Chamath Palihapitiya - how we put Facebook on the path to 1 billion users

I want some intro music from Ignasio.

Where is Agnosio?

First of all, uh I was playing poker till really late last night, so I'm I'm a little rough around the edges. I got

my slides to you at like midnight. I was

at the table doing the slides. Uh, okay.

So, I'll just start with a little bit about myself. I'm actually going to give

about myself. I'm actually going to give you a somewhat cynical view of this entire space of what it means to be a growth hacker. So, don't be offended.

growth hacker. So, don't be offended.

Um, little bit about me. Uh, I think Aaron just touched upon this. Uh, I

actually my I graduated from Double E and, uh, in the midst of trying to find my way, I ended up working at an investment bank for a year trading derivatives. It was probably the most

derivatives. It was probably the most incipid, idiotic use of my time. Um, and

the biggest thing that I realized was that bankers are like smart enough to be greedy but not smart enough to be useful. So I quit and uh I applied to

useful. So I quit and uh I applied to all these jobs online and I got one at Winamp accidentally and uh we actually built something really cool. Um but the thing that I learned at WinAmp and all

of this ties together so apologize rambling but um we actually had one of the most important and early consumer platforms available which was the set of abstractions that we had built to allow

people to customize our product. you

built skins, you build plugins. And what

it actually did was uh start to refine my understanding of sort of how um when you develop sort of things that uh appeal to specific sets of consumers, you start to get this operational

leverage in your product. We were seven people. Um and the things that we did as

people. Um and the things that we did as a sevenperson group were pretty impressive back in the day. 100 million

users. Not as impressive uh as it is today as it was back then when the internet was a lot smaller, but it was still quite an interesting product and uh really defined a lot of the characteristics of how I actually

approached things when I was at uh Facebook. Um, Win Amp was acquired by uh

Facebook. Um, Win Amp was acquired by uh AOL. Um, and uh at AOL uh I bumbled

AOL. Um, and uh at AOL uh I bumbled along into a bunch of different jobs and ultimately was able to uh run AI and ICQ

which was the instant messaging product.

And uh the takeaway from that were two things. One uh and I'll get to this a

things. One uh and I'll get to this a little bit later. Um, most people at most companies are really [ __ ] and uh that was manifested in a large degree at

AOL. Uh, so I learned all the things not

AOL. Uh, so I learned all the things not to do one and that was probably 90% of my learnings to be quite honest with

you. Uh, and then 10% was reinforcing

you. Uh, and then 10% was reinforcing some things that I learned at Win Amp, which is really about core product value um, and what it means to sort of create

uh, a real connection with someone. I

think now we all kind of euphemistically call it their the aha moment with the consumer. Um but also the power of how

consumer. Um but also the power of how these communication networks when they develop um create real entrenched usage and scale and how these things can just dramatically accelerate adoption uh and

engagement. And um and then lastly uh I

engagement. And um and then lastly uh I spent a bunch of time at uh Facebook. So

the Facebook story is actually really interesting um and I'll tell it sort of uh interle it as I go through the rest of the slides. Uh I spent most of my time investing and playing poker to be

quite honest with you. Um some of the big ones that I was a fairly large stakeholder in Platum, Yammer, which we sold uh for about two billion in combined value. Uh I'm a fairly large

combined value. Uh I'm a fairly large investor in Box and Palunteer and a bunch of very small companies now. Some

of which where I act as a co-founder, some of which that I don't. And uh you know, a lot of people like to tout every return that they have on their blog. I

don't blog or use the Twitter, but uh the track record here is pretty good. Um

I'm a dad. I have two kids. Another one

on the way in January. Uh I play a lot of poker and uh I own the Warriors. I mean,

uh that's what that means. Baller for

all you for all you people don't don't use urban dictionary. Just that's what it Okay. All right. So, let's talk about

it Okay. All right. So, let's talk about growth.

