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

Summary

Acquired LIVE from Chase Center – September 30, 2024

Podcast Information:

• Title: Acquired
• Hosts: Ben Gilbert and David Rosen
• Description: Every company has a story. Learn the playbooks that built the world’s greatest companies—and how you can apply them as a founder, operator, or investor.
• Episode: Acquired LIVE from Chase Center
• Release Date: September 30, 2024

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Introduction and Opening Remarks

The episode kicks off with a humorous exchange between hosts Ben Gilbert and David Rosen about a missing thumb drive containing the "Who Got the Truth" MP3 for the sound crew. This lighthearted banter sets the stage for an engaging live session filled with high-profile guests and special surprises.

Surprise Guest: Jamie Dimon

Timestamp: [02:27 - 03:19]

Ben and David welcome Jamie Dimon, Chairman and CEO of JPMorgan Chase, as a surprise guest. Dimon expresses his excitement about the partnership between JPMorgan Payments and Acquired, highlighting the significance of storytelling and education about major companies. He remarks:

"Jamie Dimon: 'I'm Jamie Dimon, chairman and CEO of JPMorgan Chase, and I'm happy to kick off the show tonight.'" ([02:57])

Acknowledging the Partnership and Teamwork

Timestamp: [04:02 - 04:37]

David Rosen extends heartfelt thanks to the JP Morgan Payments team, particularly Dustin Sedgwick, the CMO, and his outstanding marketing team comprising Hannah, Nick, Vinny, Amy, and Carly. Ben Gilbert humorously notes that their usual recording process from their studios is a stark contrast to the live event's scale.

Welcoming Daniel Ek, CEO of Spotify

Timestamp: [09:09 - 12:39]

The hosts introduce Daniel Ek from Stockholm, CEO and founder of Spotify. Jamie Dimon shares impressive statistics about Acquired's growth on Spotify, noting:

"Jensen Huang: 'On Spotify alone, you guys have now done over 5 million hours, and it tripled in the last year. Pretty remarkable, right?'" ([12:39])

Ben and David discuss Acquired's organic growth strategy, emphasizing the power of word-of-mouth and consistent content production without paid marketing. Ek highlights the global expansion of Acquired, with significant listener growth in regions like Mexico, Hong Kong, Israel, and Singapore.

Acknowledging Global Reach and Success

Timestamp: [12:39 - 15:41]

Jamie Dimon praises Acquired's global footprint, mentioning:

"Jamie Dimon: 'Acquired is global. So look at some of this stuff. Like you have Mexico Growing five times. Hong Kong, Israel, Singapore—Acquired is global.'" ([15:41])

The discussion underscores how Acquired has managed to attract a diverse, worldwide audience by delivering valuable storytelling on company histories and strategies.

Interview with Emily Chang: Revisiting Past Episodes

Timestamp: [44:30 - 65:34]

Emily Chang from Bloomberg joins the live event to critically review some of Acquired's past episodes. The segment delves into Acquired's initial grading of YouTube, LinkedIn, SpaceX, and Taylor Swift, reflecting on the hosts' early predictions versus current realities.

YouTube Acquisition Revisited

Emily challenges Ben and David on their initial C-grade for YouTube, highlighting YouTube's exponential growth and strategic value within Google. Ben acknowledges their misjudgment, noting:

"Ben Gilbert: 'We were misguided. We completely had no idea that YouTube would grow into the strategic powerhouse it is today.'" ([47:25])

LinkedIn Acquisition Insights

The hosts reassess their A-grade for LinkedIn post-acquisition by Microsoft, recognizing LinkedIn's substantial revenue growth and strategic integration into Microsoft's ecosystem.

SpaceX's Starlink Success

Ben and David commend SpaceX for surpassing their initial expectations with Starlink, transforming it into a billion-dollar, profitable endeavor with millions of subscribers. They acknowledge:

"David Rosen: 'The Starlink execution is just more remarkable than I think 99% of people would have guessed.'" ([57:54])

Taylor Swift as an Enterprise

A lively debate ensues over Taylor Swift's business acumen, with the hosts arguing that her streaming revenues, concert tours, and strategic partnerships position her as a highly profitable enterprise.

"Ben Gilbert: 'So what if we're at peak Taylor?'

David Rosen: 'For my own safety, I'm going to say we are not at peak Taylor.'" ([63:15])

Emily concludes by suggesting a future episode dedicated to Taylor Swift, recognizing the depth of her business strategies and market impact.

Showcasing JP Morgan Payments Executives

Timestamp: [66:22 - 70:02]

Max Nikkurchin and Umar Farooq, Global Co-Heads of JP Morgan Payments, take the stage to provide an overview of their business. They highlight JP Morgan Payments' vast global presence, processing approximately $10 trillion daily across 160 countries. Max emphasizes their role as a backbone for various businesses, from local coffee shops to multinational corporations.

"Max Nikkurchin: 'We help companies receive money, hold money, send money, safeguard money against fraud, and take the insights from all of this to grow their business.'" ([67:09])

Addressing a Viral Misinterpretation: Jensen Huang's Correction

Timestamp: [70:14 - 73:09]

Jensen Huang from Nvidia addresses a viral clip that misrepresented his earlier statements about "Who Got the Truth." He clarifies his original intent, emphasizing the challenges and resilience required in entrepreneurship.

"Jensen Huang: 'My point there is the super point of entrepreneurs, which is your superpowers are partly your ignorance that you don't know how hard it is.'" ([71:04])

This clarification ensures accurate representation of his views and fosters a deeper understanding of the entrepreneurial journey.

Main Event: Interview with Mark Zuckerberg

Timestamp: [73:56 - 143:27]

The highlight of the episode features an in-depth conversation with Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta (formerly Facebook). The discussion navigates through Meta's evolution, strategic pivots, challenges, and future vision.

Rebranding to Meta

Mark discusses the rationale behind rebranding Facebook to Meta, focusing on the company's broader mission to build the future of human connection beyond traditional social media platforms.

"Mark Zuckerberg: 'I want to be able to build what I think are sort of the ideal experiences, not just what you're allowed to build on some platform that someone else built...'" ([76:50])

Open Source and Technological Foundation

Zuckerberg highlights Meta's commitment to open-source technologies, acknowledging their foundational role in the company's growth and infrastructure development.

"Mark Zuckerberg: 'I think almost all of the major technology companies at this point are primarily using open source stacks. So, yeah, I mean, I don't know. We wouldn't have been able to get built without open source.'" ([100:54])

Strategic Resilience and Adaptation

Reflecting on Meta's resilience, Zuckerberg shares insights into navigating technological shifts and market challenges, including the company's strategic investments in AI and AR/VR technologies.

"Mark Zuckerberg: 'I think that's one of the things that has been really fundamental. It's like we're able to kind of go from platform to platform and do these different things because we've invested and cared about the underlying technology.'" ([89:44])

Facing Challenges and Criticisms

Zuckerberg openly addresses Meta's challenges, including political scrutiny and public perception issues post-2016. He emphasizes the importance of differentiating between corporate responsibility and unfounded allegations.

"Mark Zuckerberg: 'I think that there's this view where when you're a company and someone says that there's an issue, ... it takes us a long time to dig out of that... But I think it was a 20-year mistake.'" ([119:15])

Advice to Founders

In the final segment, Zuckerberg offers advice to aspiring founders, urging them to pursue projects they are passionate about while remaining adaptable and open to learning.

"Mark Zuckerberg: 'I think there's something about maintaining flexibility that's helpful... You want to keep things lean and be able to do that.'" ([120:15])

Special Treat: Correction from Jensen Huang

Timestamp: [70:21 - 73:09]

Jensen Huang returns to clarify a misunderstanding from a previous episode, reinforcing the importance of perseverance and the nuanced nature of entrepreneurial challenges.

"Jensen Huang: 'The mountain of it. In the course of 31 years... my superpowers are partly your ignorance that you don't know how hard it is.'" ([71:04])

Conclusion and Gratitude

Timestamp: [143:26 - 143:43]

Ben Gilbert and David Rosen wrap up the live event by expressing profound gratitude to all guests, partners, and the dedicated team behind the production. They acknowledge the immense effort that went into organizing the event and celebrate the memorable interactions and insights shared throughout the evening.

"Ben Gilbert: 'Thank you to our wives. And of course, thank you to Jamie Dimon, JP Morgan Chase, JP Morgan Payments for making this whole evening possible.'" ([143:11])

Notable Quotes

• Mark Zuckerberg:
  “We are a technology company that is focused on human connection, not a specific type of app.”
  (Timestamp: [76:50])

• Jensen Huang:
  “Your superpowers are partly your ignorance that you don't know how hard it is.”
  (Timestamp: [71:04])

• Jamie Dimon:
  “It's word of mouth in a new way.”
  (Timestamp: [14:21])

Key Takeaways

1. Organic Growth and Global Reach: Acquired's partnership with Spotify has facilitated exponential growth, emphasizing the power of consistent, high-quality content and word-of-mouth marketing across diverse global markets.

2. Strategic Reassessment: Revisiting past podcast episodes revealed initial misjudgments, particularly regarding YouTube's potential and LinkedIn's post-acquisition success, underscoring the importance of adaptability in assessments.

3. Meta's Evolution: Mark Zuckerberg detailed Meta's strategic pivots, including rebranding and investments in AI and AR/VR technologies, highlighting the company's focus on building the future of human connection.

4. Open-Source Philosophy: Meta's reliance on open-source technologies has been pivotal in its technological advancements and infrastructure scalability, fostering innovation and industry-wide standardization.

5. Resilience Amid Challenges: Zuckerberg candidly discussed Meta's navigational strategies through political and economic upheavals, emphasizing the necessity of owning legitimate responsibilities while tactfully addressing unfounded criticisms.

6. Entrepreneurial Insights: The podcast offered valuable lessons on the importance of flexibility, maintaining a strong technological foundation, and the relentless pursuit of innovation as cornerstones of enduring business success.

Conclusion

"Acquired LIVE from Chase Center" provided an enriching experience, blending insightful interviews with industry titans like Jamie Dimon, Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang, and Mark Zuckerberg. The episode delved deep into the mechanics of successful companies, the evolution of podcasting, strategic business pivots, and the challenges of leading a tech giant in a rapidly changing world. With memorable quotes and profound discussions, this episode serves as a valuable resource for founders, operators, and investors aiming to emulate the playbooks of the world's most successful companies.

Transcript

[Ben Gilbert]

Hey, so I know this isn't like the best time to bring this up, but did you bring the thumb drive with the who got the truth mp3 for the sound crew?

[David Rosen]

No, why would I bring a thumb? I did email that probably like three weeks ago, though.

[Ben Gilbert]

Well, there's 6,000 people out there waiting to hear it.

[David Rosen]

Look, the team is really great. I'm sure they'll think of something.

[Jensen Huang]

Who got the truth? Yeah, Is it you? Is it you? Is it you? Who got the truth now? Is it you? Is it you? Is it you? Sit me down, say it straight Another story on the way who got the truth? Everybody's talking, Nobody's listening these days I feel lost, man. Lost in opinions Everybody's fighting, nobody's winning Take me home. Cause I don't know what's going on in the world I'm living. Say San Francisco. Please help me welcome to the stage the creators of the Acquire Podcast, Ben Gilbert and David Rosen.

[David Rosen]

Oh, my God.

[Mark Zuckerberg]

Hi.

[Jensen Huang]

Yeah, sit me down, say it straight. Another story on the way. Who got the truth? D who got the truth? Who got the truth?

[Mark Zuckerberg]

San Francisco, Mike Taylor.

[Ben Gilbert]

Woo. We didn't need the thumb drive.

[David Rosen]

We didn't need the thumb drive. Welcome to this episode of Acquired, the podcast about. Welcome to Acquired Live at the Chase Center.

[Emily Chang]

Woo.

[Ben Gilbert]

Wow. This is. Wow. This is unbelievable. Thank you all for coming. We have a very, very special guest and surprise to welcome us all here tonight. The CEO of JPMorgan Chase, Jamie Dimon.

[Jamie Dimon]

Hello, Acquired listeners.

[Mark Zuckerberg]

Welcome to the Chase center and to Acquired Live.

[Jamie Dimon]

I'm Jamie dimon, chairman and CEO of JPMorgan Chase, and I'm happy to kick.

[Mark Zuckerberg]

Off the show tonight and welcome all.

[Jamie Dimon]

Of you to one of my favorite arenas. It's been a great partnership all year.

[Mark Zuckerberg]

Between JP Morgan Payments and Acquired, storytelling and educating about some of the greatest companies in the world. For many of them, just like many of you in the crowd, we're thrilled to call you friends and partners of the firm.

[Jamie Dimon]

Sorry I couldn't be there in person.

[Mark Zuckerberg]

Tonight, but I hope everyone enjoys the show. Ben and David, over to you.

[David Rosen]

Thanks, Jamie. Well, a special shout out and a huge thank you to JP Morgan and the whole Payments team, especially Dustin Sedgwick, the CMO of JP Morgan Payments, longtime listener who's been like, really the driving force behind this whole thing and his truly world class marketing team. Hannah, Nick, Vinny, Amy and Carly. David and I, for the first time, really now understand what it is like to have a glimpse of what a sort of real built out team would look like, and not just two guys in their basement. So thank you for an amazing partnership.

[Ben Gilbert]

Ben and I did not put this on ourselves tonight. So what are we doing tonight?

[David Rosen]

Well, as you all know, Mark Zuckerberg is in the house.

[Mark Zuckerberg]

Woo.

[David Rosen]

So tonight we'll actually have three acts, not one. Mark will be our third act after intermission. But we got a lot of great segments in our first two acts here and some more fun surprises sprinkled in in the middle. So, David, what is the format? Is this an acquired episode?

[Ben Gilbert]

Well, amazingly shockingly, we tell you all the time that when we make an episode, we sit in our houses, in our studios, we record all day for nine hours. We turn that nine hours into three or four or five hours that you all hear. And we thought, yeah, that's probably not going to play here. But you keep asking us, you keep emailing us. So we want to put this request, this question to bed once and for all here tonight. Here is what you are missing in the full nine hours of an acquired recording session.

[David Rosen]

I've been trying to do a better job getting airflow in here while we're recording because I think I get dumber at the end of episodes, or at least I get like. I just get exhausted. And I think part of it's the lack of oxygen.

[Ben Gilbert]

It's really hot in here, and we've been going for five and a half hours.

[David Rosen]

So let me finish this thing and then we'll take a bathroom break.

[Ben Gilbert]

Mm, I had a similar thought. Pour some more champagne. Sorry about that.

[Mark Zuckerberg]

Hey, Blue angels. Great.

[David Rosen]

Only 9 minutes and 40 seconds of bullshitting before we actually started. It's pretty good for us.

[Ben Gilbert]

It's a new.

[David Rosen]

Is this too in the weeds? Let me take a stab at making it more loosey goosey.

[Ben Gilbert]

I think I can simplify all this.

[David Rosen]

We gotta advance the story more. The pacing's too slow. Oh, this doesn't make any sense.

[Ben Gilbert]

Okay, great. We can cut all that then.

[David Rosen]

Cut that.

