Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg) AI transcript and summary - episode of podcast Acquired

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

Author: Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal
Duration: 02:26:04

Episode Shownotes

Here it is: the complete video of the most unbelievable night of Acquired’s nine-year life… our sold out live show at the Chase Center in San Francisco. We joked during the months (months!) of preparation leading up to this event that it was like planning a wedding for 6,000 Acquired

fans, and the guest list included Jamie Dimon, Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg… no pressure! But thanks to our amazing partnership with J.P. Morgan Payments, together we were able to make something incredible. Tune in and enjoy the celebration!Sponsors:Many thanks to our fantastic Fall ‘24 Season partners:J.P. Morgan PaymentsStatsigCrusoeLinks:Mike Taylor, the truly incomparable performer of Who Got the Truth?Mike Amiri (who designed Mark’s shirt)More Acquired:Get email updates with hints on next episode and follow-ups from recent episodesJoin the SlackSubscribe to ACQ2Check out the latest swag in the ACQ Merch Store!Photo Credit: Mark Zuckerberg by Jeff Sainlar / Meta‍Note: Acquired hosts and guests may hold assets discussed in this episode. This podcast is not investment advice, and is intended for informational and entertainment purposes only. You should do your own research and make your own independent decisions when considering any financial transactions.

Summary

In a lively celebration at the Chase Center, hosts Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal, alongside industry giants like Mark Zuckerberg and Daniel Ek, reflect on the remarkable journey of the Acquired podcast. They discuss the podcast's growth, fueled primarily by word-of-mouth marketing and an expanding global audience. Highlights include Spotify's evolution into a social platform, the significance of AI infrastructure, and the remarkable financial success stories like Taylor Swift. The conversation also delves into entrepreneurship challenges and the need for adaptability in the tech industry, showcasing valuable insights and inspirational moments from the live event.

Go to PodExtra AI's episode page (Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)) to play and view complete AI-processed content: summary, mindmap, topics, takeaways, transcript, keywords and highlights.

Full Transcript

00:00:02 Speaker_07
Hey, so, um, I know this isn't, like, the best time to bring this up, but, um, did you bring the thumb drive with the Who Got the Truth MP3 for the sound crew?

00:00:14 Speaker_10
No, why would I bring a thumb— Uh, I did email that probably, like, three weeks ago, though.

00:00:20 Speaker_07
Uh, well, um, there's 6,000 people out there waiting to hear it.

00:00:28 Speaker_10
Look, uh, the team is really great. I'm sure they'll think of something.

00:00:43 Speaker_03
-♪ Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah

00:01:10 Speaker_03
Everybody's talking. Nobody's listening. These days I feel lost, man. Lost in the past. Everybody's fighting. Nobody's winning. Take me home, because I don't know what's going on in the world I'm living.

00:01:30 Speaker_03
San Francisco, please help me welcome to the stage the creators of the Acquired podcast, Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal. San Francisco! Mike Taylor!

00:02:11 Speaker_07
We didn't need the thumb drive.

00:02:13 Speaker_10
We didn't need the thumb drive. Welcome to this episode of Acquired, the podcast about... Welcome to Acquired Live at the Chase Center!

00:02:26 Speaker_07
Wow. This is, uh... Wow, this is unbelievable. Thank you all for coming. We have a very, very special guest and surprise to welcome us all here tonight. The CEO of JPMorgan Chase, Jamie Dimon.

00:02:53 Speaker_01
Hello, Acquired listeners. Welcome to the Chase Center and to Acquired Live. I'm Jamie Dimon, Chairman and CEO of JPMorgan Chase. I'm happy to kick off the show tonight and welcome all of you to one of my favorite arenas.

00:03:05 Speaker_01
It's been a great partnership all year between JPMorgan Payments and Acquired, storytelling and educating about some of the greatest companies in the world.

00:03:14 Speaker_01
For many of them, just like many of you in the crowd, we're thrilled to call you friends and partners of the firm. Sorry I couldn't be there in person tonight, but I hope everyone enjoys the show. Ben and David, over to you.

00:03:28 Speaker_10
Thanks, Jamie. Well, a special shout out and a huge thank you to J.P. Morgan and the whole payments team, especially Dustin Sedgwick, the CMO of J.P.

00:03:39 Speaker_10
Morgan Payments, longtime listener who's been really the driving force behind this whole thing, and his truly world-class marketing team, Hannah, Nick, Vinnie, Amy, and Carly,

00:03:49 Speaker_10
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.

00:04:02 Speaker_07
Ben and I did not put this on ourselves tonight. So what are we doing tonight?

00:04:09 Speaker_10
Well, as you all know, Mark Zuckerberg is in the house. So tonight, we'll actually have three acts, not one. Mark will be our third act after intermission.

00:04:25 Speaker_10
But we've got a lot of great segments in our first two acts here, and some more fun surprises sprinkled in in the middle. So David, what is the format? Is this an acquired episode?

00:04:37 Speaker_07
Well, amazingly, shockingly, we tell you all all the time that when we make an episode, we sit in our houses, in our studios, we record all day for nine hours, we turn that nine hours into three or four or five hours that you all hear, and we thought, yeah, that's probably not gonna play here, but you keep asking us, you keep emailing us, so we wanna put this

00:05:03 Speaker_07
Request this question to bed once and for all here tonight.

00:05:08 Speaker_10
Here's what you are missing in the full nine hours of an acquired recording session I'm gonna try to do a better job getting airflow in here while we're recording today I get dumber at the end of episodes or at least I get like I Should get exhausted.

00:05:23 Speaker_10
I think part of it's the lack of oxygen.

00:05:25 Speaker_07
It's really hot in here. I and we've been going for five and a half hours, so.

00:05:29 Speaker_10
Let me finish this thing and then we'll take a bathroom break.

00:05:33 Speaker_07
I had a similar thought. Pour some more champagne. Sorry about that. Hey, blue angels.

00:06:01 Speaker_10
Great. Only nine minutes and 40 seconds of bullshitting before we actually started. It's pretty good for us.

00:06:06 Speaker_07
It's a new record.

00:06:09 Speaker_10
Is this too in the weeds? Let me take a stab at making it more loosey goosey.

00:06:13 Speaker_07
I think I can simplify all this.

00:06:15 Speaker_10
We got to advance the story more. The pacing's too slow. Oh, this doesn't make any sense.

00:06:21 Speaker_07
OK, great. We can cut all that then. Cut that. Just cut it. Let's cut all that. Got that. Skip it. Skip it. Yeah. Let's skip it and keep moving. OK, I think one of us has our timelines wrong. We've been so stop and start.

00:06:35 Speaker_07
Do you think we should just restart the whole thing?

00:06:37 Speaker_10
We're 35 to 40 minutes into this episode and nothing has happened. I think I would actually feel better and more in the flow. Because right now I'm like, what did we cover? What did we not?

00:06:47 Speaker_07
I think what you're saying is replace all of what we did before.

00:06:49 Speaker_10
I'm going to go rerecord 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.

00:06:58 Speaker_07
Uh... I think I've been, like, interrupting. No, I think it's great. No, please keep doing it. No, no, I don't... I don't find it annoying at all. No, the goal is, like, make the best stuff.

00:07:11 Speaker_10
I actually quite like how this is puzzling in. Hang on one second. You gotta stop making that face. Oh, me? Was I making a face? And take it without the um. Um... Uh... Uh... Uh... Uh... Totally.

00:07:31 Speaker_07
Totally.

00:07:32 Speaker_10
Totally. Totally. Totally. Totally. Go for it.

00:07:46 Speaker_07
Dude, it is so hard to keep all this information in our heads. I feel like I'm out of RAM. What's going on? I just heard a beep on your end.

00:07:58 Speaker_10
OK, well, that wasn't one of their best episodes. That is how the sausage is made? I think that actually is a good way to end it.

00:08:08 Speaker_07
So are you done or do you have more?

00:08:13 Speaker_10
I'm done. Thank you all for indulging us. I was not sure if that would play in an arena.

00:08:25 Speaker_07
This is what Steven has to deal with every month. Yes.

00:08:29 Speaker_10
So obviously, not only are we not doing that, we literally can't. There's just fire marshal issues. So David, what are we doing?

00:08:37 Speaker_07
Well, tonight we thought we are going to take the acquired playbook and we're going to throw it out the window. and we are going to throw a party instead. It is a celebration of technology, of the San Francisco Bay Area, of San Francisco! Yeah!

00:08:59 Speaker_07
some of the most important businesses of our time, and most importantly, it's a celebration of you all. We say you all on the show. Usually you're not here. You're here.

00:09:09 Speaker_10
So tonight, you know, normally we study the past, often the far past. Tonight, we're going to kind of look at the present.

00:09:15 Speaker_10
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 going to indulge tonight.

00:09:25 Speaker_07
Indeed we are. So to start, We wanted to spend a couple minutes at the top of the show here in our first act. Just giving you all an update on the state of Acquired. It has been quite a year for us. You and I have lived a lot of life in one year.

00:09:44 Speaker_07
We've both had kids. The Wall Street Journal wrote about us. And we've experienced some pretty amazing growth.

00:09:55 Speaker_10
Yeah, and so we were thinking, like, you know, David kind of pitched this to me, and I'm like, what, are we going to stand up and give a keynote on, like, the state of the union of a choir? That's not, that doesn't feel right.

00:10:03 Speaker_10
But a conversation would be great if it was, you know, the right person to have a conversation with.

00:10:07 Speaker_10
And we were like, who is a big choir listener, kind of gets what we're all about, everyone in the audience is going to be like, oh, yeah, that person's one of us. you know, the world expert on podcasting.

00:10:19 Speaker_10
Fortunately, for us and all of you tonight, we are here to welcome, all the way from Stockholm, the CEO and founder of Spotify, Daniel Ek.

00:10:34 Speaker_07
Wow. Thank you so much. Wow. Daniel.

00:10:50 Speaker_02
Wow, this is pretty insane, guys. I think this probably ought to be the biggest recording of a podcast in the world.

00:11:00 Speaker_10
It's kind of an echoey studio.

00:11:05 Speaker_02
Yeah. You guys should use this as the studio every time, I think.

00:11:09 Speaker_07
Well, you've been after us to do more video for years. That is true.

00:11:13 Speaker_02
Here you are.

00:11:14 Speaker_10
This is going to be a video, for sure.

00:11:15 Speaker_02
All right. Well, love that. Love that. And it's really amazing for me to be here and just see this and all of you guys' success. I remember listening to you guys.

00:11:29 Speaker_02
as a fan, I think starting 2019 and see that we're now five years later from a small base going to something like this, it's pretty remarkable to see. And I don't know about you guys, but I thought maybe to commemorate this moment, it'd be pretty fun

00:11:50 Speaker_02
I know you don't want to tout your success, so I thought maybe I could do that for you. So maybe we can have a look at some of the amazing stats and achievements you guys have accomplished.

00:12:01 Speaker_10
Well, thanks. Yeah, I know you pulled some data, we pulled some data.

00:12:06 Speaker_10
This is the updated version up here of the kind of classic acquired chart that we've been showing, which basically shows from when we started in 2015, the kind of like organic doubling year over year over year all the way through today.

00:12:20 Speaker_10
And basically, since we don't market the show or we don't do any paid marketing,

00:12:24 Speaker_10
The only way the show grows is we make an episode, someone tells their friend about it, and on average, every listener tells one other listener every year, hey, you should listen, and that person sticks. And that's kind of the whole thing.

00:12:39 Speaker_02
Yeah, I mean, it's pretty remarkable. And on Spotify alone, you guys have now done over 5 million hours, and it tripled in the last year. Pretty remarkable, right? Yeah, big round of applause.

00:12:57 Speaker_07
So we did the math, or Ben did the math, as he usually does. I believe that is over 400 years of Acquired. We feel like it was 400 years making the episodes in the last year, but that was listened to in the past year.

00:13:11 Speaker_02
Yeah, is the Nintendo one the longest one you guys have done? I think Microsoft Volume 2 was our longest.

00:13:18 Speaker_07
Longest single episode.

00:13:20 Speaker_10
But thank you for pulling this. So the way this came to be is we asked Daniel, hey, you have access to data that all podcasters sort of dream of. What is the most interesting insights you can kind of pull out of it?

00:13:30 Speaker_10
And the thing that's the craziest to me about this chart is that even though Acquired's here's how many downloads an episode gets isn't celebrity status. It's not the craziest, biggest in the world.

00:13:44 Speaker_10
Because of the volume of our episodes, we all spend a lot of time together. Thank you for lending us your ears for all of those moments, because that's what that chart is to me, is all the time we spend together.

00:13:55 Speaker_02
Yeah, but what was really cool for me, too, is just seeing the fandom of the show. So one thing is, you know, obviously seeing the sort of total numbers, but also seeing the fandoms.

00:14:04 Speaker_02
And you guys added more than 250,000 followers and that tripled last year, too. So it's over 250,000 followers on Spotify alone now on The Quiet Show, which, again, is pretty remarkable to see that kind of growth.

00:14:22 Speaker_10
Yeah, there's two, I'm like a reformed venture capitalist, so I can't help but like point out things on charts. There's two things that are interesting about that chart. One is we've had like ridiculous subscriber growth on Spotify.

00:14:34 Speaker_10
I mean, it's just been, you guys entering the industry has created a ton of net new audience of people who did not listen to podcasters before.

00:14:43 Speaker_10
The second thing is if you pull the chart back up again, you can see the Wall Street Journal article in May in that insane,

00:14:53 Speaker_07
I know we keep talking about it, but this literally has never happened in the decade of acquired where a single Event caused a kink in the chart and that we see you guys see it.

00:15:03 Speaker_02
It's crazy Well, it's word-of-mouth in a new way But the other part that was really cool to me as I was looking through the data I kind of expected this to be sort of an English language thing only maybe the US maybe UK that kind of thing But you guys have truly grown worldwide

00:15:21 Speaker_02
So, you know, look at some of this stuff, like you have Mexico growing five times, Hong Kong, Israel, Singapore, acquired is global.

00:15:32 Speaker_02
So it's amazing to see here in San Francisco that we got 6,000 people in one place, but I'm pretty sure you guys should take this on the road and we'll see if we can make it in other places too.

00:15:42 Speaker_10
When you see the whole arc of the show tonight, I think you'll say, yeah, you can't take that on the road.

00:15:45 Speaker_02
Yeah. Could be. It's maybe a timing question. You guys should be like the new rock stars that tour around. That would be the great thing to do. I want to really kind of maybe take the moment here and ask you guys how all of this happened.

00:16:03 Speaker_02
And by way of context, just to put this in perspective, in 2019, you know, when we got into podcasts, the world around podcast listening and Spotify, there was a few million people listening to this.

00:16:17 Speaker_02
And you mentioned this, but like our goal was to sort of broaden

00:16:21 Speaker_02
this whole medium and today there's over a hundred and fifty million people listening to a podcast on Spotify and obviously your show is a huge success and something that people kind of attracts people to the medium because it's both pretty broad these days but also very very deep.

00:16:39 Speaker_02
What do you think contributed to that success?

00:16:42 Speaker_07
Well, you guys entering the industry, for sure. But I think you hit on it with broad... When Ben and I started this, we thought... We used to talk about what our TAM was. We were venture capitalists. We were like, what's the TAM for Acquire?

