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

Hey, so I know this isn't like the best time to bring this up, but did you bring the thumb drive with the who got the truth MP3 for the sound crew? No, why would I bring a thunt? I did email that probably like three weeks ago though. Well, there's 6,000 people out there waiting to hear it. The team is really great. I'm sure they'll think of something. San Francisco, please help me welcome to the stage. The creator's up in Acquired Podcast, Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal. Oh my god. Hi.

Yeah, send me down, say a string, another story on the way who got the truth. Yeah, who got the truth. Yeah, who got the truth. San Francisco! Mike Taylor! Woo! We didn't need the thumb drive. We didn't need the thumb drive. Welcome to this episode of Acquired, the podcast about... Welcome to Acquired LIVE at the Chase Center!

This is a... Wow, this is unbelievable. Thank you all for coming. We have a very, very special guest and surprise to welcome us all here tonight, the CEO of JP Morgan Chase, Jamie Dunn. Hello, Acquired listeners. Welcome to the Chase Center and to Acquired LIVE. I'm Jamie Dimon, Chairman and CEO of JP Morgan Chase. I'm happy to kick off the show tonight and welcome all of you to one of my favorite arenas.

It's been a great partnership all year between JP Morgan Payments and Acquired, storytelling and educating about some of the greatest companies in the world. For many of them, just like many of you in the crowd, were thrilled to call you friends and partners of the firm. Sorry I couldn't be there in person tonight, but I hope everyone enjoys the show. Ben and David, over to you.

Thanks, Jamie. Well, a special shout out and a huge thank you to JP Morgan and the whole Payments team, especially Dustin Sedgwick, the CMO of JP Morgan Payments.

Long time listener, he's been like really the driving force behind this whole thing and his truly world class marketing team. Hannah, Nick, Vinnie, Amy and Carly, David and I for the first time really now understand what it is like to have a glimpse of what a sort of real built out team would look like and not just two guys in their basement. Thank you for an amazing partnership. Ben and I did not put this on ourselves tonight.

So what are we doing tonight? Well, as you all know, Mark Zuckerberg is in the house. So tonight will actually have three acts, not one. Mark will be our third act after intermission, but we've got a lot of great segments. You know, in our first two acts here, some more fun surprises sprinkled in in the middle. So David, what is the format? Like is this an acquired episode?

Well, amazingly, shockingly, we tell you all all the time that when we make an episode, we sit in our houses in our studios. We record all day for nine hours. We turned that nine hours into three or four or five hours that you all hear. And we thought, yeah, that's probably not going to play here, but you keep asking us. You keep emailing us.

So we want to put this request, this question to bed. Once and for all, here tonight, here is what you are missing in the full nine hours of an acquired recording session. I'm going to try to do a better job getting air flow in here while we're recording, because I get dumber at the end of episodes, or at least I get like, I should get exhausted. I think part of it's the lack of oxygen. It's really hot in here. And we've been going for five and a half hours.

Let me finish this thing and then we'll take about the break. Alright, similarly thought. I'm going to pour some more champagne. Sorry about that. Hey, blue angels. Great. Only nine minutes and 40 seconds of bullshit before we actually started. It's pretty good for us. It's a new record. Is this two in the weeds? Let me take a stab at making it more loosey-goosey. I think I can simplify all this. We got to advance the story more. The pacing's too slow. Oh, this doesn't make any sense.

Okay, great. We can cut all that then. Cut that. Just cut it. Let's cut all that. Cut that. Skip it. Skip it. Yeah. Let's skip it and keep moving. Okay, I think one of us has our timelines wrong. We've been so stop and start. Do you think we should just restart the whole thing? We're 35 to 40 minutes into this episode and nothing has happened. I think I would actually feel better and more in the flow. Because right now I'm like, what did we cover? What did we not?

I think what you're saying is replace all of what we did before. I'm going to go re-record at least the first part. Maybe that whole thing. I don't recall exactly how we started, though. I don't remember the last thing you said. I don't either. I think I've been interrupting. No, I think it's great. Please keep doing it. No, I don't find it annoying at all. The goal is make the best stuff. I actually quite like how this is puzzling in.

I think I want to say. You got to stop making that face. Oh, me? Was that making your face? Can take it without the um. Totally. Totally. Totally. Totally. Totally. Totally. Totally. Go for it. Dude, it is so hard to keep all this information in our heads. I feel like I'm like out of ram. What's going on? I just heard a beep on your end. Okay, well that wasn't one of their best episodes. That is how the sausage is made.

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

And we are going to throw a party instead. It is a celebration of technology of the San Francisco Bay area of... Woo! San Francisco! Yeah! Some of the most important businesses of our time and most importantly, it's a celebration of you all. We say you all on the show. Usually you're not here. So tonight, normally we study the past, often the far past. Tonight we're going to look at the present. It's a little unacquired.

But once every two and a half years or however often we do a live show, we want to indulge. So yeah, we're going to indulge tonight. Indeed we are. So to start, we want to spend a couple minutes at the top of the show here in our first act. Just giving you all an update on the state of acquired, it has been quite a year for us. You and I have lived a lot of life in one year. We both had kids. The Wall Street Journal wrote about us. And we've experienced some pretty amazing growth.

Yeah, and so we were thinking, David kind of pitched this to me. I'm like, what do we stand up and give a keynote on the state of the union of acquired? That's not. That's not feel right. But a conversation would be great if we were the right person to have a conversation with. And we were like, who is a big acquired listener? Kind of gets what we're all about. Everyone in the audience going to be like, oh yeah, that person's one of us. And is like, you know, the world expert on podcasting.

Fortunately for us and all of you tonight, we're here to welcome all the way from Stockholm, the CEO and founder of Spotify, Daniel Eck. Thanks a lot. Daniel. Wow, this is pretty insane, guys. I think this probably ought to be like the biggest recording of a podcast in the world. It's a little like an echoing studio. Yeah, you guess should use this as the studio every time I think. Well, you've been after us to do more video for years.

That is true. Here you are. This is going to be a video for sure. All right. Well, love that. Love that. And, you know, it's it's really amazing for me to be here and just see, you know, this and all of you guys success. I remember listening to you guys as a fan, I think starting 2019 and see that we're now five years later. From a small base going to something like this. It's pretty remarkable to see. And I don't know about you guys, but I thought maybe to commensurate this moment.

It'd be pretty fun. I know you don't want to tell your success. So I thought maybe I could do that for you. So maybe we can have a look at some of the amazing stats and achievements you guys have accomplished. Well, thanks. Yeah, I know you pulled some data. We pulled some data. This is the updated version up here of the kind of classic acquired chart that we've been showing, which basically shows from when we started in 2015.

The kind of like organic doubling year over year over year all the way through today. And basically, since we don't market the show or we don't do any paid marketing. The only way the show grows is we make an episode a friend tells, you know, someone tells their friend about it. And on average, every listener tells one other one other listener every year, hey, you should listen to that person sticks. And that's kind of the whole thing.

Yeah, I mean, it's pretty remarkable. And on Spotify alone, you guys have now done over five million hours. And it's tripled in the last year. Pretty remarkable, right? Yeah, figure on the bottom. So, so so we did the math or bend it. The math has usually does. I believe that is over 400 years of acquired. That was, we feel like it was 400 years making the episodes in the last year.

But that was listened to in the past year. Yeah, what is the is didn't attend the one the longest one you guys have done. I think Microsoft volume two was our longest single episode. But thank you for pulling this. So the reason the way this came to be is we asked Daniel, hey, you know, you have access to data that all podcasters sort of dream of what is the most interesting insights you can kind of pull out of it.

And the thing that's the craziest to me about this chart is that even though acquired. Here's how many downloads and episode gets isn't like celebrity status like it's not the craziest biggest in the world. Because of the volume of our episodes, we all spend a lot of time together. Like thank you for lending us your ears for all of those moments because that that's what that chart is to me is all the time we spend together.

Yeah, but what was really cool for me too is just seeing the fandom of the show. So one thing is is, you know, obviously seeing the sort of total numbers, but also seeing the fandoms and you guys added more than 250,000 followers. And that triple last year too. So it's over 250,000 followers on Spotify loan now on the choir show, which again is pretty remarkable to see that kind of growth.

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

The second thing is if you pull the chart back up again, you can see the Wall Street Journal article in May in that insane. Yeah, you know, I know we keep talking about it, but this literally has never happened in the decade of acquired where a single event caused a kink in the chart. And that we see you guys see it. It's crazy.

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. So, you know, look at some of this stuff. Like you have Mexico growing five times Hong Kong, Israel, Singapore, acquired is global.

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

And you know, it's, I want to really kind of maybe take the moment here and ask you guys how all of this happened. And by way of context, just to put this in perspective. And so, in 2019, you know, when we got into podcasts, the world around podcasts listening in Spotify, there's a few million people listening to this. And you mentioned this, but like our goal was to sort of broaden this whole medium. And today there's over 150 million people listening to podcasts on Spotify.

And so, you know, the first 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. What do you think contributed to that success? Well, you guys entering the industry for sure. But I think you hit on it with like broad, but like when Ben and I started this, we thought, you know, we used to talk about what our

career, we were venture capitalists, we're like, what's the tam for acquired? Not even thought about it as a business or product. But, and we're like, I don't know, maybe there's what's the population of students in business school. So out there, maybe that's our tam. And then we were like, well, I don't know, maybe it's a little bigger than that. Like maybe, maybe it's, you know, everybody who ever wanted to go to business school or

was interested in like, okay, like, what's that cap out that like a million people, maybe a million, a million felt like our tam. And what's happened to us. And I'm curious, I think you guys have probably seen the same thing is that even though we think we're super nerds and we tell these very esoteric stories,

they're just great stories. And people of all types want to listen to them. Right. And the growth of the medium, like we should have this ridiculous tailwind where we got lucky and picked right in 2015. We stayed with it. We got better at the craft. But like, it turns out people are super interested thanks to all the wireless headphones that exist now. And I don't know, it's just this weird cultural norm that's.

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

Right. So one of the things you're obviously done is, you know, add a video to the format. And this is my plug of hopefully getting you guys to finally add video to Spotify as well. But what do you think is next for the show when it comes to that? Like what do you see the big innovation.

Overquired will be in the future. So I think our total dress will market is at least 10 times bigger than it currently is today with our exact same product if we just keep doing the work and making the product better and shipping one episode a month. And the question is like, how much more can we do without killing the golden goose? Like, how do you keep the main thing? Actually, can I turn this back on you? Like, you have massively expanded what Spotify does since the original vision.

Yeah, so you were using music on Facebook. Yeah. 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 everyone, you should do other things. Well, I mean, I think it starts with your audience, right? And knowing your audience. So like, for instance, we launched audio books about a year ago. But the sort of untold story about that audio books launches.