[Ben Gilbert]

Just cut it. Let's cut all that. Cut that.

[David Rosen]

Skip it.

[Ben Gilbert]

Skip it. Yeah, let's skip it and keep moving. Okay, I think one of us has our timelines wrong. We've been so stop and start. Do you think we should just restart the whole thing?

[David Rosen]

We're 35 to 40 minutes into this episode and nothing has happened.

[Ben Gilbert]

I think I would actually feel better and more in the flow.

[David Rosen]

Cause right now I'm like, what did we cover? What did we not?

[Ben Gilbert]

I think what you're saying is replace all of what we did before.

[David Rosen]

I'm gonna go rerecord at least the first part. Maybe that whole thing.

[Ben Gilbert]

I don't recall exactly how we started though.

[David Rosen]

I don't remember the last thing you said.

[Ben Gilbert]

I don't either.

[David Rosen]

Uh, I think I've been like interrupting.

[Ben Gilbert]

No, I think it's great. No, please keep doing. No, no, I don't find it annoying at all. No, the goal is like, make the best stuff.

[David Rosen]

I actually quite like how this is puzzling in.

[Ben Gilbert]

Hang on one second.

[David Rosen]

You gotta stop making that face.

[Ben Gilbert]

Ob. Was that making a face?

[David Rosen]

And take it without the, um, um, uh, uh, uh, uh. Totally, totally, totally, totally, totally, totally. Oh, go for it.

[Ben Gilbert]

Dude. It is so hard to keep all this information in our heads. Like, I feel like I'm like out of ram. What's going on? I just heard a beep on your end.

[David Rosen]

Okay, well, that wasn't one of their best episodes.

[Ben Gilbert]

That is how the sausage is made.

[David Rosen]

I think that actually is a good way to end it.

[Ben Gilbert]

So are you done or do you have more?

[David Rosen]

I'm done. Thank you all for indulging us. I was not sure if that would play in an arena.

[Ben Gilbert]

This is what Stephen has to deal with every month. Yes.

[David Rosen]

So obviously not only are we not doing that, we literally can't. There's just fire marshal issues. So David, what are we doing?

[Ben Gilbert]

Well, tonight we thought we are going to take the acquired playbook and we're going to throw it out the window and we are going to throw a party instead. It is a celebration of technology, of the San Francisco Bay area. Of Woo. San Francisco. Yeah. Some of the most important businesses of our time. And most importantly, it's a celebration of you all. We say you all on the show. Usually you're not here, you're here.

[David Rosen]

So tonight, normally we study the past, often the far past. Tonight we're going to kind of look at the present. It's a little unacquired, but like, you know, once every two and a half years or however often we do a live show, we want to indulge. So yeah, we're going to indulge tonight.

[Ben Gilbert]

Indeed we are. So to start, we wanted to spend a couple minutes at the top of the show here in our first act, just giving you all an update on the state of acquired. It has been quite a year for us. You and I have lived a lot of life in one year. We both had kids. The Wall Street Journal wrote about us. Yeah. And we've experienced some pretty amazing growth.

[David Rosen]

Yeah. And so we were thinking like, you know, David kind of pitched this to me and I'm like, what are we going to stand up and give a keynote on, like, the state of the union of acquire? That's not. That doesn't feel right. But a conversation would be great if the right person to have a conversation with. And we were like, who is a big acquired listener, kind of gets what we're all about. Everyone in the audience is going to be like, oh, yeah, that person's one of us. And is like, you know, the world, expert on podcasting. Fortunately for us and all of you, tonight we are here to welcome, all the way from Stockholm, the CEO and founder of Spotify, Daniel Ek.

[Jamie Dimon]

Wow.

[David Rosen]

Thank you so much.

[Mark Zuckerberg]

Wow, Daniel.

[Jamie Dimon]

Wow. This is pretty insane, guys. I think this probably ought to be, like, the biggest recording of a podcast in the world.

[David Rosen]

It's a little like an echoey studio.

[Jamie Dimon]

Yeah. You guys should use this as the studio every time. I think, well, you've been after us.

[Ben Gilbert]

To do more video for years.

[Jamie Dimon]

That is true.

[Ben Gilbert]

Here you are.

[David Rosen]

It's going to be a video for sure.

[Jamie Dimon]

All right, well, love that, Love that. And, you know, it's really amazing for me to be here and just see, you know, this and all of you guys success. I remember listening to you guys as a fan, I think, starting 2019 and see that we're now five years later from a small base going to something like this. It's pretty remarkable to see. And I don't know about you guys, but I thought maybe to commemorate this moment, it'd be pretty fun. I know you don't want to tout your success, so I thought maybe I could do that for you so maybe we can have a look at some of the amazing stats and achievements you guys have accomplished.

[David Rosen]

Well, thanks. Yeah, I know you pulled some data. We pulled some data. This is the updated version up here of the kind of classic acquired chart that we've been showing, which basically shows from when we started in 2015, the kind of like, organic doubling year over year over year, all the way through today. And basically, since we don't market the show or we don't do any paid marketing, the only way the show grows is we make an episode. A friend tells someone tells their friend about it. On average, every listener tells one other listener every year, hey, you should listen. And that person sticks. And that's kind of the whole thing.

[Jamie Dimon]

Yeah, I mean, it's pretty remarkable. And on Spotify alone, you guys have now done over 5 million hours, and it tripled in the last year. Pretty remarkable, right? Yeah. Big round of applause.

[Ben Gilbert]

So we did the math or Ben did the math as he usually does. I believe that is over 400 years of acquired. That was. We feel like it was 400 years making the episodes in the last year, but that was listened to in the past year.

[Jamie Dimon]

Yeah. What is the. Is the Nintendo one the longest one you guys have done?

[David Rosen]

I think Microsoft Volume 2 was our longest.

[Ben Gilbert]

Longest single episode.

[David Rosen]

But thank you for pulling this. So the way this came to be is we asked Daniel, hey, you have access to data that all podcasters sort of dream of. What is the most interesting insights you can kind of pull out of it? And the thing that's the craziest to me about this chart is that even though Acquired's here's how many downloads an episode gets isn't like celebrity status. It's not the craziest biggest in the world. Because of the volume of our episodes, we all spend a lot of time together. Like, thank you for lending us your ears for all of those moments. Because that's what that chart is to me is all the time we spend together.

[Jamie Dimon]

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

[David Rosen]

Yeah, there's two. I'm like a reformed venture capitalist, so I can't help but point out things on charts. There's two things that are interesting about that chart. One is we've had ridiculous subscriber growth on Spotify. I mean, it's just been you guys entering the industry has created a ton of net new audience of people who did not listen to podcasters before. The second thing is, if you pull the chart back up again, you can see the Wall Street Journal article in May in that insane exponential growth.

[Ben Gilbert]

I know we keep talking about it, but this literally has never happened in the decade of Acquired where a single event caused a kink in the chart. And that we see. You guys see it, it's crazy.

[Jamie Dimon]

Well, it's word of mouth in a new way. But the other part, that was really cool to me as I was looking through the data, I kind of expected this to be sort of an English language thing only maybe the US maybe uk, that kind of thing. But you guys have truly grown worldwide. So look at some of this stuff. Like you have Mexico Growing five times. Hong Kong, Israel, Singapore acquired is global. So it's amazing to see here in San Francisco that we got 6,000 people in one place. But I'm pretty sure you guys should take this on the road, and we'll see if we can make it in other places, too.

[David Rosen]

When you see the whole arc of the show tonight, I think you'll say, oh, yeah, you can't take that on the road.

[Jamie Dimon]

Yeah, could be. Could be. Well, you know, it's maybe a timing question. You guys should be like, the new rock stars to tour around. That would be the great thing to do. And, you know, it's. I want to really kind of maybe take the moment here and ask you guys how all of this happened. And by way of context, just to put this in perspective, in 2019, you know, when we got into podcasts, the world around podcast listening and Spotify, there was a few million people listening to this. And you mentioned this, but, like, our goal was to sort of broaden this whole medium. And Today there's over 150 million people listening to podcasts on Spotify. And obviously, your show is a huge success and something that people kind of attracts people to the medium because it's both pretty broad these days, but also very, very deep. What do you think contributed to that success?

[Ben Gilbert]

Well, you guys entering the industry for sure, but I think you hit on it with broad. But, like, when Ben and I started this, we thought, you know, we used to talk about what our TAM was. We were venture capitalists. Like, what's the TAM for? Acquired. Not that we even thought about it as a business or a product, but. And we were like, I don't know, maybe there's. What's the population of students in business schools out there? Maybe that's our tam. And then we were like, well, I don't know, maybe it's a little bigger than that. Like, maybe. Maybe it's, you know, everybody who ever wanted to go to business school or was interested in, like, okay, like, what's that cap out that, like a million people, maybe a million, felt like Artem and what's happened to us? And I'm curious, I think you guys have probably seen the same thing, is that even though we think we're super nerds and we tell these very esoteric stories, they're just great stories, and people of all types want to listen to them, right?

[David Rosen]

And the growth of the medium, like, we just have this ridiculous tailwind where we got lucky and picked right. In 2015, we stayed with it. We got better at the craft. But, like, it turns out, people are super interested thanks to all the wireless headphones that exist now. And I don't know, it's just this weird cultural norm that's kind of come into fruition that it's okay to spend hours and hours and hours with someone in your ears talking about something that is interesting to them. And I just don't actually think that was a thing in the early 2010s.

[Jamie Dimon]

Right. So one of the things you obviously have done is added video to the format. And this is my plug of hopefully getting you guys to finally add video to Spotify as well. But what do you think is next for the show when it comes to that? Like, what do you see the big innovation of acquired will be in the future?

[David Rosen]

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

[Ben Gilbert]

As your original vision was you were music on Facebook. Yeah.

[David Rosen]

How should founders think about, like, the only reason that you are allowed to exist is because you're really good at this one core thing, but you should do other things.

[Jamie Dimon]

Well, I mean, I think it starts with your audience, right. And knowing your audience. So, like, for instance, we launched audiobooks about a year ago, but the sort of untold story about that audiobooks launch is what happened in Germany is all the record companies started uploading audiobooks to the service. So they started hacking the system for all these other things, and when they ran out of that, they actually started uploading podcasts. So podcasts turned out to be the easier medium for us to start with. But eventually we added audio books too. So I think most amazing things tend to start with people suggesting things or maybe even doing things. So it'd be interesting to figure out what people are doing in and around acquired already. And that will probably be your adjacency, I think.

[Ben Gilbert]

The other video. Ben and I talk a lot. We'll talk more about video throughout the evening here. You know, we've just always sort of been of the belief of, like, nobody wants to sit and watch us in our studios as talking heads going yak, yak, yak. But we've started to ask the question of, like, is there for certain companies we cover. Is there a rich visual tapestry that we could do at the same level that we try and create an audio tapestry?

[David Rosen]

It's an absolute crime that we did four hours on the entire multi hundred year history of Hermes and it was just audio.

[Jamie Dimon]

But it was an amazing show though, right?

[David Rosen]

Thank you. But audio is this like magic thing where I'm going to drag my, we're going to end up doing more video but I'm going to drag my feet kicking and screaming all the way there. Because I feel very passionately that the reason that the caliber of person in this room with all the busy things that you have in your life, the reason that you're open to spending all this time with us is because we don't take your full undivided attention. You can run, you can mow the lawn, you can drive, you can, you know, everything that everyone does while they listen to Acquired. I like, I remain unconvinced that we would work as a four hour video product.

[Jamie Dimon]

Yeah, I mean, look, I don't know. To be honest, I think this is probably the biggest thing that surprised me is that the world just keeps evolving constantly. So you talked about video and on Spotify, it's been a huge growth thing. I would have said to you as well, people probably mostly, why would you want to watch any video? But I think younger consumers especially, they don't know what the difference is. They just want to feel closer presence to the person. And I mean we saw it already with the bloopers, right? It's like this is fun what you guys are doing. And people have a relationship to you guys too. Hence why so many people are showing up here tonight. And I think video is just a way to express that whether or not they're watching the full four hours or whether they're diving in and out over a particular type of segment, I think just giving the consumer the choice is sort of one of the big things. And that's kind of what we're leaning into as well is just allowing the creator and the consumer to more directly interact in more and novel ways.

[Ben Gilbert]

It's funny, there's, you know, your question was what's next for Acquired? We, we're going to do a normal episode after this. After tonight. That normal episode probably will focus on a Menlo park based technology company. And one of the lessons that we're already starting to learn.

[David Rosen]

Spoilers.

[Ben Gilbert]

What do you.

[David Rosen]

We can't take that back now. This is live.

[Ben Gilbert]

This is live. It's just not holding the current state of things and vision of what you are too tightly. And we want to talk about. You've learned a lot from Mark over the years. You all have been very close. Spotify started on Facebook and here you are, you're the biggest podcasting platform in the world. So you didn't hold onto that vision too tightly. Yeah.

[David Rosen]

So can I turn that into a question, please?

[Ben Gilbert]

I was actually going to. I wanted to leave you some space.

[David Rosen]

Before we ask what great partnership is all about. Do you remember? So David and I have one way of growing which is make a good episode and hope people tell their friends. Do you remember in the early days of Spotify when you figured out, oh, Facebook is going to be this unbelievable channel for us?

[Jamie Dimon]

Yeah, I mean, I think it starts like so many other things. I think Mark and I, we just struck this sort of friendship and we started talking about, you know, the little told story is, if I remember this correctly, I think Mark even pre Facebook was trying to do a music startup.

[David Rosen]

Oh yeah.

[Jamie Dimon]

And then he was like, yeah, this feels like a difficult thing.

[David Rosen]

Wire hug.

[Jamie Dimon]

Yeah, exactly. And so I think he's like, I think pretty much every great entrepreneur in the Valley tried to do a music startup. And so he was definitely passionate about it. And then his idea obviously was a social music product. And he and I, we started talking about it in the beginning. It started like he wanted mostly Spotify to be more social. And I kind of said, well, I don't know that that's.

[David Rosen]

Do you remember how you got introduced? Because Spotify was not like Spotify the way it is today, a pillar of the world.

[Jamie Dimon]

Yeah, well, I got introduced to Mark through Sean Park. And so Sean kind of said to Zuck, like, hey, you gotta meet this entrepreneur from Sweden. And I remember like Zuck at the time was living in a very small house and we went for a barbecue at his house. This is probably, I don't know, 2008 or 9, like one of those things. And then we kind of struck a friendship and we started jamming on various ideas around how to make music more social.

[David Rosen]

And you weren't even live in the US yet, I don't think. Or you were definitely weren't live.

[Jamie Dimon]

So this sort of secret of Spotify was we sort of seeded one account at a time to get a bunch of influencers to kind of like it. And I think Sean in particular, he kind of used it as a social currency. So everyone came to him to kind of try to get.

[Ben Gilbert]

Yeah. All the invites. Oh, man. The currency of the Spotify invites.