Um, everyone asks me because this is like the topic duour. It's what everyone wants to know. It's like what was the secret? It's like almost as if like, you

secret? It's like almost as if like, you know, we're the NSA and we've like developed something and like nobody knows or like, you know, some secret backroom negotiation between us and

governments. And it's like none of that

governments. And it's like none of that [ __ ] We did three really obvious brain dead things. And the reality was we

dead things. And the reality was we lacked enough self-awareness and ego to frankly just continue to do these very simple things over and over and over again repetitively, monotonously to a

point where every time we used to see things move in one direction or another, we would either keep doing them or stop doing them and not second guessess ourselves. And so I I kind of tell

ourselves. And so I I kind of tell people, you know, look, we actually just looked at a lot of data. We measured a lot of stuff. We tested a lot of stuff and we tried a lot of stuff. Now, that

masks over a lot of more nuanced understanding, but at an extremely high level, that's really what we did. And

what's shocking to me is when I see like a lot of products out there, it's unbelievable to me that people are um trying to shroud products in this

veneer of complexity that makes themselves seem like so good and so smart. And you know, I'm this [ __ ]

smart. And you know, I'm this [ __ ] hipster and I'm riding the muni in San Francisco and look at my oolong green tea that I bought organically and you know, look at these ripped tight skinny jeans that I bought. And it's like, you

got to get over yourself. Like, measure

some [ __ ] try some [ __ ] test some more [ __ ] throw the stuff that doesn't work.

It's not that complicated. And I see app after app and I get inundated. And when

I download it and I try it, I'm like, did you even spend eight seconds using your own product? It's unbelievable the lack of dog fooding that happens. And so

most people when they think about growth, they think it's this convoluted thing where you're trying to generate these, you know, um, extra normal behaviors in people. And that's not what

it's about. What it's about is a very

it's about. What it's about is a very simple, elegant understanding of product value and consumer behavior. And when you shroud yourself

behavior. And when you shroud yourself in all the [ __ ] veneer, and this is the single biggest problem in the valley today, you will miss the mark. And the

problem is is we're in this massive long tail where you've had these seinal huge successes occur and now you have all these people who have two choices and

they're extremely difficult choices.

Choice number one is you do what you think is right independent of what the external feedback loop tells you. And

choice number two is you do what you read about and what you get, you know, credit for and what people tell you is interesting. And that second class of

interesting. And that second class of things destroys products and it destroys people's ability to build something interesting. And it doesn't matter how

interesting. And it doesn't matter how good you are at your job. If that

specific set of values isn't imbued in what you're building, you will fail. And

it doesn't matter. And right now, that is the one most important thing that if you're going to leave away with this is just don't believe the hype and the [ __ ] that we're in right

now. How do we do

now. How do we do this? We didn't even come up with this

this? We didn't even come up with this framework. A guy worked for me. I'm not

framework. A guy worked for me. I'm not

gonna say who it is because I was literally like nine times I was going to fire this num skull. And he once and he came to me and said, "At eBay, we had this framework. eBay, this is 2007." I'm

this framework. eBay, this is 2007." I'm

like, "Bay? Sucks. What can I learn from eBay?" And he said, "Well, we had this

eBay?" And he said, "Well, we had this framework we used at eBay." And we tweaked it a little bit. And what what I realized was, oh my gosh, you know, there's this massive amount of

complexity when expressed in simplicity can be extremely useful. And the tweaks that we made,

useful. And the tweaks that we made, eBay is a different product and eBay now is a wonderful company doing really, really well.

Um, what come on, it's doing really well.

was we sort of created a framework in which we applied those three very simple principles of measuring, testing and trying things. And we said,

things. And we said, okay, the biggest risk that we have is we alienate the people that trust us today and use the product.

And when you alienate someone, what happens is it's actually not palatable generally in uh top level metrics, but there's just this extremely long

tail. So like anecdotally, you can look

tail. So like anecdotally, you can look at companies and you know, you know, let's like not to pick on HP as an example, but you look at HP. Um, you're

signaling me 10 minutes. I have 10 minutes left. Jesus Christ. Okay.

minutes left. Jesus Christ. Okay.