What happened in Germany is all the record companies started uploading audio books to the service. So they started hacking the system for all these other things. And when they ran out of that, they actually started uploading podcasts. So podcasts turned out to be the easier medium for us to start with. But eventually we added sort of audiobooks too. So I think you know, most amazing things tend to start with people kind of suggesting things or maybe even doing things.

So be interested to kind of like figure out what people are doing in and around a quart already. And that will probably be your sort of adjacency. I think the other video Ben and I talk a lot. We'll talk more about video throughout the evening here. You know, we've just always sort of been of the belief of like nobody wants to sit and watch us in our studios is talking heads going, yeah, yeah, yeah, I can.

But we've started to ask the question of like, is there for certain companies we cover is there a rich visual tapestry that we could do at the same level that we try and create an audio tapestry. 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 amazing show though. Thank you. But audio is this like magic thing where I'm going to drag my we're going to end up doing more video, but I'm going to drag my feet kicking and screaming all the way there because I feel very passionately that the reason that the caliber of person in this room with all the busy things that you have in your life.

The reason that you're open to spending all this time with us is because we don't take your full undivided attention. You can run, you can mow the lawn, you can drive, you can, you know, everything that everyone does, well, they listen to acquired. I like, I remain unconvinced that we would work as a four hour video product. 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 the world just keeps evolving constantly.

So you talked about video and you know on Spotify, it's been a huge rough thing. I would have said to you as well, people probably mostly, why would you want to watch a video? But I think younger consumers, especially they don't know what the difference is, they just want to feel closer presence to the person. And I mean, we saw it already with the bloopers, right?

It's like, this is fun. What you guys are doing and people have a relationship to you guys too, hands why so many people are showing up here tonight. And I think video is just a way to express that whether or not they're watching the full four hours or whether they're diving in and out over a particular type of segment.

I think just giving the consumer the choice is sort of one of the big things. And that's kind of what we're leaning into as well is just allowing the creator and the consumer to more directly interact and more in all of ways. It's funny. There's your question was what's next for acquired. We are going to do a normal episode after this. After tonight, that normal episode probably will focus on a men low part based technology company. And one of the lessons that we're already starting to learn.

We can take that back now. It's just not holding the current state of things and vision of what you are too tightly. And you know, we want to talk about you've learned a lot from Mark over the years. You all have been very close. Spotify started on Facebook. And here you are, you're the biggest podcasting platform in the world. So you didn't hold on to that vision too tightly. So can I turn that into a question? Please. I was actually going to I wanted to leave you some space before we ask.

So great partnership was all about. Do you remember so David and I have one way of growing, which is make a good episode and hope people tell their friends. Do you remember in the early days of Spotify when you figured out? Oh, Facebook is going to be this unbelievable channel for us. Yeah, I mean, it's it's. I think it starts like so many other things. I think Mark and I would just struck this sort of friendship and we started talking about.

You know, the little told story is if I remember this correctly, I think Mark even pre Facebook was trying to do a music startup. Oh, yeah. And then he was like, yeah, this feels like a difficult thing. Why are all the wire. Yeah, exactly. And so I think he's like I think pretty much every great entrepreneur in the valley tried to do a music startup. And so he was definitely passionate about it. And then his idea obviously was a social user product.

And you know, I we started talking about it. I said in the beginning he started like he wanted mostly Spotify to be more social. And I kind of said, well, I don't know that that's how you got introduced because Spotify was not like Spotify the way what it is today. Yeah, pillar of the world. Yeah, well, I got introduced to Mark through Sean Parker.

And so Sean kind of said to do suck like, hey, you got to meet this entrepreneur from Sweden. And I remember like suck at the time was living in a very small house. And we went for a barbecue at his house. This is probably I wrote 2008 or nine likes 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 you were definitely were in live. So this sort of secret of Spotify was we sort of see that 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. So everyone came to him to kind of try to get all the invites.

Yeah, man, the currency of the in the Spotify invites. Yeah, it was a big, big thing for quite a few years before we launched where it was kind of the secret thing if you were in the club or if you weren't. And anyway, he got Mark on it. And I think a mark kind of wrote this status update like Spotify so good.

And then, you know, everyone's like, how did you get this? This was kind of the main thing. When can I get it? How can I do it? And yeah, then we started jamming around like what a social music product ought to be. And we had this sort of idea wouldn't be cool sort of like with.

I see you at the time where you had the status updates like wouldn't be cool to be able to check out what your friends were listening to. And we kind of got to work together built that product and coincided it with the Spotify US launch. 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 these status updates of what your friends were listening to piped in directly from Spotify.

Exactly right. So you could see all your friends. It actually still exists in Spotify product on desktop. So you can kind of see what your friends are listening to real time. It's one of our more popular legacy features that's been around now for like 13 years. It was the right side bar, but I feel like I've seen it in a while. Maybe I just, it's still there. It's still there.

But this gets at the point of like social music listening was this core insight that you had. Mark was on board to kind of build it together and and let you, you know, use the, I mean, he got a lot out of it too, but let you use Facebook to distribute it. And yet everyone here who's a Spotify customer today, when I think Spotify, I think, oh, that's like the easy way to access music podcasts and audio books, but I don't think like, oh, it's a social listening.

Right. So at what point did you kind of like, like, let go of that precious idea and say, maybe the social is like important, but not that important. Well, I still think social is hugely important. And for instance, we have, 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. It is growing incredibly rapidly right now all over the world. So it's something that, you know, I think very much is a social product.

But while I still think music is very social, I think what we got wrong in the product was this sort of notion that just seeing sort of what all of your friends are listening to may not be the sort of right social product. But if you instead sort of say, like, I want to work together with my friends and I want to have a shared listening, whether we're in the same place or not, that turns out to be a pretty amazing thing.

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. But what we saw during the pandemic and that's like where jam sort of started was we started seeing that people were using this to stay connected as well by having sort of this shared, you know, consistent music listening where we're all listening to the same thing at the same time. Even though we were sort of apart, it's like the best of linear TV brought to music.

Yeah. So I think we're still sort of, you know, definitely playing with the social concepts and trying to get that right. 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. So it was like, you know, I've created another farmville.

Yeah, yeah. We remember that era. Yeah. I was at, it was like north of 10% of Facebook's revenue at IPO was from was in. Yeah. Yeah. What, I mean, this is all fun history. I'm curious though, we're going to talk to Mark later tonight. Are you doing research live on stage? Yeah. Definitely. You know, you've had a relationship, a pretty close relationship for 15 plus years as fellow founders in the trenches.

What are, what have you taken from him that you've brought in this modify and how you run the company? Many things and I've learned so much from him and the rest of the team at meta as well. But I think specifically for him, you know, he's the probably the best learner I've ever seen. You know, you can, you can have a conversation with them about a topic. He may not know very much about it. And then the next time he would know more than I would say most experts about the subject.

And it's really remarkable just how tenacious he is sort of about learning and staying curious about things. So that's definitely been a super inspiring thing for me. And I think that this sort of shines through with how he runs the company too. He has a very clear idea but he also takes a lot of feedback and sort of iterates on that.

And you know, it's everything from one of the cool things for me. I've been seeing how he runs meetings. For instance, I kind of like having relatively small meetings with people. Mark, the average meeting he has is like 15 to 20 people in the room. And how you make, you know, a product review or discussion productive with 15 to 20 people still get people to be heard.

Like he's very, very good at that stuff. And that's just a few of the things that I've learned which has helped me as a leader as well. Can I ask maybe this is a little bit more pointed. You are a kind person. You are a soft spoken person. But you are a fierce competitor. We haven't told you this when we interviewed you. What 18 24 months ago in Stockholm. I'd never been to Sweden before. I don't think you had either. And we left with just like what a lovely country, what lovely people.

Daniel is like the most generous person we could imagine. You're here tonight. And that guy is a fierce competitor. And there is a reason why he has built Spotify. And very strategic. Like I think you see the chess board. Mark is like that too. Do you feel like your relationship. Do you amplify each other? Well, I mean, the rule I have with Mark is I don't try to go into a competition with them because I know it will end badly for both of us.

So as you know, Mark likes sports. So one of the things I don't do with Mark is play sports. For exactly this reason. What was the last time he sort of tore his ACL when someone rather than giving up. So I feel like it and pretty badly. So I like playing when I know I'll win. So I think it's a pretty good thing to not do that.

I mean, if I were to characterize like why Spotify worked, it feels like there's an incredible amount of tenacity and a willingness to run into a problem that like a lot of people had tried and failed at before. But there is also this like you kind of buy your time. You kind of wait for the opening and then you figure out a game you know that you can win and then you go execute in that game.

That's pretty much spot on to be honest. That's one of the things we talk about a lot that I don't say that much but Gustav was backstage here is our product officer and CTO is we say talk is sheep. Most people talk about execution speed of execution. Let's move. Let's go. We actually spend a lot of time just discussing and talking. So the internal saying that Spotify's talk is sheep because we want to be really deliberate about what it is we're doing and how we're doing it.

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

And we have our sort of ways of doing that now that we've sort of codified across the company which I think is pretty unique at this point. But part of that is also because so to set the stage is because we had to because remember everything unlike many other products when you're building a company. You can kind of sort of iterate and do stuff. We had to get the entire industry with us. So if we wanted to do something we had to convince a bunch of people that it was the right thing to do.

And many 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. We're probably not going to be the fastest in moving fast and breaking things. But we are going to be very deliberate and we're probably going to be more right when we actually do something.

You're like the anti fail fast the anti move fast and break things the anti ship and iterate like. Well I like to hope we can also ship an array. But yeah, yeah, yeah. But we won't be the fastest now. 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?

I think it sort of depends on which markets are kind of looking at it. But we were pretty much, it started happening in quite a few markets already 2020 and 2021. And in 2022 we were pretty much the market leader in most markets around the world. So three years. Yeah. Yeah, why? That's the question. And did you expect that it would be that fast given that you were so methodical and working so long to launch it? We don't always know how fast this will be.

But I think we had a pretty good sense that we could sort of iterate and improve our way. It's a sort of hell climb from the mountain we were on when we saw the sort of initial traction. But I think the contrarian that we did unlike many others did was you know at the time when we launched it's it was sort of view that you needed to have a different app for everything right like you had to have a separate podcasting app and podcasting music were very different. And for us it's just listening.

And what we realized is we should use this base of what was then several hundred million people in today's way north of half a billion people and just serve them more stuff. And it turns out that like what we saw all the time it wasn't like our music listeners weren't listening to podcast. So why not use this experience and also recommend them great other stuff.

And we went from there and then a year ago we also added audiobooks because that turned out to be another way to increase people's listening and that they were also spending time doing. But 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 that that blows up your core.

And so I think like my takeaway at least is though you figured out a way to do it where you made sure that people were going to be open to using you for this new. Yeah of course you're right obviously just because you have the distribution advantage doesn't mean it'll work. But I think going back to what's so amazing with the platform is every time we try to do something that the liberal sort of top down it's sort of fail.

