Don't Be Afraid To Break Things 38:25

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In 2011, Mark Zuckerberg opened his company's annual F8 keynote with a boyish billionaire flex by blasting DJ Khaled and pulling a prank on the audience. Hey, welcome to F8, okay? We're going to change the universe!

I say that every year. Dressed in a hoodie and jeans with a very specific Caesar-looking haircut, this is Andy Samberg. He was the go-to Zuck impersonator on SNL. The bottom line is you get closer to your authentic identity when you share everything. Andy! Andy!

"The hell are you doing?" Just a reminder, this was the same year Aaron Sorkin's The Social Network came out. Zuckerberg, he wasn't quite a fan. But here, with Sandberg, he seemed more than comfortable being a parody. "The deal was I was going to feed you information through the earpiece and you were going to repeat me." And anyway, even if the world thought of him as the robotic, ruthless Jesse Eisenberg, the real Zuckerberg had plenty to boast about. "So just last week we had a pretty cool milestone at Facebook.

For the first time ever in a single day, we had half a billion people use Facebook. Half a billion people. Facebook's user growth had exploded more than any other social network before it. In a few months, it would have the largest tech IPO in history to date. The company was doing a lot of things right. But as the world would find out years later, it was also doing a lot of things wrong.

This is Land of the Giants. And this keynote, it's Facebook and Zuckerberg right in the middle of a critical moment. An era of supercharged user growth, when the company built the unique internal culture that still powers it today. And a time defined by one big bet: Zuckerberg's attempt to turn Facebook into something much bigger than just a website.

to make it the central platform for all social activity on the internet. It's a bet that ultimately didn't pay off the way Zuckerberg envisioned. But it was still formative for Facebook and its impact on the world. If our first episode brought you into the beginning of Zuckerberg's vision for connecting at scale, this story is about the consequences of pursuing that vision at full speed. Because Zuckerberg's bet, it led to one of the biggest blows to the company's reputation ever, the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

But before we unravel that story, first, growth. That half a billion users Zuckerberg reported in 2011, it's a number that felt impossible back in 2008. You know, on any random Tuesday afternoon, much of our user base all wanted to see what was going on with Bieber. Mike Shreffer joined Facebook as director of engineering in 2008. He says back in those early years, any surge of activity threatened to break the site's infrastructure.

So newly discovered heartthrob Justin Bieber, he calls some late nights for him. We were sort of brute forcing it when I first got here. You know, there's a lot of burned out engineers. Shrekfer had previously led the development of the Firefox browser at Mozilla. In 2013, he became Facebook's chief technology officer, reporting directly to Zuckerberg, a role he kept until March 2022. Now he's the company's first senior fellow, helping with key initiatives and recruiting technical talent.

Shrepfer, known as Shrep to employees, is one of those leaders who quickly became a culture bearer for the company. I used to give an onboarding to every new engineer and I would actually go through all of the signs you see up on our wall and I would usually start with move fast and break things.

Move fast and break things was so popular that it became part of the greater Silicon Valley lexicon, and later a mantra that Facebook's critics would latch on to. The original version of it is move fast and don't be afraid to break things, right? Which sounds like a subtle change, and it got shorter to like fit on a poster. But the problem with move fast and break things is like it makes the break things part feel like an imperative. Like you should go do that. And that is not at all the intent. The

The actual intent is to not be afraid to make the changes you need in order to make progress. The imperative is the move fast part, necessary for those early days of fighting to keep the site up. What that meant was the pace of working at Facebook felt intense.

That's one of the first things Brian Boland noticed when he joined the company from Microsoft in 2009 to help Facebook make money from showing ads in the newsfeed. Boland was used to working in a department at Microsoft that he says push new software changes twice a year. Then he asked what Facebook's schedule was for shipping code. And I think they were like 4 p.m. And I was like, oh, like 4 p.m. which date? And they're like, no, like 4 p.m. every day.