Um, and you ask yourself, you know, and I know Meg Whipin, she's actually a really great CEO. So, what

CEO. So, what happened? Well, there's no product

happened? Well, there's no product innovation right now, and they have to figure out where their growth comes from. Well, when you trace that thing

from. Well, when you trace that thing back, well, it's a decision that was made maybe five or six years ago when it was all about cutting costs and optimizing for short-term revenue. And

so, you realize, okay, well, that's the long tale. That's how long it takes

long tale. That's how long it takes these things to manifest. Similarly, my

biggest fear was we spam our users and we trick them and it will alienate these people. You won't see it today, but

people. You won't see it today, but you'll see it in three years from now or four years from now. And it accelerates when you compound that with a competitor who actually builds a better product that doesn't alienate people. So, the

most important thing that we did against our framework was I teased out verality and said you cannot do it. Don't talk

about it. Don't touch it. I don't want you to give me any product plans that re revolve around this idea of verality. I

don't want to hear it. What I want to hear about is the three most difficult and hard problems that any consumer product has to deal with. How do you get people in the front door? How do you get

them to an aha moment as quickly as possible? And then how do you deliver

possible? And then how do you deliver core product value as often as possible? And after all of that is said

possible? And after all of that is said and done, only then can you propose to me how you are going to get people to get more people. And that single decision about

people. And that single decision about not even allowing the conversation to revolve around this last thing in my opinion was the most important thing

that we did and when I look again in the landscape things that scale understand that principle whether it's explicitly or intuitively and things that don't and

also things that have this amazingly steep rise and then fall off a cliff and there are really visible examples of that today also ignore that princip principle and it's the discipline to not

optimize for the thing that gives you the shortest and most immediate ROI because that is never the sustainable thing that allows you to build something

useful. So when you boil that all up the

useful. So when you boil that all up the most important two highle takeaways that we had and after all of this stuff was we got to eliminate ego and ego

manifests itself every day. So I talked about it earlier. It's the ego of basically living a lifestyle and a vision and like a Twitter stream than it is actually like living the life of an

entrepreneur building good product and trying to deliver core product value.

That takes ego meaning you have to be comfortable not being rewarded in the short term. And then the second is to

short term. And then the second is to invalidate all the lore. In any given product, there's

lore. In any given product, there's always people who strut around the office like, you know, I have this gut feeling. It's all about gut feeling. And

feeling. It's all about gut feeling. And

most people with gut feeling are [ __ ] morons. They don't know what they're

morons. They don't know what they're talking about. They just don't. If we

talking about. They just don't. If we

lived on gut feeling, you can look at what happens when you live on gut feeling. Look at the financial markets.

feeling. Look at the financial markets.

Look at how government works. Look at

how all of these industries that are completely broken. Gut feel is not

completely broken. Gut feel is not useful because most people can't predict correctly. We know this.

correctly. We know this.

So, one of the most important things that we did was just invalidate all of the lore. As much as we didn't do stuff,

the lore. As much as we didn't do stuff, all we did was disprove all of the random anecdotal nonsense that filtered around the company. Well, I think it's this that you know, people are using it

because of that and I want to do this and and it's like where where did you pull that out of? And you know where they pulled it out of and they just again wanted to do it to go back and you

know reinforce a sense of ego. And a lot of people don't have a

ego. And a lot of people don't have a culture within a company that allows these two things to happen.

And if you can't be extremely clinical and extremely unemotionally detached from the thing that you're building, you will make these massive

mistakes and things won't grow because you don't understand what's happening.

It takes a really special type of person to not believe the [ __ ] and an even more special person to not conflate luck and

skill. You have to be, if you're in this

skill. You have to be, if you're in this type of job, in my opinion, relatively cynical. And you can be confident. [ __ ]

cynical. And you can be confident. [ __ ] you can be arrogant. Doesn't really

matter. But you

can't believe your own BS because when you do, you start to compound these massively structural mistakes that again don't expose core

product value and then don't allow real engagement and real product value to emerge. You don't listen to consumers

emerge. You don't listen to consumers because you think it's all about your gut. you don't bother doing any of the

gut. you don't bother doing any of the traditional straightforward obvious things that would allow you to answer very straightforward obvious questions and you lose

yourself. Most people unfortunately are

yourself. Most people unfortunately are just don't know what they're talking about. I'm I hate this

about. I'm I hate this letter. This letter is the dumbest

letter. This letter is the dumbest letter in the in the alphabet. You

people are doing more when you focus on this to ruin the internet for the entire human race. Don't talk about this

human race. Don't talk about this anymore. Just

anymore. Just stop. Talk about being in the weeds and

stop. Talk about being in the weeds and not understanding what you're doing.

There is no context when you talk about this. None whatsoever. You are

this. None whatsoever. You are

spammers and spamming is pathetic and it ruins the experience. Don't do it.