[Jamie Dimon]

Yeah, it was a big Big thing for quite a few years before we launched, where it was kind of the secret thing if you were in the club or if you weren't. And anyway, he got Mark on it, and I think Mark kind of wrote this status update, like, Spotify is so good. And then everyone's like, how did you get this? This was kind of the main thing. When can I get it? How can I do it? And yeah, then we started jamming around what a social music product ought to be. And we had this sort of idea. Wouldn't it be cool, sort of like with ICQ at the time where you had these status updates, wouldn't it be cool to be able to check out what your friends were listening to? And we kind of got to work together, built that product and coincided it with the Spotify US launch.

[David Rosen]

And this was when News Feed was really young, right? So there was like, you'd be scrolling through your newsfeed and it would be giving you these status updates of what your friends were listening to piped in directly from Spotify.

[Jamie Dimon]

Exactly right. So you could see all your friends. It actually still exists in Spotify product on desktop. So you can kind of see what your friends are listening to real time. It's one of our more popular legacy features that's been around now for like 13 years.

[David Rosen]

It was the right sidebar, but I feel like I haven't seen it in a while. Maybe I just.

[Jamie Dimon]

It's still there. It's still there.

[David Rosen]

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

[Jamie Dimon]

Well, I still think social is hugely important. And for instance, we have a product now called jam, which allows you to be with your friends and actually alter what you're listening to at the same time. And it's growing incredibly rapidly right now all over the world. So it's something that I think very much is a social product. But while I still think music is very social, I think what we got wrong in the product was this sort of Notion that just seeing what all of your friends are listening to may not be the right social product. But if you instead say, I want to work together with my friends and I want to have a shared listening, whether we're in the same place or not, that turns out to be a pretty amazing thing. You see people do it at parties where literally join someone's jam and you can sort of all queue up songs together. Instead of taking my phone or your phone, we could all be sort of working together on something. But what we saw during the pandemic, and that's like where jam sort of started, was we started seeing that people were using this to stay connected as well by having sort of this shared, you know, consistent music listening where we were all listening to the same thing at the same time, even though we were sort of apart.

[David Rosen]

It's like the best of linear TV brought to music.

[Jamie Dimon]

Yeah. So I think we're still sort of, you know, definitely playing with the social concepts and trying to get that right. But I think, you know, Facebook kind of moved off of this sort of presence based social aspect for all things. So it wasn't just music actually. People were doing it for games back then too. So it was like, you know, I've created another farmville.

[Ben Gilbert]

Oh yeah, we remember that era.

[Jamie Dimon]

Yeah.

[David Rosen]

What is it? It was like north of 10% of Facebook's revenue at IPO was from Wazynga.

[Ben Gilbert]

Yeah, yeah. I mean, this is all fun history. I'm curious though, we're going to talk to Mark later tonight.

[David Rosen]

Are you doing research live on stage?

[Ben Gilbert]

Yeah, yeah, definitely. You know, you've had a relationship, a pretty close relationship for 15 plus years as fellow founders in the trenches. What have you taken from him that you've brought into Spotify and how you run the company?

[Jamie Dimon]

Many things. And I've learned so much from him and the rest of the team at Meta as well, but I think specifically from him. He's probably the best learner I've ever seen. You can have a conversation with him about a topic, he may not know very much about it and then the next time he would know more than I would say most experts about the subject. And it's really remarkable just how tenacious he is sort of about learning and staying curious about things. So that's definitely been a super inspiring thing for me. And I think that this sort of shines through with how he runs the company too. He has a very sort of clear idea, but he also takes a lot of feedback and sort of iterates on that. And you Know, it's everything from. One of the cool things for me has been seeing how he runs meetings. You know, for instance, I kind of like having relatively small meetings with people. Mark, the average meeting he has is like 15 to 20 people in the room. And how you make, you know, a product review or discussion productive with 15 and 20 people still get people to be heard. Like, he's very, very good at that stuff. And that's just a few of the things that I've learned which has helped me as a leader as well.

[David Rosen]

Can I ask maybe this a little bit more pointed? You are a kind person, you are a soft spoken person, but you are a fierce competitor.

[Ben Gilbert]

So we haven't told you this when we interviewed you 18, 24 months ish ago in Stockholm. I'd never been to Sweden before. I don't think you had either. And we left, we thought just like, what a lovely country, what lovely people. Daniel is like the most generous person we could imagine. You're here tonight. And that guy is a fierce competitor and there is a reason why he.

[David Rosen]

Has built Spotify and very strategic. I think you're. You see the chessboard. Mark is like that too. Do you feel like your relationship, do you amplify each other?

[Jamie Dimon]

Well, I mean, the rule I have with Mark is I don't try to go into a competition with him because I know it'll end badly for both of us. So as you know, Mark likes sports. So one of the things I don't do with Mark is play sport for exactly this reason. What was the last time he sort of tore his ACL when someone, you know, rather than giving up. So I feel like it ended pretty badly. So I like playing when I know I'll win. So I think it's a pretty good thing to not do that.

[David Rosen]

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

[Jamie Dimon]

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

[David Rosen]

You mean that as a virtue, like, talk is cheap, so let's talk a lot. Because it's inexpensive to waste those resources.

[Jamie Dimon]

Exactly right. It's more expensive to build than most people think. And so we actually spend a lot of time discussing. And people get really confused when they sort of enter our culture. They're like, but why don't we just execute? And we're still sitting and debating and sort of game theorizing how this will play out and getting all the things working in a certain way. And we have our sort of ways of doing that now that we've sort of codified across the company, which I think is pretty unique at this point. But a part of that is also because. So to set the stage is because we had to. Because remember everything, unlike many other products, when you're building a company, you can kind of sort of iterate and do stuff. We had to get the entire industry with us. So if we wanted to do something, we had to convince a bunch of people that it was the right thing to do. And in many cases, even making relatively simple changes could take one or two years for us to get licensed. So you better be sure that you're right when you're doing it. And this has kind of now become a thing in how we're doing stuff is we're probably not going to be the fastest, as in moving fast and breaking things, but we are going to be very deliberate and we're probably going to be more right when we actually do something.

[David Rosen]

You're like, the anti fail fast. The anti move fast and break things. The anti ship and iterate, like, well.

[Jamie Dimon]

I'd like to hope we can also ship and iterate, but.

[David Rosen]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Jamie Dimon]

But we won't be the fastest. No.

[Ben Gilbert]

Which is funny. Coming back to podcasting, you didn't enter the business until 2019. I assume you were thinking about it for a long time after that. And when I'm sure, you know. When did you become the market leader in podcasting?

[Jamie Dimon]

Oh, I think it sort of depends on which markets you're kind of looking at it. But we were pretty much. It started happening in quite a few markets already, 2020 and 2021. And in 2022, we were pretty much the market leader in most markets around the world.

[Ben Gilbert]

So three years yeah, from launch.

[David Rosen]

Why?

[Ben Gilbert]

Yeah, why? That's the question. And did you expect that it would be that fast given that you were so methodical and working so long to launch it?

[Jamie Dimon]

We don't always know how fast this will be, but I think we had a pretty good sense that we could sort of iterate and improve our way, sort of hill climb from the mountain we were on when we saw the sort of initial traction. But I think the contrarian that we did, unlike many others did was, you know, at the time when we launched, it was sort of viewed that you needed to have a different app for everything, right? Like you had to have a separate podcasting app. And podcasting music were very different. And for us, it's just listening. And what we realized is we should use this base of what was then several hundred million people in today's way, north of half a billion people, and just serve them more stuff. And it turns out that like what we saw all the time, it wasn't like our music listeners weren't listening to podcasts. So why not use this experience and also recommend them? Great other stuff. And we went from there. And then a year ago, we also added audiobooks because that turned out to be another way to increase people's listening and that they were also spending time doing.

[David Rosen]

But to your point on being slow and methodical, okay, you had channel to people, okay, they knew you were for listening. But if you're stuffing stuff in that channel that is not the thing that they want, then that blows up your core. And so I think my takeaway at least is you figured out a way to do it where you made sure that people were going to be open to using you for this new job.

[Jamie Dimon]

Yeah, of course, you're right. Obviously, just because you have the distribution advantage doesn't mean it'll work. But I think going back to it, what's so amazing with the platform is every time we try to do something deliberate, sort of top down, it sort of fail. And most of the time, actually what we see is the inklings of something already existing on the platform and then growing from there. So I mentioned this at the beginning, but Germany was sort of an early indicator for a lot of things for us, both in podcasting and in books. And what I realized even before we launched Books, for instance, was around 2018, we started seeing books showing up on the top list in Germany of the most sort of listened to music tracks. It wasn't music, it was clearly books, but it sort of made it all the way up to the top list. And shortly thereafter we started showing up as the biggest book distributor in the country. But we weren't even trying and it was actually a pretty horrible experience to listen to books on Spotify. So when your product is being used in spite of it actually being a pretty terrible experience, you kind of know you've got something. So that was the sort of genesis for how we then were able to build and sort of expand.

[David Rosen]

It's awesome. Well, that's it for this segment. Are you gonna stick around and watch the rest of the night?

[Jamie Dimon]

Oh, yeah, for sure. I'm so excited.

[David Rosen]

Awesome. Well, Daniel, thank you.

[Ben Gilbert]

Thank you so much for being here.

[David Rosen]

All right, listeners, this is a great time to tell you about one of our favorite companies in the acquired ecosystem, statsig. As you probably know by now, statsig is the world's first product acceleration platform. Thousands of companies, from OpenAI to Series A startups, rely on Statsig to ship fast, learn more and make smart decisions. But you may not know about all the ways in which their story is directly tied to Facebook's story that Mark will share with us later this episode.

[Ben Gilbert]

Indeed. And Mark's most famous catchphrase is probably move fast and break things. But despite instilling this in Facebook's engineering culture, Facebook doesn't actually break very often. How, Ben?

[David Rosen]

Well, Facebook invested hundreds of thousands of engineering hours in a set of internal tools. These tools let any engineer set up new metrics, ship new features, and measure performance in real time. So that meant anyone could just ship a new feature, but they always had the metrics to use as guardrails and they could always roll it back if anything broke.

[Ben Gilbert]

Totally awesome. You might wish that your team could build products like Facebook did, ship fast, make database decisions, iterate rapidly, but you need the right tools so you're stuck. Right? Well, enter statsig. Statsig has built the world's first product acceleration platform, combining tools like feature flags, product analytics, experimentation and observability all in one place, helping you move faster and make smarter decisions.

[David Rosen]

And even better, statsig was literally founded by an ex meta team who wanted to help everyone build like the best. Today, many of the world's leading tech Companies rely on STATSIG, including OpenAI, Microsoft, Notion, Anthropic, Figma, plus thousands of early stage startups.

[Ben Gilbert]

So if you're ready to accelerate your growth and democratize product building at your company, just go to statsig.com acquired and when you get in touch just tell them that Ben and David sent you.

[David Rosen]

Yes, now is also a great time to tell you about one of Our very favorite companies, the climate aligned AI infrastructure provider, Crusoe.

[Ben Gilbert]

Yes, Crusoe is a cloud platform built specifically for AI workloads and powered by clean energy. They build and operate GPU data centers with each one powered by low cost stranded energy that otherwise goes to waste or worse gets emitted as greenhouse gases.

[David Rosen]

The way this works is completely crazy. When acquired first started working with Crusoe last year, it was a cool idea, it was an early stage, very cool kind of insane concept. Now they are one of the world's most important companies with an AI cloud that is actually superior to the hyperscalers. And a whole bunch of the largest companies in the world are now trusting their AI infrastructure to Cruso.

[Ben Gilbert]

Yeah, it's easy to think about AI as like, oh, that's a bunch of PhDs over at Meta or OpenAI or anthropic tinkering with mobile model weights and then going and hitting compute. But there's this whole other industrial side of AI that's everything that happens after they press go on model training and that's energy, that's cooling, that's construction. It's literally like steel and pipes and wire. It's all the physical infrastructure behind AI. Crusoe has like hundreds and hundreds of construction workers, steel workers, plumbers, electricians, all building and operating data centers in some of the harshest locations on earth to capture this energy.

[David Rosen]

Yeah, the net of all this is Crusoe has gigawatts of power in their development pipeline that is like nuclear reactor amounts of power for less cost than other providers and with zero or in some cases actually negative emissions. And that's super important. If you listen to Mark talk later than this episode or elsewhere about what the bottleneck to AI progress is. It's actually not compute, but energy and Crusoe is solving that problem.

[Ben Gilbert]

It's just an awesome company. We're super proud to work with them and also to be investors. The other big update that's happened since we started working with them last year is that you can now work with Crusoe either through their managed AI cloud, which you always could. And that's great for startups and enterprises who want a complete AI platform or directly as a data center customer, which yeah, several of like the biggest companies in the world are now doing. So just go on over to Crusoe, AI Acquired, that's C R U S O E AI Acquired. Or click the link in the show notes and tell them that Ben and David sent you.

[David Rosen]

Thanks Crusoe.

[Ben Gilbert]

Well, we've got a little more Time before Mark comes on, and we have a couple more surprises planned. I think it's time to talk about the next 1.

[David Rosen]

Act 2.

[Ben Gilbert]

Act 2.

[David Rosen]

So David and I are sitting around. We're planning tonight. We're like, what's the thing to do when we've got all these great folks in the room who love Acquired? And we're like, rather than ask them, hey, what should we do tonight? We just check our email and see what do people actually already want when we're not even asking.

[Ben Gilbert]

Episode requests. Number one, you go through the acquired inbox. A lot of episode requests.

[David Rosen]

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

[Ben Gilbert]

Yep. Add it. Update the acquired canon. And we thought, who could we do this with? And it just so happens that the perfect person to grill us on everything we got wrong and everything we need to update lives right here in San Francisco. Please welcome, from Bloomberg and the circuit, Emily Chang.

[Mark Zuckerberg]

Hi.

[David Rosen]

Hello.

[Emily Chang]

Hi, Huck.

[Ben Gilbert]

Emily. Thank you so much.

[Emily Chang]

Congratulations.

[David Rosen]

Thank you.

[Emily Chang]

Thank you for being our guest. You guys, this is pretty awesome.

[David Rosen]

Welcome to our recording studio.

[Ben Gilbert]

Welcome to our.

[Emily Chang]

Yeah, thank you. I'm glad to be here.

[David Rosen]

I need to, like, mine you for some research. I know we have, like, a thing that we're doing here over the next 19 minutes, but you went wake surfing with Mark. Like, the theme of tonight is researching his. His fourth of July video. He is standing there in a tuxedo with an American flag, drinking a beer.

[Ben Gilbert]

Everybody's seen it.

[David Rosen]

Everybody's seen this. And the tuxedo's dry. Like, I've wake surfed a couple times. I start, you know, in the water, and you get pulled up. I would not. So how logistically can he, like, step off the boat?

[Emily Chang]

As you could probably tell from the episode, I'm not a wake surfer, but I tried, and Mark is pretty good. And what I did not realize is that you can do a dry start where you. If you're so good, you can just ride the board right off the boat and voila. Tuxedo surfing video. And I can personally attest that I did see him do a dry start. And he can. I mean, I think it's real.

[David Rosen]

I think that. Or he had, like, a lot of tuxedos on that boat to get multiple.

[Emily Chang]

Trial runs by the Way, Priscilla's pretty awesome, too. They can both shred. Just have to say why? Because she's here tonight, too. Yeah.

