 Hello slush Wow a grand total of two people responded, so I'm gonna try that all over again. It's day two. It's day two. Yo, they're over it. Hello slush Spontaneous such an awesome audience you made isn't it nice to be traveling again anywhere at all. It is it's a journey I came from Oakland, California A good 10-plus hour flight This is my first trip since the pandemic. Oh wow and First trip as a working parent now. I had a kid five months ago, so congratulations Yeah, so there's a lot going on right now, but it's good It's good to be back in person and you picked a nice warm place to start the best I have appropriate clothes on as you can see as anyone who's seen me over the course of the last day or two I haven't quite been dressed for this weather, but I did warn you listen I'm really excited to be speaking to him on stage. He's the head of new product experimentation Are the company formerly known as Facebook? Yes now now meta meta So what is new product experimentation at meta and how does that fit into the metaverse daddy? Yeah, it's a it's a quite literal name. I mean at the end of the day We are an organization that is trying to build new products for meta That arguably can either fold into our our product portfolio as a standalone entity standalone experience or as a feature into one of our main apps or one of our main products right now either the main family of apps that Everyone knows Facebook Instagram Messenger WhatsApp or reality labs, which is their VR experience In terms of how does it fit into meta? Right on the metaverse? Sorry the metaverse Everyone has a definition for the metaverse, right? I like the Icelandic definition of the meta You almost look up the parody that the Icelandic tourism body did I thought that that was Genius hilarious and and wonderful. Um, yeah, I mean I think about the metaverse as a natural extension of technology You know and it's its its ability to essentially augment human capacity So like the way I think about it is I just took a trip and I flew out here I rewound 20 20 years ago to college age In the 90s when we were making the shift towards the internet and the 2000 we were making the shift towards the mobile internet I got on a flight to go travel with a physical map a Big old camera right to capture my experiences Anyone remember the lonely planet books? Oh, yes I have like a shelf guide to everywhere guide to everywhere So I had all of these things that I would put into a backpack on a plane make my trip make my travel Nowadays I got on this flight and because of the mobile internet because of the internet in general It's all in my mobile phone right all of those different things that we just talked about experiences in my mobile phone So when I think about Technology's natural progression over the course of this next a decade or two decades There's a bunch of things that I'm tracking when it comes to the metaverse There's so much hardware that needs to be built right there's a bunch of network Infrastructure that needs to be rolled out that needs to be built There's industry standards and interoperability. We talked about that a little bit as a company too That the importance of that actually happening, but then on top of all of those things There's there's virtual platforms, but then there's there's experiences. There's products There's assets and new product experimentation. We're building a lot of those things for it I don't know if anybody caught Benedict Evans Presentation yesterday. He talked a lot about how yes, there's a vision for what we're building towards for the next 10 plus years And that's metaverse. That's NFTs. That's web 3 kind of all the language that people are using right now There's also a lot of innovation that's going to happen this decade, you know Mobile device mobile internet still has a lot of invitation So we're experimenting with stuff this decade Clearly a lot of the natural experiences that we build right now We're going to find their way and bridge the way to the metaverse when that starts to roll out as an industry This is kind of a weird place to find the meta or Facebook because you're not a startup you were a startup a Billion years ago. Oh man, but now when When you're 3.1 billion users, whatever you are not a startup But your department your organization kind of works in a way that a smaller startup might operate Something that people in this audience are familiar with. Yeah, super similar. I mean we a little bit about my background So before I was running this organization for the company I ran an organization called product new our product partnerships Which means that I've got to fly around the world sit down with a bunch of smart Entrepreneurs kind of the next generation of entrepreneurs and figure out how to work with them from a meta from a Facebook capacity at the time Now this team that I have we do exactly the same thing that a lot of people out here doing we have small teams You can think three to five person teams And I have a thesis of how they think the world is going to work and my job is to be an architect more So than anything else of the structure of the organization to give them a space where they can see those ideas come to life at a company like meta So you have three to five person teams based in places like Nigeria who are trying to you know You know notice that the the education system there Has its opportunities and its challenges and needs that are unique to Nigerians How can we take the power the smarts of the resources of a place like Facebook? integrate into the community build with the community and try to find some non-obvious technology solutions and The the the the beautiful thing like many folks on it We've had some conversations over the course of the last two days about how Most startup ideas the first idea you go out with is not going to be the thing that actually scales and that right rose Right, so we've created this space at meta where these teams can fail They can fail fast as one of my product leaders tries to remind us all the time. It's not about winning and failing It's about winning and learning so you learn pretty rapidly you learn pretty quickly you put ideas out there Put them in people's