We never talked about this once. It

never came up once. I didn't have some little guy, you know, tickling the ivories on his little Excel spreadsheet telling me what K values were and

all. Tell me how I'm acquiring people.

all. Tell me how I'm acquiring people.

Tell me how we're doing getting them to their aha moment. And tell me core engagement.

Don't give me these low-level abstractions that allow you to validate short get short-term results in ROI that don't mean anything. Don't focus on things that destroy long-term value.

Don't give me stuff that allows you to trick yourself into thinking you know what you're talking about. I'd rather

you say you don't know and I'd rather us figure stuff out together. What I don't want to have happen is a culture where you take these short-term things. You

start working on it in the absence of context and you have these meteoric rises and what you have is massive churn and falloff and everyone's looking around with their hands in their pockets

thinking, "Well, what just happened? I

thought I was doing a really great job."

You're not doing a really great job. You

optimize a variable. Now, there may be somebody on

variable. Now, there may be somebody on your team that should be doing that, but it should be doing that in the context of something much more important.

So you destroy a lot of value when you abstract away that highle goal to something so ridiculously stupid. Like I'm like raining on

stupid. Like I'm like raining on everybody's parade today. Core product value is really

today. Core product value is really elusive and most products don't have any. I actually fundamentally believe

any. I actually fundamentally believe that. But I also believe that most

that. But I also believe that most products can have some value. So when you put those two things

value. So when you put those two things together, again, you go back to the discipline of do you really know what you're building and why? And do you really understand how to marry things

that may be non-intuitive for people, but really are the important things that people need? So I remember when we were

people need? So I remember when we were launching in uh Asia, we created a team.

So the the history of Facebook right just very quickly. So I started Facebook, my team launched Facebook platform. Huge success. Then you know uh

platform. Huge success. Then you know uh we do this big deal with Microsoft. We

gener we raise a huge round and you know at the tail end of that round it's like oh well we're going to launch a bunch of ad products to validate this valuation and you know we're going to do all this stuff and you know my team goes out and we we build three

products and again this is again talk about conflating luck and skill. had all

these people, all of our best guys working on this product with me which we called social ads and Beacon. And then we had another thing

Beacon. And then we had another thing doing sponsored stories. And then we had another team focused on uh an online self-service ad product. Most of the resources in mind share, none of the

resources in mind share. Eight people,

our best engineers, product managers, two people. Fast forward to today, all

two people. Fast forward to today, all of the revenue, billions of dollars scaling inordinately.

lawsuits, FTC suing us, you know, people telling me on the New York Times, I lied about how cross-sight scripting work.

I'm not going to lie about cross-sight scripting to the New York Times. New

York Times. Okay, guys. I mean, really, like, that's what I'm going to lie to you guys about. So stupid.

Uh, any just goes to show you, um, at that point, we were seeing this like what looked like monotonically negative growth and we were like, "Oh my god, what's happening?" It was like 25 30

what's happening?" It was like 25 30 million people. So we came up with this

million people. So we came up with this idea okay we're going to focus on growth and we went and created a team as part of that we said we're going to internationalize we're going to launch we're just going to go everywhere all over the world and so we used again we

dog fooded our own product and we used Facebook platform to create this crowdsourcing translation which was really successful but long story short we get to Japan Korea and it's the it's

a constant refrain you know I go around the valley I talked to some folks who've done this before um the guys at Yahoo you know the guys at Google the guys at eBay just to get a sense of how did you think about it? And all these people had

the same answer. Well, we take these MBAs who really want to live on an expat package and we sent them out there and you're just like, okay, well that's not the right answer. So, so um you know,

first thing we did was we hired only native people in those native markets.

So, I had these guys, you know, trying to I have an MBA from Harvard, you know, I I really want to spend time. I'm like,

get the [ __ ] out of my office. Go to ba.com, buy a ticket, get

office. Go to ba.com, buy a ticket, get out of my face. you're not going to travel on the company dime. So, but

you'd hire all these people natively.

