Speaker A
Welcome. Thanks. Good to be here. This doing the live demo thing. Yeah, I know.
Mark Zuckerberg discusses AI's transformative impact on business, advertising, and customer interaction in a Stripe Sessions conversation.
Key Takeaways
- AI will transform nearly every product category and economic sector.
- AI-driven advertising automates targeting and creative processes, improving efficiency and results.
- AI business agents will become integral to customer support and sales, especially in messaging platforms.
- Labor cost influences the adoption of messaging-based business interactions globally.
- Meta is heavily investing in AI infrastructure and aims to lead the AI-driven business transformation.
Summary
- Mark Zuckerberg highlights AI as a transformative force across all product categories and economic sectors.
- Meta is a leading AI company, heavily investing in GPU infrastructure and AI development.
- AI is accelerating business automation, especially in advertising where AI optimizes ad delivery based on business goals.
- Meta is developing AI business agents that automate customer support and sales via messaging platforms.
- Messaging-based business interactions are more prevalent in countries with lower labor costs, like Thailand and Vietnam.
- Zuckerberg predicts AI agents will become standard for businesses, changing how customers interact with companies.
- Advertising is expected to grow as an AI-driven business results machine, potentially increasing its share of global GDP.
- Meta AI currently serves about a billion monthly active users across its apps, with rapid goal-setting and achievement cycles.
- The conversation touches on the challenges of live AI demos and the evolving AI landscape over the next 5-10 years.
- Meta aims to maintain leadership by setting ambitious AI goals and adapting to fast-changing industry dynamics.
Chapters
- 00:00Introduction and live demo challenges
- 03:00Meta's AI goals and rapid progress
- 05:23AI in advertising and business automation
- 08:09AI business agents and messaging platforms
- 10:45Global differences in messaging-based business
- 18:05AI's impact on advertising and economy
- 22:15Future outlook and Meta's AI strategy
- 26:54Leadership and company culture insights
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
Speaker A
Obviously, live demos are so much worse um when they're AI based because you just get a different thing every time.
Speaker A
It's like it's over the It adds an element of Exactly. It just gets you really alive. Yeah. Um, so this is, um, the last public speaking appearance you did was Theo Van. He actually took a lot of the questions that I wanted to ask.
Speaker A
Um, but, uh, same kind of vibe. Exactly. Yeah. Um, here at Stripe Sessions. Um, so we obviously just talked a whole bunch about AI. Uh, you are, I mean, arguably just the largest AI company, right? you are the largest buyer of GPUs
Speaker A
in the US outside of you know a cloud hyperscaler um from my deep research um how is your thing on AI just evolved over the past year haven't been moving slowly yeah I mean I think the high level is it's on track how so well well
Speaker A
I mean I think I think one of the big questions is I I think it's like I think most people at this point view that AI is going to transform pretty much every category of product and every part of the economy and all
Speaker A
that. the the big question is to what extent are we in a bubble versus to what extent um you know is this gonna be a big thing soon and you know I mean I think one of the one of the I mean you
Speaker A
were just talking about this I think right before I I I came out you know it's even if it is a bubble and it takes a bit longer to build out that's not necessarily the end of the world
Speaker A
although it will be expensive um for certain people well yeah when you're spending 65 to 70 billion in capex a year. You'd like it to come when you think it's going to come, but you know, it's but um but but I think the main
Speaker A
question is sort of is that is this going to be a kind of five to 10 year thing? And in some ways it probably will to get built into every enterprise workflow and things like that. But I don't know. I mean the the
Speaker A
more time that the kind of the more that we work on this, it actually seems like all the things that we think are going to happen happen sooner and being even more ambitious um has been more predictive over the
Speaker A
last few years about where things are likely going to be in the industry. So I mean like we keep on you know building you know setting goals for our teams.
Speaker A
You know, Meta AI is like right about a billion people monthly active using it across our apps.
Speaker A
Um, you know, we keep on setting these goals for, you know, what do we think is going to be the most used AI? What do we need to do? And we keep on passing them and then like others in the industry
Speaker A
keep on passing their goals too. and we're like, "Ah, we should have had even higher goals." And um you know how much AI is accelerating all of the like all of the uh business agent stuff that we're doing and advertising and changing
Speaker A
that. It's like it's it's all just happening very quickly. Do you want to describe the business agent stuff briefly for people who are unfamiliar?
Speaker A
Maybe everyone's familiar. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean there's two basic versions of this and I I think this is probably good context for for folks here to have.
Speaker A
I mean there's one is just the transformation of the ad system, right? where, you know, it used to basically be if you wanted to run ads, you had to like come up with your own creative and you had to come up with who you wanted
Speaker A
to reach. You had to kind of have a sense of who your customers were and do a lot of your own measurement. And over time, we've just like automated more and more of this stuff. So, the the basic
Speaker A
end goal here is any business can come to us um say what their objective is. I want to get new customers to do this thing. I want to sell these things. Tell us how much they're willing to pay to
Speaker A
achieve those results. connect their bank account and then we just deliver as many results as we can. And in in a way, I mean, it's kind of like the ultimate business results machine. It's probably I think it'll be one of the most
Speaker A
important and valuable AI systems and and and kind of business systems that gets built. Now, I mean, obviously there's a whole ecosystem around this stuff. No one company is going to do everything in advertising. there are, you know, all these companies that
Speaker A
specialize in doing creative work and they'll keep on doing that and uh but but it will be possible in the future that if you're running a small business or maybe even a larger one, you won't even need to have to start off with a
Speaker A
creative. Maybe you can, maybe you'll get better results, but but um you could just come with a goal um and and uh how much that's worth to you and we'll just kind of deliver results across our platform. So, I think that that's cool
Speaker A
and I think is going to um pretty dramatically change what advertising is. Historically, advertising has been about 1% of global GDP, but that includes all the stuff that's really inefficient.
