The a16z Show - Meta CMO: How Advertising Works Under the Hood

Episode Date: September 29, 2025

Ads pay for the internet—and they’re about to change again. a16z General Partner Erik Torenberg, entrepreneur and author Antonio García Martínez, and Meta CMO Alex Schultz dive into growth and performance marketing, privacy myths, retail media, and the AI future of “audience-of-one” advertising—plus Instagram what-ifs, WhatsApp as a super-app, and how Meta’s feed shifted from social graphs to AI-ranked content. Timecodes:0:00 Introduction 0:38 Book Inspiration & Positive Perspective on Advertising4:43 Critiques of Online Advertising & Data Privacy7:34 The Evolution of Media Business Models10:12 Content Moderation and Platform Shifts11:43 Connected vs. Unconnected Content & The Rise of AI13:34 The Future of AI, Personalization, and Advertising28:18 Retail Media Networks & First-Party Data38:18 Alternative Histories: Instagram, Libra, and Industry What-Ifs46:31 The Impact of AI on Jobs and Company Structure55:00 The Metaverse, VR, and Future PlatformsResources:Make sure to get Alex’s book here!Follow Alex on X: https://x.com/alexschultzFollow Alex on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/alexschultzFollow Alex on Threads: https://www.threads.com/@alexorigFollow Antonio on X: https://x.com/antoniogm Stay Updated: If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to like, subscribe, and share with your friends!Find a16z on X: https://x.com/a16zFind a16z on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/a16zListen to the a16z Podcast on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5bC65RDvs3oxnLyqqvkUYXListen to the a16z Podcast on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/a16z-podcast/id842818711Follow our host: https://x.com/eriktorenbergPlease note that the content here is for informational purposes only; should NOT be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security; and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any a16z fund. a16z and its affiliates may maintain investments in the companies discussed. For more details please see a16z.com/disclosures.   Stay Updated:Find a16z on YouTube: YouTubeFind a16z on XFind a16z on LinkedInListen to the a16z Show on SpotifyListen to the a16z Show on Apple PodcastsFollow our host: https://twitter.com/eriktorenberg Please note that the content here is for informational purposes only; should NOT be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security; and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any a16z fund. a16z and its affiliates may maintain investments in the companies discussed. For more details please see a16z.com/disclosures. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

I'm sick and tired of all the negative talk about online ads. It drives the entire internet economy. You wouldn't have all of these companies without online advertising. It has democratized all this stuff so the startups can do little things that before you'd have to pay for a soup bowl ad to do. I've learned to stop worrying and love the automated ad campaign. I am full in on algorithm. I'm sick and tired of no one saying the positive thing.

Ads is the damn business. Antonio Garcia Martinez, director of ads at Coinbase, picked up, click here. art and science of digital marketing and advertising by Alex Schultz, CMO and Meta, and called it the definitive book on growth and performance marketing. That moment led to today's conversation. We cover why ads pay for the internet, while people misunderstand about data and surveillance capitalism, and how retail media and first-party data are reshaping the game. We also dig into AI's audience of one future, where ads, agents, and even transactions happen inside the ad,

and along the way, we explore Instagram's alternate history. WhatsApp as the stealth super app, and what meta got right and wrong in its shift from family and friends to AI ranked content. Let's get into it. Antonio, this conversation was inspired by you, appreciating Alex's work and think it'd be good to discuss his book. Why don't you share what captivated you about it and would inspire the conversation?

How did this get started, Alex? I think either I DM'd you or you DM me on LinkedIn or something, or I noticed that you were publishing a book. I'm like, hey, congrats. And somehow I got a review copy. One of the great things about Alex's book is that he really understands marketing funnels, which seems simple in theory,

but are actually super complicated in detail. It's really hard to reconcile the super high-level thinking of someone who's like CMO at meta or running growth at meta, et cetera, like high-level, like the theory of this, how does it work? And then the super detailed thing that's like,

oh, if the email server gets backlogged, it doesn't send out the email, it's going to completely hose your analytics. Or if you do server-side versus client-side logging, you're going to see completely different conversion rates. for like X, Y, and Z region. And then that's the reality of working in marketing.

It's like the super high-level strategy. And then the most detailed technical breakages you can possibly imagine. And so I think your book is brilliant at showing the full fun, so to speak. Alex, I want to go deeper. Where did you write this book? What are you trying to say that's not already understood by people about the company? Say more. I mean, the obvious banal reason why I wrote this book is there's a gap in the market.

Everyone asks me for a book like this and there isn't one that I can recommend. and the publisher agree. And my team tells me to do thought leadership all the time because I'm a CMO of a company that sells ads. They want me to do thought leadership bads. So this seemed like a really good fit. So that's the banal reason. The less banal reason which works for you guys

and I think both of you in particular is I'm sick and tired of all the negative talk about online ads about our industry as a whole. And all the books that give in, especially about us, are the people who like, don't like Mark and don't like Facebook and don't like meta. And I just actually want to have a book out there that's like online advertising rots. It drives the entire internet economy.

You wouldn't have Google. You wouldn't have meta. You wouldn't have all of these companies without online advertising. It has democratized all this stuff so the startups can do little things that before you have paper a soup bowl ad to do, but they can try it small and then build up. And I just think it's awesome. I'm sick and tired of no one saying the positive thing. And thought I wanted to do that too, so that's the less than August.

Yeah, yeah. It's like what Mark said in TVPN, right? Thinking ads are bad is like a luxury belief of people in wealthy countries who can entertain the notion of paying whatever Facebook's Arpoo is that Alex knows and probably can't say. But let's say something north of $100 or whatever. Maybe someone in the United States will pay that. But if you're going to get 3 to 4 billion people online, there's no way they're going to do it. And ads is an indirect business model that works.

It's not the only business model in the world. Like I used to be on step stack. I used to charge subscriptions. There's other business models. But if you want to pay for the Internet at scale, ads is a way to do that. totally good with Alex. It's time to end the stigma of ads. It's how the internet gets paid for. And the reality is good ads experiences. Like everyone cites me the example. Alex, like even in crypto that I'm in now, Instagram ads are amazing, right? People like Instagram ads, actually.

The CTRs are crazy. And I think one thing that we both learned at Facebook Alex is that like people's stated preferences and revealed preferences are very different, right? And it all comes out in the CTRs and the conversion rate, which is one message you have in your book. And that kind of is the only thing that actually matters. And so, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. In general, I think as an industry, a lot of people in tech kind of think ads is like, oh, it's that thing over there that pays for everything. But actually, like, ads is the damn business. And anyway, I want to say positive things about ads. Before we do that, why don't we just steal man, just so we understand the critiques better? Maybe Antonio, you could say stab, it's been a few years since the critiques were in full swing.