[David Rosen]

All right, Emily, take us in.

[Emily Chang]

So right now and a you guys, for self reflection, we're going to revisit some of your past episodes. And we decided on some episodes that maybe were a little controversial. In the early days, you would grade every company that you covered and you made some good calls, but also some questionable calls sometimes. So I thought we would go down, do a little memory lane and start with YouTube, which. David, you gave YouTube a C in 2016.

[David Rosen]

This is the acquisition of YouTube by Google.

[Emily Chang]

And you, Ben, said it could be as bad as a C. And I just. I just. I have to. I just question that a little bit.

[David Rosen]

We were young. It was 2016. We didn't know what we were doing.

[Ben Gilbert]

We were misguided.

[Emily Chang]

But let's just twist the knife a little because we have some quotes here. Ben, you said, I'm a little bit bearish on YouTube, primarily because it's not a destination. And David said, like, who goes to YouTube and discover something?

[Ben Gilbert]

The sad part is that we actually said that and decided to revisit this.

[David Rosen]

So I don't know, it may actually be the case that that wasn't a huge behavior yet. Like, the algorithm hadn't become. I know I'm being defensive here, but.

[Ben Gilbert]

Like, this is where we fall on our sword.

[David Rosen]

YouTube was like the utility that you uploaded a video and then you could embed it on your site. It's not like I would, like, start my day by. Maybe I was weird, but, like, I couldn't imagine starting my day and going to YouTube.com and just watching whatever. It served me the way that now, like, it's very easy to do that in the app.

[Ben Gilbert]

Well, I think. Okay, so for me, there's a lot to talk about with YouTube that we got wrong. This is the biggest thing that we've discovered since is, I think literally as we were making that episode, AI and social media feed recommenders were happening in that moment. And it was about to lead to everything that is happening today. And it was YouTube within Google and Meta, then Facebook buying GPUs and building AI that turned feed recommenders into the ultimate destination site. And we just completely had no idea that that was happening.

[David Rosen]

Right. AI had its moment a decade ago. We're excited about it now. But, like, the use case of recommending you something that should be the next item that you should consume was a killer use case for AI. Even then, we missed that.

[Emily Chang]

Well, Today you have analysts saying if you pulled YouTube out of Google, it would be worth half a trillion dollars, which is almost double where Netflix is. It's on track. YouTube TV to be the largest cable provider, cable provider in the United States.

[Ben Gilbert]

It has Sunday Ticket.

[Emily Chang]

I have a house full of kids in my house. It's the first and the second screen because we have YouTube TV. So the question is, can they really be everything to everyone? Right, Right.

[Ben Gilbert]

So here is, I think, our most legitimate defense. Google does not report YouTube profitability. They report YouTube revenue. So when we did the episode, YouTube was doing about $5 billion run rate revenue. It is now like 35 to 40 billion annual revenue run rate.

[David Rosen]

And what it was. And back then it was way losing money. Like it was a money pit.

[Ben Gilbert]

Yes, and it was losing a lot of money back then. Google does not report today. But here is what is unique about YouTube versus every other platform is they pay out 55% of revenue on long form and 45% on shorts directly to.

[David Rosen]

Creators, which, you know, is great for creators, but that's a tough business to run when every dollar you're getting in, you're giving more than half out, you.

[Ben Gilbert]

Know, and it's a direct variable cost.

[Emily Chang]

$70 billion to creators over the last three years, which again is more than Netflix spends on content.

[David Rosen]

So I'll go on record. YouTube was an A acquisition because of the strategic value. I mean, whether it's the second largest search engine, second to Google, or the second largest social media property, you know, it strategically, very great thing to own, not to mention going into the land of AI training data. But like, as a business, it is not clear to me that YouTube makes money.

[Emily Chang]

Well, and I mean, my source is also, if they're making money, it's little to no money, but they could, they could obviously change how much they're paying out to creators. They can, you know, turn the spigot.

[Ben Gilbert]

On and off and the durability that they're building and the affinity from creators. We'll talk about creators on the platform in a minute. Yes, there is a reason why so many creators want to graduate to YouTube and this is it.

[Emily Chang]

Well, my shows on YouTube, your shows on YouTube. How do you feel about YouTube as creators?

[David Rosen]

Strongly for everyone listening. Thank you for listening to the podcast feed where we have a direct relationship with you that is not intermediated by an algorithm. But honestly, it is the craziest thing to see these YouTubers who have built mass followings, tens of millions, you know, hundreds of millions, sometimes of subscribers, where subscribers and Views are uncorrelated.

[Emily Chang]

Yeah, yeah. Grade today.

[Ben Gilbert]

Grade today. Oh, A, still an A. So here's the other thing we didn't mention, and I think this was true back then too. YouTube is both the second largest social media property in the world and the second largest search engine in the world. So yeah, A, the way that you.

[David Rosen]

Should look at YouTube is not what is the discounted cash flow of YouTube as an independent business. If you look at their profitability today, it's what was the existential risk to Google of not owning YouTube if YouTube became a thing somewhere outside of Google? And that is worth paying a lot for.

[Emily Chang]

Huge. All right, moving on. The next company we're going to Talk about is LinkedIn. You covered it three days after they got bought by Microsoft. You both basically gave it an A bed and quote. How are we both positive on this? I woke up Monday morning being like, what?

[David Rosen]

Oh yeah. And then we've got this other one.

[Emily Chang]

What about LinkedIn today?

[David Rosen]

Yeah, that we said we had no idea how it went because it was too recent. I think the story with LinkedIn is it was super unclear that it had the running room ahead of it. Like, what are the numbers on YouTube today, revenue wise?

[Ben Gilbert]

On YouTube? I'm sorry, on LinkedIn, 16 billion plus in revenue today.

[David Rosen]

They 5x revenue since they were bought 8 years ago, of which 5 billion.

[Ben Gilbert]

Comes from advertising and content, which for all intents and purposes didn't exist when the acquisition happened. They have built that into a real business. I mean, for us on acquired, you know, actually went and looked in preparation for this. We have about relatively equal number of followers on LinkedIn as a platform versus any of the other social platforms out there. But engagement is like 5, 10x on LinkedIn. I mean it's our most important social platform. And if you had said that eight years ago, we would have been crazy.

[David Rosen]

The reason why this was worth a revisit and that why I think they've been so much more successful, successful than anyone would have thought. At the time of acquisition, they 5x'd in revenue, which, you know, over eight years is great, but not like three standard deviations, four standard deviations from the mean. It's not one of these crazy things in the world, but essentially they created $100 billion of market cap. I mean, if you look at what a reasonable multiple would be for LinkedIn if it were an independent company today, it's a big company. Like it would be 100 and, I don't know, over $100 billion market cap company today. And like it's just kind of hanging out inside Microsoft.

[Emily Chang]

Revisiting this was a little traumatic for me because this was, if you'll remember, this was an acquisition that like no one saw coming. There were no leaks, no reporting on this before it happened. And my producer was apparently like calling my phone nonstop in the morning. It was like the crack of dawn and I was not picking up. So she called my husband who came in and was like, Microsoft just bought LinkedIn and you have to interview Satya and Jeff Weiner in an hour. And I was like, what? So, yeah, so that's what I remember.

[David Rosen]

Was it a good interview?

[Emily Chang]

I mean, I think so.

[Ben Gilbert]

I actually, I watched it. You said it. Yeah, it was good. It was great.

[Emily Chang]

My hair wasn't quite fully done, but we made it. We made it through. Okay.

[David Rosen]

You have some new reporting.

[Emily Chang]

I do actually, because I talked to Reid Hoffman who of course is co founder of LinkedIn. And you know, it's interesting because Reid joined the board of Microsoft. He's still on the board of Microsoft. He was an early investor in OpenAI. On the board of OpenAI.

[Mark Zuckerberg]

Shocker.

[Emily Chang]

Satya Nadella is on the AI train early. Microsoft is the biggest backer of OpenAI now.

[Ben Gilbert]

And Kevin Scott is the CTO of Microsoft now who came from LinkedIn.

[Emily Chang]

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

[Ben Gilbert]

The question is, did he listen to our Microsoft series?

[Emily Chang]

I don't know. You wonder if the AI wars would have played out differently. Okay, we're going to keep moving quickly because I really want to make sure we get to the last one. But SpaceX, one of your most popular episodes ever. Luckily you're in the clear because you didn't grade them.

[Ben Gilbert]

We stopped grading at some point, but.

[Emily Chang]

Obviously Starlink is a juggernaut. Ben, you talked about it being potentially a $30 billion business at the time. Can you grade SpaceX today knowing that Starlink is just even bigger?

[David Rosen]

Okay, so yeah, the company was valued at 36 billion in May of 2020 when we did the episode. At that time they had had 26 successful launches that year. Last year they did 96 launches and they're planning to do 118 this year, which is over two a week. It's like an insane.

[Ben Gilbert]

They're doing one every three days.

[David Rosen]

But on top of the launch business.

[Ben Gilbert]

Yeah, the launch business is not the interesting part of the business.

[David Rosen]

They now have Starlink, which is estimated to do six and a half billion dollars in 2024. And they are reportedly profitable as a business. I'm pretty sure the 7,000 Starlink satellites that are in orbit represent two thirds of the total satellites orbiting the Earth. And it's not just like, oh, we'll see if people want Starlink. People want Starlink. I mean, the business itself. I think I'm looking at the subscriber count. It's something like 3 million subscribers. And it's only been three years since it launched, so it is.

[Ben Gilbert]

So when we did the episode, Starlink was like pie in the sky. Literally. There was nothing. And now I'm pretty sure Starlink is. The entire SpaceX was valued at 36 billion when we did the episode. Starlink itself is worth way more than 36 billion today.

[Emily Chang]

It's a beast. Total beast. And by the way, nobody else could have saved those astronauts, right? Like, fight. I mean, NASA didn't have a choice.

[Ben Gilbert]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Emily Chang]

Well, Russia maybe, but that's complicated. And we don't even know if China could dock at the iss. I mean, I think that's okay to say. So I didn't just cross the line.

[David Rosen]

I will say so. The Starlink execution is just more remarkable than like, I think 99% of people would have guessed.

[Emily Chang]

Yeah. Okay, so now to your most requested revisit ever. The Arena Queen. You gave her an A, but that was two years ago before the ERAS tour. So I think you're going to have to invent a new category.

[David Rosen]

Certainly. Or stop grading. That's the real answer.

[Ben Gilbert]

The context on this is it's a little weird because there's no, like, enterprise value of Twitter out there, of Taylor out there that you can calculate.

[David Rosen]

We're not talking about Taylor.

[Ben Gilbert]

There's no enterprise value of Taylor. The closest thing was when we did the episode. Forbes estimated her net worth at $550 million. Not Woo.

[Mark Zuckerberg]

Yeah.

[Ben Gilbert]

By our calculations, we're pretty sure she generated on the order of $550 million of free cash flow this past year. This year, last 12 months. That's a woo.

[Emily Chang]

So is she more than a billionaire?

[David Rosen]

So this is. David's got like an argument on this. So walk us through the. Your perceived financial breakdown of Swift Incorporated.

[Mark Zuckerberg]

Of.

[Ben Gilbert]

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

[David Rosen]

There was this myth that streaming doesn't pay.

[Ben Gilbert]

This myth that streaming doesn't pay. Last year Taylor made over well reported, reported, reported this is reported well over $100 million from Spotify. Streaming alone. Alone doesn't include any of the other platforms. So, you know, gross that up. And by nature of what she has been doing that we talked about in that episode, redoing her masters, like you think about what of the percentage of those streams that are happening, are they on where she owns all the rights? Like that is a very, very, very high gross margin number that is coming.

[David Rosen]

To take every year of that high hundred plus million dollar streaming number. She actually keeps quite a bit of it because of this strategy that she's.

[Ben Gilbert]

Not all the amount that she's getting just from streaming. Like ERAS tour aside, movie aside, she is getting paid more every year than any Hollywood actor, probably any athlete in the world. She could just sit at home.

[David Rosen]

Okay, but then, but she doesn't. But then, but then she did an ERAS tour, which is like the most unbelievable tour that any artist has ever conceived of or executed. How much money did that make last year, David?

[Ben Gilbert]

So last year the ERAS tour In calendar year 2023 grossed I think $1.1 billion.

[Emily Chang]

Wow.

[Ben Gilbert]

The previous.

[David Rosen]

Which is a gross. Tours are expensive. There's a lot of, you know, things a lot of involved in making shows.

[Ben Gilbert]

Yes, there are. The previous record for highest grossing tour ever, I believe was a billion dollars. So Taylor eclipsed that over multiple years that that was earned. So not only did she set the record for highest grossing tour, she did it within 12 months. Obviously the tour has continued.

[Emily Chang]

Yeah.

[David Rosen]

But let's say she operates like a very high, you know, a high margin touring business. Let's assume she's very efficient at it. Call it a 30, 35% operating margin on the business. A lot of artists actually lose money touring because it's a, you know, Anyway.

[Ben Gilbert]

That'S another 300, 300, $350 million in cash flow every year.

[David Rosen]

Yep. Or at least last year during the.

[Ben Gilbert]

ERAS tour she is making when she is actively touring. And then, and then there's the movie.

[Emily Chang]

Right.

[Ben Gilbert]

So the movie grossed 260, $67 million at the box office. Highest grossing concert film of all time. Taylor went direct to the theaters with the movie.

[David Rosen]

So paying less middlemen.

[Ben Gilbert]

Less middlemen. Then she did the direct deal with Disney for the streaming rights. That was another $75 million on top of that. So well over $300 million from the movie. Obviously you're not going to make a movie every year, but.

[David Rosen]

So David, you're kind of getting to the point of like your 550 million number of cash flow last year may actually be conservative.

[Ben Gilbert]

I think that is conservative for last year. I think if you were to say, like, okay, what is a smoothed out steady state over a three year rolling average for Taylor Inc. Well, you did.

[David Rosen]

Used to be an investor.

[Ben Gilbert]

Billion plus cash flow every year.

[Emily Chang]

So I re listened to the Taylor podcast with my kids driving to Tahoe and they loved it. You have a potential gen Alpha audience. It's our gateway drug in case you're getting nervous. But here's a question. Is it possible that we're at peak Taylor?

[Ben Gilbert]

Okay, so this is the most important debate to all of this, which is if you're trying to value the enterprise of Taylor, what multiple do you put on that cash flow? Right, right.

[David Rosen]

Do you believe it is a durable business like some of the great content businesses of all time, like the one that you put in our model, which is Disney?

[Ben Gilbert]

Yes. Disney trades at 20x free cash flow. Taylor is 550 million in free cash flow. That's a $11 billion enterprise value for Taylor. Forbes currently estimates her net worth at 1.1, I think.

[Emily Chang]

And now she's in her NFL era. Like how do you value that?

[Ben Gilbert]

Right. So okay, but here's the good. I think Ben and I differ a little bit on this. How would argue Disney is the right comp.