Speaker A
Like you buy a billboard and you know like threequarters of the people who see the billboard are not target customers.
Speaker A
So when you actually can change it so it it turns into this like AI business results machine. I I think that you know just like the overall internet economy is going to grow. I would guess that what we currently think of advertising
Speaker A
will sort of grow as a as a field and will be a larger portion of of global GDP. Um it's interesting. I mean a lot of a lot of innovative companies are are experimenting with different kinds of automation with our platforms and that's
Speaker A
kind of a fun thing that we can get into. The the other part of what we're doing on business agents is um this notion that you know just like every business today has an email address and um you
Speaker A
know and a website and a social media presence in the future every business is going to have an AI agent that lives in the different messaging platforms that their customers can do customer support and sales through. Um and you know
Speaker A
there's sort of this wild precedent that we've seen so far in a couple of countries where like Thailand and Vietnam are kind of these interesting cases for us where there are there's relatively low cost of human labor and
Speaker A
because of that a lot of the economy is sort of developed around messaging. Um and basically like a large number of businesses out there can afford to have people who just do manual customer support and sales through messaging. And
Speaker A
it's at the point where even though Thailand and Vietnam are like ranked in the top I think they're in the 30s by global GDP. They're they're actually Meta's number 10 and 11 revenue countries. And um it's just because so
Speaker A
much commerce in those places goes through the messaging platforms already. But that hasn't really come to a lot of developed countries yet for a number of reasons including the kind of cost of labor. But I think when you get to the
Speaker A
point where every business just has a business agent that is an AI agent that can do customer support and sales, I I think that that's just going to turbocharge. And you know, most of our business today, it's it's Facebook and
Speaker A
Instagram and ads in there. WhatsApp really from a revenue perspective at least is sort of just getting started.
Speaker A
And I think that that's kind of going to be the next pillar of the business. So sorry, that's quite interesting.
Speaker A
Basically, you're saying that when cost of labor is not an issue, you see people have much more messaging based business experiences, kind of UIs at some level for how you do things. And the reason that we don't see as much of it in the
Speaker A
US is just it's too expensive to have someone at your, you know, hair salon just responding to messages all day. And that's one of your predictions for how it seems like people actually want to interact with. Yeah, totally. I I mean I
Speaker A
I think that there's there is some path determinism here and you know I think that the whole messaging ecosystem developed differently in some of these places where the cost of human labor was lower but overall I think people are
Speaker A
going to contact more businesses for more things when they get very high quality low latency personalized responses. Um, and now I mean of course in the in the kind of modern web you'll be able to have a business agent that is
Speaker A
a chatbot on your website too. So I mean how much of that is happening through messaging services versus apps or having this just embedded everywhere I'm not sure. But um overall what we do see you know across our platform is just a a
Speaker A
business messaging is growing very quickly. It's you know about10 billion of revenue now continues to grow quickly. Um, and yeah, I think that this is probably going to be the next kind of new pillar of our business and and the
Speaker A
stuff that we're doing. And then in the first point you made, it sounds like you're basically saying that execution friction just gets in the way of a lot of things like, you know, maybe the more be more confetti animations in the world
Speaker A
if it was just, you know, a single uh line to uh get them to happen. Uh, and similarly, you think that many businesses would actually go out and do more. It's not that they're not economically willing to pay $20 to get
Speaker A
an acquired user or something like that. it's just all the steps that go into the data analytics and the creative and everything like that mean that they don't actually get the right outcome for their businesses and so less friction in
Speaker A
execution well that and also um I think we've just reached a point where the AI is more effective at a lot of things that that different businesses do. So I mean it's like okay if you're starting a company there's normally like some core
Speaker A
idea or something that you're trying to do and then there's like all these other things that you need to do to make a company work and like okay if you want to reach customers you've had to you know like basically go find ways to do
Speaker A
marketing and then okay you want to make sure your marketing works well so you need to like find ways to measure your marketing and all this and I do think a bunch of that stuff we're just getting to the point where the AI can do it
Speaker A
better than sort of the average people who are doing that which makes it so that more companies can get started more easily. I mean, this is also a big theme for Stripe, right? It's like, okay, companies also needed to spend all this
Speaker A
time doing all this different stuff with financial services and payments. Now, they don't have to. So, I think what that allows is just way more people in the world to focus on what their core idea is and and kind of execute that and
Speaker A
have a core talent dense team of people who are like focused on that idea and more of the stuff that's like not the core part of of building your company is is going to be able to be offloaded. So,
Speaker A
you know, in the future, um you know, if you were working with a a um creative agency to to make creative, you'll probably keep doing that. If you aren't, then um then, you know, and you're just kind of hacking something together and
Speaker A
throwing it into Meta's ad system. Well, now we're going to be able to come up with like 4,000 different versions of your creative and just test them and figure out which one works best. You know, it used to be that um on the
Speaker A
targeting side, like the the way that our business kind of got started on the ad side was because people put all this profile information into Facebook early on. It used to be like a great place for a business to say, "Okay, I think my
Speaker A
product is like I think like women between like, you know, 18 and 28 in this city are really going to love this thing." and like Facebook early on it was like the best place to go reach them because okay we we kind of knew who
Speaker A
people were and and and had all this people had input all this demographic information at this point we basically encourage advertisers not to restrict what the AI can do like we're like all right look if you think that like women
Speaker A
in in kind of this age range are going to be um more receptive then yeah give us that hint as as kind of a an input to the system but you know unless you really have a reason why you don't want
Speaker A
to sell to other people. Don't constrain who are going to reach to just that because the AI is actually probably going to be able to find who is going to be interested in your product better than you can. And that just means that
Speaker A
okay, you just focus on building the best product. More stuff that's awesome is going to happen in the world. The Hello Kitty effect. Um so last question on AI. I'm not familiar with that reference. Oh, never mind.
