the chat GPT moment. And these were not manufactured and shipped as an AI device.

1:21:07 That came later when they were already in market. Yeah, a few years ago I would have predicted that AR holograms would have been available before kind of like Full scale AI. And now I think it's probably gonna be the other order.

1:21:21 So now it's like all right, great, well this is actually a great product because it's got it's got the cameras so it can see what you see. It's got the microphone, it's got the speakers, you can talk to it. I I remember calling Alex Himmel, the guy who runs the product group that's running it, and I'm like, hey, you know, I I think we should probably pivot this and make it to that Um 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 gonna be a very successful problem.

1:21:50 Much more high stakes version of that story. I was on the highway with my kids and I get this call on a Saturday from Mark and he's like Those classes Could we put meta AI in them running on device? And like ship that

1:22:05 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.

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1:24:10 Thank you for opening up with a story. The question that I would like to try to answer tonight Is why has Meta worked? as spectacularly well as it has. I mean one of the most valuable companies in the world through multiple iterations, multiple technology waves Fighting off

1:24:29 You know Maybe you W let's name all the waves in which people said, Oh, Facebook and Meta are so screwed. And yet That is not the way it looks today.

1:24:40 Uh my space. Twitter Gen One. Yep. Instagram. Snapchat.

1:24:47 WhatsApp. Tic tack. Apple approaching transparency. Put in its own whole category. Um And now chat GPT. That's nine.

1:24:58 Like there is a widely held public narrative every single time. Snapchat discovers stories or th 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.

1:25:14 What do you think is the through line of the DNA of the company that allows you to keep winning? Um I think it's that we're a technology company. That is focused on Human connection.

1:25:32 Not a specific type of app. So like we never thought about ourselves as a website or a social network or anything like that. For for me, building this kind of glasses to enable The Future of

1:25:47 people being able to feel present with another person no matter where they actually physically are. Із начу 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?

1:26:05 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 were this kind of one thing.

1:26:17 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

1:26:28 me and how I think about stuff. I'm I I was an engineer before I got started. I mean I Like mostly took like systems engineering type classes when I was in And you talk about like Friendster in MySpace and all the

1:26:40 scaling challenges they had doing the graph calculations of like all right uh do you know this person should you shoot the friends of friendship and can you take us back and like we want to ask you the story of that time. I mean Um It seems quaint now, Friendster MySpace, but You study computer science. Graph.

1:26:58 Networking social graphs. That is a Very very difficult computational calculation. A product question and a technology question. I think you can define the product in a such a general way that the technology becomes basically impossible to solve.

1:27:15 Um so you want to have a smart product definition. But then you wanna be competent and better than everyone else at the technology. And I I think that that's something that we've held ourselves to and build a good organization around. It's it's one of the things that I I Observed as soon as I came out to the valley.

1:27:32 But all these companies that call themselves technology companies were not really set up that way. Right, it's uh like the the companies I was talking about, it's like Day You know, they the CEO wasn't technical.

1:27:45 The board of directors had no one technical on it. They had like one dude on the management team who was the head of engineering who was technical and like everyone else wasn't. It's like all right if that's your team. then you're not a technology company.

1:27:58 So I I think one of the things that I've always been pretty careful about is I I actually like want Like the a lot of the people on our on our management team, it's like Yeah, split mostly people running

1:28:11 um either these big product groups who come up through different technical pathways of 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.

1:28:28 And I think that that Also is important to the board. And and I I think just like in terms of how you weigh decisions and culturally things inside the company matters a lot. But but I I I think that that's

1:28:41 has been really fundamental. It's like we're able to kind of go from Platform to platform and do these different things because we've invested and cared about the underlying technology. The product experiences that we build on top of that. are in implementation and they matter. We also I think are a pretty curious and learning focused organization.

1:29:01 Where Yeah, I view the product strategy Less is any one specific thing. And more as How do we iterate and learn as quickly as possible?

1:29:15 how to make each thing better for for the people we're trying to serve. Right. So Like I define our strategies we can learn faster than every other company. We're gonna win. We're gonna build a better product than everyone else because we're gonna get it out first.

1:29:28 We're going to Uh have a good feedback loop, we're gonna get a bunch of feedback, we're gonna learn what people like better than other people. And 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 we you ship so frequently. It's um You just uh You learn faster. So I'm good, that's basically the formula.

1:29:49 Be a technology company. Build good foundation. Like learn from w what what people are are kind of focused on in the world and and just iterate as quickly as you can. In one of my research calls to prep for this, someone uh uh described you as a master strategist, which like I it's we c we all sort of acknowledge that at this point, but that the I mean except for like all the stuff that I just thought was not gonna be that important that ended up actually being the most important. It's

1:30:15 Mm. But that's the thing is part of it is like okay, you you want to set up the games so that way you optimize you create your luck. Trevor Burrus This is what Jetson told us. Like the apple's gonna fall from the tree in some direction. And if you just set up The game. That

1:30:30 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 He plays The company.

