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The a16z Show
Meta CMO: How Advertising Works Under the Hood
01:02:52
Ads pay for the internet—and they’re about to change again. a16z General Partner Erik Torenberg, entrepreneur and author Antonio García Martínez, and Meta CMO Alex Schultz dive into growth and performance marketing, privacy myths, retail media, and the AI future of “audience-of-one” advertising—plus Instagram what-ifs, WhatsApp as a super-app, and how Meta’s feed shifted from social graphs to AI-ranked content.
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Transcript93 lines
- [00:00]
A
I'm sick and tired of all the negative talk about online ads. It drives the entire Internet economy. You wouldn't have all of these companies without online advertising. It has democratized all this stuff so the startups can do little things that before you'd have to pay for a Super bowl ad to do. I've learned to stop worrying and love the automated ad campaign. I am full in on algorithm. I'm sick and tired of no one saying the positive thing. Ads is the damn business.
- [00:25]
B
Antonio Garcia Martinez, Director of Ads at Coinbase, picked up Click Here the Art and Science of Digital Marketing and Advertising by Alex Schultz, CMO at Meta, and called it the definitive book on growth and performance marketing. That moment led to today's conversation. We cover why ads pay for the Internet, what people misunderstand about data and surveillance capitalism, and how retail media and first party data are reshaping the game. We also dig into AI's audience of one future where ads, agents and even transactions happen inside the ad. And along the way we explore Instagram's alternate history, WhatsApp as the stealth super app, and what Meta got right and wrong in its shift from family and friends to AI ranked content. Let's get into it.
- [01:12]
C
Antonio, this conversation was inspired by you appreciating Alex's work and think it'd be good to discuss his book. Why don't you share what captivated you about it and what inspired the conversation?
- [01:20]
D
How did this get started? Alex, I think either I DM'd you or you DM me on LinkedIn or something or I noticed that you were publishing a book and I'm like hey congrats. And somehow I got a review copy. One of the great things about Alex's book is that he really understands marketing funnels, which seems simple in theory, but are actually super complicated in detail. It's really hard to reconcile the super high level thinking of someone who's like CMO at Meta or running Growth and Meta, et cetera. Like high level. The theory of this, how does it work? And then the super detailed thing that's like oh, if the email server gets backlogged, it doesn't send out the email, it's going to completely hose your analytics. Or if you do server side versus client side logging, you're going to see completely different conversion rates for like X, Y and Z reason. And then that's the reality of working in marketing. It's like the super high level strategery and then the most detailed technical breakages you can possibly imagine. And so I think Your book is brilliant at showing the full funnel, so to speak.
- [02:15]
C
Alex, why don't you go deeper? Why did you write this book? What are you trying to say that's not already understood by people about the company? Say more.
- [02:22]
A
I mean, the obvious banal reason why I wrote this book is there's a gap in the market. Everyone asks me for a book like this and there isn't one that I can recommend. And the publisher agreed. And my team tells me to do thought leadership all the time because I'm a CMO of a company that sells ads. They want me to do thought leadership ads. So this seemed like a really good fit. So that's the banal reason, the less banal reason, which works for you guys, and I think both of you in particular, is I'm sick and tired of all the negative talk about online ads, about our industry as a whole. And all the books that get written, especially about us, are the people who, like, don't like Mark and don't like Facebook and don't like Meta. And I just actually want to have a book out there that's like, online advertising rocks. It drives the entire Internet economy. You wouldn't have Google, you wouldn't have Meta, you wouldn't have all of these companies without online advertising. It is, you know, democratized all this stuff. So the startups can do little things that before you have to pay for a Super bowl ad to do, but they can try it small and then build up. And I just think it's awesome. I'm sick and tired of no one saying the positive thing. And so I wanted to do that too. So that's the lesson I'll use.
- [03:29]
D
Yeah, yeah. It's like what Mark said in tvpn, right? Thinking ads are bad is like a luxury belief of people in wealthy countries who can entertain the notion of paying whatever Facebook's ARPU is that Alex knows and probably can't say, but let's say it's something north of a hundred bucks or whatever. Maybe someone in the United States will pay that. But if you're going to get 3 to 4 billion people online, there's no way they're going to do it. And ads is an indirect business model that works. It's not the only business model in the world. Like, I used to be on substack. I used to charge subscriptions, other business models. But if you want to pay for the Internet at scale, ads is a way to do that. And I totally agree with Alex. It's time to end the stigma of ads. It's how the Internet gets paid for. And the reality is good ads experiences like everyone cites to be the example, Alex. Like, even in crypto that I'm in now, Instagram ads are amazing, right? People like Instagram ads. Actually, the CTRs are crazy. And I think one thing that we both learned at Facebook, Alex, is that, like, people's stated preferences and revealed preferences are very different. Right? And it all comes out in the ctrs and the conversion rate, which is one message you have in your book. And that kind of is the only thing that actually matters. And so, yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [04:32]
A
In general, I think as an industry, a lot of people in tech kind of think ads is like, oh, it's that thing over there that pays for everything. But actually, like, ads is the damn business. And anyway, I want to say positive things about ads before we do that.
- [04:45]
C
Why don't we just steel man, just so we understand the critiques better. Maybe Antonio, you could say, stab, it's been a few years since the critiques were in full swing, but. But what were people so concerned about with ads? People had all sorts of sort of outlandish claims about it. Can you sort of recall and steel man their side and then we could respond back?
- [04:59]
D
I think people feel a sense of mistrust and violation that their personal data is being used. I mean, I even wrote a wired piece about it because it so annoyed me. Like, the rumors that Facebook is listening to you through your microphones, which is, like, completely ludicrous. A you'd be able to tell on your phone that it's like, constantly talking to the mothership and it would consume so much network bandwidth. Secondly, the reality is, like, even in this conversation, what are the chances that anything I say could actually be used in ads targeting? Even assuming perfect godlike knowledge? Not very much. And the reality is, what actually happened if people are still asking themselves a question? It's like you search for something, or maybe your spouse or partner actually searched for something on the same machine, and maybe you're actually in the same lookalike cluster on Facebook, as the case may be. So there's other things going on that you actually do have control over that aren't as nefarious as anyone listening to you on your microphone. And so they just don't understand how it is. I do definitely think that Alex said, like, a notion, a certain level of transparency and what data is being used is often not clear to most users. Like, they just don't understand it. And I think a lot of web2ad tech, I'm not putting Facebook in that bucket, by the way. There's other way, more sketchy forms of ad tech that I do think do sell data. But, like, it's not even true that Facebook sells data, right? It doesn't. So, yeah, I'll stop there. Alex probably has more important comments here.
- [06:10]
A
I think that Dealman is like the Zuboff surveillance capital. Like, that's what they're describing it as, surveillance capitalism. You know, you are the product. You don't understand what these companies are doing. They're selling you that. That's the steel man. Oh, and by the way, you're manipulated by all of these marketers because people don't like average advertising either. It's not just online performance advertising that's disliked, it's advertising as a whole. So then there's the meta critique of the marketing industry as a bunch of people who drink martinis and convince you to buy things you don't need.