hands They don't work they don't resonate shut them down kind of pivot on to the next thing And that's the environment that we've created. So that's fascinating in me that you're saying if it fails shut it down Keep going and I've seen also that you said in the past that you expect many failures as part of this process Yeah, explain that. Yeah, I mean there is I think there's a bunch of myths that exist out there This audience again now how you spent all day yesterday here And I think that this it's well tuned people know that this myth is not It's one that's worth being busted Which is the first thing you put out there is probably not going to be the thing that works, right? Finding lightning in a bottle happens to a couple entrepreneurs Maybe you know every every so a couple years and that's wonderful But the average experience is one of a lot of pivots a lot of attempts a lot of tries and a lot of failures there's a So it's I call the execution myth which is first idea you put out there is not going to be the thing that works And in fact the people who end up being successful are the people that are able to do the iterative lots of shots on goal Right it out there, you know, it's ultimately somewhat of a portfolio play Which is it's not a function about whether you're right every single time you put a product out there But when you're right, how right are you and that plays out over years for most entrepreneur opportunities and same thing for the For the team that experimenting here at Meadow Somebody listening to you might think the way this works is one person has a eureka moment like oh I think I've discovered something major but in your experience it works slightly different from that incredibly different I mean I call that the the leadership myth right and if anything, you know People see the title that I have and like oh this person's gonna, you know Be able to wave a magic wand and tell us what are the next yeah What are the next five things that are gonna happen into the future give me the big things? That's just not the role that I need to play like the role that I have to play is one that is hopefully way more humble Is more of like a gardener or like an editor, right? Which is I'm creating the fertile ground in the space for entrepreneurs smart Entrepreneurially thinking teams to build their ideas and to plant their seeds at a company like meta And hopefully they will absolutely grow and be you know oak trees one day But nonetheless, it's not me disappearing to some mountain Meditating coming down from the mountain saying hey here's what we need to go build and what we need to go do It's more of a how can I empower that person who has a great idea get out of their way get them the resources? They need to build something awesome give them the psychological safety to fail multiple times at a place that clearly has a pretty High bar for what success looks like right and see what happens over time So you're saying ideas don't come to you when you are meditating The next big Facebook product. I have figured it all out Okay I think I think Larry backstage is saying that he's gonna do a drinking game every time he could mention meta or do Meta for or meta something. He was gonna have people drink it. So yeah, I know you're absolutely right. There is there's no There's no assumption that I have all the answers To what should be built and what needs to be built in fact, it's the opposite Which is I feel like the key part of my role, especially for a company like meta is to be a great listener I mean a big reason why I spent all day here yesterday Meeting with some of the startups and entrepreneurs is just to bounce around ideas. See what people are building right now Offer some perspective on what we're building right now what we're excited about and that energy in real life Right, which has been missing for so long for the last year and a half for so many of us Has felt wonderful, right? That's that's where the real sparks happen in the time since you've been leading new product Experimentation at meta. What do you think is the biggest success of this process of this journey? Yeah, I mean I go back to falling in love with this process of learning So when I think about it, so I've been running the organization now for about two years or so, right? And when I think about about the dozens and dozens of experiments that we've launched and we've done You know, there's nothing that stands out. It's like, hey, I need to go tell your mom about this like right now Right get her to download it get her to buy this right now and run it because it's the future But we've learned a bunch of lessons along the way with every single one of our experiments and these things take time to play out In 2019 pre-pandemic we had, you know, a fairly young entrepreneur That said hey me and all my friends and my generation are wearing earbuds right now And there need to be more social, you know, audio first experiences. Let's try a bunch of different things We tried, you know Seven eight different ideas that we put out there in people's hands didn't find product market fit for a number of them But again as the pandemic hit and you saw everyone shifting to okay These audio first experiences are actually going to be valuable for the time that we're spending as that's human beings and then meta as a company Wanted to make a play in order to do some things We were able to share a lot of those learnings and accelerate and catalyze what the company was doing when it came to Experiences like that. We've had teams that are working on things like wearables And playing around with things like wearables and as a result like, you know As we as a company are thinking more and more about what the meta versus gonna look like and what are the hardware devices that need to exist out There whether it's AR glasses We can talk about VR But you know being able to take those teams the learnings the experiments that they've done and be able to catalyze what we're Doing more broadly at that meta is exactly what I think about a success for us and exciting for us So because I asked what the successes are I'm gonna flip the question around and you said you can't tell us What are the