But to Boland, all the work felt in service to a big mission. You know, connecting people and the benefits of connecting people really drove people to think about the things that they could be building and the freedom to build. Our mission is to make the world more open and connected. To do that, we need the world on Facebook.

That's Alex Schultz, giving a lecture in 2015 for Kosla Ventures, a venture capital firm. He's now the chief marketing officer of Meta. Back then, Schultz was a founding member of what is still regarded by many employees as Meta's most powerful team, the embodiment of move fast, break things, the growth team. Now, we created the growth team at the end of 2007, beginning of 2008.

Because Facebook stopped growing. The story goes, Facebook saw a huge bump in users when it expanded past college campuses. But then its growth started to slow. So it formed a team dedicated entirely to studying and pushing user growth. Which, at least initially, meant obsessively chasing one metric. Mark had a drumbeat.

MAP, MAP, MAP, MAP, and now DAP, DAP, DAP, DAP. Monthly active people, daily active people. Not number of Facebook accounts, not new signups. Zuckerberg knew those metrics wouldn't secure Facebook's dominance quite like monthly and daily active users. Of course, growth is the goal of any Silicon Valley company. But Facebook did growth like no one else.

else, and its approach would become the blueprint for other startups to follow. That team has to have been one of the most analytical teams ever on the face of the planet. Brian Boland again. They were constantly testing things, extremely metrics oriented.

I love the show House. Do you guys like the show House? Maybe because there's a British person in it. But I love the show House. He's got this whole thing, test by treating. In the TV show House, apparently a favorite for Alex Schultz, Hugh Laurie played a doctor who saw an alarming number of hyper rare diseases and just threw treatments at them to see what worked. And like doctors trying to discover a cure, the growth team tested thousands of different tweaks on subsets of Facebook users to really figure out what moved the needle on monthly active users.

One famous growth hack: Facebook's "People You May Know" feature. Remember that sometimes eerily accurate list of suggested friends projected onto your homepage? As Schultz told it, the growth team didn't actually realize how powerful that idea was until the feature accidentally broke and they saw numbers slow down. "People You May Know" did a critical thing. It helped get every new user connected to a network of friends almost immediately. And that network made people stay.

If you can run more experiments than the next guy, if you can be hungry for growth, if you fight and die for every extra user and you stay up late at night to get those extra users to run those experiments, to get the data and do it over and over and over again, you will grow faster. A Facebook growth team ethos, as told by Schultz in a 2014 course at Stanford on how to start a startup.

That ethos delivered. At the start of 2009, Facebook had 150 million monthly active users. Start of 2010, 400 million. And following the metrics, doing exhaustive testing, that seeped into Facebook's culture at large. Yeah, from my experience, the metrics focus was just the be-all, end-all, right? And I think, you know, we'll foreshadow some of the things that you see in the future where it turns out that metrics don't tell you exactly what's happening underneath those metrics.

There's a huge important human side that gets lost when you start chasing metrics. This is one of the tensions that would inspire Boland to leave Facebook in 2020.

But that is for a future episode. It's worth noting that from early Facebook's view, growth had to be the be-all end-all. Because the most valuable thing Facebook offered its users was connections to their friends. It's the classic network effect. Facebook's success would ultimately come from its scale and never losing the hunger for that scale. I mean, interesting thing about Facebook is it's a place that always styles itself an underdog. Alex Stamos started as the chief security officer at Facebook in 2015.

Facebook had 1.4 billion monthly users by that point, so the fear that it wouldn't be able to grow was long over. But even then, its early sense of survivalism still ran strong.

And as with everything, this came directly from Zuckerberg. I think one of the things that really drives him is the idea of obsolescence and the idea that Facebook will become irrelevant. He's very aware that you drive up and down 101 and the sides of the freeway are covered by the bones of ancient dinosaurs upon which other companies have built themselves, including Facebook itself.