- [06:38]
C
I think there was also another critique in addition to the ones you're making, which is that it shapes the content itself. That because it's a business model, it sort of. It like dumbs down the content. It makes the incentive to create, you know, sort of the cat with the, you know, sort of Buzzfeed lists, etc. The cat videos and stuff.
- [06:55]
A
Well, it's actually as part of the core of the Zuboff surveillance capitalism thing. That's actually part of the core is because your incentives are to get more time spent in attention and clicks. Therefore, you know, you are going to do stuff that's nefarious, that incentivizes bad content and so on. The thing that blows my mind, we have. We are not. We're not attacking the steel man yet.
- [07:16]
C
Yeah, well, I mean, one thing I'll say is that it seems almost the opposite in the sense that I think we have some nostalgia for, like, subscribe, you know, New York Times. Moving to a subscription model didn't quite make the New York Times more sort of, you know, detached and objective. When people, you know, when you're charging, you know, a certain demographic, you're going to want to tell that demographic what it wants to hear.
- [07:34]
D
If you look at the history of advertising, particularly newspaper advertising, which you go into a little bit in the book, very briefly, it was actually the New York Times was originally a platform for advertising. Right. If you look at 19th century American journalism, it was overtly partisan. Right. The Press Democrat was the Democratic Party's newspaper. And if you were a party member, you'd subscribe, and that's fine. And everyone understood that if they read that version of reality, it would be very biased. If you still go to Europe. Now, most European countries have a left and right wing newspaper. In the UK they have 12. But you can still see a sort of partisan media here. A lot of why American press became objective was that the New York Times could sell ads for Macy's without offending anybody.
- [08:10]
A
Right?
- [08:11]
D
Because the Macy's didn't want to run an ad alongside some screaming editorial for or against this or that president. And so in many ways, ads actually kept media honest in the sense that you couldn't take an overt position. But once you have a subscription model, and I think what's his name? Ben Smith even said this, the New York Times then becomes a home for compelling narratives that people are paying for. And that in some sense that actually skews media more than an ad model would, in my opinion.
- [08:37]
A
Completely. Right. I actually think that is completely correct in terms of the incentives of the models. But this is why we like. These are the critiques. And I think a lot of the critiques, when you actually get into them, are negative. The biggest piece for me about attacking like the critique is growth is good. Growing the economy is good. Growing the economy gives people better lives, it provides taxes, it improves the world to have a growing economy. Now, look, if it's out of control, if you've got rivers catching on fire, none of that stuff is good. You do need some level of like, regulation and you need to figure out the balance. But I think we've got to a place where online advertising has been so attacked, it's as if it's Satan. And actually it just helps people get slightly better ranked ads for trainers, which is a good thing because it sells more trainers, people get products they love, companies employ more people, the economy grows, it's just good. That's the point I want to make out there. Advertising is a good thing. It's useful.
- [09:30]
C
Alex, you're in the uk, so your pro growth arguments are thought crime at the moment.
- [09:35]
D
I wasn't going to say that, but I was thinking it.
- [09:37]
C
Alex, I'm just teasing.
- [09:38]
A
No, no, look, I get the point. I have seen Coinbase's latest work in the uk. I think there's a lot of very pro growth people here who are fighting for it, who I'm pretty supportive of. And I encourage you to read the UK Foundations co essay. That's a very good essay.
- [09:54]
C
I know, I'm just. Yeah, a lot of great companies progress ethos. Antonio. So you also wrote a book about Facebook, obviously we referred to Chaos Monkeys, you know, over a decade earlier. If the book had sort of a new forward or an updated edition based on what's happened at Meta and the advertising industry since then, what do you think would be different?
- [10:12]
D
I mean, I don't know that the ad side would actually be fundamentally different. I think. I don't know how much we want to get into this, but I think the attitude towards what's changed in the past five years is the attitude towards content moderation. Not of ads content, but of organic content. Right. And to what extent should platforms put a thumb on the scale and say this is truth or not, or you know what, we're going to be an open forum for ideas and other than, you know, bad content that nobody wants, like porn and violence, we're not going to do anything. I think that pendulum swinging is what has changed in the past 10 years. Not really the ad side of things.
- [10:44]
A
Yeah, I mean, I think that the biggest. So yeah, I agree with Antonio's point and that pendulum swings and it swings. I think like the revolution in social media in the last five years has been that it was all connected content five years ago, like it was people you follow. And now the combination of the modern AI systems that allow you to have semantic understanding of content and do ranking based on semantic understanding of content, combined with short form video means the majority of meta and I spent a lot of time testifying in court to this fact. The majority of meta at this point is actually unconnected content that people are engaging with. The majority of people's engagement and I think the TikTok factor is the other massive thing that's happened to the industry in the last five years. It's totally different. We have been completely, I mean, people don't understand how completely disrupted as a company we've been fundamentally. Five years ago it was all connected content. Now the vast majority of engagement is on unconnected content.
- [11:43]
D
Can you define unconnected and connected for the listeners who maybe don't know what that means?
- [11:47]
A
Yeah, I kind of think of the world as a sort of two by two with one cell hopefully never existing. So connected and unconnected. Connected content is someone you follow, a group you've joined, a page you've liked, whatever. Unconnected is something you've not followed, joined connected with an NY friend, did whatever. And then private. And public is obviously private is it's restricted to some small group of people. Public is it's open to the world. If you think Facebook started in connected private. So it was friends, it was private Even, you know, small public networks of your university, but no bigger. So connected private, if you think about it, like Instagram started as connected public, right? It was like photographers and celebrities and whatever. Twitter started there as well. And then TikTok started as unconnected public. And each of these companies have moved and now play in every one of the zones. Like TikTok has its friends tab, it doesn't awful lot on message sending and dms. Instagram has reels and Facebook has reels which are completely unconnected content. And so what's happened is each of these social media companies started in a different quadrant and they're all competing across all quadrants now.
- [13:00]
C
It seems social networks in general, but also meta have shifted from, you know, primarily or mostly, you know, friend to friend to content feed over time. I'm curious what that, you know, means for switching costs, network effects and more broadly, the way I sort of read or one way to read sort of meta's big push into AI recently is just the sort of the threat of a world in which people are communicating less and less to their friends and more and more to to ChatGPT or sort of, et cetera. How do you react to that?