1:30:42 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 like Meta's project? But it does kinda feel like the way that you make bets is like

1:31:00 I uh well if we have great engineering, then that can kind of take care of the speed part. That's like m you know, many iterations or multiple uh at bats. And then the the Well grid 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.

1:31:24 But I know there's there's a certain personality that goes with kind of taking your stuff. in putting it out there before it's fully polished. And look, I'm I'm not saying that our

1:31:37 strategy or approach on this is the only one that works. I think in a lot of ways we're like the opposite of Apple and clearly their stuff has worked really well too. Right, but I mean they take this approach, it's like we're gonna take a l like a long time, we're gonna polish it, we're gonna put it out. Um And

1:31:52 Maybe for the stuff that they're doing that works, maybe that just fits with their culture. But for us I I think that there are a lot of conversations that we have internally. Where You're almost at the line of being embarrassed about what you put out. You want to put stuff out early enough so you can get good feedback.

1:32:11 You obviously want to test things that are reasonable hypotheses. So if it's like so ineffective, then You're not. testing a good hypothesis, that doesn't work. But I I do think a lot of the conversations that we have

1:32:21 are 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. I I I do just think that like you wanna really have a culture that values shipping. And getting things out and getting feedback. Um more than needing Always to get great

1:32:39 positive accolades from people when you put stuff out. Because I I think like if you want to wait until you get praised all the time. You're missing a bunch of the time when Yeah.

1:32:49 you could have learned a bunch of useful stuff and then incorporated that into the next version you were gonna ship. And it's just about making sure that the what the thing that the company's known for or its brand can withstand. All the little damage that you do to it by shipping stuff that's not quite ready. damaging to the brand. But Um

1:33:10 innately i it is. Like when you're like, Oh, I feel bad'cause I s I shipped a product that wasn't good enough You're you're sort of Yeah, no, I I don't want to overstate it. I mean uh we don't ship things that we think are bad, but we also don't take we want to make sure that we're shipping things that that are kind of early enough that we can get good feedback to see what they're gonna 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 it's pretty clear that AI is going to be transformative for a lot of different things.

1:33:38 Yeah. is actually less clear what are gonna be the initial use cases for for a lot of these things that that are that are super valuable. So okay, part of it is like okay, you put something out. you want to kind of collect feedback and on what people are actually What when it's um

1:33:53 You know where it's resonating. If if what you put out is bad, then you're not gonna collect good data because people aren't gonna use it for anything because it sucks. So but but I do think that You 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 kinda go early enough.

1:34:10 Yeah. So I'm building to this question of uh Uh. to you is

1:34:16 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 am like

1:34:35 I'm going to make this and put it in the world. Does it have to be one or the other? I mean I think it's a combination. I think you're basically taking some kind of values. Either kind of like values that you have or a value for something that you believe should exist in the world. And trying to build that's aligned with that.

1:34:54 While trying to Match it up with what Is is going to resonate the most with people. But I think if you If you just do the latter, then I think you just don't have enough conviction to see through hard things.

1:35:09 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 Um I think I think both probably matter. Yeah.

1:35:23 as I pour through all these historical examples, there's uh like the market discovers some other participant in the markets discovers the stories format. And suddenly the whole world is like, oh my God That is the way that we all that's the social interaction mechanism. And that's like a pretty pure Discovery. Where y you have products that have stories, they perform very well. Uh

1:35:46 that's been discovered. But there's other times it feels like everything you're trying to do in reality labs all you know, fifty 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 like Asking for that much feedback, I'm putting it in the world. What's a combination. I I mean I I think that there's

1:36:07 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? The like before that social networks are basically profiles. And then we're like, hey, like people actually kinda 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. I don't want to call it an invention, but like patterns that we 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 in the

1:36:48 Um you know I d you know, we're not embarrassed about learning from things that other people like discovered that we're good first and And then we build a better version of it. And

1:36:59 Um Ha I mean

1:37:03 I think that that's You know, no one company is gonna invent everything. Right. I think if you don't invent anything, then it's hard to to kind of be a successful company. But um but I 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

1:37:24 get valuable signal from from people in the community and customers about what they want you to be doing. Which Meta is a technology company. We'll get to that later. Um Ben and I have been uh having a conversation. I wanna take this uh to open source.

1:37:46 Um and open source technology and its importance to you. And Ben posited First to me and then to many other people in our calls over the last couple of weeks. That Meta

1:37:57 has been the Largest Beneficiary. of open source technology in the modern world. And I'm curious if you would agree with that.

1:38:07 And If you would comment on Mm. Your relationship to open source. I think almost all of the major technology companies at this point

1:38:16 are primarily using open source stacks. So Yeah, I mean I don't we wouldn't have been able to get built without open source, I think Probably that's true for any new company that's been created since like I don't know, nineteen the late nineteen nineties or something.

1:38:33 Um For us, open source has been important and valuable. Um I mean you were the first big company built on the lamp stack. Yeah, yeah, no, and it's it's great. Makes it super easy to develop stuff quickly and iterate quickly.

1:38:47 But We've also had an interesting relationship this with this because sequentially as a company we came after Google. So Google was the first of the g uh great companies that built this distributed computing infrastructure. So they came first, so they were like, all right.

