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

Transcript: (disclaimer: may contain unintentionally confusing, inaccurate and/or amusing transcription errors)

David: I know this isn’t 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?

Ben: No. Why would I bring a thumb…? I did email that. It’s probably three weeks ago though.

David: Well there are 6000 people out there waiting to hear it.

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

David: We didn’t need the thumb drive.

Ben: We didn’t need the thumb drive. Welcome to this episode of Acquired, the podcast about…

David: 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 JP Morgan Chase, Jamie Dimon.

Jamie: Hello, Acquired listeners. Welcome to the Chase Center and to Acquired Live. I’m Jamie Dimon, chairman and CEO of JP Morgan Chase. I’m happy to kick off the show tonight and welcome all of you to one of my favorite arenas.

It’s been a great partnership all year 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. Sorry I couldn’t be there in person tonight, but I hope everyone enjoys the show. Ben and David, over to you.

Ben: 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, long time listener, who’s been really the driving force behind this whole thing, and his truly world class marketing team—Hannah, Nick, Vinnie, Amy, and Carly.

David and I for the first time, really now understand what it is like to have a glimpse of what a real built-out team would look like and not just two guys in their basement. Thank you for an amazing partnership.

David: Ben and I did not put this on ourselves tonight. What are we doing tonight?

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

David: Woo.

Ben: 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 the middle. David, what is the format? Is this an Acquired episode?

David: 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. 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’s what you are missing in the full nine hours of an Acquired recording session.

Ben: 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 just get exhausted. I think part of it’s the lack of oxygen.

David: It’s really hot in here, and we’ve been going for 5½ hours.

Ben: Let me finish this thing, and then we will take a bathroom break.

David: I have a similar thought. Pour some more champagne. Sorry about that. Hey, Blue Angels.

Ben: Great. Only 9 minutes and 40 seconds of bullshitting before we actually started. It’s pretty good for us.

David: It’s a new record.

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

David: I think I can simplify all this.

Ben: We got to advance the story more. The pacing’s too slow. Oh, this doesn’t make any sense.

David: Okay, great. We can cut all that then. Cut that. Just cut it. Let’s cut all that. Cut that.

Ben: Skip it.

David: 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?

Ben: We’re 35–40 minutes into this episode and nothing has happened.

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

Ben: Because right now I’m like, what did we cover? What did we not?

David: I think what you’re saying is to replace all of what we did before.

Ben: I’m going to re-record at least the first part. Maybe that whole thing.

David: I don’t recall exactly how we started though.

Ben: I don’t remember the last thing you said.

David: I don’t either.

Ben: I think I’ve been interrupting.

David: No, I think it’s great. Please keep doing. I don’t find it annoying at all. The goal is to make the best stuff.

Ben: I actually quite like how this is puzzling in.

David: Hang on one second.

Ben: You got to stop making that face.

David: Oh, beef. What I making a face?

Ben: And take it without the… totally.

David: Totally.

Ben: Totally.

David: Totally,

Ben: Totally, totally. Go for it.

David: Dude, it is so hard to keep all this information in our heads. I feel like I’m out of RAM. What’s going on? I just heard a beep on your end.

Ben: Okay, well that wasn’t one of our best episodes.

David: That is how the sausage is made?

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

David: Are you done or do you have more?

Ben: I’m done.

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

David: This is what Steven has to deal with every month.

Ben: Obviously, not only are we not doing that. We literally can’t. There are just fire marshal issues. David, what are we doing?

David: Well tonight, we thought we are going to take the Acquired playbook, 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—San Francisco, yeah—of 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.

Ben: Normally, we study the past, often the far past. Tonight, we’re going to look at the present. It’s a little un-Aquired, but once every 2½ years or however often we do a live show, we want to indulge. We’re going to indulge tonight.

David: Indeed, we are. To start, we wanted to spend a couple of 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, and we’ve experienced some pretty amazing growth.

Ben: David pitched this to me and I’m like, what? Are we going to stand up and give a keynote on the state of the union of Acquired? That doesn’t feel right. But a conversation would be great if it was the right person to have a conversation with. We were like, who is a big Acquired listener, 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 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.

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

Ben: It’s a little echoey studio.

Daniel: You guys should use this as the studio every time I think.

David: Well, you’ve been after us to do more video for years.

Daniel: That is true.

David: Here you are.

Ben: This is going to be a video for sure.

Daniel: All right, well love that. It’s really amazing for me to be here and just see this and all of your guys’ success. I remember listening to you guys as a fan (I think) starting in 2019 and seeing that we’re now five years later from a small base going to something like this. It’s pretty remarkable to see.

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 talk about your success, so I thought maybe I could do that for you. Maybe we can have a look at some of the amazing stats and achievements you guys have accomplished.

Ben: Well, thanks. I know you pulled some data. We pulled some data. This is the updated version up here of the classic Acquired chart that we’ve been showing, which basically shows from when we started in 2015, to the organic doubling year over year over year, all the way through today.

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, someone tells their friend about it. On average, every listener tells one other listener every year, hey, you should listen, and that person sticks. That’s the whole thing.

Daniel: Yeah, it is pretty remarkable. On Spotify alone, you guys have now done over five million hours and it’s tripled in the last year. Pretty remarkable, right? Yeah. Big round of applause.

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

Daniel: Is the Nintendo one the longest one you guys have done?

Ben: I think Microsoft Volume II was our—

David: Longest single episode.

Ben: But thank you for pulling this. The way this came to be is we asked Daniel, hey you have access to data that all podcasters dream of. What is the most interesting insight you can pull out of it? The thing that’s the craziest to me about this chart is that even though Acquired here’s how many downloads an episode gets, it isn’t 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. 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.

Daniel: Yeah, but what’s really cool for me too is just seeing the fandom of the show. One thing is obviously seeing the total numbers, but also seeing the fandoms. You guys added more than 250,000 followers, and that tripled last year too. It’s over 250,000 followers on Spotify alone now on the Acquired show, which again, is pretty remarkable to see that growth.

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

Daniel: Exponential growth.

David: 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 that we see. You guys see it, it’s crazy.

Daniel: 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 expected this to be an English language thing–only, maybe the US, maybe UK, that kind of thing. But you guys have truly grown worldwide.

Look at some of this stuff. You have Mexico growing five times. Hong Kong, Israel, Singapore, Acquired is global. It’s amazing to see here in San Francisco that we got 6000 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.

Ben: When you see the whole arc of the show tonight, I think you’ll say, ah, yeah. You can’t take that on the road.

Daniel: Could be. Well it’s maybe a timing question. You guys should be the new rock stars that tour around. That would be the great thing to do.

I want to really maybe take the moment here and ask you guys how all of this happened. By way of context, just to put this in perspective, in 2019, when we got into podcast, the world around podcast listening and Spotify, there were a few million people listening to this. You mentioned this, but our goal was to broaden this whole medium.

Today, there are over 150 million people listening to podcasts on Spotify. Obviously, your show is a huge success and something that 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?

David: Well, you guys entering the industry for sure. But I think you hit on it with broad. When Ben and I started this, we used to talk about what our TAM was. We were venture capitalists. We’re like, what’s the TAM for Acquired? Not that we even thought about it as a business or product.

We were like, I don’t know. What’s the population of students in business schools out there? Maybe that’s our TAM. Then we were like, well, I don’t know. Maybe it’s a little bigger than that. Maybe it’s everybody who ever wanted to go to business school. Okay, what’s that cap out? A million people, maybe? A million felt like our TAM.

What’s happened to us—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.

Ben: And the growth of the medium. 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 it turns out people are super interested thanks to all the wireless headphones that exist now. It’s just this weird cultural norm that’s 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. I just don’t actually think that was a thing in the early 2010s.

Daniel: One of the things you obviously have done is added video to the format. This is my plug of hopefully getting you guys to finally add video to Spotify as well. What do you think is next for the show when it comes to that? What do you see the big innovation of Acquired will be in the future?

Ben: 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. The question is how much more can we do without killing the golden goose? Actually, can I turn this back on you? You have massively expanded what Spotify does since the original vision.