Speaker A
Um, so just on AI and market structure, obviously you guys are so interesting here because unlike a lot of the pure play AI companies, you were off doing stuff doing a lot of production AI and then also decided to get into the AI business
Speaker A
and also you know Llama, you're uh well, one of your big bets is uh is open source. I guess you're also wearing the uh what are your meta bands saying to you about me right now? like what are
Speaker A
they what Bluetooth? No, they're they're off. Um I I left my phone backstage. Their Bluetooth connection is severed.
Speaker A
But um I'm picturing like a Terminator style UI. Well, look, you know, I'm like I'm like famously awkward. I need some input as I'm, you know, as we're doing these so I can make sure I don't say anything stupid. Yeah, John, not
Speaker A
Patrick. Um but uh no. Okay. So anyway, you guys are doing a lot in AI and I'm just curious for your thoughts on market structure because it's a super fast evolving like it feels to me like the first time since
Speaker A
I moved to the valley that we've been in a tech race. you um read about uh the development of you know the computing industry in uh the 1980s and there's a new leader every six months and we didn't have a good tech race uh for a
Speaker A
while and now we do where it's constantly evolving leaders and it's just not clear even where the value capture happens and so I'm curious how you see the chessboard.
Speaker A
Well I I mean I think this is going to transform every category. So I I think people are like oh is it going to be primarily a consumer thing or is it going to be primarily an enterprise thing? it's going to be everything. So,
Speaker A
it's kind of like at the internet, it's like what is the point of the internet?
Speaker A
Is it going to be consumer or enterprise? It's like there are going to be a lot of opportunities, right? So, I I think we we were kind of in this zone early on where, you know, people were competing to build the kind of best
Speaker A
general model and my guess is that that stuff is just going to start specializing a little bit. There's um there's obviously I mean it's intelligence by its nature is general.
Speaker A
So you're not going to be able to just build something that is focused on kind of one area and and only go deep in that and not be good at other things. Um but I do think it'll be the case that the
Speaker A
products and ecosystems and the areas of research that that different companies emphasize will be focused on on different areas. And um you know what we're so we're doing some of the business stuff we just talked about.
Speaker A
We're also on the consumer side very focused on like personal AI right more than than kind of productivity. So, you know, what is that? It's going to be um probably more conversational, probably index a little bit more towards voice,
Speaker A
be more personalized. Um, you know, I think people are going to want a system that gets to know them well and that kind of understands them in the way that their feed algorithms do. Um, and and honestly that they don't have to like,
Speaker A
you know, ramp up from scratch because it's already connected to some of that stuff. Um, and like as you walk through the world and you have your glasses like it, you can, you know, it's like glasses are kind of the perfect form factor for
Speaker A
AI because you can let an AI see what you see and hear what you hear and talk to you throughout the day and it should all just kind of get to know you, right?
Speaker A
And it shouldn't be like every time you do a query, it's like, you know, you're just kind of starting from scratch and you need to provide it all the details.
Speaker A
So that's kind that's going to be kind of our game on the consumer side. And that's a little bit different from, you know, a company like, you know, Anthropic or Curser who, you know, Claude can do a lot of stuff, but like
Speaker A
they're really focused on coding and coding agents and like that's going to be a massive massive part of the economy, right? Where there's like all these knowledge workers and engineers and they'll all be turbocharged by now having more, you know, every engineer is
Speaker A
going to be a tech lead that has like effectively an army that is working for them. It is striking to me what an overhang there is of personalization in AI, the ability to improve products.
Speaker A
Like it's kind of funny to me that Siri cannot understand uh my voice to save its life. And it's kind of funny, right?
Speaker A
Because it's a general language recognition model, but you have so much of my voice to go off. Like your job is not to recognize any voice under the sun. It's just to recognize my voice.
Speaker A
And you know, similarly, you know, it would be trivial to have personalized handwriting recognition models, but we don't have those yet. And so it's just interesting to me how little personalization there is compared to how much we'll obviously have in in five
Speaker A
years time. No, I mean I think it's very little right now. I think we're just starting to scratch the surface with some of these products on like, okay, they learn from what you've talked about in the past and what you've told them in
Speaker A
that model, but I I think it's pretty clear that you're going to want to connect more and more things to your AI.