But what were people so concerned about with ads? People had all sorts of outlandish claims about it. Can you sort of recall and steal man their side and then we could respond back? I think people feel a sense of mistrust and violation that their personal data is being used. I mean, I even wrote a wired piece about it because it so annoyed me. Like the rumors that Facebook is listening to you through your microphones, which is like completely ludicrous. A, you'd be able to tell on your phone that it's like constantly talking to the mothership and it would consume so much network bandwidth. Secondly, the reality is like, even in this conversation, what are the chances that anything I say could actually be used in ads targeting,

even assuming perfect godlike knowledge, not very much? And the reality is what actually happened if people are still asking themselves a question, it's like you search for something or maybe your spouse or partner actually search for something on the same machine and maybe you're actually in the same lookalike cluster on Facebook as the case may be.

So there's other things going on that you actually do have control over than art isn't nefarious as anyone listening to you in your microphone. And so they just don't understand how it is. I do definitely think that Alex said like a certain level of transparency and what data is being used is often not clear to most users.

like they just don't understand it. And I think a lot of Web2 ad tech, I'm not putting Facebook in that bucket, by the way. There's other way more sketchy forms of ad tech that I do think do sell data. But like, it's not even true that Facebook sells data, right? It doesn't. So yeah, I'll stop there.

Alex probably has more informed comments here. I think that Dealman is like the Zubov surveillance capital. Like that's what they're describing it as, surveillance capitalism. You know, you are the product. You don't understand what these companies are doing. They're selling your debt. That's the steel man.

Oh, and by the way, you're manipulated by all of these marketers because people don't like average advertising either. It's not just online performance advertising that's disliked. It's advertising as a whole. So then there's the meta critique of the marketing industry as a bunch of people who drink martinis and convince you to buy things you don't make. I think there was also another critique in addition to the ones you're making, which is that it shapes the content itself, that because it's a business model, it sort of, it like dumps down the content. It makes the incentive to create, you know, sort of the cat with a, you know, sort of buzzfeed lists, etc. The cat videos and stuff.

Well, this actually is part of the core with the Zubov surveillance capitalism thing. That's actually part of the core is because your incentives are to get more time spent in attention and clicks, therefore, you know, you are going to do stuff that's nefarious that incentivizes bad content and so on.

The thing that blows my mind of why, anyway, we are not, we're not attacking the steel mind yet. Yeah, well, I mean, one thing I'll say is it seems almost the opposite in the sense that I think we have some nostalgia for, like, you know, New York Times moving to a subscription,

model didn't quite make the New York Times more sort of, you know, detached and objective. When people, you know, when you're charging, you know, a certain demographic, you're going to want to tell that demographic what it wants to hear. If you look at the history of advertising, particularly newspaper advertising, which you go into a little bit in the book, very briefly, it was actually, the New York Times was originally a platform for advertising, right? If you look at 19th century American journalism, it was overtly partisan, right? The press Democrat was the Democratic Party's newspaper, and if you were a party member, you'd subscribe, and that's fine. And everyone understood that if they read that version of

reality, it would be very biased. If you still go to Europe now, most European countries have a left and writing newspaper. In the UK, they have 12. But you can still see a sort of partisan media here. A lot of why American press became objective was that the New York Times could sell ads for Macy's without offending anybody, right? Because the Macy's didn't want to run an ad alongside some screaming editorial for or against this or that president. And so in many ways, ads actually kept media honest in the sense that you couldn't take an overt position. But once you have a subscription model, and I think what's his name, Ben Smith even said this. The New York Times then becomes a home for compelling narratives that people are paying for. And that, in some sense, that actually skews media more

than an ad model would, in my opinion. Completely right. I actually think that is completely correct in terms of the incentives of the models. But this is why we, like these are the critiques. And I think a lot of the critiques when you actually get into them are negative. The biggest piece for me about attacking like the critique is growth is good. Growing the economy is good. Growing the economy gives people better lives. It provides taxes. It improves the world to have a growing economy. Now look, if it's out of control, if you've got rivers catching on fire, none of that stuff is good. You do need some level of regulation and you need to figure out the balance. But I think we've got to a place where online advertising has been so attacked.

It's as if it's Satan. And actually, it just helps people get slightly better ramped ads for trainers, which is a good thing because it sells more trainers. People get products they love. Companies employ more people. The economy. grows, it's just good. That's the point I want to make out that. Advertising is a good thing. It's useful. Alex, you're in the UK, so your pro-growth arguments are thought crime at the moment.

I was not going to say that, but I was thinking it, Alex. I'm just thinking. Look, I get the point. I've seen CoinBolt's latest work in the UK. I think there's a lot of very pro-growth people here who are fighting for it, who I'm pretty supportive of. And I encourage you to read the UK Foundations. So, CO, essay.

That's a very good essay. I'm just, yeah, a lot of great companies, pro-growth ethos. Antonio, so you also wrote a book about Facebook, obviously that we referred to Chaos Monkeys, you know, over decade earlier. If the book had sort of a new forward or an updated edition based on what's happened at Meta

and the advertising industry since then, what do you think would be different? I mean, I don't know that the ad side would actually be fundamentally different. I think, I don't know how much we want to get into this, but I think the attitude towards, I mean, what's changed in the past five years is the attitude towards content moderation, not of ads content, but of organic content, right?

And to what extent should platforms put a thumb on the scale and say, this is truth or not? Or, you know what, we're going to be an open forum for ideas. And other than, you know, bad content that nobody wants like porn and violence, we're not going to do anything. I think that pendulum swinging is what has changed in the past 10 years, not really the ad side of things. Yeah, I mean, I think that the biggest, so, yeah, I agree with Antonia's point.

And that pendulum swings and it swings. I think, like, the revolution. in social media in the last five years has been that it was all connected content five years ago, like it was people you follow, and now the combination of the modern AI systems that allow you to have semantic understanding of content and do ranking based on semantic understanding of content

combined with short form video means the majority of meta, and I spend a lot of time testifying in court to this fact, the majority of meta at this point is actually unconnected content that people are engaging with, the majority of people's engagement. And I think the TikTok factor is the other massive thing that's happened to the industry in the last five years.

It's totally different. We have been complete, I mean, people don't understand how completely disrupted as a company we've been. Fundamentally, five years ago, it was all connected content. Now, the vast majority of engagement is on unconnected content.

You define unconnected and connected for the listeners who maybe don't know what that means? Yeah, I kind of think of the world as a sort of two-by-two with one cell hopefully never existing. So connected and unconnected. Connected content is someone you follow, a group you've joined, a page you've liked, whatever. Unconnected is something you've not followed, joined, connected with an anyway, friend did whatever. And then private and public is obviously private is, it's restricted to some small group of people.