David: The original vision was you were music on Facebook.

Ben: Yeah. How should founders think about 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?

Daniel: Well, I think it starts with your audience and knowing your audience. For instance, we launched audiobooks about a year ago. But the untold story about that audiobooks launch is what happened in Germany is all the record companies started uploading audiobooks to the service. They started hacking the system for all these other things. When they ran out of that, they actually started uploading podcasts.

Podcasts turned out to be the easier medium for us to start with, but eventually we added audiobooks too. I think most amazing things tend to start with people suggesting things or maybe even doing things. It’d be interesting to figure out what people are doing in and around Acquired already, and that will probably be your adjacency.

David: I think the other video—Ben and I talk a lot; we’ll talk more about video throughout the evening here—we’ve just always been of the belief of 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, 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?

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

Daniel: But it was an amazing show though, right?

Ben: Thank you. But audio is this magic thing where—we’re going to end up doing more video—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 everything that everyone does while they listen to Acquired. I remain unconvinced that we would work as a four hour video product.

Daniel: 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. You talked about video. On Spotify, it’s been a huge growth thing. I would’ve said to you as well, people probably mostly why would you want to watch any video, but I think younger consumers, especially, don’t know what the difference is. They just want to feel a closer presence to the person.

We saw it already with the bloopers. It’s like, this is fun what you guys are doing, and people have a relationship with you guys too, hence why so many people are showing up here tonight. 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 one of the big things. That’s what we’re leaning into as well, is just allowing the creator and the consumer to more directly interact in more novel ways.

David: It’s funny. Your question was what’s next for Acquired? We’re going to do a normal episode after tonight. That normal episode probably will focus on a Menlo Park–based technology company. One of the lessons that we’re already starting to learn from that—

Ben: Spoilers. What are you… We can’t take that back now. This is live.

David: This is live. It’s just not holding the current state of things and vision of what you are too tightly. 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. You didn’t hold onto that vision too tightly.

Ben: Can I turn that into a question?

David: Please. I wanted to leave you some space before we asked the question.

Ben: I appreciate that. That’s what great partnership is all about. David and I have one way of growing, which is to 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?

Daniel: Yeah. I think it starts like so many other things. I think Mark and I just struck this friendship. The little told story is, if I remember this correctly, I think Mark, even pre-Facebook, was trying to do a music startup. He was like, yeah, this feels like a difficult thing.

Ben: Wirehog?

Daniel:. Exactly, I think he’s like, I think pretty much every great entrepreneur in the valley tried to do a music startup. He was definitely passionate about it. Then his idea obviously was a social music product. He and I started talking about it. In the beginning, he wanted Spotify to be more social. I said, well, I don’t know that that’s—

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

Daniel: I got introduced to Mark through Sean Parker. Sean said to Zuck, like, hey, you got to meet this entrepreneur from Sweden. I remember 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 2009, one of those things. Then we struck a friendship and we started jamming on various ideas around how to make music more social.

Ben: And you weren’t even live in the US yet, I don’t think, or you were just—

Daniel: This secret of Spotify was we seeded one account at a time to get a bunch of influencers to like it. I think Sean, in particular, used it as a social currency, so everyone came to him to try to get—

David: Oh yeah, all the invites. The currency of the Spotify invites.

Daniel: Yeah. It was a big, big thing for quite a few years before we launched where it was the secret thing if you were in the club or if you weren’t. Anyway, he got Mark on it, and I think Mark wrote this status update, like Spotify is so good. Then everyone’s like, how did you get this? This was the main thing. When can I get it? How can I do it?

Then we started jamming around what a social music product ought to be. We had this idea 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? We got to work together, built that product, and coincided it with the Spotify US launch.

Ben: And this was when the newsfeed was really young. You’d be scrolling through your newsfeed and it would be giving these status updates of what your friends were listening to piped in directly from Spotify.

Daniel: Exactly. You could see all your friends. It actually still exists in the Spotify product on the desktop. You can see what your friends are listening to in real time. It’s one of our more popular legacy features that’s been around now for 13 years or so.

Ben: It was the right sidebar, but I feel like I haven’t seen it in a while.

Daniel: It’s still there.

Ben: Okay. But this gets at the point of social music listening was this core insight that you had. Mark was on board to build it together. 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 of Spotify, I think, oh, that’s like the easy way to access music, podcasts, and now audio books. But I don’t think, oh, it's social listening. At what point did you let go of that precious idea and say maybe social is important but not that important?

Daniel: Well, I still think social is hugely important. 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. It’s growing incredibly rapidly right now all over the world. 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 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 you can literally join someone’s jam, and you can all queue up songs together. Instead of taking my phone or your phone, we could all be working together on something.

But what we saw during the pandemic, and that’s where Jam started, was we started seeing that people were using this to stay connected as well by having this shared consistent music listening where we’re all listening to the same thing at the same time, even though we were apart.

Ben: It’s like the best of Linear TV brought to music.

Daniel: Yeah. I think we’re still definitely playing with the social concepts and trying to get that right. But I think Facebook moved off of this presence-based social aspect for all things. It wasn’t just music, actually. People were doing it for games back then too, so it was like I'd created another Farmville.

David: We remember that era.

Ben: What was it? It was like north of 10% of Facebook’s revenue at IPO was from…

David: Zynga, yeah. This is all fun history. I’m curious though, we’re going to talk to Mark later tonight.

Ben: Are you doing research live on stage?

David: Definitely. You’ve had 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?

Daniel: 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, and then the next time he would know more than I would say most experts about the subject.

It’s really remarkable just how tenacious he is about learning and staying curious about things. That’s definitely been a super inspiring thing for me. I think that this shines through with how he runs the company too. He has a very clear idea, but he also takes a lot of feedback and iterates on that.

One of the cool things for me has been seeing how he runs meetings. For instance, I like having relatively small meetings with people. Mark, the average meeting he has is 15–20 people in the room. How you make a product review or discussion productive with 15 and 20 people still gets people to be heard, he’s very, very good at that stuff. Those are just a few of the things that I’ve learned, which has helped me as a leader as well.

Ben: Maybe this is a little bit more pointed. You are a kind person, you are a soft-spoken person, but you are a fierce competitor.

David: Okay. 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. We left, we thought what a lovely country, what lovely people. Daniel is 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 has built Spotify.

Ben: And very strategic. I think you see the chess board. Mark is like that too. Do you feel like your relationship amplifies each other?

Daniel: Well, 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. As you know, Mark likes sports. One of the things I don’t do with Mark is play sports for exactly this reason.

What was the last time he tore his ACL with someone rather than giving up? I feel like it will end pretty badly. I like playing when I know I’ll win, so I think it’s a pretty good thing to not do that.

Ben: 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 a problem that a lot of people had tried and failed at before. But there is also this, you abide your time, you wait for the opening, then you figure out a game you know that you can win, and then you go execute in that game.

Daniel: That’s pretty much spot on, to be honest. 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, 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. The internal saying that Spotify is talk is cheap because we want to be really deliberate about what it is we’re doing and how we’re doing it.

Ben: You mean that as a virtue, like talk is cheap, so let’s talk a lot because it’s inexpensive to waste those resources.

Daniel: Exactly right. It’s more expensive to build than most people think. So we actually spend a lot of time discussing, and people get really confused when they enter our culture. They’re like, but why don’t we just execute? We’re still sitting and debating, game theorizing how this will play out, and getting all the things working in a certain way.

We have our ways of doing that now that we’ve codified across the company, which I think is pretty unique at this point. But a part of that is also, so to set the stage, is because we had to. Remember, everything, unlike many other products, when you’re building a company, you can iterate and do stuff. We had to get the entire industry with us.

If we wanted to do something, we had to convince a bunch of people that it was the right thing to do. 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.

This has now become a thing in how we’re doing stuff. 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.

Ben: You’re like the anti-fill fast, the anti-move fast and break things, the anti-ship and iterate.

Daniel: Well, I’d like to hope we can also ship and iterate, but yeah. We won’t be the fastest, no.