Speaker A
Um, you know, so from our world, it's going to be, you know, starting with the other meta services, um, messaging, glasses, like all of that, as well as just be able to infer and and kind of remember the key things from all the
Speaker A
conversations that you've had over time. No, it's going to be really good. I'm very excited for the Stripe sessions in five years time and what we're uh, it's going to be. Yeah. No, it's going to be wild. It's going to be a wild time. Does
Speaker A
it feel like a wild time to you? Like again, it feels Oh, yeah. It's the craziest, but like it's very Yeah, it's very different to three years ago.
Speaker A
things were just quieter three years ago. Um, maybe not for you. Well, I think it was starting three years ago.
Speaker A
It's getting it's it's ramping. It's ramping. Um, I I don't know. I think it's the most exciting time that But it's like Yeah. No, it's really good there. I mean, it's I I think it's just there's but I do think that everyone needs to
Speaker A
kind of rethink a lot of the the different ways that their products work. And and over time, I think that there are going to be a lot of opportunities for just building companies in different ways, too. And there's the version of
Speaker A
this where like everyone at your company just gets a ton more leverage. Um, and that that's the version that I'm kind of excited about. Um, you know, people are I think very fixated on this notion of O AI is going to be able to like replace
Speaker A
people's jobs. I I kind the wrong mental model. Yeah. I mean, I guess if you're if we get into like some kind of really deep recession and the order of the day is like we need everything needs to be
Speaker A
more efficient, I guess AI can be used to to make things more efficient. But but um yeah, I mean across what we do, there are all these places where there's stuff that just like wasn't cost-effective to do before like
Speaker A
um like provide voice customer support for everyone who uses Meta. It's like all right there's billions of people use you know it's like that would cost so much right to do it's like we would cost us so much
Speaker A
and we don't we don't charge for our product so it like our business model doesn't quite support that but you know okay maybe now if you could have a voice AI that could answer 90% of people's questions um maybe now it actually
Speaker A
becomes maybe now it makes sense to go hire the people to go answer the other 10% of questions that the AI can't because you could kind of again you're just getting this like 10x leverage and it's it's just super super powerful.
Speaker A
This is where someone whispers Jeff's paradox uh from offstage. Um but okay, as we live through this very fast changing landscape, you are positioning meta for it. And one thing as I was preparing for this that I was observing
Speaker A
is it feels like you uh are early to a lot of tech trends. So here's my here's my argument for this.
Speaker A
you um built your own chat app when you were 11 before AIM took off. This was in 199. Yeah. Got it. Got to got to connect my dad's uh different the different offices and his dental office. I I built
Speaker A
him Zucknet. Yeah. So with the computers at your dad's dentist office um you know the Oculus had had to convince him to get me a computer. You know it's like Okay. So it's a good business model of a
Speaker A
kid is like do useful things for your parents in order to get computer. Um, see it's always been about business messaging. Um, so, uh, really has been.
Speaker A
You acquired Oculus 11 years ago. Like AR was not a cool thing, uh, 11 years ago. Um, I don't know, is it fair to say that fair uh, the AI lab uh, was kind of one of the earliest big things you guys
Speaker A
did in AI, but that was 2013 again before the entire current trend. I want to get to Libra later on, the thing people are obviously most excited to hear about, but that thing's dead.
Speaker A
But just but the good news is you have reincarnated the idea with bridge into something that is going to do much better because now there's actually a company that is fully focused on this that's going to absolutely nail the
Speaker A
opportunity globally. We are seeing a lot of stablecoin growth as we uh show the chart but I guess is this part of your self identity being early to tech trends and this is how meta stays ahead and this is kind of how you have been
Speaker A
good at what it is that you do. Uh, I mean, well, it's certainly more fun when you're early than you're late, but I mean, there's plenty of things that I'm late to and have to kind of claw our way
Speaker A
back into the game, which I think we're pretty good at that, too. But, um, I I don't know. What were we late to? I mean, like reals, right? Tik Tok got to be pretty big before we're like, "Okay,
Speaker A
we need to go win." Um, but is pretty big. Seems like people are watching a lot of real. You did fine on reals.
Speaker A
We're doing okay. We're doing okay. Um, but but I mean, you know, Tik Tok is a is a very big competitor. Um, and yeah.
Speaker A
So, yeah. So, there's some things that we're that we're kind of ahead on, some things that we're behind on. I think that's the nature of the world. If you're behind on everything, that probably doesn't work. Um, for for um the next computing
Speaker A
platforms and I guess the way I thought about it was I started the company in 2004 like the smartphone or the iPhone at least came out in 2007. So, you know, we were still in the phase of just like
Speaker A
existential trying to survive and like kind of be a reasonable company at the time that all the smartphone stuff was getting done. So, we obviously weren't going to play any role in in defining that. And the smartphone overall, I
Speaker A
think, has been, you know, it's been great in a bunch of ways. Now, everyone has a computer in their pocket that they could bring with them all day long. And um great for communicating, great for entertainment, great for utility. It's
Speaker A
good. The thing that's complicated for us is like we deliver our services through our competitors, right? So Apple and Google probably, you know, two of our biggest competitors. It is awkward, right, to um to basically um have the
Speaker A
main kind of way that you distribute your service. You run into Tim and Sundar. Is it like is it awkward? Um God, you know, I'm gonna dodge the Apple thing again. You're you're really trying to drag me in here.