[David Rosen]

Oh boy. To look at this single greatest like IP holder in the world that has proven over, you know, a century that it can stay relevant and apply that multiple to a single artist with no diversification who has had this unbelievable ascent and you're taking that multiple off of this extreme outlier year. Like I'm not saying, you know, it should trade at 1 or 2x but like 20x. David is a little. But your point I think is a very interesting one, which is when people are looking at oh, net worth of a person like this, they sort of foolishly don't consider it an enterprise.

[Ben Gilbert]

Their multiple they're using is one.

[David Rosen]

Right. Like why are you assuming that they're worth the cash in their bank when clearly they can produce these incredible returns year over year over year. So I think that's the slept on thing in Taylor.

[Ben Gilbert]

Are we at peak Taylor? I think to me, I mean, I think the song that played before we started the movie and walking out here was Start Me up by the Rolling Stones.

[David Rosen]

Yeah.

[Ben Gilbert]

Taylor is the Rolling Stones of this generation. Yeah, that's my idea.

[Emily Chang]

Is it Taylor or just the beginning? I'm going to say no just because that seems like a safe bet when you're talking about Taylor.

[David Rosen]

Yeah. For my own safety, I'm going to say we are not at peak Taylor.

[Emily Chang]

All right, you heard it here. For the record, I think you guys need another Taylor episode. That's the verdict for the fans. Thank you guys so much and congratulations and I can't wait to keep listening.

[David Rosen]

Thanks, Emily.

[Ben Gilbert]

Thank you, Emily.

[David Rosen]

Thank you so much. All right, so David, we've had Jamie Dimon, we've had Daniel Ek, we've had Emily Chang.

[Ben Gilbert]

Yep.

[David Rosen]

What else could we possibly have up our sleeve before Mark, we won't keep.

[Ben Gilbert]

You waiting too, too much longer. But we do have one more special guest, one more surprise update in a minute.

[David Rosen]

Yes. But first, David, this is a great time to tell you a little bit more about our incredible presenting partner, JP Morgan Payments.

[Ben Gilbert]

Yes, it is. Max and Umar are actually backstage.

[David Rosen]

Oh, should we do it live?

[Ben Gilbert]

I think we should do it live. I think. In the spirit of doing it live, please welcome the global co heads of JP Morgan Payments, Max Nikkurchin and Umar Farooq.

[David Rosen]

Hey, Umar.

[Mark Zuckerberg]

Thank you.

[David Rosen]

Well, welcome guys. It is so great to have you here. Listeners have heard us talk about JP Morgan Payments all year unacquired. But could you start maybe just with a quick overview on the business, how big it is and how important to the world it.

[Ben Gilbert]

Yeah.

[G]

Hello everyone. Great to be here with you. And you know Dave and Ben. Great to share the stage with you. It's been a fantastic partnership. You talk about so many successful companies. Look what you have created here now. J.P. morgan payments. In brief, we basically help companies receive money, hold money, send money, safeguard money against fraud and take the insights from all of this to grow their business. That takes many different forms. We help the coffee shop around the corner have a point of sale solution so they can take credit cards. We work with marketplaces or e commerce platforms and we work with many large multinational companies and even other banks. We're in 160 countries and we move about $10 trillion. $10 trillion every day. That is, I think one in every four dollars that moves around the Globe.

[Ben Gilbert]

Wow.

[G]

So it is, I think, probably the largest payments business in the world. And as a result, we don't only become the backbone of many companies, but sometimes of entire economies. Which means we have, of course in our DNA, creativity and problem solving, but we also focus on stability, resiliency and safety. And this is why so many companies that you feature and acquired, actually our clients and you know, they simply can't outgrow us. We are with them every step of the way. From startup all the way to sitting here on the chair.

[David Rosen]

The last payment solution you will ever need.

[Ben Gilbert]

Exactly. Well, okay, so speaking of, we're here in San Francisco in Silicon Valley, the tech and AI capital of the world. How is JP Morgan Payments keeping pace with the innovation that is happening in this room all around us? The businesses that you all are building, as Max said, it's part of our DNA. You have to innovate to survive. We are building stuff for next 5, 10, 20, 100 years. We, within our Onyx business unit have the largest financial blockchain life equal system on the planet. We do bigger transactions than any blockchain, including the crypto blockchains. We basically have pretty extensive embedded finance solutions where you might be interacting with the platform, but really it's our rails that are seamlessly serving you.

[Mark Zuckerberg]

And then the list goes on and on.

[Ben Gilbert]

And even in AI, which you cannot not mention anymore in the world, we use AI to catch fraud, which you can imagine. You know, we've got to go up some against some AI systems on the other side. You need to have some AI of your own. So we are building stuff at a different scale and scope. When I think of JPMorgan payments, we perform miracles in magnitude every single day. Great. Well, thank you so much for the great relationship. Thank you.

[David Rosen]

Really appreciate it.

[Ben Gilbert]

Thank you.

[David Rosen]

All right, so we alluded to one more thing before intermission.

[Ben Gilbert]

We have one more thing before. One more thing.

[David Rosen]

A special treat from a past Acquired guest. So one of the things that happened in the insane, you know, year that we've had was that we had this like viral clip from an episode this never happened in the land of acquired. And it got like tens of millions of views and it got picked up by Forbes and Fortune and the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. It actually went so nuts that we felt like it was kind of misunderstood. And we felt bad we pulled the clip down because we felt like it just wasn't really explaining what the person meant correctly. And so we wanted to correct the record and have that person back via video to kind of say it straight and say what he meant. So everyone, Jensen Huang.

[H]

Hi everybody. It's great to join you at A Acquired Life. Wow, this is, this is really something. I, I still remember when I met Dave and Ben. They interviewed me right here on this stage at Nvidia's headquarters. And now this podcast, it's attracted an incredible audience and so I'm really proud of them. And one of the questions that they asked me was, was, you know, if I, if I knew what I know now, I think, or something like that, you know, would I start Nvidia all over again? And I said, absolutely not. Of course I, it was taken out of context because I was asked about that several times after that. And of course I would start the company if I knew it would turn out this way. The reason why I said what I said was, has everything to do with being an entrepreneur. Building a company is insanely hard. The number of things that you have to know, the amazing people that you have to surround yourself with, the adversaries and all the smart things that they're going to do and the adversities that you're going to be confronted with over time. The mountain of it. In the course of 31 years, if I were to take all of that, all the challenges and all the hardship and all the pain and suffering of the last 32 years and I would have compressed it into the brain of a 29 year old, there is no way that that person would have started the company. And my point there is the super point of entrepreneurs, which is your superpowers are partly your ignorance that you don't know how hard it is. And so I think that's what I meant.

[David Rosen]

Everybody.

[Mark Zuckerberg]

Jetson Wong.

[David Rosen]

Nice to have that fixed.

[Mark Zuckerberg]

Yes, yes.

[David Rosen]

Feels good.

[Ben Gilbert]

We can officially correct the record on that one.

[David Rosen]

Yes. All right. We have finally arrived. The main event tonight is featured some incredible founder led companies. Jensen from Nvidia, Daniel from Spotify, and next we have the iconic founder, CEO of our time, Mark Zuckerberg.

[Mark Zuckerberg]

Hey, let's go, man. Let's go on. Yeah.

[Jamie Dimon]

Mark.

[Mark Zuckerberg]

Hey.

[Ben Gilbert]

It's great to have you here.

[Mark Zuckerberg]

It's great to be here. You know, I was watching, I was watching Jensen's video correcting the record and I was thinking to myself, we might need to book the next one of these for all the things I'm going to have to apologize for that I'm going to say tonight. Nah, just kidding. Well, I don't apologize anymore.

[David Rosen]

We've noticed.

[Ben Gilbert]

Well, okay, wait, wait. Here's the question. If you knew what you knew today.

[Mark Zuckerberg]

What's up?

[Ben Gilbert]

If you knew what you know today, would you have started Facebook?

[Mark Zuckerberg]

Oh, God. I mean, look, I think coming out hot, David.

[Ben Gilbert]

Yeah, I mean, he started it literally.

[Mark Zuckerberg]

I think there's something to Jensen's original sentiment, which is that the entrepreneurial journey is very challenging, especially the early days when you're running a startup, and there's the sense that what you're doing could just die at any moment. And the volatility, everything is just getting thrashed so much. And it's not, obviously, you look back, you have all these fond memories, but it was not the most fun part of the journey or, you know, the part of my life that I, like, wish I could go back and relive. So, I mean, I do think that there's something to what Jensen was saying that I thought was very honest and that when I heard him say it the first time, I was like, yeah, I get that. Right. I think there are, like, a lot of people for whom, you know, if you knew how painful it would be along the way, you wouldn't get started. But then, you know, I think that that's one of the things that's good about human nature, is you can underestimate how painful things are going to be. So that way you can go and do good things.

[Ben Gilbert]

Well, on that topic, we have a lot to talk about. Yeah, I think this is actually very appropriate. First, we have to ask you about your shirt and what you're wearing.

[Mark Zuckerberg]

Yeah. You know, I started working with people to design some of my own clothes. So I figure, you know, look, we're going to design eyewear, we're going to design other stuff that people wear. Let's get good at this. And so this one, I actually worked with this great fashion designer, Mike Amiri, and he's got a great story, so I wouldn't be surprised if you're doing one of these with him one day. And this one is. So I've kind of started working on this series of shirts with some of my favorite classical sayings on them. So this one is Pathe Mathos, Learning Through Suffering. It's a little family saying and also Aeschylus.

[Ben Gilbert]

Was that your family saying growing up, or is that your family now?

[David Rosen]

Well, no, let's pull that thread. No pun intended, I promise. What does learning through suffering mean to you?

[Mark Zuckerberg]

Well, I think you learn what matters to you and what's important and kind of your place in the world through repeatedly hitting your head against different challenges. And, I mean, I think that that is Sort of. That's the journey, right? I mean, that's the entrepreneurial journey. It's also, I think, part of the beauty of building things. But something that Jensen talks a lot about too. Right? It's like I feel like.

[David Rosen]

You know.

[Mark Zuckerberg]

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

[Ben Gilbert]

Speaking of facing challenges, we want to talk about a number of those because we counted. By our count, I think you have faced more existential challenges than any meaningful company in history through your first 20 years.

[Mark Zuckerberg]

First though, it's a dubious distinction.

[David Rosen]

We will make our case to you of why and enumerate them.

[Ben Gilbert]

You're still here.

[Mark Zuckerberg]

But first, I kind of think my, you know, like that old Nike Michael Jordan ad where he's talking about how he's failed over and over and over again and that's how he succeeds. That one really resonates with me too.

[Ben Gilbert]

So thanks to you guys, I got a pair of these this summer and I genuinely love them. Tell us the story of how these came to be.

[Mark Zuckerberg]

Yeah, so thanks. I'm excited about them too. So, you know, we at Meta, we've been building social experiences for 20 years now. And originally it took the form of a website, then mobile apps. But the thing is, I never thought about us as a social media company. We're not a social app company. We are a social connection company. We talk about what we're doing is building the future of human connection. And that's not only going to be constrained over time to what you can do on a phone, right? On a small screen. So when you think about when we got started, okay, we're like a handful of kids, you know, we weren't able, we didn't have the resources, the time to go define whatever the next computing platform is. And also, you know, Facebook originally got started around the same time as, you know, a bunch of the early smartphones and those platforms got started. So we didn't really get to play any role in developing that platform. And one of the big themes I think for the next chapter of what we do is I want to be able to build what I think are sort of the ideal experiences, not just what you're allowed to build on some platform that someone else built, but like what is actually if you can think from first principles. What is the ideal social experience? So I think what you would like to have is not a phone that you look down at that kind of takes your attention away from the things and the people around you. Not just a small screen. I think what you ideally have is glasses. And through the glasses, there's one part of it. Whereas the glasses, they can see what you see and they can hear what you hear. And in doing so, they can be kind of the perfect AI assistant for you because they have context on what you're doing. But then part of that is also that the glasses can project images, basically like holograms, out into the world. And that way your social experiences with other people aren't constrained to these little interactions you can have on a phone screen in the not so distant future. You can imagine, because you guys have demoed some of the stuff that we've done a version of this where we're having a conversation like this, but maybe one of us isn't even here. They're just a hologram and we have glasses. And it really. There's the question of delivering a realistic sense of presence. There's something magical in the realm of building social experiences around the feeling of human presence and, like, being there with another person and this physical perception, right, where we're very physical beings, right? People like to intellectualize everything, but a lot of our experience is very physical. And this physical sense of presence that you are with another person, doing things in the physical world is something that you're going to be able to do through holograms, through glasses, without being taken away from whatever else you're doing. Just kind of have that mixed in with the rest of the world. It's going to be, I think, the ultimate digital social experience. And I think it's also going to be the ultimate incarnation of AI because you're going to have conversations where it's like, all right, there's some people. It's like, maybe I'm physically here. There's a person. You're like a hologram there. There's an AI that is kind of embodied as someone is there. And the glasses will enable this. So, okay, so how are we going after this building this? This is like some. Some huge project. We've been working on it for 10 years, and there are a lot of different challenges to solve to get there. There's like, you have to build a novel display stack, right? It's not. These aren't just screens, like the kind that are in phones. There's this long lineage. They they're connected to the screens that have been in TVs and monitors and things for a long time. There's been this massive optimization of the supply chain. There's like brand new display stack around holographic displays that basically need to get created and then they need to be put into glasses, they need to be miniaturized. And you also in the glasses need to fit chips, microphones, speakers, cameras, eye tracking to be able to understand what you're doing. Batteries to make it last all day.

[David Rosen]

Operating new novel RF protocols.

[Mark Zuckerberg]

Yeah, it's like, okay, it's a pretty big challenge. So we're like, all right, let's go try to go for the big thing. And we've been working on that for a while and we're pretty close to being able to show off kind of the first prototype that we have of that. And I'm really excited about that. At the same time, we also came at it from this lens of. All right, so that's like a lot of new technology that needs to get developed a lot to pack into a form factor because the glasses have to be good looking too. So what if we just constrain ourselves to like we're going to work with a great partner. Essel or Luxottica, they make Ray Ban, they make a lot of the iconic glasses. Let's see what we can fit into glasses today and make them as useful as possible. And I actually, I kind of thought when we were getting started with those that it was almost like a practice project for like for the ultimate, which.

[David Rosen]

Let'S be clear, that's what you thought Facebook was.

[Mark Zuckerberg]

That's true, that's true. Yeah.

[David Rosen]

I did like for your real startup someday.

[Mark Zuckerberg]

That's true. Yeah. No, this is. Let's go on a tangent there for a second. So started Facebook in school, came out to Silicon Valley with Dustin and a handful of people working on it at the time. And we did that because Silicon Valley is where all the startups came from. And I remember we got off the plane, we were driving down 101, we were like, wow, ebay, Yahoo. Like, this is amazing. All these great companies. One day maybe we'll build a company like this. And I'd already started Facebook and I was like, surely the project that we're working on now is not a company.

[David Rosen]

And Facebook had like some scale at this point.

[Mark Zuckerberg]

Oh, no, no. It was a great project. I just didn't have the ambition to turn it into a company at the time. That just kind of happened. But anyway, yeah, I mean, a lot of Hard work, obviously, but it's. But I just, at the time I was kind of like, yeah, no, I don't think this is it.