David: 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. I’m sure you know. When did you become the market leader in podcasting?

Daniel: Oh wow. I think it depends on which markets you’re looking at. Pretty much it started happening in quite a few markets already, 2020 and 2021. In 2022 we were pretty much the market leader in most markets around the world.

David: So three years.

Daniel: Yeah.

David: From launch?

Daniel: Why?

David: 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?

Daniel: We don’t always know how fast this will be, but I think we had a pretty good sense that we could iterate and improve our way, and help climb from the mountain we were on when we saw this initial traction.

But I think the contrarian that we did, unlike many others did, was at the time when we launched, it was viewed that you needed to have a different app for everything. You had to have a separate podcasting app and podcasting music was very different. For us it’s just listening.

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. It turns out that what we saw all the time, it wasn’t like our music listeners weren’t listening to podcast, so why not use this experience and also recommend them great other stuff?

We went from there. 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.

Ben: But to your point on being slow and methodical, you had a channel to people, they knew you’re for listening, but if you are stuffing stuff in that channel that is not the thing that they want, then that blows up your core. 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.

Daniel: 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 to deliberate top down, it sort of fails. Most of the time actually what we see is the inklings of something already existing on the platform and then growing from there.

I mentioned this at the beginning, but Germany was an early indicator for a lot of things for us both in podcasting and in books. 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 listened to music tracks. It was music, it was clearly books, but it made it all the way up to the top list. Surely thereafter, we started showing up as the biggest book distributor in the country, but we weren’t even trying. It was actually a pretty horrible experience to listen to books on Spotify.

When your product is being used in spite of it actually being a pretty terrible experience, you know you’ve got something. That was this genesis for how we then were able to build and expand.

Ben: That’s awesome. Well, that’s it for this segment. Are you going to stick around and watch the rest of the night?

Daniel: Oh yeah, for sure. I’m so excited.

Ben: Awesome. Well, Daniel, thank you

David: Thank you so much for being here.

Ben: 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.

David: 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?

Ben: 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. 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.

David: 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.

Ben: And even better, Statig 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.

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

Ben: Now is also a great time to tell you about one of our very favorite companies, the climate-aligned AI infrastructure provider, Crusoe.

David: 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 admitted as greenhouse gasses.

Ben: 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, insane concept. Now, they are one of the world’s most important companies with an AI cloud that is actually superior to the hyperscalers. A whole bunch of the largest companies in the world are now trusting their AI infrastructure to Crusoe.

David: 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 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. That’s energy, that’s cooling, that’s construction. It’s literally steel and pipes and wire. It’s all the physical infrastructure behind AI.

Crusoe has 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.

Ben: 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. 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.

David: 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 to complete AI platform, or directly as a data center customer, which yes, several of the biggest companies in the world are now doing.

Just go on over to crusoe.ai/acquired, or click the link in the show notes and tell them that Ben and David sent you.

Ben: Thanks Crusoe.

David: Well, we’ve got a little more time before Mark comes on, and we have a couple of more surprises planned. I think it’s time to talk about the next one.

Ben: Act II.

David: Act II.

Ben: 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 like, what do people actually already want when we’re not even asking

David: Episode requests, number one. You go through the Acquired inbox, lots of episode requests.

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

David: Yup, add it, update the Acquired cannon. 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.

Emily: Hi. Hello.

David: Hi.

Emily: Hi, hugs.

David: Emily, oh thank you so much.

Emily: Congratulations.

Ben: Thank you. Thank you for being our guest.

Emily: You guys. This is pretty awesome.

Ben: Welcome to our recording studio.

David: Welcome to our, yeah.

Emily: Thank you. I’m glad to be here.

Ben: I need to mine you for some research. I know we have a thing that we’re doing here over the next 19 minutes, but you went wake surfing with Mark. The theme of tonight is researching his. His 4th of July video, he is standing there in a tuxedo with an American flag drinking a beer.

David: Everybody’s seen it.

Ben: Everybody’s seen this. The tuxedo’s dry. I’ve wake surfed a couple of times. I start in the water and you get pulled up. How logistically, can he step off the boat?

Emily: As you could probably tell from the episode, I’m not a wake surfer, but I tried. Mark is pretty good. 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. I can personally attest that I did see him do a dry start, and I think it’s real. I think.

Ben: That, or he had a lot of tuxedos on that boat to get multiple trial runs.

Emily: By the way, Priscilla’s pretty awesome too. They can both shred, just have to say that, because she’s here tonight too, yeah.

Ben: All right, Emily. Take us in.

Emily: Right now, and A-plus you guys for self-reflection, we’re going to revisit some of your past episodes. 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. I thought we would go down a little memory lane and start with YouTube, which David, you gave YouTube a C in 2016.

Ben: This is the acquisition of YouTube by Google.

Emily: Right. You, Ben, said it could be as bad as a C-minus. I just questioned that a little bit.

Ben: We were young. It was 2016. We didn’t know what we were doing.

David: We were misguided.

Emily: 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.” David said, “Who goes to YouTube and discovers something?”

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

Ben: It may actually be the case that that wasn’t a huge behavior yet. I know I’m being defensive here.

David: Ben, this is where we fall on our sword.

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

David: 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. I think literally as we were making that episode, AI and social media feed recommenders were happening in that moment. It was about to lead to everything that is happening today. It was YouTube within Google and Meta (then Facebook) buying GPUs and building AI that turned feed recommenders into the ultimate destination site. We just completely had no idea that that was happening.

Ben: AI had its moment a decade ago, where I’m all excited about it now, but 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: 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 in the United States.

David: It has Sunday Ticket.

Emily: I have a house full of kids. In my house, it’s the first and the second screen because we have YouTube TV. The question is, can they really be everything to everyone?

David: Here is I think our most legitimate defense. Google does not report YouTube profitability. They report YouTube revenue. When we did the episode, YouTube was doing about $5 billion run rate revenue. It is now $35–$40 billion annual revenue run rate.

Ben: And back then it was way losing money. It was a money pit.

David: Yes, 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 creators.

Ben: Which 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.

David: I think it’s a direct variable cost.

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

Ben: I’ll go on record. Youtube was an A-plus acquisition because of the strategic value. Whether it’s the second largest search engine second to Google, or the second largest social media property, it is strategically a very great thing to own. Not to mention going into the land of AI training data. But as a business, it is not clear to me that YouTube makes money.

Emily: My sources also, if they’re making money, it’s little to no money. But they could obviously change how much they’re paying out to creators. They can turn the spigot on and off.

David: With it and the durability that they’re building, and the affinity from creators. We’ll talk about creators on the platform in a minute. There is a reason why so many creators want to graduate to YouTube, and this is it.

Emily: Well, my show’s on YouTube, your show’s on YouTube. How do you feel about YouTube as creators?

Ben: 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, hundreds of millions sometimes of subscribers, where subscribers and views are uncorrelated.

Emily: Grade today?

David: A-plus. 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-plus.

Ben: The way that you 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: 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. Ben quote, “How are we both positive on this? I woke up Monday morning being like, what?”

Ben: Oh, yeah. Then we’ve got this other one.

Emily: What about LinkedIn today?

Ben: That we said we had no idea how it went because It was too recent. I think the story with LinkedIn is that it was super unclear that it had the running room ahead of it. What are the numbers on LinkedIn today, revenue-wise?

David: $16 billion–plus in revenue today.

Ben: They’ve 5x revenue since they were bought 8 years ago.

David: Of which $5 billion 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. For us on Acquired—we actually went and looked in preparation for this—we have about a relatively equal number of followers on LinkedIn as a platform versus any of the other social platforms out there. But engagement is like 5x–10x on LinkedIn. It’s our most important social platform. If you had said that eight years ago, it would’ve been crazy.

Ben: The reason why this was worth a revisit, and that why I think they’ve been so much more successful than anyone would’ve thought at the time of acquisition, they 5x in revenue, which, over 8 years is great, but not 3–4 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.

