Mark Zuckerberg: evaluation

Transcript context

…We're starting to enter, looking at the clock, like 'conclusion lightning round' territory. I've had one lurking in the back of my head. It makes sense to me that you would rebrand the company, something that is not Facebook, given how broad the family of apps was that you've got. Let's imagine you were going to rebrand it today. You've got AI going on, you've got AR going on, you've got VR going on. Would you pick the name Meta if you were going to rename the company today? I like Meta. It's a good name, you know, finding good short names...this actually was a thing that we talked about for a while because it was pretty clear that Facebook is continuing to grow in importance in the world, which I think a lot of people don't appreciate and it's kind of mind-boggling at the scale that it's at. But the others, we went through a period where we had Facebook and a handful of small apps and now we have four apps that have a billion people or more using them. You know, hopefully in the next few years, five with Threads, if that continues scaling. And this was a conversation that we had a bunch - where it's like does it make sense for the name of the company to be one of the apps as the other apps, as it's really becoming a family of apps. And it was important to me this was also coinciding with a lot of the challenges that we were having, the political brand challenges, different things and a lot of people were proposing that from the perspective of running away from the Facebook brand. Right, they were like oh well, like does the Facebook brand have issues? Do we need a new brand? And I was like we don't run away from that, right, it's like it might make sense one day to not have Facebook be the lead brand for the company, because we do so many different things. But I'm only going to do this when we come up with a brand that is going to be evocative of the future that we're trying to build, because we run towards something, we don't run away from things. And when we got to Meta, then I was like all right, we're here. And it was around the time when we were doubling down on the investment and where there was all the controversy and it's like look, if we're doing this, we're going to lean into this and we're going to do it. So let's do it. And if I were to make the case to you, I feel the core competency of Meta is you are able to discover products in the world. You have great ideas, you work on them. You discover interesting products and you, Mark, are not someone who wants to define yourself by anything. You want to have your hands on a bunch of great controls and maximize your degrees of freedom, see where the world's going and then have the best freaking spaceship possible to go maneuver your way over there. It seems like I would pick a brand that almost doesn't pigeonhole me into a specific future. I might be looking for something that's more like look, I want to maximize my maneuverability.…

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