00:16:57 Speaker_07
Not that we even thought about it as a business or a product. And we were like, I don't know, maybe there's... What's the population of students in business schools out there? Maybe that's our TAM.

00:17:08 Speaker_07
And then we were like, well, I don't know, maybe it's a little bigger than that. Maybe it's everybody who ever wanted to go to business school. What's that cap out at? A million people, maybe? A million felt like our TAM.

00:17:23 Speaker_07
And what's happened to us, and I'm curious, I think you guys have probably seen the same thing, is that even though we think we're super nerds and we tell these very esoteric stories, they're just great stories.

00:17:37 Speaker_07
And people of all types want to listen to them.

00:17:41 Speaker_10
and the growth of the medium. We each have this ridiculous tailwind where we got lucky and picked right in 2015. We stayed with it. We got better at the craft.

00:17:48 Speaker_10
But it turns out people are super interested thanks to all the wireless headphones that exist now. It's just this weird cultural norm that's

00:17:59 Speaker_10
kind of come into fruition that it's okay to spend hours and hours and hours with someone in your ears talking about something that is interesting to them. And I just don't actually think that was a thing in the early 2010s. Right.

00:18:08 Speaker_02
So one of the things you obviously have done is, you know, added video to the format. And this is my plug of hopefully getting you guys to finally add video to Spotify as well. But what do you think is next for the show when it comes to that?

00:18:24 Speaker_02
Like, what do you see the big innovation of acquired will be in the future?

00:18:30 Speaker_10
So I think our total addressable market is at least 10 times bigger than it currently is today with our exact same product if we just keep doing the work and making the product better and shipping one episode a month.

00:18:40 Speaker_10
And the question is, like, how much more can we do without killing the golden goose? Like, how do you keep the main thing, actually, can I turn this back on you? Like, you have massively expanded what Spotify does since the original Vision.

00:18:55 Speaker_07
How should we as founders and- I mean, the original Vision was your music on Facebook.

00:19:00 Speaker_10
How should founders think about, like, the only reason that you are allowed to exist is because you're really good at this one core thing, but you should do other things?

00:19:10 Speaker_02
Well, I mean, I think it starts with your audience, right, and knowing your audience.

00:19:14 Speaker_02
So, like, for instance, we launched audiobooks about a year ago, but the sort of untold story about that audiobooks launch is what happened in Germany is all the record companies started uploading audiobooks to the service.

00:19:27 Speaker_02
So they started hacking the system for all these other things. And when they ran out of that, they actually started uploading podcasts.

00:19:34 Speaker_02
So podcasts turned out to be the easier medium for us to start with, but eventually we added sort of audiobooks too. So I think, you know, most amazing things tend to start with people kind of suggesting things or maybe even doing things.

00:19:47 Speaker_02
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.

00:19:56 Speaker_07
I think the other, you know, video, Ben and I talk a lot, we'll talk more about video throughout the evening here.

00:20:03 Speaker_07
You know, we've just always sort of been of the belief of, like, nobody wants to sit and watch us in our studios as talking heads going yak, yak, yak. But we've started to ask the question of, like, is there

00:20:16 Speaker_07
For certain companies we cover, is there a rich visual tapestry that we could do at the same level that we try and create an audio tapestry?

00:20:26 Speaker_10
It's an absolute crime that we did four hours on the entire multi-hundred year history of Hermes and it was just audio. But it was an amazing show though, right? Thank you.

00:20:36 Speaker_10
But audio is this like magic thing where I'm going to drag my, we're going to end up doing more video, but I'm going to drag my feet kicking and screaming all the way there because I feel very passionately that the reason that the caliber of person in this room with all the busy things that you have in your life, the reason that you're open to spending all this time with us is because we don't take your full undivided attention.

00:20:57 Speaker_10
You can run. You can mow the lawn. You can drive. You can, you know, everything that everyone does while they listen to Acquired. I like, I remain unconvinced that we would work as a four hour video product.

00:21:12 Speaker_02
Yeah, I mean, look, I don't know, to be honest. I think this is probably the biggest thing that surprised me is that the world just keeps evolving constantly. So you talked about video and on Spotify, it's been a huge growth thing.

00:21:28 Speaker_02
I would have said to you as well, people probably mostly, why would you want to watch any video? But I think younger consumers, especially, they don't know what the difference is. They just want to feel closer presence to the person.

00:21:41 Speaker_02
And I mean, we saw it already with the bloopers, right? It's like, this is fun, what you guys are doing, and people have a relationship to you guys too, hence why so many people are showing up here tonight.

00:21:52 Speaker_02
And I think video is just a way to express that, whether or not they're watching the full four hours or whether they're diving in and out over a particular type of segment. I think just giving the consumer the choice is sort of one of the big things.

00:22:09 Speaker_02
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 novel ways.

00:22:18 Speaker_07
It's funny, your question was what's next for Acquired. We're going to do a normal episode after this, after tonight. That normal episode... probably will focus on a Menlo Park-based technology company.

00:22:35 Speaker_07
And one of the lessons that we're already starting to learn from that... Spoilers!

00:22:40 Speaker_10
We can't take that back now!

00:22:41 Speaker_07
This is live! This is live. It's just not holding the current state of things and vision of what you are too tightly. You've learned a lot from Mark over the years. You all have been very close. Spotify started on Facebook.

00:23:03 Speaker_07
And here you are, you're the biggest podcasting platform in the world, so you didn't hold on to that vision too tightly. Right.

00:23:12 Speaker_10
So can I turn that into a question?

00:23:14 Speaker_07
Please. I wanted to leave you some space before we ask the question. Thank you, I appreciate that.

00:23:18 Speaker_10
That's what a 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.

00:23:27 Speaker_10
Do you remember in the early days of Spotify when you figured out, oh, Facebook is gonna be this unbelievable channel for us?

00:23:35 Speaker_02
Yeah, I mean, it's, 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, you know, the little told story is, if I remember this correctly, I think Mark even

00:23:53 Speaker_02
pre-Facebook, was trying to do a music startup. And then he was like, yeah, this feels like a difficult thing. So I think pretty much every great entrepreneur in the valley tried to do a music startup. And so he was definitely passionate about it.

00:24:13 Speaker_02
And then his idea, obviously, was a social music product. And he and I, we started talking about it. In the beginning, he started like he wanted mostly Spotify to be more social.

00:24:25 Speaker_02
And I kind of said, well, I don't know that that's... Do you remember how you got introduced?

00:24:27 Speaker_10
Because Spotify was not like Spotify, the way what it is today, a pillar of the world.

00:24:32 Speaker_02
Yeah, well, I got introduced to Mark through Sean Parker.

00:24:37 Speaker_02
And so Sean kind of said to do suck like hey you got to meet this entrepreneur from Sweden And I remember like suck at the time was living in a very small house And we went for a barbecue at his house. This is probably

00:24:52 Speaker_02
I don't know, 2008 or 2009, like one of those things. And then we kind of struck a friendship and we started jamming on various ideas around how to make music more social. And you weren't even live in the US yet, I don't think.

00:25:06 Speaker_02
We definitely weren't live. So the sort of secret of Spotify was we sort of seeded one account at a time to get a bunch of influencers to kind of like it. And I think Sean in particular, he kind of used it as a social currency.

00:25:19 Speaker_02
So everyone came to him to kind of try to get... Oh, the invites!

00:25:24 Speaker_07
Oh man, the currency of the Spotify invites.

00:25:28 Speaker_02
Yeah, it was a big, big thing for quite a few years before we launched where it was kind of the secret thing if you were in the club or if you weren't.

00:25:39 Speaker_02
Anyway, he got Mark on it, and I think Mark kind of wrote this status update, like Spotify is so good. And then, you know, everyone's like, how did you get this? This was kind of the main thing. When can I get it? How can I do it?

00:25:52 Speaker_02
And yeah, then we started jamming around, like what a social music product ought to be. And we had this sort of idea, wouldn't it be cool, sort of like with,

00:26:04 Speaker_02
You know, ICQ at the time where you had the status updates, like, wouldn't it be cool to be able to check out what your friends were listening to? And we kind of got to work together, built that product and coincided it with the Spotify US launch.

00:26:21 Speaker_10
And this was when News Feed was really young, right? So there was like, you'd be scrolling through your News Feed and it would be giving you these status updates of what your friends were listening to piped in directly from Spotify.

00:26:29 Speaker_02
Exactly right. So you could see all your friends. It actually still exists in Spotify product on desktops. So you can kind of see what your friends are listening to real time.

00:26:39 Speaker_02
It's one of our more popular legacy features that's been around now for like 13 years.

00:26:44 Speaker_10
It was the right sidebar, but I feel like I haven't seen it in a while. Maybe I just... It's still there.

00:26:48 Speaker_02
It's still there.

00:26:49 Speaker_10
But this gets at the point of, like, social music listening was this core insight that you had.

00:26:55 Speaker_10
Mark was on board to kind of build it together and let you, you know, use the... I mean, he got a lot out of it, too, but let you use Facebook to distribute it.

00:27:06 Speaker_10
And yet, everyone here who's a Spotify customer today, when I think Spotify, I think, oh, that's, like, the easy way to access music podcasts and now audiobooks. But I don't think, like, oh, it's a social listening.

00:27:18 Speaker_10
So at what point did you kind of, like, Like let go of that precious idea and say maybe the social is like important, but not that important.

00:27:24 Speaker_02
Well, I still think Social is hugely important.

00:27:28 Speaker_02
And for instance, we have a we have a product now called jam which allows you to Be with your friends and actually alter what you're listening to at the same time and it's growing incredibly rapidly right now all over the world and

00:27:42 Speaker_02
So it's something that I think very much is a social product.

00:27:46 Speaker_02
But while I still think music is very social, I think what we got wrong in the product was this notion that just seeing what all of your friends are listening to may not be the right social product.

00:27:58 Speaker_02
But if you instead say, I want to work together with my friends and I want to have a shared listening, whether we're in the same place or not, That turns out to be a pretty amazing thing.

00:28:07 Speaker_02
So you see people do it at parties where you can literally join someone's jam and you can sort of all queue up songs together instead of taking my phone or your phone. We could all be sort of working together on something.

00:28:19 Speaker_02
But what we saw during the pandemic, and that's like where jam sort of started, was we started seeing that people were using this to stay connected as well by having sort of this shared, you know, consistent music listening where we're all listening to the same thing at the same time.

00:28:34 Speaker_02
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, and, and trying to get that right.

00:28:47 Speaker_02
But I think, you know, Facebook kind of moved off of this sort of presence based social aspect for all things. So it wasn't just music, actually. People were doing it for games back then too.

00:28:57 Speaker_02
So it was like, you know, I've, uh, created another Farmville.

00:29:02 Speaker_07
We remember that era.

00:29:03 Speaker_10
Yeah. What was it, it was like north of 10% of Facebook's revenue at IPO was from?

00:29:09 Speaker_07
Was Zynga, yeah, yeah. I mean, this is all fun history. I'm curious though, we're gonna talk to Mark later tonight.

00:29:18 Speaker_10
Are you doing research live on stage?

00:29:20 Speaker_07
Yeah, yeah, definitely. You've had a relationship, a pretty close relationship for 15 plus years as fellow founders in the trenches. What have you taken from him that you've brought into Spotify and how you run the company?

00:29:39 Speaker_02
Many things, and I've learned so much from him and the rest of the team at Meta as well. But I think specifically from him, he's probably the best learner I've ever seen.

00:29:53 Speaker_02
You can have a conversation with him about a topic, he may not know very much about it. And then the next time, he would know more than, I would say, most experts about the subject.

00:30:04 Speaker_02
And it's really remarkable just how tenacious he is sort of about learning and staying curious about things. So that's definitely been a super inspiring thing for me. And I think that this sort of shines through with how he runs the company too.

00:30:20 Speaker_02
He has a very sort of clear idea, but he also takes a lot of feedback and sort of iterates

00:30:27 Speaker_02
On that and you know, it's everything from what one of the cool things for me has been seeing how he runs meetings, you know For instance, I kind of like having relatively small meetings with people mark the average meeting he has is like 15 to 20 people in the room and

00:30:44 Speaker_02
And how you make a product review or discussion productive with 15 and 20 people, still get people to be heard. 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.

00:31:02 Speaker_10
Can I ask, maybe this is a little bit more pointed, you are a kind person, you are a soft-spoken person, but you are a fierce competitor.

00:31:11 Speaker_07
Okay, so we haven't told you this. When we interviewed you 18, 24 months-ish ago in Stockholm, I'd never been to Sweden before, I don't think you had either. And we left, we thought, just like, what a lovely country, what lovely people.

00:31:29 Speaker_07
Daniel is like the most generous person we could imagine. You're here tonight. And... That guy is a fierce competitor, and there is a reason why he has built Spotify.

00:31:46 Speaker_10
And very strategic. I think you see the chessboard. Mark is like that too. Do you feel like your relationship, do you amplify each other?

00:31:55 Speaker_02
Well, I mean, the rule I have with Mark is I don't try to go into a competition with him because I know it'll end badly for both of us. So, you know, as you know, Mark likes sports.

00:32:06 Speaker_02
So one of the things I don't do with Mark is play sports for exactly this reason. You know, what was the last time he sort of tore his ACL when someone, you know, rather than giving up. I feel like it ends pretty badly.

00:32:23 Speaker_02
I like playing when I know I'll win, so I think it's a pretty good thing to not do that.

00:32:31 Speaker_10
If I were to characterize why Spotify worked, it feels like there's an incredible amount of tenacity and a willingness to run at a problem that a lot of people had tried and failed at before.

00:32:40 Speaker_10
But there is also this, you kind of bide your time, you kind of wait for the opening, and then you figure out a game you know that you can win, and then you go execute in that game.

00:32:51 Speaker_02
That's pretty much spot on, to be honest. One of the things we talk about a lot, that I don't say that much, but Gustav, who's backstage here, who's our product officer and CTO, is we say talk is cheap.

00:33:05 Speaker_02
Most people talk about execution, speed of execution, let's move, let's go. We actually spend a lot of time just discussing and talking.

00:33:14 Speaker_02
So the internal saying at Spotify is talk is cheap, because we want to be really deliberate about what it is we're doing and how we're doing it.

00:33:20 Speaker_10
You mean that as a virtue, like talk is cheap, so let's talk a lot because it's inexpensive to waste those resources.

00:33:25 Speaker_02
Exactly right. It's more expensive to build than most people think. And so we actually spend a lot of time discussing and people get really confused when they sort of enter our culture. They're like, but why don't we just execute?

00:33:38 Speaker_02
And we're still sitting and debating and sort of game theorizing how this will play out and getting all the things working in a certain way.

00:33:46 Speaker_02
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.

00:33:54 Speaker_02
But 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.

00:34:05 Speaker_02
We had to get the entire industry with us. So if we wanted to do something, we had to convince a bunch of people that it was the right thing to do.

00:34:12 Speaker_02
And in many cases, even making relatively simple changes could take one or two years for us to get licensed. So you better be sure that you're right when you're doing it. And this has kind of now become a thing in how we're doing stuff.

00:34:27 Speaker_02
We're probably not going to be the fastest in moving fast and breaking things. But we are going to be very deliberate, and we're probably going to be more right when we actually do something.

00:34:39 Speaker_10
You're like the anti-fail fast, the anti-move fast and break things, the anti-ship and iterate. Well, I'd like to hope we can also ship and iterate.