[Ben Gilbert]

Well, that's your answer of would you have started? You actually didn't try to start Facebook?

[Mark Zuckerberg]

I didn't know. So, yeah, so I mean, the glasses though, you know, we thought that this was like, all right, we want to get working with SLR luxottica so we can start building more and more advanced glass. And then, you know, they're really good, they look good. And then AI, like the massive transformation in AI for listeners.

[David Rosen]

Let's just be really clear. You guys shipped this product that I'm holding before LLMs or at least before the public consciousness was aware of, you know, the chatgpt moment. And these were not manufactured and shipped as an AI device that came later when they were already in market.

[Mark Zuckerberg]

Yeah, a few years ago I would have predicted that AR holograms would have been available before kind of like full scale AI. And now I think it's probably going to be the other order. So now it's like, all right, great. Well, this is actually a great product because it's got, it's got the cameras so it can see what you see. It's got the microphone, it's got the speakers, you can talk to it. I remember calling Alex Himmel, the guy who runs the product group that's exactly running it, and I'm like, hey, you know, I think we should probably pivot this and make it so that meta AI is the primary feature of it. And then like, I remember I came in the next week and they built a prototype of it on Tuesday and it was like, all right, good. Yeah, no, this is good. This is going to be a very successful product.

[Ben Gilbert]

He told us a much more high stakes version of that story.

[David Rosen]

I was on the highway with my kids and I get this call on a Saturday from Mark and he's like, those glasses, could we put meta AI in them running on device and like ship that soon so we can see if that's a good idea or not?

[Mark Zuckerberg]

Yeah, that's. That tracks. That's what I just said. Sounds right.

[David Rosen]

Okay, so thank you for opening up with a story. The question that I would like to try to answer tonight is why has Meta worked as spectacularly well as it has? I mean, one of the most valuable companies in the world through multiple iterations, multiple technology waves fighting off, you know, maybe let's name all the waves in which people said, oh, Facebook and Meta are so screwed. And yet that is not the way it looks today.

[Ben Gilbert]

MySpace, Twitter, Gen1, Instagram, Snapchat, WhatsApp, TikTok, Apple app tracking put in its own whole category. And now ChatGPT, that's nine.

[David Rosen]

Like, there is a widely held public narrative every single time Snapchat discovers stories, or there's something where people are like, oh, the cool thing that Facebook, the company did is just obsolete now and they're going to go away. You very much haven't gone away. What do you think is the through line of the DNA of the company that allows you to keep winning?

[Mark Zuckerberg]

I think it's that we're a technology company that is focused on human connection, not a specific type of app. So we never thought about ourselves as a website or a social network or anything like that. For me, building this kind of glasses to enable the future of people being able to feel present with another person, no matter where they actually physically are, is the natural continuation of the kind of apps that we build today. But it depends on how you define what you are. And then you need to figure out, well, how do you build? How do you give yourself the competence to actually go do that? And that's where I think being a strong technology company comes in. Because a lot of companies, I think, think about themselves too narrowly in terms of, okay, well, we're this kind of one thing. And the reason why we can build all these things is because we have a really strong technology foundation. And some of that is just me and how I think about stuff. I was an engineer before I got started. I mean, I mostly took systems engineering type classes when I was in college. So you talk about Friendster in MySpace and all the scaling challenges they had doing the graph calculations of like, all right, do you know this person? Should you share friends of friends and friends? Yeah, yeah.

[Ben Gilbert]

Actually, can you take us back? And we want to ask you the story of that time. I mean, it seems quaint now. Friendster, MySpace, but you study computer science, graph networking, social graphs. That is a very, very difficult conversation calculation.

[Mark Zuckerberg]

So it's a combination of a product question and a technology question. I think you can define the product in such a general way that the technology becomes basically impossible to solve. So you want to have a smart product definition, but then you want to be competent and better than everyone else at the technology. And I think that that's something that we've held ourselves to and build a good organization around. And it's one of the things that I observed as soon as I came out to the Valley that all these companies that called themselves technology Companies were not really set up that way. Right? The companies I was talking about, it's like the CEO wasn't technical. The board of directors had no one technical on it. They had like one dude on the management team who was the head of engineering who was technical and like everyone else wasn't. It's like, all right, if that's your team, then you're not a technology company. So I think one of the things that I've always been pretty careful about is I actually, like, want like a lot of the people on our management team. It's like, you know, split. It's mostly people running either these big product groups who come up through different technical pathways of the company. And I think that there's like a balance, right? It's like you don't want everyone to be an engineer because there's other things that matter too. But if you don't have enough of your kind of share of the company as engineers, then you're not a technology company. And I think that that also is important to the board. And I think just like, in terms of how you weigh decisions and culturally, things inside the company matters a lot. But I think that that's one of the things that has been really fundamental. It's like we're able to kind of go from platform to platform and do these different things because we've invested and cared about the underlying technology. The product experiences that we build on top of that are an implementation and they matter. And for that, I think we also, I think, are a pretty curious and learning focused organization where I view the product strategy less as any one specific thing and more as how do we iterate and learn as quickly as possible how to make each thing better for the people we're trying to serve. Right? So, like, I define our strategy as we can learn faster than every other company. We're gonna win. We're gonna build a better product than everyone else because we're gonna get it out first or early. We're going to have a good feedback loop. We're going to get. Get a bunch of feedback. We're going to learn what people like better than other people. And then over time, by the time you get to, you know, whether it's version three or four or five, I mean, they're not even discrete versions because you ship so frequently. It's. You just. You learn faster. So I think that's basically the formula. Be a technology company, build good foundation. Like, learn from what people are kind of focused on in the world and just iterate as quickly as you can.

[David Rosen]

In one of my research calls to prep for this, someone described you as a master strategist, which, like, it's. We, we all sort of acknowledge that at this point, but that the, I.

[Mark Zuckerberg]

Mean, except for like all the stuff that I just thought was not going to be that important, that ended up actually being the most important. It's.

[David Rosen]

But that's the thing is part of.

[Mark Zuckerberg]

It is like, okay, you, you want to set up the game so that way you optimize, you create your luck.

[Ben Gilbert]

This is what Jensen told us. Like the apple's going to fall from the tree in some direction and if you just set up the game that you have a hand close enough to catch it.

[David Rosen]

The comment that someone made to me was the reason Mark is such a good strategist is because he plays the company as if it's a turn based strategy game. And he just makes sure he gets more turns than anybody else and he makes sure that he learns more from each turn than the next player does. Do you feel like that encapsulates like Meta's product? But it does kind of feel like the way that you make bets is like, well, if we have great engineering, then that can kind of take care of the speed part. That's like many iterations or multiple at bats. And then the, well, grid engineering and.

[Mark Zuckerberg]

Speed and iteration are actually two different values. They're not necessarily at odds. But I think there are a lot of great engineering organizations that try to build things that are super high quality and have good competence around that. But there's a certain personality that goes with taking your stuff and putting it out there before it's fully polished. And look, I'm not saying that our strategy or approach on this is the only one that works. I think in a lot of ways we're the opposite of Apple and clearly their stuff has worked really well. But I mean, they take this approach, it's like we're going to take a long time, we're going to polish it, we're going to put it out. And maybe for the stuff that they're doing that works, maybe that just fits with their culture. But for us, I think that there are a lot of conversations that we have internally where you're almost at the line of being embarrassed about what you put out, you want to put stuff out early enough so you can get good feedback. You obviously want to test things that are reasonable hypotheses. So if it's like so ineffective, then you're not testing a good hypothesis that doesn't work. But I Do think a lot of the conversations that we have are like, okay, well, we can get this to be a lot better if we work on it for like another couple of months or whatever. And I do just think that, like, you want to really have a culture that values shipping and getting things out and getting feedback more than needing always to get great positive accolades from people when you put stuff out. Because I think if you want to wait until you get praised all the time, you're missing a bunch of the time when you could have learned a bunch of useful stuff and then incorporated that into the next version you were going to ship.

[David Rosen]

And it's just about making sure that what the thing that the company is known for or its brand can withstand all the little damage that you do to it by shipping stuff that's not quite ready.

[Mark Zuckerberg]

Well, I would like to hope that it's not damaging to the brand, but.

[David Rosen]

Well, but innately it is. Like when you're like, oh, I feel bad because I shipped a product that wasn't good enough, you're sort of.

[Mark Zuckerberg]

Yeah, no, I don't want to overstate it. I mean, we don't ship things that we think are bad, but we also don't take. And we want to make sure that we're shipping things that are kind of early enough that we can get good feedback to see what they're going to be most used for. Like, I think a lot of the AI stuff that we're building now, for example, it actually, you know, it's pretty clear that AI is going to be transformative for a lot of different things. It is actually less clear what are going to be the initial use cases for a lot of these things that are super valuable. And so, okay, part of it is like, okay, you put something out, you want to kind of collect feedback and what people are actually where it's resonating. Now, if what you put out is bad, then you're not going to collect good data because people aren't going to use it for anything because it sucks. So. But I do think that you have hypotheses for what people might really want to use it for. And they're not all going to be right. And you want to kind of go early enough on that as more. Yeah.

[David Rosen]

So I'm building to this question of, to you, is product creation an act of invention or discovery? Like, is David always inside that marble and you just need the very best tooling and ability to get things in market and get feedback to discover the statue of David? Or do you conceive of David in your head. And I'm like, I'm going to make this and put it in the world.

[Mark Zuckerberg]

Does it have to be one or the other? I mean, I think it's a combination. I think you're basically taking some kind of values, either kind of like values that you have or a value for something that you believe should exist in the world and trying to build something that's aligned with that while trying to match it up with what is going to resonate the most with people. Right. I think if you, if you just do the latter, then I think you just don't have enough conviction to see through hard things. And if you just do the former, then you probably don't get to product market fit or optimize what you do because you're not focused enough on your customers. So I think both probably matter. Yeah.

[David Rosen]

As I pour through all these historical examples, there's like the market discovers some other participant in the market discovers the stories format and suddenly the whole world is like, oh my God. That is the way that we all. That's the social interaction mechanism. And that's like a pretty pure discovery where you have products that have stories, they perform very well. That's been discovered. But there's other times it feels like everything you're trying to do in reality labs, all, you know, 50 plus billion dollars that you've put into it is like, we're gonna freaking will this thing into existence. Because I have an idea of the way that I want the world to be. I'm not really like asking for that much feedback. I'm putting it in the world.

[Mark Zuckerberg]

Well, it's a combination. I mean, I think that there's. There's certainly a lot of things that we've invented or created for the first time. I mean, like in 2006, when we built the first version of newsfeed, right. The like before that, social networks were basically profiles. And then we were like, hey, like people actually kind of want to get the updates and let's like show them that and if we rank them, then we can. You know, there's so many updates that this can help people parse through that quickly. And today it's like hard to imagine any social product without a. So I think that that's. Obviously there's. Some of these things are sort of seminal. I don't want to call it an invention, but like patterns that we, that we basically established first and then some of them are ones that other people did where we take pride in learning from what is working in the in the world, you know, you know, we're not embarrassed about learning from things that other people, like, discovered that were good first and, and then we build a better version of it. And I mean, I think that that's, you know, no one company is going to invent everything, right? I think if you don't invent anything, then it's hard to kind of be a successful company. But I do think that there's a mix of this. There are more smart people outside of your company than inside your company. If you're not learning from what's going on in the market, then you're missing a lot of opportunities to get valuable signal from people in the community and customers about what they want you to be doing.

[Ben Gilbert]

Which speaks to the thesis of Facebook as a technology company.

[David Rosen]

Meta.

[Ben Gilbert]

Meta is a technology company. We'll get to that later. Ben and I have been having a conversation. I want to take this to open source and open source technology and its importance to you. And Ben posited first to me and then to many other people in our calls over the last couple of weeks that meta has been the largest beneficiary of open source technology in the modern world. And I'm curious if you would agree with that and if you would comment on your relationship to open source.

[Mark Zuckerberg]

I think almost all of the major technology companies at this point are primarily using open source stacks. So, yeah, I mean, I don't know. We wouldn't have been able to get built without open source. I think probably that's true for any new company that's been created since, like, I don't know, the late 1990s or something. For us, open source has been important and valuable.

[Ben Gilbert]

I mean, you were partially the first big company built on the LAMP stack.

[Mark Zuckerberg]

Yeah, yeah, no, and it's great. Makes it super easy to develop stuff quickly and iterate quickly. But we've also had an interesting relationship with this because sequentially as a company, we came after Google. So Google was the first of the great companies that built this distributed computing infrastructure. So they came first. So they were like, all right, let's keep this proprietary because it's a big advantage for us. And then we're like, all right, we need that too. But we built it. And then we're like, okay, not an advantage for us because Google already has that. So we might as well just make it open. And by making it open, then you basically get this whole community of people building around it. So it wasn't going to help us compete with Google for any of the stuff that we were doing to have that technology. But what we were able to do with things like Open Compute were get it to become the industry standard. So now you have all these other cloud service platforms that basically use Open Compute. And because of that the supply chain is standardized around our designs, which means that it's like way more supply, way cheaper to produce. We've saved billions of dollars and the quality of the stuff that we get to use goes up. So, all right, that's like a win win. But I think in order for this to work, we do a lot of open source stuff. We do a lot of closed source stuff. I'm not like a zealot on this. I think open source is very valuable. But I also think it sort of makes sense for us because of our position in the market and the same for AI. I mean around lama.

[Ben Gilbert]

Well, okay, this is where we were going with this.

[Mark Zuckerberg]

Yeah, it's you know, similar deal. You know, we want to make sure that we have access to a leading AI model. Right. I think just like we want to build the hardware so that we can build the best social experiences for the next 20 years. I don't think that for us it's like we've been through too much stuff with the other platforms to fully depend on anyone else. And we're a big enough company at this point that we don't have to. We can build our own core technology platforms, whether that's going to be AR glasses or mixed reality or AI. So I think that's somewhat of an imperative for us to go do that. But these things are not like pieces of software that are monolithic. They're ecosystem, they get better when other people use them. So for us there's a huge amount of good and it philosophically lines up with where we are, where like, I mean, look, I definitely, you know, firsthand have a lot of experiences. We were like trying to build stuff on mobile platforms. The platforms are just like, nah, you can't build that. Okay, that's frustrating.

[Ben Gilbert]

Can we take a real quick detour?

[Mark Zuckerberg]

What's up?

[Ben Gilbert]

I really want to ask you something.

[Mark Zuckerberg]

We can take a detour.

[Ben Gilbert]

Okay, you took a detour. We're going to take a detective help us with our research here. The eve of the ipo.

[Mark Zuckerberg]

Yeah, this is quite a detour.

[Ben Gilbert]

Wait, quite a detour.

[Mark Zuckerberg]

David, I really am grabbing the wheel here.

[David Rosen]

Is this connected or did you just decide that it was your turn to talk?

[Mark Zuckerberg]

I'm sorry, I was like really wound up.

[David Rosen]

I know open source and AI.

[Ben Gilbert]

I think it's related. I really genuinely do Facebook on mobile is HTML5 in 2012, maybe?

[David Rosen]

2012?

