Thanks @patrick_oshag this was a lot of fun!

I was devastated to learn this week that Owen van Natta passed away. He was my mentor and closest friend for the decade that we worked together at Amazon and Facebook. We traveled all over the world together, played tennis and basketball, and bbq'd with our families on weekends. He was my boss, and he was also like my big brother. When I dropped out of business school to join Amazon in 1999, Owen took me under his wing. He had attended community college before going to University of Santa Cruz, which he self-deprecatingly acknowledged with a reference to the school’s mascot: “Go, banana slugs...” He assured me I would learn more at Amazon than in a classroom, and he then proceeded to give me a master class in negotiation strategy. In 2000, we cut a deal with AOL that included an infusion of cash, without which Amazon might have gone bankrupt. I was Owen's sidekick, the good cop to his bad cop. He was not afraid to throw a contract across the table to get a point across, which he always did. I can't remember ever losing a deal that we worked on together. While we were at Amazon, we daydreamed about starting a company together someday in Palo Alto, where he had worked in high school as a salesman at Neiman Marcus and once got arrested for drunkenly stealing a bust from the British Bankers Club in Menlo Park (his stories were legendary, as was his laughter). Then in 2006, he told me he was leaving Amazon to join a 30-person startup in Palo Alto run by a 21 year-old. A year later, he was promoted from VP of Biz Dev to COO of Facebook, and I jumped at the opportunity to backfill his role in business development, which kicked off two crazy years during which we were practically inseparable. After working side by side all day, we would go on long runs or play tennis in the evening, followed by a beer at the Old Pro or Antonio's Nut House. Shortly after I joined Facebook, Owen and I negotiated a deal with Microsoft that changed the company's revenue trajectory, and a year later we negotiated a follow-on deal that valued Facebook at fifteen billion dollars. After we signed it, he told me "you're better at this than me, the student has surpassed the teacher." It was one of the proudest moments of my career. When he left Facebook to become CEO of MySpace and then COO of Zynga, we drifted apart. But on the eve of Facebook's IPO a few years later, he called me to say "you've done an incredible job since I left, and I want to thank you for the value you've created for my family." We still saw each other occasionally, and it was always fun and ended late, but we saw each other less and less over the years, until we reconnected a year ago. He invited me to join him at a Warriors game, one of his great joys and a special reunion for us because I had helped him negotiate his floor seats back in the day when he could barely afford them. After that, we started talking more regularly. When I last spoke with him a few months ago, there was more peace in his voice than I had heard in a long time. Few people have touched my life as deeply as Owen. I miss you bro, and I love you.