And most of the time actually what we see is the inklings of something already existing on the platform and then growing from there. So I mentioned this at the beginning but Germany was sort of an early indicator for a lot of things for us both in podcasting and in books.

And what I realized even before we launched books for instance was around 2018 we started seeing books showing up on the top list in Germany of the most sort of you know listen to music tracks right it was a music it was clearly books but it sort of made it all the way up to the top list. And surely thereafter we started showing up as the biggest book distributor in the country but we weren't even trying and it was actually a pretty horrible experience to listen to books on Spotify.

So when your product is being used in spite of it actually being a pretty terrible experience you kind of know you've got something so that was the sort of genesis for how we then were able to build and sort of expand. Awesome. Well that's it for this segment are you going to stick around and watch the rest of the night. Yeah for sure. I'm so excited. Awesome. Well Daniel thank you. Thank you so much for being here.

All right listeners 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 thousands of companies from open AI to series a startups rely on Statsig to ship fast learn more and make smart decisions. But you may not know about all the ways in which their story is directly tied to Facebook story that Mark will share with us later this episode.

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 been. Well Facebook invested hundreds of thousands of engineering hours in a set of internal tools these tools let any engineer setup 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 guard rails and they could always roll it back if anything broke. 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 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 makes smarter decisions and even better Statsig was literally founded by an X meta team who wanted to help everyone build like the best today many of the world's leading tech companies rely on Statsig including open AI Microsoft notion and

the topic Figma plus thousands of early stage startups. 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. Now is also a great time to tell you about one of our very favorite companies the climate aligned AI infrastructure provider Crusoe.

Yes, Crusoe is a cloud platform built specifically for AI workloads and powered by clean energy 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.

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 now they are one of the world's most important companies with an AI cloud that is actually superior to the hyperscanners and a whole bunch of the largest companies in the world are now trusting their AI infrastructure to Crusoe.

It's easy to think about AI is like oh that's a bunch of PhDs over at meta or open AI or anthropic tinkering with model weights and then going and hitting compute. 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 it's all the physical infrastructure behind AI.

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. 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.

And that's super important if you listen to mark talk later than 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.

It's just an awesome company we're super proud to work with them and also to be investors 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 start ups and enterprises who want to.

Complete AI platform or directly as a data center customer which yes several of like the biggest companies in the world are now doing so just going over to Crusoe dot AI slash acquired that's CR us o e dot AI slash acquired or click the link in the show notes and tell them that Ben and David sent you thanks Crusoe. Well we've got a little more time before mark comes on and we have a couple more surprises planned. I think it's time to talk about the next one act to act to.

So David and I are sitting around we're planning tonight we're like what's the thing to do when we've got all these great folks in the room who love acquired and we're like rather than ask them hey what should we do tonight we just check our email and see like what do people actually already want when we're not even asking. Episode requests episode one yeah go to the acquired inbox lot of episode requests.

The second biggest request is hey you did this episode you were wrong you need to fix it or you did this episode and like a lot has happened since and you need to do a follow up on it and so we thought what if we pick like three or four of those and we speed run all of them with the acquired audience present.

Yep. Add it 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. Please welcome from Bloomberg and the circuit Emily Chang. Hi. Hi. Hi. Hi. Hi, Hux. Congratulations. Thank you so much. Congratulations. Thank you for being here. I'll be your guest. You guys. This is pretty awesome. Welcome to our recording studio.

Welcome to our, yeah. Thank you. I'm glad to be here. I need to like mine you for some research. I know we have like a thing that we're doing here over the next 19 minutes, but you went to wake surfing with Mark. Like, he's in the news. I tried. 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 is dry. Like, I've wake surfed a couple times.

I start, you know, in the water and you get pulled up. I would not, so how logistically can you like step off the boom? As you could probably tell from the episode, I'm not awake, surfer, but I tried. And Mark is pretty good. And what I did not realize is that you can do a dry start where you, if you're so good, you can just ride the board right off the boat. And voila, tuxedo surfing video. And I can personally attest that I did see him do a dry start.

And he can, I mean, I think it's real, I think. And he had like a lot of tuxedos on that boat to get multiple trial runs. By the way, Priscilla is pretty awesome too. They can both shred. We'll just have to save time. Because she's here tonight too. Yeah. All right, Emily, take us in. All right. So right now, and I, A plus, you guys, for self-reflection, we're going to revisit some of your past episodes. And we decided on some episodes that maybe were a little controversial.

In the early days, you would grade every company that you covered. And you made some good calls, but also some questionable calls sometimes. So I thought we would go down, do a little memory lane, and start with YouTube, which David, you gave YouTube a C in 2016. This is the acquisition of YouTube by Google. Right. And you, you, Ben said it could be as bad as a C minus. And I, I just, I just, I have to, I just questioned that a little bit. We were young. It was 2016. We know we were doing.

We were misguided. But let's just twist the knife a little, because we have some quotes here. Ben, you said, I'm a little bit bearish on YouTube primarily because it's not a destination. And David said, like, who goes to YouTube and discover something? The sad part is that we actually said that and decided to revisit this. So I don't know. It may actually be the case that that wasn't a huge behavior yet. Like the algorithm hadn't become, I know I'm being defensive here.

Ben, this is where we fall on our sword. The YouTube was like the utility that you uploaded a video to and then you could embed it on your site. It's not like I would like start my day, but maybe I was weird. But like, I couldn't imagine starting my day and going to YouTube.com and just watching whatever it served me. The way that now, like, it's very easy to do that in the app. Well, I think, um, okay, so for me, there's a lot to talk about with YouTube that we got wrong.

This is the biggest thing that we've discovered since is, I think literally as we were making that episode, AI and social media feed recommenders were happening in that moment. And it was about to lead to everything that is happening today. Oh, yeah. And it was YouTube within Google and Meta then Facebook buying GPUs and building AI that turned feed recommenders into, you know, the ultimate destination site. And we just completely had no idea that that was happening. Right.

AI had its moment a decade ago where I was all excited about it now, but like the use case of recommending you something that should be the next item that you should consume was a killer use case for AI. Yeah. Even then, we missed that. Well, today, you have analysts saying if you pulled YouTube out of Google, it would be worth half a trillion dollars, which is almost double where Netflix is. It's on track YouTube TV to be the largest cable provider, cable provider in the United States.

And I said they take it. You know, I have a house full of kids in my house. It's the first and the second screen because we have YouTube TV. So the question is, can they really be everything to every one, right? Right. Here is, here is I think our most legitimate defense. Google does not report YouTube profitability. They report YouTube revenue. So when we did the episode, YouTube was doing about $5 billion run rate revenue.

It is now like 35 to 40 billion annual revenue run rate, which is incredible. And when it was, and back then, it was way losing money. Like it was a money pit. Yes, and it was losing a lot of money back then. Google does not report today, but here is what is unique about YouTube versus every other platform is, they pay out 55% of revenue on long form and 45% on shorts directly to creators. Which is great for creators, but that's a tough business to run.

Yeah. When every dollar you're getting in, you're giving more than half out, you know, I think. And it's a direct variable cost. 70 billion dollars to creators over the last three years, which again is more than Netflix spends on content. So I'll go on record. YouTube was an A plus acquisition because of the strategic value.

I mean, whether it's the second largest search engine, second to Google, or the second largest social media property, you know, strategically very great thing to own, not to mention going into the land of AI training data. But like as a business, it is not clear to me that YouTube makes money. Well, and I mean, my source is also, 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 spiket on and off. And the durability that they're building and the affinity from creators. We'll talk about creators on the platform in a minute. Yes, there's a reason why so many creators want to graduate to YouTube. Yeah. And this is it. Well, you're creating my shows on YouTube. Your shows on YouTube. How do you feel about YouTube as creators? Strongly.

For everyone listening, thank you for listening to the podcast feed where we have a direct relationship with you that is not intermuted. By an algorithm. But like honestly, it is the craziest thing to see these YouTubers who have built mass followings. Tens of millions, you know, hundreds of millions sometimes of subscribers where subscribers and views are uncorrelated. Yeah. Great today. Great today. Oh, A plus. Still a plus. Yeah. Okay, okay. So here's the other thing we didn't mention.

And I think this was true back then too. YouTube is both the second largest social media property in the world. And the second largest search engine in the world. So, yeah, yeah, yeah. 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, you know, profitability today. It's what was the existential risk to Google of not owning YouTube if YouTube became a thing somewhere outside of Google.

And that is worth paying a lot for. Huge. All right. Moving on. The next company we're going to talk about is LinkedIn. You covered it three days after they got bought by Microsoft. You both basically gave it an A. Bed and quote. How are we both positive on this? I woke up Monday morning being like, what? Oh, yeah. And then we've got this other one. What about LinkedIn today? Yeah, that we said we had no idea how it went because it was too recent.

I think the story with LinkedIn is it was super unclear that it had the running room. Ahead of it. Like, what are the numbers on YouTube today revenue wise? On YouTube? I'm sorry. I'm not really doing 16 billion plus in revenue today. They've five X revenue since they were bought eight years ago. Of which five billion comes from advertising and content. Which for all intents and purposes didn't exist when the acquisition happened. They have built that into a real business.

I mean, for us, it's unacquired. Actually went and looked in preparation for this. We have about relatively equal number of followers on LinkedIn as a platform versus any of the other social platforms out there. But engagement is like five, ten X on LinkedIn. I mean, it's our most important social platform. And if you had said that eight years ago, it would have been crazy.

The reason why this was worth a revisit and why I think they've been so much more successful than anyone would have thought at the time of acquisition. They five X in revenue, which over eight years is great, but not like three standard deviation for standard deviation from the mean. It's not one of these crazy things in the world. But essentially, they created a hundred billion dollars of market cap.

I mean, if you look at what a reasonable multiple would be for LinkedIn, if it were an independent company today, it's a big company. Like, it would be a hundred and, I don't know, over a hundred billion dollar market cap company today. And like, it's just kind of hanging out inside Microsoft revisiting this was a little traumatic for me because this was, if you'll remember, this was an acquisition that like no one saw coming. There were no leaks, no reporting on this before it happened.

And my producer was apparently like calling my phone nonstop in the morning. It was like the crack of dawn and I was not picking up so she called my husband. And it was like Microsoft just bought linked in 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. Was it a good interview? I mean, I think so. I actually watched it. You said it. Yeah, it was good. My hair wasn't quite fully done, but we made it. We made it through. Okay.

Okay. You have some new reporting. I do actually because I talked to Reed Hoffman, who of course is co founder of LinkedIn. And you know, it's interesting because Reed joined the board of Microsoft. He's still in the board of Microsoft. He was an early investor in open AI on the board of open AI. Shocker Satya Nadella is on the AI train early. Microsoft is the biggest backer of open AI now. And Kevin Scott is the CTO of Microsoft now who came from LinkedIn.