Stamos is being literal here. Facebook's headquarters in Menlo Park are built on the old campus of Sun Microsystems, a Silicon Valley giant of yore that felt untouchable for 25 years and then failed to innovate for a new era. When Zuckerberg bought the campus, he kept the aging Sun sign out front. He just turned it around and put Facebook's logo on the other side. It was Zuckerberg's message to the entire company that Facebook was always at risk of being disrupted.

because no matter how many users it amassed, Facebook was still just a website. In the end, another social network could come along that offered a better experience. And all those users could just leave. This is key to the next part of our story, the story of Zuckerberg's ill-fated attempt to build Facebook into something much stronger than a website.

His attempt to own the social layer of the internet and build Facebook into a platform. In the technology world, platforms are the holy grail. You think of like Apple, you think of like Microsoft, like they're all like platform companies. That's Ruchi Sanghwi of early News Feed fame. And here's what she means by being a platform company. Let's take Microsoft as an example.

Microsoft dominated the PC industry and still does to this day, thanks to Windows. If you don't use a Mac, chances are your computer is powered by Windows and chock full of other Microsoft software, like Office and Outlook. Microsoft actually got in trouble with the U.S. government in the 90s for how it bundled its Internet Explorer browser with Windows. Platforms are powerful. Zuckerberg once called Bill Gates his hero. He takes a lot of his cues from Microsoft. He also took its money.

In 2007, Microsoft invested in Facebook, giving the young startup $240 million in exchange for a 1.6% stake in the business. It was the same year that Zuckerberg saw his own Windows opportunity, his way towards becoming a platform.

The idea was anything people do online could have a social component, and all that could be powered by Facebook. So when we thought about how Facebook, the product, could be a platform, we realized that there could be an entire ecosystem of developers, not just Facebook engineers, who could build applications that users would like to use. That would be the first step. Bring more social experiences into Facebook by investing.

by inviting outside developers to build social applications on the site. Applications that would appear as widgets users saw on their news feeds or profiles, like little quizzes or playful features like a super poke.

The first iteration of Facebook Platform, that's literally what it was called, launched in 2007. You know, at the time, like, it was just exciting and fun, and here's all this awesome stuff that can be built, and we just wanted to see it built quickly. Mike Schrepp for Frame Platform is a way to release pressure from Facebook's burnt-out engineers and scale more quickly. Because now, Facebook wouldn't be under pressure to build every possible experience for users by itself.

There was not really any PowerPoint decks or strategy going on. It was just like, let's build this stuff. It's going to be awesome. And let's like enable other people to do it. This open invite to developers, it was a radical idea at the time. No other site had torn down its own walls like this and offered outside businesses access to its users. And access to its users, that is what underpinned Facebook's vision for Platform.

Back in 2007, when the company first launched Platform at its inaugural F8 conference, Zuckerberg took the occasion to introduce another key concept: the social graph. The social graph. The idea that if you mapped out all of the connections between people and things in the world, it would form this massive interconnected graph that just shows how everyone is connected together. Zuckerberg would bring up the social graph throughout the Platform era. That clip is actually from an F8 in 2010.

And this map or graph was something that Facebook's platform offered developers. If someone used your application, not only would you get info about them, you would also gain access to that person's social graph. The idea was applications could be better if they could know your identity and who your friends are. Like a calendar application listing public holidays, eh, could be nice. But a calendar app that scanned your friends list and pulled their birthdays in automatically? That was more useful. In the years to come, Zuckerberg's vision for Facebook as a platform would expand.

applications on Facebook would plug into the social graph. But also, Facebook would attempt to cast this graph across the entire internet so that even things you did outside Facebook could come into Facebook's view. After the break, for a moment, a flourishing economy is created on Facebook. But the company ultimately makes some key missteps, costing it dearly.

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Mark Pincus was already a Silicon Valley veteran by 2004. Sean Parker had worked for me at my first startup when he was 14 as a summer free intern. Sean Parker, as in the guy played by Justin Timberlake in The Social Network. Well, I founded an internet company that let folks download and share music for free.