If you look at what a reasonable multiple would be for LinkedIn if it were an independent company today, it’s a big company. It would be over a $100 billion market cap company today. And it’s just kind of hanging out inside Microsoft.

Emily: Revisiting this was a little traumatic for me because if you’ll remember, this was an acquisition that no one saw coming. There were no leaks, no reporting on this before it happened. My producer was apparently calling my phone nonstop in the morning. It was the crack of dawn and I was not picking up.

She called my husband who came in and was like, Microsoft just bought LinkedIn and you have to interview Satya and Jeff Wiener in an hour. I was like, what? So yeah, that’s what I remember.

Ben: Was it a good interview?

Emily: I think so, actually,

David: I watched it. You said it? Yeah, it was good. It was great.

Emily: My hair wasn’t quite fully done, but we made it. We made it through.

Ben: You have some new reporting.

Emily: I do actually, because I talked to Reid Hoffman who of course is the co-founder of LinkedIn. It’s interesting because Reid joined the board of Microsoft. He’s still on the board of Microsoft. He was an early investor in open AI on the board of OpenAI. Shocker. Satya Nadella is on the AI train early. Microsoft is the biggest backer of OpenAI now.

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

Emily: 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.”

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

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

David: We stopped grading at some point.

Emily: But 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?

Ben: 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 2 a week. It’s insane.

David: They’re doing one every three days.

Ben: But on top of the launch business…

David: The launch business is not the interesting part of the business.

Ben: They now have Starlink, which is estimated to do $6.5 billion in 2024, and they are reportedly profitable as a business. I’m pretty sure the 7000 Starlink satellites that are in orbit represent two-thirds of the total satellites orbiting the earth.

It’s not just like, oh, we’ll see if people want Starlink. People want Starlink. The business itself—I’m looking at the subscriber count—I think it’s something like three million subscribers. And it’s only been three years since it launched.

David: When we did the episode, Starlink was the pie in the sky, literally. There was nothing. SpaceX was valued at $36 billion when we did the episode. Starlink itself is worth way more than $36 billion today.

Emily: It’s a beast. By the way, nobody else could have saved those astronauts.

Ben: Fighting words.

Emily: I mean, NASA didn’t have a choice. Well, Russia maybe, but that’s complicated. We don’t even know if China could dock with the ISS. I think that’s okay to say.

Sorry. Where did I just cross the line?

Ben: I will say the Starlink execution is just more remarkable than I think 99% of people would’ve guessed.

Emily: Okay. Now to your most requested revisit ever, the arena queen. You gave her an A-plus, but that was two years ago before the Eras Tour. I think you’re going to have to invent a new category.

Ben: Certainly, or stop grading. That’s the real answer.

David: The context on this is it’s a little weird because there’s no enterprise value of Taylor out there that you can calculate. The closest thing was when we did the episode, Forbes estimated her net worth at $550 million. Not woo. By our calculations, we’re pretty sure she generated on the order of $550 million of free cash flow this last 12 months. That’s a woo.

Emily: So is she more than a billionaire?

Ben: David’s got an argument on this. Walk us through your perceived financial breakdown of Swift Incorporated.

David: Of Taylor Swift, Inc. 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 all the challenges for artists and et cetera, et cetera, it’s getting better, Spotify’s doing great and Daniel’s doing great and all that. The latest reported, talked about numbers was that Taylor was making less than $5 million dollars a year from streaming.

Ben: There was this myth that streaming doesn’t pay.

David: Last year Taylor made well over—this was reported—$100 million from Spotify streaming alone. Alone. Doesn’t include any of the other platforms, so gross that up. By nature of what she has been doing that we talked about in that episode redoing her masters, you think about what of the percentage of those streams that are happening, are they on where she owns all the rights? That is a very, very, very high gross margin number that is coming to table every year.

Ben: Of that high $100-plus million streaming number, she actually keeps quite a bit of it because of this strategy that she’s—

David: The amount that she’s getting just from streaming. Eras tour aside, movie aside, she’s getting paid more every year than any Hollywood actor, probably any athlete in the world. She could just sit at home. But she doesn’t.

Ben: Okay. But then, she did an Eras tour, which is the most unbelievable tour that any artist has ever conceived of or executed. How much money did that make last year, David?

David: Last year, the Eras tour in the calendar year 2023 grossed (I think) $1.1 billion.

Ben: Which is a gross. And tours are expensive. There are a lot of things involved in making shows.

David: Yes, there are. The previous record for highest grossing tour ever, I believe was $1 billion. Taylor eclipsed that over multiple years that that was earned. Not only did she set the record for highest grossing tour, she did it within 12 months. Obviously the tour has continued.

Ben: But let’s say she operates a very 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… anyway.

David: That’s another $300–$350 million in cash flow every year.

Ben: Or at least last year during the Eras tour she’s making that.

David: When she’s actively touring.

Ben: And then…

David: And then there’s the movie. The movie grossed $267 million at the box office. Highest gross in concert film of all time. Taylor went directly to the theaters with the movie.

Ben: So paying less middlemen.

David: 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. Obviously you’re not going to make a movie every year.

Ben: So David, you’re getting to the point of your $550 million number of cash flow last year may actually be conservative.

David: 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.?

Ben: Oh, you did used to be an investment banker.

David: Half a billion–plus cash flow every year.

Emily: I re-listened to the Taylor podcast with my kids driving to Tahoe and they loved it. You have a potential gen alpha audience.

David: It’s a gateway drug.

Emily: In case you’re getting nervous. But here’s a question. Is it possible that we’re at peak Taylor?

David: 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?

Ben: 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?

David: Yes. Disney trade’s a 20x free cash flow. Taylor has $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: And now she’s in her NFL era. How do you value that?

David: Right. But I think Ben and I differ a little bit on this. I would argue Disney is the right comp.

Ben: Oh boy. To look at the single greatest IP holder in the world that has proven over 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, I’m not saying it should trade at 1x or 2x, but 20x, David, is a little…

But your point I think is a very interesting one, which is when people are looking at the net worth of a person like this, they foolishly don’t consider it an enterprise.

David: The multiple they’re using is one.

Ben: Right. 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. I think that the slept-on thing is Taylor.

David: Are we at peak Taylor? I think to me, the song that played before we started the movie, I’m Walking Out Here, was Start Me Up by the Rolling Stones. Taylor is the Rolling Stones.

Ben: Of this generation?

David: Yeah.

Emily: The Taylor or just beginning. I’m going to say no just because that seems like a safe bet when you’re talking about Taylor.

Ben: Yeah. For my own safety I’m going to say we are not at peak Taylor.

Emily: 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. I can’t wait to keep listening. Bye guys.

Ben: Thanks, Emily.

David: Thank you, Emily.

Ben: Thank you so much. All right. David, we’ve had Jamie Dimon, we’ve had Daniel Ek, we’ve had Emily Chang. What is possibly up our sleeve before Mark?

David: We won’t keep you waiting too much longer, but we do have one more special guest. One more surprise update in a minute.

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

David: Yes it is. Max and Umar are actually backstage.

Ben: Oh, should we do it live?

David: I think we do it live. I think in the spirit of doing it live, please welcome the global co-heads of JP Morgan Payments, Max Neukirchen and Umar Farooq.

Ben: Hey, you Max.

David: Max. Thank you.

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

Max: Hello everyone. Great to be here with you. 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, JP 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 are in 160 countries and we move about $10 trillion every day. That is, I think, one in every $4 that moves around the globe.

David: Wow.

Max: It is (I think) probably the largest payments business in the world. 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.

This is why so many companies that you feature in Acquired actually our clients, and 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.

Ben: The last payment solution you’ll ever need.

Max: Exactly.

David: 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?

Umar: As Max said, it’s part of our DNA. You have to innovate to survive. We are building stuff for the next 5, 10, 20, 100 years. Within our Onyx business unit, we have the largest financial blockchain life ecosystem 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.

Then the list goes on and on. Even in AI, which you cannot not mention anymore in the world, we use AI to catch fraud, which you can imagine we’ve got to go against some AI systems on the other side, you need to have some AI of your own. We are building stuff at a different scale and scope. When I think of JP Morgan Payments, we perform miracles and magnitude every single day.