I'm working on a book that captures my stories from Amazon and Facebook. This section covers Facebook's journey towards building a successful advertising business: In any event, it wouldn’t matter how well our product was performing on mobile unless we could figure out how to make money from it. Mark had always understood the importance of building a great business in order to attract the best people and continue investing in new technologies (always in the service of the mission to make the world more open and connected). It wasn’t enough to build a product that people loved, we had to find a way to monetize it. Similar to Jeff Bezos’ decision to put Andy Jassy in charge of AWS, Mark surprised all of us when he decided to promote someone with no experience in advertising to lead our advertising products: Andrew Bosworth (Boz). Boz was one of Facebook’s earliest engineers who had originally met Mark when they were students together at Harvard. Prior to running ads, Boz had worked on News Feed and Groups and had no experience building products for businesses. Mark intentionally turned to him for a fresh, unencumbered perspective. After years of chasing our North Star under the leadership of experienced ad product managers from Google and Yahoo, we still hadn’t developed an ad product that improved the user experience rather than diminishing it. Mark felt it was time to give a shot to someone who was an outsider to the ads industry and a trusted insider at Facebook. Ironically, Mark originally wanted Boz to report to Sheryl, in violation of our otherwise functional organizational structure, but Sheryl insisted he report to Chris Cox. Sheryl smartly wanted to ensure Cox – and by extension, Mark – were just as invested in developing our ads products as they were our consumer products. Boz had learned from his experience building News Feed that content relevance directly correlated with inventory scale; our algorithms were better able to identify engaging content from thousands of possible stories rather than dozens or hundreds. In the context of ads, this principle suggested we would need to massively ramp up inventory. Boz realized this would only be possible if advertisers were set free from Mark’s insistence on social context, which inherently limited inventory since we could only show ads from businesses with whom a user’s friends had previously engaged. (TikTok later extended this insight by removing the prerequisite for social context even in organic content, letting their algorithm choose from every video in their network rather than only those created by someone’s friends.) Another artificial constraint we had imposed on advertisers was around our rules for targeting. Google’s success had stemmed in part from their novel approach of allowing advertisers to target users based on search terms. We extrapolated that our own targeting approach should be based on what we knew about our users, including demographics and interests as self-identified on Facebook. This worked well for small businesses hunting for new customers, but large advertisers already knew a lot about their customers and prospects, and they wanted to target our users with their own data. As Boz had done with the requirement for social context in ads, he quickly convinced Mark to relax our targeting constraints. By anonymously matching their data to ours via email addresses, Nike (for example) could now target an ad on Facebook to all the sneakerheads in their customer database. By removing constraints on inventory and targeting – while still maintaining the format constraint of News Feed stories – Boz’s team drove a huge surge in user engagement with ads. This created a flywheel effect: as people found the ads more relevant, they clicked on them more often, which attracted more advertisers, which increased inventory further, leading to ever greater relevance and correspondingly more clicks. We started tracking advertiser growth using the same metrics we had for user growth, and the count quickly jumped into the millions. In Sheryl’s early analysis of Facebook’s business model, she framed Google’s addressable opportunity as the part of the market known to advertisers as “bottom of the funnel.” Previously dominated by the Yellow Pages, bottom-of-funnel advertising was great at converting sales but did little to stimulate demand. Sheryl argued that Facebook had the potential to tap into “top of the funnel” advertising, a much bigger part of the market dominated by television and print media (this was part of the reason she got excited about moving from Google to Facebook). If Google had perfected the art of matching consumers with merchants to buy a product they were already looking for (i.e. demand fulfillment), Facebook could help merchants find consumers who might be interested in a product they didn’t know they wanted (i.e. demand generation). For this reason, Sheryl spent a considerable amount of her personal time selling to large brands, and she took M-Team on field trips to visit companies like Procter & Gamble and Walmart, two of the biggest brand advertisers in the world. Sheryl’s intuition had been correct, although it didn’t play out exactly the way we expected. In the mid-2010’s, ecommerce infrastructure platforms like Shopify were unlocking a new capability for small merchants to sell niche products directly to consumers at scale for the first time in history. The only thing these new merchants were missing was an efficient way to find their target customers. Traditional top-of-funnel advertising on television was too expensive and inefficient (the old saw about brand advertising was, “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted, the trouble is I don’t know which half”), and print media was in terminal decline as the internet replaced specialty magazines. Facebook’s new advertising platform, on the other hand, seemed purpose-built for this exact use case, and once these merchants discovered it, they couldn’t get enough. We enabled a whole new wave of internet native merchants to suddenly compete for the first time with the Procter & Gamble’s of the world by providing them with an infinitely efficient and scalable demand generation marketing channel to promote their products. Even as it became clear that Facebook’s value proposition to advertisers was different from that of traditional television ads, our sales team continued to sell to large brand advertisers in the hopes of shifting their TV budgets to Facebook. Companies like Procter & Gamble, Ford and Nike spent huge amounts of money on demand generation, and we wanted to capture some of it (not to mention the prestige their brands offered). But as it turned out, those companies had been built on a market structure which leveraged television advertising as a competitive moat. Facebook wasn’t simply capturing top-of-funnel advertising budgets, we were completely reinventing demand generation for the internet age, and empowering a whole new class of companies in the process. Just as search advertising would prove to be many times bigger than the Yellow Pages, social media advertising would eventually prove to be much bigger than television. This realization took some time to fully internalize. Mark had been pushing for years to offer an ad-free subscription version of Facebook, against Sheryl’s vehement opposition. Sheryl ultimately won this argument by demonstrating how the bottom would fall out when advertisers realized our most valuable users (by virtue of their ability to pay for a subscription) were no longer eligible to see their ads. Nevertheless, Mark continued to pine for an ad-free option until he finally embraced the realization that our ads were actually starting to add meaningful value to the user experience. A short time later, when the Instagram team was ready to start inserting ads into their product, Kevin Systrom wanted to personally approve every piece of creative submitted by advertisers to ensure beautiful, magazine-quality ads. As he presented his proposal to us, I thought back to a comment Kevin had made to me as we strolled around campus shortly after the Instagram acquisition, “My goal is for one of these buildings to be entirely dedicated to Instagram someday, and I know the only way that will happen is by driving a lot of revenue to Facebook.” Kevin prided himself on bringing a craft-driven approach to product development, in contrast to what some people viewed as Facebook’s over reliance on cold hard data. Kevin’s design instincts had served him well in crafting a beautiful user experience, but when he resisted a more data-driven approach to ads, Mark pushed back hard (Sheryl was naturally thrilled with Mark’s newfound religion on ads). After giving Kevin six months to try it his way, Mark forcefully plugged Facebook’s ad system into Instagram. A short time later, many people started visiting Instagram for the ads as much as for the organic content, the ultimate realization of our North Star. Mark’s newfound religion on native app development, and Boz’s fresh new take on our advertising strategy, were both well underway by the time of our IPO, but we weren’t far enough along to confidently tell investors we had yet cracked the code on mobile. Mark resisted the urge to start inserting ads into News Feed on mobile phones until he was certain they would add value to the user experience, and we didn’t cross that magic threshold in his mind until several quarters after the IPO. Meanwhile, investors were clamoring for immediate answers, and for good reason. Engagement in our unmonetized mobile app was starting to dwarf our well-monetized desktop website – which also housed all the revenue from our Platform business – a trendline which suggested revenue growth would soon start to slow dramatically. And this was an accelerating trend as we continued to ship better and faster versions of our mobile apps. However, even in the face of intense pressure from Wall Street, Mark stubbornly took the long view, refusing to insert ads into the mobile News Feed until he felt they were good enough to live alongside organic content. When that day finally arrived and we started inserting ads into mobile News Feed, investors suddenly realized we were onto something big. On a small screen where banner ads would only fit “on a user’s thumb,” News Feed represented an infinite scrolling surface in which ads momentarily took over the entire screen. After our stock price had been cut in half in the first year following our IPO, it would double back to eclipse that price less than a year later, and over the next thirteen years it would increase by forty times (or four-thousand percent).