00:34:47 Speaker_02
Yeah, yeah, yeah. But we won't be the fastest, no.

00:34:53 Speaker_07
Which is funny, coming back to podcasting. You didn't enter the business until 2019. I assume you were thinking about it for a long time after that. And when, I'm sure you know, when did you become the market leader in podcasting?

00:35:11 Speaker_02
Oh, I think it sort of depends on which markets you're kind of looking at it. But we were pretty much, it started happening in quite a few markets already 2020 and 2021.

00:35:26 Speaker_02
And in 2022, we were pretty much the market leader in most markets around the world. So three years. Yeah. Why?

00:35:32 Speaker_07
From launch.

00:35:33 Speaker_10
Why?

00:35:34 Speaker_07
Yeah, why? That's the question. And did you expect that it would be that fast, given that you were so methodical and working so long to launch it?

00:35:43 Speaker_02
We don't always know how fast this will be, but I think we had a pretty good sense that we could sort of iterate and improve our way, sort of hell climb from the mountain we were on when we saw the sort of initial traction.

00:35:57 Speaker_02
But I think the contrarian bet we did, unlike many others did, was at the time when we launched, it was sort of viewed that you needed to have a different app for everything, right?

00:36:08 Speaker_02
Like you had to have a separate podcasting app, and podcasting and music were very different. And for us, it's just listening.

00:36:15 Speaker_02
And what we realized is we should use this base of what was then several hundred million people and today's way north of half a billion people and just serve them more stuff.

00:36:26 Speaker_02
And it turns out that like what we saw all the time, it wasn't like our music listeners weren't listening to podcasts. So why not use this experience and also recommend them great other stuff?

00:36:37 Speaker_02
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.

00:36:47 Speaker_10
But to your point on being like slow and methodical, okay, you had channel to people, okay, they knew you're for listening, but if you're stuffing stuff in that channel that is not the thing that they want, then that blows up your core.

00:37:00 Speaker_10
And so I think my takeaway at least is you figured out a way to do it where you made sure that people were going to be open to using you for this new

00:37:11 Speaker_02
Yeah, of course, you're right. Obviously, just because you have the distribution advantage doesn't mean it'll work.

00:37:18 Speaker_02
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 fails.

00:37:27 Speaker_02
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

00:37:36 Speaker_02
Germany was sort of an early indicator for a lot of things for us, both in podcasting and in books.

00:37:43 Speaker_02
And what I realized even before we launched books, for instance, was around 2018, we started seeing books showing up on the top list in Germany of the most sort of you know, listen to music tracks, right?

00:38:00 Speaker_02
It wasn't music, it was clearly books, but it sort of made it all the way up to the top list. And shortly thereafter, we started showing up as the biggest book distributor in the country, but we weren't even trying.

00:38:12 Speaker_02
And it was actually a pretty horrible experience to listen to books on Spotify. So when your product is being used in spite of it actually being a pretty terrible experience, you kind of know you've got something.

00:38:23 Speaker_02
So that was the sort of genesis for how we then were able to build and sort of expand.

00:38:27 Speaker_10
That's awesome. Well, that's it for this segment. Are you going to stick around and watch the rest of the night? Oh, yeah, for sure. I'm so excited. Awesome. Well, Daniel, thank you.

00:38:38 Speaker_07
Thank you so much for being here.

00:38:41 Speaker_10
Alright listeners, this is a great time to tell you about one of our favorite companies in the acquired ecosystem, Statsig. As you probably know by now, Statsig is the world's first product acceleration platform.

00:38:53 Speaker_10
Thousands of companies from OpenAI to Series A startups rely on Statsig to ship fast, learn more, and make smart decisions.

00:39:01 Speaker_10
But you may not know about all the ways in which their story is directly tied to Facebook's story that Mark will share with us later this episode.

00:39:09 Speaker_07
Indeed and Mark's most famous catchphrase is probably move fast and break things But despite instilling this in Facebook's engineering culture Facebook doesn't actually break very often. How Ben?

00:39:21 Speaker_10
Well Facebook invested hundreds of thousands of engineering hours in a set of internal tools These tools let any engineer set up new metrics ship new features and measure performance in real time So that meant anyone could just ship a new feature But they always had the metrics to use as guardrails and they could always roll it back if anything

00:39:39 Speaker_10
broke.

00:39:40 Speaker_07
Totally awesome. You might wish that your team could build products like Facebook did, ship fast, make database decisions, iterate rapidly. But you need the right tools, so you're stuck, right? Well, enter Statsig.

00:39:52 Speaker_07
Statsig has built the world's first product acceleration platform, combining tools like feature flags, product analytics, experimentation, and observability all in one place, helping you move faster and make smarter decisions.

00:40:05 Speaker_10
And even better, Statsig was literally founded by an ex-meta team who wanted to help everyone build like the best.

00:40:11 Speaker_10
Today, many of the world's leading tech companies rely on Statsig, including OpenAI, Microsoft, Notion, Anthropic, Figma, plus thousands of early-stage startups.

00:40:21 Speaker_07
So if you're ready to accelerate your growth and democratize product building at your company, just go to statsig.com slash acquired. And when you get in touch, just tell them that Ben and David sent you. Yes.

00:40:33 Speaker_10
Now is also a great time to tell you about one of our very favorite companies, the climate aligned AI infrastructure provider, Crusoe.

00:40:41 Speaker_07
Yes, Crusoe is a cloud platform built specifically for AI workloads and powered by clean energy.

00:40:48 Speaker_07
They build and operate GPU data centers, with each one powered by low-cost, stranded energy that otherwise goes to waste or, worse, gets emitted as greenhouse gases.

00:40:58 Speaker_10
The way this works is completely crazy. When Acquired first started working with Crusoe last year, it was a cool idea. It was an early stage, very cool, kind of insane concept.

00:41:10 Speaker_10
Now they are one of the world's most important companies with an AI cloud that is actually superior to the hyperscalers, and a whole bunch of the largest companies in the world are now trusting their AI infrastructure to Crusoe.

00:41:23 Speaker_07
Yeah, it's easy to think about AI as like, oh, that's a bunch of PhDs over at Meta or OpenAI or Anthropic tinkering with model weights and then going and hitting compute.

00:41:32 Speaker_07
But there's this whole other industrial side of AI that's everything that happens after they press go on model training. And that's energy, that's cooling, that's construction. It's literally like steel and pipes and wire.

00:41:46 Speaker_07
It's all the physical infrastructure behind AI.

00:41:49 Speaker_07
Crusoe has like hundreds and hundreds of construction workers, steel workers, plumbers, electricians, all building and operating data centers in some of the harshest locations on earth to capture this energy.

00:42:01 Speaker_10
Yeah, the net of all this is Crusoe has gigawatts of power in their development pipeline. That is like nuclear reactor amounts of power for less cost than other providers and with zero or in some cases actually negative emissions.

00:42:15 Speaker_10
And that's super important. If you listen to Mark talk later in this episode or elsewhere about what the bottleneck to AI progress is, it's actually not compute, but energy. And Crusoe is solving that problem.

00:42:28 Speaker_07
It's just an awesome company. We're super proud to work with them and also to be investors.

00:42:33 Speaker_07
The other big update that's happened since we started working with them last year is that you can now work with Crusoe either through their managed AI cloud, which you always could, and that's great for startups and enterprises who want a complete AI platform, or directly as a data center customer.

00:42:49 Speaker_07
which yes, several of like the biggest companies in the world are now doing. So just going over to Crusoe.ai slash acquired that's C-R-U-S-O-E.ai slash acquired or click the link in the show notes and tell them that Ben and David sent you.

00:43:05 Speaker_10
Thanks Crusoe.

00:43:08 Speaker_07
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.

00:43:18 Speaker_10
Act two.

00:43:18 Speaker_07
Act two.

00:43:19 Speaker_10
So Dave and I are sitting around, we're planning tonight. We're like, what's the thing to do when we've got all these great folks in the room who love Acquired? And we're like, rather than ask them, hey, what should we do tonight?

00:43:32 Speaker_10
We should just check our email and see what do people actually already want when we're not even asking.

00:43:37 Speaker_07
Episode requests. Episode requests. Number one. You go through the Acquired inbox, a lot of episode requests.

00:43:43 Speaker_10
The second biggest request is, hey, you did this episode. You were wrong. You need to fix it. Or you did this episode, and a lot has happened since, and you need to do a follow-up on it.

00:43:56 Speaker_10
And so we thought, what if we pick three or four of those, and we speed run all of them with the acquired audience present?

00:44:06 Speaker_07
update the acquired cannon, and we thought, who could we do this with? And it just so happens that the perfect person to grill us on everything we got wrong and everything we need to update lives right here in San Francisco.

00:44:19 Speaker_07
Please welcome, from Bloomberg and the circuit, Emily Chang. Hello!

00:44:33 Speaker_06
Hi, Hux!

00:44:35 Speaker_07
Emily, thank you so much.

00:44:45 Speaker_06
Congratulations.

00:44:47 Speaker_10
Thank you.

00:44:47 Speaker_06
Thank you for being our guest. You guys, this is pretty awesome.

00:44:51 Speaker_10
Welcome to our recording studio. Welcome to our, yeah.

00:44:54 Speaker_06
Thank you, I'm glad to be here.

00:44:57 Speaker_10
I need to like mine you for some research. I know we have like a thing that we're doing here over the next 19 minutes, but You went wakesurfing with Mark. The theme of tonight is researching.

00:45:08 Speaker_09
I tried.

00:45:09 Speaker_10
His Fourth of July video, he is standing there in a tuxedo with an American flag, drinking a beer. Everybody's seen it. Everybody's seen this. And the tuxedo's dry. I've wakesurfed a couple times. I start in the water, and you get pulled up.

00:45:24 Speaker_10
I would not... So how logistically... Can he, like, step off the boat?

00:45:29 Speaker_06
As you could probably tell from the episode, I'm not a wake surfer, but I tried. And Mark is pretty good. And what I did not realize is that you can do a dry start where you, if you're so good, you can just ride the board right off the boat.

00:45:45 Speaker_06
And voila, tuxedo surfing video. And I can personally attest that I did see him do a dry start. And he can, I mean, I think it's real. I think.

00:45:56 Speaker_10
That or he had a lot of tuxedos on that boat to get multiple trial runs.

00:46:00 Speaker_06
By the way, Priscilla's pretty awesome, too. They can both shred. Just have to say that. Because she's here tonight, too.

00:46:06 Speaker_10
All right, Emily.

00:46:08 Speaker_06
Take us in. So right now, and A plus, you guys, for self-reflection, we're going to revisit some of your past episodes. And we decided on some episodes that maybe were a little controversial.

00:46:22 Speaker_06
In the early days, you would grade every company that you covered, and you made some good calls, but also some questionable calls sometimes.

00:46:32 Speaker_06
So I thought we would go down, do a little memory lane, and start with YouTube, which, David, you gave YouTube a C in 2016.

00:46:41 Speaker_10
This is the acquisition of YouTube by Google.

00:46:43 Speaker_06
Right. And you, Ben, said it could be as bad as a C minus. And I, I just, I just, I have to, I just question that a little bit.

00:46:55 Speaker_10
We were young, it was 2016, we didn't know what we were doing.

00:46:58 Speaker_06
We were misguided. But let's just twist the knife a little because we have some quotes here. Ben, you said, I'm a little bit bearish on YouTube primarily because it's not a destination. And David said, like, who goes to YouTube and discovers something?

00:47:20 Speaker_07
The sad part is that we actually said that and decided to revisit this.

00:47:25 Speaker_10
So I don't know, it may actually be the case that that wasn't a huge behavior yet. Like the algorithm hadn't become, I know I'm being defensive here.

00:47:36 Speaker_07
Ben, this is where we fall on our sword.

00:47:38 Speaker_10
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 start my day.

00:47:45 Speaker_10
Maybe I was weird, but I couldn't imagine starting my day and going to YouTube.com and just watching whatever it served me the way that now, it's very easy to do that in the app.

00:47:53 Speaker_07
Well, I think, okay, so for me, there's a lot to talk about with YouTube that we got wrong.

00:47:57 Speaker_07
This is the biggest thing that we've discovered since is, I think literally as we were making that episode, AI and social media feed recommenders were happening in that moment, and it was about to lead to everything that is happening today, and it was YouTube within Google, and meta then Facebook,

00:48:22 Speaker_07
buying GPUs and building AI that turned feed recommenders into the ultimate destination site. And we just completely had no idea that that was happening.

00:48:36 Speaker_10
Right. AI had its moment a decade ago. We're all excited about it now, but the use case of recommending you something that should be the next item that you should consume was a killer use case for AI even then. We miss that.

00:48:48 Speaker_06
Well, today, you have analysts saying if you pulled YouTube out of Google, it would be worth half a trillion dollars, which is almost double where Netflix is. It's on track YouTube TV to be the largest cable provider in the United States.

00:49:07 Speaker_06
I have a house full of kids in my house. It's the first and the second screen because we have YouTube TV. So the question is, can they really be everything to everyone, right?

00:49:20 Speaker_07
So here is, I think, our most legitimate defense. Google does not report YouTube profitability. They report YouTube revenue. So when we did the episode, YouTube was doing about $5 billion run rate revenue.

00:49:35 Speaker_07
It is now like $35 to $40 billion annual revenue run rate, which is incredible.

00:49:39 Speaker_10
And back then, it was way losing money. It was a money pit.

00:49:42 Speaker_07
Yes, and it was losing a lot of money back then. Google does not report today, but here is what is unique about YouTube versus every other platform is they pay out 55% of revenue on long form and 45% on shorts directly to creators.

00:49:58 Speaker_10
which 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.

00:50:05 Speaker_06
And it's a direct variable cost. $70 billion to creators over the last three years, which, again, is more than Netflix spends on content.

00:50:14 Speaker_10
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,

00:50:25 Speaker_10
strategically very great thing to own, not to mention going into the land of AI training data. But as a business, it is not clear to me that YouTube makes money.

00:50:34 Speaker_06
Well, and I mean, my source is also, if they're making money, it's little to no money, but they could obviously change how much they're paying out to creators. They can, you know, turn the spigot on and off.

00:50:45 Speaker_07
And the durability that they're building and the affinity from creators, we'll talk about creators on the platform in a minute. Yes, there's a reason why so many creators want to graduate to YouTube, and this is it.

00:50:59 Speaker_06
Well, my show's on YouTube, your show's on YouTube. How do you feel about YouTube as creators?

00:51:05 Speaker_10
Strongly. For everyone listening, thank you for listening to the podcast feed where we have a direct relationship with you that is not intermediated by an algorithm.

00:51:16 Speaker_10
But honestly, it is the craziest thing to see these YouTubers who have built mass followings, tens of millions, hundreds of millions sometimes of subscribers, where subscribers and views are uncorrelated.

00:51:28 Speaker_06
Yeah. Great today.

00:51:33 Speaker_07
Great today. Oh, A+. So here's the other thing we didn't mention. And I think this was true back then too. YouTube is both the second largest social media property in the world and the second largest search engine in the world.

00:51:48 Speaker_10
The way that you should look at YouTube is not what is the discounted cash flow of YouTube as an independent business if you look at their profitability today.

00:51:58 Speaker_10
What was the existential risk to Google of not owning YouTube if YouTube became a thing somewhere outside of Google? And that is worth paying a lot for.

