Ben Gilbert: belief

Transcript context

…I think there are two things here. Yes, I think that is true specifically at this moment in time. But this is where again, Mark is just a master strategist, calling it all the way back to Civilization and the 4X strategy game. He’s got multiple bets he’s placing on the chess board. One, as you said, is platform. Platform is rocking and rolling. We think we’re building the next great technology company and the next great business model. Just on platform. Also, yeah, we’re a social media company that involves a lot of page views and engagement. The right way to monetize that is advertising. So yes, we’ve just continued this big Microsoft partnership, but we have the right to sell our own inventory and we should probably start building that muscle too. The other thing that’s happening here is Mark still thought ads were gross at this point in history. The things he cared about were product and engineering and design, and he wanted to outsource everything else or at least have someone else at the company think about it. Having Microsoft take care of the ads was (I think) in his mind a win-win. That way the commodity stuff can happen elsewhere and I can focus on the thing that really matters. The company really did not have the insight yet. Oh, we can do ads different and better than anyone has ever done them before. Well, I’m smiling as you’re saying that because in practice for this moment, yeah. In reality they were trying to build their own native Facebook advertising unit, so to speak. It was just Beacon.…

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