David Marcus Leaves Messenger to Focus on Blockchain Within Facebook | Hacker News Reader

David Marcus Leaves Messenger to Focus on Blockchain Within Facebook

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80 pointstin7in102 comments

This article is vastly more informative:

https://www.recode.net/2018/5/8/17330226/facebook-reorg-mark...

This is part of a major reorg. David is on the board of Coinbase, which could explain his interest, but by any reading he’s getting much less responsibility (going from 1B daily actives to 0)

These guys don't think like that. They think about the future - not the past. By any means, David Marcus was killing it at Messenger.

I remember a presentation where he shared that messaging will become the primary way we get information and transact.

Rather than going to Amazon - you could just tell a chat bot to buy you a book. I don’t think the vision has come true at all.

you mean like "Hey Alexa, order me this book ?"

I mean like "Hey Facebook Messenger, order me this book". The vision was about bypassing Amazon (and the Internet) and having Messenger at the heart of commerce.

If Facebook becomes a middleman for Amazon (or some other retailer), they're going to want a cut of the transaction, so going directly to Amazon would probably get you a better deal (or at least fewer ads). And it's no easier to buy something through a Facebook app than through an Amazon app. (If people really want to type "buy me book X", Amazon can add that to their own app very easily.) So it's not clear what value Facebook would be adding here.

(I don't think that Facebook would actually want to be the retailer in this transaction - that would involve competing with Amazon at something that Amazon is very good at and Facebook knows nothing about, like warehousing, shipping, purchasing, etc... and requires billions of dollars to build. So I don't see Facebook having any role except being a middleman.)

Why would I want to buy a book through a user interface that doesn't even allow me to browse the book or the reviews?

I can understand asking Alexa to restock the cereal if I buy the same brand all the time, but buying anything unique like a book, or an item of clothing or electronics, would seem to require much more interaction than such an interface is capable of.

I always got the sense that they were always just trying to copy wechat and were envious of all the commerce it captured.

Sometimes projects like this are spun up to merely retain executives/high performing employees. I've seen this happen before where employees at large tech companies are encouraged to start things inside the company instead of leaving to go to startups.

some would construe this as a gesture of more faith -- not less. it's generally wiser to put the best people on your biggest opportunities, not your biggest products. sometimes, they are one and the same, but often they diverge.

the roadmap and strategy for messenger are defined. marcus oversaw a bunch of experiments, and it seems like the results are in and the experiments over. what you need now is someone who can execute the messenger strategy.

bitcoin, however, remains undefined. it could be a blue ocean of opportunity and reshape the world; it could also be a wasteland and memorialized as digital tulips. the last thing zuckerberg wants is fb degenerating into ballmer-era microsoft or fiorina-era hp, ignoring tomorrow's dollars for today's dimes.

someone like marcus could retire and do whatever, so if he's staying, it's likely because he both likes it and sees the opportunity. what's more impressive is zuckerberg convincing marcus to stick around.

Or you could be D Marcus having dinner with Mark, telling him how you are looking forward to your next big adventure, one that FB is not doing. Mark who values you and wants to keep you asks why not do it in house. It will essentially be like starting your own company from scratch, only you won't have to raise money, hire employees, etc... Oh and you get X% of it too. Yes that is smaller than XY%, but at this point it is not even about money. Win win.

This article better still:

https://www.recode.net/2018/5/8/17329696/facebook-blockchain...

Looks like several heavy hitters on the blockchain project

I remember when I interned for PayPal, one of my first exposures to corporate communication was an all company email from David Marcus, where he mentioned that he had seen PayPal employees not paying with PayPal at places on the corporate campus that accepted PayPal, and he suggested that they should find other jobs.

Well, that’s not very good leadership. You shouldn’t be pressuring your employees into using your preferred payment provider or financial institution.

Well you would think your employees using a different service tells you more about your product than them. What a lost opportunity to learn.