Public is it's open to the world. And if you think Facebook started in connected private. So it was friends, it was private, even, you know, small public networks of your university, but no bigger. so connected private. If you think about it, like Instagram started as connected public, right? It was like photographers

and celebrities and whatever. Twitter started there as well. And then TikTok started as unconnected public. And each of these companies have moved and now play in every one of the zones. Like TikTok has its friends tab. It does an awful lot on message sending and DMs. Instagram has reels and Facebook has reels,

which are completely unconnected content. And so what's happened is each of these social media companies started in a different quadrant, and they're all competing across all quadrants now. It seems social networks in general, but we also matter how I've shifted from, you know, primarily or mostly, you know, friend to friend to content feed over time. I'm curious what that, you know, means for switching costs, network effects, and more broadly, the way I sort of read, or one way to read sort of met as big push. in AI recently is just the sort of the threat of a world in which people are communicating less

and less to their friends and more and more to chat GPT or sort of, et cetera. How do you react to that? I mean, I think there's two or three things. One thing is, I mean, we just posted a very significant earnings result. That could not have happened without the modern AI systems in two different ways. the first way is they drive engagement. So getting more time spent and more engagement with reels is really, really what's driving our usage growth at this stage.

But the second element is at ranking. And so, you know, I mean, 10 years ago, I would not use automated ad campaigns to save my life. I'm like, get set against them. Today, I've learned to stop worrying and love the automated ad campaign. I am full in on algorithm first. And the place where the creativity lies is, what data do you feed with the algorithm?

than what you teach the machines. All of that relies on the modern AI systems. And so if you don't, when people say we don't have any reason to invest in these AI systems, I'm like, first and foremost, our core business is all AI ranking and has been since I've been there. You know, it's always machine learning after it's shipped and it's AI until it shipped, until it last two years. And so like, it's our core business would be the number one point.

The number two point would be, yes, I mean, I think people are going to be talking to AI chatbots a lot. And I think down the line there will be a feed of AI content. You're already seeing a lot of it on TikTok and Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, someone's Snapchat. People are really interacting and liking the right AI content. And that's only going to get better because these things are definitely good. Even if scaling laws ends, these things are good at media. And so I think there's two elements to it. One is like, it's our core business, ranking things. And two, yeah, there's really engaging AI stuff out there and we need to be on top of it. It's just like we were the shift to reels, just like we work the shift to stories, just like mobile,

just like Mester. Yeah, I have one comment on that out. It says you have a section at the internet AI that I thought is really interesting. And one of the concepts you introduce is, I forget how you frame it exactly, but it's a world where there's an audience of one, right, which is like the media I'm consuming is literally hyper-personalized, like literally me, as if the person, and you always had a feed that was ranked differently person to person, but you're still engaging with not exactly mass media, but media that is being seen by more than one person.

While AI totally changes the dynamic, and in the past 30 years of ad tech, we've gone from something that it felt like newspapers, like everyone got the front page in the New York Times to something that it feels like, you know, Facebook, which is a ranked feed, but it's the same content, the one where, no, no, literally nobody else is seeing this except me, right? I mean, the underlying influences that bubble up through an LLM model

or through search indexing, you know, might be common, but what you're actually visualizing is different. So I'm curious if you've thought about it, because I've gotten interested in what AI ads will eventually look like. Having some sort of sponsored offer or surfacing or re-ranking content inside your AI result seems like it'd be really interesting. And to the extent the web browser goes away, like I almost don't even use Google anymore. I'm really a chat to BT guy. Obviously, it's going to be a channel, you know, you mentioned AIDA, right? The eye side of it, the intention side of it's happening inside AI.

I'm curious if you thought about how that plays out and how advertising kind of gloms onto AI. Yeah, I mean, I actually think this is going to be super, super interesting. There's, I think there's two major interesting sort of things to think about. One is what happens to search, which, you know, Google's very on top of, like they're very worried about the innovator's dilemma they find themselves in right now. But if search ads goes to a paid model like chap GPT and people start asking their questions in that way and they pay for it, that is very disrupted to online advertising and who knows where that lands

or does it go the other way where people are using more and more search and there's a freemian model and there's ads associated in which case the AI ads will have a lot of principles of the search ads and so which way that goes is one big question the second big question is yeah what happens to the creative intersected with the target so my perspective is it gets more engaging more personalized you can convert in the advert like in a world where you can tell an agent,

hey, I want to buy this thing, take a picture of me, or look at my camera, this is my size, like, evaluated. By the way, you've got all of my past purchases associated with me, and you can therefore make sure it's the perfect fit for this particular retailer, because you can compare it with everyone else. You can get the conversion experience

right in the interface where you're in, start the buyflow, complete the buyflow from an agentic perspective, or honestly just a you interacting with the other. company's agent perspective. So I think you're going to find a completely personalized ad will happen, targeted entirely to you that's customized to you, and you can convert in the ad by interacting with the company you're trying to buy from through an AI interest.

I mean, the crazy end world of this is ads to AI agents, which I think is definitely also going to happen within our life. Yeah, the AI agent is doing a search. There are ads for the AI agent to click on and we pay for placement where you're promoting stuff to someone's agent. I mean, this is all very likely and the underlying principles of online marketing are actually going to hold like AI optimization versus search engine optimization really actually a lot of similarities on a bunch of companies trying to do the same thing there. AI search ads versus search ads don't have a lot of similarities. And when you talk to a chat bar, why is that that

different than SMS marketing push notifications or snail mail back in the day? There's a lot of similarities. It's going to be wild. I mean, you just think about, I think the way you think about it as like intelligence too cheap to meet up. Like there's a lot of people who are afraid of loss, right?

You look at the ads industry and every agency like freaked out when Mark said, oh, someone will, you know, use AI as their agency and we'll use a credit card to buy. Now, big ad agency clients don't use credit cards. So it clearly was talking about SMBs and not big clients. But you're going to be in

this world where I think a bunch stuff that today is not ROI positive because it's not worth staffing it suddenly becomes possible and becomes RY positive and AI will unlock a bunch of abundance in terms of us being able to make things possible like creative for SMBs, like having a chat bot. I mean, we're in this place where we're replacing our content moderation systems with AI from old ML. And we've just been watching the curves get closer and closer and closer. And they finally crossed up. over on a few cases and they're doing better. Better than experts, even when we use expert trend data.

The same is true for customer support. You can now actually get customer support in the US for Facebook. It is possible by a chat bar and that is entirely AI and at the end passes over to human beings. It's suddenly possible. We could never staff it with human beings. We can now actually start something that wasn't possible before. And yes, there's incrementally a few more staff.