So, we had this amazing guy that we hired in Japan who raised his hand. He

said, you know, it's really important to actually have specific elements of the profile be different because in Japan the cultural dynamic is different. And

so, we said, well, what does that mean to you? And he said, well, maybe it

to you? And he said, well, maybe it means, you know, putting your blood type on the profile. And you're like, that makes no sense. But it makes no sense to us, but it makes sense to him. And so,

you know, we developed this flexibility where we're like, okay, well, maybe the connections we're trying to make in that market are a little too elusive. So,

this product that worked here just didn't have any context here. And so,

you would say, well, Facebook has clear product value, but in Japan at the time, it didn't. And so, having the courage to

it didn't. And so, having the courage to sort of like reset and redefine what it means in any given market, again, takes a lot of courage. And we did it. And now

it's massively scaling. And then all of a sudden the the light bulb goes off and you're like, "Oh my gosh." It's like, "We don't know what we don't know." In

every single market, people react differently. They behave differently.

differently. They behave differently.

They speak different languages. SP,

guess what? Spanish is not Spanish.

Maybe you didn't know that. Five

minutes. I got it. I'm on.

Um, so the point is, um, even when you think something works, it probably doesn't work for everyone. And finding a framework that allows you to actually restructure and reorganize the things that you're doing to expose value in

different ways to different people in different situations is an extremely important thing. Again, goes back to how

important thing. Again, goes back to how do you live in a world where you're willing to redefine and reset the things that you do independent of what the short-term feedback loop is telling you.

It's a very difficult proposition. We knew we were going to

proposition. We knew we were going to beat MySpace when he had like 45 million users. They had like 115 million. We

users. They had like 115 million. We

just knew. We used to just like that was not what we celebrated. We celebrated at 45 million. It was kind of like a high

45 million. It was kind of like a high five. We're like, "All right, let's get

five. We're like, "All right, let's get back to work." Um, and the reason was because we had started to do enough things right where we could just see now we understood what we were doing after all the testing, all the iterating, all

of this stuff. You know what the single biggest thing we realized? Get any

individual to seven friends in 10 days.

That was it. You want a keystone? That

was our keystone.

There's not much more complexity than that. There's an entire team now,

that. There's an entire team now, hundreds of people that have helped ramp this product to a billion users based on that one simple rule. So if you were looking for a lot of complexity, I

couldn't give it to you. But we were able to reframe the

you. But we were able to reframe the entire experience around that one simple premise. a very simple, elegant

premise. a very simple, elegant statement of what it was to both capture core product value, to define what it meant to be able to onboard into a product that allowed you to communicate,

to get into a network, define density, and then to basically iterate around that. And then what we did at that

that. And then what we did at that company was we talked about nothing else. Every Q&A, every all hands,

else. Every Q&A, every all hands, nothing was spoken about other than this. Monetization didn't really come

this. Monetization didn't really come up. platform came up but again in a

up. platform came up but again in a secondary or tertiary context but it was the single sole focus but because we had defined it in this very elegant way that

expressed it as a function of product value it was something that everyone could intrinsically wrap their arms around. Again another reason why

around. Again another reason why focusing on you know abstracting growth down to these low-level things is not right. So the person that runs growth on

right. So the person that runs growth on any team has to be strategic and capable enough to engage on the core strategy of the product because then you allow yourself

to uplevel the conversation and have it become the most important framework in which you organize an entire company. How equity is given, how

company. How equity is given, how expenses are generated, how things are focused on, who gets hired, who gets fired. But when you understand core

fired. But when you understand core product value and then you can basically pivot around it and create these loops that expose that over and over and over again this becomes the most important

and obvious thing to do. And in the few companies that I help now with this context when they do that and when it's the CEO or when it's the co-founder who are living in that world and living in

this context they've consistently systematically every single one has been successful. every single one of them.

successful. every single one of them.

I've also met a lot of people who ask all these questions and you know they like hey you know we'd love to really and I meet them and they're kind of dbags and they're like you know way too quantish and like way too like kind of

like passive aggressive and a little aggro and uh it reminds me of um something that's actually again a lot more important um than the short-term

ability for people to uh focus on short-term results um which is in this battle between culture and capability.

Culture wins every time and what you value is really what you achieve. And so

when you see these companies again today that had these massive apexes of like rocket ship growth and now you know some are public and now we're going through

just unbelievable wreting gut-wrenching change, negative spiraling churn downwards. What you realize is that's

downwards. What you realize is that's not a growth problem.