Speaker A
Um Tim's had a bad week. I'm not going to pile on. Um the um no but Sundar is cool. I like Sundar. Um um but uh no it's look it's it's complicated right? It's complicated delivering your your services through
Speaker A
competitors who are trying to compete with your thing. um you know so you know it's like if you're Apple they like really want iMessage to win and they don't you know it's like it's the more things that are
Speaker A
crossplatform the easier it is for people to switch from iPhones to Android phones right so it's like all right they can probably survive Spotify but you know it's like but like the more things that are like iMessage is such a huge
Speaker A
lock in for them so I think that that's it's a big deal so anyhow going back to the main question though I I kind of So there are all these things over time that Google but especially Apple have
Speaker A
just been like you can't do these things that you think that that I think are good consumer things to do. And at some point we ran this calculation and we're like all right if we were able to do all
Speaker A
the things that we thought were good like between the additional engagement and usage of our apps and the random taxes and stuff like I think we might be twice as profitable as a company or something as we are now. So it's um and
Speaker A
and obviously like I mean I mostly I'm I honestly get more offended by like the consumer things that we just think are good that they just block us from doing.
Speaker A
You just can't do the consumer so it's like okay we really should try to play a role in shaping the next computing platform. And now we're not a company that has like built operating systems and computing platforms. So my general
Speaker A
assumption is if we show up the same year as Apple or Google with Android or you know even Microsoft with with Windows, you know, if they they kind of build the same kind of AR glasses the same year, I I kind of assume the tie
Speaker A
goes to them because they have like they have a much a kind of bigger um kind of base of of stuff built out. So my view is that we have to be better and earlier and maybe that will mean that we need to
Speaker A
invest a little bit like a lot in advance of of when the market is ready for prime time. But but I mean look, we're doing it. I think our I mean our um our VR products I think are better
Speaker A
and 10 times cheaper than than Apple's. Um our AR stuff, the glasses, I mean the things that I'm wearing now, it's like going really well. We're selling many millions of units and just going to keep on expanding into more styles, more
Speaker A
functionality. We'll kind of add the holograms in. Um, so yeah. No, I feel good about that. I I think that this is going to be like these the glasses especially are going to be like the ultimate social platform because
Speaker A
holograms will deliver this like the this feeling of presence like you're there with another person and that's something that like no screen today can deliver. So, it's like in the future, maybe I'll just like beam in as a
Speaker A
hologram to this and and um and that that'll be pretty cool. Um but between that and and glasses being the ultimate device for AI that can like you know see what you see and hear what you hear, I
Speaker A
think this is one that is worth investing in 10 years ahead. Um okay, I want to ask about leadership.
Speaker A
Um so Microsoft invested in uh Meta in 2007. uh that big um strategic investment and our mutual friend uh Charlie Sonhurst was involved in that investment at the time and he said that a big part of his uh investment thesis
Speaker A
for why it made sense for Microsoft to invest in meta was because you were able to beat the civ uh AI on deac level difficulty which is the top of the eight difficulty levels. Um what do you think
Speaker A
about this as a an investment thesis in meta? Uh, well, I mean, the well, the civ AI has always been famously bad. Um, so I I I think it's beating all the other people that is actually more impressive than beating the deity mode.
Speaker A
But, um, I don't know. I I think I don't know games. Yeah, I I definitely there's one theory on kind of hiring or investing in people which is like being able to be excellent at one thing is sort of shows that
Speaker A
someone has the discipline to be able to become excellent at something right so whether you're like a Olympian athlete or you know good at any one area like like I think that that level of achievement it sort of requires a you
Speaker A
know basic level of dedication a ability to basically learn new things and master things and I think in general people who can do that you know it's kind of like the thinking on going to school right it's like okay maybe you learn some
Speaker A
stuff in your courses but really in theory you're supposed to learn how to think and learn new things and um so I don't know I didn't I didn't actually know that that he wanted to invest because I was good at like I'm sure they
Speaker A
told you I was picking like the things that like I might be good that I wouldn't I wasn't going to think that like Civ is like that meaningful of one of them, but I'm glad to know that that's what got the deal done. It's like
Speaker A
the all those thousands of hours playing Civ. Um it actually are actually useful. Exactly. Go back and tell your parents.
Speaker A
It's like I just want to correct the record about video games. Yeah. Um so last year we had uh uh Jensen Hang here and he uh had a conversation with Patrick and he described his management uh system which as you probably know is
Speaker A
um somewhat singular. He has 60 direct reports, doesn't do any one-on- ones, and it kind of goes from there. Um, do you have a an unusual management system like what would be in the Mark Zuckerberg management book? Where do you
Speaker A
differ from the orthodoxy? Um, that's a good question. So, I don't have 60 direct reports.
Speaker A
Um I I don't even like managing people. Um so I don't I mean that's different from the orthodoxy some books, you know.
Speaker A
Um no. So so actually the way that we've set up the company is we have like there there are a bunch of really great leaders who sort of we have like 15 different product groups. Everything from like Facebook to Instagram to our
Speaker A
ad system to VR to the glasses to like all the different stuff. I kind of think that the people who run those 15 groups or so are like the people who are running like the real things and then but I I don't want to
Speaker A
have 15 direct reports and um so we kind of have organized the company thematically where you know all the apps report to uh Chris and all the kind of crosscutting services like the ads and the infra and the integrity systems and
Speaker A
all that stuff report to Javi and and a lot of the like future tech platform stuff reports to Bos.