00:52:07 Speaker_06
Huge. All right, moving on. The next company we're going to talk about is LinkedIn. You covered it three days after they got bought by Microsoft. You both basically gave it an A. Ben quote, how are we both positive on this?

00:52:22 Speaker_06
I woke up Monday morning being like, what?

00:52:26 Speaker_10
Oh yeah, and then we've got this other one.

00:52:27 Speaker_06
What about LinkedIn today?

00:52:29 Speaker_10
Yeah, we said we had no idea how it went because it was too recent. I think the story with LinkedIn is it was super unclear that it had the running room ahead of it. What are the numbers on YouTube today, revenue-wise?

00:52:43 Speaker_07
On YouTube? I'm sorry, on LinkedIn. 16 billion plus in revenue today.

00:52:48 Speaker_10
They have 5X revenue since they were bought 8 years ago.

00:52:51 Speaker_07
Of which 5 billion comes from advertising and content, which for all intents and purposes didn't exist when the acquisition happened. They have built that into a real business.

00:53:02 Speaker_07
I mean, for us at Unacquired, I 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.

00:53:15 Speaker_07
But engagement is like 5, 10x on LinkedIn. I mean, it's our most important social platform. And if you had said that eight years ago, we would have been crazy.

00:53:24 Speaker_10
The reason why this was worth a revisit and why I think they've been so much more successful than anyone would have thought at the time of acquisition, they 5x'ed in revenue, which, you know, over eight years is great, but not like

00:53:36 Speaker_10
three standard deviations, four standard deviations from the mean. It's not one of these crazy things in the world. But essentially, they created $100 billion of market cap.

00:53:45 Speaker_10
I mean, if you look at what a reasonable multiple would be for LinkedIn, if it were an independent company today, it's a big company. It would be over $100 billion market cap company today. And it's just kind of hanging out inside Microsoft.

00:54:01 Speaker_06
Revisiting this was a little traumatic for me because this was, if you'll remember, this was an acquisition that like no one saw coming. There were no leaks, no reporting on this before it happened.

00:54:12 Speaker_06
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.

00:54:20 Speaker_06
who came in and was like, Microsoft just bought LinkedIn, and you have to interview Satya and Jeff Weiner in an hour. And I was like, what? So yeah, so that's what I remember.

00:54:34 Speaker_07
Was it a good interview?

00:54:35 Speaker_06
I mean, I think so. I actually went back.

00:54:36 Speaker_07
I watched it. You said it? Yeah, it was good.

00:54:38 Speaker_06
It was great. My hair wasn't quite fully done, but we made it. We made it through. Okay.

00:54:45 Speaker_10
You have some new reporting.

00:54:47 Speaker_06
I do, actually, because I talked to Reid Hoffman, who, of course, is the co-founder of LinkedIn. And, you know, it's interesting because Reid joined the board of Microsoft. He's still on the board of Microsoft.

00:54:58 Speaker_06
He was an early investor in OpenAI, on the board of OpenAI. Shocker, Satya Nadella is on the AI train early. Microsoft is the biggest backer of OpenAI now.

00:55:08 Speaker_07
And Kevin Scott is the CTO of Microsoft now, who came from LinkedIn.

00:55:13 Speaker_06
So Reid gave me a little quote. He said, Satya has run Microsoft as a type of founder. You could call it being a re-founder or even a late-stage co-founder. The re-founder doesn't need to have been in the garage from day one.

00:55:26 Speaker_06
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.

00:55:37 Speaker_07
The question is, did he listen to our Microsoft series?

00:55:41 Speaker_06
I don't know. You wonder if the AI wars would have played out differently. OK, we're going to keep moving quickly because I really want to make sure we get to the last one. But SpaceX, one of your most popular episodes ever.

00:55:54 Speaker_06
Luckily, you're in the clear because you didn't grade them.

00:55:57 Speaker_07
We stopped grading at some point.

00:56:00 Speaker_06
But obviously, Starlink is a juggernaut. Ben, you talked about it being potentially a $30 billion business at the time. Can you grade SpaceX today knowing that Starlink is just even bigger?

00:56:11 Speaker_10
OK, so yeah, the company was valued at $36 billion in May of 2020 when we did the episode. At that time, they had had 26 successful launches that year. Last year, they did 96 launches. And they're planning to do 118 this year, which is over two a week.

00:56:29 Speaker_10
It's like an insane great decade.

00:56:29 Speaker_07
They're doing one every three days.

00:56:31 Speaker_10
But on top of the launch business.

00:56:33 Speaker_07
Yeah, the launch business is not the interesting part of the business.

00:56:36 Speaker_10
They now have Starlink, which is estimated to do $6.5 billion in 2024. And they are reportedly profitable as a business. I'm pretty sure the 7,000 Starlink satellites that are in orbit represent 2 thirds of the total satellites orbiting the Earth.

00:56:51 Speaker_10
And it's not just like, oh, we'll see if people want Starlink. People want Starlink. I mean, the business itself, I think, I'm looking at the subscriber count. It's something like 3 million subscribers. And it's only been three years since it launched.

00:57:05 Speaker_07
So when we did the episode, Starlink was like pie in the sky, literally. There was nothing. And now, I'm pretty sure Starlink is the entire... SpaceX was valued at $36 billion when we did the episode.

00:57:21 Speaker_07
Starlink itself is worth way more than $36 billion today.

00:57:25 Speaker_06
It's a beast, total beast. And by the way, nobody else could have saved those astronauts, right?

00:57:31 Speaker_09
Like, I mean, NASA didn't have a choice. Yeah, yeah.

00:57:36 Speaker_06
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 OK to say, sorry. Hopefully I didn't just cross the line.

00:57:45 Speaker_10
Well, I will say it. So the Starlink execution is just more remarkable than, like, I think 99% of people would have guessed.

00:57:54 Speaker_06
Yeah. Okay, so now, to your most requested revisit ever, the Arena Queen, you gave her an A+. But that was two years ago, before the ERAs tour. So I think you're going to have to invent a new category.

00:58:12 Speaker_10
Certainly. Or stop grading. That's the real answer.

00:58:18 Speaker_07
The context on this is, it's a little weird because there's no enterprise value of Taylor out there that you can calculate. We're not talking about Twitter, I promise. There's no enterprise value of Taylor.

00:58:36 Speaker_07
The closest thing was when we did the episode, Forbes estimated her net worth at $550 million.

00:58:46 Speaker_07
Yeah By our calculations, we're pretty sure she generated on the order of 550 million dollars of free cash flow this year this year last 12 months That's a woo So so is she more than a billionaire

00:59:05 Speaker_10
So David's got like an argument on this. So walk us through your perceived financial breakdown of Swift Incorporated.

00:59:13 Speaker_07
Yes, Taylor Swift Inc. So the big piece that I actually think is the most interesting piece that we got wrong in our episode, Ben did a

00:59:24 Speaker_07
fantastic primer on the music industry, and all the challenges for artists, etc., etc., and it's getting better, and Spotify's doing great, and Daniel's doing great, and all that.

00:59:35 Speaker_07
The latest reported talked-about numbers was that Taylor was making less than $5 million a year from streaming.

00:59:44 Speaker_10
There was this myth that streaming doesn't pay.

00:59:46 Speaker_07
This myth that streaming doesn't pay. Last year, Taylor made over, well over, reported, reported, this is reported, well over $100 million from Spotify streaming alone. Alone. Doesn't include any of the other platforms, so gross that up.

01:00:11 Speaker_07
And by nature of what she has been doing that we talked about in that episode, redoing her masters, like you think about what of the percentage of those streams that are happening are they on where she owns all the rights?

01:00:25 Speaker_07
That is a very, very, very high gross margin number that is coming to Taylor every year.

01:00:30 Speaker_10
Of that high hundred plus million dollar streaming number, she actually keeps quite a bit of it because of this strategy that she's, it's not a lot.

01:00:36 Speaker_07
So the amount that she's getting just from streaming, like eras tour aside, movie aside, she is getting paid more every year than any Hollywood actor, probably any athlete in the world. She could just sit at home.

01:00:50 Speaker_10
Okay, but then.

01:00:50 Speaker_07
But she doesn't.

01:00:52 Speaker_10
But then.

01:00:53 Speaker_07
But then.

01:00:54 Speaker_10
She did an ERAs tour.

01:00:55 Speaker_07
Yes.

01:00:55 Speaker_10
Which is like the most unbelievable tour that any artist has ever conceived of or executed. How much money did that make last year, David?

01:01:03 Speaker_07
So last year, the ERAs tour in calendar year 2023 grossed I think $1.1 billion. Wow. The previous. Which is a gross. Gross, gross. And tours are expensive. Tours are expensive.

01:01:16 Speaker_10
There's a lot of, you know. things involved in making shows.

01:01:22 Speaker_07
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.

01:01:33 Speaker_07
So not only did she set the record for highest grossing tour, she did it within 12 months. Obviously, the tour has continued.

01:01:39 Speaker_10
But let's say she operates a very high margin touring business. Let's assume she's very efficient at it. Call it a 30%, 35% operating margin on the business. A lot of artists actually lose money touring because it's a, you know, anyway.

01:01:56 Speaker_07
That's another $300, $350 million in cash flow every year.

01:02:00 Speaker_10
Yep. Or at least last year. During the eras to where she is making that money.

01:02:03 Speaker_07
When she is actively touring. And then... And then, there's the movie. Right. So, the movie grossed... $267 million at the box office. Highest grossing concert film of all time. Taylor went direct to the theaters with the movie. So paying less middlemen?

01:02:26 Speaker_07
Less middlemen. Then she did the direct deal with Disney for the streaming rights. That was another $75 million on top of that. So well over $300 million from the movie. Obviously, you're not going to make a movie every year.

01:02:39 Speaker_10
So David, you're kind of getting to the point of like your 550 million number of cash flow last year may actually be conservative.

01:02:44 Speaker_07
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.? Wow, you did used to be an investment banker.

01:02:55 Speaker_07
Half a billion plus cash flow every year.

01:02:59 Speaker_06
So I re-listened to the Taylor podcast with my kids driving to Tahoe and they loved it. You have a potential Gen Alpha audience.

01:03:07 Speaker_07
It's our gateway drug.

01:03:08 Speaker_06
In case you're getting nervous. But here's a question. Is it possible that we're at peak Taylor?

01:03:15 Speaker_07
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?

01:03:26 Speaker_10
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?

01:03:34 Speaker_07
Yes. Disney trades at 20X free cash flow. Taylor is 550 million in free cash flow. That's a $11 billion enterprise value for Taylor. Forbes currently estimates her net worth at 1.1, I think.

01:03:47 Speaker_06
And now she's in her NFL era. Like, how do you value that?

01:03:52 Speaker_07
Right. So OK, but here's the good. I think Ben and I differ a little bit on this. I would argue Disney is the right comp.

01:04:00 Speaker_10
Oh, boy. To look at the single greatest IP holder in the world that has proven over a century that it can stay relevant and apply that multiple

01:04:16 Speaker_10
to a single artist with no diversification who has had this unbelievable ascent and you're taking that multiple off of this extreme outlier year. I'm not saying it should trade at 1 or 2x, but 20x, David, is a little.

01:04:32 Speaker_10
But your point, I think, is a very interesting one, which is when people are looking at net worth of a person like this, they foolishly don't consider it an enterprise.

01:04:44 Speaker_07
The multiple they're using is one.

01:04:47 Speaker_10
Right. 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.

01:04:57 Speaker_07
Are we at peak Taylor? 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.

01:05:10 Speaker_10
This generation?

01:05:10 Speaker_07
Yeah.

01:05:11 Speaker_06
That's my argument. Peak Taylor or just beginning? I'm going to say no, just because that seems like a safe bet when you're talking about Taylor.

01:05:18 Speaker_10
Yeah. For my own safety, I'm going to say we are not at peak Taylor. All right.

01:05:23 Speaker_06
You heard it here, for the record. 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 to everything that comes next. Thanks, Emily.

01:05:35 Speaker_09
Thank you, Emily.

01:05:36 Speaker_06
Thank you so much.

01:05:50 Speaker_10
All right, so David, we've had Jamie Dimon. We've had Daniel Eck. We've had Emily Chang. What else could we possibly have up our sleeve before Mark?

01:06:00 Speaker_07
We won't keep you waiting too, too much longer. But we do have one more special guest, one more surprise update in a minute.

01:06:09 Speaker_10
Yes. But first, David, this is a great time to tell you a little bit more about our incredible presenting partner, JP Morgan Payments.

01:06:22 Speaker_07
Yes, it is. Max and Umar are actually backstage. Oh, should we do it live? I think we should do it live. I think in the spirit of doing it live, please welcome the global co-heads of JPMorgan Payments, Max Nykerchen and Umar Farouk.

01:06:47 Speaker_10
Hey, Umar. Max. Thank you. Well, welcome guys. It is so great to have you here.

01:07:00 Speaker_10
Listeners have heard us talk about JP Morgan payments all year on Acquired, but could you start maybe just with a quick overview on the business, how big it is, and how important to the world it is?

01:07:10 Speaker_00
Yeah, hello everyone. Great to be here with you. And Dave and Ben, great to share the stage with you. It's been a fantastic partnership. You talk about so many successful companies. Look what you have created here.

01:07:22 Speaker_00
Now, JPMorgan Payments, in brief, we basically help companies receive money, hold money, send money, safeguard money against fraud, and take the insights from all of this to grow their business. that takes many different forms.

01:07:41 Speaker_00
We help the coffee shop around the corner have a point of sale solution so they can take credit cards. We work with marketplaces or e-commerce platforms and we work with many large multinational companies and even other banks.

01:07:58 Speaker_00
We're in 160 countries, and we move about $10 trillion, $10 trillion every day. That is, I think, one in every $4 that moves around the globe. So it is, I think, probably the largest payments business in the world.

01:08:15 Speaker_00
And as a result, we don't only become the backbone of many companies, but sometimes of entire economies. Which means we have of course in our DNA creativity and problem solving, but we also focus on stability, resiliency and safety.

01:08:36 Speaker_00
And this is why so many companies that you feature in Acquired are actually our clients. You know, they simply can't outgrow us. We are with them every step of the way, from startup all the way to sitting here on the chair.

01:08:51 Speaker_10
The last payment solution you will ever need. Exactly.

01:08:54 Speaker_07
Well, okay, so speaking of, we're here in San Francisco, in Silicon Valley, the tech and AI capital of the world. How is J.P.

01:09:02 Speaker_07
Morgan Payments keeping pace with the innovation that is happening in this room, all around us, the businesses that you all are building?

01:09:09 Speaker_04
As Max said, it's part of our DNA. We have to innovate to survive. We are building stuff for next 5, 10, 20, 100 years. We, within our Onyx business unit, have the largest financial blockchain life ecosystem on the planet.

01:09:23 Speaker_04
We do bigger transactions than any blockchain, including the crypto blockchains.

01:09:27 Speaker_04
We basically have pretty extensive embedded finance solutions where you might be interacting with the platform, but really, it's our rails that are seamlessly serving you.

01:09:36 Speaker_04
And then the list goes on and on, and even in AI, which you cannot not mention anymore in the world, we use AI to catch fraud, which you can imagine, you've got to go up against some AI systems on the other side, you need to have some AI of your own.

01:09:48 Speaker_04
So we are building stuff at a different scale and scope. When I think of JPMorgan Payments, we perform miracles in magnitude every single day.