1:39:01 Let's keep this proprietary,'cause it's a big advantage for us. And then we're like, all right, we need that too. But we built it, and then we're like, okay. Not an advantage for us, because Google already has that. So uh we might as well just make it open. And by making it open

1:39:15 then you basically get this whole community of people building around it. So it wasn't gonna help us compete with Google for any of the stuff that we were doing to to have the technology. But what we were able to do with things like open compute. where um get it to become the industry standard. So now you have like all these other cloud service platforms that

1:39:34 Yeah, basically use open compute and because of that the supply chain is standard around standardized around our designs, which means that it's like 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. I I think in order for this to work.

1:39:55 We do a lot of open source stuff, we do a lot of closed source stuff. I'm not like a zealot on this. Um I think open source is is very valuable, but I also think it sort of makes sense for us because of our position in the market. And the same for AI. I'm going to run long. Okay. This is where we were going with this. Yeah. You know the sim similar deal. Um you know we want to make sure That we have access to a leading

1:40:18 AI model. I think just like we want to build the hardware so that we can build the best social experiences for the next twenty years. I don't think That you know for for us it's like we've just been We've been through too much stuff with the other platforms to to fully depend on

1:40:34 Anyone else and we're big enough? company at this point that like we don't have to, right? We can build our own core technology platforms whether that's gonna be AR glasses or mixed reality or AI. So I think that that's somewhat of an imperative for us to to go do that. But You know?

1:40:51 These things are not like pieces of software that are monolithic, they're ecosystems. They get better when other people use them. So For us There's a huge amount of good. And it philosophically lines up with where we are, where like I mean look, w I I I I definitely

1:41:05 you know, firsthand have a lot of experiences. We were like trying to build stuff on mobile platforms and the platforms are just like nah you can't build that. That's frustrating. Can we take a real quick detour? What's up? I really want to ask you something. We can we can take a detour. Okay. You took a detour, we're going to take a detour. Help us with our research here.

1:41:23 Uh The eve of the IPO. Yeah, this is a quite a detour. Quite in detail. Is this connected or did you just decide that it was your turn to talk?

1:41:36 I'm sorry. I was like really like wound up. It's gonna get back to us. I think it's related. I do. I really genuinely do. Facebook on mobile is HTML five. Uh-huh. In twenty Yeah, twelve.

1:41:55 Yeah. Yeah. I wanna ask you what you were thinking going into the IPO with Facebook on mobile being HTML five. And

1:42:05 what happened you IPO at a hundred billion dollar market cap over the next three months. You have a fifty percent drawdown. Probably because of that. Um But I've d I guess

1:42:15 the related question to what we're talking about now is How much is that informing your approach here? With. It was a pretty different different technical. Yeah, sure.

1:42:26 So I mean our legacy was building on web for websites. And We were very used to building one thing and being able to continuously deploy it and it fits with our iteration style and all that. So now all of a sudden this like app model comes along. It's like we have to build like Different ones for each

1:42:44 Bone? And like you have to go through s approval to get it shipped? Do we have to wait like weeks before it can ship? It's like this sucks. All right, we have an idea. Let's build this platform where we can get A web based platform.

1:42:58 So you basically build a native shell and you build this web based platform in it. And We'll be able to just update our apps. Every day and we'll ship one thing. once and we'll update our apps across Android and iPhone and

1:43:10 Blackberry and Windows Mobile and all the stuff that existed at the time because it it hadn't gotten consolidated yet. And um Like that's gonna be that's w we're like basically whatever downside we are gonna have from not having the most native thing, we're gonna make up for in velocity, and by having like way more of our energy focused on one platform.

1:43:31 Well we were wrong. It turned out that You know, having the native integration was actually critical for having the interactions feel good. And

1:43:42 And that so we basically went through this period where we had to go rewrite our apps from scratch. And That coincided with Mobile growing dramatically. And mobile, we didn't have any revenue.

1:43:56 Um 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 as. And on mobile, we needed to figure out

1:44:07 What does it mean to put ads into the experience. Like let's be clear, the feed ad had not been invented yet. No, it's a very important thing. Yeah, and it's and like advertisers had like specific formats that they like working with, and the idea that we were just going to be like, all right, now your ad is going to look like a feed story was a big challenge for advertisers. And the idea that now for people you're gonna have this organic feed that was the most important part of the product, and now we're just gonna start putting ads in it.

1:44:34 was a challenge for for for 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

1:44:44 We basically took I think it must have been like a year or something, where just like look We're gonna pause feature development of the company. Because it's hard enough to do a rewrite. It's if if you look at like the history of the tech industry. There are all these examples like Netscape and you know there's 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 completely changing your underlying platform that there's n you're you're gonna miss it.

1:45:13 Um I was like, all right, we've 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. Um But while we're doing this

1:45:25 Like basically mobile's growing. So the percent of our traffic that is monetizable is shrinking, because web is basically shrinking and and mobile's your only business model. Yeah, and I was like all right, like it's actually pretty cleared 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.