Although it seems numerically a growth problem, what that is is a product value and culture problem. And when you're focused on

problem. And when you're focused on again KK KK KKK, well, not KKK, but you get you get a point. Uh, another reason why K sucks,

a point. Uh, another reason why K sucks, right? I mean, use it three times,

right? I mean, use it three times, you're a racist. Like Jesus.

Uh but the point is that's the type of stuff that always comes back and it gets you. So it's a short-term optimization.

you. So it's a short-term optimization.

It never works. You have to work backwards from what is the thing that people are here to do? What is the aha moment that they want? Why can I not give that to them as fast as possible?

Measuring that in days is unrealistic.

Measuring it in hours is unrealistic.

measuring it in minutes is necessary but not sufficient. But

like how do you get that to seconds? How

do you get that to hundreds of milliseconds? That's how you win. And if

milliseconds? That's how you win. And if

you can't even understand what the thing does, optimizing all of this stuff over time, I think it just it just creates these um really bad crappy companies that all they do is just spam and

destroy the internet for everybody else.

So to this end, this is really what I wanted to leave you with, which is you probably expected a bunch of formulas and stuff. Tough.

and stuff. Tough.

Um, you have to really understand this and go back to that first slide.

detached, egoless, focused on what's important, not living the hype, not trying to follow some lifestyle, but doing what you think is important, focusing on core value, ruthlessly

prioritizing and getting people who believe in these things. These are the values that we originally wrote in terms of how we recruit. Again, may seem like a crazy

recruit. Again, may seem like a crazy thing, but for all the CEOs here, all of you people should be writing this down.

This is how you should recruit. It

worked for us. I give this to every single company I invest in. It works for most of them. And these are things that in my mind are so obvious, blindingly,

glaringly obvious. And people make

glaringly obvious. And people make mistakes around these things all the time. A very high IQ,

time. A very high IQ, self-explanatory. A strong sense of

self-explanatory. A strong sense of purpose are people that will not buckle under short-term pressure. A relentless focus on success

pressure. A relentless focus on success just so competitive that you will do whatever it takes to win.

Aggressive and competitive people who always respect the person but constantly challenge the idea. A high quality bar that borders on

idea. A high quality bar that borders on perfectionism. Just nothing is ever

perfectionism. Just nothing is ever good. You win. Something improves by 10

good. You win. Something improves by 10 basis points. Now it needs to improve by

basis points. Now it needs to improve by 20 basis points. Now it needs to improve by a percent. That kind of living in that world is just a really great dynamic.

people who are comfortable taking something that works and saying it doesn't work here and let's just reset and start again. It just takes a lot of courage. When that guy came to me in

courage. When that guy came to me in Japan said hey uh I think we need to introduce a blood type or our team in Korea came with a bunch of different ideas or our team in India came up with this really clever way of engaging with

Facebook over a over a phone. You have to be willing to take

phone. You have to be willing to take yourself out of your own biases and find people who are willing to come up with things that again are unconventional.

Another reason why you can't live in the bubble that is the valley. There are too many problems and too many products that are focused on solving the needs of the

1% of the 1% that live here. And the reality is there are 7

here. And the reality is there are 7 billion people in the world. Most have

never even used a PC. Most are coming straight into a world of phones. They're

living in entirely different contexts.

They have completely different socioeconomic paradigms. And you have to be able to be sensitive enough to empathize with where they're coming from. High integrity, I think, speaks

from. High integrity, I think, speaks for itself. It's really easy to kind of,

for itself. It's really easy to kind of, you know, focus on short-term results.

And um I just don't think there's enough of the long-term thinking. Being able to take some arrows along the way in the short term because you're trying to build something for the long term. and

having a culture and set of values where that's rewarded. Perfect example of this

that's rewarded. Perfect example of this is LinkedIn. Reed Hoffman's an extremely

is LinkedIn. Reed Hoffman's an extremely good friend of mine. That is an unbelievable company. Built over 10

unbelievable company. Built over 10 years, 11 years of just working, working, working. Friendster comes out of

working. Friendster comes out of nowhere. Reed didn't panic. MySpace

nowhere. Reed didn't panic. MySpace

comes out of nowhere. Reed didn't panic.