Impressive pivot from the founders of Product Science, now @gonka_ai

Thanks @arampell those were fun times and the people I met are now running the world (including you)

Big launch today from @Replit !!

I first attended Coatue’s conference as a participant when I worked at Facebook, and then I transitioned to co-host when I joined the firm. Glad we’re posting content from the show, hope you enjoy

This team is unstoppable @tryramp

Big unlock - Replit agent now available on mobile

Great comms advice for founders from my partner @carynm650

I've been on Choco's board for 5 years, watched them survive near-death during covid and now thrive with AI. Also clear @DanielKhachab and @HarryStebbings really enjoyed each other in this conversation which makes it a fun listen youtube.com/watch?v=pGU78Q5t…

My favorite quote has always been from Joseph Campbell who advised his students to "follow your bliss." I printed this on my badge at Facebook, and I've tried to live my life by it. I like it because it's not deterministic, only you can decide what brings you bliss and whether you're following it. My son @Ecrose29 sent me PG's essay and asked me whether this is good advice for young people or maybe more relevant as you get older. I started down this path early in my career, but I made sure to zoom way out. After college, I followed my bliss into a job working for a personal growth company called Life Mastery. That led me to curiosity about starting my own business, which led me to the internet where so many start-ups were happening in the late 90s. This led me to a realizing what I really cared about was inspiring people to work towards a higher purpose and helping them enrich themselves financially. I originally thought I had to start my own business to do this, but I came to realize I could have a bigger impact working for someone on a larger opportunity than working for myself on a smaller one. I also realized I was better at scaling things than starting things. Early on, I thought I could follow my bliss into any type of business, as long as I was leading and inspiring people. This mistake caused me to nearly leave Amazon when a friend asked me to join his furniture start-up. Thankfully, I realized part of my bliss was to work on products I loved. I loved reading books so I worked on the Kindle. I was interested in sociology so I worked on Facebook. Later, I wanted to learn about investing and move from player to coach, so I joined Coatue. I got lucky these companies became so successful, but I also created my own luck by following my bliss. I also followed my bliss into a functional career in partnerships and business development. I was always interested in the Buddhist concept of the "middle way," which fits my personality and happens to apply nicely to negotiations. I'm good at seeing both sides, finding healthy compromises, and being unemotional in pursuit of a win-win outcome. So I became proficient at a skill set that was valuable and somewhat rare in business, and I worked hard at excelling in it. I no doubt have selection bias, and I definitely got extremely lucky. But I believe I still would have had a successful and enjoyable career even if I hadn't gotten so lucky, because I followed my bliss. More on this here: xitter.cf/DanRose999/status/1696… Also, Joseph Campbell's biography inspired me early in my career a.co/d/0a8UuTF

13 years debating strategy with Zuck, he always chose the hardest path. I admired his willingness to stake out extreme positions, and I believe he respected me for trying to find the middle way. Me: "Our platform strategy isn't working on mobile, let's focus our resources on other things" Zuck: "We need to keep banging our head against the wall until something works, I will never give up on this" Me: "We're winning on mobile, let's double down on what's working" Zuck: "We're out of position strategically on mobile, boxed-in by competitors who want to kill us" Me: "Let's not antagonize our partners when they have more leverage than us" Zuck: "We can't let them push us around, we need to build muscle for the coming war" Me: "Let's negotiate a compromise that works for everyone to get this done" Zuck" "I'll give you more time, but if your approach doesn't work I'm pushing the nuclear button" Me: "The ultimate goal of life is to find happiness" Zuck: "I'm not trying to be happy, I'm optimizing to win" "Progress Through Suffering" isn't just a Latin phrase on a tee shirt, it's truly a philosophy of business and life. youtu.be/QciJ9ubeLQk