1:45:49 Like when stuff is going well, it's like what is the next move to like go from Winning to winning more. Um But when you're losing, it's usually pretty clear what you have to do. And and I think a lot of it is like Is is just do you have the pain tolerance to go do it. So

1:46:04 A lot of this was like all right, the team was like, okay. Um Well we're going public and you know it's uh investors really aren't gonna like this if we are like not making money for a year and a half, and it's like well

1:46:18 A year and a half is short in the grand scheme of things. Let's do this. And We did it. And it was a painful year and a half, and then we came out of that and we were in great shape. So I I think like people Inside the company it felt a lot better sooner because it was pretty clear to people.

1:46:34 that we were doing the right thing. Um And they they knew that we were executing it in a responsible way. um basically focused and we're doing the right thing. But I I think it's actually when

1:46:46 You have something that's working well. And you're on one local hill and You need to jump to another hill. That's the stuff that's really culturally hard. But This one I think was it was it was not fun. There have been a period uh a series of periods throughout the company that were not

1:47:03 I don't know. Not the most fun periods, but um 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 Yeah.

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1:48:10 to how users actually behaved. So 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 with our research? Can I follow that thread that you just said, hey, that that one wasn't so bad. Um

1:48:31 There's been a lot of amazing 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. Um that there are many criticisms that are legitimate.

1:48:54 But if that was a year and a half mistake. Uh I think, you know, one of the things I reflect on over the last like ten years or so. was you know the the political environment just changed dramatically. Right? It's like before twenty sixteen, there was like not a month that went by except for maybe this IPO period, where the sentiment about the company was Mm. Anything but positive.

1:49:13 And then after twenty sixteen, after the election, basically there was not a month for a while where the sentiment about the company was positive. And We I I think so much of this stuff is Correctly understanding your place in the world and in history. And yeah, so I think you know we talked about before how it's like

1:49:34 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. Um the political environment. sophistication around and I think I just fundamentally misdiagnosed the problem. So

1:49:57 I I I think that there was this basic Чален And there are a lot of things. I don't want to simplify this too much. I mean there are there are a lot of things that we did wrong, or some things that we did right. But I think one of the things that I I look back on and regret. is um

1:50:12 I think We accepted other people's view of Some of the things that you know, they were asserting that we were doing wrong or were responsible for that I don't actually think we were.

1:50:25 And No that's It's um There were a lot of things we did mess up and we needed to fix. But

1:50:34 I 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 like take ownership for it.

1:50:45 Right, say like okay. Like maybe maybe it's not like 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. When it's a political problem. I actually think a lot of the time

1:50:59 Sometimes th there are people who are operating in good faith who who are identifying a problem that want something to be fixed. and there are people who are just looking for someone to play. And I I think to some degree if you If if you take responsibility for things Because you think it's a corporate crisis, not a political crisis.

1:51:17 Um and your view is like okay. I'm I like I'm gonna take responsibility for all this stuff. Like people are basically like like blaming social media and the tech industry for like all these different things in society and if we're saying okay we're gonna really like do our part to go fix like this stuff. I know there were a bunch of people who just took that and were like

1:51:35 Oh, you're taking responsibility for that? Let me like kick you for more stuff. And And honestly, I think we should have been firmer about and and clearer about Which of the things we actually Felt like we had a part in.

1:51:47 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 twenty year mistake.

1:51:58 And I so it started in twenty sixteen. 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,

1:52:11 political dynamic across both the country and multiplied across all these places around the world. I think we've sort of found our footing. And like Like what what the principles are, like where we think we need to improve stuff, but where

1:52:25 Um you know, where people make allegations about the impact of the tech industry or our company, which are just not founded in any fact. That I think we should push back on harder. And I think it's gonna take another ten years or so. For us to kind of fully

1:52:39 work through that cycle before our brand and all of that. is back to kind of the place that it Maybe could have been if I hadn't messed that up in the first place. So But look, in the grand scheme of things, twenty years isn't that bad either.

1:52:53 And we'll get through it. Um and I think we'll come out stronger. Um but I do think that is one of the kind of more interesting critiques that I think people get. I mean we get critiques on both sides on that. There are people who don't think we've taken enough responsibility. But um But I I think certainly there's one line of critique which is

1:53:12 You know, you you kind of bought into too much of the stuff that you shouldn't have. And um Yeah. I think it's gonna take us a long time to dig out about. D do you have a reasonable framework at this point for like okay, here's the stuff where I feel like

1:53:25 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. Mm. So I mean I don't want to go rehash all the different things, but um

1:53:39 But I I think at this point there's been like years of academic research on a lot of these things. And you know, part of the thing that's challenging is and one of the things that we've learned is we actually should be trying to support more academics and doing more of this research ahead of time because like when you get to a point where you're being kind of accused of something, you're not super credible just standing up yourself and being like, I don't think we did this one. You know, it's like so I uh but what has worked over time is like you know you do the research in advance and and you get kind of third party academics, respected folks who get to debate all these different issues, And then it's like oh no, actually like the evidence just does not show that social media is correlated with this kind of harm at all.

