Ben Gilbert: commitment

Transcript context

…It’s just wild. There’s no other way to put it. In the over 20 years since its founding, Meta truly has connected humanity through its apps—Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger, and now Threads. Today we’re going to study how they did it. There’s been a lot of inks spilled writing about Facebook over the years, and for its first 10 years, most of that writing focused on the many benefits to society, with breathless exuberance over milestone after milestone. For the past 10 years, it’s seemed like Meta could do nothing right. Reporting focused on its many stumbles, the massive mistakes, the incredible controversies surrounding the company. While we will of course discuss these events as part of our story and analysis, our goal today on this podcast episode is really to understand how it is that Meta became the dominant fabric that connects the human race, and why they’ve been so successful at continuing to win over and over again. No matter what you think of the company, it is undeniably one of the most important institutions in the world, and their global scale is no accident. It is the result of careful actions from some of the most motivated and brilliant people in the world who believe in one mission—connecting as many people as possible. I hadn’t thought about this till now, but almost taught logically this is the most important episode we’ll ever do, to try and understand this. It’s the biggest company that has ever existed. It’s the biggest thing that’s ever existed.…

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