- [13:36]
A
I mean, I think there's, there's two or three things. One thing is, I mean, we just posted a very significant earnings result that could not have happened without the modern AI systems in two different ways. The first way is they drive engagement. So getting more time spent and more engagement with reels is really, really what's driving our usage growth at this stage. But the second element is ad ranking. And so, you know, I mean, 10 years ago I would not use automated ad campaigns to save my life. I'm like dead set against them. Today I've learned to stop worrying and love the automated ad campaign. I am full in on algorithm first. And the place where the creativity lies is what data do you feed with the algorithm to the algorithm, what you teach the machines. All of that relies on the modern AI systems. And so if you don't. When people say we don't have a reason to invest in these AI systems, I'm like, first and foremost, our core business is all AI ranking and has been since I've been there. You know, it's always machine learning after it's shipped and it's AI until it shipped until like the last two years. And so like it's our core business would be the number one point. The number two point would be yes. I mean, I think people are going to be talking to AI chatbots a lot. And I think down the line there will be a feed of AI content. You're already seeing a lot of it on TikTok and Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, some on Snapchat. People are really interacting and liking the right AI content. And that's only going to get better because these things are definitely good. Even if scaling laws end, these things are good at media. And so I think there's two elements to it. One is like it's our core business ranking things. And two, yeah, there's really engaging AI stuff out there and we need to be on top of it. Just like we were the shift to reels, just like we worked the shift to stories, just like mobile, just like messaging.
- [15:26]
D
Yeah. I have one comment on that, Alex, is you have a, you have a section at the end on AI that I thought is really interesting. And one of the concepts you introduce is. I forget how you frame it exactly, but it's a world where the, there's an audience of one, right. Which is like the media I'm consuming is literally hyper personalized, like literally me, as if the person. And you always had a feed that was ranked differently person to person, but you're still engaging with not exactly mass media, but media that is being seen by more than one person. While AI totally changes the dynamic. And you know, in the past 30 years of AD tech, we've gone from something that felt like newspapers, like everyone got the front page in the New York Times, to something that feels like, you know, Facebook, which is a ranked feed, but it's the same content to one where no, no, literally nobody else is seeing this except me. Right. I mean the underlying influences that bubble up through an LLM model or through search indexing, you know, might be common, but what you're actually visualizing is different. So I'm curious if you thought about. Because I've gotten interested in what AI ads will eventually look like. Having some sort of sponsored offer or surfacing or re ranking content inside your AI result seems like it'd be really interesting. And to the extent the web browser goes away, like I almost don't even use Google anymore. I'm really a chatgpt guy. Obviously it's going to be a channel. You know, you mentioned Aida, right? The I side of it, the intention side of it's happening inside AI. I'm curious if you thought about how that plays out and how advertising kind of gloms onto AI.
- [16:48]
A
Yeah, I mean, I think, I actually think this is going to be super, super interesting. There's, I think there's two major interesting sort of things to think about. One is what happens to search, which, you know, Google's very on top of. Like they're very worried about the innovators dilemma they find themselves in right now. But if, if search ads goes to a paid model like ChatGPT and people start asking their questions in that way and they pay for it, that is very disruptive to online advertising. And who knows where that lands. Or does it go the other way where people are using more and more search and there's a freemium model and there's ads associated, in which case the AI ads will have a lot of principles in the search ads. And so which way that goes is one big question. The second big question is, yeah, what happens to the creative intersected with the target? So my perspective is it gets more engaging, more personalized. You can convert in the advert. Like in a world where you can tell an agent, hey, I want to buy this thing. Take a picture of me or look at my camera, this is my size, like evaluated by the way, you've got all of my past purchases associated with me. And you can therefore make sure it's the perfect fit for this particular retailer because you can compare it with everyone else. You can get the conversion experience right in the interface where you're in, start the buy flow, complete the buy flow from an like an agentic perspective or honestly just a you interacting with, with the other company's agent perspective. So I think you're going to find a, a completely personalized ad will happen targeted entirely to you, that's customized to you. And you can convert in the ad by interacting with the company you're trying to buy from through an AI interest. I mean the crazy end world of this is ads to AI agents, which I think is definitely also going to happen within our life. Yeah, the AI agent is doing a search. There are ads for the AI agent to click on and pay for placement where you're promoting stuff to someone's agent. I mean this is all very likely and the underlying principles of online marketing are actually going to hold. Like AI optimization versus search engine optimization. Really actually a lot of similarities on a bunch of companies trying to do the same thing there. AI search ads versus search ads. And I have a lot of similarities. And when you talk to a chat bot, why is that that different than SMS marketing, push notifications or snail mail back in the day? There's a lot of similarities.
- [19:18]
D
It's gonna be wild.
- [19:19]
A
I mean you just think about, I think the way you think about it as like intelligence too cheap to meet it. Like there's a lot of people who are afraid of loss, right? You look at the ads industry and every agency like freaked out when Mark said, oh, someone will use AI as their agency and we'll use a credit card to buy. Now big ad agency clients don't use credit cards. So it clearly was talking about SMBs and not big clients. But you're going to be in this world where I think a bunch of stuff that today is not ROI positive because it's not worth staffing. It suddenly becomes possible and becomes ROI positive and AI will unlock a bunch of abundance in terms of us being able to make things possible like created for SMBs, like having a chatbot. I mean we're, we're in this place where we're replacing our content moderation systems with AI from old ML and we've just been watching the curves get closer and closer and closer and they finally crossed over on a few cases and they're doing better. Better than experts. Even when we use expert transit data. The same is true for customer support. You can now actually get customer support in the US for Facebook. It is possible via a chatbot and that is entirely AI and at the end passes over to human beings. It's suddenly possible we could never staff it with human beings. We can now actually staff something that wasn't possible before. And yes, there's incrementally a few more staff, but the workload is that of a hundred thousand people. The workload isn't that of like a hundred extra people. So I think there's going to be just a ton of stuff that's unlocked that today isn't ROI positive. But you add in an AI tool that makes you as a human being more efficient and you're going to suddenly make things ROI positive that are never ROI positive before.
- [21:03]
C
When we think about the future of advertising, like is there going to be a world where I have the option to just get a ton of things for free if I just ingest ads, I go into an Uber and I don't have to pay for it, but I'm just looking at ads. Then I go to a restaurant and I don't have to pay for that, but I'm just seeing ads everywhere. Like, like how more integrated can you see ads to the experience more so.
- [21:26]
A
Than it is now?
- [21:27]
D
I mean, the classic terrible web2ad tech idea was paying the users for their data. I mean, that's flawed for a bunch of reasons. A, it instantly gets farmed and you have Massive fraud. Also, the amount of the value of the user's data that they actually own isn't nearly as valuable as they think it is. Right. Like it's, it just isn't that valuable in the scheme of things that you're actually shot. Like, data is not the new oil. It actually isn't this commodity product that you can just sell. Like, even if I managed, let's cite a third party company so we don't get into trouble. Let's say I managed to take Amazon's conversion record for users and steal it and tried to sell it. I mean, somebody might find it meaningful if they managed to match the identities, but it's not actually that. That is worth billions of dollars within the context of the Amazon buying experience and the customer relations that they have on its own, it's actually not worth a huge amount of money. Right. And that's, that applies even more so for like literally the past 30 days of my browser behavior, I don't know how much would you price the past 30 days of my browser behavior? A few bucks, 10 bucks maybe, at most. It just isn't, it isn't enough money to make anyone switch off a browser, say, and go to this browser versus that one typically.