1:54:16 So I I I think that like or it's you know so I I think that that's um I think that's it's it kinda cuts it cuts both ways. To me this brings up Another topic we wanted to talk about with you. And you just you know you say twenty years isn't that long.

1:54:33 I'm young. Uh we all are. This is the advantage of being a college dropout founder. No, no, no. When you start when you're nineteen, it's like Hopefully we have more than twenty years left. And hopefully you have like buffet duration. Yeah. You set up the company. In a Especially at the time truly unique way. Uh

1:54:53 Where you can operate the company. And Take that you know. Take that approach. Do you mean super voting shares? Supervoting shares is like in the technical aspect.

1:55:06 you can take that perspective in a way that if you are a CEO, non founder, you know, without a structure that you've set up. You j you just can't. And I think you know, in doing all the research for this A thesis we've developed is that like that is just one of the core fundamental advantages that Meta has.

1:55:28 Um so as you were setting up the company, you know, when you were so young, even when you went public, you were so young. Like why was that so important to you? Well In 2006, Yahoo wanted to buy the company for a billion dollars, and everyone on our management team wanted to sell it. And the board tried to fire me.

1:55:48 And everyone and basically in the next year everyone else on the management team left because they I hadn't done a good job communicating, I mean I don't want to blame them. I like I hadn't done a good job communicating the long term vision because I didn't I wasn't thinking about that at the time. I like wasn't thinking in terms of this as a company. I was like, this is a great project, it's awesome, like a lot of people like what we're doing. I think this will probably continue for a while, I think it's gonna be pretty important in the world. Um But I didn't I didn't like know how to think in terms of you know, like long term financial plans or

1:56:17 Um Like make a case to them why it would be worth more than a million. Yeah, yeah. Or or just like, look, we're doing this for the long term, we're not planning on selling the company. So it's like w without having made that case, it was understandable. But basically. Yahoo comes around. A lot of people, it's like this is like all their startup dreams come true. You gotta take this offer. Um because I I like I just wasn't in a place where I had the sophistication to basically

1:56:39 Articulate a lot of the stuff around Where we were Going longer term. It probably wasn't super confidence inspiring to them when I was like, Hey, I think we should turn this down because We're gonna do this so

1:56:51 Um So after that It's like all right, well, I don't want to get fired. Mm-hmm. for my own company for wanting to build it. So let's uh try to set up a governance structure that makes it somewhat harder to do that.

1:57:07 Um So Learning through suffering. Well, Wow.

1:57:17 very cash generative very early, such that you had a very real going concern on your hands and you just didn't didn't need to cut off your arm and sell it to someone in order to Yeah. Done your business. Yeah.

1:57:29 Like I think I think this is a fundamentally misunderstood thing about it. Uh Фейсбук в стартап. E it is V prototypic.

1:57:40 You are the iconic startup founder. of this century. And there's a lot of people that want to start a startup for a lot of the glamorous reasons of starting a startup. You hated being a startup and wanted to stop being a startup as fast as possible and be a like going concern.

1:57:58 Yeah, I mean I think we're having a lot more fun now. They get to work on all the stuff. It's awesome. But what is your advice to all these founders who sort of romanticize the idea of the idea of the idea of the of of starting a company and kind of using those money.

1:58:14 Right, I mean I I think that there's different schools of thought on how to do it. I think some people think, okay, I wanna go start a company, so I'm gonna like go. And I just think that that's a little bit dangerous. Because there's this issue which is you have to be able to be nimble and pivot around until you can like figure out what works, right? It's I mean part of the reason why I didn't think Facebook was g gonna be the company early on was because when I was in school I built like twelve different things, right? That I were just things that I wanted to exist and

1:58:42 It was like, all right, this is fun, okay, let's build another thing. It's like, okay, this one's fun, people are still using that, I'll like help upkeep this one. But I had like a bunch of other ideas for stuff I was gonna build too. So I just like I didn't I didn't like know how to think about what a company was gonna be. Um I think there's something about maintaining flexibility. That's that's helpful. Um you know, once you hire a bunch of people

1:59:05 Yeah, it's a lot easier when you can just have meetings in your own head about what direction you want to go in. Um and it's like and there's a lot less pride and like people dug in when you're just like, okay, I'm gonna change direction. It's like you know, people haven't like invested their ego in like, no, we were going in this direction, and like now I must be convinced. It's like nah, I just so I I I do think that that's a thing where you wanna like keep things lean and and and be able to do that. And that's one of the reasons why we tried to get the company back to being you know where uh the leanest version of a large company is that we can we can be.

1:59:35 But I do know there's something to that. Where it's like It's obviously it's not it's not super fun. not having the resources to do what you want to do But I think it also is problematic.

1:59:46 To have more people working on something then 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 like make the changes and do the things that they need to. Which is less fun.