01:09:58 Speaker_07
Ah, great. Well, thank you so much for the great relationship.

01:10:01 Speaker_04
Thank you for having us. Really appreciate it.

01:10:14 Speaker_10
All right, so we alluded to one more thing before intermission.

01:10:18 Speaker_07
We have one more thing before one more thing.

01:10:21 Speaker_10
A special treat from a past Acquired guest. So one of the things that happened in the insane year that we've had was that we had this viral clip from an episode. This never happened in the land of Acquired.

01:10:33 Speaker_10
And it got 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.

01:10:45 Speaker_10
We pulled the clip down because we felt like it just wasn't really explaining what the person meant correctly. And so we wanted to correct the record and have that person back via video to kind of say it straight and say what he meant.

01:11:00 Speaker_10
So everyone, Jensen Huang.

01:11:05 Speaker_05
Hi everybody, it's great to join you at Acquired Live. Wow, this is really something. I still remember when I met Dave and Ben, they interviewed me right here on this stage at NVIDIA's headquarters.

01:11:19 Speaker_05
And now this podcast has attracted an incredible audience. And so I'm really proud of them. And one of the questions that they asked me was, if I knew what I know now, I think or something like that, would I start NVIDIA all over again?

01:11:38 Speaker_05
And I said, absolutely not. Of course, it was taken out of context because I was asked about that several times after that. And of course I would start the company if I knew it would turn out this way.

01:11:55 Speaker_05
The reason why I said what I said was it has everything to do with being an entrepreneur. Building a company is insanely hard.

01:12:03 Speaker_05
The number of things that you have to know, the amazing people that you have to surround yourself with, the adversaries and all the smart things that they're going to do. and the adversities that you're going to be confronted with over time.

01:12:23 Speaker_05
The mountain of it, in the course of 31 years, if I were to take all of that, all the challenges and all the hardship and all the pain and suffering of the last 32 years, and I would have compressed it into the brain of

01:12:39 Speaker_05
a 29-year-old, there is no way that that person would have started the company. And my point there is the super point of entrepreneurs, which is your superpowers are partly your ignorance, that you don't know how hard it is.

01:12:57 Speaker_05
And so that's what I meant.

01:13:00 Speaker_09
Everybody, Jetsu On!

01:13:07 Speaker_10
Nice to have that fixed.

01:13:09 Speaker_07
Yes, yes. Feels good. We can officially correct the record on that one.

01:13:12 Speaker_10
Yes. All right, we have finally arrived, the main event. Tonight is featured some incredible founder-led companies. Jensen from NVIDIA, Daniel from Spotify, and next we have the iconic founder CEO of our time, Mark Zuckerberg.

01:13:54 Speaker_07
Mark. It's great to have you here.

01:13:58 Speaker_08
It's great to be here. You know, I was watching Jensen's video correcting the record, and I was thinking to myself, we might need to book the next one of these for all the things I'm going to have to apologize for that I'm going to say tonight.

01:14:11 Speaker_07
Yeah, just kidding.

01:14:12 Speaker_08
I don't apologize anymore.

01:14:17 Speaker_10
We've noticed.

01:14:18 Speaker_07
OK, 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?

01:14:27 Speaker_08
Oh, God. I mean, look, I think... Coming out hot, David.

01:14:30 Speaker_07
Yeah, no, I mean... He started it.

01:14:33 Speaker_08
Literally. I think there's something to Jensen's original sentiment, which is that the entrepreneurial journey is very challenging, especially the early days when you're

01:14:45 Speaker_08
running a startup and there's this sense that what you're doing could just die at any moment and the volatility, everything is just getting thrashed so much and it's not.

01:14:57 Speaker_08
You obviously look back, you have all these fond memories, but it was not the most fun part of the journey, or the part of my life that I wish I could go back and relive.

01:15:07 Speaker_08
So I do think that there's something to what Jensen was saying that I thought was very honest, and that when I heard him say it the first time, I was like, yeah, I get that. I think there are a lot of people for whom, if you knew how painful

01:15:26 Speaker_08
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.

01:15:39 Speaker_07
Well, um, on that topic, we have a lot to talk about. Yeah. I think this is actually very appropriate. First, we have to ask you about your shirt and what you're wearing.

01:15:52 Speaker_08
Yeah. You know, I, um, I started working with people to design some of my own clothes. And so I figure, you know, look, we're going to design eyewear. We're going to design other stuff that people wear. Let's get good at this.

01:16:11 Speaker_08
And so this one, I actually worked with this great fashion designer, Mike Amiri. And he's got a great story. So I wouldn't be surprised if you're doing one of these with him one day.

01:16:26 Speaker_08
This one is, so I've kind of started working on this series of shirts with some of my favorite classical sayings on them. So this one is Pathemathos, learning through suffering. It's a little family saying and also Aeschylus.

01:16:49 Speaker_07
Was that your family saying growing up or is that your family now?

01:16:58 Speaker_10
Well, no, let's pull that thread. No pun intended, I promise. What does learning through suffering mean to you?

01:17:10 Speaker_08
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?

01:17:22 Speaker_08
I mean, that's the entrepreneurial journey. It's also, I think, part of the beauty of building things. But this is something that Jensen talks a lot about too, right? It's like, I feel like

01:17:34 Speaker_08
You know, when you go to start a company, everyone kind of writes down what they would like their values to be, but values are not what you write down on the wall. It's like your lived behaviors.

01:17:45 Speaker_08
And you only really learn what you care about when you have to make hard trade-offs and face challenges. So, yeah, you learn the most important things through facing challenges.

01:17:58 Speaker_07
Speaking of facing challenges, we want to talk about a number of those because we counted, by our count, I think you have faced more existential challenges than any meaningful company in history through your first 20 years. First, though.

01:18:15 Speaker_07
dubious distinction.

01:18:17 Speaker_10
We will make our case to you of why and enumerate them.

01:18:20 Speaker_08
You're still here. That's good. But first, but first. I kind of think my, you know like that old Nike Michael Jordan ad where he's talking about how he's failed over and over and over again, and that's how he succeeds?

01:18:30 Speaker_08
That one really resonates with me too.

01:18:32 Speaker_07
So thanks to you guys, I got a pair of these this summer. And I genuinely love them. Tell us the story of how these came to be.

01:18:46 Speaker_08
Yeah, so, thanks, I'm excited about them too. So, at Meta we've been building social experiences for 20 years now. And originally it took the form of a website, then mobile apps. But the thing is, I never thought about us as a social media company.

01:19:10 Speaker_08
We're not a social app company, we are a, a social connection company, right?

01:19:15 Speaker_08
I mean, we talk about what we're doing is building the future of human connection, and that's not only gonna be constrained over time to what you can do on a phone, right, on a small screen.

01:19:26 Speaker_08
So, when you think about, you know, when we got started, okay, we're like a handful of kids, you know, we weren't able, we didn't have the resources at the time to go define whatever the next computing platform is, and also, you know, Facebook originally got started around the same time as

01:19:41 Speaker_08
you know, a bunch of the early smartphones and those platforms got started. So we didn't really get to play any role in developing that platform. And one of the big themes, I think, for the next chapter of what we do is I want to

01:19:56 Speaker_08
be able to build what I think are sort of the ideal experiences, not just what you're allowed to build on some platform that someone else built, but what is actually, if you can think from first principles, what is the ideal social experience?

01:20:09 Speaker_08
So I think what you would like to have is not a phone that you look down at that kind of takes your attention away from the things and the people around you, not just a small screen. I think what you'd ideally have is glasses.

01:20:26 Speaker_08
Through the glasses, there's one part of it where the glasses, they can see what you see and they can hear what you hear, and in doing so, they can be kind of the perfect AI assistant for you because they have context on what you're doing.

01:20:38 Speaker_08
But then part of that is also that the glasses can project images, basically like holograms, out into the world. And that way your social experiences with other people aren't constrained to these little interactions you can have on a phone screen.

01:20:54 Speaker_08
In the not so distant future, you can imagine, because you guys have demoed some of the stuff that we've done, a version of this where we're having a conversation like this, but maybe one of us isn't even here.

01:21:08 Speaker_08
They're just like a hologram, and we have glasses. And it really, there's the question of, delivering a realistic sense of presence.

01:21:14 Speaker_08
There's something magical in the realm of building social experiences around the feeling of human presence and like being there with another person and this physical perception, right, where we're very physical beings, right, and people like to intellectualize everything, but a lot of our experience is very physical.

01:21:31 Speaker_08
And this physical sense of presence that you are with another person doing things in the physical world is something that you're gonna be able to do through holograms

01:21:40 Speaker_08
through glasses without being taken away from whatever else you're doing just kind of have that mixed in with the rest the world. It's going to be I think the ultimate. digital social experience.

01:21:55 Speaker_08
And I think it's also going to be the ultimate incarnation of AI, because you're going to have conversations where it's like, all right, there's some people. It's like maybe I'm physically here. There's a person. You're a hologram there.

01:22:07 Speaker_08
There's an AI that is embodied as someone is there. And the glasses will enable this. So how are we going after this, building this? This is some huge project. We've been working on it for 10 years.

01:22:21 Speaker_08
And there are a lot of different challenges to solve to get there. You have to build a novel display stack. These aren't just screens like the kind that are in phones. There's this long lineage.

01:22:32 Speaker_08
They're connected to the screens that have been in TVs and monitors and things for a long time. There's been this massive optimization of the supply chain. There's brand new display stack around holographic displays that basically need to get created.

01:22:45 Speaker_08
And then they need to be put into glasses. They need to be miniaturized. And you also, in the glasses, need to fit chips, microphones, speakers, cameras, eye tracking to be able to understand what you're doing, batteries to make it last all day.

01:23:02 Speaker_10
Like, OK, so then it's like a new novel RF protocols.

01:23:06 Speaker_08
Yeah, it's like, OK, it's a pretty big challenge. So we're like, all right, let's go try to go for the big thing. And we've been working on that for a while.

01:23:15 Speaker_08
And we're pretty close to being able to show off the first prototype that we have of that, and I'm really excited about that.

01:23:22 Speaker_08
At the same time, we also came at it from this lens of, all right, so that's a lot of new technology that needs to get developed, a lot to pack into a form factor, because the glasses have to be good-looking, too.

01:23:34 Speaker_08
So what if we just constrain ourselves to, like, we're going to work with a great partner, Essilor Luxottica. They make Ray-Ban. They make a lot of the iconic glasses. Let's see what we can fit into glasses today and make them as useful as possible.

01:23:49 Speaker_08
And I actually, I kind of thought when we were getting started with those that it was almost like a practice project. for the ultimate AR.

01:24:01 Speaker_10
Which, let's be clear, that's what you thought Facebook was.

01:24:04 Speaker_08
That's true. That's true. Yeah, it did.

01:24:06 Speaker_10
Like for your real startups someday.

01:24:08 Speaker_08
That's true. Let's go on a tangent there for a second. So I started Facebook in school, came out to Silicon Valley with Dustin and a handful of people working on it at the time. And we did that because Silicon Valley is where all the startups came from.

01:24:23 Speaker_08
And I remember we got off the plane, we were driving down 101, we're like, wow, eBay, Yahoo, this is amazing. All these great companies. One day, maybe we'll build a company like this. And I'd already started Facebook.

01:24:35 Speaker_08
And I was like, surely the project that we're working on now is not a company.

01:24:38 Speaker_10
And Facebook had some scale at this point.

01:24:41 Speaker_08
Oh, no, no. It was a great project. I just didn't have the ambition to turn it into a company at the time. That just kind of happened. But anyway. Yeah. A lot of hard work, obviously.

01:24:54 Speaker_08
But I just at the time, I was kind of like, yeah, I don't think this is it.

01:24:58 Speaker_07
Well, that's your answer of would you have started? You actually didn't try to start Facebook.

01:25:03 Speaker_08
I didn't know. So yeah. So I mean, the glasses, though, we thought that this was like, all right, we want to get working with Estelora Luxottica so we can start building more and more advanced glasses. And then they're really good. They look good.

01:25:15 Speaker_08
And then AI, the massive transformation in AI.

01:25:19 Speaker_10
So for listeners, let's just be really clear. You guys shipped this product that I'm holding before LLMs, or at least before the public consciousness was aware of the chat GPT moment, and these were not manufactured and shipped as an AI device.

01:25:37 Speaker_10
That came later when they were already in market.

01:25:39 Speaker_08
Yeah, a few years ago, I would have predicted that AR holograms would have been available before full-scale AI. And now I think it's probably going to be the other order. So now it's like, all right, great.

01:25:53 Speaker_08
Well, this is actually a great product, because it's got the cameras so it can see what you see. It's got the microphone. It's got the speakers. You can talk to it.

01:26:00 Speaker_08
I remember calling Alex Himmel, the guy who runs the product group that's running it, and I'm like, hey, you know, I think we should probably pivot this and make it so that meta AI is the primary feature of it.

01:26:11 Speaker_08
And then like, I remember I came in the next week and they built a prototype of it on Tuesday and it was like, all right, good. Yeah, no, this is good. This is going to be a very successful product.

01:26:19 Speaker_07
He told us a much more high stakes version of that story.

01:26:24 Speaker_10
I was on the highway with my kids and I get this call on a Saturday from Mark and he's like, those glasses, Could we put meta AI in them running on device and ship that soon so we can see if that's a good idea or not?

01:26:38 Speaker_08
Yeah, that tracks. That's what I just said. Sounds right.

01:26:51 Speaker_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?

01:27:03 Speaker_10
I mean, one of the most valuable companies in the world, through multiple iterations, multiple technology waves, fighting off, you know, maybe, let's name all the waves in which people said, oh, Facebook and meta are so screwed, and yet, that is not the way it looks today.

01:27:22 Speaker_07
MySpace, Twitter Gen 1, Instagram, Snapchat, WhatsApp, TikTok.

01:27:32 Speaker_10
Apple app tracking transparency.

01:27:34 Speaker_07
ATT, you can put in its own whole category. And now, ChatGPT.

01:27:39 Speaker_10
That's mine. There is a widely held public narrative every single time Snapchat discovers stories. There's something where people are like, oh, the cool thing that Facebook, the company, did is just obsolete now, and they're going to go away.

01:27:54 Speaker_10
You very much haven't gone away. What do you think is the through line of the DNA of the company that allows you to keep winning?

01:28:05 Speaker_08
I think it's that we're a technology company that is focused on human connection, not a specific type of app. So we never thought about ourselves as a website or a social network or anything like that.

01:28:23 Speaker_08
For me, building this kind of glasses to enable the future of people being able to feel present with another person, no matter where they actually physically are, is the natural continuation of the kind of apps that we build today.

01:28:38 Speaker_08
But it depends on how you define what you are. And then you need to figure out, well, how do you give yourself the competence to actually go do that? And that's where I think being a strong technology company comes in.

01:28:50 Speaker_08
Because a lot of companies, I think, think about themselves too narrowly in terms of, OK, well, we're this kind of one thing. And the reason why we can build all these things is because we have a really strong technology foundation.

01:29:06 Speaker_08
And some of that is just me and how I think about stuff. I was an engineer before I got started. I mostly took systems engineering type classes when I was in college.

01:29:19 Speaker_08
So you talk about Friendster and MySpace and all the scaling challenges they had doing the graph calculations of like, all right, do you know this person? Should you show them their page?