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

I don't know. You wonder if the AI wars would have played out differently. Okay, we're going to keep moving quickly because I really want to make sure we get to the last one. But SpaceX, one of your most popular episodes ever, luckily you're in the clear because you didn't grade them. We stopped grading at some point. But obviously, Starlink is a juggernaut Ben. You talked about it being potentially a $30 billion business at the time.

Can you grade SpaceX today knowing that Starlink is just even bigger? Okay, so yeah, the company was valued at $36 billion in May of 2020 when we did the episode. 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. It's like an insane break. They're doing one every three days. But on top of the launch business. The launch business is not the interesting part of the business.

They now have Starlink, which is estimated to do $6.5 billion in 2024. And they are reportedly profitable as a business. I'm pretty sure the 7,000 Starlink satellites that are in orbit represent two thirds of the total satellites orbiting the Earth. And it's not just like, oh, we'll see if people want Starlink. 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. So when we did the episode, Starlink was like pie in the sky. Literally, there was nothing. And now I'm pretty sure Starlink is the entire, like SpaceX was valued at $36 billion when we did the episode. Starlink itself is worth way more than $36 billion today. It's a beast, total beast. And by the way, nobody else could have saved those astronauts. Right? Like... Fight more. I mean, NASA didn't have a choice.

Yeah. Well, Russia may be, but that's complicated. And we don't even know if China could dock at the ISS. I mean, I think that's okay to say so. Oh, it just crossed the lines. I will say it's... So the Starlink execution is just more remarkable than... I think 99% of people would have guessed. Yeah. Okay, so now, to your most requested revisit ever, the arena queen, you gave her an A+. But that was two years ago before the era's tour.

Yeah. So I think you're going to have to invent a new category. So, certainly. Or stop grading. That's the real answer. The context on this is... It's a little weird because there's no like... Enterprise value of Twitter out there, of Taylor out there that you can calculate. We're not talking about Twitter. I probably... There's no Enterprise value of Taylor. The closest thing was when we did the episode, Forbes estimated her net worth at $550 million.

Yeah. Not Wu. Yeah. By our calculations, we're pretty sure she generated on the order of $550 million of free cash flow this past year. This year. This year. Last 12 months. That's a Wu. So is she more than a billionaire? So, this is... So, David's got like an argument on this. So, walk us through the... You're perceived financial breakdown of Swift Incorporated.

Of yes, Taylor Swift Inc. The big piece that I actually think is the most interesting piece that we got wrong in our episode, Ben did a fantastic primer on the music industry. And, you know, all the challenges for artists and et cetera, and like it's getting better, and Spotify is doing great, and Daniel is doing great, and all that. The latest sort of reported talked about numbers was that Taylor was making like less than $5 million a year from streaming.

There was this myth that streaming doesn't pay. The myth that streaming doesn't pay. Last year, Taylor made over... This is reported. ...reported, this reported. Well, over $100 million from Spotify streaming alone. Alone. Doesn't include any of the other platforms, so, you know, gross that up.

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? Like, that is a very, very, very high gross margin number that is coming to Taylor. Right, so that of that high $100 million streaming number, she actually keeps quite a bit of it because of this strategy that she's... So, the amount that she's getting just from streaming.

Like, Eris Tora sighed, movie aside, she is getting paid more every year than any Hollywood actor, probably any athlete in the world. She could just sit at home. Okay, but then... But she doesn't. But then... But then... She did an Eris tour, which is like the most unbelievable tour that any artist has ever conceived of or executed. How much money did that make last year, David? So, last year, the Eris tour in calendar year 2023, grossed, I think, $1.1 billion. Wow. The previous...

Which is a gross. And two were expensive. Like, there's a lot of, you know, things... A lot of... And involved in making shows. Yes, there. The previous record for highest grossing tour ever, I believe was a billion dollars, so Taylor, Eclipse that over multiple years that that was earned. So, not only did she set the record for highest grossing tour, she did it within 12 months. Obviously, the tour has continued. Yeah, but let's say she operates like a very high...

You know, a high margin touring business. Let's assume she's very efficient at it. Call it a 30-35% operating margin on the business. A lot of artists actually lose money touring because it's a... You know, anyway. That's another 300... Three hundred... Three hundred, three hundred, three hundred and fifty million dollars in cash flow every year. Yep. Or at least last year. During the era as to where she is making that. When she is actively touring. And then... And then... There's the movie.

Right. So, the movie grossed... Uh, 267 million dollars at the box office. Highest grossing concert film of all time. Um, Taylor went direct to the theaters with the movie. So paying less middlemen? Less middlemen. Uh, then she did the direct deal with Disney for the streaming rights. That was another 75 million dollars on top of that. So, well over 300 million dollars from the movie... Obviously, not going to make a movie every year, but...

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. I think that is conservative for last year. I think if you were to say like, okay, what is a smoothed-out steady state over a three-year rolling average for Taylor Inc? Well, you did used to be an investment- Passability-plus cash flow every year. Uh, so I relist into the Taylor podcast with my kids driving the Tau and they loved it.

You have a potential Gen-Alpha audience. It's our gateway drug. In case you were getting nervous. But here's a question. Is it possible that we're at peak Taylor? Okay, so this is the most important debate to all of this, which is if you're trying to value the enterprise of Taylor, what multiple do you put on that cash flow? Right? Right? Do you believe it is a durable business? Like some of the great content businesses all the time? Like the one that you put in our model, which is Disney?

Yes. Disney trades at 20x free cash flow. Taylor is 550 million in free cash flow. That's a $11 billion enterprise value for a Taylor. Forbes currently estimates her net worth at 1.1, I think. And now she's in her NFL era. Like how do you value that? Right. So, okay, but here's the good, I think Ben and I differ a little bit on this. How do you Disney is the right comp? Oh boy.

To look at this single greatest like IP holder in the world that has proven over, you know, a century that it can stay relevant and apply that multiple to a single artist with no diversification who has had this unbelievable ascent and you're taking that multiple off of this extreme outlier year. Like I'm not saying, you know, it should trade at 1 or 2x, but like 20x David is a little.

But your point, I think, is a very interesting one, which is when people are looking at, oh, net worth of a person like this, they sort of foolishly don't consider it an enterprise. They're multiple, they're using as one. Right. Like why are you assuming that they're worth the cash in their bank when clearly they can produce these incredible returns year over year over year? So I think that's the slept on thing, Inteler. Are we a peak Taylor?

I think to me, I mean, I think the song that played before we started the movie and walking out here was start me up by the Rolling Stones. Yeah. Taylor is the Rolling Stones. This generation. Yeah. That's my idea. I'm going to say no just because that seems like a safe bet when you're talking about Taylor. Yeah. Yeah. For my own safety, I'm going to say we are not at peak Taylor. All right. You ordered here for the record. So I think you guys need another Taylor episode.

That's the verdict for the fans. Thank you guys so much and congratulations and I can't wait to keep listening. Thanks Emily. Thank you Emily. Thank you so much. Bye guys. All right. So David, we've had Jamie Dimon. We've had Daniel Eck. We've had Emily Chang. Yep. What is going to possibly have up our sleeves before Mark? We won't keep you waiting too much longer. But we do have one more special guest. One more surprise update in a minute.

Yes. But first David, this is a great time to tell you a little bit more about our incredible presenting partner, JP Morgan Payments. 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 JP Morgan Payments. Max, Nick Kirchin and Umar Ferrick. Hey Umar. Max. Thank you. Well, welcome guys. It is so great to have you here.

Listeners have heard us talk about JP Morgan Payments all year unacquired. 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? Yeah. Hello, everyone. Great to be here with you. And you know, 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.

Now, JP Morgan Payments, in brief, we basically help companies receive my company. 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. 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. We are 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. Wow. So it is, I think, probably the largest payments business in the world. 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. And this is why so many companies that you feature and acquire it are actually our clients. And, you know, they simply can't outgrow us. We always them every step of the way from start up all the way to sitting here on the chair. The last payment solution you will ever need. Exactly.

Well, okay. So speaking of, we're here in San Francisco, in Silicon Valley, the tech and AI capital of the world. How is JP Morgan payments keeping pace with the innovation that is happening in this room all around us, the businesses that you all are building? As Max said, it's part of our DNA. You have to innovate to survive. We are building stuff for next 5, 10, 20, 100 years. We within our on-ex business unit have the largest financial blockchain life ecosystem on the planet.

We do bigger transactions than any blockchain, including the crypto blockchains. 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. 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 know, you've got to go up some against some AI systems on the other side. You need to have some AI if you own. So we are building stuff at a different scale and scope. When I think of JP Morgan payments, we perform miracles and magnitude every single day. Oh, great. Well, thank you so much for the great advice, and Jeff. Really appreciate it. All right. So we alluded to one more thing before intermission. We have one more thing before we're finishing.

A special treat from a past acquired guest. So one of the things that happened in the insane, you know, gear that we've had was that we had this like viral clip from an episode. This never happened in the land of acquired. And it got like tens of millions of views, and it got picked up by Forbes and Fortune and the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. It actually went so nuts that we felt like it was kind of misunderstood and we felt bad.

We pulled the clip down because we felt like it just wasn't really explaining what the person meant correctly. And so we wanted to correct the record and have that person back via video to kind of say it straight and say what he meant. So everyone, Jensen Huang. Hi, everybody. It's great to join you at acquired life. Wow. This is this is really something. I still remember when I met Dave and Ben. They interviewed me right here on this stage at NVIDIA's headquarters.

And now this podcast, it's attracted an incredible audience. And so I'm really proud of them. And one of the questions that they asked me was, was that, you know, if I knew what I know now, I think there's something like that. You know, when I start NVIDIA all over again. And I said, absolutely not. I was taken out of context because I was asked about that several times after that. And of course, I would start the company if I knew it would turn out this way.

The reason why I said what I said was, was has everything to do with being an entrepreneur, building a company is insanely hard. The number of things that you have to know, the amazing people that you have to surround yourself with, the adversaries that, and all the smart things that they're going to do, and the adversities that you're going to be confronted with over time.

The mountain of it in the course of 31 years, if I were to take all of that, all the challenges and all the hardship and all the pain and suffering of the last 32 years. And I would have compressed it into the brain of a 29 year old. There is no way that that person would have started the company. And my point there is the superpoint of entrepreneurs, which is your superpowers are partly your ignorance, that you don't know how hard it is. And so that's what I meant. Everybody, get some more!

Nice to have that fixed. Yes, yes. We can officially correct the record on that one. 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 V, Iconic, founder CEO of our time, Mark Zuckerberg. Okay. Let's go, man. Let's go. Yeah. Ah. Mark. It's great to have you here. It's great to be here. You know, I was watching Jensen's video correcting the record.