- [22:35]
A
Well, I think what's interesting, there's a few things that's interesting in this. I agree, data is not the new oil. Data is sand. And sand is only valuable if you refine it in silicon chips. Right. So, and by the way, data isn't destroyed. Data exists forever. Oil gets burned once and it goes away. So there's a ton of reasons. I really agree with what you're saying there. And I think the thing you're saying, I've literally got an example in the book of incentive affiliates where at ebay when we paid people to get confirmed registered users, incentive affiliates would go out and pay people to sign up for ebay and confirm and then they would give them money back and then we changed it to activated confirmed registered users and that caused us a huge amount of credit card chargebacks because activation was buying or bidding on something and people would convert activate and then they would charge back once they got paid back by their affiliate partner. So 100% here lies a lot of issues on the other side of it. I really do think this is the point about online ads being awesome. You live in that world today, Eric. Like Google search, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, Twitter, like these are incredible. YouTube. These are incredible products that you get completely free. Not like cable where you pay and get Ads, you get them completely free, and you get them completely free because ads makes that possible. And so I think it will go further. I actually agree it will go further. At the same time, I think there's a lot of risks with it if you don't think about the fundamental principles in my book in dealing with affiliates. Because, like, there's a lot of ways you can be defrauded. And I have a lot of examples of fraud.
- [24:15]
C
Hey, Alex, why hasn't Meta built a. A1 integrated super app like. Like WeChat? Why are Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram siloed?
- [24:27]
A
Well, two. Two thoughts. One, I would actually say the WeChat doesn't really integrate Instagram and Facebook in that meaningful way. So I wouldn't smush all of social media together into one super app. I think there's a few comments here. One, actually, WhatsApp is disarmingly close to that and people don't understand it. So WhatsApp is the place, the single largest broadcast sharing channel on Earth. The WhatsApp Status tab is bigger than Instagram or Facebook in terms of the amount of content shared. It just so happens it's not in the US so Americans don't notice it, but it is massive. WhatsApp has payments in India. It actually just got. It just got awarded the best payments platform in India. The government fought us for a long time on that one and now is really supportive of WhatsApp payments, which is a wonderful turnaround. So WhatsApp actually has payments in India. They're growing very rapidly. The interesting thing though about WeChat is going back to growth. Why did WeChat turn the corner so dramatically on payments? And it comes down to two things. In the Chinese market. Thing number one is China has red envelopes, and nowhere else on the earth has the red envelopes. Cash in envelopes that you get with the. Yeah. And thing number two is China had not the credit cards. And so what happened was you have to connect your bank details to WeChat if you wanted to partake in WeChat red envelopes. And WeChat allowed people to give their friends red envelopes, but also gave people red envelopes and one in fifty, a hundred, whatever, had a large chunk of cash in it, but most of them didn't. And WeChat got people to connect their bank accounts before they could receive the red envelope. So WeChat wired up the payments system in China in a way it had never been wired up before through this viral growth mechanism that couldn't exist anywhere else on Earth. So we are building a super app. It's called WhatsApp. It is the largest place for broadcast sharing on Earth and it has a lot of success in commerce and in particular in payments growing. But it's a lot harder to do it anywhere on earth else on earth than it is in China.
- [26:40]
D
Yeah, I was going to say, I mean, WhatsApp really is like the business communication later. And it's funny, Americans don't use it because they all use messages. Which is funny because it's like only Americans would flex using an inferior product in my opinion and say, oh, no, no. Like, there was this viral tweet. It's like, oh, I don't live in a third world country. I don't use WhatsApp. It's like, bro, messages sucks. I can't Even synchronize across two devices, the message thread and WhatsApp. I never have that problem. But like, I was in Lisbon randomly for a conference and like the dry cleaner on the corner only did it via WhatsApp. And like, I, I had to WhatsApp them and like, somebody magically appears, the clothes came back all via WhatsApp. Like, no other touchpoint. WhatsApp. The whole thing. Right. And I assume in India it's probably even more sophisticated than that. But I think people in America don't, don't quite understand, like, calling a business is like backwards or like even text. Like, no, no, no, no, no. There's whole business WhatsApp accounts where you can just transact business with WhatsApp. And that is the communication layer. And like you said, also as the social thing. Right. Like, group chat started as like a WhatsApp thing. And it's like, I also did a wire piece. You know, it's like Facebook got so much flack during the whole post toast 2016 thing for like feed and ranking. It's like, bro, there's no ranking in feed in WhatsApp. And it still causes both good and bad. Like, technology always has positive and negative externalities. And so of course there are some negative externalities that come out of tech, but that all happens on WhatsApp too. It's not the ranking. It's just putting a network computer in everyone's hand and connecting everybody to everybody is obviously kind of a shock to the system. Right. And so that's. It's always going to have, you know, it's going to convulse the system a little bit, so you see some negative outcomes. But net, I think it's positive. And again, having a communications layer that everyone can communicate on. That's just, to me, it's crazy, right? And WhatsApp is that, is that layer. So one thing that actually has changed in the past 10 years of AD tech is retail ad networks. And you mentioned them a little bit inside your, inside your book, Alex. And for those who aren't familiar with it, and I haven't played in that pond too much, but one of the unique things, and it actually reflects another topic that we haven't gone into, which is privacy and GDPR and all that, but basically inside large retailers like Walmart, like Amazon is probably what the number three ad system after Meta and Google at this point or like number three, number four. And it's, and it's unique because what retail ad network means is you're showing ads inside a retailer that already has a first party experience with the user, which again is somewhat unusual, right? Like typically that the classic ad network is advertiser A, advertising and publisher B and A and B have like nothing to do with each other. But in this case, advertisers are actually paying for placement inside like a native Walmart shopping experience. And part of it is it's very efficacious, right? Like you control the entire. Like you say in your book, friction kills everything. And so having a single form of payment, whether it be Amazon, pay Walmart or Shopify, for example, who also does the same thing, is absolutely key. But the other thing, of course, the way privacy law works, if you have a first party relationship with the user, you can do things with data that you can't as a third party. I mean, arguably it's, it's, it's a good reason for that, but it does skew the market a little bit. Walmart can sit there and construct a certain segment around users because they can legally do that because they have a first party relationship, but then they leverage that data for a third party who's buying an ad inside that system. And so it's a combination of both easing the funnel and frankly, you know, getting through existing privacy law that's kind of driven that. But I'm curious, you know, what you think about that. Because that, that world I think didn't really exist when I was at Meta and it's only come recently. I'm curious what your take is on, on that.