Speaker A
And that's great. Um, but I've also set it up so I just like go to the people who obviously those people are all brilliant and I work with them super closely, but I also go like directly to, you know, the people who are running
Speaker A
whatever the thing is that I care about. Um, so we're very non- hierarchical in that way. I think of our management team is not really my just my direct reports.
Speaker A
It's sort of like this broader group of like 25 to 30 people who I try to include in everything. Um, so you don't have 60 direct reports. That would be crazy. However, there are 25 to 30 people to whom you go and direct the
Speaker A
work. Probably more. But I but I um but but at least 60 direct reports. Well, what's the point of having direct reports if you don't if you're not going to like do one-on- ones? Well, I actually don't do one-on- ones with the
Speaker A
people who report to me either, but but it's so so so let me stop that sentence and cut that off. But why would you have 60 of them if you aren't going to do direct like I actually believe
Speaker A
management is important, right? and and like part of the reason why I don't have all other people to do. I think if you're going to report to me, you need to be able to manage yourself, but um but but I but I believe that for the
Speaker A
rest of the company, management is um is is is kind of important and and it's like an important way that people grow.
Speaker A
But I for the team, I like want to have sort of the largest group that I think can basically have context on every single thing that's happening across the company. And um so that way they can go do as much as possible. And so that's
Speaker A
why I have this group that I sort of ironically call small group, but it's like you know 25 to 30 people and um and that's like group auditorium all these things and and that's like and I I invest a lot of time in like making sure
Speaker A
that there's a group that's very connected to each other and that have all the context on what's going on inside the company and that's sort of like the core army that can go get like anything done. across the company. But I
Speaker A
guess the other thing that maybe is nonorthodoxy, it may be like a little pathier to explain this. I basically don't believe in delegation. Um, you know, I think that there's sort of this theory that a lot of people have, which
Speaker A
is like, all right, the job of a leader is like you hire people and you delegate things to them. My theory is there's so much going on across the company that I can't possibly get involved in all of
Speaker A
it. So all these people are going to have like a ton of stuff that they're going to do. But fundamentally, if there is a decision that I want to be involved with, I'm going to be involved in it. I
Speaker A
don't I just I don't believe in delegating. Um like it's it's like if and I I think that that's generally a good way for founders to operate. I I think it's like if you're running the company and you're on the hook for
Speaker A
everything and there's like something that's important at whatever level of detail in the organization, I don't get like the logic of saying like I don't I'm not going to be involved in that.
Speaker A
Now, I mean, you want to be you want to have humility and know that like if you're diving into some decision, you may not have the most context immediately, but um but I generally think that you want to be able to just
Speaker A
have the cultural expectation that things are not going to be so hierarchical and like you're just going to dive into whatever you want. Well, and so what is a week in the life of Mark where it's striking to me that you
Speaker A
do often have a lot of context on these product things? Uh but at the same time, you know, you've been running the company for 21 years. you uh you presumably don't have to do the things that you don't want to do. And so I'm
Speaker A
curious how you organize your time to actually spend time on the things that you um you know you think is valuable for the company that you want to work on and just so you have the context to to
Speaker A
be able to make these decisions. Just yeah I guess I um you know I really try to minimize standing meetings. So I mean I do two things weekly with this like small group zone, right? there's like an open-ended kind of strategy discussion
Speaker A
and then I go through like our I have an operational meeting where I like basically go through company priorities and that is it right so the point of not having one-on-one sorry the only recurring meetings you're in are these
Speaker A
okay yeah well I mean I do earnings once a quarter and like okay but like um yeah we have a board meeting current calendar hold yeah board meeting you know like stuff like that but but like um but in
Speaker A
general no I try to cut down on that um you know and when I say I don't have one-on-one I don't have like recurring scheduled 101 ones. I talk to all these people constantly. Um, and more than they want to talk to me, I'm I'm sure.
Speaker A
Um, and but I do it when I have something that I I want to talk to them about or if they want to talk to me, I I try to generally keep a bunch of time open so that way like stuff is pretty
Speaker A
dynamic and like you wake up in the morning and you're like, "Okay, I need to work on these three things today and I want to make sure that I have a block of time where I can go do that." I get
Speaker A
really frustrated and bad mood if like my whole day is scheduled and there's like a thing that I know is really important and I like don't get time to do it because I'm sitting in other things that are not the most important
Speaker A
thing to be doing. It's like like you have too many days like that in a row and I just like explode. So I I think it's just like you want to make sure that you keep like a meaningful amount
Speaker A
of your time I I think open so that way you can just go talk to the people that that you want to either about whatever you want to get done or whatever you want to learn about about what's going
Speaker A
on in the organization. So um very few recurring meetings uh but you have to turn up to earnings. Um uh I mean yeah I I I haven't won that argument with Susan yet.
Speaker A
Okay. Well, I'm not going to wait into that, but um very few recurring meetings. Um sorry meta investors. Um decided here it's like now look what you've done. Exactly. Very few recurring meetings. Uh diving deep with the core.
Speaker A
I I think going to earnings is actually pretty good for the record for everyone who's live streaming this. Very good high leverage. Good use of time.
Speaker A
Excellent. Um very few recurring meetings, diving deep with the people um that you actually need to spend time on and uh tons of free time. It sounds like that's part of what has allowed you to actually be ready for these new things.
