Ben Gilbert: belief

Transcript context

…Yeah. You know? I guess they are. All right, so what happened here? Way back in (call it) 2012, Facebook starts getting interested around the same time that they’re starting FAIR for AI, in what is the platform of the future. They start doing some hardware prototyping on their own. They’re not really set up for that yet, but they do want to do the same approach that they did with AI which is focused research, not general research. Pick a particular thing where we have an opinion about something we think is going to be the future, and then invest deeply in it. So a crazy thing happened in February of 2014. They opened up the purse strings and paid $19 billion for WhatsApp. They had so much conviction that the future was AR and VR, that 34 days later they paid another $2 billion for Oculus. I had no recollection that these things were a month apart. No I didn’t. I knew they were both in 2014 but I didn’t realize they were a month apart.…

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