Facebook came out of nowhere. He didn't

panic.

just built a great product, just kept working and working, did not take the short easy way up. And you have to respect that because when those guys win, they win. And they win in scale and

they win for a long time. Surround yourself with good

time. Surround yourself with good people. Seems obvious, but I see a lot

people. Seems obvious, but I see a lot of people who are just like not comfortable uh recruiting people that are better than them. Uh the best thing that I did was recruit four people to my team. My original growth team was James

team. My original growth team was James Wang who was an engineering lead on Facebook platform, Naomi Glite, who's the most tenured employee at Facebook and one of our best product managers.

Alex Schultz who is this unbelievable sort of um crazy growth guy and uh Javier Olivon uh who ran international for me and Blake Ross who is a product manager also founded Firefox. All of

these guys are dramatically better than I was. All I did was enable a framework

I was. All I did was enable a framework and create discipline and they all thrived. And the great thing when I left

thrived. And the great thing when I left was they didn't miss a beat. And that's

really really a good sign. And then the last thing is cares about building real value over perception. I like oolong green tea as

perception. I like oolong green tea as much as the next guy. It doesn't make anything happen. I

guy. It doesn't make anything happen. I

like skinny jeans too. More on girls and guys, but whatever. Uh it doesn't mean anything.

And uh right now we're living in a world where you can get distracted by things that don't matter and the superficiality of of how you think things should be done versus the things that need to get

done. And that takes a lot of courage.

done. And that takes a lot of courage.

So uh I think my time is up. Thank

up. Thank you. And uh I'm happy to take questions.

you. And uh I'm happy to take questions.

So, we have a few minutes for questions, and we're trying our new approach here of, uh, tweeting questions. So, uh, one of the first ones we have is, what was it about Instagram that made it worth $1

billion to Facebook?

Um, I'll give you my opinion. So, again,

as a person that's not involved, but was there. So, again, when you talk about

there. So, again, when you talk about core product value at Facebook, one of the key things that it got right or it understood was the connectivity around you being able to associate your friends

in social situations. And the simplest manifestation of that was in photos. And

so when we launched our photo feature, it literally was just explosive growth.

And so here it is where in many ways it is the atomic unit of how Facebook gets organized. As much as people are an

organized. As much as people are an atomic unit, it's almost even more important in the sense that it's even more elemental. And so all that is great

more elemental. And so all that is great and we're, you know, Facebook is generating billions and billions of photos a And all of a sudden along comes this company who does the equivalent

thing in a slightly different paradigm, a looser privacy model, but all on mobile and in a context where people enjoy consuming the content as much as they enjoy consuming the photos on Facebook. And so from my perspective,

Facebook. And so from my perspective, it's both defensive and offensive. And

from the defensive perspective, it locks in that core tenant of behavior and product value that is essential and the elemental building block on which everything else around Facebook is built

on top of. And offensively it gets you into a place where now you have this flanker strategy where you have a your your main sort of product you know getting more and more usage and getting

more and more entrenched and you know creating this fertile ground all over the world on phones and you have this unbelievable product specific application that does the same thing and now you both can go and sort of thrive

but uh it was a combination in my opinion of the offensive capability of what it gave Facebook as a tool in its arsenal and defensively protect detecting this core element that if all

of a sudden that behavior seated someplace else and photo activity started to be generated and stayed in another environment I think it's very problematic for Facebook or would have been but I don't

think it is all right actually anyone else want to uh tweet a question everyone's busy quoting you chimoth so lots of good quotes today I don't use a Twitter but

I'll I'll make sure we have time for one more someone wants to waiting for an update Well, it it actually that's exactly right.

So, it started with invalidating lore.

So, we had all of these anecdotes about how people thought the site worked. And

part of me is just this cynical part of me which is just like I just like proving people wrong especially when I don't think they know what they're talking about. And so for the first six

talking about. And so for the first six months it was like we're just going to instrument something and just prove people wrong because the best thing is what they do is they shut up and then then they actually the next time they speak they try to know what they're talking about which generally culturally

is just a very good thing. So in that process, we're like, "Oh my gosh, there's these weird things that are happening and you know, you rinse and repeat through all these cohorts and you're like, why does these why did

these people get into a certain space and are now fully engaged and ramped up and have these vibrant networks and these people didn't?" And we just tried enough things where we were able to back

into that axiom being the sort of, you know, the definitive sort of thing that defined how things work for us. But for

you, it's going to be different. But it

started I mean if I had to give you a framework it would probably be you got to start with a broad cross-section of engaged users and when you work backwards from each of those and you are

smart enough and clever enough to really figure out the different pathways in which they got to that place. Um you can probably tease out what those simple things are and then hopefully and I

think most products are structured this way. you can then sort of path people

way. you can then sort of path people more and more of those people into those same click flows that allow them to get to that state. But again, it starts with like looking at an engaged user and not

just thinking about how many emails can I send and how do I, you know, trick everyone to like click on a select all, not unselect a select all.