2:00:00 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've got it, you just have to dial it right. You're spending a gajillion dollars on reality labs. It's a technical term. It's not making that much money. So I'm gonna I'm gonna play mark back to you. It's not appropriate to have all these people and resources working on things for more than the stage warrants. I'm being a little facetious here, but I'm curious how you th why you categorize it differently. I mean

2:00:28 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 ten to twenty years. And what do you think are gonna be important? And you know, we were talking about like making your own luck and all that, and how you know it's like I think there were some broad strokes. That we can have a sense of where things are going.

2:00:47 and kind of like holographic presence and AR is going to be a completely ubiquitous Product. Right. It's just like everyone who had a Phone before replaced it with a smartphone, and then a lot of more people got smartphones. If all we get is all the people in the world who already have glasses upgrading to glasses that have AI in them.

2:01:04 Then like This is already going to be one of the most successful products in the history of the world. So um and I think it's going to go a lot further than that. So I know there's that. There is the thing about controlling our own destiny.

2:01:16 Um It's strategically valuable. You know, 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 like

2:01:27 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. And um I I it's hard to exactly estimate it, but

2:01:43 I think we might be like twice as profitable if we own the platform or something. So I think from that perspective. that's worth a lot. Just from like a pure like dollars perspective, which It's not primarily how I come at this stuff, but even like now I've learned a thing or since the Yahoo days. So now I at least am able to like. Like um

2:02:02 I might not be able to convince the all the investors that we should be investing to the extent that we are in reality labs if I didn't control the company, but at least I can sort of articulate a case. For why I am confident that it's going to be good over time. But For me it's always been way more about The product experience

2:02:19 And What you can enable and build. And You know w one of the shifts and th this is sort of like a values shift. Um over time is you know one of the things that

2:02:31 Um When some of the early Oculus guys used to say to me Th there's a difference between building good things. And awesome things. And

2:02:42 And like 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

2:02:55 Uplifting. and inspiring And Just be way more optimistic about the future.

2:03:05 And is is just like this uplifting thing about humanity. And So I I I think a lot of what we've done with social media so far is is very good. Where we've got we've built these products. More than three billion people use them. I know you know.

2:03:21 It's like three point three billion on a daily basis. And they use it because it is useful in their life. Right. In in in all these different ways. I mean uh obviously people vary, people use it for different things, but It's useful.

2:03:40 And it helps people and it it helps people stay connected, helps people build businesses, it helps people form communities. It's good. There aren't that many people on a day to day basis who get out of bed and are like Fuck yeah, social media. Like that's right, it's I mean that's not like um So I I kinda think for the next

2:03:59 For my next stage, right? For the next stage of the company, the next like fifteen years. I want us to build more things. That are awesome. In addition to things that are good. And I think that they both matter.

2:04:12 Um But kind of the next stage of what I want our company to stand for and be. And

2:04:22 So I think A lot of the reality lab stuff that we're doing is gonna be in that bucket. Um a lot of the AI stuff that we're doing, I think is gonna be in that bucket. There are a bunch of things in the apps that are gonna be in that bucket, too. Um new apps too. But um

2:04:40 But I don't know, I think that there's there's just something that's like fundamentally pretty good about that. And that's m maybe it's also just like where I am in my life, right? I'm I'm like to think I'm young, I'm a little older, right? But it's but it's like I I do think that at this point No, it's not just a meta thing. Also, you know, in my

2:04:59 Like personal life. personally value is doing Things that are inspiring with people who I find inspire. All right. Yeah, so there's the personal version of this. It's like I get to work on

2:05:11 You know, interesting science problems with like Priscilla and my wife and like And a bunch of awesome people. Design shirts with like some of the best fashion designers in the world, right? It's like I Statues.

2:05:27 Yeah, sculpture of my wife. Bring back the Roman tradition of Designing sculptures of people you love. Um I'm not at all being facetious. Yeah, no, I'm cool. No, I but I mean I think Daniel Arsham is like a really talented guy, and I was like That's a person who I'd love to work with on something.

2:05:44 Let's go find a project. You know, building Yeah, I have one of my side projects is you know, we have this cattle ranch in Kawaii. And I'm trying to See if we can raise the highest quality beef in the world. And

2:05:56 There's like all this stuff. It's like starts with like It's It's awesome. We got We got the steer. Shawn?

2:06:06 He's just the man. He's the man. We're having a hard time. Keeping him on the ranch because We every time we put him in a steel enclosure and he sees a female cow, he busts through the steel enclosure. But I feel like that's the kind of bull that you want to make the highest quality beef in the world.

2:06:29 And we're just working with you know We're trying to do really high quality, awesome things with awesome people. That's like if if that's what I get to do for the next Fifteen or twenty years. Then like

2:06:40 It's gonna be a good fifteen or twenty minutes. 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.

2:06:57 I know. I I think that there might have been something around the way the company shifted in operations around Covid. I mean it's like the Yeah, Covid like All these tech companies when

2:07:08 remote 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 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.

2:07:27 And With Covid I I kinda got that and I it was a time of reflection. Um where I I was able to think about this stuff. And we were also going through this very difficult political time in the country.

2:07:40 and and our company was at the center of a lot of those things. So I think that 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 at smaller scale. Right, so The reality lab stuff that we started.