- [29:59]
A
Yeah, there's one other thing that you're missing off which, which goes on deeper in the retail ad network funnel. But necessarily the Walmart and Amazon, but like the smaller retailers that do it, they also buy off other companies with the data they have on first party so that the retail ad network becomes a third party ad network as well, which is space for opportunity for things to go awesomely and space for opportunity for things to go really badly in terms of fraud, attribution and your ads showing up in the wrong place. Yeah, I mean I think when you look at it from the perspective of an FMCG company and I'd add in for a lot of quick serve restaurants QSRs DoorDash is a retail ad network as well. Uber Eats has a retail ad network as well. And so they're seeing this situation where they're getting a double bite at the cherry from the people who are retailing their goods both at Walmart and Amazon and also with UberEats and DoorDash where they have to pay for placement to promote themselves and they have to pay a commission to the vendor. So this, this sounds terrible, right? This sounds like it's a real squeeze from the distribution channels onto the FMCG companies and the quick serve restaurants. But it's also just the history and this, this gets back to like a lot of what I feel and have put in the book. This gets back to the history that Benedict Evans likes to say. Amazon got the Sears catalog from 1950 and just implemented everything in the Sears catalog for the Internet. You paid for placement in the shelves when you were on Walmart in the big mega store, you paid for placement in the Sears catalog. Retail ad networks have existed for as long as retailers basically have existed. And so all it's done is modernized that and brought it online. It's going more to below the below the line media budgets. So kind of direct response placement, related media budgets, discount related media budgets and less to above the line typical media buying. So it's competing for different budgets, but it's a major, major factor in terms of the ad industry right now. And the whole thing does boil down, as you say, to data and algorithms and first party data having advantage over third party data. So these big companies have a really good legs up to be successful in this space.
- [32:13]
D
Which if you're being charitable you would say, well that was a good outcome of gdpr, right? I mean it's, it's true like the sketchiest part of ad was always the third party data vendors. I won't name names, but we know who the companies are or were for that matter because the world has died a little bit. But like that part of it always kind of sketched me out a little bit. I think the reason why, I think you should Privilege first party data is because if you have the user relationship you'll, you'll safeguard that user relationship because you have a long term incentive in making sure that user is comfortable and doesn't, you know, bail or turn out of Amazon prime or stop buying on Walmart and buy some Target instead.
- [32:44]
A
Right.
- [32:45]
D
They're not just a random user that you have a very transactional relationship with. There's actually like an arc of a relationship there. And if they were to turn out that same growth leader is going to get dinged in the next report like well, why did the, why did the retention rate go down to 75% or whatever? It's like, well, because you burnt them out on ads or the ads are terrible or what have you. Right. So I think it actually aligns incentives very nicely, actually 100% but it is.
- [33:07]
A
Directly incentivizing the privacy laws. But yeah, 100%.
- [33:10]
C
Is there anything else worth sharing about how the industry is going to change with the platform shift to. Alex, you gave a couple of examples earlier, but anything else high level or concrete that's worth mentioning?
- [33:22]
D
Yeah, I think ads to AI agents are going to be nuts. I think that the interesting question is you have to pass that personal context somehow like you mentioned. It's funny, you know one of the interesting exercises, go ask your favorite chatgpt, like your open session when you're logged in. So bot, what do you know about me? And it's amazing how much it knows about you. And it's not even scraping the Internet. It's just like literally. So what do you think my political opinions are? What do you think my taste in clothing are? And it just sits there and rattles off the most informed opinion that knows me better than my fiance does. And you know how you, how you activate that in a kind of ads sponsored sort of way I think will be interesting. I think there's going to be billions of dollars of billable hours for privacy. Lawyers have to figure this out. But at some point you're going to get to the point where in fact you have even better personalization than you have now and again in a way that you yourself control and is probably centralized in one place and all that good stuff. But it'll be interesting to see that play out. It's funny though, cookies are still around. Alex. Everyone's been predicting the death Of Cookies for 10, 15 years and yet here.
- [34:21]
A
They still are and Google has reversed course. So that's like actually quite pleasing on that one. Yeah. I think this point is also like if you think about which ads are going to be disruptive. You've already got a bunch of disruption happening for Google search, for meta advertising, there's going to be more disruption, there's going to be more creative stuff happening. We talked about that already. I think the thing we haven't talked much about is direct mail and how direct mail was a letter and then direct mail was an email and then direct mail was an SMS and then it was a push notification and now it's a chat thread and has a lot of stuff in common across all of those different, different areas. But when your direct mail is sentient and can interact with you, that is going to completely change the value of direct mail marketing and having a chat thread with your clients, with your customer. And so I think that is the probably the field inside marketing that's going to get revolutionized the most. Because I think definitely, I mean, I was talking to one very large, very large luxury cosmetics company at Pan and they were saying in one country, like of their D2C sales, 30% online were coming through Chatbots now a large company. And the startups in the beauty space, there are some that are totally chatbot first in terms of sales. And if you look at India, if you look at Thailand, so much of what's happened in tech came out of Southeast Asia and Asia in general. So look, cacao was the first real breakthrough in messaging. Yes, there was WhatsApp line, WeChat, all the others. But Kakao was like the first one we looked at that woke us up. Kakao story was there before Snapchat brought it to the US by a year. And then they made Snapchat, made it disappear, which was really smart. But like a cow story was first. You know, TikTok came out of Southeast Asia. You're in this place where at the moment you're looking at TikTok shop, you're looking at some of the other stuff that's going on that's come out Southeast Asia and the, the stuff, or Asia in general, Sorry. And the stuff that I'm looking at a lot is for businesses, they are now replacing a chat thread with a human being with a customer, with a chat thread, with a chatbot, an AI chatbot. And in the US that's not working. And in Western Europe that's not working. But in Asia that is working right now. And in the developing world, Brazil, Africa, that's working really well and it's scaling. And so I think that's something that be really big that comes across is direct mail will be Completely revolutionized by AI.
- [36:48]
D
It's funny you mentioned direct mail because it's. I mean, direct mail is where this all started. I mean, I actually. In chaos monkeys. I kind of drawed a line between. At the time, I don't remember Alex, we were doing like custom audiences and stuff. It was like, yeah, Bed, Bath and Beyond, and there's like 20% off coupons or whatever. And the reason why direct mail, people are wondering, like, what the hell is direct mail about? The reason why is because the primary key to use database language for the American consumer was the address.
- [37:11]
A
Right?
- [37:12]
D
And that was the way that you would address. Like a lot about ads, to get a little philosophical about it is about identity and addressable media. Like how. How do I actually reach out to that person and then follow that identifier throughout the entire conversion funnel. It used to be literally the address because then you'd order something, it'd arrive at your address, and that would be the. That. That was the attribution system, right? You received the thing and then that would be cataloged by that. But of course, everything going on on the Internet, meta total reshift, whether it be mobile device identifier, Facebook user id, cookie, what have you. It's just interesting that how the notion of who you are as an individual actually informs a lot of the marketing and how in the crypto context, just to go to what I do right now a little bit, your on chain wallet address is kind of that identifier, right? And that's a whole different namespace for the user. And so it's just interesting to see how. I think you say this in your book. The details. The details change, but the fundamentals always persist. Right? So like, the primary key on the database shifts from mailing address to cookie to mobile device identity, fire to Facebook user ID to blockchain address. But the actual principles don't change, actually. They're exactly the same across all these. Across all these channels.