David: Great. Well thank you so much for the great relationship. Thank you.

Ben: All right. We alluded to one more thing before intermission.

David: We have one more thing before one more thing.

Ben: A special treat from a past Acquired guest. One of the things that happened in the insane year that we’ve had was that we had this viral clip from an episode. This never happened in the land of Acquired. It got tens of millions of views and it got picked up by Forbes, Fortune, the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal.

It actually went so nuts that we felt like it was 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. So we wanted to correct the record and have that person back via video to say it straight and say what he meant. Everyone, Jensen Huang.

Jensen: Hi everybody. It’s great to join you at Acquired Live. Wow. This is really something. I still remember when I met Dave and Ben, they interviewed me right here on this stage at NVIDIA’s headquarters. Now this podcast attracted an incredible audience, so I’m really proud of them.

One of the questions that they asked me was if I knew what I know now, I think, or something like that, would I start Nvidia all over again? And I said, absolutely not. Of course, it was taken out of context because I was asked about that several times after that. Of course, I would start the company if I knew it would turn out this way.

The reason why I said what I said 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, all the hardships, and all the pain and suffering of the last 32 years, and I would’ve compressed it into the brain of a 29-year-old, there is no way that that person would’ve started the company.

My point here is the super point of entrepreneurs, which is that your superpowers are partly your ignorance. That you don’t know how hard it is. That’s what I meant.

Ben: Everybody, Jensen Huang. Nice to have that fixed. Feels good.

David: Yes. We can officially correct the record on that one.

Ben: All right. We have finally arrived, the main event. Tonight is featured some incredible founder-led companies, Jensen from Nvidia, Daniel from Spotify. Next we have the iconic founder-CEO of our time, Mark Zuckerberg.

David: Mark, it's great to have you here.

Mark: It's great to be here. 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 I'm going to say tonight. Nah, just kidding. I don't apologize anymore.

Ben: We've noticed.

David: Well, okay. Wait. Here's the question. If you knew what you know today, would you have started Facebook?

Mark: Oh God, I mean, look. I think… yeah. No, I mean, he started it.

David: Literally.

Mark: 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. You obviously look back and you have all these fond memories, but it was not the most fun part of the journey or the part of my life that I wish I could go back and relive.

I do think that there's something to what Jensen was saying that I thought was very honest. When I heard him say it the first time I was like yeah, I get that. I think there are a lot of people for whom, if you knew how painful it would be along the way, you wouldn't get started. But then 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.

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

Mark: I started working with people to design some of my own clothes. So I figured we're going to design eyewear, we're going to design other stuff that people wear. Let's get good at this.

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. I've started working on this series of shirts with some of my favorite classical sayings on them. So this one is 'pathemathos,' learning through suffering. It's a little family saying, and also Aeschylus...

David: Was that your family saying growing up or is that your family now?

Mark: No, its just something my sister said.

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

Mark: I think you learn what matters to you, what's important, and your place in the world through repeatedly hitting your head against different challenges. I think that that is the journey. That's the entrepreneurial journey. It's also, I think, part of the beauty of building things.

But this is something that Jensen talks a lot about too. I feel like when you go to start a company, everyone 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 behaviors. 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.

David: Well, speaking of facing challenges, we want to talk about a number of those. 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: It's a dubious distinction.

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

Mark: I kind of think 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.

David: 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: Thanks, I'm excited about them, too. At Meta, we've been building social experiences for 20 years now. 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, on a small screen.

When we got started, we were like a handful of kids. We weren't able—we didn't have the resources at the time—to go define whatever the next computing platform is. Also, Facebook originally got started around the same time as 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.

One of the big themes for the next chapter of what we do is I want to be able to build what I think are the ideal experiences, not just what you're allowed to build on some platform that someone else built, but what is actually, if you can think from first principles, what is the ideal social experience. What you would like to have is not a phone that you look down at, that 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 where the glasses 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 demo'd 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 like a hologram and we have glasses. 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 being there with another person and this physical perception where we're very physical beings.

People like to intellectualize everything, but a lot of our experience is very physical. 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. I think it's also going to be the ultimate incarnation of AI, because you're going to have conversations where it's like there are some people. Maybe I'm physically here, there's a person, you're a hologram there, there's an AI that is embodied as someone is there, and the glasses will enable this.

How are we going after this, building this? This is 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. You have to build a novel display stack.

These aren't just screens like the kind that are in phones. There's this long lineage. 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 a brand new display stack around holographic displays that basically need to get created.

Then they need to be put into glasses, they need to be miniaturized, and 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.

Ben: Operate on new novel RF protocols.

Mark: Yeah, it's a pretty big challenge, so let's go try to go for the big thing. We've been working on that for a while, and we're pretty close to being able to show off 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. That's 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. What if we just constrain ourselves, like we're going to work with a great partner, EssilorLuxottica? 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.

Actually, I thought when we were getting started with those that it was almost like a practice project for the ultimate AR.

Ben: Which, let's be clear, that's what you thought Facebook was.

Mark: That's true. Yeah, it did.

Ben: Like for your real startup someday.

Mark: Let's go on a tangent there for a second. I 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.

I remember we got off the plane, we were driving down 101, we're like wow, eBay, Yahoo, this is amazing. There are all these great companies. One day, maybe we'll build a company like this. I'd already started Facebook and I was like surely the project that we're working on now is not a company.

Ben: And Facebook had some scale at this point.

Mark: 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, a lot of hard work obviously, but just at the time I don't think this is it.

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

Mark: I didn't know. The glasses, though, we thought we want to get working with EssilorLuxottica so we can start building more and more advanced glasses. They're really good. They look good. And then the massive transformation in AI.

Ben: For listeners, 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 the ChatGPT moment, and these were not manufactured and shipped as an AI device. That came later when they were already in market.

Mark: A few years ago, I would have predicted that AR holograms would have been available before full-scale AI. Now, I think it's probably going to be the other order. Now it's like all right, great. Well, this is actually a great product because 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 Himel, the guy who runs the product group, running into him and I'm like, hey, I think we should probably pivot this and make it so that Meta AI is the primary feature of it. Then I remember I came in the next week and they built a prototype of it on Tuesday. It was like all right, good, yeah, this is good, this is going to be a very successful product.

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

Ben: I was on the highway with my kids. 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 ship that soon so we can see if that's a good idea or not?

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

Ben: 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? One of the most valuable companies in the world through multiple iterations, multiple technology waves fighting off, 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.

David: MySpace, Twitter Gen 1, Instagram, Snapchat, WhatsApp, TikTok.

Ben: Apple app tracking transparency.

David: ATT, you could put in its own whole category, and now ChatGPT. That's nine.

Ben: There is a widely held public narrative every single time—Snapchat discover stories. 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: I think it's that we're a technology company that is focused on human connection, not a specific type of app. 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.

Then you need to figure out well, how do you give yourself the competence to actually go do that? That's where I think being a strong technology company comes in, because a lot of companies think about themselves too narrowly in terms of, okay, well, we're this one thing, and the reason why we can build all these things is because we have a really strong technology foundation.

Some of that is just me and how I think about stuff. I was an engineer before I got started. I mostly took systems engineering–type classes when I was in college. You talk about Friendster and MySpace and all the scaling challenges they had, doing the graph calculations of like all right. Do you know this person? Should you show them your page?

Ben: Friends of friends of friends.

Mark: Yeah.

David: Actually, can you take us back and we want to ask you the story of that time. It seems quaint now, Friendster, Myspace, but you studied computer science, graph networking, social graphs. That is a very, very difficult computational calculation.

Mark: I think 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. You want to have a smart product definition, but then you want to be competent and better than everyone else at the technology.

I think that that's something that we've held ourselves to and built 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. 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 one dude on the management team who was the head of engineering, who was technical, and everyone else wasn't. All right, if that's your team, then you're not a technology company.

I think one of the things that I've always been pretty careful about is I actually want a lot of the people on our management team, it's like split 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. 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 share of the company as engineers, then you're not a technology company.