01:29:27 Speaker_07
Yeah. Yeah, actually, can you take us back? And we want to ask you the story of that time. I mean, it seems quaint now, Friendster, MySpace.

01:29:36 Speaker_07
you study computer science, graph networking, social graphs, that is a very, very difficult computational calculation.

01:29:47 Speaker_08
a product question and a technology question. I think you can define the product in such a general way that the technology becomes basically impossible to solve.

01:29:55 Speaker_08
So you want to have a smart product definition, but then you want to be competent and better than everyone else at the technology. And I think that that's something that we've held ourselves to and built a good organization around.

01:30:08 Speaker_08
And it's one of the things that I observed as soon as I came out to the valley, that all these companies that call themselves technology companies were not really set up that way. The companies I was talking about, it's like they

01:30:24 Speaker_08
You know, the CEO wasn't technical, 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.

01:30:35 Speaker_08
It's like, all right, if that's your team, then you're not a technology company. So I think one of the things that I've always been pretty careful about is I actually want

01:30:47 Speaker_08
like a lot of the people on our management team, it's like split, it's mostly people running either of these big product groups who come up through different technical pathways at the company. And I think that there's like a balance, right?

01:30:59 Speaker_08
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.

01:31:09 Speaker_08
And I think that that also is important to the board. And I think just like in terms of how you weigh decisions and culturally things inside the company matters a lot. But I think that that's one of the things that has been really fundamental.

01:31:24 Speaker_08
Where 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.

01:31:33 Speaker_08
The product experiences that we build on top of that are an implementation and they matter. And for that, I think, we also, I think, are a pretty curious and learning-focused organization where

01:31:44 Speaker_08
You know, I view the product strategy less as any one specific thing and more as how do we iterate and learn as quickly as possible how to make each thing better for the people we're trying to serve.

01:32:01 Speaker_08
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, or early. We're going to have a good feedback loop.

01:32:13 Speaker_08
We're gonna get a bunch of feedback. We're gonna learn what people like better than other people.

01:32:17 Speaker_08
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 ship so frequently. It's, you just, you learn faster. So that's basically the formula.

01:32:30 Speaker_08
Be a technology company, build good foundation, learn from what people are focused on in the world, and iterate as quickly as you can.

01:32:40 Speaker_10
In one of my research calls to prep for this, someone described you as a master strategist, which we all sort of acknowledge that at this point.

01:32:50 Speaker_08
I mean, except for all the stuff that I just thought was not going to be that important that ended up actually being the most important. But you're very generous.

01:32:59 Speaker_08
Part of it is like, OK, you want to set up the game so that way you optimize, you create your luck.

01:33:04 Speaker_10
This is what Jensen told us, like, the apple's gonna fall from the tree in some direction, and if you just set up the game that you have a hand close enough to catch it... The comment that someone made to me was, the reason Mark is such a good strategist is because he plays the company as if it's a turn-based strategy game, and he just makes sure he gets more turns than anybody else, and he makes sure that he learns more from each turn than the next player does.

01:33:33 Speaker_10
Do you feel like that encapsulates Meta's product development? But it does kind of feel like the way that you make bets is like, well, if we have great engineering, then that can kind of take care of the speed part.

01:33:46 Speaker_10
That's like many iterations or multiple at-bats.

01:33:50 Speaker_08
And then the... Well, great engineering and speed and duration are actually two different values.

01:33:56 Speaker_08
They're not necessarily at odds, but I think there are a lot of great engineering organizations that try to build things that are super high quality and have good competence around that. But there's a certain...

01:34:09 Speaker_08
personality that goes with kind of taking your stuff and putting it out there before it's fully polished. And look, I'm not saying that our strategy or approach on this is the only one that works.

01:34:21 Speaker_08
I think in a lot of ways, we're like the opposite of Apple. And clearly, their stuff has worked really well, too. But I mean, they take this approach. It's like, we're going to take a long time. We're going to polish it. We're going to put it out.

01:34:33 Speaker_08
And maybe for the stuff that they're doing that works, maybe that just fits with their culture.

01:34:37 Speaker_08
But for us, I think that there are a lot of conversations that we have internally where you're almost at the line of being embarrassed about what you put out. You want to put stuff out early enough so you can get good feedback.

01:34:52 Speaker_08
You obviously want to test things that are reasonable hypotheses. So if it's so ineffective, then you're not testing a good hypothesis. That doesn't work.

01:34:59 Speaker_08
But I do think a lot of the conversations that we have are like, OK, well, we can get this to be a lot better if we work on it for another couple of months or whatever.

01:35:10 Speaker_08
I do just think that you want to really have a culture that values shipping and getting things out and getting feedback more than needing always to get great positive accolades from people when you put stuff out.

01:35:23 Speaker_08
Because I think if you want to wait until you get praised all the time, you're missing a bunch of the time when you could have learned a bunch of useful stuff and then incorporated that into the next version you're going to ship.

01:35:35 Speaker_10
And it's just about making sure that the thing that the company is known for, or its brand, can withstand all the little damage that you do to it by shipping stuff that's not quite ready.

01:35:45 Speaker_08
Well, I would like to hope that it's not damaging to the brand.

01:35:48 Speaker_10
Well, but innately it is. Like when you're like, oh, I feel bad because I shipped a product that wasn't good enough, you're sort of

01:35:57 Speaker_08
Yeah, no, I don't want to overstate it. I mean, we don't ship things that we think are bad, but we also don't take... we want to make sure that we're shipping things that...

01:36:07 Speaker_08
that are kind of early enough that we can get good feedback to see what they're going to be most used for.

01:36:11 Speaker_08
Like, I think a lot of the AI stuff that we're building now, for example, it actually, you know, it's pretty clear that AI is going to be transformative for a lot of different things.

01:36:20 Speaker_08
It is actually less clear what are going to be the initial use cases for a lot of these things that are super valuable. And so, OK, part of it is like, OK, you put something out.

01:36:29 Speaker_08
You want to kind of collect feedback and what people are actually, what it's, you know, where it's resonating.

01:36:36 Speaker_08
If what you put out is bad, then you're not going to collect good data, because people aren't going to use it for anything, because it sucks. But I do think that you have hypotheses for what people might really want to use it for.

01:36:47 Speaker_08
And they're not all going to be right. And you want to go early enough on that as more. Yeah.

01:36:52 Speaker_10
So I'm building to this question of, to you, is product creation an act of invention or discovery?

01:37:04 Speaker_10
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?

01:37:14 Speaker_10
Or do you conceive of David in your head, and I'm like, I'm going to make this and put it in the world?

01:37:20 Speaker_08
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,

01:37:34 Speaker_08
and trying to build something that's aligned with that, while trying to match it up with what is going to resonate the most with people. I think if you just do the latter, then I think you just don't have enough conviction to see through hard things.

01:37:51 Speaker_08
And if you just do the former, then you probably don't get to product market fit or optimize what you do, because you're not focused enough on your customers. So I think both probably matter. Yeah.

01:38:04 Speaker_10
As I pour through all these historical examples, the market discovers, some other participant in the market discovers the stories format.

01:38:13 Speaker_10
And suddenly the whole world is like, oh my god, that is the way that we all, that's the social interaction mechanism. And that's like a pretty pure discovery where you have products that have stories, they perform very well. that's been discovered.

01:38:28 Speaker_10
But there's other times it feels like everything you're trying to do in reality labs, all, you know, 50 plus billion dollars that you've put into it, is like, we're going to freaking will this thing into existence because I have an idea of the way that I want the world to be.

01:38:40 Speaker_10
I'm not really like asking for that much feedback. I'm putting it in the world. Well, it's a combination.

01:38:46 Speaker_08
I mean, I think that there's There's certainly a lot of things that we've invented or created for the first time. I mean, like in 2006, when we built the first version of News Feed, before that, social networks were basically profiles.

01:38:59 Speaker_08
And then we were like, hey, people actually kind of want to get the updates, and let's show them that. And if we rank them, then we can, you know, there's so many updates that this can help people parse through that quickly.

01:39:07 Speaker_08
And today, it's hard to imagine any social product without a feed. So I think that that's obviously, some of these things are sort of seminal. I don't want to call it an invention, but like patterns that we basically established first.

01:39:21 Speaker_08
And then some of them are ones that other people did, where we take pride in learning from what is working in the world.

01:39:32 Speaker_08
We're not embarrassed about learning from things that other people discovered that were good first, and then we build a better version of it. I mean, I think that that's... No one company is going to invent everything.

01:39:50 Speaker_08
I think if you don't invent anything, then it's hard to be a successful company. But I do think that there's a mix of this. There are more smart people outside of your company than inside your company.

01:40:01 Speaker_08
If you're not learning from what's going on in the market, then you're missing a lot of opportunities to get valuable signal from people in the community and customers about what they want you to be doing.

01:40:10 Speaker_07
Which speaks to the thesis of Facebook as a technology company.

01:40:15 Speaker_10
Meta.

01:40:17 Speaker_07
Meta is a technology company. We'll get to that later. Ben and I have been having a conversation. I want to take this to open source and open source technology and its importance to you.

01:40:31 Speaker_07
And Ben posited, first to me and then to many other people in our calls over the last couple of weeks, that meta has been the largest beneficiary of open source technology in the modern world. And I'm curious if you would agree with that.

01:40:49 Speaker_07
if you would comment on your relationship to open source?

01:40:54 Speaker_08
I think almost all of the major technology companies at this point are primarily using open source stacks. So yeah, I mean, I don't know, we wouldn't have been able to get built without open source.

01:41:04 Speaker_08
I think probably that's true for any new company that's been created since like, I don't know, 19, the late 1990s or something. For us, open source has been important and valuable.

01:41:18 Speaker_07
I mean, you were the first big company built on the LAMP stack.

01:41:24 Speaker_08
Yeah. Yeah, no, and it's great. It makes it super easy to develop stuff quickly and iterate quickly. But we've also had an interesting relationship with this, because sequentially, as a company, we came after Google.

01:41:34 Speaker_08
So Google was the first of the great companies that built this distributed computing infrastructure. So they came first. So they were like, all right, let's keep this proprietary, because it's a big advantage for us.

01:41:45 Speaker_08
And then we're like, all right, we need that too. But we built it. And then we're like, OK, not an advantage for us, because Google already has that. So we might as well just make it open.

01:41:55 Speaker_08
And by making it open, then you basically get this whole community of people building around it. So it wasn't going to help us compete with Google for any of the stuff that we were doing to have that technology.

01:42:06 Speaker_08
But what we were able to do with things like Open Compute were get it to become the industry standard. So now you have all these other cloud service platforms that basically use Open Compute.

01:42:18 Speaker_08
And because of that, the supply chain is standardized around our designs, which means that it's way more supply, way cheaper to produce. We've saved billions of dollars. And the quality of the stuff that we get to use goes up.

01:42:30 Speaker_08
So all right, that's like a win-win. I think in order for this to work, we do a lot of open source stuff, we do a lot of closed source stuff. I'm not like a zealot on this.

01:42:41 Speaker_08
I think open source is very valuable, but I also think it sort of makes sense for us because of our position in the market. And the same for AI. I'm going to run long.

01:42:50 Speaker_07
This is where we were going with this.

01:42:53 Speaker_08
You know, similar deal. You know, we want to make sure that we have access to a leading AI model, right?

01:43:01 Speaker_08
I think just like we want to build the hardware so that we can build the best social experiences for the next 20 years, I don't think that, you know, for us, it's like we've just been

01:43:11 Speaker_08
We've been through too much stuff with the other platforms to fully depend on anyone else. And we're a big enough company at this point that we don't have to.

01:43:19 Speaker_08
We can build our own core technology platforms, whether that's going to be AR glasses or mixed reality or AI. So I think that's somewhat of an imperative for us to go do that. But these things are not like pieces of software that are monolithic.

01:43:35 Speaker_08
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.

01:43:45 Speaker_08
We're like, I mean, look, I definitely firsthand have a lot of experiences where you're trying to build stuff on mobile platforms, and the platforms are just like, nah, you can't build that. That's frustrating.

01:43:56 Speaker_07
Can we take a real quick detour?

01:43:57 Speaker_08
What's up?

01:43:58 Speaker_07
I really want to ask you something.

01:43:59 Speaker_08
We can take a detour.

01:44:00 Speaker_07
OK. You took a detour. We're going to take a detour. Help us with our research here. The eve of the IPO.

01:44:08 Speaker_08
Yeah, this is quite a detour. Quite a detour.

01:44:12 Speaker_10
I really am grabbing the wheel here. Is this connected, or did you just decide that it was your turn to talk?

01:44:18 Speaker_08
I'm sorry. I was really wound up.

01:44:21 Speaker_07
I know. Open source and AI, we are right in Mark's wheelhouse. I think it's related. I do. I really genuinely do. Facebook on mobile is HTML5. In 2012.

01:44:32 Speaker_10
May 2012. Yeah.

01:44:39 Speaker_07
I want to ask you what you were thinking going into the IPO with Facebook on mobile being HTML5 and what happened, you IPO at $100 billion market cap over the next three months, you have a 50% drawdown, probably because of that.

01:44:55 Speaker_07
But I guess the related question to what we're talking about now is, How much is that informing your approach here with AI?

01:45:05 Speaker_08
It was a pretty different technical issue. So 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.

01:45:19 Speaker_08
So now all of a sudden, this app model comes along. And it's like, we have to build, like, different ones for each phone. And you have to go through approval to get it shipped. And we have to wait weeks before it can ship. It's like, this sucks.

01:45:32 Speaker_08
So we're like, all right, we have an idea. Let's build this platform where we can get a web-based platform. So you basically build a native shell. And you build this web-based platform in it. And we'll be able to just update our apps every day.

01:45:47 Speaker_08
And we'll ship one thing once. And we'll update our apps across Android and iPhone.

01:45:52 Speaker_08
blackberry and windows mobile and all the stuff that existed at the time because it hadn't gotten consolidated yet and like that's going to be that's like basically whatever downside we are going to have from not having the most native thing we're going to make up for in velocity and by having like way more of our energy focused on one platform.

01:46:12 Speaker_08
Well, we were wrong. It turned out that having the native integration was actually critical for having the interactions feel good. And so we basically went through this period where we had to go rewrite our apps from scratch.

01:46:29 Speaker_08
And that coincided with mobile growing dramatically. And mobile, we didn't have any revenue. Because it may seem like it's pretty similar, but there's a very big difference.

01:46:41 Speaker_08
On desktop, you basically have the app, and you have a column on the side that we could put ads. And on mobile, we needed to figure out, what does it mean to put ads into the experience?

01:46:52 Speaker_10
Let's be clear. The feed ad had not been invented yet.

01:46:55 Speaker_08
The ad unit of our timeline. Yeah, and advertisers have specific formats that they like working with, and the idea that we were just going to be like, all right, now your ad is going to look like a feed story was a big challenge for advertisers.

01:47:07 Speaker_08
And the idea that now for people, you were going to have this organic feed that was the most important part of the product, and now we're just going to start putting ads in it was a challenge for the people using the product.

01:47:21 Speaker_08
We needed to figure that out, and we needed to get the apps to be better. And we basically took, I think it must have been like a year or something.

01:47:28 Speaker_08
We were just like, look, we're going to pause feature development of the company, because it's hard enough to do a rewrite.