> preferred payment provider

This was not about a payment provider. It was about their employer. If you can't promote your own product then Marcus was right - go find something else to do

Or you could try to make a better product.

Using a product is not "promoting" it. If it's easier to use a different payment method, then why use PayPal? Maybe that's a sign they should create a better product, instead of blaming employees

No, you blame the employees for not suffering their own product and raising ideas and tickets for how to fix it. It would be like John Carmack using the Vive instead of the Oculus Rift at home because its better. When you create the product there's no excuse to not be eating your own dogfood.

John Carmack has the authority and position to actually make changes to the product. In what company beyond the 30+ person range does a random employee have any ability to just go up and suggest changes to a product and have a reasonable expectation to see the change happen? Maybe their reason for not using the product is the lack of some feature that doesn't even make sense for the company to ever implement. Are the employees supposed to suffer forever in their personal lives because of who their employer is?

Also John Carmack is the CTO, not some lowly admin employee or engineer working on a completely underrated product.

Was using paypal for buying snacks part of the contract they signed, or is this just demands for loyalty by a company where managment felt no loyalty to the staff?

I have never used Paypal to buy physical things on the street, but what would be the comission on that? I would never use Paypal for anything if I did not have to because of the comission and the bad conversion rate. So that could be a reason?

> If you can't promote your own product then Marcus was right - go find something else to do

As a developer, should I also quit if I don't want to vacuum the carpets or restock the supply cabinet? If you need your product promoted, maybe hire someone with a marketing degree.

No, but you should quit if you've created a product that you wouldn't even use and have no interest in fixing it.

You are not working alone; maybe I love the stuff I make but dislike what my colleague makes? If I would work at Paypal; I see the value of the online product but I definitely see no value at all for offline. So even though I stand behind part of the product why would I use it for the parts I do not like?

Why would you assume that any random PayPal employee (a) was directly involved in the point-of-sale payment system, (b) actively dislikes the PoS system (as opposed to simply seeing no advantage over their existing debit card), (c) has the ability and authority to fix whatever they think is wrong?

This notion that it should be mandatory to love your company and its products is so fucking Orwellian.

I don't now why you're being downvoted. The vast majority of PayPal employees had nothing to do with PayPal's POS system. This isn't some start up with one product.

Should Tesla employees be sanctioned for driving a Honda to work?

If McDonalds made every employee have a Big Mac every lunchtime they would shortly have no employees left...

As long as the policy extends only to on-campus spending, I don't necessarily see a problem with this. I might do the same thing if I ran a payments company that wanted to go brick-and-mortar; what better way to collect feedback and build empathy in the people responsible for the service?

A PayPal employee who buys snacks on campus wouldn't be likely to have the same kinds of experiences that a vendor using PayPal has, or even the same experience as someone buying from an unknown vendor - it would always be a smooth and risk-free transaction. And if an employee ever has a problem with their PayPal account, it can probably be promptly resolved by talking to the right people, unlike the horror stories one constantly reads about vendors losing access to all their funds for weeks because PayPal thinks their legitimate transactions are suspicious. So this doesn't seem to me like a useful case of "eating one's own dogfood".

I think that corporations already try to exert way too much control over their employees' lives. Forcing them to use a particular payment service or a particular brand of personal phone seems a bit too intrusive to me. Employees should be able to exercise autonomy over their private lives, even when they're at work.

> A PayPal employee who buys snacks on campus wouldn't be likely to have the same kinds of experiences that a vendor using PayPal has, or even the same experience as someone buying from an unknown vendor - it would always be a smooth and risk-free transaction.

This might be true - or it might not, we have no way to know. Even if it were, how does it make sense (from a business perspective) to allow the people you've charged with building your product to avoid using it? That's a recipe for disaster.

> Employees should be able to exercise autonomy over their private lives, even when they're at work.