next five things that are going to be a big deal? But do you think there's something that? Maybe was a spectacular failure in this process or Some that you really better. I'm like, I think this is gonna be great. And then it just ended up just fizzling out Man, it's a it's a it's a great question and It's like trying to call out like like you have kids I have no kids you have no kids It's like what is the worst thing that one of your kids has done It's hard for me to point at one and say this is like a spectacular failure or something that has shocked the system We've learned every single, you know step along the way in fact just yesterday As I was working through my jet lag one of the entrepreneurial teams posted a hey We just ran this experiment for the last five minutes five five weeks. We were all really excited about it We thought it was gonna be something compelling to be honest with you It was something in the space of trying to make a dating as an experience more safe and Enjoyable for people on the internet because there are a whole host of issues that you know We we could we could talk about and the experiment that they ran was something that they were excited about But they were the first ones to say it didn't work Right like and it wasn't a wasted five weeks by the team, right? It was actually an incredible five weeks by the team executing building something interesting together Capturing the learnings learning in a low-cost cheap fast way sharing those learnings more broadly with our team and with the company Is exactly what we want to be doing and you know the more of those the merrier Right at the end of the day when I go back to this notion that the first thing you launch is never going to be the thing That actually takes off and that works I get excited when I see more and more of the teams being like this didn't work this didn't work This didn't work because that means that we're on to hopefully getting closer and closer to the thing that will work I think that's a point that a lot of people in the audience here will relate with because this is slush Lots of people are building companies and trying to find the right product and sometimes not quite the first thing They had in mind that eventually has traction. What do you think based on your? Experience leading new product experimentation at a large company What are some of the insights that people here who are early-stage companies can take from that while they're doing their own kind of iterating and Figuring out. What is it that my company does really and what will I succeed it or what will I fail it? Yeah? It's a great question. I mean like pull on that last point a little bit more You know the iterative approach towards experimentation is the thing that I believe leads to and begets innovation So you have to be and build the muscle for as an organization to just rapidly experiment and to put things out there and to get Pretty comfortable with that There's a great I think might be a New York Times article or piece called the creative myth right or the creativity myth And they talk a little bit about Bach who you know, I'm not I Don't love Classical classical music. I'm not a huge one I love the example that they use there, which is you know box pieces were considered genius Wonderful for a number of different reasons what a lot of people didn't see was like the work that went into that Like yes, he had hit after hit after hit after hit But because he had failure after failure after failure after failure after failure after failure and the people that tend to actually Come up with the next thing innovate build tongues that are actually truly creative tend to also be the people that Are failing the most so I think as a startup That is like one thing that I would say is like absorbing that understanding that DNA and making sure that's a piece of what you are And what you do is important the other thing I would offer is I think there's like a culture myth I've got an environment myth that exists out there, too right just notion of if I have the fun Structure our creative space to put my startup in and we don't do office buildings and so on and so forth all The things that people used to poke fun at Silicon Valley for that that's what's going to beget innovation That's just not true at the end of the day I think there are some cultural things that you can do as an organization and do them really really early Especially as you're a small team as you scale So if you went back to the early early days of Facebook, we ran hackathons. That was like our thing, right? And that's like a cultural pillar of meta that exists now that we're getting close to you know 6070 80,000 employees that existed back when we were 50 employees So I think they are cultural artifacts that you can start to plant an early early stage that scale and will grow with you I think the myth in there though is that the cultural alone will Breed innovation breed creativity and the fact is you have to build some structure in there You know, we are now at the size and skills when organization where an organization like mine needs to exist in order to make sure that I can Incubate protect right give enough time space and resources to ideas that Arguably if you're doing it, right aren't going to make sense to the massive organization to the moment. Yeah, so The combination of culture and like creating these early cultural moments as a startup and then also realizing it as you scale You need to put some structure in place to make sure that they can actually be you know Fruitful is is the other offer this year that I would give to folks air slash You mentioned that you spent the whole day here yesterday listening to people and meeting and all that Why are you here? Why is a Facebook vice president at a startup conference? You came all the way from San Francisco to this. Yeah, I don't understand. Why are you here? I mean the next I mean what slush this describes itself as is the next generation of of entrepreneurs and of builders and As someone who you know spent the majority of my over a decade now at Facebook Proxima and integrated into this type of community. It was really important for me to continue to stay