- [38:18]
A
Couldn't say that to myself 100%.
- [38:21]
C
So I want to play a little bit of alternative history, but it's like four or five questions. What if Instagram was an independent company and was it wasn't bought by Facebook? Antonio. Because I'm not sure if Alex can comment on Antonio.
- [38:36]
A
Imagine comment on it. The antitrust trial is over and I just spent two months in D.C. i.
- [38:40]
D
Can comment on it.
- [38:42]
C
Great. So maybe imagine a world where Instagram said played the snap route. What would that look like?
- [38:49]
A
They look like snap, maybe smaller. I mean, I think, like, if you look at what Kevin has testified to, like he's explicitly testified to. He said it could go either way. You know, on WhatsApp, I think WhatsApp was tremendously successful. And I would not say that I, as a growth leader, did much for the success of WhatsApp. We helped them a lot with infrastructure. I think we kept them free. I think there was a bunch of things that we enabled to happen for WhatsApp. But bluntly, WhatsApp was a great, great product with high retention. Instagram, I think, was touch and go as to whether it could be either a Twitter or a Snapchat or just a complete also ran like path. Like when, when we announced we were buying it, there was a massive spike in their growth just caused by the pr. Like literally the global news that Meta was buying Facebook, was buying Instagram, caused their growth to accelerate. And there's a whole stack of things I can go into in the details of like, their infrastructure was on the verge of falling over. They were in a position where they had real, real issues with spam filtering and massive issues with comments that they were failing to get on top of. Now the flip is obviously it could have gone either way. And that's exactly what Kevin said. And I can see how it could have gone either way. And other companies have got there, but. And Mikey and Kevin were astounding. And you can see it from what Mikey's doing today. But Mikey and Kevin were just so brilliant. And I loved working with at the start. We fought so much, like Kevin and I fought so much. And by the end I'm like, he's one of my favorite people to work with.
- [40:19]
D
You fight Alex? No way. I don't believe it.
- [40:22]
A
I know, but we did it. We. We fought and by the end we was like, hopefully aligned. And so I think it could have gone either way. My gut is it would have been maybe Snapchat, maybe Twitter. It wouldn't have been zero, but it certainly wouldn't have been the Instagram it is today.
- [40:39]
C
What were some of the biggest. What was the crux underlying the fights?
- [40:42]
A
So there was some organizational stuff which literally came up in the trial about my team, really. So you need to have a product and engineering team on growth. You can't just have a marketing team. And the magic in Meta is that we have really made it a pillar, a capability that is so ingrained in the company that every product and engineering team gets growth now. And it is really special about the company. And it's different about Meta and I have a product growth team, but it's only like 100, 150 people for an 80,000 person company. It's not a massive, massive team who then go in and help teams implement growth best practices throughout the company. At that time, Instagram didn't have a growth product and engineering team and sort of we had a big disagreement over that. In the end, they built one out. It was really successful for them. And I'm really. And actually it's a place where we ended up being super aligned and super happy with each other, but we've never had a fight. The other place that was massive was called the connections pivot. So Instagram was focused on public figures and it was not focused on friends and family. You remember, it was public photographers and cool celebrities and everything. And we said no people you may know which on Instagram is accounts you should follow or suggested users. Is really important to get that happy blend of friends and family with public figures, you know. And Instagram was a modern social network where there wasn't a distinction between business account and friend account. Whereas Facebook, MySpace, others, they had some of these distinctions back in the day. And so we had a disagreement over like importing contacts, focusing on friends, all of those things. Focusing on algorithmic follows and all those. So those were the two, I think, larger disagreements that ended up being quite front and center in the antitrust case. And so I feel I can, I can mention them because they have been covered in the press and they are literally a matter of court record at this time.
- [42:41]
C
Okay, continuing our alternative history theme and Antonio, why don't you take this one? What if Libra was allowed to sort of exist in its full vision without regulatory challenges?
- [42:53]
D
Yeah, I mean, I wasn't there for the Libra period, to be honest, but obviously I'm at a crypto company now. It's amazing how much the regulatory landscape changes everything. I think recently Stripe announced that it's building an L1. Every company and their brother seems to be announcing a stablecoin. We had major crypto legislation passed that was favorable to crypto. We've had members of the admin say that they want the US to be the capital of crypto, which obviously something I'm supportive of. It's just. Yeah, I mean, I think if Libra were to launch now or something, it would be a very different conversation. And it seems like it was doomed from the start at the time.
- [43:28]
A
It's a shame.
- [43:31]
D
But yeah, I think you're going to start seeing crypto be sort of the rails under the hood. People are going to be on chain and not even realize it, actually. Which is fine. And actually, arguably is the way you should build these things. And I think it's. Again, what's the positive shine on all that? I think I tweeted about it yesterday. Right. The fact that you're going to have investors around the world who can hold dollars freely or who can invest in American equities, but have them on chain with all the rigmarole that it takes to buy a U.S. stock in some other country, that's going to be magical in a way, and it's going to open a level of economic freedom that you haven't seen to date. I know that's probably a little bit beyond the purview of whatever Libra's goal were back in the day. But just to give an example of how it actually opens up the world and makes it freer and drives more economic growth, that's kind of a good thing. And that's kind of part of the reason why I got Crypto Pill. It's like, man, it just seemed like a lot of traditional institutions are actually choking innovation rather than fomenting it. And sometimes you kind of need a different paradigm to kind of kickstart that process. And I'm old enough to remember Web one and Web two and now Web three, if we're still using that term, or on chain or whatever. Yeah. I think, obviously Libra now would be a very. A very different scenario. Maybe Alex has thoughts on this one.
- [44:40]
A
I'd add one thing, which is, look, it's public now that one of the places we go when we are sourcing terrorist material to take off of Facebook and Instagram is Telegram. Like, we go to Telegram, we subscribe to the terrorist groups, we take the data, and for prescribed organizations in the United States and the United Kingdom and so on, we take down the terrorist information. That is illegal content by anyone's standards. It's not sort of one of these debatable areas of content moderation. If you were in a place where Libra had succeeded, you would have WhatsApp, messenger, Instagram, friend ID us, friendly messaging apps be the successful ones with crypto. And instead you don't. And I. I think that probably matters to national security and matters to a lot of things that the people who beat us up on this actually care.
- [45:33]
C
About continuing our alternative history. Antonio, we'll start with you. What if Hillary had won the 2016 election?
- [45:40]
D
Oh, my God, I'm not even gonna go into that topic. I have no idea. Absolutely no clue. Is there anything totally different?
- [45:48]
A
Totally different? I have no idea.