And no offense, like we did that too, but I mean we did that after we figured that [ __ ] out, you know.

Okay, we'll take one last question.

Well, look, I'm the best thing that happened is like I'm not American. I'm

Canadian, but even I'm not even really Canadian. Well, I am Canadian, but I was

Canadian. Well, I am Canadian, but I was born in Sri Lanka. So I I like, you know, I I love America and everything that's given to me, but I'm pretty cynical about like the imperialistic nonsense of a lot of Americans and how

Americans treat, you know, their place in the world to be quite honest with you. And so I was so my mental sort of

you. And so I was so my mental sort of like worldview I think like was one where that combined with the feedback that I got from all these big companies like well you know I have this really

great you know MBA JD guy that you know and it's just like you're just like well how's this whitey going to [ __ ] figure out Korea like no offense but like a Korean's going to figure out Korea before you know what I'm saying

like this guy's hey guys we're coming here to take over and he's like really that's crazy that's just absolutely crazy. So I was just like, let's just

crazy. So I was just like, let's just hire some really smart, awesome young Korean lady and she's kicking ass and then it's like, let's do the same thing in Japan. Let's do the same thing in

in Japan. Let's do the same thing in Brazil. Let's do the same thing. It's

Brazil. Let's do the same thing. It's

not complicated. Like that's not, you know, that's not so hard. And then just listen to them and let them try. You

know, we had a culture fortunately of experimenting and trying a ton of stuff and we celebrated failure more than we really celebrated success. You know, we would s we would we would celebrate

these massive landmark milestones, 100 million, 250 million, 500 million and even a billion. But a billion was like this like kind of like hoham thing. You

know the growth team had a dinner here at Madiraa. That's you know we all kind

at Madiraa. That's you know we all kind of got together the original team and kind of had a quiet celebration. So we

were more interested in just trying stuff and learning, right? and then had and then the then it was just a matter of having different people willing to try different stuff in their own markets

and then us being able to give them a framework where we said look 99% of the thing can't change but you have this 1% flexibility and if you need more justify it and it was a good interplay but it

was it was kind of like just part of my worldview of just like you know America's great but it's like there's like a lot of other great people and a lot of great countries too Well, I mean I think that that but there

those frameworks. So the great thing is

those frameworks. So the great thing is we had to build all of our stuff ourselves, right? You don't have to do

ourselves, right? You don't have to do that anymore, you know, like you know for you guys like even something as simple as like you know our ability to like AB test was just a convoluted mess.

for you it's like so straightforward you know and you can't even do it yourself just go use optimizer you know or you know like now it's like there's like 19,000 gajillion like Hadoop companies and hive companies out there's none when

we were doing this stuff so we had to just like we were rolling our own stuff constantly so like you know we just had like a lot of delays that you don't have to suffer from so that abstraction allows you to free up resources that you can allocate in different places it but

it just again it comes back to the discipline of like is the senior manager of the company fixated on a goal and then giving flexibility to someone who has the political capital and the

patience and the resolve to get there and then the ability to question and understand really what's happening in a product and the other thing is you know this is like a lot of this credit goes to Zuck because he managed the board and

all of the people around so that it's like we're doing this you know what I'm saying and sometimes it's like if you and we had a very functional useful board you know and a lot of times boards

can maybe distract CEOs as well it's like well focus on this and focus on And then they come down, they shout from the mountain tops, say, "Hey, we're going to do this." And then when it gets filtered

do this." And then when it gets filtered down to an individual person, what they hear is KK K you know, and I think and I think that's where that's where you you you you kind

of like lose your stride.

All right. Thank you guys. Thank you,

Chimoth. Please give him a round of applause.

[Applause]