David Rosenthal: belief

Transcript context

…And actually we should say not Dustin, but a lot of the people around the table who were expecting a nice cash payout and now aren’t getting one or are not pleased. What are they going to do? The first thing is I think Mark had always operated the company this way, but now he gets real religion of like we need to get more revenue and we need to focus on becoming truly cash flow positive, so that we are never in a position again where we would even consider doing something like this. In August of 2006, they do the first partnership with Microsoft. It’s funny that the Microsoft-Facebook relationship in some ways a precursor to the Microsoft-OpenAI relationship today and how that gets built. Here’s what it’s. Microsoft says, we are going to take over selling all of the display ad inventory domestically within the US for Facebook, and we will give you a guaranteed CPM that we can sell. Then we are going to use this to help bootstrap our online services division, which as we talked about in our Microsoft series, becomes super, super important. Not only for their efforts launching Bing and making that into ultimately a successful business, but even more importantly for Azure that comes out of it. Microsoft knows they need some scale to bootstrap up and get started with both the ad business but also just like the online services division, period. This is a ton of inventory. You just think about the amount of page views that are happening here. Suddenly, Microsoft’s problem is not how do we find enough inventory to sell, it’s how do we go find enough advertisers to actually fill all these slots on Facebook?…

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