2:07:54 In twenty fourteen, really. Um The fair stuff. around you know fundamental AI research. Um the

2:08:04 Yeah. Twenty twelve, thirteen. These things they they kinda got started. And they were growing And it was it kind of reached this moment which is like

2:08:15 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. I mean this is I think that this like

2:08:25 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

2:08:46 Clearly the right thing to do. Um The What I didn't know Was that

2:08:53 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. Um So that like really it's like I mean look like Like you learn who you are through challenges.

2:09:06 It's like we we had like a really you know it's like okay, like Losing half of your market cap is is quaint compared to losing eighty percent of your market cap, or whatever it was, right? But so I mean these are all intentional decisions, right? It's like I mean there are a lot of conversations that we had which are like should we go forward with this?

2:09:25 And the answer that I came out with is yes. I th this is what I believe in. I think this is gonna be important for the world. I think it's gonna work over time. We're no stranger to going through painful periods. In some ways it makes the company better.

2:09:41 Let's do it. Yeah. Well. Mm. We're starting.

2:09:52 We're starting to enter uh Conclusion lightning round territory. I've had one like 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.

2:10:17 Um Would you pick the name Meta? If you were going to rename the company today. Uh That's a good name.

2:10:27 You know, finding good short names I mean this actually was a thing that we talked about for a while because it was pretty clear that Yeah, Facebook is continuing to grow in importance in the world, which I think a lot of people don't appreciate and it's kind of mind boggling at the scale that it's at. But the the others, I mean when it You know, we went through a period where it's like we had Facebook and a handful of small apps. So now we have like

2:10:48 Yeah. More apps that Have a billion people or more using them. You know, hopefully in the next few years five with threads if that continues scaling. And um

2:10:58 This was a conversation that we had a bunch. What it's like does it make sense for the name of the company to be one of the apps as the other apps as as it's really becoming a family of apps. And It was important to me

2:11:12 This was also coinciding with a lot of a lot of the challenges that we were having, right? The political brand challenges, different things. And a lot of people were proposing that. From the perspective of running away. From the Facebook brand, right? They're they were like, oh well, like is the does the Facebook brand have issues? Do we need a new brand? And I was like, we don't run away from that. But it's like it might make sense one day.

2:11:35 to not have Facebook be the lead brand for the company because we do so many different things. But I'm only gonna do this. when we come up with a brand that is going to be evocative of the future that we're trying to build, because we run towards something. We don't run away from things. And when we got to Meta then I was like, all right, we're here.

2:11:55 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 gonna lean into this and we're gonna do it. So let's do it.

2:12:07 And if I were to make the case to you I Field the core competency of meta Is You are able to discover

2:12:17 products in the world. You have great ideas, you work on them, you discover interesting products. And you mark are not someone who wants to define yourself by anything. You 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 doesn't pigeonhole me into a specific future.

2:12:43 I I might be looking for something that's more like Look, I I wanna maximize my uh maneuverability. Yeah. I get it. Um

2:12:54 But I don't know. We align around a vision and a mission of what we're trying to do and we run towards it. That's always been how we've operated. Yeah. And in many ways doing what I just suggested would kind of be running. It's like well we don't believe in it that much. And you're like, No, we don't know. I mean we're we're a company that like puts a flag down around what we're doing and we're gonna go do it.

2:13:17 Psych. Put a wall in front of us, there's gonna be a mark shaped hole in the wall. Uh

2:13:26 Speaking of lightning rounds and mark shape holes. Um You are accelerating what used to be your annual challenges. when we were all kids. Uh and we didn't know each other. I mean I was so inspired.

2:13:42 You would do your annual challenges. You would post about them. Yeah. Wow, that's like pretty damn cool. And then we all get a little older and We all have kids on the stage now.

2:13:53 And We all have companies on the stage now. And there's some large, some small. The demands on your time. For me especially I mean lots of people that's like

2:14:03 that space gets sucked. And you have expanded it. How? What do you mean? Well you used to do annual challenges, and I feel like you're now doing weekly challenges. You're you're designing T shirts, you're making sculptures, you're raising platforms.

2:14:21 Trying to do inspiring things. I mean it's uh yeah, I don't know. Um I'm also really competitive.

2:14:31 Ha ha ha. Who's your competition? What do you mean? Oh I was just thinking about pr uh about about other things that I'm doing. I'm like what if I what if I start doing I like Got into

2:14:42 more extreme sports and fighting and stuff and like I don't know, I mean there's uh there's w we face a lot of competition and a lot of different aspects of what we do. Um So I mean 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 ten

2:15:04 Fifteen years. I I think that kind of like battle over ideological battle over what Should the architecture be of the Next set of platforms, or they gonna be the closed integrated Apple uh model that Apple has always done which

2:15:19 Again, I mean like There's multiple There are multiple good ways to build things. Right. So I I think if you look at the different generations of computing.

2:15:29 Um PCs, mobile, they've all had sort of a closed integrated version. And an open version. And The thing that I think there's just a ton of recency bias around.