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. Well, I don't apologize anymore. We've noticed. I mean, I think you knew what you knew today. What's up? If you knew what you know today, would you have started Facebook? Oh, God. I mean, look, I think... Come on out. Hot, Dave. Yeah, I mean... Wait, he started it. Literally.

I think there's something to Jensen's original sentiment, which is that the entrepreneurial journey is very challenging. I start up and, you know, there's the sense that what you're doing could just die at any moment and the volatility, everything is just going to thrash so much. And it's not... You know, you obviously look back at all these fun memories, but it was not the most fun part of the journey. Or, you know, the part of my life that I like, wish I could go back and relive.

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 were like a lot of people for whom, you know, if you knew how painful it would be along the way you wouldn't get started. But then, you know, I think that that's one of the things that's good about human nature is you can underestimate how painful things are going to be, so you can go and do good things.

Well, on that topic, we have a lot to talk about. Yeah. I think this is actually very appropriate. First, we have to ask you about your shirt and what you're wearing. Yeah, you know. I um... I started working with people to design some of my own clothes. And, um, 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. And, um, so this one, I actually worked with this great fashion designer, Micah Meary.

And, um, he's got a great story. So, I wouldn't be surprised if you were doing one of these with him one day. Um, and this one is... So, I've kind of started working on this series of shirts with my... Some of my favorite classical sayings on them. So, this one is Pate Matos, learning through suffering. It's a little family saying and also escolas. Was that your family saying growing up or is that your family bad? Yeah, that's also my sister. Well, no, let's pull that thread.

Yeah. No pun intended, I promise. What does learning through suffering mean to you? Um, well, I think you learn what matters to you and what's important and kind of your place in the world through repeatedly hitting your head against different challenges. And, I mean, I think that that is sort of, that's the journey. Right? I mean, that's the entrepreneurial journey. It's also, I think, part of the beauty of building things. But, there's some that Jensen talks a lot about, too.

Right? It's like, I feel like... You know, when you go to start a company, you... You know, everyone kind of writes down what they would like their values to be. But values are not what you write down on the wall. It's like, you're lived behaviors. And you only really learn what you care about when you have to make hard trade-offs and face challenges. So, yeah. You learn the most important things through facing challenges.

Speaking of facing challenges, we want to talk about a number of those because I... I mean, we counted by our count. I think you have faced more existential challenges than any meaningful company in history through your first 20 years. First, though. It's a dubious distinction. We will make our case to you of why... Well, and enumerate them. That's good. But first... I kind of think my...

You know, like that old Nike Michael Jordan ad where he's talking about who he's failed over and over and over again. And that's how he succeeds. That one really resonates with me, too. So, thanks to you guys, I got a pair of these this summer. And I genuinely love them. Tell us the story of how these came to be. Yeah, so... Thanks. I'm excited about them, too. So, you know, we... Metta, we've been building social experiences for 20 years now.

And originally it took the form of a website, then mobile apps. But the thing is, I never thought about us as a social media company. We're not a social app company. We are a social connection company. Right? I mean, we talk about what we're doing is building the future of human connection. And that's not only going to be constrained over time to what you can do on a phone, right on a small screen. So, when you think about... You know, when we got started, we're like a handful of kids.

You know, we weren't able, we'd love the resources at the time to go define whatever the next computing platform is. And also, you know, Facebook originally got started around the same time as, you know, a bunch of the early smartphones and those platforms got started. So, we didn't really get to play any role in developing that platform. And one of the big themes, I think, for the next chapter of what we do is... I want to be able to build what I think are sort of the ideal experiences.

Not just what you're allowed to build on some platform that someone else built, but what is actually, if you can think from first principles, what is the ideal social experience? So, I think what you would like to have is not a phone that you look down at that kind of takes your attention away from the things and the people around you, you know, not just a small screen. I think what you ideally have is glasses.

And through the glasses, there's one part of it where the glasses, you can see what you see and they can hear what you hear and in doing so, they can be kind of the perfect AI assistant for you because they have context on what you're doing. But then part of that is also that the glasses can project images, basically like holograms, out into the world. And that way your social experiences with other people aren't constrained to these little interactions you can have on a phone screen.

In the not-so-distant future, you can imagine, because you guys have demoed some of the stuff that we've done, like a version of this where we're having a conversation like this, but maybe like one of us isn't even here, they're just like a hologram and we have glasses.

And it really, there's the question of delivering a realistic sense of presence. There's something magical in the realm of building social experiences around the feeling of human presence and like being there with another person and this physical perception, right, where we're very physical beings, right? People like to intellectualize everything, but a lot of our experience is very physical.

This physical sense of presence that you were with another person doing things in the physical world is something that you're going to be able to do through holograms, through glasses, without being taken away from whatever else you're doing, just kind of have that mixed in with the rest of the world.

It's going to be, I think, the ultimate digital social experience, and I think it's also going to be the ultimate incarnation of AI, because you're going to have conversations where it's like, alright, there's some people, it's like maybe like, on physically here, there's like a person, you're like a hologram there, there's an AI that is kind of embodied as someone is there, and the glasses won't enable.

So, okay, so how are we going after this building? This is like some huge project we've been working on it for 10 years, and there are a lot of different challenges to solve to get there. You have to build a novel display stack, or it's not, these aren't just screens, like the kind that are in phones, there's this long lineage, they're connected to the screens that have been in TVs and monitors and things for a long time.

There's been this massive optimization of the supply chain, there's like brand new display stacker on holographic displays that basically need to get created. And then they need to be put into glasses, they need to be miniaturized, and you also in the glasses need to fit chips, microphones, you know, speakers, cameras, eye tracking to be able to understand what you're doing, batteries to make it last all day.

So, there's like a new novel, RF protocols. Yeah, it's like, okay, it's a pretty big challenge, so we're like, alright, let's go try to go for the big thing. And we've been working on that for a while, and we're pretty close to being able to show off kind of the first prototype that we have of that, and I'm really excited about that.

At the same time, we also came at it from this lens, so that's like a lot of new technology that needs to get developed, a lot to pack into a form factor, because the glass has to be good looking too. So, what if we just constrain ourselves to like, we're going to work with a great partner, Essela or Laxatica, they make Rayban, they make a lot of the iconic glasses.

Let's see what we can fit into glasses today, and make them as useful as possible. And, you know, I actually, I kind of thought when we were getting started with those, that it was almost like a practice project for like for the ultimate AR. Which let's be clear, that's what you thought Facebook was. That's true, that's true. Yeah, I did. Like for your real startups someday.

So, let's go on a tangent there for a second. When, so, a started Facebook in school came out to Silicon Valley with Dustin and a handful of people working on it at the time, and we did that because Silicon Valley is where all the startups came from. And I remember we got off the plane, we were driving down 101, we're like, wow, eBay, Yahoo, like this is amazing.

And we had great companies one day, we're maybe we'll build a company like this, and I'd already started Facebook, and it was like, surely the project that we're working on now is not a company. And Facebook had like some scale at this. Oh, no, no, it was a great project. I just didn't have the ambition to turn it into a company at the time, that just kind of happened. But anyway.

Yeah, I mean, a lot of hard work obviously, but it's but I just at the time I was kind of like, yeah, I don't think this is it. Well, that's your answer. Would you have started? You actually tried to start Facebook. 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 us to lower Luxatica so we can start building more and more advanced glasses.

And then they're really good. They look good. And then AI like the massive transformation in AI. So, and I remember 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, you know, the Chatchee PT moment. And these were not manufactured and shipped as an AI device. That came later when they were already in market.

Yeah, a few years ago, I would have predicted that AR holograms would have been available before kind of like full scale AI. And now I think it's probably going to be the other order. So now it's like, all right, great. Well, this is actually a great product because it's got it's got the cameras so it can see what you see. It's got the microphone. It's got the speakers. You can talk to it.

I remember calling Alex Himmel, the guy who runs the product group. I think we should probably pivot this and make it so that that met AI is the primary feature of it. And then like, I remember I came in the next week and they built a prototype of it on Tuesday. And it was like, all right, good. Yeah, no, this is good. This is going to be a very successful product.

He told us a much more high stakes version of that story. 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 like ship that soon so we can see if that's a good idea or not. Yeah, that's that tracks. That's what I just said. Sounds right. Okay, so.

Thank you for opening up with the story. The question that I would like to try to answer tonight is why has meta worked as spectacularly well as it has. 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.

My space Twitter Gen 1 Instagram snapchat WhatsApp TikTok Apple app tracking transparency putting its own whole category. And now chat GPT. Like there is a widely held public narrative every single time snapchat discover stories or there's something where people are like, oh, the cool thing that Facebook the company did is just obsolete now and they're going to go away. You very much haven't gone away.

What do you think is the through line of the DNA of the company that allows you to keep winning. I think it's that we're a technology company that is focused on human connection. Not a specific type of app. So like we never thought about ourselves as a website or a social network or anything like that for me building this kind of glasses to enable the future of people being able to feel present with another person or where they actually physically are.

Is the natural continuation of the kind of apps that we build today. But it depends on how you define what you are. And then you need to figure out, well, how do you build, how do you give yourself the competence to actually go do that. And that's where I think being a strong technology company comes in. Because you know, a lot of companies I think think about themselves too narrowly in terms of, okay, well, where this kind of one thing.

And the reason why we can build all these things is because we are have a really strong technology foundation. And some of that is just me and how I think about stuff. I was an engineer before I got started. I mean, I mostly took like systems engineering type classes when I was in college. You talk about like Friendster and Myspace and all the scaling challenges they had during the graph calculations of like, alright, do you know this person?

Friends of Friendspace? Yeah. Yeah, actually, can you take us back and like we want to ask you the story of that time. I mean, it seems quaint now, Friendster and Myspace. But you study computer science, graph networking, social graphs, that is a very difficult competition. So I think it's a combination of a product question and a technology question. I think you can define the product in such a general way that the technology becomes basically impossible to solve.

So you want to have a smart product definition. But then you want to be competent and better than everyone else at the technology. And I think that that's something that we've held ourselves to and build a good organization around. And it's one of the things that I observed as soon as I came out to the valley. That all these companies that called themselves technology companies were not really set up that way.

Right? It's like the companies that I was talking about, it's like they, you know, they, 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. And it's like, alright, 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 like a lot of the people on our management team. It's like, you know, split mostly people running either of these big product groups to come up through different technical pathways at the company. And I think that there's like a balance, right? It's like you don't want everyone to be an engineer because there's other things that matter too.

But if you don't have enough of your kind of share of the company as engineers, then you're not a technology company. And I think that that also is important to the board. And I think it 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.