If I were running a marketing team, I probably wouldn't care what brand of phone my team members use. If I were running the iPhone division at Apple, I would very much care whether they were using iPhones for work. I wouldn't mind if you were using a Pixel as your personal phone, but if you're building an iPhone you better have some kind of empathy for the people who're going to buy it.

We can also look at this through a different lens: if you (as an employee) can't be bothered to use the product you're building, why did you accept a job building that product? It's clearly not something that motivates you.

It's a payment service. Who gets motivated about payment services? If you're doing something cutting edge and flashy like SpaceX then you can probably get 100% of your workforce to be motivated about the issue. For everyone else you're gonna have to deal with the fact that most of your employees are there for the paycheck. The company isn't their baby and they're also not the ones who are gonna turn into a billionaire if the startup makes it big.

As for the affect on the business if the employees don't use their own product, why do you think the company should force their employees to use the product instead of using the opportunity to figure out how to improve the product so that the employees want to use it?

For a website where the general consensus is that the government should stay out of the way and most regulation is authoritarian, there's quite a lot of people who don't have any concern when it's a corporation exerting the same sort of pressure on people

> why do you think the company should force their employees to use the product instead of using the opportunity to figure out how to improve the product so that the employees want to use it

If nobody uses it, how are you supposed to figure out how to improve it so they will?

> there's quite a lot of people who don't have any concern when it's a corporation exerting the same sort of pressure on people

It's an employer telling employees to do something while they're at work, on company time and company premises! How is that relatable to federal regulation of private industry?

> If nobody uses it, how are you supposed to figure out how to improve it so they will?

- They could survey their actual customers. (Businesses I deal with ask me for feedback all the time.)

- They could conduct focus groups, where they pay customers to come in and give feedback directly to the product team.

- They could do A/B testing.

I think customers would be more likely to provide negative feedback about a product than employees. Employees might be wary of offending the decisions of powerful people in the company.

And in any case, some employees will voluntarily use the company's product. Just don't force people to use it if they don't want to.

> It's an employer telling employees to do something while they're at work, on company time and company premises!

- It involves the employee consenting to hook up their personal financial account to the company-owned payment account, which is a rather personal and intrusive thing for an employer to ask.

- It exposes all the employee's purchases to their employer, which is a privacy issue. What if I don't want my employer to know that I drink six cans of diet Coke every day?

Just because the employee is on the clock doesn't mean the company owns them. Would you think it's OK for the employer to force the employee to eat certain foods or read non-work-related political literature just because they're on the clock?

The email was to the entire company, not to a specific product design or marketing team that was working on PayPal Here.

It strikes me as hypocritical that David wanted people to demonstrate their loyalty to PayPal, only to quit PayPal and go to Facebook shortly thereafter.

Upper managers often wax pious about underlings' loyalty to corporate. Not so much the other way around.

It's encouraging dog fooding. If you are forced to use the product, you'll learn its strengths and weaknesses.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eating_your_own_dog_food

Part of that would be treating this as an opportunity to learn rather than punish. Imagine how much better PayPal would be if they’d asked why their own employees preferred not to use it?

I've seen a similar attitude with Apple employees some years back if someone had an Android phone. It seems ridiculous. They should really be trying to understand why, and encourage occasional compeitor product use to see what they like about the others for their own product improvement.

When I was a kid, every once in awhile we'd be invited for a drink with the owner of the biggest employer in my town, which happened to be a Pepsi bottling plant. We were always told in fairly strong terms to make sure not to ask for Coca-Cola products when offered a drink. I always thought that was very silly and weak. It seems to me that if you want kids who come over to your house to ask for your product instead of your competitor's, the way to do that is to have a better product, such that they don't want your competitor's. If they do ask for your competitor's product, you should politely give it to them and then ask them why they prefer it.

All of this is to say: I'm sure the reason those employees weren't using PayPal was because it was a pain in the ass to use. Maybe if, instead of suggesting their employees find other jobs they had focused on making their product work better, we would have had a better digital payments processor before competitors like Square came along and ate their lunch.