But the workload is that of 100,000 people. The workload isn't that of like 100,000. extra people. So I think there's going to be just a ton of stuff that's unlocked that today isn't ROI positive, but you add in an AI tool that makes you as a human being more efficient and you're going to suddenly make things ROI positive but than never ROI positive before. When we think about the future of advertising, like, is there going to be a world where I have the option to just get a ton of things for free if I just ingest ads? I go into an Uber and I don't have to pay for it, but I'm just looking at ads. Then I go to a restaurant and I don't have to

pay for that, but I'm just seeing ads everywhere. Like, how, how more integrated can you see ads to the, they experience more so than it is now? I mean, the classic terrible Web2 ad tech idea was paying the users for their data. I mean, that's flawed for a bunch of reasons. A, it instantly gets farmed and you have massive fraud. Also, the amount of, the value of the users' data that they actually own isn't nearly as valuable as they think it is, right?

like it's, it just isn't that valuable in the scheme of things if you were actually shot. Like, data is not the new oil. It actually isn't this commodity product that you could just sell. Like, even if I managed, let's cite a third-party company so we don't get into trouble, let's say I managed to take Amazon's conversion record for users and steal it and try to sell it. I mean, somebody might find it meaningful if they managed to match the identities,

but it's not actually, that is worth billions of dollars within the context of the Amazon buying experience and the customer relationship that they have. on its own, it's actually not worth a huge amount of money, right? And that applies even more so for, like, literally the past 30 days of my browser behavior. I don't know, like, how much would you price the past 30 days of my browser behavior? A few bucks, 10 bucks, maybe, at most. It just isn't enough money to make anyone switch off a browser, say, and go to this browser versus that one, typically. Well, I think what's interesting is this.

I agree. That is not the new oil. Nature is sand. And sand is only valuable if you're refining silicon chips, right? And by the way, data isn't destroyed. Data exists forever. Oil gets burned once and it goes away.

So there's a ton of reasons. I really agree with what you're saying there. I mean, the thing you're saying, I've literally got an example in the book of incentive affiliates where at eBay, when we paid people to get confirmed registered users, incentive affiliates would go out and pay people

to sign up for eBay and confirm, and then they would give them money back. And then we changed it to activated confirmed registered users. And that caused us a huge amount of credit card chargebacks because activation was buying or bidding on something and people would convert, activate, and then they would charge back once they got paid back

by their affiliate partner. So 100% here lies a lot of issues. On the other side of it, I really do think this is the point about online ads being awesome. You live in that world today, Eric. Like Google search, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, Twitter. Like these are incredibly,

YouTube. These are incredible products that you get completely free. Not like cable where you pay and get ads. You get them completely free and you get them completely free because ads makes that possible. And so I think it will go further. I actually agree it will go further. At the same time, I think there's a lot of risks with it. If you don't think about the fundamental principles in my book in dealing with affiliates because like there's a lot of ways you can be deployed and I have a lot of examples of fraud. Hey, Alex, why hasn't Meta built a one integrated super app like WeChat? Why are Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram siloed?

Well, two thoughts. One, I would actually say that WeChat doesn't really integrate Instagram and Facebook in that meaningful one. So I wouldn't smash all of social media together into one super app. I think there's a few comments here. One, actually WhatsApp is disarmingly close to that, and people don't understand it. So WhatsApp is the place, the single largest broadcast sharing channel on Earth. The WhatsApp status tab is bigger than Instagram or Facebook in terms of the amount of content share. It just so happens it's not in the US, so Americans don't notice it, but it is massive.

WhatsApp has payments in India. It actually just got awarded the best payments platform in India. The government fought us for a long time on that one, and now is really supportive of WhatsApp payments, which is a wonderful turnaround. So WhatsApp actually has payments in India. They're growing very rapidly. The interesting thing, though, about WeChat is going back to growth,

why did WeChat turn the corner so dramatically on payments? And it comes down to two things in the Chinese market. Thing number one is China has red envelopes. and nowhere else on the earth had the red envelopes cash in envelopes that you get with the yeah and thing number two is china had not the credit cards and so what happened was you have to connect your bank details to we chat if you wanted to partake in we chat red envelopes and we chat allowed people to give their friends red envelopes but also gave people red envelopes and one in 50 100 whatever had a large chunk of cash in it but most of them didn't and we chat got you

people to connect their bank accounts before they could receive the red envelope. So, WeChat wired up the payment system in China, in a way, had never been wired up before through this viral growth mechanism that couldn't exist anywhere else on earth. So we are building a super app. It's called WhatsApp. It is the largest place for broadcast sharing on Earth, and it has a lot of success in Connors and in particular, in payments growing. But it's a lot harder to do it anywhere else on Earth than it is in China.

Yeah, I was going to say, I mean, WhatsApp really is like the business communication later. And it's funny, Americans don't use it because they all use messages, which is funny because it's like only Americans would flex using an inferior product. It might say, oh, no, no. Like there was this viral tweet. It's like, oh, I don't live in a thorough country. I don't use WhatsApp. It's like, bro, messages sucks.

I can't even synchronize across two devices. The message thread in WhatsApp, I never have that problem. But, like, I was in Lisbon randomly for a conference. And, like, the dry cleaner on the corner only did it be a WhatsApp. And, like, I had to WhatsApp them. and like somebody magically appears, the clothes came back, all via WhatsApp. Like no other touchpoint WhatsApp, the whole thing, right?

And I assume in India is probably even more sophisticated than that. But I think people in America don't quite understand like calling the business is like backwards or like even text like, no, no, no, no, no. There's whole business WhatsApp accounts where you can just transact business or WhatsApp and that is the communication layer. And like you said, also as the social thing, right?

Like group chat started as like a WhatsApp thing. And it's like, I also did a wire piece, you know, it's like Facebook got so much flack during the whole post-2016 thing for like feed and ranking. It's like, bro, there's no ranking in feed in WhatsApp and it still causes both good and bad. Technology always has positive and negative externalities.

And so, of course, there are some negative externalities to come out of tech. But that all happens on WhatsApp too. It's not the ranking. It's just putting a network computer in everyone's hand and connecting everybody to everybody is obviously kind of a shock to the system. Right.

And so it's always going to have, you know, it's going to convulse the system a little bit so you see some negative outcomes. But net, I think it's positive. And again, having a communications layer that everyone can communicate on, that's just, to me, it's crazy, right? And WhatsApp is that layer? So one thing that actually has changed in the past 10 years of ad tech is retail ad networks.

And you mentioned a little bit inside your book, Alex. And for those who aren't familiar with it, and I haven't played in that pond too much, but one of the unique things, and it actually reflects another topic that we haven't got into, which is privacy and GDPR and all that, but basically inside large retailers like Walmart, Like Amazon is probably what, the number three ad system after meta and Google at this point, or like number three and number four. And it's unique because what retail ad network means is you're showing ads inside a retailer that already has a first party experience with the user, which again is somewhat unusual, right? Like typically the classic ad network is advertiser A, advertising and publisher B, and A and B I'm like nothing to do with each other. But in this case, advertisers are actually paying for placement inside like a native network.