I think that that also is important to the board. I think just like in terms of how you weigh decisions and culturally, things inside the company matters a lot. But I think that's one of the things that has been really fundamental. We're able to 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. For that, I think we also 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. I define our strategies. We can learn faster than every other company. We're going to win.

We're going to build a better product than everyone else because we're going to get it out first or early. We're going to have a good feedback loop. We're going to get a bunch of feedback. We're going to learn what people like better than other people. By the time you get to whether it's version three or four or five—they're not even discrete versions because you ship so frequently—you just learn faster.

I think that's basically the formula. Be a technology company, build good foundation, learn from what people are focused on in the world, and just iterate as quickly as you can.

Ben: In one of my research calls to prep for this, someone described you as a master strategist, which we all acknowledge at this point.

Mark: Except for all the stuff that I just thought was not going to be that important, that ended up actually being the most important. Part of it is like okay, you want to set up the game so that way you optimize, you create your luck.

David: This is what Jensen told us. 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.

Ben: 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 gam. 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 Meta's product development?

Mark: I do like turn-based strategy.

Ben: But it does feel like the way that you make bets is like if we have great engineering, then that can take care of the speed part. That's many iterations or multiple at-bats and then the—

Mark: Well, great engineering and 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.

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 too. They take this approach, 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.

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, because 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 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 another couple of months or whatever. I do just think that you want to really have a culture that values shipping, getting things out, and getting feedback more than needing always to get great positive accolades from people when you put stuff out. 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.

Ben: And it's just about making sure 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: I would like to hope that it's not damaging to the brand, but…

Ben: Innately, it is. When you're like oh, I feel bad because I shipped a product that wasn't good enough. you're sort of—

Mark: I don't want to overstate it. We don't ship things that we think are bad, but we also want to make sure that we're shipping things that are 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'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.

Part of it is like okay, you put something out. You want to collect feedback and 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. 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 go early enough on that as more.

Ben: 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: Does it have to be one or the other? I think it's a combination. I think you're basically taking some kind of values, either 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.

I think 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. I think both probably matter. Yeah.

Ben: As I pour through all these historical examples, there's the market discovers. Some other participant in the market discovers the stories format, and suddenly the whole world is like oh my God, 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 $50-plus billion that you've put into it, is like we're going to 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 asking for that much feedback. I'm putting it in the world.

Mark: Well it's a combination. I mean, I think that 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 News Feed. Before that, social networks were basically profiles and then we were like, hey, people actually kind of want to get the updates and let's 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 feed. 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 world.

You know, we're not embarrassed about learning from things that other people discovered that were good first, and then we build a better version of it and, um, 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 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.

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

Ben: Meta.

David: 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 'Ben:eficiary' 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: 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.

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

Mark: Yeah, yeah, no, and it's great. It 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. Google was the first of the great companies that built this distributed computing infrastructure. So they came first. 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, ok, 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. Now you have like all these other you know, cloud service platforms that you know basically use Open Compute and because of that, the supply chain is standard around, standardized around our designs, which means that it's 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 Llama.

David: Okay, this is where we were going with this.

Mark: Yeah, it's a similar deal. 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 just 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 ecosystems. They get better when other people use them. For us, there's a huge amount of good and it philosophically lines up with where we are. We're like mean look, I definitely, firsthand have a lot of experiences. We were like trying to build stuff on mobile platforms. The platforms are just like no, you can't build that okay, uh that's frustrating.

David: Can we take a real quick detour?

Mark: What's that? We can, we can, take a detour.

David: Okay, you took a detour. We're going to take a detour. Help us with our research here, the eve of the IPO...

Mark: Yeah, this is quite a detour.

Ben: Wait, Did you just stop?

David: I'm really grabbing the wheel here.

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

David: I'm sorry, I was really wound up.

Ben:  I know Open source and AI, we'll get back.

David: I think it's related. I do, I really genuinely do Facebook on mobile is HTML5.

Ben: In 2012.

David: Yeah, May 2012.

Mark: Yeah.

David: Yeah, I want to ask you what you were thinking going into the IPO with Facebook on mobile being HTML5, and what happened to 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 with AI?

Mark: I think it was a pretty different technical issue. 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. 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. We're like, all right, we have an idea, let's build this platform where we can get a web-based platform. 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, um, we're that's going to be that's. We're like, 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. 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?

Ben: Let's be clear the 'feed ad' had not been invented yet.

Mark: Yeah, that was the thing 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 were 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 using the product. 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 where we were just like look, we're going to pause feature development of the company because it's hard enough to do a rewrite.

If you look at the history of the tech industry, there are all these examples like Netscape and all these things that they tried to do a rewrite. They needed to reestablish their technical platform and they also tried to add features. They basically just never terminated. That's a real risk when you're completely changing your underlying platform, that you're going to miss it.

It's like, all right, we've got to minimize the chance that that happens. 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's growing, so the percent of our traffic that is monetizable is shrinking, because web is basically shrinking and mobile's growing

David: And that's your only business model.

Mark: Yeah, and I was like all right, like okay,

Ben: And you're now recently quarterly reporting, you know.

Mark: But the thing is, it was actually pretty clear what we needed to do. You know, I think strategically, a lot of the time it's somewhat harder to know what to do when you're winning. 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 just do you have the pain tolerance to go do it?

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 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.

I think 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 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, although that one in retrospect looks pretty good. In retrospect. It's not that bad. Your market cap only got cut in half for a year and a half. I'm like great, great, yeah, I'll take that. Anyway, where were we?

Ben: Maybe can I so, can I connect? So David asked hey, can you help 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: 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, you know, one of the things I reflect on over the last like 10 years or so was, you know, the political environment just changed dramatically, right? 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. And I think so much of this stuff is correctly understanding your place in the world and in history, and 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. 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 were some things that we did right, but I think one of the things that I look back on regret is, we accepted other people's view of some of the things that they were asserting that we were doing wrong or were responsible for.

I don't actually think we were, and there were a lot of things we did mess up and we needed to fix up and we needed to fix. But 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, say okay, maybe it's not all our thing, but we're going to fully own this problem, we're going to take responsibility for it, we're going to 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 wants something to be fixed, and there are people who are just looking for someone to blame. And I think, to some degree, 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 going to take responsibility for all this stuff. People are basically blaming social media and the tech industry for all these different things in society.

If we're saying, okay, we're going to really do our part to go fix this stuff, I know 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,  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 it started in 2016. And 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.

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. I think it's going to take another 10 years or so for us to fully work through that cycle before our brand and all of that is back to the place that it maybe could have been if I hadn't messed that up in the first place.

But look, in the grand scheme of things, 20 years isn't that bad either and we'll get through it and 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 certainly there's one line of critique, which is, you know, you kind of bought into too much of the stuff that you shouldn't have and, yeah, it's going to take us a long time to dig out of that.

Ben: 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 where like, no, that's not our fault.

Mark: Yeah, I mean, at this point, I think a lot of this stuff has been studied. I mean, I think a lot of this stuff has been studied. 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. 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 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 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 it kind of cuts both ways.

David: To me, this brings up another topic we wanted to talk about with you and you, just you know, 20 years isn't that long.

Mark: I'm young.

David: You're young, we all are.

Ben: This is the advantage of being a college dropout founder with one company.

Mark: Yeah, it is. When you start, when you're 19, it's like, hopefully we have more than 20 years left to do this

Ben: And hopefully you have like 'Buffett' duration.

Mark: Yeah, I don't know, Maybe, hopefully.

David: You set up the company in a, especially at the time, truly unique way where you can operate the company and take that approach.

Ben: Do you mean super voting shares?

David: Super voting shares is like the technical aspect. 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 you know in doing all the research for this, a thesis we've developed is that, like that, is just one of the core fundamental advantages that Meta has. So as you were setting up the company, you know when you were so young, even when you went public, you were so young, why was that so important to you?