- [45:51]
C
Going back to sort of AI for a second. You know, it's. It seems that mobile was a more of a sustaining technology than it was a disruptive technology. Sure we got Uber and Snap and Instagram but you know, more of the gains went to, to Facebook and Google than the entire startup industry from the time. Do you think something similar is going to happen in AI? Maybe Antonio will get your first take where companies invented pre2016 pre OpenAI are going to just accrue so much more value than the companies after it.
- [46:26]
D
I don't have a hard answer. I find myself somewhat unopinionated. I do think it's one of the great questions. Are you going to have the incumbents? I mean Microsoft seems to be playing the AI game pretty well and actually have it, you know, bootstrap or like boost their growth. Are they going to be totally and utterly disrupted? I mean, I think another way of framing the same problem is is OpenAI and ChatGPT and some of the other foundational models who currently own the consumer experience, are they going to own the consumer experience forever? Are people going to actually be building apps on top of a more API version of. And it's like Alex said, it's intelligence too cheap to meter and it just infiltrates every product. You know, bots, whatever. I really don't know what the answer there is to be honest. I think it's going to be, it's a, it's a standard yin yang thing of like can Amazon become Walmart before Walmart can become Amazon thing. Right. In which can the old become the new fashion? The new can eat the old and that's, it's. We're going to see that play out again.
- [47:16]
A
Yeah and I, I've challenged you a little bit on mobile. How sustaining it, how sustaining it was versus disruptive it was. I think, I think maybe I'm being a Chinese diplomat here. I think it is too, too soon to tell because a lot of stuff couldn't happen without mobile in the current wave of destruction of disruption that's come in with, with the chat, the chat face interfaces for AI. So we will see. The thing for me that's been the realization is when I got into this was 20 years ago and sort of, you know, Google was maybe the previous generation of company and then you had Apple and Microsoft and Yahoo and ebay were the most valuable companies on the Internet and you know what like Google, Amazon, Microsoft, they made it through Yahoo and Ebay are much less relevant today. And the question is, are we the leadership team that does the Google, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, or are we the leadership team that does the ebay Yahoo is a question that really does keep me up at night and makes me, makes me think about this, this moment of transition. We've gone through a lot, but there's another one coming and now we're the company leadership, which is interesting.
- [48:25]
C
I think Meta's recruiting strategy, from how I understand it as an outsider, is just absolutely brilliant. And I'm surprised more sort of, you know, big tech companies haven't done it sooner and have more just sort of antiquated sort of understanding of, of, of sort of aligning compensation to, to true value. Antonio, do you have any, any, any perspective on whether, or any thoughts on whether that's going to be the norm going forward or.
- [48:49]
D
That's so above my pay grade? Eric, I wouldn't know what to tell you there. I mean, I mean, obviously, you know, I think one of Mark's, you know, famous thing is that we, we judge you based on your outputs, not your inputs. Right. And that was like the party line even at meta, like in 2011. And I assume it hasn't changed. And I think every, every sane, you know, successful company I've worked at has had some version of that as a, as a, as a company principle.
- [49:15]
A
Yeah, I mean, I think the thing that certainly has been talked about in conversations I'm having is people who can successfully use AI as individual contributors. In particular, it is a force multiplier. Like you give a 10x engineer access to AI, like they become 100x engineer and it is showing therefore the talent, the best talent, when they can use the tools that currently exist becomes way more valuable and then being able to produce the tool is way more valuable too. If that continues to play out, that will mean there will be a massive differentiator in how pay works out for the 10x100x engineers than there is today, which is already like they come in at BP level, they are paid significantly more than the typical ic, but clearly, clearly there's going to be more. The other alternative is these tools make it easier. Now my, my perspective is the tools help you implement a lot of stuff that's been implemented before, but they don't solve logic for you, they don't solve creative thinking for you. And so they push things up the value stack in terms of where the work is happening. Whether you're talking about marketing or I run data science and data engineering for the company. You talk about DS and they take away routine, routine data pipeline coding, but they don't get you to the creative analysis that actually does something that changes the direction of the company. So I think there's a good chance that value accrues to the most creative best logic thinkers and value gets taken away from the routine work which therefore would say compensation is going to go up for the best employees.
- [50:59]
D
Yeah. The best encapsulating effort is you're not going to lose your job to AI, you're going to use. You're going to lose your job to a human who uses AI better than you do. You're going to lose your job too. I mean, it's still kind of a harsh lesson, but that's the reality of it.
- [51:12]
C
Do you think these companies in the future have fewer employees or more employees or what's the way to think about it?
- [51:19]
A
Oh, so this is a really interesting one. Two things. One, it depends how weird you think it's going to get. Like do we actually get to a si AGI? You do. Let's not, you know, AI 2027 isn't off the table. Look, this comes back to three different things which we are talking about a lot internally. Thing number one for the framing is doing existing stuff more efficiently. Existing stuff is going to be done more efficiently with AI as it exists today without more breakthroughs. Like a lot of stuff can be automated, a lot of stuff can be done more efficiently so that work there will be less of it. Thing number two is things that literally weren't possible before will become possible. That can open up a lot more jobs. And thing number three is things that were possible but just were really effing expensive suddenly become over the threshold of, you know, reasonable to do. That's the support example I used reasonably. So thing number one, let's just, you know, rank ads better. We could already rank cast. We can now do, do it more efficiently. We can rank them better. Thing number two was semantic understanding of content to lead to content ranking to enable short form video and unconnected content could not exist without these models. It now exists. Thing number three is support chatbots. You could do it with human beings. Before it was just prohibitively expensive. And now AI does a hell of a lot better than a phone. The phone. True. So there are those three different categories. And what matters is jobs will go down in category number one. They will. How many jobs category number two and category number three create will determine. Some of these companies may even get bigger, like literally because so many things are now ROI positive to do. So this is just, I think it's still up in the Air. But what is certain is all three of those things alive.
- [53:10]
D
Yeah. No, I think in the short term, one of the biggest problems here is what's called a lump of labor fallacy, which you assume that there's a certain fixed amount of work in the world and it's not true for manual labor. It's not even true for. It's certainly not true for knowledge of labor. I think in the short term, AI might have a negative impact on hiring ever so slightly in certain places, maybe interns or junior engineering. But overall, I think I agree with the latter. I think was the last scenario that Alex set out, which is. No, it actually increases jobs. I mean, take the example of stagecoach drivers and introduction of a car, right? Yeah. The poor stage coach driver who had a team of horses through New York, whose streets used to be full of horses with horse manure on the streets. I'm looking at New York, which is why I'm citing the analogy. Cars created hundreds, thousands of new roles that didn't exist in the past. From motel owners to gas stations to everything you can possibly imagine. So the thought that we're just going to sit around with 99% of people just getting paid UBI from OpenAI, that's like the least likely scenario I see playing out. Actually, though, to be clear, I think there'll be disruption between here and that point, but I just don't see. No, I think there's going to be more demand, there's going to be more code, there's going to be more companies. Like Alex said, there's going to be things that weren't even physically possible or possible just so expensive you couldn't possibly view them, which are suddenly feasible. And so, no, I think it's going to be actually a net positive on society. It's just going to change. And change is scary and. But that's, that's it. I mean, generally kind of positive AI. I think if anything, like, if it's funny because you think, oh, there'll be this cognitive elite of AI builders. Like, dude, if. If you have intelligence on demand, does that make intelligence more or less valuable as like a thing that just exists in the world? It's like, no, no, the human touch EQ rather than IQ. And I hate those buzzwords cause they sound very LinkedIn, but you know what I mean, right? Like actually the raw intelligence is just going to be a thing you buy, just like a server on aws. Like that. Actually this matters a lot less than actually framing the problem or the human touch to it.