01:47:34 Speaker_08
If you look at the history of the tech industry, there are all these examples like Netscape and all these things that they tried to do a rewrite. They needed to reestablish their technical platform. And they also tried to add features.

01:47:46 Speaker_08
They basically just never terminated. So that's a real risk when you're completely changing your underlying platform, that you're going to miss it. I was like, all right, we've got to minimize the chance that that happens.

01:47:58 Speaker_08
So we're not going to ship any new features. We're just going to rewrite it, make it faster. But while we're doing this, basically mobile is growing. So the percent of our traffic that is monetizable

01:48:13 Speaker_08
is shrinking, because web is basically shrinking, and mobile's growing.

01:48:16 Speaker_07
And that's your only business model.

01:48:18 Speaker_08
Yeah, and I was like, all right.

01:48:19 Speaker_10
And you're now recently quarterly reporting.

01:48:20 Speaker_08
The thing is, it was actually pretty clear what we needed to do. I think strategically, a lot of the time, it's somewhat harder to know what to do when you're winning.

01:48:30 Speaker_08
When stuff is going well, it's like, what is the next move to go from winning to winning more? But when you're losing, it's usually pretty clear what you have to do. And I think a lot of it is just, do you have the pain tolerance to go do it?

01:48:45 Speaker_08
So a lot of this was like, all right, the team was like, OK. Well, we're going public and investors really aren't going to like this if we are not making money for a year and a half.

01:48:58 Speaker_08
And it's like, well, a year and a half is short in the grand scheme of things. Let's do this. And we did it. And it was a painful year and a half. And then we came out of that, and we were in great shape.

01:49:09 Speaker_08
So I think people inside the company had felt a lot better sooner because it was pretty clear to people that we were doing the right thing.

01:49:18 Speaker_08
And they knew that we were executing in a responsible way and basically focused and we're doing the right thing.

01:49:25 Speaker_08
But I think it's actually when you have something that's working well and you're on one local hill and you need to jump to another hill, that's the stuff that's really culturally hard. But this one I think was, it was not fun.

01:49:40 Speaker_08
There have been a series of periods throughout the company that were not, I don't know, not the most fun periods. Although that one, in retrospect, looks pretty good in retrospect. It's like, not that bad.

01:49:53 Speaker_08
It's like your market cap only got cut in half for a year and a half. Great. Great. Yeah, I'll take that. Where were we?

01:50:05 Speaker_10
So David asked, hey, can you help us with our research? Can I follow that thread that you just said, hey, that one wasn't so bad? There's been a lot of amazing things the company has done. There's also been a lot of criticism.

01:50:22 Speaker_10
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?

01:50:31 Speaker_08
I mean, there's so many things that we've messed up that there are many criticisms that are legitimate. But if that was a year and a half mistake,

01:50:43 Speaker_08
I think, you know, one of the things I reflect on over the last like 10 years or so was, you know, the political environment just changed dramatically, right?

01:50:50 Speaker_08
It's like before 2016, there was like not a month that went by except for maybe this IPO period where the sentiment about the company was anything but positive.

01:50:59 Speaker_08
And then after 2016, after the election, basically there was not a month for a while where the sentiment about the company was positive. And we, I think so much of this stuff is, correctly understanding your place in the world and in history.

01:51:14 Speaker_08
We talked about before how it's like, I think we understood that we are a technology company and that you have to be a technology company to build this kind of thing.

01:51:27 Speaker_08
I think we understood that we're not a social network company, we're a human connection company and that will take different forms over time. The political environment, I think I didn't have much sophistication around.

01:51:39 Speaker_08
And I think I just fundamentally misdiagnosed the problem. So I think that there was this basic challenge. And there were a lot of things. I don't want to simplify this too much. I mean, there were a lot of things that we did wrong.

01:51:51 Speaker_08
There were some things that we did right. But I think one of the things that I look back on and regret is I think we accepted

01:52:01 Speaker_08
other people's view of some of the things that they were asserting that we were doing wrong or were responsible for that I don't actually think we were. There were a lot of things we did mess up and we needed to fix.

01:52:19 Speaker_08
But I think that there's this view where when you're a company and someone says that there's an issue, I think the right instinct is to take ownership for it.

01:52:30 Speaker_08
Say like, okay, maybe it's not all our thing, but we're gonna fully own this problem, we're gonna take responsibility for it, we're gonna fix it. But when it's a political problem, I actually think a lot of the time

01:52:44 Speaker_08
sometimes that there are people are operating in good faith to her identify a problem that wants to be fixed and there are people who are just looking for someone to play. And I think to some degree if you.

01:52:57 Speaker_08
if you take responsibility for things because you think it's a corporate crisis, not a political crisis, and your view is like, okay, I'm gonna take responsibility for all this stuff.

01:53:08 Speaker_08
People are basically blaming social media and the tech industry for all these different things in society, and if we're saying, okay, we're gonna really do our part to go fix this stuff.

01:53:18 Speaker_08
I know there were a bunch of people who just took that and were like, oh, you're taking responsibility for that? Let me kick you for more stuff.

01:53:25 Speaker_08
And honestly, I think we should have been firmer and clearer about which of the things we actually felt like we had a part in and which ones we didn't. And my guess is if the IPO was a year and a half mistake.

01:53:40 Speaker_08
I think that the political miscalculation was a 20 year mistake.

01:53:44 Speaker_08
And so it started in 2016 and I think that we have been working super hard to fix a lot of issues and to figure out kind of what the right tone is for navigating what is a very kind of fraught political dynamic across both the country and multiplied across all these places around the world and I think we've

01:54:02 Speaker_08
sort of found our footing on what the principles are, where we think we need to improve stuff, but where people make allegations about the impact of the tech industry or our company, which are just not founded in any fact, that I think we should push back on harder.

01:54:20 Speaker_08
And I think it's going to take another 10 years or so for us to fully work through that cycle before our brand and all of that is back to the place that it maybe could have been if I hadn't messed that up in the first place.

01:54:35 Speaker_08
But look, in the grand scheme of things, 20 years isn't that bad either. And we'll get through it. And I think we'll come out stronger. But I do think that is one of the kind of more interesting critiques that I think people get.

01:54:49 Speaker_08
And we get critiques on both sides on that. There are people who don't think we've taken enough responsibility. But I think certainly there's one line of critique, which is you kind of bought into too much of the stuff that you shouldn't have.

01:55:02 Speaker_08
And yeah, I think it's going to take us a long time to dig out of that.

01:55:07 Speaker_10
Do you have a reasonable framework at this point for like, OK, here's the stuff where I feel like we actually do want to take responsibility for it, and here's the stuff where we're like, no, that's not our fault?

01:55:16 Speaker_08
Yeah. I mean, at this point, I think a lot of this stuff has been studied. So I mean, I don't want to go rehash all the different things. But I think at this point, there's been years of academic research on a lot of these things.

01:55:29 Speaker_08
And part of the thing that's challenging is, and one of the things that we've learned, is we actually should be trying to support more academics and doing more of this research ahead of time.

01:55:36 Speaker_08
Because when you get to a point where you're being accused of something, you're not super credible, just standing up yourself and being like, I don't think we did this one.

01:55:46 Speaker_08
But what has worked over time is like, you do the research in advance 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 the evidence just does not show that social media is correlated with this kind of harm at all.

01:56:02 Speaker_08
So I think that like, or it's, you know, so I think that that's, I think that it kind of cuts both ways.

01:56:10 Speaker_07
To me, this brings up another topic we wanted to talk about with you. 20 years isn't that long. I'm young. You're young. We all are.

01:56:22 Speaker_10
This is the advantage of being a college dropout founder.

01:56:25 Speaker_08
When you start when you're 19, hopefully we have more than 20 years left. And hopefully you have Buffett duration. Yeah, hopefully.

01:56:32 Speaker_07
You set up the company. in a, especially at the time, truly unique way, where you can operate the company and take that approach. Do you mean Super Voting Shares? Super Voting Shares is like, you know, the technical aspect.

01:56:49 Speaker_07
I think there are a bunch of technical aspects to it that we're not gonna get into in this conversation, but effectively, you can take that perspective in a way that if you are a CEO, non-founder, you know, without a structure that you've set up, you just can't.

01:57:04 Speaker_07
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.

01:57:14 Speaker_07
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?

01:57:25 Speaker_08
In 2006, Yahoo wanted to buy the company for a billion dollars, and everyone on our management team wanted to sell it, and the board tried to fire me, and basically in the next year, everyone else on the management team left because I hadn't done a good job communicating the long-term vision because I wasn't thinking about that at the time.

01:57:46 Speaker_08
I wasn't thinking in terms of this as a company. I was like, this is a great project. It's awesome. A lot of people like what we're doing. I think this will probably continue for a while. I think it's going to be pretty important in the world.

01:57:57 Speaker_08
But I didn't know how to think in terms of long-term financial plans. Make the case to them why it would be worth more than a billion. Or just like, look, we're doing this for the long term, we're not planning on selling the company.

01:58:11 Speaker_08
So it's like, without having made that case, it was understandable that basically Yahoo comes around, a lot of people, it's like, this is like all their startup dreams come true, you gotta take this offer.

01:58:20 Speaker_08
Because I just wasn't in a place where I had the sophistication to basically articulate a lot of the stuff around where we were going longer term.

01:58:31 Speaker_08
It probably wasn't super confidence-inspiring to them when I was like, hey, I think we should turn this down because we're going to do this.

01:58:38 Speaker_08
So after that, I was like, all right, well, I don't want to get fired from my own company for wanting to build it. So let's try to set up a governance structure that makes it somewhat harder to do that. Learning through suffering.

01:59:01 Speaker_10
Wow. And being very cash-generative very early, such that you had a very real-going concern on your hands, and you just didn't need to cut off your arm and sell it to someone in order to build your business.

01:59:15 Speaker_10
I think this is a fundamentally misunderstood thing about Facebook the startup. It is the prototypical startup.

01:59:26 Speaker_07
You are the iconic startup founder.

01:59:28 Speaker_10
Of this century. And there's a lot of people that want to start a startup for a lot of the glamorous reasons of starting a startup. You hated being a startup and wanted to stop being a startup as fast as possible and be a going concern.

01:59:44 Speaker_08
I think we're having a lot more fun now. I get to work on all the stuff. It's awesome.

01:59:52 Speaker_10
What is your advice to all these founders who romanticize the idea of starting a company and raising all this money?

01:59:58 Speaker_08
Obviously, starting a company is not bad. I think that there's different schools of thought on how to do it. I think some people think, okay, I want to go start a company, so I'm going to go dive into this idea.

02:00:09 Speaker_08
And I just think that that's a little bit dangerous because there's this issue, which is you have to be able to be nimble and pivot around until you can figure out what works.

02:00:18 Speaker_08
Part of the reason why I didn't think Facebook was going to be the company early on was because when I was in school, I built like 12 different things. that were just things that I wanted to exist. And I was like, all right, this is fun.

02:00:29 Speaker_08
OK, let's build another thing. It's like, OK, this one's fun. People are still using that. I'll help up, keep this one. But I had a bunch of other ideas for stuff I was going to build, too.

02:00:36 Speaker_08
So I didn't know how to think about what a company was going to be. And so I think there's something about maintaining flexibility that's helpful. Once you hire a bunch of people, you

02:00:51 Speaker_08
It's a lot easier when you can just have meetings in your own head about what direction you want to go in. And there's a lot less pride and people dug in when you're just like, OK, I'm going to change direction.

02:01:02 Speaker_08
People haven't invested their ego in like, no, we were going in this direction, and now I must be convinced. So I do think that that's a thing, where you want to keep things lean and be able to do that.

02:01:13 Speaker_08
And that's one of the reasons why we tried to get the company back being the leanest version of a large company is that we can be.

02:01:20 Speaker_08
But I do know there's something to that, where it's like, obviously it's not super fun not having the resources to do what you wanna do, but I think it also is problematic.

02:01:32 Speaker_08
to have more people working on something than you should have for the stage that it's at. Because then the people who are working on it don't have the agency to actually make the changes and do the things that they need to, which is less fun.

02:01:46 Speaker_08
And then you can't attract the best people to go work on those things because it's less fun. And so I do think you just have to dial it right.

02:01:53 Speaker_10
you're spending a gajillion dollars on reality labs.

02:01:57 Speaker_07
It's a technical term.

02:01:58 Speaker_10
It's not making that much money. So I'm going to 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.

02:02:08 Speaker_10
I'm being a little facetious here, but I'm curious why you categorize it differently.

02:02:13 Speaker_08
I mean, well, I think some of the stuff, by the time you're at the scale that we're at, is also just about what do you want to do over the next 10 to 20 years? And what do you think are going to be important?

02:02:23 Speaker_08
And we were talking about making your own luck and all that, and how I think there are some broad strokes that we can have a sense of where things are going.

02:02:31 Speaker_08
I'm pretty sure glasses and holographic presence and AR is going to be a completely ubiquitous product, right? It's just like everyone had a phone before, replaced it with a smartphone, and then a lot of more people got smartphones.

02:02:44 Speaker_08
If all we get is all the people in the world who already have glasses upgrading to glasses that have AI in them, then this is already going to be one of the most successful products in the history of the world.

02:02:55 Speaker_08
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. It's strategically valuable.

02:03:04 Speaker_08
We did this calculation or estimate at some point where it's like, how much money do we lose from our core family of apps to the various taxes that the platforms have to when they tell us we can't run the ad business the way that we think we should be able to, when they tell us we can't ship certain products so that way people use the things less or like them less.

02:03:27 Speaker_08
It's hard to exactly estimate it, but I think we might be twice as profitable if we own the platform or something. So I think from that perspective, that's worth a lot.

02:03:37 Speaker_08
Just from a pure dollars perspective, which is not primarily how I come at this stuff, but even now, I've learned a thing or two since the Yahoo days, and now I at least am able to, I might not be able to convince all the investors that we should be investing to the extent that we are in Reality Labs if I didn't control the company, but at least I can articulate a case

02:03:56 Speaker_08
for why I am confident that it's going to be good over time. But for me, it's always been way more about the product experience and what you can enable and build.

02:04:08 Speaker_08
And one of the shifts, and this is sort of like a value shift over time, is one of the things that And some of the early Oculus guys used to say to me that there's a difference between building good things and awesome things. And good is good.

02:04:30 Speaker_08
It's helpful. It's useful. It's things that people use on a day-to-day basis because it adds something to their lives. But awesome is different. Awesome is uplifting and inspiring and just like leads you to just be way more optimistic about the future.

02:04:50 Speaker_08
And it's just like this uplifting thing about humanity. And so I think a lot of what we've done with social media so far is very good. We've built these products. More than three billion people use them. on a near daily basis.

02:05:09 Speaker_10
It's like 3.3 billion on a daily basis.

02:05:13 Speaker_08
Yeah. And they use it because it is useful in their life. And in all these different ways. I mean, obviously, people vary. People use it for different things. But it's useful. And it helps people. And it helps people stay connected.

02:05:28 Speaker_08
It helps people build businesses. It helps people form communities. It's good. There aren't that many people on a day-to-day basis who get out of bed and are like, fuck yeah, social media.

02:05:41 Speaker_08
So I kind of think for my next stage, for the next stage of the company, the next 15 years, I want us to build more things that are awesome in addition to things that are good. And I think that they both matter.

02:06:01 Speaker_08
To me, this is like a little bit of a kind of the next stage of what I want our company to stand for and be. And so I think a lot of the reality lab stuff that we're doing is going to be in that bucket.