close to this community This is the first trip that I have made since essentially things got locked down in the United States in February of you know 2020 it feels like ten years ten years ago at lifetime ago But that's primary reason which is just to be a part of this community say proximate this community Personally, I have a pretty strong thesis that the next era of innovation is going to be created and built by some of the places that are non-traditional right so the places that have historically been overlooked under estimated you live in in Kenya exactly I'm very very bullish across the African continent just not just East Africa, but also, you know, but Nigerian descent You know West Africa I'm very very bullish on what's happening across Asia right now I'm very very bullish on what's happening across Latin America right now And why is that because we're sitting here in the global north and this might not be relevant to people here But there's people from all over the world. Yeah, that I've met since I've been here Why are you excited about what's happening in Latin America in Asia in Africa? Yeah, I mean a couple people have talked about this with the panels that I've been listening into which is just like the Barriers for building are getting exponentially lower and cheaper You can be anybody with a dismind like a design mindset You don't even need engineering skills these days right to build a new product build a new business build a new experience and not just do it Locally, but do it in a way that actually it could scale universally and kind of a and your idea could get shared with the globe So in that environment as that's happening over the course of this next decade and coming out to the future I just feel like there's going to be new innovative interesting ideas that are happening in corners around the world that I Personally can't see driving up and down the 101 in Silicon Valley every single day That are going to be you know happening in these corners of the world All right I didn't get to the elephant in the room until now the reason why I said the company formerly known as Facebook is Because there's been this rebranding operation partly because we and others in the media have been talking a lot about what Facebook is doing Some people might consider Facebook the evil empire that's harming democracy and all sorts of other things So why should we trust anything you're telling us right now? I? Mean you were thinking it Right look if there's one thing Larry can do he can keep it real You know, I would say a couple things Someone said this yesterday or maybe it's earlier today Which is just like talk is cheap at the end of the day Right, and I have a big proponent that talk is cheap at the end of the day It really is about actions and it's about you know what we end up doing what we've ended putting out there And you're talking to someone if you looked across the portfolio right now things that we're experimenting on you see a reflection of People people that care pretty deeply about the communities that they're building for I talked about you know the work that we're doing in Nigeria We have Nigerians building for Nigerians with Nigerians I have people in the United States right now who are part of the LGBTQ community building for that particular community right now with very close proximity and very close care, so I'm not gonna get up here and try to say hey here all the different reasons why you should believe me and the approach That we're taking right now. I think that as a company We have taken a pretty Large kind of approach to trying to build responsibly and to innovate responsibly There's been a bunch of talks about responsible innovation over the course the last couple of days that I've really enjoyed and a lot has resonated with me Right when we think about the metaverse one of the things I think that we have learned from this last era of innovation to the mobile internet has been to proactively engage with all the different Stakeholders right whether it's civil society, whether it's regulators Whether it's the media Whether you know it's kind of entrepreneurial and ecosystem out there So there's a proactive approach that we're taking we've learned a lot over the course the last ten years And I'm pretty excited about what the future looks like but a big benefit is is getting the right talent getting the right people Oriented and building all the right products. It's fascinating that you say Building responsibly because that's a word is going to use if you understand the responsibility of the products You make are not being used by a couple hundred thousand people often. There are billions of people Parts of the world where for instance, what's up is the internet or Facebook is the entire internet that most people understand So when you make a product when you build a product, it's not a tiny drop in the ocean It is some people's entire universe Is that something that plays with the back of your mind when you think through what we're gonna ship? Yeah, and what we're gonna kill Yeah, 100% it's an it's an incredible awesome Unprecedented responsibility that I think that everyone over the course of my you know now almost 11 or over 11 years at meta feels Incredibly, you know it closely personally It's on and so forth. So yeah, it's it's something that we think about especially when we are Experimenting quote-unquote and that's where I go back to a big approach that we're taking a big thesis that I have is that We're taking a bet on people and their proximity to the communities that we're actually building for and the audiences that we're building for because I think You know ultimately if you have someone who is a part of the community Let's let's go back again to the continent that you know, we're both You know connected to if I have Nigerians from Nigeria Building for Nigerians in Nigeria based in Nigeria I can rest assure that they are going to take a thoughtful Responsible approach to making sure that they are building with that community in the way that brings a lot of empathy and Understanding and understands the nuance the dynamics that exist there that arguably even I couldn't pick up on nor understand