Speaker A
Yeah, that and like really good people. Yeah. Right. I think like it's that's what struck me about the meta senior leadership team. Um very strong leaders who've been at the company a very long time. Yeah. Um we have we have a a
Speaker A
tenure team. I mean one of the things that's interesting so we have so have these like 15 or so different product groups. One of the things I think is really cool is none of them actually started at the company running a product
Speaker A
group. So like I mean just a completely different set of things like some started as a designer, some started as a data analyst. Um one started as an admin um one um two actually now on our management team started as admins. Um
Speaker A
and uh some started as like an engineering director or something and then you know eventually kind of got to be a VP running a running a big group.
Speaker A
Like but it's literally like part of the process for me is that it's not just like is this person good. It's like you want to have a dense network of connections so that way you know it's ultimately like getting things done is a
Speaker A
people driven thing um as much as it is kind of an intellectual exercise. And um I think it's just really valuable when you're running a team to have a team that is densely connected that trusts each other that understands like each
Speaker A
other's APIs and like how um you know what they're good at, what their what their weaknesses are and um just has like a long history and trust of having worked together on a bunch of things.
Speaker A
That's like you can't hire that. You have to build that. Um, and so I think a lot of people think about, you know, how they want to run their company in terms of like what is the org chart, right?
Speaker A
It's like how many people report to you, whatever. Like it's, you know, I I actually think like the people and the culture. Um, you know, what's what's the the saying culture eats strategy for breakfast or whatever, right? It's like
Speaker A
I do think that there's like Yeah, it's it like it doesn't matter what lines you draw or like or all that. you you just need you need to have really good people and I think you need to make sure that
Speaker A
they um work well together and no matter like different people have different ways of doing that. Um you know one of the ways that I do it is I just like think okay if you want to get a group to
Speaker A
work well together let's like get a group and like we'll spend a lot of time together going through all the context of everything across the company and like that's kind of that's what what that's what's worked for me. It doesn't
Speaker A
mean that it has to be what what um what what is the case for everyone, but but that's at least what what's worked for me. In a way, I think this is like a an oldfashioned management philosophy of,
Speaker A
you know, a high trust group that spent lots of time together that's pretty well bonded. And so there's there's some ways in which you're embracing the the orthodoxy. And sorry, I have a very um oddly um specific question, but I was
Speaker A
just wondering like you're everyone here is running a business where there's a tension between investing in the current thing that's um working and we could just do an iterative improvement or you know your version of the meta ray bands
Speaker A
or uh you know llama or some new thing that could be a huge business in future but just like it's not going to show any uh interesting P&L contribution this year or next year. And I think that problem is interestingly scale
Speaker A
invariant. Like we had it when we were 10 people at Stripe. We were at it when we were a thousand people at Stripe. We still have it. We're always debating between the, you know, this year payoff, next year payoff, 10 years from now
Speaker A
payoff. Do you do you think about that question quantitatively? Do you just do stuff that you think is cool? Like you see what I mean by the the problem, right? Every single business facing time horizons. Yeah.
Speaker A
Um, I don't know that there's one answer to it. Obviously, some of that depends on like how profitable is your business and how many bets can you take long term. Like obviously when you're getting started, you're like just trying to be
Speaker A
very profitable. Yeah. Step Yeah. Step one. Yeah. Um, well, I mean, look, yeah, I think every business goes through the phase early on where you're just trying to like survive and become a stable and self-sustaining thing. And you you
Speaker A
obviously want to do that in a way that is has an eye towards the future.
Speaker A
Um but I think that there is this just sort of like grappling to get to some kind of sustainability part. That's the beginning of of a business. Um and then after that, you know, you can you can make different bets.
Speaker A
Um I don't have a specific kind of quantitative or financial framework for this. Um it might be better if I did.
Speaker A
Um, but I I kind of just think like you want to get really good people to do all of the different things and then you want to do all of the things that you're doing well. And so I I think like part
Speaker A
of this is um we can do the long-term stuff because we do really well at the core business. And you know on a day-to-day basis like I'm not spending really any time like doing the improvements to the recommendation
Speaker A
algorithm in feed or Instagram or the ad system but like the people who are running those teams are amazing and they get whatever resources they need right because like that's just like fundamentally I mean that's those are the core products that people come to
Speaker A
the the company to to use. Um, and I think that there's so much more upside in terms of delivering better personalized experiences, the business um, AI platform that that I talked about earlier, all that stuff. Um, and so we
Speaker A
you gota so you want to make sure you have so I think about stuff maybe more in terms of people than finances which is like where are you going to allocate the best people and like who gets to eat
Speaker A
first and then and then there's just a question of okay like the more profitable you are the more you can try different things on top of that and the more of a surplus you have in talent the more you can do good things um good
Speaker A
additional things But like yeah, I'm I'm probably more people focused on on that than than kind of more about management bandwidth. Yeah. Um we're almost out of time and I can't believe I haven't got back to um the most important thing to
Speaker A
talk about which is um uh payments and uh stable coins. Let's do it. Uh and uh your earlier No, no. I I guess I'm just curious what got you really excited about Libra and getting into the payment the stable coin space in 2019. You know,
Speaker A
Libra obviously didn't work out. Now we're seeing huge amounts of stable coin adoption, but I'm just curious, what was your thesis back then? Well, so, so I kind of have this view that if you're starting a social app from scratch
Speaker A
today, rather than starting it with a feed, I think that's a big thing, too.