Walmart shopping experience. And part of it is it's very efficacious, right? Like you control the entire, like you say in your book, friction kills everything. And so having a single form of payment, whether it be Amazon pay, Walmart or Shopify, for example, who also does the same thing, is absolutely key.

But the other thing, of course, the way privacy law works, if you have a first party relationship with the user, you can do things with data that you can't as a third party. I mean, arguably, it's a good reason for that. But it does skew the market a little bit. Walmart can sit there and construct a certain segment

around users because they can legally do that because they have a first-party relationship, but then they leverage that data for a third party who's buying an ad inside that system. And so it's a combination of both easing the funnel and frankly, you know, getting through existing privacy law that's kind of driven that.

But I'm curious, you know, when you think about that, because that world, I think, didn't really exist when I was at Meta, and it's only come recently. I'm curious what you're taking on that act. Yeah, there's one other thing that you're missing off, which goes on deeper in the,

the retail out network funnel that necessary than the more than Amazon, but like the smaller retailers that do it, they also buy off other companies with the data they have on first party. So the retail out network becomes a third party out network as well, which is space for opportunity for things to go awesomely and space for opportunity for things to go really badly

in terms of fraud attribution in your eyes, showing up in the wrong place. Yeah, I mean, I think when you look at it from the perspective of an FMCG company, and I'd add in for a lot of quick serve restaurants, QSRs, DoorDash is a retail out network as well. Uber Eats has a retail out notebook as well. And so they're seeing this situation

where they're getting a double bite of the cherry from the people who are retailing their goods, both at Walmart and Amazon and also with Uber Eats and DoorDash, where they have to pay for placement to promote themselves and they have to pay a commission to the vendor. So this sounds terrible, right? this sounds like it's a real squeeze from the distribution channels onto the FMCG companies and the quick serve restaurants.

But it's also just the history. And this gets back to a lot of what I feel and have put in the book. This gets back to the history that Benedict Evans likes to say, Amazon got the Sears catalog from 1950 and just implemented everything in the Sears catalog for the internet. You paid for placement in the shelves when you were on Walmart in the big megastore. You paid a placement in the Sears catalog. retail ad network have existed for as long as retailers basically have existed. And so all it's done is modernize that and brought it online.

It's going more to below the line media budgets. So kind of direct response, placement related media budgets, discount related media budgets, and less to above the line, typical media buying. So it's competing for different budgets. But it's a major, major factor in terms of the ad industry like now. And the whole thing does boil down, as you say, to data and algorithms and first-party data having advantage over third-party data. So these big companies have a really good legs-up to be successful in this space.

Which if you're being charitable, you would say, well, that was a good outcome of GDPR, right? I mean, it's true. Like, the sketchiest part of ads was always the third-party data vendors. I won't name names, but you know who the companies are or were, for that matter, because the world has died a little bit. But, like, that part of it always kind of sketched me out a little bit. I think the reason why I think you should privilege first-party data is because if you have the user relationship, you'll safeguard that user relationship because you have a long-term incentive

in making sure that user is comfortable and doesn't, you know, bail or turn out of Amazon Prime or stop buying on Walmart and buy some targeted stead, right? They're not just a random user that you have a very transactional relationship with. There's actually like an arc of a relationship there. And if they were to turn out, that same growth leader is going to get dinged in the next report. Like, well, why did their retention rate go down to 75% or whatever? It's like, well, because you burnt them out on ads or the ads are terrible or what have you, right? So I think it actually align incentives very nicely. 100%.

But it is directly incentivization of privacy laws. But yeah, 100%. Is there anything else worth sharing about how the industry is going to change with the platform shift to Aalice? I gave a couple examples earlier. But anything else high level or concrete that's worth mentioning? Yeah, I think ads to say AI agents are going to be nuts. I think the interesting question is you have to pass that personal context somehow. Like you mentioned, like it's funny.

You know, one of the interesting exercises, go ask your favorite chat to BT. like your open session when you're logged in. So what do you know about me? And it's amazing how much it knows about you. And it's not even scraping the internet. It's just like literally, so what do you think my political opinions are? What do you think my taste in clothing are?

And it just sits there and rattles off the most informed opinion that knows me better than my fiance does. And, you know, how you activate that in a kind of ads sponsored sort of way, I think will be interesting. I think there's going to be billions of dollars of billable hours for privacy lawyers. I don't have to figure this out.

But at some point, you're going to get to the point where, in fact, you have even better personalization than you have now. And again, in a way that you yourself control and is probably centralize in one place and all that good stuff. But it'll be interesting to see that play out. It's funny, though, cookies are still around, Alex.

Everyone's been predicting the death of cookies for 10 to 15 years, and yet, here they still are. And Google has reversed force. So that's, like, actually quite pleasing on that one. Yeah, I think this point is also like, if you think about which ads are going to be disrupted, You've already got a bunch of disruption happening for Google search, for Metro advertising. You know, there's going to be more disruption.

There's going to be more creative stuff happening. We talked about that already. I think the thing we haven't talked much about is direct mail. And now direct mail was a letter and then direct mail was an email and then direct mail was an SMS and then it was a push notification, and now it's a chat thread. And has a lot of stuff in common across all of those different areas. But when your direct mail is sentient, and can interact with you,

that is going to completely change the value of direct mail marketing and having a chat thread with your client, with your customer. And so I think that is probably the field inside marketing that's going to get revolutionized the most because, I mean, I was talking at one very large

luxury cosmetics company at Pan. And they were saying in one country, like, of their DTC sales, 30% online were coming through chat. SNAP, a large company. And the startups in the beauty space, there are some that are totally chat-bop first in terms of sales.

And if you look at India, if you look at Thailand, so much of what's happened in tech came out of Southeast Asia and Asia and Germany. So look, Kakao was the first real breakthrough in messaging. Yes, there was WhatsApp line, we chat, all the others. But Kikau was like the first one we looked at that woke us up. Kikau Story was there before Snapchat brought it to the U.S. by a year and then they made Snapchat made it disappear which was really smart but like a cow story was first you know TikTok came out of southeast Asia you're in this place where at the moment

you're looking at TikTok shop you're looking at some of the other stuff that's going on that's come out of Southeast Asia and the stuff or Asia in general sorry and the stuff that I'm looking at a lot is for businesses they are now replacing a chat thread with a human being with a customer with a chat thread with a chat bot an AI chat bot and in the U.S., that's not working. And in Western Europe, that's not working. But in Asia, that is working right now. And in the developing world, Brazil, Africa,

that's working really well. And it's scaling. And so I think that's something that be really big that comes across, is direct mail will be completely revolutionized by AI. It's funny you mentioned direct mail because it's, I mean, direct mail is where this all started. I mean, actually, in Chaos Monkeys, I kind of draw a line between, at the time,

I don't remember Alex, when we were doing like custom audiences and stuff, it was like, yeah, bed, baths and beyond, and there's like 20% off coupons or whatever. And the reason why direct mail, people were wondering, like, what the hell is direct mail about? The reason why is because the primary key to use database language for the American consumer was the address, right?