Sitting in Oakland, California or Menlo Park, California or Silicon Valley more large So there's a big piece of just getting I use proximity as a language a lot Proximity to these communities that we're building for and make sure that we're doing right by them Okay This is something that I want to ask you which is kind of a personal reflection because you are who you are you? lead a Division of Facebook, but also you're one of the few probably one of the highest ranking black executives in all of Silicon Valley and After the kind of summer we had last year, obviously your role has become much more important as a representative of the culture But as a representative of people of color in these Very important places that build products that a lot of people around the world use and how do you wrestle with that? How do you? Think about that when you go into work every day. Yeah Again, you know talk about the the secondary responsibility I think that we we probably put on ourselves as the the lonely onlys sometimes the organizations that we represent and the companies that we end Up building for I think about it every single day and I've been thinking about every single day for 11 years now This company is what role do I have to play as one of the lonely folks black? Executives at this company and ensuring that the products that we're building touch the community that I care about And I've been a very responsible way a couple different ways it ends up playing out You know last year you talked about you know 2020 in the wake of 2020 we as a company Publicly stated hey, we're gonna take a look at our products and make sure that the products that we're building have a lens of equity Clearly in the United States a lot of that lens was around racial equity and ensuring that you know the products We're showing up for the communities and in powerful ways Mark publicly talked about me as an executive Leading some of those efforts for the company and some of the organization and that was an easy decision, right? It wasn't something that it was like oh You you like a guy. Yeah. Yeah, you do it. No It was a natural extension of what I was already doing I go back to it The the if you were look at the the team that I that I have been able to assemble and new product experimentation You're gonna see one of the my most diverse teams across meta and that is both important and strategic And it made it very very easy for us to say oh If we need to make some public commitments about doing and committing and resources it to working on equity We're already doing it right look at this team over here Who has been tackling the problem of reentry from the criminal justice system which? Disproportionately punishes people of color in the United States We're trying to use our technology and tools to try to figure out how we can help those folks and those citizens Reenter back into into until a healthy environment. Oh look at the LGBTQ community who historically hasn't had resources for Evolving their families and growing their families got a team here working on that exact issue right now and trying to Figure out how we can bring our smarts our technology and our resources doing that right now So there was a bunch of stuff and work that we were already doing on equity that made it a natural thing for me To actually proactively say hey This is what I want to do the second half of that is is you know I call us the emergent majority right at the end of the day when you look around the world when you look at The billions and billions of people that we have the opportunity to touch every single day a lot of them look like me Right right now the builders of our technology. It's not just the meta thing This is an industry-wide thing don't necessarily look like the people who are using our products and our tools and technology And we need a course correct on that it is the reason why you know I've been pretty aggressive about making sure that we have a presence on the continent which oh by the way is getting Connectivity at an incredible rate I'm pretty excited about what's going to happen across that continent over the course of the next decade and as a result the Tools to build right people locally building solutions Unlocking opportunities fear they're not for their needs are addressing their problems in a way that I think will be way more sustainable Right will be better solutions because of their proximity to the communities that actually exist out there and the facilitator of that being a Facilitator of that is something that I that I've personally felt is been an important role that I play at a company like meta and more broadly in the Industry making sure that it's well known that we need to do this all right So we have only 30 seconds left and you might have already talked about this in some of the responses What is your takeaway for founders here who are iterating and doing new product experimentation? What is the thing or the things you have learned leading this organization over the last two years? Yeah We talked about a couple of them. Yeah, there's the there's the environment myth, right? It's not just about creating the right structures actually see creativity happen You have to put some seeds of the culture in there and then you have to put some structure around it It's a process around it. I think that there's the leadership myth Which is if anyone is is a founder is is leading an organization a small organization or a middle-sized organization right now You're not gonna have all the answers right regardless of how genius or how smart you are You're not gonna have the other answers The best you can do is to be a gardener to create the environment to create the experiences for other Entrepreneurial talent to come and bring their ideas to table and have those grow and then last but not least Execution execution execution like the first idea you put out there is not gonna be the one that works be committed and fall in love with the process of Winning and learning not winning and failing but winning and learning and learning a lot fantastic image on thank you So much a big round of applause for this gentleman, please and thank you for being a fabulous audience