- [55:03]
C
What if Snap had sold to Meta.
- [55:08]
A
I think Snap would be Instagram. I genuinely think we have the tools and the ability and the know how to make things more successful. So I genuinely think it would be significantly more successful if it had. But, you know, that's a woulda, coulda, shoulda. And I'm sure they might not agree with me, but that's. That's what I believe.
- [55:30]
C
Five plus years after the acquisition of. Well, after the acquisition of Oculus, after sort of the big bet on the Metaverse, Help us conceptualize where we are five plus years later and where we're going.
- [55:46]
A
Yeah, I mean, the thing I would do is we spent an awful lot of time and an awful lot of money on a video that was the mother of all demos of what the future looks like. And that video contains AI assistants. It contains audio glasses. It contains glasses like our Orion glasses we put out last year, which have sort of the visual overlay. And what's really interesting to me is, despite everyone saying the Metaverse is over or whatever, a lot of stuff in that video is coming true. And so my perspective on this is these are a smash hit. So the glass is total smash here. It's AI with you at any stage. You can ask it questions. I now ask it all the time to give me a reminder. I think of something and I. I say, hey, Metro AI remind me in three hours of X, which I know is a minor use of it, but I don't have to take my phone out and send myself an email. And I'm finding myself just because it's with me all time, all day. I'm thinking of things to use it for. These have a lot, A lot of active users at this stage, and that is one of the things we feature in the video. So my perspective is, where are we? It's a research and development space, actually. Amazingly, the AI jumped forward far faster than we thought, which means that it got ahead of the waveguides that are needed to do the overlaid augmented reality experience that we think is the end game. So, yeah, that's going at the pace that we expected it to. The AI is going far faster than we expected it to. And I think you'll probably see 10 years, years from now, people walking around with these glasses with always on AI with a visual overlay of the real world, helping them navigate their lives better.
- [57:29]
C
What is your prediction of. Of Antonio as a now an outsider of what the. The legacy will be of. Of. Of Meta's big bet, you know, rebrand and, And. And sort of big you know, financial bet on, on, on the category.
- [57:43]
D
This is definitely an outsider view because of all the companies we talked about, the VR thing didn't exist at all when I was at Facebook. So this is a completely uninformed view. It felt to me the big investment. And again, Alex has a deeper knowledge here, but it seems to me that Mark's obsession was always mediating human social behavior in different forms. And how many touch points could that possibly take? I think Facebook played its cards with the mobile revolution very well. And I guess the thinking there was like, well, VR is the next way that humans are going to interact with each other and so we're going to build a social grass around that. It hasn't quite played out that way. I'm not quite sure why, because I used to be an AI skeptic as well, because for the past 20 years in tech, it's like AI is the constant technology of the future and it seems like the future is finally here. But similarly, virtual reality has always been this perpetual technology of the future and somehow that ship hasn't really quite come in yet. That said, over the longer term, I suspect something like the VR headsets that I think Alex modeled for us a second ago probably will be in production and at scale. But sometimes things are just too early. I think people, if you actually read technological history, you realize that technology has developed a lot longer developed than you think they did, right? There was 20 years between the transistor and the integrated circuit, another 20 years between the integrated circuit and the PC, another 20 years between the PC and the Internet, and like 10 years between the Internet and mobile. So these are like decade long things that play out. So it might just be too early. I think in the case of VR.
- [59:06]
C
Is there any world which Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft could have made an actual competitor to the iPhone, or was it just too complex and hey, better try for the next platform?
- [59:21]
A
Maybe if everyone had spotted it early enough. But everyone said it was the year of mobile for years and then stopped saying it and then suddenly it actually became the year of mobile and we all missed it because it actually happened around 2010. And so I think the issue is everyone missed it. Yeah, maybe, maybe.
- [59:37]
C
But I think probably not gearing towards closing here. Alex, the book is Click here. It's a history of the industry, it's a history of the company, Meta Facebook, obviously it's one of the most, if not the most iconic and important company of the last 20 years. Not just a technology, but globally. And it's had a lot of different evolutions and phases in its substance and its perception. What do you think is is not fully appreciated about where the company is, is now or what's a misperception or misunderstanding that that's worth correcting?
- [60:09]
D
You know, I'm going to come back.
- [60:10]
A
To what I said at the beginning, but this is obviously my, my personal take on it. I'm sure if you're stock, he'd have a different, you know, a different opinion. The biggest thing is that advertising is good. And I think there's this whole, this whole thing about like, you know, surveillance capitalism, ads are bad, you know, and it's all protecting people from slightly better ads for personalized trainers. And I actually think like the way that it gives people access to things that they like. People prefer personalized ads to non personalized ads. We have tested that again and again and again. If we just personalize the ad based on your demographic, you will not like what you get. But if it's based on what you truly like, you'll get a better experience. And I'm still struggling to see what European customers have been protected from. The US customers are suffering from when it comes down to a lot of this privacy regulation and a lot of this hatred of ads. And so the number one perception I want people to shift is ads are a good thing. People like personalized ads. And you know, yes, the book has a bit of history in it of the company. It has a lot of context on each of the channels. And I think it is really important that we as an industry care about advertising and learn how to do it well. A lot of startup founders just still believe in like, oh, they clicked on my ad and they converted. Therefore the ad drove that conversion. There's some really obvious stuff that people can learn and this book is, I think, at a good level to get people to know how to do the basics really, really, really well.
- [61:38]
C
The book is. Click here. The Art and Science of Digital Marketing and Advertising. Alex has been a fantastic conversation. Thanks for coming on.
- [61:44]
A
Thank you very much and thanks, Antonio.
- [61:49]
B
Thanks for listening to this episode of the A16Z podcast. If you like this episode, be sure to like, comment, subscribe, leave us a rating or review and share it with your friends and family. For more episodes go to YouTube, Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Follow us on X1 6Z and subscribe to our substack@A16Z.substack.com thanks again for listening and I'll see you in the next episode. As a reminder, the content here is for informational purposes only. Should not be taken as legal, business, tax or investment advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any A16Z fund. Please note that A16Z and its affiliates may also maintain investments in the companies discussed in this podcast. For more details, including a link to our investments, please see a16z.com forward slash disclosures.