And that was the way that you would address, like a lot about ads to get a little philosophical about it is about identity and addressable media. Like, how do I actually reach out to that person and then follow that identifiers throughout the entire conversion funnel? It used to be literally the address because then you'd order something, it'd arrive at your address,

and that would be the, That was the attribution system, right? You received the thing, and then that would be cataloged by that. But of course, everything going on the internet meant a total reshift, whether it be mobile device identifier, Facebook user ID, cookie, what have you. It's just interesting that how the notion of who you are as an individual actually informs a lot of the marketing and how in the crypto context, just to go to what I do right now a little bit, your on-chain wallet address is kind of that identifier, right?

And that's a whole different namespace for the user. And so it's just interesting to see how, I think you see. say this in your book, the details, the details change, but the fundamentals always persist, right? So like the primary key on the database shifts from mailing address to cookie, to mobile device identity, to Facebook user ID, to blockchain address. But the actual principles don't change, actually. They're exactly the same across all these, across all these channels. Good one thing. I thought of myself. So I want to play a little bit of alternative history, but it's like four or five questions. What if?

Instagram was an independent company and wasn't bought by Facebook. Antonio, because I'm not sure if Alex can comment on it, Antonio, I can comment on it. The anti-trust trial is over, and I just spent two months in D.C. I can comment. Great. So maybe, imagine a world where Instagram said, no, no, played the Snap route. What would that look like?

They look like Snap. Maybe smaller. I mean, I think, like, if you look at what Kevin has testified to, like, he's explicitly testified to. He said it could go either way. You know, on WhatsApp, I think WhatsApp was tremendously successful, and I would not say that I as a growth leader did much for the success of WhatsApp. We helped them a lot with infrastructure. I think we kept them free.

I think there was a bunch of things that we enabled to happen for WhatsApp. But bluntly, WhatsApp was a great, great product with higher attention. Instagram, I think, was touching go as to whether it could be either a Twitter or a Snapchat or just a complete also ran like path. When we announced we were buying it, there was a massive spike in their growth just caused by the PR. Like literally the global news that Meta would buy, Facebook would buy Instagram caused their growth to accelerate. And there's a whole stack of things I can go into in the details of like their infrastructure was on the verge of falling over. They were in a position where they had real, real issues with spam filtering and massive issues with comments that they were failing to get on top of.

Now, the flip is, obviously, it could have gone either way, and that's exactly what Kevin said, and I can see how it could have gone either way, and other companies that got there. But, and Mikey and Kevin were, as family, we can see if I'm what Mike is doing today, but Mike and Kevin were just so brilliant. And I loved working with it.

At the start, we fought so much. Like, Kevin and I fought so much, and by the end, I'm like, he's one of my favorite people who work with you. You fight Alex? No way. I don't believe it. I know. But we did. It sucked. We thought, and by the end, we were like, hopefully aligned. And so I think it could have gone either way.

My gut is it would have been maybe Snapchat, maybe Twitter. It wouldn't have been zero, but it certainly wouldn't have been the Instagram is to death. What were some of the biggest, what was the crux underlying the fights? So there was some organizational stuff, which literally came up in the trial. My team really, so you need to have a product and engineering team on growth. you can't just have a marketing team. And the magic in meta is that we have really made it a hiller, a capability that is so ingrained in the company

that every product and engineering team gets growth now. And it is really special about the company. It's different about meta. And I have a product growth theme, but it's only like 150 people for an 80,000 person company. It's not a massive, massive team who then go in and help teams implement growth best practices throughout the company. At that time, Instagram didn't have a growth product and engineering team,

and sort of we had a big disagreement over that. In the end, they built one out. It was really successful for that. And actually, it's a place where we ended up being super aligned and super happy with each other, but we had a fight. The other place that was massive was called the Connections Pivot. So Instagram was focused on public figures, and it was not focused on friends and family.

You remember, it was public photographers and cool celebrities and everything. everything. And we said, no, people you may know, which on Instagram is accounts you should follow or suggested users, is really important to get that happy blend of friends and family with public figures, you know? And Instagram was a modern social network where there wasn't a distinction between business account and friend account, whereas Facebook, MySpace, others, they had some of these distinctions back in the day. And so we had a disagreement over like importing contacts, focusing on frames, all of those things, focusing on algorithmic follows and all those.

So those were the two, I think, larger disagreements that ended up being quite front and center in the antitrust case. And so I feel I can mention them because they have been covered in the press and they are literally a matter of court record at this time. Okay, continuing our alternative history theme and Antonio, want to take this one.

What if Libra was allowed to sort of exist in its full vision without regulatory challenges? Yeah, I mean, I wasn't there for the Libre period, to be honest. But obviously, I'm at a crypto company now. It's amazing how much the regulatory landscape changes everything. I think recently Stripe announced it as building an L1. Every company in their brothers used to be announcing a stable coin. We had major crypto legislation passed that was favorable to crypto.

We've had members of the admins say that they want the U.S. to be the capital of crypto, which obviously something I'm supportive of. it's just it's yeah I mean I think if Libra were to launch now or something would be a very different conversation and it seems like it was doomed from the start at the time it's a shame

but yeah I think you're going to start seeing crypto B be sort of the rails under the hood people are going to be on chain and not even realize it actually which is fine and actually arguably is the way you should build these things and I think it's again what's the positive shine on all that I think I tweeted about it yesterday right the fact that you're going to have investors around the world who can hold dollars freely

or who can invest in American equities but have them on chain with all the rigmaral that it takes to buy a U.S. stock in some other country, that's going to be magical in a way. And it's going to open a level of economic freedom that you haven't seen to date. I know that's probably a little bit beyond the purview of whatever Libra's goal were back in the day, but just to give an example of how it actually opens up the world that makes it freer and drives more economic growth. That's kind of a good thing. And that's kind of part of the reason why I got crypto pill. it's like, man, it just seemed like a lot of traditional institutions

are actually choking innovation rather than fomenting it. And sometimes you kind of need a different paradigm to kind of kickstart that process. And I'm old enough to remember Web 1 and Web 2 and now Web 3 if we're still using that term or on chain or whatever. Yeah, I think obviously Libra now would be a very different scenario. Maybe Alex has thoughts on this one. I'd have one thing, which is, look, it's public now.

that one of the places we go when we are sourcing terrorist material to take off of Facebook and Instagram is Telegram. Like we go to Telegram, we subscribe to the terrorist groups, we take the data and for prescribed organizations in the United States and the United Kingdom and so on, we take down the terrorist information. That is illegal content by anyone's standards. It's not sort of one of these debatable areas of a content moderation. If you were in a place where Libra had succeeded, you would have WhatsApp, Messenger, Instagram, Friety, U.S. friendly messaging apps be the successful ones with crypto,

and instead, you don't. And I think that probably matters to national security and matters to a lot of things that the people who beat us up on this actually care about. Continuing our alternative history, Antonio, we'll start with you. What if Hillary had won the 2016 election? Oh, my God.