What purpose does a company with a centralized service have for "blockchain". Apparently even tech leaders have no idea what they're talking about.

Apparently blockchain related job titles are the modern day equivalent of "Special Projects"... a vesting, semi-working responsibility. </sarcasm>

Mark pegs himself as altruistic and wants to 'change the world', he's also a proponent of guaranteed basic income... I'd like to see blockchain used as a sort of gbi dole system, but it'd need to use reputation / social network effects in order to block 'sybil attacks', ie the bigger your score the more people have 'vouched' you're a real person not a bot or spammer, the more you get out of the daily dole. They also have marketplaces/ads/etc that they could make required to use fbcoin, in order to prop up the currencies prices...

Just speculation obviously, lots of others are trying to figure out a way to do this, but the imposter thing is very real and hard to stop obviously in crypto.

Using a CA instead of proof-of-work, I could see the underlying concept being useful in chain-of-custody type applications or limiting the attack surface of a compromised server.

Right. When "Enterprise" says "blockchain", what they mean is some combination of cryptography, an immutable database, and data/control/access/ownership flow logging. Sometimes also a financial product.

I think this word is now like "hacker" or "AI". It's not completely meaningless -- it does have a kinda-sorta fuzzy meaning. But that meaning is different from what techincal experts mean when using the term and is very much audience dependent.

That's just misusing the word blockchain. Like saying "cloud server" for "hosting" when there is nothing cloud about it.

Using digital signatures in a chain is not a novel idea. Without PoW you do not need the block part, just records.

> What purpose does a company with a centralized service have for "blockchain"

Platform was marketed as an open marketplace. Once it was sufficiently powerful, Facebook showed its proprietary intent and closed the gates. Same happened with Microsoft. And Twitter. And countless others. Blockchain is just the newest tool for selling proprietary systems as open utopias.

They have a lot of things they can do

1. crypto currencies and P2P payments

2. Take clues from Steemit (a decentralized social platform that runs on blockchain) and how they utilize blockchain

3. Use to combat censorship in countries that are not favorable to Facebook

4. Use BC to combat fake news

5. AI platforms

6. Streaming services

Just because they have a centralized service doesn't mean they can use some of their considerable capital and branch out into other areas and offerings. To think FB will always be a social media platform is kind of. . .myopic wouldn't you say?

    > 4. Use BC to combat fake news
    > 5. AI platforms
    > 6. Streaming services

I fail to see how any of those has anything to do with the blockchain.

This reminds me of "lets do x, except in THE CLOUD" all over again. fight censorship by putting things in THE CLOUD where it can't easily be blocked, stream video from THE CLOUD

wasn't "the cloud" supposed to do decentralization too? hmm

The "Cloud" was at least about economies of scale (switching on-prem -> cloud has some potential cost savings).

I'm not sure re-implementing on a blockchain has the same effect, unless they're farming processing out to third-party actors at no cost somehow.

They don't have anything to do with it. He's just throwing out buzzwords, no clue what he's saying.

> 4. Use BC to combat fake news

perhaps blockchains can be used to immutably timestamp events like political speeches, to create an authoritative historical record?

> 5. AI platforms

consider the following efforts:

https://pandoraboxchain.ai/

https://oceanprotocol.com/

> 6. Streaming services

perhaps content rights could be managed on a blockchain?

also consider this lightning network related effort: https://www.coindesk.com/bitcoin-meets-netflix-laolu-buildin...

> perhaps blockchains can be used to immutably timestamp events like political speeches, to create an authoritative historical record?

So it’s not "combat fake news" but rather "create an authoritative historical record of events’ timestamps". I’m not sure how the blockchain is in any way useful for the latter. I feel like we’re trying to force blockchain into every imaginable field without even thinking about it.