Kind of like Napster? Exactly like Napster. Pincus gave him a check for that. And later, Parker became Facebook's first president. And then, I think it was in 2004, he came in my office with Zuck, and I was familiar with the Facebook. Pincus remembers the pitch that Parker and Zuckerberg gave him. They said it took the Facebook a week to get 20% of a new college signed up, and then just one more week to get the other 80%.

It was all the pitch Pincus needed. He was one of the first investors in Facebook, along with Peter Thiel and Reid Hoffman. Fast forward to 2007, when Facebook first launched Platform. Pincus knew it was the place where people would bring their social lives online. The web was moving from this anonymous network made up of

Pages linked together to an intimate cocktail party of people linked together. And the Facebook was the cool cocktail party. What better way to spice up a party than a game or two? Through Platform, Pincus saw a natural opportunity to build social gaming into Facebook. So his company Zynga built its first app for the site in 2007, a poker game you could play with your Facebook friends.

Which, surprisingly, didn't impress Facebook, Pincus told us. I had a lunch or a dinner with Zuck almost every month, and we would just talk about roadmaps and ideas and stuff. And I would regularly bring a whole PowerPoint pitch to give to him and other people at Facebook on, no, no, no, games is this huge opportunity. I don't think you realize how big it could be.

and all of the cool dimensions of social it can offer, and I would just get blank stares back. So it took a long time before they or anybody else really believed in it.

This was probably because much simpler social apps were taking off on Facebook. One of the most popular, for instance, was called Kiss Me. It was basically an upgrade to the Poke. You sent a kiss to friends. This was in the top 100 apps on Facebook in 2007. It was created by three students at Stanford who were in a class built around developing for Facebook.

The fact that Stanford had a Facebook class says a lot about the buzz around platform. It was just this era of free growth. For the first time, it really felt like somebody else was out there providing you a way to gain new customers. Josh Constein is a former Facebook beat reporter for TechCrunch, turned venture capitalist.

He followed the platform era closely. I had a friend who, he took that Facebook class. A friend who woke up one morning with $30,000 in his account from his Facebook app, Constine says. Because with viral growth came monetization opportunities through ads or through virtual goods for users to buy up.

But a lot of the most successful apps were like Kiss Me, Pretty Goofy. Around Silicon Valley, there was not a lot of respect for someone building apps on the Facebook at that time. A lot of my friends and friends

Pretty soon, Pincus would be proven right. We were looking for that breakthrough mass market game, and it seemed like we might have it in farming.

A humble introduction to what would indeed become a breakthrough mass market game, FarmVille. Pincus and his company, Zynga, launched FarmVille on Facebook in 2009. It quickly became the most popular game on the site, with tens of millions of users, a position it would keep for nearly two years. This was the first time that an app or a game on Facebook

moved into a point of cultural relevancy. That for the first time, someone might have been talking about Farmville first and Facebook second. Farmville became so culturally relevant, it's where Lady Gaga decided to release one of her singles, even though it had no connection to farming. "Marry the Night" off the album "Born This Way."

I remember maybe three or four months after we launched it, being with Zuck and having him give me a nod of approval, which did not ever come easy. And he said, wow, I'm playing it. Everyone I know is playing it. And I think probably 10 or 20 percent of people on Facebook are playing Farmville right now. This was not a serendipitous phenomenon.

FarmVille grew so quickly because it leveraged Facebook's news feed. FarmVille was the first game we built with the feed in mind, that we literally built game mechanics that you would play out through the feed. We built one feature mechanic called the chicken coop. Your chicken would hatch eggs that would post to your feed. Your friends would scratch off the eggs and collect them, and you and they would unlock new features based on that.

This was in step with Zuckerberg's vision for Facebook as a platform: for outside developers to make the newsfeed richer with more kinds of content. And so Zynga and Facebook, for a moment, they became symbiotic organisms. Newsfeed supercharged FarmVille by blasting out updates to users, drawing more in. And then all those viral Zynga games fed right back into Facebook's bottom line. Because people were buying virtual goods in FarmVille, like tractors to work their fields. And Facebook took a cut.

