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Comment by abc-1 | Hacker News Reader

I always feel like these manager types have drunk deeply from the koolaid for some reason. It’s a lot of words and processes that they usually cargo culted from somewhere else. A lot of it seems to boil down to “don’t be an idiot” and “actually care about your work”. They always have this air of superiority because they’re high up on the org chart. Like CEOs who think they’re the chosen ones, when plenty of people could do it just fine. I laugh hard when people like Zuck say software devs will be replaced by AI, not realizing an AI CEO probably wouldn’t have burnt 30 billion on a terrible metaverse flop.

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Would it have bought instagram and whatsapp? Would it have identified major social media trends in competitors that couldn't be bought and outcompeted them at their own game? Would it have suggested developing your own ad platform or just should banner space per cpm?

There is a lot to not like about Meta and Zuckerberg, but saying he's a bad business man is a little silly. Metaverse was a wrong and expensive move, but it was a wrong move they could afford.

IMO metaverse was a bet.

It's perfectly fine to take a bet that you're not 100% convinced will pay off (professional poker players and traders understand this on a very deep level), as long as the potential upside is massively larger than the downside.

Zuck understood that Meta could take the hit if the metaverse bet didn't pay off, but that they'd be massively better off if it did, and they had their own platform. Apple's blatantly anticompetitive behavior around ATT was a prime example of what happens when your business is reliant on "platform overlords."

I'm not fully convinced that the metaverse era is over, though. If they can get Orion costs down and put something of that quality into serial production, I think they still have a chance there.

> IMO metaverse was a bet.

It was FOMO. They had no vision, they had no plan, it was clear that it was only a thing because it was a buzzword at the time. Just like every other company stuffing crypto-adjacent things everywhere. It might have been a bet, but it was obvious that it was a really terrible one.

Reminds me of Ballmer buying Nokia or Cook buying Beats (or whatever the company was called.) Cook's bet might have worked out a little better than Nokia.

Not really. FB was choked by Apple and trolled by Google for so long, Zuck understood his position without a hardware platform in the furture. XR seems to be a reasonable bet which he already have an edge. If he won, he won big.

I do not know where this notion that Meta has given up on the metaverse comes from. Mark continues to talk about AR/VR at every opportunity and Reality Labs continues to invest big on it. The metaverse is a bet but its a 10 year bet that has not been played out yet.

> It was FOMO.

> Just like every other company

What other companies (besides Apple and a few startups that were specifically in the metaverse space) went in on the metaverse?

I think this was very much unlike AI and crypto, where everybody wanted a piece of the pie. Meta seemed a lot more invested in this than most of the other tech players, which makes FOMO an unlikely explanation to me.

No. "Bet" implies some sort of clear vision or value proposition. Metaverse was a dream.

It's okay to dream. It's not okay to burn billions of dollars on dreams with no proof of concept or business plan. Set aside the question of whether or not it's a bad idea - that's just plain bad execution.

The Orion is the proof of concept. The metaverse that Mark is thinking of is as ambitious as Musk's Mars plans. And it is something that requires large amounts of capital and time.

Exactly. I’ve never understood this criticism. A good CEO (in terms of the business) is able to make significant, groundbreaking decisions but is also able to reverse course quickly if those decisions aren’t working out (anyone remember the Facebook phone)?

Unless the CEO is psychic, they’re necessarily going to make a lot of bad or wrong decisions. The key is being able to recover quickly and move on to the next thing. A bad CEO makes no big decisions for fear of being wrong.

When FB bought Instagram for $1B, there were a lot of talk show hosts riffing on Zuckerberg for making one of the stupidest business decisions of all time. A lot of executives who got to their position by corporate ladder climbing have personalities that would be terrified of that sort of widespread criticism. They would never make the kinds of decisions that might possibly put them in the unenviable position of being made fun of on national television.

The assumption that hierarchical organizations are inevitable blinds us to more effective ways of organizing. When we look at companies today, their feudal-like structure means CEO decisions naturally have outsized impact - but this is a product of the system, not inherent necessity.