> consider the following efforts

Landings full of buzzwords are not "efforts". Like another commenter pointed out, it’s the whole "let’s do X, except in the cloud" thing all over again.

> perhaps content rights could be managed on a blockchain?

Ditto. "let's do content rights, except in the blockchain".

This is what you think today. Tomorrow, when new apps are developed by FB via blockchain, you'd be like that seemed so obvious in the hindsight. We are early on blockchain - there are a lot of hidden use cases and apps waiting to be built.

> there are a lot of hidden use cases

Not much different from no use cases, at least from where I'm standing.

People compare this to the early 90s of the internet, except even then early internet was EXTREMELY useful, even with the limited access and content.

The early internet was extremely useful for getting credit card numbers and warez/serials/cracking tools.

It would seem we have come full circle.

Wait and watch. You will most likely have to eat your words. Most people are like you - they think they know a lot and are not open to the possibility how technology can evolve and new use cases can emerge.

If theyre hidden, how do you know they're there?

Not sure your what use cases you claim that we haven't discovered yet. Lists/Linked-Lists data structures with locks and priorities go back to the dawn of computing.

You're assuming that "a new effort to tackle blockchain technology" (from the recode article) means "use a blockchain" rather than "surveil and monetize The Blockchain"...

How much would you bet against Facebook attempting to link Bitcoin/BitcoinCash/Etherium wallet addresses to individuals and tracking cryptocurrenct transactions as part of your profile?

https://www.recode.net/2018/5/8/17330226/facebook-reorg-mark...

Somehow I’m missing AI in the equation (and in his new title). I think Blockchain based AI will solve all remaining puzzles out there

How do you figure?

What you have to understand is that Facebook is effectively the defacto global identity system. Russian bots and astroturfing aside, it's still the most widely used and deployed identity verification service around that is borderless and not government controlled.

Yes, they don't have penetration in every country in the world (i.e. in China). But they effectively own identity services in the Western world. For blockchains, one of the key gaps in adoption is validating and verifying real users.

If I'm one of the blockchain startups doing identity verification such as Civic or Status, I'd be very worried right now that the 500 pound gorilla is getting into the game.

I am the first person to admire the solution to Byzantine Generals but to wonder what Blockchain can do that a centralised system can. However, Marcus knows that very well -- so I suspect the move corresponds to a core strategic shift for the company. Some use cases that would make sense:

- allow Facebook users to pay each other using BitCoin & Co.(certainly the key feature as Messenger killer and under-utilised feature is its payment option, and Markus’ past at PayPal)

- allow Ethereum & Co. to leverage Facebook Identity (for instance, define “someone” as an active Facebook account with at least 50 active friends, the way I believe Tinder does) for their contracts;

- find a way to run a Facebook-compatible version of Mastodon/Diaspora/etc. off Smart contracts, allowing privacy-conscious individuals to host their social media-like experience on a platform compatible with Facebook but without a identifiable central repository or hard to maintain decentralised structure.

Only the last one is something that would make Marcus excited enough to leave Messenger. The first one is a Hackathon idea, the second probably a project that makes sense once Ethereum (for all its merits) has more compelling use case than a cat-collectibles to its name.

I don't see how the cryptocurrencies make sense for (1). If you're going to trust FB anyway, might as well use Facebook Credits, which are much cheaper to run and are already partially integrated into the platform.

I don’t think of Bitcoin as an alternative to trusting Facebook, just another currency. That project would be akin to being paid in foreign currency transparently.

Fair enough. What's in it for FB, then?

Retaining users.

I think you misspelled "surveilling"...

Why would anyone want to use a cryptocoin though a service like facebook?

Venmo / ZuckBucks / Paypal / Patron all are much simpler and more efficent for payments. Plus you don't have to buy the cryptocoins from someone who generated nearly for free and then and then jacked up the price, with Venmo etc it's instant and hassle free.

It never ceases to amaze me to see Bitcoin / Ethereum users try to come up with what-if services in an effort to trick others into thinking the database token is worth anything to other people.