I'm not even going to that topic. I have no idea. Absolutely. No clue. Is there anything? Totally different. I have no idea. Going back to sort of AI for a second,

it seems that mobile was more of a sustaining technology than it was a disruptive technology. Sure, we got Uber and Snap and Instagram, but more of the gains went to Facebook and Google than the entire startup industry from the time. Do you think something similar is going to happen in AI? Maybe Antonio will get your first take,

where companies, you know, invented pre-2016, pre-open AI are going to just accrue so much more value than the companies after it? You know, I don't have a hard answer. I find myself somewhat unopinated. I do think it's one of the great questions. Are you going to have the incumbents? I mean, Microsoft seems to be playing the AI game pretty well

and actually have it, you know, boost their growth. Are they going to be totally and utterly disrupted? I mean, I think another way of framing the same problem is, is OpenAI and ChatGBTDB and some of the other foundational models who currently own the consumer experience are they're going to own the consumer experience forever? Are people going to actually be building apps

on top of a more API-ified version of and it's like Alex said, it's intelligence too cheap to meter and it just infiltrates every product, you know, bots, whatever. I really don't know what the answer there is, to be honest. I think it's going to be,

it's a standard yin-yang thing of like, can Amazon become Walmart before Walmart can become Amazon thing, right? In which can the old become the new fashion than you can eat the old? and we're going to see that play out again. Yeah, and I challenge you a little bit on mobile how sustaining it, how sustaining it was

versus disruptive it was. I think maybe I'm being a Chinese diplomat here. I think it's too soon to tell because a lot of stuff couldn't happen without mobile in the current wave of destruction, of disruption that's coming with the chat, the chat face interfaces for AI. So we will see.

The thing for me, there's been the realization is when I got into this was 20 years ago and sort of, you know, Google was maybe the previous generation of company and then you had Apple and Microsoft and Yahoo and eBay were the most valuable companies on the internet. And you know what? Like Google, Amazon, Microsoft, they made it true. Yahoo and eBay are much less relevant today. And the question is, are we the leadership team that does the Google Apple, Microsoft,

off Amazon or we the leadership team does the eBay Yahoo is a question that really does keep me up at night and makes me think about this moment of transition. We've gone through a lot, but there's another one coming and now we're the VLH company leadership, which is interesting. I think META's recruiting strategy from how I understand it as an outsider is just absolutely brilliant. And I'm surprised more sort of big tech companies haven't done it sooner and have more just sort of antiquated sort of understanding of sort of aligning companies. conversation to true value. Antonio, do you have any perspective on whether or any thoughts on whether that's going to be the norm going forward? That's so above my pay grade, Eric. I wouldn't know what to tell you there. I mean, obviously, you know, I think one of Mark's, you know, famous thing is that we

judge you based on your outputs, not your inputs, right? And that was like the party line even at meta, like in 2011. And I assume it hasn't changed. And I think every sane, you know, successful company, worked at has had some version of that as a as a as a company principal yeah i mean i think the thing that that certainly is being talked about in conversations i'm having is people who can successfully use ai as individual contributors in particular it is a force multiplier like you give a 10x engineer access to ai like they become a hundred ex engineer and it is showing therefore the talent the

best talent when they can use the tools that currently exist becomes way more valuable. And then being able to produce the tool is way more valuable too. If that continues to play out, that will mean there will be a massive differentiator in how pay works out for the 10x100 X engineers than there is today, which is already, like they come in at BP level, they are paid significantly more than the typical I see. But clearly, clearly there's going to be more. the other alternative is these tools make it easier. Now, my perspective is the tools help you implement a lot of stuff that's been implemented before,

but they don't solve logic for you. They don't solve creative thinking for you. And so they push things up the value stack in terms of where the work is happening, whether you're talking about marketing or I run data science and data engineering for the company. You talk about DS and DE. They take away routine data pipeline code. it in, but they don't get you to the creative analysis that actually does something that changes the direction of the company. So, I think there's a good chance that value accrues

to the most creative best logic thinkers and value gets taken away from the routine work, which therefore would say compensation is going to go up for the best employees. Yeah, the best encapsulation effort is you're not going to lose your job to AI. You're going to lose your job to a human who uses AI better than you do. You're going to lose your job to. I mean, it's still kind of a harsh lesson, but that's the reality of it. Do you think these companies in the future have fewer employees or more employees? What's

the way to think about? So this is a really interesting one. Like, two things. One, it depends how weird you think it's going to get. Like, do we actually get to a S-I-A-G-I? That's not, you know, AI 20-27 is not the table. Look, this comes back to

three different things, which we are talking about. a lot internally. Thing number one for the framing is doing existing stuff more efficiently. Existing stuff is going to be done more efficiently with AI as it exists today without more breakthroughs. Like a lot of stuff can be automated, a lot of stuff can be done more efficiently. So that work, there will be less of it. Thing number two is things that literally weren't possible before will become possible. That can open up a lot more jobs. And thing number three is things that were possible, but just were really effing expensive, suddenly become over the threshold of, you know, reasonable to do.

That's the support example I used reasonably. So thing number one, let's just, you know, rank ads better. We could already rank out so we can now do it more efficiently. We can rank them better. Thing number two was semantic understanding of content to lead to content ranking to enable short form video and unconnected content could not exist without these models. It now exists. Thing number three,

is support chatbots, you could do it with human beings before. It was just prohibitively expensive. And now AI does a hell of a lot better in a phone true. So there are those three different categories. And what matters is jobs will go down in category number one. They were. How many jobs category number two and category number three create will determine some of these companies may even get bigger, like literally, because so many things are now ROI positive

to do. So this is just, I think it's still up in the air. but what is certain is all three of those things are like. Yeah, no, I think in the short term, you know, one of the biggest problems here is what's called the lump of labor fallacy, which you assume that does a certain fixed amount of work in the world. And it's not true for manual labor.

It's certainly not true for knowledge of labor. I think in the short term, you might have AI might have a negative impact on hiring ever so slightly in certain places, maybe interns or junior engineering. But overall, I think I agree with the latter, I think it was the last scenario that Alex set out, which is, no, it actually increases jobs. I mean, take the example of state.

Coast drivers in the introduction of a car, right? It's like, yeah, the poor stage coach driver who had a team of horses through, you know, New York whose streets used to be full of horses with horsemen around the streets. I'm looking at New York, which is why I'm citing the analogy. Cars created hundreds, thousands of new roles that didn't exist in the past from motel owners to gas stations, everything you can possibly imagine. So the thought that we're just going to sit around with 99% of people just getting paid UBI from Open AI.

