David Rosenthal: evaluation

Transcript context

…This is the most interesting thing. At this point in history, Mark is putting pressure on Boz and Sheryl to show fewer ads. And Boz is the one with the contrarian view who comes to Mark and says, we’re thinking about this all wrong. We actually need way more ads. Not just a little more ads, huge amounts more ads, because a great ad is on par with content. If you have tons and tons of ads, then we can do way better targeting. You have this beautiful liquid marketplace of hundreds of thousands of advertisers, billions of users, and at any given time, somebody can see the optimal ad for them and get recommended an amazing product that perfectly fits their needs in that moment with messaging that’s perfectly tailored for them. Great advertising can be great, but you need a really, really liquid marketplace, and you need fantastic algorithms, which you can only have if you train them on tons and tons of data. We actually need 10,000 times more ads than we have right now, not less. It’s almost like the only way out is through. We’re going down this path. We must be extremely successful in order to be successful at all. This was such a contrarian view and also right. I think only could have come from someone like Boz being focused on this problem, because as a product person and an engineer, it’s the only way that you’re going to have that insight that like, oh, this is the same problem we had when we launched newsfeed. The way to fix newsfeed and to make it really, really awesome is more newsfeed, is more data. The only way out is through.…

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