[Mark Zuckerberg]

Yeah.

[Ben Gilbert]

Yeah. I want to ask you what you were thinking going into the IPO with Facebook on mobile being HTML5 and what happened. You IPO at $100 billion market cap over the next three months, you have a 50% drawdown probably because of that. But I guess the related question to what we're talking about now is how much is that informing your approach here.

[Mark Zuckerberg]

With AI it was a pretty different technical issue. So I mean, our legacy was building on web for websites and we were very used to building one thing and being able to continuously deploy it and it fits with our iteration, style and all that. So now all of a sudden this app model comes along and it's like we have to build like different ones for each phone and like you have to go through approval to get it shipped and we have to wait like weeks before it can ship. It's like, this sucks. So we're like, all right, we have an idea. Let's build this platform where we can get a web based platform. So you basically build a native shell and you build this web based platform in it and we'll be able to just update our apps every day and we'll ship one thing once and we'll update our apps across Android and iPhone and BlackBerry and Windows Mobile and all the stuff that existed at the time because it hadn't gotten consolidated yet. And we're like, that's going to be basically whatever downside we are going to have from not having the most native thing we're going to make up for in velocity and by having way more of our energy focused on one platform. Well, we were wrong. It turned out that, you know, having the native integration was actually critical for having the interactions feel good and that. So we basically went through this period where we had to go rewrite our apps from scratch. And that coincided with mobile growing dramatically. And mobile we didn't have any revenue because it may seem like it's pretty similar, but there's a very big difference. On desktop you basically have the app and you have a column on the side that we could put ads. And on mobile we needed to figure out what does it mean to put ads into the experience.

[David Rosen]

Let's be clear, the feed ad had not been invented of our team.

[Mark Zuckerberg]

No, that's something that the team did. Yeah. And advertisers have specific formats that they like working with. And the idea that we were just going to be like, all right, now your ad is going to look like a Feed Story was a big challenge for advertisers and the idea that now for people, you are going to have this organic feed. That was the most important part of the product. And now we're just going to start putting ads in. It was a challenge for the people who are using the product. So we needed to figure that out and we need to get the apps to be better. And we basically took, I think it must have been like a year or something. We were just like, look, we're going to pause feature development of the company because it's hard enough to do a rewrite, right. If you look at, like, the history of the tech industry, there are all these examples like Netscape and, you know, these things that, like, they tried to do a rewrite, they needed to reestablish their technical platform, and they also tried to add features they basically just, like, never terminated. So that's a real risk, right? When you're, like, completely changing your underlying platform that you're going to miss it. It's like, all right, we got to minimize the chance that that happens. So we're not going to ship any new features. We're just going to rewrite it, make it faster. But while we're doing this, basically, mobile is growing. So the percent of our traffic that is monetizable is shrinking because web is basically shrinking and mobile is growing.

[Ben Gilbert]

And that's your only business model.

[Mark Zuckerberg]

Yeah. And I was like, all right, and.

[David Rosen]

You'Re now recently growing.

[Mark Zuckerberg]

But the thing is, it was actually pretty clear what we needed to do. I think strategically, a lot of the time, it's. It's somewhat harder to know what to do when you're winning. Like, when stuff is going well, it's like, what is the next move to go from winning to winning more? But when you're losing, it's usually pretty clear what you have to do. And I think a lot of it is like, is just, do you have the pain tolerance to go do it? So a lot of this was like, all right. The team was like, okay, well, we're going public and investors really aren't going to like this if we are, like, not making money for a year and a half. And it's like, well, a year and a half is short in the grand scheme of things. Let's do this. And we did it, and it was a painful year and a half. And then we came out of that and we were in great shape. So I think, like, people inside the company had felt a lot better sooner because it was pretty clear to people that we were doing the right thing and they knew that we were executing it in a responsible way and basically focused and we're doing the right thing. But I think it's actually when you have something that's working well and you're on one local hill and you need to jump to another hill, that's the stuff that's really culturally hard. But this one I think was, it was not fun. There have been a series of periods throughout the company that were not, I don't know, not the most fun periods. But although that one in retrospect is, you know, looks pretty good in retrospect, it's like not that bad. It's like your market cap only got cut in half for a year and a half. Like, great, great. Yeah, I'll take that.

[David Rosen]

Where were we? Maybe so could I connect? So David asked, hey, can you help us with our research? Can I follow that thread that you just said? Hey, that one wasn't so bad. There's been a lot of amazing things the company has done. There's also been a lot of criticism. If you were to be self critical of your own company, of your own creation. Of all the criticisms that have happened over the years, which do you believe is the most legitimate and why?

[Mark Zuckerberg]

I mean, there's so many things that we've messed up that there are many criticisms that are legitimate. But if that was a year and a half mistake, I think one of the things I reflect on over the last 10 years or so was the political environment just changed dramatically. It's like before 2016, there was not a month that went by except for maybe this IPO period where the sentiment about the company was anything but positive. And then after 2016, after the election, basically, there was not a month for a while where the sentiment about the company was positive. I think so much of this stuff is correctly understanding your place in the world and in history. And so I think we talked about before how it's like, I think we understood that we are a technology company and that you have to be a technology company to build this kind of thing. I think we understood that we're not a social network company, we're a human connection company. And that will take different forms over time. The political environment. I think I didn't have much sophistication around and I think I just fundamentally misdiagnosed the problem. So I think that there was this basic challenge and there were a lot of things. I don't want to simplify this too much. I mean, there were a lot of things that we did wrong. There are some things that we did right. But I think one of the things that I look back on and regret is I think we accepted other people's view of some of the things that they were asserting that we were doing wrong or were responsible for that. I don't actually think we were. And now there are a lot of things we did mess up and we needed to fix. But I think that there's this view where when you're a company and someone says that there's an issue, I think the right instinct is to take ownership for it, right? Say like, okay, like maybe, maybe it's not, like, maybe it's not all our thing, but we're gonna fully own this problem, we're gonna take responsibility for it, we're gonna fix it. But when it's a political problem, I actually think a lot of the time sometimes there are people who are operating in good faith, who are identifying a problem that want something to be fixed, and there are people who are just looking for someone to blame. And I think to some degree, if you, if you take responsibility for things because you think it's a corporate crisis, not a political crisis, and your view is like, okay, I'm gonna take responsibility for all this stuff, people are basically blaming social media and the tech industry for all these different things in society. And if we're saying, okay, we're gonna really do our part to go fix this stuff, I knew that there were a bunch of people who just took that and were like, oh, you're taking responsibility for that? Let me kick you for more stuff. And honestly, I think we should have been firmer and clearer about which of the things we actually felt like we had a part in and which ones we didn't. And my guess is if the IPO was a year and a half mistake, I think that the political miscalculation was a 20 year mistake. And so it started in 2016. And I think that we have been working super hard to fix a lot of issues and to figure out kind of what the right tone is for navigating what is a very kind of fraught political dynamic across both the country and multiplied across all these places around the world. And I think we've sort of found our footing on what the principles are, where we think we need to improve stuff, but where people make allegations about the impact of the tech industry or our company, which are just not founded in any fact, that I think we should push back on harder. And I think it's going to take another 10 years or so for us to kind of fully work through that cycle before our brand and all of that is back to kind of the place that it maybe could have been if I hadn't messed that up in the first place. So. But look, in the grand scheme of things, 20 years isn't that bad either. And we'll get through it and I think we'll come out stronger. But I do think that is one of the kind of more interesting critiques that I think people get. And we get critiques on both sides on that. There are people who don't think we've taken enough responsibility, but I think certainly there's one line of critique which is you kind of bought into too much of the stuff that you shouldn't have. And yeah, I think it's going to take us a long time to dig out of that.

[David Rosen]

Do you have a reasonable framework at this point for like, okay, here's the stuff where I feel like we actually do want to take responsibility for it. And here's the stuff we're like, no, that's not our fault.

[Mark Zuckerberg]

Yeah. I mean, at this point, I think a lot of this stuff has been studied. So I mean, I don't want to go rehash all the different things, but I think at this point there's been years of academic research on a lot of these things. And part of the thing that's challenging and one of the things that we've learned is we actually should be trying to support more academics and doing more of this research ahead of time. Because when you get to a point where you're being kind of accused of something, you're not super credible, just standing up yourself and being like, I don't think we did this one. You know, it's like, so. But what has worked over time is like, you know, you do the research in advance and you get kind of third party academics, respected folks who get to debate all these different issues. And then it's like, oh, no, actually, like the evidence just does not show that social media is correlated with this kind of harm at all. So I think that. Or it's, you know, so I think that that's, I think that it kind of cuts. It cuts both ways.

[Ben Gilbert]

To me. This brings up another topic we wanted to talk about with you. And you just, you know, you said that's 20 years isn't that long. I'm young, you're young, we all are.

[David Rosen]

This is the advantage of being a college dropout founder.

[Ben Gilbert]

Yeah.

[Mark Zuckerberg]

No, it is. When you start when you're 19, it's like hopefully we have more than 20.

[David Rosen]

Years and hopefully you have like Buffett duration.

[Ben Gilbert]

Yeah, you, hopefully you set up the company in a, especially at the time, truly unique way where you can operate the company and take that, you know, take that approach.

[David Rosen]

Do you mean super voting shares?

[Ben Gilbert]

Super voting shares is like, you know, the technical aspect of there. I think there are a bunch of technical aspects to it that we're not going to get into in this conversation. But effectively you can take that perspective in a way that if you are a CEO, non founder, without a structure that you've set up, you just can't. And I think in doing all the research for this, a thesis we've developed is that that is just one of the core fundamental advantages that Meta has. So as you were setting up the company when you were so young, even when you went public, you were so young. Why was that so important to you?

[Mark Zuckerberg]

Well, so in 2006, Yahoo wanted to buy the company for a billion dollars and everyone on our management team wanted to sell it. And the board tried to fire me and everyone. And basically in the next year everyone else on the management team left because they, I hadn't done a good job communicating. I mean, I don't want to blame them. I hadn't done a good job communicating the long term vision because I wasn't thinking about that at the time. I like wasn't thinking in terms of this as a company. I was like, this is a great project, it's awesome. Like a lot of people like what we're doing. I think this will probably continue for a while. I think it's going to be pretty important in the world. But I didn't know how to think in terms of long term financial plans.

[David Rosen]

Making case to them why it would.

[Mark Zuckerberg]

Be worth more than doing or just like, look, we're doing this for the long term, we're not planning on selling the company. So it's like without having made that case, it was understandable that basically Yahoo comes around and a lot of people, it's like, this is like all their startup dreams come true. You gotta take this offer. Because I just wasn't in a place where I had the sophistication to basically articulate a lot of the stuff around where we were going. Longer term, it probably wasn't super confidence inspiring to them when I was like, hey, I think we should turn this down because we're gonna do this. So after that it's like, all right, well I don't want to get fired from my own company for wanting to build It. So let's try to set up a governance structure that makes it somewhat harder to do that. So. Wow. Learning through suffering.

[Ben Gilbert]

Wow.

[David Rosen]

And being very cash generative very early, such that you had a very real going concern on your hands and you just didn't need to cut off your arm and sell it to someone in order to build your business.

[Mark Zuckerberg]

Yeah.

[David Rosen]

Like, I think. I think this is a fundamentally misunderstood thing about Facebook, the startup. It is the prototypical startup startup.

[Ben Gilbert]

You are the iconic startup founder of.

[David Rosen]

This century, and there's a lot of people that want to start a startup for a lot of the glamorous reasons of starting a startup. You hated being a startup and wanted to stop being a startup as fast as possible and be a going concern.

[Mark Zuckerberg]

Yeah, I mean, I think we're having a lot more fun now, so get to work on all this stuff. It's awesome.

[David Rosen]

What is your advice to all these founders who sort of romanticize the idea of starting a company and kind of. I don't know.

[Mark Zuckerberg]

Obviously, starting a company is not. Not bad. Right? I mean, I think that there's different schools of thought on how to do it. I think some people think, okay, I want to go start a company, so I'm going to, like, go dive into this idea. And I just think that that's a little bit dangerous because there's this issue which is you have to be able to be nimble and pivot around until you can, like, figure out what works. Right. It's. I mean, part of the reason why I didn't think Facebook was going to be the company early on was because when I was in school, I built like 12 different things, right. That were just things that I wanted to exist. And it was like, all right, this is fun. Okay, let's build another thing. It's like, okay, this one's fun. People are still using that. I'll, like, help up keep this one. But I had, like, a bunch of other ideas for stuff I was gonna build too. So I just, like, I didn't. I didn't, like, know how to think about what a company was gonna be. And it was. So I think there's something about maintaining flexibility that's helpful. You know, once you hire a bunch of people, you know, it's a lot easier when you can just have meetings in your own head about what direction you want to go in. And it's like. And there's a lot less pride and people dug in when you're just like, okay, I'm going to change direction. It's like people haven't invested their ego in, like, no, we were going in this direction, and now I must be convinced it's like, nah. So I do think that that's a thing where you want to keep things lean and be able to do that. And that's one of the reasons why we tried to get the company back to being whatever the leanest version of a large company is that we can. We can be. But I do think that there's something to that where it's like, it's. Obviously, it's not super fun not having the resources to do what you want to do, but I think it also is problematic to have more people working on something than you should have for the stage that it's at, because then the people who are working on it don't have the agency to actually, like, make the changes and do the things that they need to, which is less fun. And then you can attract the best people to go work on those things because it's less fun. And so I do think you got it. You just have to dial it. Right?

[David Rosen]

You're spending a gajillion dollars on reality labs.

[Ben Gilbert]

And it's a technical term.

[David Rosen]

It's not making that much money. So I'm going to play Mark back to you of it's not appropriate to have all these people and resources working on things for more than the stage warrants. I'm being a little facetious here, but I'm curious how you. Why you categorize it differently.

[Mark Zuckerberg]

I mean, well, I think some of the stuff by the time you're at the scale that we're at is also just about, like, what do you want to do over the next 10 to 20 years? And what do you think are going to be important? And, you know, we were talking about, like, making your own luck and all that and how, you know, it's like, I think there are some broad strokes that we can have a sense of where things are going. I'm pretty sure glasses and kind of like holographic presence and AR is going to be a completely ubiquitous product. Right. It's just like everyone who had a phone before replaced it with a smartphone, and then a lot of more people got smartphones. If all we get is all the people in the world who already have glasses upgrading to glasses that have AI in them, then, like, this is already going to be one of the most successful products in the history of the world. So. And I think it's going to go a lot further than that. So I think that there's. That there is the thing about controlling our own destiny, it's strategically valuable. You know, we did this calculation or estimate at some point where it's like, how much money do we lose from our core family of apps to the various like, taxes that the platforms have to like when they tell us we can't run the ad business the way that we think we should be able to when they tell us we can't ship certain products. So that way, like, people use the things less or like them less and it's hard to exactly estimate it, but I think we might be like twice as profitable if we own the platform or something. So I think from that perspective, that's worth a lot. Just from a pure dollars perspective, which is not primarily how I come at this stuff, but even now I've learned a thing or two since the Yahoo days and now I at least am able to. I might not be able to convince all the investors that we should be investing to the extent that we are in reality Labs if I didn't control the company, but at least I can articulate a case for why I'm confident that it's going to be good over time. But for me, it's always been way more about the product experience and what you can enable and build. And you know, one of the shifts, and this is sort of like a value shift over time is, you know, one of the things that, you know, some of the early Oculus guys used to say to me that there's a difference between building good things and awesome things. And good is good, right? It's helpful, it's useful. It's things that people use on a day to day basis because it adds something to their lives. But awesome is different. Awesome is uplifting and inspiring and just leads you to just be way more optimistic about the future. And it's just like this uplifting thing about humanity. And so I think a lot of what we've done with social media so far is very good. Where we've got, we've built these products, more than 3 billion people use them on a near daily basis. Right?

