Ben Gilbert: recommendation

Transcript context

…And that is like Nvidia levels of drawdown, back in the crazy Nvidia journey that we talked about. It’s totally insane. The interesting thing is at this time the real threat wasn’t actually ATT. The biggest of those three threats was TikTok stealing users. The whole ATT thing is about how much money can we make off of an ad because it is so well-targeted. That’s an optimization. That is useless if you do not have users to advertise to in the first place. So the actual real existential threat is TikTok. Ben Thompson makes this really great point, and I know I’ve quoted Ben over and over this episode, but I think he’s just been so astute on Facebook at many points throughout history. “This decision to make these product changes to respond to the TikTok threat in the face of ATT to do these at the same time is a founder-led decision. If you had a professional CEO, the correct thing to do to preserve your job and shareholder value is to wait 6–12 months before you start reacting to TikTok to let the whole ATT thing blow over.” Mark’s like, I can’t get fired. I think the right thing to do is react to TikTok now because every day this problem compounds and gets absolutely worse. I don’t care that there’s this horrible narrative going on right now with ATT that is going to cause us apparently to lose $10 billion of revenue we otherwise would’ve gotten this year. We must cannibalize revenue in addition to that to make these product changes. What it ends up with is a 72% drawdown, and what it also ends up with is the chance for it to 5X from there, which is what has happened. The company saved itself by acting correctly in this and they had to go through this wild tumultuous two-year journey in the process. It’s just another episode of Mark making these sets of decisions because he’s Mark, because he controls the company, and because he has the stomach to withstand it.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.