Like, I just like the least likely scenario I seek buying out. out actually. To be clear, I think there'll be disruption between here and that point, but I just don't see, no, I think there's going to be more demand. There's going to be more code. There's going to be more companies. Like Alex said, there's going to be things that weren't even physically possible or possible if they're so expensive you can possibly give them, which are suddenly

seizable. And so, no, I think it's going to be actually a net positive on society. It's just going to change. And change is scary. And that's, that's it. I mean, generally kind of positive AI. I think if anything, like, if it's, It's funny because you think, oh,

this cognitive elite of AI builders, like, dude, if you have intelligence on demand, does that make intelligence more or less valuable as like a thing that just exists in the world? It's like, no, no, the human touch, EQ rather than IQ, and I hate those buzzwords, so they sound very LinkedIn. But you know what I mean, right?

Like, actually the raw intelligence is just going to be a thing you buy, just like a server on AWI. It's like that actually, this matters a lot less than actually framing the problem or the human touch tool. What if Snap had sold to Meta? I think Snap would be Instagram. I genuinely think we have the rules and the ability and the know-how to make things more successful.

So I genuinely think it would be significantly more successful if it had. But, you know, that's a woulda-kiddishida. And I'm sure they might not agree with me, but that's what I believe. Five plus years after the acquisition of, you know, well after the acquisition of Oculus, after sort of the big bet on the metaverse, help us concession. where we are, you know, five plus years later and where we're going. Yeah, I mean, the thing I would do is we spent an awful lot of time and an awful lot of money on a video that was the mother of all demos of what the future looks like.

And that video contains AI assistance. It contains audio glasses. It contains glasses like our Orion glasses we put out last year, which have sort of the visual overlay. And what's really interesting to me is, despite everyone saying the metaverse is over or whatever, a lot of stuff in that video is coming true. And so my perspective on this is these are a smash here. So the glasses, total smash here.

It's AI with you at any stage. You can ask you questions. I now ask you all the time to give me a reminder. I think of something and I say, hey, Metairai, remind me in three hours of X, which I know is a minor use of it. But I don't have to take my phone out and send myself an email. and I'm finding myself just because it's with me all time, all day, I'm thinking of things to use it for.

These have a lot of active users at this stage. And that is one of the things we feature in the video. So my perspective is, you know, where are we? It's a research and development space. Actually, amazingly, the AI jumped forward far faster than we thought, which means that it got ahead of the waveguides that are needed to do the overlay. like augmented reality experience

that we think is the end game. So, yeah, that's going at the pace that we expected it to. The AI is going far faster than we expected it to. And I think you'll probably see 10 years from now people walking around with these glasses with always on AI, with a visual overlay of the real world,

helping them navigate their lives better. What is your prediction of Antonio as now an outsider of what the legacy will be of Meta's big bet? you know, rebrand and, and sort of big, you know, financial bet on the category. I mean, this is definitely an outsider view because of all the companies we talked about, the VR thing didn't exist at all when I was at Facebook. So this is a completely uninformed view.

It sold to me the big investment. I mean, and again, you know, Alex has a deeper knowledge here, but it seems to me that Mark's obsession was always mediating human social behavior in different forms. And how many touchpoints could that possibly take? I think Facebook played its cards with the mobile revolution very well. And I guess the thinking there was like, well, VR is the next way that humans are going to interact with each other.

And so we're going to build a social grass around that. It hasn't quite played out that way. I'm not quite sure why. Because I used to be an AI skeptic as well. For the past 20 years in tech, it's like AI is the constant of the reality of the future, and it seems like the future is finally here. But similarly, virtual reality has always been

just like perpetual technology of the future. And somehow that ship hasn't really quite come in yet. That said, over the longer term, I suspect something like the VR headsets that I think Alex mold for us a second ago probably will be in production and at scale. But sometimes things are just too early. I think people, if you actually read technological history, you realize that technologies develop a lot longer to develop and you think they did, right?

There was 20 years between the transistor and the integrated circuit, another 20 years between the integrated circuit and the PC, and the PC and the internet, and like 10 years between the internet and mobile. So these are like decade-long things that play out. So it might just be too early, I think, in the case of VR. Is there any world which Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft could have made an actual competitor to the iPhone? Or was it just too complex and a better try for the next platform? You know, VR.

Maybe if everyone had spotted it early enough, but everyone said it was the year of mobile for years and then stopped saying it. And then suddenly it actually became the year of mobile. And we all missed it. because it actually happened around 2010. And so I think the issue is that everyone missed it. Yeah, maybe, maybe, but I think probably not. Gearing towards closing here, Alex, the book is Click here. It's a history of the industry, is a history of the company.

Meta Facebook, obviously it's one of the most, if not the most iconic and important company of the last 20 years, not just its technology, but globally. And it's had a lot of different evolutions and phases in its substance and its perception. what do you think is not fully appreciated about where the company is now or what's a misperception or misunderstanding of that that's worth correcting? You know, I'm going to come back to what I said at the beginning, but this is obviously my personal take. I'm sure if you're stock, he'd have a different, you know, a different opinion.

The biggest thing is that appetizing is good. And I think there's this whole thing about like, you know, surveillance capitalism, ads are bad, you know, and it's all protecting people from slightly better ads for personalized trainers. And I actually think like the way that it gives people access to things that they like. People prefer personalized ads to non-personalized ads. We have tested that again and again and again. If we just personalize the ad based on your demographic, you will not like what you get.

But if it's based on what you truly like, you'll get a better experience. And I'm still struggling to see what European customers have been protected from, the U.S. customers are suffering from when it comes down to a lot of this. privacy regulation and a lot of the hatred of ads. And so the number one perfection I want people to ship is ads are a good thing. People like personalized ads. And, you know, yes, the book has a bit of history in it of the company. It has a lot of context on each of the channels.

And I think it is really important that we as an industry care about advertising and learn how to do it well. A lot of startup founders just still believe in like, oh, they clicked on my ad and they converted, therefore the ad drove that conversion. There's some really obvious stuff that people can learn. And this book is, I think, at a good level to get people to know how to do the basics really, really, really well. The book is Click Here, The Art and Science of Digital Marketing and Advertising. Alex has been a fantastic conversation.

Thanks for coming up. Thank you very much. And thanks, and thank you. Thanks for listening to this episode of the A16Z podcast. If you like this episode, be sure to like, comment, subscribe, leave us a rating or review, and share it with your friends and family. For more episodes, go to YouTube, Apple Podcasts, and Spotify. Follow us on X, A16Z, and subscribe to our substack at A16Z. com. Thanks again for listening, and I'll see you in the next episode.

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