Right? It's like we're able to kind of go from platform to platform and do these different things because we've invested and cared about the underlying technology. The product experiences that we build on top of that are an implementation and they matter. And for that, I think we also think are pretty curious and learning focused organization where, 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? Right? So like I define our strategies, we can learn faster than every other company. We're going to win. We're going to build a better product than everyone else because we're going to get it out first. Early, we're going to have a good feedback loop. We're going to get a bunch of feedback. We're going to learn what people like better than other people.

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 your ships are frequently. It's, you just, you learn faster. So I think that's basically the formula. Be a technology company, build good foundation, learn from what people are kind of focused on in the world and iterate as quickly as you can.

And one of my research calls to prep for this, someone described you as a master strategist, which like we all sort of acknowledge that at this point. And except for like all the stuff that I just thought was not going to be that important that ended up actually being the most important. But that's the thing is you, you want to set up the game so that way you optimize, you create your luck. This is what Jetson told us. Like the Apple is going to fall from the tree in some direction.

And if you just set up the game that you have a hand close enough to catch it. The comment that someone made to me was the reason Mark is such a good strategist is because he plays the company as if it's a turn-based strategy game. And he just makes sure he gets more turns than anybody else. And he makes sure that he learns more from each turn than the next player does. Do you feel like that encapsulates like a meta-strategic 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. That's like, you know, many iterations or multiple at bats. And then the... Well, great engineering and speed and duration are actually two different values.

They're not necessarily at odds, but I think like there are a lot of great engineering organizations that try to build things that are super high quality and have good confidence around that. But I know there's a certain 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.

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. And maybe for the stuff that they're doing that works, maybe that just fits with their culture. But for us, I think that there are a lot of conversations that we have internally where you're almost at the line of being embarrassed about what you put out.

You want to put stuff out early enough so you can get good feedback. You obviously want to test things that are reasonable eye hypotheses. So if it's like so ineffective, then you're not testing a good hypothesis that doesn't work. But I do think a lot of the conversations that we have are like, okay, well we can get this to be a lot better if we work on it for like another couple of months or whatever.

And I do just think that you want to really have a culture that values shipping and getting things out and getting feedback. More than needing always to get great positive accolades from people when you put stuff out. Because I think if you want to wait until you get praised all the time, you're missing a bunch of the time when you could have learned a bunch of useful stuff and then incorporated that into the next version you're going to ship.

And it's just about making sure that what the thing that the company is known for or its brand can withstand all the little damage that you do to it by shipping stuff that's not quite ready. I'd like to hope that it's not damaging to the brand. But. Well, but it innately it is like when you're like, oh, I feel bad because I shipped a product that wasn't good enough.

Yeah, no, I don't know overstated. I mean, we don't ship things that we think are bad, but we also don't take and we want to make sure that we're shipping things that. That are kind of early enough that we can get good feedback to see what they're going to be most used for. Like I think a lot of the AI stuff that we're building now, for example, it actually, you know, it's pretty clear that AI is going to be transformative for a lot of different things.

It is actually less clear what are going to be the initial use cases for a lot of these things that are super valuable. And so, okay, part of it is like, okay, you put something out. You want to kind of collect feedback and what people are actually what what it's, you know, where it's resonating. Now, if what you put out is bad, then you're not going to collect good data because people are going to use it for anything because it sucks.

So, but I do think that you have hypotheses for what people might really want to use it for. And they're not all going to be right and you want to kind of go early enough on that as more. So, I'm building to this question of to you is product creation, an act of invention or discovery? Like is David always inside that marble and you just need the very best tooling and ability to get things and market and get feedback to discover the statue of David.

Or do you conceive of David in your head and I'm like, I'm going to make this and put it in the world. Does it have to be one or the other? I mean, I think it's a combination. I think you're basically taking some kind of values. Either kind of like values that you have or a value for something that you believe should exist in the world and trying to build something that's aligned with that.

So, I'm trying to match it up with what is going to resonate the most with people. Right, I think if you just do the ladder, then I think you just don't have enough conviction to see through hard things. And if you just do the former, then you probably don't get to product market fit or optimize what you do because you're not focused enough on your customers.

I think both probably matter. Yeah. As I pour through all these historical examples, there's like the market discovers some other part of them in the markets discovers the story's format. And suddenly the whole world is like, oh my god, that is the way that we all, that's the social interaction mechanism. And that's like a pretty pure discovery where you have products that have stories they perform very well.

That's been discovered, but there's other times it feels like everything you're trying to do in reality labs, all 50 plus billion dollars that you've put into it is like, we're going to freaking will this thing into existence because I have an idea of the way that I want the world to be. I'm not really like asking for that much feedback. I'm putting it in the world. What's a combination? I think that there's certainly a lot of things that we've invented or created for the first time.

Like in 2006 when we built the first version of newsfeed, like before that social networks are basically profiles. And then we're like, hey, like people actually kind of want to get the updates and let's like show them that. And if we rank them, then we can, you know, there's so many updates that this can help people parse through that quickly. And today it's like hard to imagine any social product without a feed. So I think that's obviously there's some of these things are sort of seminal.

I don't want to call it an invention, but like patterns that we basically established first. And then some of them are ones that other people did where we take pride in learning from what is working in the world. You know, we're not embarrassed about learning from things that other people like discovered that were good first. And then we build a better version of it.

And I mean, I think that that's, you know, no one company is going to invent everything. Right. I think if you don't invent anything, then it's hard to kind of be a successful company. But I do think that there's a mix of this. There are more smart people outside of your company than inside your company.

If you're not learning from what's going on in the market, then you're missing a lot of opportunities to get valuable signal from people in the community and customers about what they want you to be doing. Which speaks to the thesis of Facebook as a technology company. Metta. Metta is a technology company. We'll get to that later. Ben and I have been having a conversation. I want to take this to open source and open source technology and it's importance to you.

And Ben, first to me and then to many other people in our calls over the last couple of weeks that Metta has been the largest beneficiary of open source technology in the modern world. And I'm curious if you would agree with that and if you would comment on your relationship to open source. I think almost all of the major technology companies at this point are primarily using open source stacks. So, yeah, I mean, I don't know. We wouldn't have been able to get built without open source.

I think probably that's true for any new company that's been created since like, I don't know, the late 1990s or something. For us open source has been important and valuable. I mean, you were partially the first big company built on the lamp stack. Yeah, yeah, no, and it's great. It makes it super easy to develop stuff quickly and iterate quickly. But we've also had an interesting relationship with this because sequentially as a company we came after Google.

So, Google was the first of the great companies that built this distributed computing infrastructure. So, they came first, they were like, all right, let's keep this proprietary because it's a big advantage for us. And then we're like, all right, we need that too. But we built it and then we're like, okay, not an advantage for us because Google already has that.

So, we might as well just make it open. And by making it open, then you basically get this whole community of people building around it. So, you know, it wasn't going to help us compete with Google for any of the stuff that we were doing to have that technology. But what we were able to do with things like open compute, we're get it to become the industry standard. So now you have like all these other, you know, cloud service platforms that basically use open compute.

And because of that, the supply chain is standard around standardized around our designs, which means that it's like way more supply, way cheaper to produce. We've saved billions of dollars and the quality of the stuff that we get to use goes up. So, all right, that's like a win-win. But I think in order for this to work, we do a lot of open source stuff. We do a lot of closed source stuff. I'm not like a zealot on this. I think open source is very valuable.

But I also think it sort of makes sense for us because of our position in the market. And the same for AI, I mean, we're on logs. Okay, this is where we were going with this. Yeah, it's, you know, a similar deal. You know, we want to make sure that we have access to a leading AI model. Right, 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, we've been through too much stuff with the other platforms to fully depend on, I don't know, and also we're big enough company at this point that like we don't have to. Right, we can build our own core technology platforms, whether that's going to be AR glasses or mixed reality or AI. So I think that's somewhat of an imperative for us to go do that.

But, you know, these things are not like pieces of software that are monolithic, they're ecosystems. They get better when other people use them. So for us, there's a huge amount of good. And it philosophically lines up with where we are. I mean, look, I definitely, you know, firsthand have a lot of experiences. We were like trying to build stuff on mobile platforms. The platforms are just like, now you can't build that. Okay, that's frustrating. Can we take a real quick detour? What's up?

I really want to ask you. We can take a detour. Okay, you took a detour. We're going to take a detour. Help us with our research here. The eve of the IPO. Okay, this is quite a detour. Wait, quite a detour. Did you just really grab in the wheel here? Is this connected or did you just decide that it was your turn to talk? I'm sorry. I was like really like wound up. I know. Open source and AI. We were going to talk to your back to this. I think it's related. I really genuinely do.

Facebook on mobile is HTML5. In 20. Yeah, 12. In 82012. Yeah. Yeah. I want to ask you what you were thinking going into the IPO with Facebook on mobile being HTML5. And what happened to IPO at $100 billion market cap over the next three months, you have a 50% drawdown. Probably because of that. But I guess the related question to what we're talking about now is, how much is that informing your approach here with AI? It was a pretty different technical issue.

So, I mean, our legacy was building on web for websites. And we were very used to building one thing and being able to continuously deploy it. And it fits with our iteration style and all that. So now all of a sudden this like app model comes along. And it's like we have to build like different ones for each phone. And like you have to go through approval to get a ship. Do we have to wait like weeks before it can ship? It's like this sucks. So, we're like, all right, we have an idea.

Let's build this platform where we can get a web-based platform to basically build a native shell and you build this web-based platform in it. And we'll be able to just update our apps every day and we'll ship one thing once and we'll update our apps across Android and iPhone and Blackberry and Windows mobile and all the stuff that existed at the time because it hadn't gotten consolidated yet.

And we're like, that's going to be, that's, we're like basically whatever downside we are going to have from not having the most native thing, we're going to make up for in velocity and by having like way more of our energy focused on one platform, well we were wrong. It turned out that having the native integration was actually critical for having the interactions feel good. And that, so we basically went through this period where we had to go rewrite our apps or scratch.

And that coincided with mobile growing dramatically. And mobile, we didn't have any revenue because it may seem like it's pretty similar but there's a very big difference on desktop. You basically have the app and you have a column on the side that we could put ads. And on mobile we needed to figure out what does it mean to put ads into the experience. Let's be clear, the feed ad had not been invented yet. Yeah, that was the part of the team did.

Yeah, and advertisers have like specific formats that they like working with and the idea that we were just going to be like, all right now your ad is going to look like a feed story was a big challenge for advertisers. And the idea that now for people you are going to have this organic feed that was the most important part of the product and now we're just going to start putting ads in it was a challenge for the people who are using the product.

So we needed to figure that out and we needed to get the apps to be better. And we basically took, I think it must have been like a year or something. We're just like, look, we're going to pause feature development to the company because it's hard enough to do a rewrite. If you look at the history of the tech industry, there are all these examples like Netscape and these things that they tried to do a rewrite.