2:15:43 is because iPhone basically won. You know I I I know that there are more Android phones out there, but I mean but iPhone is sort of like the intellectual leader and by far like has all the time. Let's take it as a conceived. Um I think there's the recency bias and probably like almost everyone here has an iPhone. And right, it's I think that because of the recency bias.

2:16:03 There's sort of this view that's like, oh no, this is just the superior way to do things. But I I I don't actually think that's a given. Right in in the P C or uh Windows with the open ecosystem was the leader. And

2:16:16 Part of my goal for the next ten fifteen 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 Of doing

2:16:34 A close and integrated model. I think Apple will have a place for sure. I expect them to be our primary competitor. And I think it will not be Just a product competition. I think it's like a in some ways very deeply values driven and ideological competition around what the future of the tech industry should be and how open

2:16:53 These platforms, whether it's things like Lama and AI or um the glasses or different things, should be for developers, like an individual, someone getting started in their dorm room like me to not have to ask for permission. to go build the next set of awesome things. I've got a closing question here. Please. Thank you.

2:17:16 So So we have a lot of builders in the audience tonight, a lot of founders. uh were in probably the most interesting technology environments and the early mobile days in terms of opportunity.

2:17:31 It's been twenty 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 two thousand and four, given we live in a different world today. Yeah, I don't know. I mean just w do something that you care about and I mean if if you're trying to run our strategy, try to learn as quickly as you can. But but I mean if there's like I think well part of what I'm trying to say is

2:18:00 I think there are different ways to build stuff. Right. It's like our way worked for me. And our team you know it's Uh different things have clearly worked for other companies. I don't know.

2:18:15 One time my daughter Went to we went took her to a Taylor Swift concert and She she was like, you know, Dad I Kinda wanna be like Taylor Swift when I grew up. Hell yeah. I was like you you can't then you can't, that's not available to you.

2:18:29 I was like but And she and she thought about it and she's like Alright. When I grow up I want people to want to be like August Chan Zuckerberg.

2:18:40 And I was like Hell yeah. Hell yeah. So I I think that that's um

2:18:50 Yeah, I don't know. I think it's like look, learn from other people's Successes and failures, but do your own thing. Love that. Well, Mm.

2:19:03 That is the perfect place to leave things. Um Yeah. Mm-hmm. You already have a very amazing well designed shirt.

2:19:13 Uh I hope you have room in your life for more than one. 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

2:19:28 Sure. That represents tonight. Thank you. Oh. It is size Zuck.

2:19:37 So no one else can't. You know. There's they can never be made again. And we've got these coordinates on the back. The first one GPS coordinates.

2:19:46 The first one represents Kirkland House. where you wrote the first line of code for Facebook and the second one is the Chase Center. Awesome. So thank you for joining us here tonight. Okay.

2:20:35 Thank you so much. Huge thank you to Mark Zuckerberg. Woo. Thank you all for making something Tonight something that we will never ever forget. Ever. We have some thank yous.

2:20:47 We have A whole lot of thank you. happened. Has taken our entire summer. It's taken the entire summer of dozens of people.

2:20:56 There were about a thousand people working on tonight. And I just want to give them all a big hand. Thank you so much. Uh thank you to Mark and the entire meta executive team that we got to talk to to prep for this. Daniel and the Spotify team. Uh Emily and Lauren from Bloomberg and the Circuit, Jensen, Mileen, uh Janine, everyone from the whole NVIDIA team to Hermes for dressing us tonight.

2:21:19 Thank you, Ermez. To our families and our lovely wives. Thank you so much. Most importantly, thank you to our wives. And of course thank you to Jamon. JP Morgan Chase, JP Morgan Payments for making this whole evening possible. It's been a dream partnership.

2:21:36 We are so Greatful Listeners. We will see you next time. And thank you, Mike Taylor!

2:21:55 David. So much. Got the truth. Yeah.

2:22:06 Is it you, is it you, is it you Who got the truth now You, is it you, is it you? Sit me down, say it straight, another story on the way Who got the truth now? Everybody's talking. Nobody's listening! Days I feel lost, man, lost in a bit.

2:22:32 Everybody's fighting Nobody's wearing in! Take me home, cause I don't know what's going on in the world I'm living. Everybody wing winging up the dinner Oh baby! All the smoke I need to know

2:22:51 Got the truth! Hey! You see you Who got the truth now?

2:22:58 Is it you? Easy. Sit me down, say it's straight, another story on the way, who got the truth now Not a hair for the cheetah talk. It ship flop like a seesaw.

2:23:14 Not free under these laws, now the world see what we saw But wonder what to do now. It took a body game to get the truth out. Hit the streets trying to move out We got so much to lose now Everybody wake wig breaking up the dinner Oh baby!

2:23:35 Through the smoke I need to know who got the truth J! Is it you Who got the truth now now? Execute!

2:23:47 Set me down, say it straight, another story on the way, Who got the truth now? Good to try Yeah! Quiet aloud!

2:24:01 From the chase center! Got the truth Yeah. Yeah. Let's get it.

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