02:06:15 Speaker_08
A lot of the AI stuff that we're doing, I think, is going to be in that bucket. There are a bunch of things in the apps that are going to be in that bucket, too. New apps, too.

02:06:25 Speaker_08
But I don't know, I think that there's just something that's fundamentally pretty good about that. Maybe it's also just where I am in my life.

02:06:33 Speaker_08
I like to think I'm young, I'm a little older, but it's like, I do think that at this point, it's not just a meta thing. Also, in my personal life, a lot of what I personally value is doing things that are inspiring with people who I find inspiring.

02:06:52 Speaker_08
And so there's the personal version of this. It's like I get to work on interesting science problems with Priscilla and my wife and a bunch of awesome people. I get to design shirts with some of the best fashion designers in the world. Statues.

02:07:13 Speaker_08
A sculpture of my wife. Bring back the Roman tradition of designing sculptures of people you love. I'm not at all being facetious. It's really cool. I think Daniel Arsham is a really talented guy.

02:07:26 Speaker_08
And I was like, that's a person who I'd love to work with on something. Let's go find a project. One of my side projects is we have this cattle ranch in Kauai. And I'm trying to see if we can raise the highest quality beef in the world.

02:07:41 Speaker_08
And there's all this stuff. It starts with, it's awesome. We got this steer. Chonk? He's just the man. He's the man.

02:07:53 Speaker_08
We're having a hard time keeping him on the ranch because every time we put him in a steel enclosure and he sees a female cow, he busts through the steel enclosure.

02:08:05 Speaker_08
But I feel like that's the kind of bull that you want to make the highest quality beef in the world. And we're just trying to do really high-quality, awesome things with awesome people.

02:08:20 Speaker_08
If that's what I get to do for the next 15 or 20 years, then it's going to be a good 15 or 20 years.

02:08:27 Speaker_10
Was there a moment? What changed? When did this become your priority and why? It feels so radical that 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?

02:08:43 Speaker_08
No, I think that there might've been something around the way the company shifted in operations around COVID. I mean, it's like the COVID, like all these tech companies went remote temporarily.

02:08:55 Speaker_08
And it was an interesting period to just like get some more time, like a step back. I'm a pretty introverted person.

02:09:02 Speaker_08
And I do think it's, I need to be careful where like, I get a lot of value and energy and ideas from being around other people, but I also need time with myself. And with COVID, I kind of got that.

02:09:16 Speaker_08
And it was a time of reflection where I was able to think about this stuff. And we were also going through this very difficult political time in the country. And our company was at the center of a lot of those things.

02:09:28 Speaker_08
So that was a cause of a bunch of reflection. And then I think that a bunch of the things that we'd spun up earlier, but at smaller scale, right? So the Reality Lab stuff that we started In 2014, really. The fair stuff around fundamental AI research.

02:09:51 Speaker_08
2012, 2013, sometime around then. These things, they kind of got started, and they were growing, and it kind of reached this moment, which is like, are we gonna double down on this and do this? Or are we gonna kind of do this as a hobby?

02:10:06 Speaker_08
And I was like, no, I think we should do this. I mean, this is going to be a really important part of what we do. And we had to make a really important set of decisions.

02:10:15 Speaker_08
What we knew was going to be really painful to go double down on those things and build out the AI infrastructure that we needed to and scale up some of the reality lab stuff.

02:10:27 Speaker_08
And I knew that a lot of the investors would hate it, at least in the short term before it's clearly the right thing to do.

02:10:36 Speaker_08
The, what I didn't know was that at the time, I thought they were gonna not like it, but I thought it was gonna be okay because I didn't think there was also gonna be a recession at the same time.

02:10:47 Speaker_08
So that, like really, it's like, I mean, look, like you learn who you are through challenges, right?

02:10:52 Speaker_08
It's like we had like a really, you know, it's like, okay, like losing half of your market cap is quaint compared to losing 80% of your market cap or whatever it was, right? But so, I mean, these are all intentional decisions, right?

02:11:06 Speaker_08
It's like, I mean, there are a lot of conversations that we had which are like, should we go forward with this? And the answer that I came out with is yes. This is what I believe in. I think this is gonna be important for the world.

02:11:19 Speaker_08
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. Let's do it. Yeah, well.

02:11:38 Speaker_10
We're starting to enter, looking at the clock, conclusion lightning round territory. I've had one lurking in the back of my head.

02:11:47 Speaker_10
It makes sense to me that you would rebrand the company something that is not Facebook, given how broad the family of apps was. 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.

02:12:04 Speaker_10
Would you pick the name Meta if you were going to rename the company today?

02:12:08 Speaker_08
I like Meta. It's a good name. You know, finding good short names, I mean, this actually was a thing that we talked about for a while because it was pretty clear that

02:12:20 Speaker_08
If 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.

02:12:28 Speaker_08
But the others, I mean, we went through a period where it's like we had Facebook and a handful of small apps.

02:12:32 Speaker_08
And now we have like four apps that have a billion people or more using them, hopefully in the next few years, five, with threads, if that continues scaling.

02:12:44 Speaker_08
this was a conversation we had a bunch it's it doesn't make sense for the name of the company to be one of the apps as the other absence as it's really become a family of acts. It was important to me. This was also coinciding with a lot of

02:13:02 Speaker_08
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?

02:13:12 Speaker_08
They were like, oh, well, does the Facebook brand have issues? Do we need a new brand? And I was like, we don't run away from that.

02:13:19 Speaker_08
It might make sense one day to not have Facebook be the lead brand for the company because we do so many different things, but I'm only going to do this when we come up with a brand that is going to be evocative of the future that we're trying to build, because we run towards something, we don't run away from things.

02:13:37 Speaker_08
And when we got to meta, then I was like, all right, we're here. And it was around the time when we were doubling down on the investment and where there was all the controversy.

02:13:47 Speaker_08
And it's like, look, if we're doing this, we're going to lean into this and we're going to do it. So let's do it.

02:13:52 Speaker_10
And if I were to make the case to you, I feel the core competency of meta is you are able to discover products in the world. You have great ideas, you work on them, you discover interesting products.

02:14:07 Speaker_10
And you, Mark, are not someone who wants to define yourself by anything.

02:14:12 Speaker_10
You want to have your hands on a bunch of great controls and maximize your degrees of freedom, see where the world's going, and then have the best freaking spaceship possible to go maneuver your way over there.

02:14:23 Speaker_10
It seems like I would pick a brand that almost doesn't pigeonhole me into a specific future. I might be looking for something that's more like, look, I want to maximize my maneuverability.

02:14:35 Speaker_08
Yeah. I get it. 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.

02:14:52 Speaker_10
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 believe in it.

02:14:58 Speaker_08
Yeah, no. I mean, we're a company that puts a flag down around what we're doing, and we're going to go do it. It's like, put a wall in front of us, there's going to be a mark-shaped hole in the wall.

02:15:12 Speaker_07
Speaking of lightning rounds and mark-shaped holes, You are accelerating what used to be your annual challenges. I mean, when we were all kids, and we didn't know each other, I mean, I was so inspired. You would do your annual challenges.

02:15:29 Speaker_07
You would post about them. And I was like, wow, that's pretty damn cool. And then we all get a little older, and we all have kids on the stage now. And we all have companies on the stage now. And there's some large, some small. The demands on your time.

02:15:46 Speaker_07
For me, especially, I think lots of people, that's like, that space gets sucked. And you have expanded it. How?

02:15:58 Speaker_08
What do you mean?

02:15:59 Speaker_07
Well, you used to do annual challenges, and I feel like you're now doing weekly challenges. You're designing t-shirts, you're making sculptures, you're raising cattle.

02:16:05 Speaker_08
I just like, I'm trying to do inspiring things. I mean, it's, yeah, I don't know. I'm also really competitive.

02:16:18 Speaker_07
Who's your competition for this?

02:16:20 Speaker_08
What do you mean? I was just thinking about other things that I'm doing. I'm like, what have I started doing? I got into all these more extreme sports and fighting and stuff. I don't know.

02:16:31 Speaker_08
We face a lot of competition and a lot of different aspects of what we do. There's the social media competitors. There's the platform competitors. I think Apple is a bigger competitor than people realize.

02:16:43 Speaker_08
They kind of think, hey, they're doing a different type of thing. I don't know, I think over the next 10, 15 years, I think that kind of like battle over, ideological battle over what should the architecture be of the next set of platforms.

02:17:00 Speaker_08
Are they gonna be the closed, integrated model that Apple has always done? Which, again, I mean like, there's multiple, there are multiple good ways to build things, right? So, I think if you look at the different generations of computing,

02:17:18 Speaker_08
PCs, mobile, they've all had sort of a closed integrated version and an open version. And the thing that I think there's just a ton of recency bias around is because iPhone basically won.

02:17:31 Speaker_08
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 rights.

02:17:39 Speaker_07
Let's take it as a concede.

02:17:40 Speaker_08
Yeah.

02:17:40 Speaker_07
Yeah.

02:17:41 Speaker_08
I think that there's the recency bias and probably like almost everyone here has an iPhone. And I think that because of the recency bias, there's sort of this view that's like, oh no, this is just the superior way to do things.

02:17:53 Speaker_08
But I don't actually think that's a given. In the PC era, Windows with the open ecosystem was the leader.

02:18:00 Speaker_08
And part of my goal for the next 10, 15 years, the next generation of platforms, is to build the next generation of open platforms and have the open platforms win. And I think that that's going to lead to a much more vibrant tech industry.

02:18:16 Speaker_08
Now, there are advantages of doing a closed and integrated model. I think Apple will have a place, for sure. I expect them to be our primary competitor. And I think it will not be... just a product competition.

02:18:29 Speaker_08
I think it's like a, in some ways, very deeply values-driven and ideological competition around what the future of the tech industry should be and how open these platforms, whether it's things like Lama and AI or the glasses or different things, should be for developers, like an individual, someone getting started in their dorm room like me, to not have to ask for permission to go build the next set of awesome things.

02:18:56 Speaker_10
I've got a closing question here.

02:18:59 Speaker_07
Please. Thank you.

02:19:03 Speaker_10
So we have a lot of builders in the audience tonight, a lot of founders. We're in probably the most interesting technology environments since the early mobile days in terms of opportunity.

02:19:17 Speaker_10
It's been 20 years, so you might have to go back a little bit, but what advice do you have for founders today on something that's different than trying to pattern match Mark Zuckerberg from 2004, given we live in a different world today?

02:19:31 Speaker_08
Yeah, I don't know. I mean, just do something that you care about. And I mean, if you're trying to run our strategy, try to learn as quickly as you can. But I mean, if there's like, I think part of what I'm trying to say is,

02:19:46 Speaker_08
I think there are different ways to build stuff, right? It's like our way worked for me and our team. Different things have clearly worked for other companies. I don't know.

02:20:01 Speaker_08
One day my daughter, we took her to a Taylor Swift concert and she was like, you know, dad, I kinda wanna be like Taylor Swift when I grow up. Hell yeah. I was like, but you can't, that's not available to you.

02:20:17 Speaker_08
I was like, but, and she thought about it, and she's like, all right. When I grow up, I want people to want to be like August Chan Zuckerberg. And I was like, hell yeah. Hell yeah. So I think that that's, yeah, I don't know.

02:20:36 Speaker_08
I think it's like, look, learn from other people's successes and failures, but do your own thing. Love that.

02:20:45 Speaker_07
Love that. Well. That is the perfect place to leave things.

02:20:52 Speaker_10
We made you something that you already have a very amazing, well-designed shirt. I hope you have room in your life for more than one.

02:21:02 Speaker_08
I do. I used to only wear one type of shirt. Now I've moved on.

02:21:10 Speaker_10
So David and I made you a custom one-of-one shirt that represents tonight.

02:21:16 Speaker_08
Thank you.

02:21:20 Speaker_10
It is size Zuck. So no one else can, you know, it can never be made again. And we've got these coordinates on the back. The first one.

02:21:30 Speaker_07
GPS coordinates.

02:21:31 Speaker_10
GPS coordinates. The first one represents Kirkland House, where he wrote the first line of code for Facebook. And the second one is the Chase Center.

02:21:39 Speaker_09
Awesome.

02:21:39 Speaker_10
So thank you for joining us here tonight.

02:21:41 Speaker_09
Thank you for joining us.

02:22:20 Speaker_10
Everyone, thank you so much. Huge thank you to Mark Zuckerberg. Thank you all for making something tonight something that we will never ever forget.

02:22:31 Speaker_07
Ever.

02:22:32 Speaker_10
We have some thank yous.

02:22:33 Speaker_07
We have a whole lot of thank yous. Making tonight happen has taken our entire summer. It's taken the entire summer of dozens of people. There were about a thousand people working on tonight and I just want to give them all a big hand. Thank you so much.

02:22:51 Speaker_10
Thank you to Mark and the entire Meta Executive team that we got to talk to to prep for this.

02:22:55 Speaker_10
Daniel and the Spotify team, Emily and Lauren from Bloomberg and The Circuit, Jensen, Mylene, Janine, everyone from the whole NVIDIA team, to Hermes for dressing us tonight.

02:23:04 Speaker_09
Thank you, Hermes. So we look quite presentable.

02:23:08 Speaker_10
To our families and our lovely wives, thank you so much.

02:23:11 Speaker_07
Most importantly, thank you to our wives.

02:23:14 Speaker_10
And of course, thank you to Jamie Dimon, JPMorgan Chase, JPMorgan Payments for making this whole evening possible. It's been a dream partnership. We are so grateful. Listeners, we will see you next time. We'll see you next time.

02:23:28 Speaker_10
And thank you, Mike Taylor!

02:23:41 Speaker_03
Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! Bennett David, thank you so much. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! Who got the truth? Yeah. Is it you? Is it you? Is it you? Who got the truth now? Now? Is it you? Is it you? Is it you? Sit me down. Say it straight.

02:24:02 Speaker_03
Another story on the way. Who got the truth now? Everybody's talking. Nobody's listening. These days I feel lost, man. Lost in opinions. Everybody's fighting. Nobody's winning. Take me home, because I don't know what's going on in the world I'm living.

02:24:27 Speaker_03
Everybody's break, break, breaking up the dinner. Oh, baby. Through all the smoke, I need to know who's got the truth. Is it you, you, you? Yeah, who's got the truth now, now? Is it you, is it you, is it you? Sit me down, say it's Trey.

02:24:49 Speaker_03
Another story on the way. Who's got the truth now?

02:24:55 Speaker_03
♪ Not here for the cheat talk ♪ ♪ It's flip-flopped like a seesaw ♪ ♪ Not free under these laws ♪ ♪ Now the world see what we saw ♪ ♪ People wonder what to do now ♪ ♪ It took a body cam to get the truth out ♪ ♪ Hit the streets trying to move out ♪ ♪ We got so much to lose now ♪ ♪ Everybody break, break, breaking up the dinner ♪ ♪ Oh, baby ♪

02:25:21 Speaker_03
Through all the smoke, I need to know who got the truth. Yeah. Is it you, you, you, you, you who got the truth now, now? Is it you, you, you? Set me down. Say it straight. Another story on the way. Who got the truth now? Who got the truth? Yeah.

02:25:43 Speaker_03
A choir live from the Chase Center. Who got the tune? Yeah. Yeah. Let's get it.