A Script for Mark Zuckerberg

One of the highest quality, nuanced strategy docs for this company I’ve ever seen. Cannot poke any holes in this. Also while people very fairly pile onto the Reality Labs disaster, it gave Meta the ray bans which is a durable form factor to build on. May or may not pan out that they recoup everything from this (it is more possible than I think most people think but requires a lot more success there which will take time if it happens).

The thing people forget: Meta has a unique advantage that it can leverage which is: make large bets and chase them for a long time. Mark is not beholden to a board. He would have been out many years ago if he was. It can be of course a downfall but it hasn’t been.

Failing is not nearly as painful as being conservative. He bet on something and held his ground and while it was a failure, not taking a bold strategic gamble would be arguably dumber.

> To that end, making our compute available for rent means that we can only take it back if we can make more money on it ourselves; the only way we can do that is by leaning into what we are good at, not what I have spent too long wanting us to be. To put it another way, our best product decisions have been intuition validated by data and revealed preference; that’s how we’re going to approach AI.

What a great way to frame the strategy + opportunity cost. "We will make a bare minimum via reselling, and it's now up to us to prove we can do better."

> We’ve taken our arrows through the years for lots of things that frankly aren’t our fault, but are rather the reality of being the primary communications platform for all of humanity, and humanity is flawed. I’m proud of the efforts we have made to ameliorate humanity’s worst impulses while enabling some of our best tendencies, including that desire to connect.

This is something I think Facebook has been unfairly attacked for. Yes, Facebook didn't do everything perfectly, sometimes they were negligent, but they did also try quite a bit (both financially and manpower-wise).

The reality is, anyone else would've failed the same way. The problem wasn't that Facebook was evil or negligent, it was that being the "primary communications platform for all of humanity" was always going to be impossible to moderate, and it was always going to turn nasty.