Speaker A
It's sort of evolved into this like algorithmic discovery engine. I think you'd start it off as a messaging platform and basically the atomic unit is like a onetoone encrypted message that's like super private and secure and then you build like really secure ways
Speaker A
for people to share all the things that they want on top of that. So like encrypted calls, encrypted location sharing, all this stuff. It it just seems journalist from the Atlantic and like it seems self-evident to me that um
Speaker A
again not going to take the bait. Um but uh uh but you know it's like you're like journalist level like trying to get me in trouble here.
Speaker A
Um but um but it seems sort of self-evident that like being able to pay and send money to people should be a core part of this. And so how that works, whether it's a stable coin or fiat or whatever, is perhaps less
Speaker A
important except that our messaging systems are inherently global. And as you know, sending money to people across lines, country lines is like surprisingly crazily difficult, right?
Speaker A
So we're like, okay, we're not a financial services company. Um, but it just seems like this thing is so broken that like someone needs to build a stable coin and and the thing that needs to exist is basically it needs to have a
Speaker A
certain amount of scale in order to become a standard. And you know our our take on that was like all right maybe we can do that because you know Meta is a a kind of large enough company to to kind
Speaker A
of build this in a standard and like WhatsApp is a large enough app that maybe if you get people transacting in that that's becomes a standard.
Speaker A
Honestly, what you're doing makes much more sense than what we were doing. like it like it just I think these things are very DNA driven and like you guys are the I I think the the best think about
Speaker A
it last you know the best you know like financial services payments company um I you know whereas this was a project for us this is like your whole company is making this thing go well and your talent density I mean just going back to
Speaker A
the question we were talking about before um is super deep in in these areas and you have like all all these awesome people like very interconnected to the are going to do this and that's why I mean I think you guys are just
Speaker A
kind of steadily building what I think is going to be one of the most valuable companies in the history of the world and I really admire the way that you guys run the company and all that. Um and I think everyone everyone who uses
Speaker A
your platforms is along for the ride and they're going to all benefit from from all the innovation that you that that you bring.
Speaker A
Um, no. What you guys did with buying bridge, um, building it out as a standard, you know, getting to critical mass on on reach, um, having it be a global thing across the global network that you're building out. Um, it
Speaker A
honestly it makes a lot of sense to me. I I think it's I think it's going to work. Um, and I think you guys are are probably the, you know, much better company to do this, I think, than than
Speaker A
than we would have been. And, um, I'm glad it's happening. Oh, I hopefully there's some collabs in future. We're we're very intrigued where I think part of our enthusiasm has been born out of um all our work on this over the past 15 years
Speaker A
and again this idea of borderless financial services like you're saying you know when you start working on messaging and then you try to put in any kind of payments or financial services those uh quickly uh seem apparent and so
Speaker A
we're very excited about that and the adoption shows it. Um very last question, any advice for this group? You have thousands of entrepreneurs in the room, people at earlier stages uh in their journey. Um I know it's kind of
Speaker A
hard to provide generalized advice, but based on everything you're thinking about right now. Well, I mean, I think we've talked about a bunch of the themes, right? So, one is the way that AI and these internet platforms are developing. a lot of the
Speaker A
things that if you were starting whatever you're starting 20 years ago, you would have had to have built up all these different competencies inside your company and now they're just great platforms to do it. I mean, you can run
Speaker A
your whole business using all the different things that Stripe has. And I mean, that's awesome. Like, we didn't have that when we were getting started, right? We had to build up all this stuff. Um, you know, you can you can basically find
Speaker A
customers and interact with your customers using all of the AI stuff that that I talked about earlier. So, it's like I think that that just what does that mean? I think it means that you can focus on like the core idea of what your
Speaker A
company is better and and and I think that this is just going to lead to like much better quality stuff that gets created around the world because now you're just be able to have these like very small talent dense teams that are
Speaker A
like passionate about an idea which maybe gets to the management philosophy thing which is like yeah I mean make sure that you know it's if if you actually don't need to end up duplicating all this different functionality and you can you can
Speaker A
outsource key parts of what you're doing to a company like Stripes platform which I think is going to make it so easy to scale in all these places around the world and run your business better. What does that mean? It means that like your
Speaker A
company can all be people who are really passionate about the core thing that you're doing and that you can get started on building that team that hopefully is going to be with you for 10 plus years and that you'll just do kind
Speaker A
of amazing stuff with. And I don't know, I think that's a pretty cool vision for the future is that uh people are going to be much more empowered to focus on the core idea and and be able to work
Speaker A
together to accomplish things at larger scale than has ever been possible before at any other point in human history.
Speaker A
People have a lot to work with. So we are going to wrap. We're going to see you at the welcome reception right outside now. Well, then uh the next thing that we'll have here is tomorrow morning bright and nearly like uh
Speaker A
Patrick mentioned, we are going to have the biggest product keynote that we've uh ever had. Really, we just like we're jamming in the ships and there's uh there's I don't want to get you too excited, but there's a lot there. But
Speaker A
please join me in thanking Mark Zuckerberg. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Topics:Mark ZuckerbergAI transformationMeta AIbusiness agentsadvertising automationmessaging platformsStripe Sessionscustomer support AIGPU investmentfuture of AI
