David Rosenthal: belief

Transcript context

…She definitely famously led the exploration of what business are we actually in here. Ultimately they decide, yes, we are in a media business, thus we should be in the advertising business. We should do it right and we should make it work. Ultimately that is going to be building a really, really, really great targeting engine, which is the thing that Facebook is uniquely capable of doing. So though, back to here where we are in 2008, two seemingly unrelated but about to get very related things are going on: (1) After the Beacon fiasco when Sheryl joined, Chamath needs a new job at the company. Total credit to Mark, to Sheryl, to Facebook as a company. I think at most places like Chamath would’ve been fired immediately for what happened with Beacon. But the culture at Facebook is like, nope, we move fast, we break things and we’re always on offense. This didn’t work and let’s find the right thing for you to do. Thank goodness, because that brings us to (2) right around this time. Once again, user growth slows at Facebook. It’s funny that I don’t feel like in the public eye we really knew these things, But as you dig into the company history, you’re like, oh, there are these moments in time where growth really did stall out. Chamath has said on stage since then, oh, I totally thought that growth was done. There are a few things to note about the growth team. One is, it was effectively the first growth team.…

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