[David Rosen]

It's like 3.3 billion on a daily basis.

[Mark Zuckerberg]

Yeah. So, yeah. And so that's. And they use it because it is useful in their life. Right. And in all these different ways. I mean, obviously people vary, people use it for different things, but it's useful and it helps people and it helps people stay connected, it helps people build businesses, it helps people form communities. It's good. There aren't that many people on a day to day basis who get out of bed and are like, fuck, yeah. Social media, like, it's like, that's right. I mean, that's not like. So I kind of think for the next. For my next stage, right? For the next stage of the company, the next, like 15 years, I want us to build more things that are awesome in addition to things that are good, and I think that they both matter. But to me, this is like a little bit of a, kind of the next stage of what I want our company to stand for. And B, and so I think a lot of the Reality lab stuff that we're doing is going to be in that bucket. A lot of the AI stuff that we're doing, I think is going to be in that bucket. There are a bunch of things in the apps that are going to be in that bucket too. New apps, too. But I don't know, I think that there's just something that's fundamentally pretty good about that. And maybe it's also just where I am in my life, right? I'm like to think I'm young, I'm a little older, but it's like, I do think that at this point, it's not just a meta thing. Also in my personal life, a lot of what I personally value is doing things that are inspiring with people who I find inspiring. So there's the personal version of this. It's like I get to work on interesting science problems with Priscilla and my wife and, like, and a bunch of awesome people. You know, I get to design shirts with, like, some of the best fashion designers in the world. Right? It's like, I am statues. A sculpture of my wife. Bring back the Roman tradition of designing sculptures of people you love.

[David Rosen]

I'm not at all being facetious. Like, yeah, no, really cool.

[Mark Zuckerberg]

No, but I mean, I think Daniel Arsham is, like, a really talented guy. And I was like, that's a person who I'd love to work with on something. Let's go find a project, you know, building. You know, one of my side projects is, you know, we have this cattle ranch in Kauai, and I'm trying to see if we can raise the highest quality beef in the world. And there's like all this stuff. It, like, starts with, like, it's. It's awesome. We got. We got this steer chonk. He's like, he's. He's just the man. He's the man. We're having a hard time keeping him on the ranch because every time we put him in a steel enclosure and he sees a female cow, he busts through the steel enclosure. But I feel like that's the kind of bull that you want to make the highest quality beef in the world. And we're just working with, trying to do really high quality, awesome things with awesome people. If that's what I get to do for the next 15 or 20 years, then, like, it's going to be a good 15 or 20 years.

[David Rosen]

Was there a moment, like, what changed? Like, when did this become your priority and why? I can't. It feels so radical that how could it have possibly been gradual? Or was this just like, mark all the time and we just couldn't see the real Mark?

[Mark Zuckerberg]

I don't know. I think that there might have been something around the way the company shifted in operations around Covid. I mean, it's like the COVID like all these tech companies went remote temporarily. And it was an interesting period to just, like, get some more time, like a step back. I'm a pretty introverted person, and I do think it's. I need to be careful where, like, I get a lot of value and energy and ideas from being around other people. But I also need time with myself and with COVID I kind of got that. And it was a time of reflection where I was able to think about this stuff. And we were also going through this very difficult political time in the country, and our company was at the center of a lot of those things, saying that that was a cause of a bunch of reflection. And then I think that a bunch of the things that we'd spun up earlier, but at smaller scale. Right? So the Reality Lab stuff that we started in 2014, really, the fair stuff around fundamental AI research that 2012.

[David Rosen]

13.

[Ben Gilbert]

2012, 13.

[Mark Zuckerberg]

Sometime around then, these things, they kind of got started and they were growing. And it kind of reached this moment, which is like, are we going to double down on this and do this, or are we going to kind of like do this as a hobby? And I was like, no, I think we should do this. Right? I mean, this is. This, like, this is going to be a really important part of what we do. And we had to make a really important set of decisions. What we knew was going to be really painful, you know, to go double down on those things and build out the AI infrastructure that we needed to and scale up some of the Reality Lab stuff. And I knew that a lot of the investors would hate it, at least in the short term, before it's clearly the right thing to do. What I didn't know was that at the time I thought they were Going to not like it, but I thought it was going to be okay because I didn't think there was also going to be a recession at the same time. So that, like, really, it's like, I mean, look like you learn who you are through challenges, right? It's like we had like a really, you know, it's like, okay, like losing half of your market cap is. Is quaint compared to losing 80% of your market cap or whatever it was. Right. But so, I mean, these are all intentional decisions, right? It's like, I mean, there are a lot of conversations that we had which are like, should we go forward with this? And the answer that I came out with is, yes, this is what I believe in. I think this is going to be important for the world. I think it's going to work over time. We're no stranger to going through painful periods. In some ways, it makes the company better. Let's do it.

[David Rosen]

We're starting to enter. Looking at the clock, like, conclusion, lightning round territory. I've had one lurking in the back of my head. It makes sense to me that you would rebrand the company. Something that is not Facebook, given how broad the family of apps was that you've got. Let's imagine you were going to rebrand it today. You've got AI going on, you've got AR going on, you've got VR going on. Would you pick the name Meta if you were going to rename the company today?

[Mark Zuckerberg]

I like Meta. It's a good name. You know, finding good short names. I mean, this actually was a thing that we talked about for a while because it was pretty clear that Facebook is continuing to grow in importance in the world, which I think a lot of people don't appreciate and is kind of mind boggling at the scale that it's at. But the others, I mean, we went through a period where it's like we had Facebook and a handful of small apps and now we have four apps that have a billion people or more using them, hopefully in the next few years, five with Threads, if that continues scaling. And this was a conversation that we had a bunch, right? It's like, does it make sense for the name of the company to be one of the apps as the other apps, as it's really becoming a family of apps. And it was important to me. This was also coinciding with a lot of. A lot of the challenges that we were having, the political brand challenges, different things. And a lot of people were proposing that from the perspective of running away from the Facebook brand Right. They were like, oh, well, like, is the. Does the Facebook brand have issues? Do we need a new brand? And I was like, we don't run away from that. Right. It's like, it might make sense one day to not have Facebook be the lead brand for the company because we do so many different things. But I'm only going to do this when we come up with a brand that is going to be evocative of the future that we're trying to build. Because we run towards something, we don't run away from things. And when we got to Meta, then I was like, all right, we're here. And it was around the time when we were doubling down on the investment and where there was all the controversy. And it's like, look, like if we're doing this, we're going to lean into this and we're going to do it, so let's do it.

[David Rosen]

And if I were to make the case to you, I feel the core competency of Meta is you are able to discover products in the world. You have great ideas, you work on them, you discover interesting products. And you, Mark, are not someone who wants to define yourself by anything. You want to have, like, your hands on a bunch of great controls and maximize your degrees of freedom, see where the world's going and then have the best freaking spaceship possible to go maneuver your way over there. It seems like I would pick a brand that almost doesn't pigeonhole me into a specific future. I might be looking for something that's more like, look, I want to maximize my maneuverability.

[Mark Zuckerberg]

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

[David Rosen]

And in many ways, doing what I just suggested would kind of be running. It's like, well, we don't believe in it that way. And you're like, no, I mean, we're.

[Mark Zuckerberg]

A company that like puts a flag down around what we're doing and we're going to go do it. It's like put a wall in front of us. There's going to be a mark shaped hole in the wall.

[Ben Gilbert]

Speaking of lightning rounds and mark shape holes, you are accelerating what used to be your annual challenges. I always, I mean, when, when we were all kids and we didn't know each other, I mean, I was so inspired you would do your annual challenges. You would post about them and I was like, wow, that's like pretty damn Cool. And then we all get a little older and we all have kids on the stage now, and we all have companies on the stage now. And there's some large, some small, the demands on your time. Like, it for me especially, I think lots of people that's like, that space gets sucked. And you have expanded it.

[Mark Zuckerberg]

How? What do you mean?

[Ben Gilbert]

Well, you used to do annual challenges and I feel like you're now doing weekly challenges. You're designing T shirts, you're making sculptures.

[David Rosen]

You'Re raising cat on.

[Mark Zuckerberg]

I just like, I'm trying to do inspiring things. I mean, yeah. I don't know. I'm also really competitive.

[Ben Gilbert]

Who's your competition for this?

[Mark Zuckerberg]

What do you mean? I was just thinking about other things that I'm doing. I'm like, what have I started doing? I got into all these more extreme sports and fighting and stuff and I don't know. I mean, we face a lot of competition and a lot of different aspects of what we do. There's the social media competitors, there's the platform competitors. I think Apple is a bigger competitor than people realize. They kind of think, hey, they're doing a different type of thing. But I don't know, I think over the next 10, 15 years, I. I think that kind of like battle over, ideological battle over what should the architecture be of the next set of platforms? Are they going to be the closed, integrated Apple model that Apple has always done? Which again, I mean, like, there's multiple. There are multiple good ways to build things. Right. So I think if you look at the different generations of computing, PCs, mobile, they've all had sort of a closed integrated version and an open version. And the thing that I think there's just a ton of recency bias around is because iPhone basically won. I know that there are more Android phones out there, but I mean, but iPhone is sort of like the intellectual leader and by far, like has all the.

[Ben Gilbert]

Let's take. Take it as it can see.

[Mark Zuckerberg]

Yeah, yeah. I think there's the recency bias and probably like, almost everyone here has an iPhone and. Right. I think because of the recency bias, there's sort of this view that's like, oh, no, this is just the superior way to do things. But I don't actually think that's a given. In the PC era, Windows with the open ecosystem was the leader and part of my goal for the next 10, 15 years, the next generation of platforms is to build the next generation of open platforms and have the open platforms win. And I think that that's going to lead to a much more vibrant tech industry. Now there are advantages of doing a closed and integrated model. I think Apple will have a place for sure. I expect them to be our primary competitor. And I think it will not be just a product competition. I think it's like a, in some ways, very deeply values driven and ideological competition around what the future of the tech industry should be and how open these platforms, whether it's things like Llama and AI or the glasses or different things should be for developers. Like an individual, someone getting started in their dorm room, like me to not have to ask for permission to go build the next set of awesome things.

[David Rosen]

I've got a closing question here, please.

[Ben Gilbert]

Thank you.

[David Rosen]

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

[Mark Zuckerberg]

Yeah. I don't know. I mean, just do something that you care about and I mean, if you're trying to run our strategy, try to learn as quickly as you can. But I mean, if there's like. I think part of what I'm trying to say is I think there are different ways to build stuff. Right. It's like our way worked for me and our team. It's different. Things have clearly worked for other companies. I don't know. One day my daughter took her to a Taylor Swift concert and she was like, you know, dad, I kind of want to be like Taylor Swift when I grow up.

[Ben Gilbert]

Hell yeah.

[Mark Zuckerberg]

I was like, but you can't. That's not available to you. I was like, but. And she thought about it and she's like, all right. When I grow up, I want people to want to be like August Chan Zuckerberg. And I was like, hell yeah. Hell yeah. So I think that that's.

[Ben Gilbert]

Yeah.

[Mark Zuckerberg]

I don't know. I think it's like, look, learn from other people's successes and failures, but do your own thing.

[David Rosen]

Love that.

[Ben Gilbert]

Love that. Well, that is the perfect place to leave things.

[David Rosen]

We made you something that you already have. A very amazing, well designed shirt. I hope you have room in your life for more than one.

[Mark Zuckerberg]

I do. I used to only wear one type of shirt. Now I've moved on.

[David Rosen]

So David and I made you a custom one of one shirt that represents tonight.

[Mark Zuckerberg]

Thank you.

[David Rosen]

It is size Zuck, so no one else can, you know, it can never be made again. And we've got these coordinates on the back. The first one.

[Ben Gilbert]

GPS coordinates.

[David Rosen]

GPS coordinates. The first one represents Kirkland House where he wrote the first line of code for Facebook. And the second one is the Chase Center.

[Mark Zuckerberg]

Awesome.

[David Rosen]

So thank you for joining us here tonight.

[Ben Gilbert]

Thank you for joining us.

[David Rosen]

Everyone. Thank you so much. Huge thank you to Mark Zuckerberg. Thank you all for making something tonight, something that we will never, ever forget, ever. We have some thank yous.

[Ben Gilbert]

We have a whole lot of thank yous. Making tonight happen has taken our entire summer. It's taken the entire summer of dozens of people. There were about a thousand people working on tonight and I just want to give them all a big hand. Thank you so much.

[David Rosen]

Thank you to Mark and the entire meta executive team that we got to take talk to to prep for this. Daniel and the Spotify team, Emily and Lauren from Bloomberg and the Circuit, Jensen, Mylene, Janine, everyone from the whole Nvidia team to Hermes for dressing us tonight.

[Ben Gilbert]

Thank you, Hermes.

[David Rosen]

Quite presentable to our families and our lovely wives. Thank you so much.

[Ben Gilbert]

Most importantly, thank you to our wives.

[David Rosen]

And of course, thank you to Jamie Dimon, JP Morgan Chase, JP Morgan Payments for making this whole evening possible. It's been a dream partnership. We are so grateful listeners. We will see you next time.

[Ben Gilbert]

We'll see you next time.

[David Rosen]

And thank you, Mike, Taylor.

[Jensen Huang]

Ben and David. Thank you so much, so much. Yeah, D who got the truth there? Is it you? Is it you? Is it you? Who got the truth now? Now Is it you? Is it you? Is it you? Sit me down, say it straight Another story on the way who got the truth now? Everybody's talking Nobody, everybody's listening these days I feel lost, man Lost in opinions Everybody's fighting, nobody's winning Take me home Cause I don't know what's going on in the world I'm living everybody break, break breaking up the dinner oh baby through all the smoke I need to know who got got the truth? Hey, is it you, you, you? Yeah who got the truth now? Now is it you? Is it you? Is it you? Sit me down, say it's trade Another story on the way who got the true now? Not here for the cheap talk they slip, flop like a seesaw not free under these laws now the world see what we saw People wonder what to do now it took a body cam to get the truth out Hit the streets trying to move out we got so much to lose now Everybody break, break. Breaking up the dinner oh, baby, through all the smoke I need to know who got the truth, Champ, Is it you, you, you, you, you, you? Who got the truth now? Now, is it you, you, you? Set me down, say it straight Another story on the way who got the truth now? Who got the truth? Yeah Acquire lie from the Trey center who got the truth?

[Mark Zuckerberg]

Yeah.

[Jensen Huang]

Yeah, let's get it.