Zynga became such a huge part of Facebook's business that the company cited Zynga in its IPO filing in 2011. Zynga accounted for an astounding 12% of Facebook's revenue that year. This was back before Facebook's ad business really took off.

Farmville's reign embodied what platform could do for users and developers inside Facebook. But Zuckerberg knew that to be a true platform, he would need to extend Facebook's reach outwards to the rest of the internet. I think they saw social as such a revolutionary concept that it was inevitable to come to the rest of the web. And it was just a question of who was going to get there first. Here is where Josh Constine gets to an important part of Zuckerberg's vision to own social activity on the web.

The Facebook login button, which a lot of apps still use to let you quickly sign up with your Facebook account. So let's take an app like Spotify. Without the Facebook platform, if you wanted to join Spotify, first you had to create a Spotify username and password. If you wanted to have it actually look like you or people be able to find you better, you needed to put in your name and upload a photo.

Facebook login offered all that info up immediately, no sweat. And it opened up a connection between your Spotify and your Facebook, two accounts that, in a way, became one. And so this is part of why Spotify grew so quickly right after its American launch, is because it was so well tied in with Facebook. The Facebook login was part of a proliferation of features the company spread across the web. Another example, Facebook introduced a way for external sites to import the Like button,

So you could react to content around the internet and have that activity pumped back into Facebook. So in effect... When you leave Facebook, you could never escape it. It was everywhere. And it really made the app feel entrenched and inevitable. And so rather than just being the next social network in a long list, you felt like this was a core piece of internet utility and infrastructure that you had to be a part of to live the easiest and best life you could on the web. All these connections made the site even more engaging to people.

At the time, Facebook was also in the process of scaling up its ads business. The more Facebook knew about people and their interests, the more valuable it could be to advertisers. By 2010, Zuckerberg's vision for Facebook to become a platform was working. Apps like FarmVille were huge on Facebook, and all kinds of websites were integrating Facebook features like the login button. But behind the scenes, the dynamic between the company and its developers was starting to get a little complicated.

Zuckerberg started paying special attention to developers building rivals to key Facebook features. His own platform was making it possible for users to flee to another social network. For example, after a direct messaging app called MessageMe hit one million users, the company cut off its ability to let people add their Facebook friends. Zynga wasn't a Facebook competitor, but the relationship between the two also got tense. It got to this point where I was like,

Or rather, so big, Facebook wanted a bigger piece of its success. Zynga and Facebook were disagreeing on how to share the profit coming in when users bought virtual goods in Farmville.

Zynga ended up agreeing to give Facebook a 30% cut of all transactions. And Facebook, in turn, agreed to help Zynga make money from ads in future games that would exist outside of Facebook. But there was a problem. Games like Zynga's were spamming users with notifications. Which, to be fair, Facebook originally designed for. Supercharged growth.

As Josh Constantine put it, I would say that free virality as a concept is just unsustainable always. And it lends to this concept of the bizarre love quadrangle that Facebook has to constantly play with. So you can see there's four major stakeholders for Facebook.

There's the company itself and its bottom line. There's the developers that are building functionality that enhance the usage of it and entrench Facebook. There's the advertisers that actually pay Facebook. And then there are the users. And it has to make sure to constantly prioritize the user because all the other parts go away if it doesn't. The system Facebook built had become too unruly. Facebook said, uh,

enough is enough. And they dialed back some of that, that virality. And you saw a bunch of game companies hit the skids really quickly. Facebook's platform changed a lot as the company's priorities shifted, eventually leaving even its biggest developers like Zynga reeling. Here's how Pincus recalls what happened. Facebook consciously decided to change strategies and they changed their algorithm so that the apps you saw on your homepage were

