David Rosenthal: belief

Transcript context

…Also, bummer if you are an employee selling six months after that IPO. Hopefully, as many people held as they could to get through it. Yes, hopefully. I think most people who were at Facebook at this time really did believe in the future of the company. At the same time, you have life circumstances. You might need to buy a house, you might need to do things for your family, et cetera. It’s a tough spot. Fall rolls around, they’ve launched sponsored pages you may like. Boz gets married, they’re still grinding on the big project, which is called Project Whale Shark. That is getting real honest-to-God native ads in the newsfeed, which frankly they should have done years ago on desktop. Now, the gun is to their head. There is nothing in the mobile app except newsfeed. We got to put ads in newsfeed. Finally, at the end of the year they launch it. Boz is like, whew, okay, mission accomplished. I can now leave on my sabbatical, we can go on our honeymoon. But there’s just one problem. Shipping this thing is only 20% of the battle. Now you have to go sell it to advertisers, which this is a whole new ad paradigm. You got to like educate brands on why this is going to work for them, especially when your overall brand as a company and effectiveness of your advertising is in the dumps right now. And it’s an iterative process where you’re going to hear a bunch of feedback from brands and you’re going to say, ooh, we got to modify the ad products, which still continues to this day. They roll out and modify ad products. This is not all right, we now have ads in the newsfeed. We’re good.…

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