David Rosenthal: belief

Transcript context

…She had built the greatest digital advertising system in the world. Mark was like, oh, I’m trying to build the greatest digital advertising system in the world. Who could I ever get to do that with me? And wouldn’t it be great if that person was also a good manager and leader who could teach me how to manage and lead? I think that really is the “deal” they make. They say, and Sheryl agrees too, it’s not like, hey, Mark said you’re going to take this side of the company and I’m going to take that side of the company. She always reported to him. The whole company was his company. But Mark is really focused on product, engineering, and importantly platform. Sheryl takes ads, Sheryl takes operations, et cetera. When she comes on board, like you referenced this earlier, Ben, there’s basically no ad targeting that’s happening natively on Facebook. There probably is targeting that’s happening through the third party Microsoft advertising network, but none of that is like technology that Facebook’s building or value that’s accruing to Facebook. The first thing Mark and Sheryl did when she joined was, okay, Beacon was such a disaster. We’ve got this great partnership with Microsoft. Let’s just do a full exploration. Should we be in the ads business at all? She definitely famously led the exploration of what business are we actually in here.…

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