moved from being the most engaged apps, the ones you use the most, to the most recent ones. And since we are the oldest apps you had with FarmVille and Poker, we were no longer on the homepage of anybody and had a painful time as a public company and missed our guidance. We asked Pincus if he misses the glory days of the Facebook platform when Zynga was at its most ascendant. I'm nostalgic for a time when distribution

was available. It didn't matter whether you were a kid in a dorm room or a big company, everyone had the same opportunity. I'm not nostalgic for being a developer buried inside of someone else's platform where you're kind of

a fly on this elephant's ass. And if they decide that they want to run to the left, you're going left today. And you might not have known when you woke up, you were going left, but that's definitely where you're going. Facebook became too unstable and too unpredictable of an elephant. By 2013, Facebook was losing its shine as a platform for developers to build social apps on.

And as that shine was dulling, another Silicon Valley company was winning developers over to the next big platform. An iPod, a phone. Are you getting it? And we are calling it iPhone. A moment you just might be familiar with. This is Steve Jobs announcing the iPhone in 2007. The same year Zuckerberg announced platform and bet on the social graph as the future of the web.

It may not seem obvious, but Steve Jobs' bet on mobile would quickly come into direct conflict with Facebook's. What it wanted to be was where you discovered everything you do on the web. And because it didn't own the mobile device, it lost that war. By the end of 2011, users weren't having their cocktail parties on their computers anymore.

And Facebook was late to where everyone was going. Facebook's early mobile approaches were pretty terrible. The mobile website hardly worked. The first version of the Facebook app, you didn't land on a news feed. You landed on a grid of nine different icons of all the different features that you could use on Facebook. Ultimately, the rise of Apple's App Store would provide the biggest blow to Facebook's original platform dream. Facebook thought it was going to be the developer platform for the web.

Apple decided it would be the developer platform for the phone. And there was no denying that smartphones, they were going to be big. Facebook found itself in Zynga's shoes. If it wanted access to iPhone users, it would have to be a developer on Apple's platform. That meant giving Apple a 30% cut of transactions and abiding by the App Store's rules. And Facebook developers like Zynga, already burned by changes to the platform, began moving their efforts to mobile too.

Smartphones were the future of how people would use the internet, and Facebook needed to be where the action was. It went into a mad dash to build native apps for the iPhone and Google's Android operating system. That experience truly taught Mark this lesson that if you don't control the computing platform, you are always beholden to somebody else.

It wasn't the only hard lesson Zuckerberg would learn from Platform. Though the next one would take a few years to land. And it all began because Facebook left one door through Platform open for too long. The ability to give away data about your friends. For Facebook to let you give that data on behalf of your friends to a developer, I think that's where they really crossed the line.

When you logged into Spotify with Facebook, when you played Farmville, even when you sent a virtual kiss with Kiss Me, you gave that third party access to a lot of your Facebook information and even information about your friends, your social graph. And that made people uncomfortable. Now...

We know that some people are scared of pressing this blue button. It's some of the most common feedback that we get on our platform. This is Zuckerberg at Facebook's F8 conference in 2014. We've also heard that sometimes you can be surprised when one of your friends shares some of your data with an app. The thing is, we don't ever want anyone to be surprised about how they're sharing on Facebook. So we're going to change how this works.

It was here in 2014 when Zuckerberg announced that Facebook would limit the ability for developers to access someone's social graph. And according to Josh Constine, people didn't seem to really care. I was there at the briefing when they sort of announced that and nobody else covered it. It was such a minor idea that like, oh, Facebook's going to start to like crack down on the data that you can give away about your friends. Zuckerberg may have made the right move to restrict the data Facebook shared with developers, but he didn't do it soon enough to catch this.

That same year, a Cambridge University researcher named Alexander Cogan created a quiz on Facebook as an app called "This is Your Digital Life." Users who plugged into it answered a series of questions about themselves to get sorted into a personality type. 270,000 people took the quiz. And as designed, all those users also handed over their Facebook friends' data — anything from their religious views to employment histories. Years later, this seemingly innocent quiz turned into a big story.