They needed to reestablish their technical platform and they also tried to add features. They basically just like never terminated. So that's a real risk when you're like completely changing your underlying platform that you're going to miss it. It's like, all right, we got to minimize the chance that that happens. So we're not going to ship any new features. We're just going to rewrite it, make it faster. But while we're doing this, like basically mobile is growing.

So the percent of our traffic that is monetizable is shrinking because Web is basically shrinking and mobile is growing. And that's your only business model. And you're now recently. 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. 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 paying tolerance to go do it? So a lot of this was like, all right, the team was like, okay. Well, we're going public and investors really aren't going to like this. If we are not making money for a year and a half and it's like, well, a year and a half is short and the grand scheme of things, let's do this.

And we did it and it was a painful year and a half and then we came out of that and we were in great shape. So I think like people inside the company had felt a lot better sooner because it was pretty clear to people that we were doing the right thing. And they knew that we were executing it in a responsible way. And it basically focused and we're doing the right thing.

But I think it's actually when you have something that's working well in your own one local hill and you need to jump to another hill. That's a stuff that's really culturally hard. But this one I think was, it was not fun. There were a series of periods throughout the company that were not, I don't know, not the most fun periods. But although that one in retrospect is, you know, looks pretty good in retrospect. It's like, not that bad.

It's like your market cap only got cut in half for a year and a half. Like, great. Yeah, I'll take that. Where were we? Maybe, could I, so could I connect, so David asked, hey, can you help 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 like a lot of criticism.

If you were to be self-critical of your own company, of your own creation, of all the criticisms that have happened over the years, which do you believe is the most legitimate and why? I mean, there's so many things that we've messed up, that there are many criticisms that are legitimate. But if that was a year and a half mistake, I think, you know, one of the things I reflect on over the last like 10 years or so, was, you know, the political environment just changed dramatically, right?

It's like, before 2016, there was like not a month that went by except for maybe this IPO period, where the sentiment about the company was anything but positive. And then, after 2016, after the election, basically, there was not a month for a while where the sentiment about the company was positive. And we, I think so much of this stuff is correctly understanding your place in the world and in history.

And, you know, so I think, you know, we talked about before how it's like, I think we understood that we are a technology company, in that you have to be a technology company to build this kind of thing. I think we understood that we're not a social network company, we're a human connection company, and that will take different forms at were time. The political environment, I think, I didn't have much sophistication around, and I think I just fundamentally misdiagnosed the problem.

So, I think that there was this basic challenge, and there were a lot of things, I don't want to simplify this too much. I mean, there were a lot of things that we did wrong, there were some things that we did right, but I think one of the things that I look back on regret is, I think we accepted other people's view of some of the things that, you know, they were asserting that we were doing wrong or were responsible for that I don't actually think we were.

Now, there were a lot of things that we did messed up and we needed to fix, but I think that there's this view where, when you're a company, and someone says that there's an issue, I think the right instinct is to take ownership for it. Right, say, like, maybe it's not all our thing, but we're going to fully own this problem, we're going to take responsibility for it, we're going to fix it.

But when it's a political problem, I actually think a lot of the time, sometimes, there are people who are operating in good faith, who are identifying a problem that wants, and there are people who are just looking for someone to blame. And I think to some degree, if you take responsibility for things, because you think it's a corporate crisis, not a political crisis, and your view is like, okay, I'm going to take responsibility for all this stuff.

People are basically blaming social media in the tech industry for all these different things in society, and if we're saying, okay, we're going to really do our part to go fixes this stuff. And so, we're going to do a bunch of people who just took that, and we're like, oh, you're taking responsibility for that, let me kick you for more stuff.

And honestly, I think we should have been firmer about, and clearer about which of the things we actually felt like we had a part in, and which ones we didn't. And my guess is if the IPO was a year and a half mistake, I think that the political miscalculation was a 20-year mistake.

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 multiply it across all these places around the world.

And I think we've sort of found our footing on, and like, 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.

And I think it's going to take another 10 years or so for us to kind of fully work through that cycle before our brand and all of that is back to kind of the place that it maybe could have been if I hadn't messed that up in the first place. So, 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 got, and we get critiques on both sides on that. There are people who don't think we've taken enough responsibility, but I think certainly there's one line of critique, which is, you know, you kind of bought into too much of the stuff that you shouldn't have. And yeah, I think it's going to take us a long time to dig out about it.

Do you have a reasonable framework at this point for like, okay, here's the stuff where I feel like we actually do want to take responsibility for it, and here's the stuff where like, no, that's not our fault. Yeah, I mean, at this point, I think a lot of the stuff has been studied. So, I mean, I don't want to go rehash all the different things, but I think at this point there's been like years of academic research on a lot of these things.

And, you know, part of the thing that's challenging is, and one of the things that we've learned is we actually should be trying to support more academics and doing more of this research ahead of time, because like when you get to a point where you're being kind of accused of something, you're not super credible just standing up yourself and being like, I don't think we did this one.

You know, it's like, so I, but what has worked over time is like, you know, 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, like the evidence just does not show that social media is correlated with this kind of harm at all. So, I think that like, or it's, you know, so I think that's, I think that it kind of cuts both ways.

To me, this brings up another topic we wanted to talk about with you, and you just, you know, you said, that's 20 years, isn't that long? I'm young. You're young. We all are. This is the advantage of being a college dropout found. Yeah, no, when you start when you're 19, it's like, hopefully we have more than 20 years. And hopefully you have like, profit duration. Yeah.

Hopefully you set up the company in a, especially at the time, truly unique way, where you can operate the company and take that, you know, take that approach. Do you mean super voting shares? Super voting shares is like, you know, the technical aspect of there. I think there are a bunch of technical aspects to it that we're not going to get into in this conversation.

But effectively, you can take that perspective in a way that if you are a CEO, non-founder, you know, without a structure that you've set up, you just can't. And I think, you know, in doing all the research for this, a thesis we've developed is that like, that is just one of the core fundamental advantages that Meta has. So as you were setting up the company, you know, when you were so young, even when you went public, you were so young, like, why was that so important to you?

Well, in 2006, Yahoo wanted to buy the company for a billion dollars and everyone on our management team wanted to sell it. And the board tried to fire me. And everyone, and basically in the next year, everyone else on the management team left because they, I hadn't done a good job communicating. I mean, I don't want to blame them. I hadn't done a good job communicating the long-term vision because I wasn't thinking about that at the time. I wasn't thinking in terms of this as a company.

I was just like, this is a great project. It's awesome. Like, a lot of people like what we're doing. I think this will probably continue for a while. I think it's going to be pretty important in the world. But I didn't like know how to think in terms of, you know, like long-term financial plans or. Like, we can case to them why it would be worse. Or just like, look, we're doing this for long-term, we're not planning on selling the company.

So it's like without having made that case, so it was understandable that basically Yahoo comes around. A lot of people, it's like, this is like all their startup dreams come true. You got to take this offer. Because I like, I just wasn't in a place where I had the sophistication to basically articulate a lot of the stuff around where we were going longer term.

It probably wasn't super confident since firing to them when I was like, hey, I think we should turn this down because we're going to do this. So after that, it's like, all right, well, I don't want to get fired for 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. Wow. Learning through suffering.

Wow. And being very cash-generated and very early, such that you had a very real going concern on your hands, and you just didn't need to cut off your arm and sell it to someone in order to build your business. Yeah. I think this is a fundamentally misunderstood thing about Facebook, the startup. It is the prototypical startup. You are the iconic startup founder of this century. And there's a lot of people that want to start a startup for a lot of the glamorous reasons of starting a startup.

You hated being a startup and wanted to stop being a startup as fast as possible and be like going concern. Yeah, I mean, I'm grabbing a lot more fun now. I think it's working on all this stuff. It's awesome. What is your advice to all these founders who sort of romanticize the idea of starting a company and kind of... 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. 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. 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.

This is fun. Let's build another thing. It's like, okay, this one's fun. People are still using that. I'll help up keep this one. But I have a bunch of other ideas for stuff I was going to build too. So I didn't know how to think about what a company is going to be. There's something about maintaining flexibility that's helpful. Once you hire a bunch of people, it's a lot easier when you can just have meetings in your own head about what direction you want to go in.

There's a lot less pride and people dug in when you're just like, okay, I'm going to change direction. People haven't invested their ego in like, no, we were going in this direction. Now I must be convinced. I do think that that's a thing where you want to keep things lean and be able to do that. That's one of the reasons why we try to get the company back to being the leanest version of a large company is that we can be.

But I do know there's something to that where it's like, it's obviously it's not super fun, not having the resources to do what you want to do. But I think it also is problematic to have more people working on something than you should have for the stage that it's at. Because then the people who are working on it don't have the agency to actually make the changes and do the things that they need to, which is less fun.

And then you can attract the best people to go work on those things because it's less fun. And so I do think you just have to dial it right. You're spending a good $1,000,000 on reality labs. And it's a technical term. It's not making that much money. So I'm going to play Mark back to you. Sure. It's not appropriate to have all these people and resources working on things for more than the stage warrants. I'm being a little facetious here, but I'm curious why you categorize it differently.

I mean, well, I think some of the stuff by the time you're at the scale that we're at is also just about like, what do you want to do over the next 10 to 20 years? And what do you think are going to be important? And we were talking about making your own luck and all that and how, you know, it's like, I think there are some broad strokes that we can have a sense of where things are going.

I'm pretty sure glasses and kind of like holographic presence in 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. If all we get is all the people in the world who are you have glasses upgrading to glasses that have AI in them, then like this is already going to be one of the most successful products in the history of the world.

So, and I think it's going to go a lot further than that. So another is that there is the thing about controlling our own destiny. It's strategically valuable, you know, we did this calculation or estimate at some point where it's like, how much money do we lose from our core family of apps to the various like taxes that the platforms have to like when they tell us we can't run the ad business the way that we think we should be able to when they tell us we can't ship certain products.

So that's the way people use the things less or like them less. And it's hard to exactly estimate it, but I think we might be like twice as profitable if we own the platform or something. So I think from that perspective, that's worth a lot. Just from like a pure like dollars perspective, which is not primarily how I come at this stuff.

And like now I've learned a thing, actually, since the other days. And now I at least am able to like, like, I might not be able to convince the all the investors that we should be investing to the extent that we are in reality labs, inviting control to company, but at least I can sort of articulate a case for why I am confident that it's going to be good over time. But for me, it's always been way more about the product experience and what you can enable and build.

And you know, one of the shifts, and this is sort of like a value shift over time is, you know, one of the things that. Some of the early, Oculus guys used to say to me that there's a difference between building good things and awesome things. And like good is good, right? It's helpful. It's useful. It's things that people use on a data 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. 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. Where we've got, we've built these products more than three billion people use them on a near daily basis. It's like three billion on a daily basis. Yeah, so yeah. And so that's, and they use it because it is useful in their life.