Take Meta's acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp under Zuckerberg. While these proved strategically valuable, framing them as evidence of unique CEO insight misses a crucial point: Many others in the organization likely would have made similar choices given the same position and information. The success stems more from the concentrated decision-making power than from individual brilliance. What's fascinating is how we conflate organizational structure with individual capability. When good outcomes emerge from hierarchical systems, we rush to credit the person at the top rather than examining how the structure itself shapes and amplifies their decisions. This creates a self-reinforcing cycle: hierarchical success is used to justify more hierarchy.

But imagine if we distributed decision-making power more broadly, tapping into the collective intelligence and diverse perspectives of entire organizations. Research on collective intelligence and successful worker cooperatives suggests groups often make better decisions than individuals, especially on complex issues. Companies like Valve and Morning Star have demonstrated that flat organizations can be both innovative and profitable. The real opportunity lies in reimagining organizational structures that harness our full human potential - not just that of a select few at the top. By questioning our assumptions about hierarchy, we open ourselves to discovering more dynamic, equitable, and effective ways of working together.

This is a common refrain I've seen on HN when this topic has come up before, but there's a problem with it. The is a huge difference between (1) "flat organizations can work" and (2) "groups make better decisions than individuals, and this disparity is even larger on complex issues."

If #2 is true shouldn't an organization like Valve run circles around every single competitor it has since they're all dinosaurs with hierarchies and Valve isn't?

Valve does run circles around every competitor it has.

I think questions about whether a CEO is "good" or not are kind of impossible to answer, because you can't test the answers. All we can observe is the current reality and the decisions they've already made. There is no way to observe the other alternate universes where Zucc didn't buy Instagram, and/or the universes where he bought something else. Did the company do better or worse in those universes? No way to know.

Also, sometimes people say things like "Only [ceo's name] could run [company]. Look at their results!" This is just survivor bias. Who could know whether someone else could or couldn't run Facebook (or Tesla, or whatever)? Who can say with certainty that out of the 8+ billion people on the planet, only one particular guy could run the company, and that particular guy happened to be the guy who indeed ran it? What an improbable coincidence!

Not being able to test alternate universes sans Instagram acquisition doesn't mean that it's not impossible to tell whether a CEO is good or not, you just have to make a qualitative argument for why they are or not.

Buying IG was a good move because it has paid back Facebook's shareholders multiple orders of magnitude. Isn't the goal of the CEO to steward the company and to make shareholders returns (wether public or private)?

I wholeheartedly agree with your thoughts, with perhaps the exception of the CEO. Or rather, the CEO needs to be someone who will be followed by the rest of the organization. Their decision making could be replaced by an AI, probably more readily than the specialist engineers in fact, but it comes back to humans being tribal. Would the middle management follow an AI overlord? Would the engineers buy into the AIs decisions?

The CEO's job is to decide on the future direction of the company, and then convince both the owners and the employees that this is a good direction. The first part is easy to replace with AI, the second part isn't. At least not for now.

I guess taken to the limit, the CEO will become replacable the moment that the employees have been replaced with AIs, because that that point there's nobody left to lead really. One could actually argue that this is tantamount to the CEO cutting off the branch they are sitting on. After all, once all the employees are AIs, what's to stop the shareholders from saying: "Hold it right there Steve/Jeff/Mark/etc, why are we paying you big bucks? You can be replaced with an AI that will make much better decisions, and there are no employees left to lead anyway."

> I guess taken to the limit, the CEO will become replacable the moment that the employees have been replaced with AIs, because that that point there's nobody left to lead really.

This seems very software-centric. You can do this today - e.g. Red Bull famously outsources basically everything but marketing[0], so they already have very few employees. However they do have a lot of suppliers, and that all needs managing.

[0] Their marketing is either simple TV ads or incredibly complex stuntwork and extreme sports.

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