If you look at what WeChat has achieved, I can see the appeal (from your average user POV) of having only one app for everything. So a Facecoin would make lot of sense.

"Why would anyone want to use a cryptocoin though a service like facebook?"

How much would you bet against Facebook attempting to link Bitcoin/BitcoinCash/Etherium wallet addresses to individuals and tracking cryptocurrency transactions as part of your marketing profile?

Eagerly awaiting reports of individually targeted Facebook ads along the lines of "3 of your friends bought items from these Benzo and Ketamine dealers on the dark web! Use coupon code #HeyNSA! for a 25% discount on your next order over $250 at their SilkRoad or Agora stores!"

Has Messenger caught up to (or aiming to catch up to) wechat in terms of functionality and scope yet? I remember a lot of hubub about bots and conversational commerce.

The best way to think of this may be that Mark and the executives at FB are like a VC firm funding a new skunkworks project in a high-risk, high-reward category. Let's say there is a 10% chance that blockchain ends up being incredibly relevant to the future of social networks. It would make sense for FB to make what amounts to a seed investment in the space, knowing that it could very likely not amount to anything.

As if Facebook wasn't already eating more than it's share of battery life.

I read this as a metaphor and it seemed quite apt.

Seems him and Jan were at odds about how to integrate Messenger with WhatsApp.

Jan leaves with some bombastic statement seeming to indicate he’s gonna go start a new messaging venture.

Now the head of Facebook’s other messaging property leaves less than a month a later for a crypto startup.

Crypto startup? The new blockchain-related role is within Facebook.

Ah yeah you're right. Leads me to believe Marcus is trying to undermine Yan's new venture; whatever that will be. Those guys did not like each other.

Note: this is the former PayPal president, not Carol Marcus' son.

That gives a whole new meaning to "genesis block".

Underrated comment.

So the head of "encrypted messaging" at Facebook is now on a "this will go down on your permanent blockchain record" project. WCPGW???

Facebook will buy Coinbase within the next 18 months.

If they wait 18 months, it will be Coinbase buying Facebook.

Holy cow, what has HN become?

Humorless, apparently.

HN has always been humourless, and we like it that way!

Facebook working on a blockchain project sounds as much in the public interest as Microsoft in the mid 90s trying to build MSN, their own version of the WWW.

Who is “David Marcus” and why should anybody care?

David Marcus was a senior executive at PayPal and was poached to lead Messenger. This move showed that Facebook was serious when they meant that Messenger will be a standalone project, with its own features, strategy, etc. and would have a different app, a different social graph than Facebook. He’s among top 30 people you should know if you care about movers and shakers in the Silicon Valley — and probably the most influential French person on that list, with Yann LeCun.

He’s a key player at Facebook and this is a surprising move. I care because I care about the company, but I agree with you that for non-Facebook-Kremlinologists, it’s minor news.

Thanks for the explanation. I know a bit of Google Kremlinology, but FB is almost completely opaque to me, even though I’m a shareholder.

There was a big shake-up announced yesterday and this is one of the best cover:

https://www.recode.net/2018/5/8/17330226/facebook-reorg-mark...

Happy to provide some confirmation and context -- but where I think Facebook is remarkable (not unlike Google) is that internal management systems allow such a major change to be mostly painless.

And, yes, I should have included Jérôme Pesenti to the list of influential French people at Facebook: he replaced Yann LeCun as the manager of Facebook AI Research, because Yann is a researcher, happy to manage a dozen post docs, not someone who wants to manage a team of hundreds of researchers.

>> This move showed that Facebook was serious when they meant that Messenger will be a standalone project...

except this announcement is about how he's leaving the project - what messages does that send?

Maybe it's time for a "mission accomplished" banner for the messenger team.

He was also one of the lead architects of the Genesis Project.

Which was/is?

Don't insult my intelligence Kirk

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