Meta Staff Slam Mark Zuckerberg in Blind Reviews
Many employees believe Zuck’s Metaverse obsession will 'single-handedly kill' the company.
You may have read the Business Insider story this past week: Meta employees posted negative comments about Mark Zuckerberg on Blind, the anonymous job review forum. Many seemed beyond angry as they vented about job security, layoffs and depressed stock option value in the face of massive spending on, and associated losses attributed to, The Metaverse.
According to Business Insider, many of the reviews were posted on the day that Meta cut 13% of its workforce. So, there were understandably frayed nerves among the rank and file, the majority being from the Millennial and Gen Z generations. These generations are said by some to lean toward entitlement and respond with a form of activism when it comes to their careers and employers. Amidst the scathing review they gave the boss, there's that undercurrent.
Biz Doc’s Take:
There is more here than meets the eye and some perspective would be helpful. Let's start with these facts about Mark Zukerberg:
His IQ has not suddenly dropped below 165.
He remains committed, competitive and creative.
He is a strategic thinker and very intentional.
He is all-in on The Metaverse, this is not a test.
OK, but WHY is Zuckerberg so committed to The Metaverse? The answer is, HE NEEDS TO BE and here's why: While Facebook remains a multi-billion-dollar enterprise, there are looming signs of trouble. These include a flattening user growth curve, lower adoption rates among the emerging generations, user erosion among older generations, Apple's iOS opt-in/opt-out app tracking policy (which has impacted ad sales) and half a dozen serious scandals ranging from Cambridge Analytics to enablement of bad actors in elections to alleged correlation with mental health issues among teenage youth. That's quite a list, eh?
Stepping back, one does not have to squint to see Facebook may have entered its maturity phase, one rife with peril. If we accept what we see in external data, imagine what Zuckerberg and others see from the inside. A year ago, whistleblower Frances Haugen exposed just how aware Facebook is of its impact on people, elections and society. It is equally aware of the associated risks to its near-term growth and longer-term viability.
Thus, The Metaverse is a big idea that needs to provide the big growth and big future that Facebook won’t, and Zuckerberg is keenly aware of this.
History often repeats itself and I believe the situation with Meta is increasingly similar to something that unfolded in chapter one of the dot-com era.
Question:
What was the most valuable company in the world in January 2000?
Hints:
- The valuation was $130B+, which is a shockingly low figure when compared to today's valuations.
- It was at the height of the "dot-com bubble."
- The two co-founders were in the top 50 on the Forbes 400 list of wealthiest Americans in 2000.
Answer:
Yahoo!
Not only was Yahoo! the most valuable company at that time, but Yahoo! also had the opportunity to buy a young Google for $1B and tried to buy Facebook for $1B. Had those transactions happened, where would Yahoo! be today? (A dirty little secret that lives in the lore of Silicon Valley is that if Yahoo had offered $1.1B, the Google board would have voted to take it.)
At one point Yahoo! was the front page of the Internet for millions of users. Maps, search and more were consolidated in one place as Yahoo! acquired companies including Overture (search), GeoCities, HotJobs, Broadcast.com (Mark Cuban's company) and more. Unable to consolidate these acquisitions under a unified strategy, Yahoo! endured a long slow decline. Along the way, Yahoo! declined an offer from Microsoft to acquire it for nearly $45B in 2008. The whiffs and fails kept coming and Yahoo was ultimately bought by Verizon in 2017 for $4.5B, barely 10% of the Microsoft offer it turned down. Verizon was unable to do much and quietly wrote down the acquisition of Yahoo in 2021 as it sold a set of media assets including Yahoo!, TechCrunch, AOL, Engadget and RYOT to Apollo Global Management for $4.9B. Yahoo!'s implied value as part of that set of media assets is estimated to be barely $2B.
Side Note: No, the original Yahoo! founders are no longer on the Forbes 400 list, but remain billionaires, albeit barely.
Mark Zuckerberg wants no part of a "Yahoo! outcome." He knows Facebook's long-term prospects are challenged and he has made his bet. The name of the company and its stock ticker have been changed to reflect his commitment to a future anchored by The Metaverse. COO Sheryl Sandberg, the architect of the ad platform that added billions of dollars of revenue and hundreds of billions of dollars in valuation for "Facebook 1.0" departed and did so somewhat unceremoniously under clouds of rumors and an internal scandal. Other management shifts and departures reflect the strategic sea-change inside Meta as well.
Right or wrong, and time will tell, all of Zuckerberg's chips are intentionally and strategically on The Metaverse.
See you next week - I miss you already.