Mark: 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 basically in the next year, everyone else on the management team left because I hadn't done a good job communicating. I don't want to blame them. I hadn't done a good job communicating the long-term vision because I didn't, 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

Ben: Or make the case to them why it would be worth more than a billion.

Mark: Yeah, or just 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, a lot of people. It's like this is like all their startup dreams come true. You've got to 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 going to do this”. After that I was like, all right, well, I don't want to get fired from my own company for wanting to build it, so let's uh, try to set up a governance structure that makes it somewhat harder to do that. Um, so wow - "learning through suffering!"

Ben: Wow, 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: Yeah,

Ben: I think this is a fundamentally misunderstood thing about 'Facebook the startup' - it is the prototypical startup.

David: You are the iconic startup founder

Ben: Of this century, 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 like going concern

Mark: Yeah, I mean I think we're having a lot more fun now. I get to work on all the stuff? It's awesome!

Ben:  But what is your advice to all these founders who sort of romanticize the idea of starting a company and kind of.

Mark: I don't know, obviously starting a company is 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 figure out what works right. 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 12 different things that were just things that I wanted to exist. I 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 help upkeep this one.

But I had a bunch of other ideas for stuff I was going to build too, I didn't know how to think about what a company was going to be. I think there's something about maintaining flexibility that's helpful. Once you hire a bunch of people, it's a lot easier when you can just have meetings in your own head about what direction you want to go in, and there's a lot less pride and people dug in when you're just like, okay, I'm going to change direction.

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. 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 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 make the changes and do the things that they need to, which is less fun, and then you can't attract the best people to go work on those things because it's less fun, and so I do think you just have to dial it right.

Ben: You're spending a gajillion dollars on Reality Labs.

Mark: It's a technical term...

Ben: It's not making that much money. I'm gonna play Mark back to you, sure 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: 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 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 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 this is already going to be one of the most successful products in the history of the world, and I think it's going to go a lot further than that. So I know 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 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, that way people use the things less or like them less, and it's hard to exactly estimate it. But I think we might be twice as profitable if we own the platform or something. 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 actually since the Yahoo days. So 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 sort of articulate a case for why I am 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 values shift over time is, you know, one of the things that 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. We've built these products. More than 3 billion people use them on a near daily basis.

Ben: It's like 3.3 billion on a daily basis.

Mark: Yeah, and they use it because it is useful in their life and in all these different ways. I mean obviously people vary, people use it for different things, but 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, 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, 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 be, 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. I like to think I'm young, I'm a little older, but I do think that at this point it's.

But it's like I. I do think that at this point, you know, it's not just a Meta thing. Also, you know, in my personal life, a lot of what I personally value is doing things that are inspiring with people who I find inspiring. All right, and you know. So there's the personal version of this. It's like I get to work on, you know, interesting science problems with Priscilla and my wife and a bunch of awesome people. I get to design shirts with some of the best fashion designers in the world. It's like I am..

Ben: Statues.

Mark: Sculpture of my wife. Bring back the Roman tradition of designing sculptures of people you love.

Ben: I'm not at all being facetious. It's really cool.

Mark: I think Daniel Arsham is a really talented guy. I was like that's a person who I'd love to work with on something. Let's go find a project. One of my side projects is 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 starts with like it's awesome, we got this steer - chonk. He's like 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. We're just working with you know, 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 it's going to be a good 15 or 20 years.

Ben: Was there a moment like what changed? When did this become your priority and why? 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: I don't know. I think that there might've been something around the way the company shifted in operations around COVID. I mean, it's like the COVID,  all these tech companies went remote temporarily and it was an interesting period to just 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, I get a lot of value and energy and ideas from being around other people, but I also need time with myself.

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. So 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 so the Reality Lab stuff that we started in 2014, really the FAIR stuff around, you know, 'Fundamental AI Research'

Ben: yeah 2012, 13?

Mark: 2012, 13, 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 do this as a hobby? And I was like no, I think we should do this. I mean, 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.

That really, it's like I mean, look, you learn who you are through challenges. It's like okay, losing half of your market cap is 'quaint' compared to losing 80% of your market cap or whatever it was. I mean these are all intentional decisions. It's like there are a lot of conversations that we had which are like, should we go forward with this?

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!

Ben: 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: I like Meta. It's a good name, you know, finding good short names...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 it's kind of mind-boggling at the scale that it's at.

But the others, we went through a period where we had Facebook and a handful of small apps and now we have four apps that have a billion people or more using them. You know, hopefully in the next few years, five with Threads, if that continues scaling. And this was a conversation that we had a bunch - where 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 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 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, if we're doing this, we're going to lean into this and we're going to do it. So let's do it.

Ben: 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 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: Yeah, I get it, but I don't know. We aligned 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.

Ben: Yeah, 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 much, and you're like, no, we don't believe in it.

Mark: Yeah, no, I mean, we're a company that 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.

David: Speaking of lightning rounds and mark-shaped holes, you are accelerating what used to be your annual challenges. I mean when we were all kids and we didn't know each other, I was so inspired you would do your annual challenges, you would post about them and I was like, wow, that's 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. How?

Mark: What do you mean?

David: 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, you're raising cattle... I feel like you have a weekly challenge.

Mark: I'm trying to do inspiring things. I'm also really competitive.

David: Who's your competition for this?

Mark: 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. I mean we face a lot of competition and a lot of different aspects of what we do. I mean 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, that kind of 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.

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 iPhone is sort of like the intellectual leader and by far has all the rights.

David: Let's take it as a conceit.

Mark: I think that there's the recency bias, and probably almost everyone here has an iPhone and I think that 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.

Ben: I've got a closing question here.

Mark: Please. Thank you.

Ben: 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: I mean just do something that you care about. 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. Different things have clearly worked for other companies, I don't know.

One day my daughter, we 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. I was like you can't, that's not available to you. 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. I think it's like look, learn from other people's successes and failures, but do your own thing.

David: I love that. Love that. Well, that is the perfect place to leave things.

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

Ben: So, David and I made you a custom one-of-one shirt that represents tonight.

Mark: Thank you.

Ben: 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.

David: GPS coordinates.

Ben: GPS coordinates. The first one represents Kirkland House, where you wrote the first line of code for Facebook, and the second one is the Chase Center. Awesome, so thank you for joining us here tonight.

David: Thank you for joining us.

Ben: Wow.

David: What a night

Ben: Absolutely crazy. I mean, Mark has done many interviews this year, both with other podcasts and in traditional press, but that felt different If for no other reason than it happened, live in front of a 6,000 person audience in an arena. But I wasn't expecting it to feel that different.

David: Yeah, I mean, it was, I think, the wildest experience of my life being up there. I don't even know what else could compare.

Ben: Pretty insane. Well, listeners, as you may have noticed, thanks to our sponsors, this conversation was uninterrupted and we do want to reflect a little bit and share some of our thoughts and our...you know how we're feeling looking back on this conversation with you. But first we do want to share a word on Statsig and Crusoe.

David: Statsig. Mark's most famous catchphrase is probably 'move fast and break things'. But, like we talked about with him, despite instilling this in Facebook's engineering culture, Facebook doesn't actually break very often. How?

Ben: Certainly not anymore and really, relative to its peers, not even throughout its past. Yeah, 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. That means anyone could just ship a new feature, but they always had metrics to use as guardrails and they could always roll back a feature if anything broke.

David: Oh man, there are legendary stories of engineers shipping features like in their first week at bootcamp as interns or new hires at Facebook and Meta over the years, and you might wish that you could do the same on your team and build products like they build products at Facebook. Ship fast, make database decisions, iterate rapidly, but you need the right tools, so you're stuck right.

Ben: 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: Even better, Statsig was literally founded by an ex-Meta team who wanted to help everyone build like the best and bring these same tools to the market. 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: David, every time we work with Statsig, this list gets more and more impressive. Like now it is purely, you know, A-list companies.

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

Ben: Thanks, Statsig.

David: Now for Crusoe. Crusoe is a climate-aligned cloud platform built specifically for AI workloads and powered by clean energy. They build and operate GPU data centers powered by low-cost stranded energy that otherwise goes to waste or, worse, gets emitted as greenhouse gasses.