Right. 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. It helps people build businesses. It helps people form communities. It's good.

There are not many people on a day to day basis who get out of bed and are like, fuck yeah, social media. That's not like, so I kind of think for the next, for my next stage, right, for the next stage of the company, the next like 15 years, I want us to build more things that are awesome in addition to things that are good. And I think that they both matter. But 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. A lot of the AI stuff that we're doing, I think is going to be in that bucket. There are a bunch of things in the apps that are going to be in that bucket too. New apps too. But I don't know. I think that there's just something that's fundamentally pretty good about that. And that's, maybe it's also just like where I am in my life.

I like to think I'm young, I'm a little older. But it's like, I do think that at this point, it's not just a meta thing. Also, in my personal life, a lot of what I personally value is doing things that are inspiring with people who I find inspiring. And so there's the personal version of this. It's like I get to work on interesting science problems with like,

I'm going to pursue my wife and a bunch of awesome people. I get to design shirts with some of the best fashion designers in the world. It's like I am statues. A sculpture of my wife. Bring back the Roman tradition of designing sculptures of people you love. I'm not at all being facetious. I think Daniel Arsham is a really talented guy. That's a person who I'd love to work with on something. Let's go find a project. Building, 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. And there's all this stuff. It starts with like, it's awesome. We got this steer chunk. He's just the man. We're having a hard time keeping him on the ranch because every time we put him in a stealing closure and he sees a female cow, he busts through the stealing closure. But I feel like that's the kind of bull that you want to make the highest quality beef in the world.

And we're just working with, you know, trying to do really high quality awesome things with awesome people. If that's what I get to do for the next 15 or 20 years, then like, it's going to be a good 15 or 20 years. Was there a moment like, what changed? Like, when did this become your priority and why? I can't, it feels so radical that it, how could it have possibly been gradual? Or was this just like, mark all the time? And we just couldn't see the real mark.

I don't know. I think that there might have been something around the way the company shifted in operations around COVID. I mean, it's like the COVID, like all these tech companies went remote temporarily and it was an interesting period to just like get some more time, like a step back. I'm a pretty introverted person and I do think it's, I need to be careful where like, I get a lot of value and energy and ideas from being around other people, but I also need time with myself.

And with COVID, I kind of got that and it was a time of reflection where I was able to think about the stuff. And we were also going through this very difficult political time in the country. Our company was at the center of a lot of those things. I think that that was a cause of a bunch of reflection. And then I think that a bunch of the things that we'd spun up earlier, but it's smaller scale. Right. So the reality lab stuff that we started in 2014, really.

And then we had a lot of other stuff around, you know, fundamental AI research that. Yeah. 2012, 13, 2012, 13, some time around then. These things they kind of got started and they were growing. And it was it kind of reached this moment, which is like, we're going to double down on this and do this. Or are we going to kind of like do this as a hobby.

And we should do this. I mean, this is like, this is going to be a really important part of what we do. And we had to make a really important set of decisions, what we knew is going to be really painful. You know, to go double down on those things and build up the AI infrastructure that we needed to and scale up some of the reality lab stuff. And I knew that a lot of the investors would hate it, at least in the short term before it's clearly the right thing to do.

The, what I didn't know was that at the time, I thought that we're going to not like it. But I thought it was going to be okay because I didn't think there was also going to be a recession at the same time. So that like really, it's like, I mean, look, like, like you learn who you are through challenges. Right. It's like, we had like a really, you know, it's like, okay, like losing half of your market cap is is quaint compared to losing 80% of your market cap or whatever it was.

Right. It's, but so I mean, these are all intentional decisions. Right. It's like, I mean, there are a lot of conversations that we had, which are like, should we go forward with this? And the answer that I came out with is yes. This is what I believe in. I think this is going to be important for the world. I think it's going to work over time where no stranger to going through painful periods.

And some ways it makes the company better. Let's do it. We're starting, we're starting to enter looking at the clock like conclusion lightning round territory. I've had one like lurking in the back of my head. It makes sense to me that you would rebrand the company something that is not Facebook given how broad the family of apps was that you've got let's imagine you were going to rebrand it today. You've got AI going on. You've got AR going on. You've got VR going on.

Would you pick the name meta if you were going to rename the company today? I like meta. It's a good name. You know, finding good short names. I mean, this actually was a thing that we talked about for a while because it was pretty clear that if Facebook is continuing to grow an importance in the world, which I think a lot of people don't appreciate is kind of mind boggling at the scale that it's at. But the others, I mean, we went to a period where it's like we had Facebook and a handful of small apps.

So now we have like, you know, four apps that have a billion people are more using them, you know, hopefully in the next few years five with threads if that continues scaling. And this was a conversation that we had a bunch where it's like, does it make sense for the name of the company to be one of the apps as the other apps as it's really becoming a family of apps.

And it was important to me. This was also coinciding with a lot of a lot of the challenges that we were having right of the political brand challenges different things. And a lot of people were proposing that from the perspective of running away from the Facebook brand, right?

They were like, oh, well, like, is the Facebook brand of issues? Do we need a new brand? And I was like, we don't run away from that. Right? It's like, 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 a vocative of the future that we're trying to build because we run towards something we don't run away from things.

And when we got to meta, then I was like, all right, we're here. And it was around the time when we were doubling down on the investment and where there's all the controversy. And it's like, look, like if we're doing this, we're going to lean into this and we're going to do it. So let's do it. And if I were to make the case to you, I feel the core competency of meta is you are able to discover products in the world. You've great ideas, you work on them, you discover interesting products.

And you mark are not someone who wants to define yourself by anything. You want to have like your hands on a bunch of great controls and maximize your degrees of freedom, see where the world's going, and then have the best freaking spaceship possible to go maneuver your way over there. Yeah. 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.

Yeah. I get it. But I don't know. We align around a vision and a mission of what we're trying to do when we run towards it. That's always been how we've operated. Yeah. 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, yeah.

I mean, we're a company that like puts a flag down or on 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. Speaking of lighting rounds and mark shape holes. You are accelerating what used to be your annual challenges. I mean, when we were all kids, we didn't know each other. I mean, I was so inspired. You would do your annual challenges. You would post about them.

And I was like, wow, that's like pretty damn cool. And then we all get a little older. And we all have kids on the stage now. And we all have companies on the stage now. And there's some large, some small, the demands on your time, like it, for me, especially in lots of people, that's like that space gets sucked. And you have expanded it. How? What do you mean? Well, you used to do annual challenges. And I feel like now doing weekly challenges.

Maybe you're designing t-shirts, you're making sculptures, raising the light. I'm trying to do inspiring things. I don't know. I'm also really competitive. Who's your competition for this? What do you mean? I was just thinking about other things that I'm doing. I'm like, what if I start doing it? I've got intel these like more extreme sports and fighting and stuff. I don't know. I mean, there's, we face a lot of competition and a lot of different aspects of what we do.

I mean, there's the social media competitors. There's the platform competitors. I think Apple is a bigger competitor than people realize. They kind of think, hey, they're doing a different type of thing. 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? Are they going to be the closed integrated Apple model that Apple has always done?

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, PC's, mobile, they've all had sort of a closed integrated version and an open version. And the thing that I think there's just a ton of recency bias around is because iPhone basically won. I know that there are more Android phones out there, but iPhone is sort of like the intellectual leader and by far has all the way.

Let's take it as a concie. Yeah. I think there's the recency bias and probably like almost everyone here has an iPhone. And I think because of the recency bias, the sort of this view that's like, oh no, this is just the superior way to do things. But I don't actually think that's a given.

And in the PC or Windows with the open ecosystem was the leader and part of my goal for the next 10, 15 years, the next generation of platforms is to build the next generation of open platforms and have the open platforms win. And I think that that's going to lead to a much more vibrant tech industry. Now there are advantages of of doing a closed integrated model. I think Apple will have a place for sure. I expect them to be our primary competitor. And I think it will not be.

Just a product competition. I think it's like a in some ways very deeply values driven and ideological competition around what the future of the tech industry should be and how open these platforms, whether it's things like llama and AI or the glasses or different things should be for developers like an individual, someone getting started in their dorm room like me to not have to ask for permission to go build the next set of awesome things. I've got a closing question here. Thank you.

So we have a lot of builders in the audience tonight, a lot of founders were in probably the most interesting technology environment since the early mobile days in terms of opportunity. It's been 20 years, you might have to go back a little bit, but what advice do you have for founders today on something that's different than trying to pattern match Mark Zuckerberg from 2004 given we live in a different world today.

Yeah, I don't know, I mean, just do something that you care about and I mean, if you're trying to run our strategy, try to learn as quickly as you can. But I think part of what I'm trying to say is, I think there are different ways to build stuff. It's like our way worked for me and our team, you know, it's different things have clearly worked for other companies. I don't know.

My daughter took her to a Taylor Swift concert and she was like, you know, dad, I kind of want to be like Taylor Swift when I grew up. Hell yeah. But you can't, that's not available to you. And she thought about it and she's like, all right, when I grew up, I want people to want to be like August Chan Zuckerberg. And I was like, hell yeah, hell yeah. So I think that that's, yeah, I don't know. I think it's like, look, learn from other people's successes and failures, but do your own thing.

I love that. I love that. Well, that is the perfect place to leave things. We made you something that you already have a very amazing, well-designed shirt. I hope you have room in your life for more than one. I do, you know. So David, you still only wear one type of shirt. Now I've moved on. So David and I made you a custom one of one shirt that represents tonight. It is size, so no one else can, you know, there's, that can never be made again. And we've got these coordinates on the back.

The first one. GPS coordinates. GPS coordinates. The first one represents Kirkland House, where you wrote the first line of code for Facebook. And the second one is the Chase Center. Awesome. So thank you for joining us tonight. Thank you for joining us. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you to Mark Zuckerberg. Thank you all for making something tonight, something that we will never, ever forget. We have some thank yous. We have a whole lot of thank yous.

Making tonight happen has taken our entire summer. It's taken the entire summer of dozens of people. There were about a thousand people working on tonight. And I just want to give them all a big hand. Thank you so much. Thank you to Mark and the entire meta executive team that we got to talk to to prep for this. Daniel and the Spotify team. Emily and Lauren from Bloomberg and the circuit. Jensen, Miley and Janine, everyone from the whole NVIDIA team. To Air Mez for dressing us tonight.

Thank you, Ms. Thank you, Ms. Thank you, Ms. Thank you to our families and our lovely wives. Thank you so much. Most importantly, thank you to our wives. And of course, thank you to Jamie Dimon, JP Morgan Chase. JP Morgan Payments for making this whole evening possible. It's been a dream partnership. We are so grateful listeners. We will see you next time. We will see you next time. And thank you, Mike Taylor. Thank you. Yeah. Thank you so much. Yeah. Who got the truth? Yeah. Is it you?

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