In 2018, news broke that the Trump campaign had employed a data firm by the name of Cambridge Analytica to help it target messaging to voters in the 2016 U.S. election. And that firm had used the data of millions of Americans, all obtained through Facebook. The implication was: Facebook had enabled the theft of personal information that the Trump campaign was able to then manipulate to affect the outcome of the election.

Here's the thing about Cambridge Analytica. Experts agree that it did not swing the election, but it did exploit the access Facebook platform afforded third-party developers. Facebook eventually confirmed that the data of up to 87 million users was misused by Cambridge Analytica. This story hit Facebook hard.

It came a year after revelations that Russia weaponized troll farms on Facebook to post political content ahead of the U.S. 2016 presidential election — content seen by more than 126 million Americans. Cambridge Analytica felt like the final straw in what was seen as Facebook's negligence to protect its users from political exploitation. So why wasn't anybody fired at Facebook over the situation with Cambridge Analytica?

You should start with easy questions. No, no, I think I'll start there. In 2018, Sheryl Sandberg, then COO of Facebook, and Mike Shrupfer, then CTO, appeared on the Code Conference stage with Kara Swisher and Peter Kafka. Shrupfer took on answering for how Cambridge Analytica happened. For the platform, what we spent a lot of time on was, look, people are smart. They're ultimately using a third-party app. So whatever Facebook data they take, they're also putting new data into that app. So they have to trust that app and understand what it is.

In our last episode, we talked about how Zuckerberg originally thought of privacy as a user control problem to solve. Here, Shreffer is laying out that worldview again. I remember spending iteration after iteration on how exactly do we design this dialogue to make it super clear exactly what data you're getting from Facebook and bringing to this third party app because if the customer knows what's happening, they can make informed decisions.

But the uproar in response to Cambridge Analytica, it was proof enough that users did not understand what they were signing away when they took quizzes and played games on Facebook years ago, even with those dialogues.

It's almost as if it shouldn't be up to the users, but to Facebook to think about how the structural design of its platform might impact user privacy. Zuckerberg appeared on CNN to apologize in the wake of the scandal. So this was a major breach of trust. And I'm really sorry that this happened. You know, we have a basic responsibility to protect people's data. And if we can't do that, then we don't deserve to have the opportunity to serve people.

Zuckerberg had apologized for privacy issues before, but this was different. This breach changed the company. I mean, it's the biggest cultural shift I've ever seen in the 10 years I've been there, which is just, you know, top to bottom, you know, not just what are all the great things that can happen, but what are all the ways people can abuse this? How do we make product changes? How do we make policy changes? In other words, Facebook would apparently no longer run on optimism.

After Cambridge Analytica, Facebook became increasingly closed off to outside developers. These days, it doesn't even host its F8 developer conference anymore. And while the political implications of Cambridge Analytica were overblown, the scandal served as a referendum on Zuckerberg's early vision for the internet and Facebook's role in it. It was a painful lesson that shattered the company's reputation. It still hasn't recovered.

But now, Zuckerberg sees an opportunity to be a platform again with the metaverse, this time moving beyond mobile apps to virtual worlds and AR glasses. He almost missed the shift to mobile in the early 2000s, and now he's banking on not missing the next one. But is this the right bet? And can he pull it off without repeating the same mistakes of the past?

That's for later in our series. First, Zuckerberg did make one just-in-time move as he angled his company toward mobile. He bought a little photo app called Instagram. Now, Instagram is the crown jewel of Meta's social media business, providing it the longevity and cultural relevance it needs to fund its future. But can Instagram hold on to its cachet for the next decade, when the stakes for Meta are at their highest?

Special thanks to Will Larson and Chris Mocko, who took time to chat with us about their experiences as developers for Platform. Land of the Giants, the Facebook meta disruption is a production of Recode, The Verge, and the Vox Media Podcast Network. Megan Cunane is our senior producer. Production support for this episode comes from Cynthia Betavisa.

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