Ben: It's crazy. When Acquired first started working with Crusoe, this was a cool idea. Now they're like one of the most important companies in the world, with an AI cloud that's superior to the hyperscalers and a whole bunch of the largest companies in the world trusting their AI infrastructure to them.

David: Yeah, it's easy to think about AI as like oh, that's a bunch of PhDs at Meta or OpenAI or Anthropic or whatever you know, tinkering with model weights in their office and hitting compute. But there's this whole other industrial side of AI. That's everything that happens after you press go on the model training and that's energy, cooling, construction, all the physical infrastructure behind AI.

Ben: And Crusoe is powering that by producing or repurposing huge amounts of power. We are talking gigawatts in their development pipeline, which is 'nuclear reactor' amounts of power for less cost than other providers and with zero or in some cases, actually negative emissions. It's super important. If you listen to Zuck and others talk about what the bottleneck to AI progress is, it's actually not compute, but energy and Crusoe is solving that problem.

David: It's just an awesome company. We are super proud to work with them and to be investors in the company. You can work with Crusoe either through their managed AI cloud, which is great for startups and enterprises who want a complete end-to-end platform for AI, or directly as a data center customer, which several of the largest companies in the world are now doing. So, just going over to crusoe.ai/acquired that's C-R-U-S-O-E dot A-I slash acquired or click the link in the show notes and tell them that Ben and David sent you.

Ben: Okay. David, reflections on this conversation, the biggest thing that I kept thinking going into the night, as we're talking with Mark, as we're talking with his team, you know, people kept saying we don't really do this, Mark doesn't really do this. And I kept thinking, yeah, he kind of does, because he's done all these podcasts this year and...

David: He does Facebook Meta Connect like he's done, big events before, of course.

Ben: Right, and he does a good number of in-person press interviews too. It's not like he doesn't talk to the traditional press, even though that has kind of become a narrative. It's not really true. However, Mark has not done an external several thousand person live thing like this. This is a very unusual format and kind of an uncomfortable one even for you and I, like we're so used to stopping starting being thoughtful in our answers and like this is a show - you're performing. There are no breaks,

David: There's no retakes, yeah

Ben: Right, but Mark and like all the Meta execs really embraced it. A bunch of the executive team came like they took off this whole day and actually some stuff we did the night before too.

David: A bunch of the board members were there. A lot of people important to Mark were there.

Ben: His family came.

David: They made it an event,

Ben: Right. I thought this was a big deal for us. I was kind of shocked to the degree that Mark also thought it was a big deal for him,

David: Which is super cool. Totally agree.

Ben: That's one. I was also surprised and delighted that he was willing to dive into history with us.

David: Yes, we totally did not expect that. He's usually so maniacally focused on the future and in our conversations to prep with him before the event, he was like, I think of you guys as a history podcast, you know, let's talk about the future. I'm like okay, okay, but we want to ground it in history. And he showed up and was totally ready to go back and I think that made the talking about the present and the future even better.

Ben: Totally, because you could create these through lines. I mean, as funny as your interjection on let's go back to the IPO moment, was it opened up the door to have these comparative moments too, is what Meta doing today, is that similar to something that you've done over and over? Should we be watching for a pattern here, or are you very different today than you were historically? The way that he was talking about that stuff on stage felt very authentic, and I just haven't heard him speak in that way before, at least publicly.

David: I think it was also a great way to let us all get a window into his psyche, which kind of brings us to another point, which is like he is still in it. Oh, what other founders of companies like that? I mean there's Jensen, who else? You know, it's the two of them.

Ben: Yeah, I think the casual observer to Meta might observe, like you know, Mark's been running it for 20 years and most of the time these founders kind of like go and do something else. They become executive chairman or they like stepped into a board role or they own 4% of the companies. There's some pattern there and for Mark I think it was plain as day on stage.

He is more in it than ever and I don't think he thinks he's like halfway through his journey, like I don't think he's 20 years in. At 40, I'll be done. I don't get that sense either. I think Meta is his vehicle by which he wants to live his entire life and he wants to make things with this group of people that he wants to make, period, and that is kind of the product strategy.

David: I got chills when he said the 20-year mistake, and then I got even more chills when he said but 20 years actually isn't that long.

Ben: Yeah, that's a pretty illustrative comment. Totally, I was appreciative that he engaged with us on the 'be critical of the company', because, honestly, I was asking that as research for when we inevitably do our Meta episode. I think he gave us a regret, not a criticism, but we were live on stage in front of 6,000 people and it's not really the right format for that.

David: Yep totally.

Ben: That said obviously a very interesting answer.

David: I think related though back to the, 'he's still in it' - in some sense Reality Labs you could look at like his blue origin.

Ben: A hundred percent.

David: It's just within Meta.

Ben: I'm glad you caught this too. Other big tech CEO founders have their moment running the company, they take a board role. They go do another thing and oftentimes it's big and important for the world and capital intensive and Mark is doing that -but inside Meta, with Reality Labs.I think it'll be super fascinating 20 to 50 years from now to reflect back and say what were the unintended or perhaps intended outcomes of co-mingling multiple huge swings under one corporate umbrella versus having people who are either CEO of multiple companies concurrently or, you know, step down from one to run the other.

For Mark, I kind of feel like, again, Meta is his vehicle for executing the things that he thinks are awesome products, and of course, it's not just awesome products but like things that could let him have more control over his universe. He's clearly a guy who values having a lot of degrees of freedom and doesn't like being boxed in.

David: I loved your turn-based strategy game of get more turns. Learn more on each turn. Oh man, Starcraft Pro Player 101 there.

Ben: Yes, but it'll be interesting to see the knock-on effects of having Reality Labs in the Meta organization versus as a new venture.

David: Totally. All of that brings me to frankly, just my biggest overwhelming takeaway from the whole experience, which is, Ben:, you've developed a really great research interview question that you use on all the sources that we talk to now, which is you ask, "what is the one thing that is most misunderstood about this company, this organization, etc”.

And everybody at Meta for years always would say Mark and I never totally got it until this evening. He's both a singular individual himself. But it's not just that, it's that a true superpower of the company is that it is architected from top to bottom legally, financially, organizationally,

Ben: Culturally...

David: Culturally to reflect and amplify his immense strength.

Ben: Which I think is probably true of, like Apple, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Microsoft, NVIDIA, Jensen. Yes, but we are right up close to the ways in which Meta is a sort of an amplifier, almost like it's a way for you to take the gain on Mark's output and turn it up, you know, 10,000x.

David: Yes, and I think what was so striking about it to me versus you're absolutely right all those other companies. It is generally accepted in the public narrative about Apple under Steve Jobs, about NVIDIA under Jensen, that that is the case. I don't think it is about Meta and Mark. I don't think people understand that. I didn't understand that until this experience.

Ben: Are you saying Meta is still very much a Mark Zuckerberg production? I'll see myself out.

David: Well put, there we go.

Ben: Well listeners, thank you so much for joining us on this journey. Come talk about it with us in the Slack acquired.fm/slack. We'd love to hear all of your thoughts as well. Join our email list acquired.fm/email. That will let you basically know every single time a new episode drops or when we are doing something like Chase Center again, to be the first to know about that. God, if we ever do something like that again.

We've got a merch store. Check it out. On acquired.fm. We've got ACQ2, our second show, where we are always interviewing earlier stage companies than Meta, but where we think there are great insightful conversations with founders and CEOs. And, David, I know you've got some thank yous.

David: One last thing, final thank yous. Thank you to Mark, thank you to basically the entire Meta executive team who helped with the evening. Thank you to Hermes for dressing us, which was my favorite Easter egg of the night.

Ben: Yes, so fun. Thank you to Jamie Dimon, JP Morgan Chase, and JP Morgan Payments for making it all possible. It was truly a dream come true, and that is because of our incredible partnership.

David: Indeed, it was. Well listeners, we'll see you next time.

Ben: Yes, in a couple of weeks with the full show, we are pumped to drop it. We'll see you next time.