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by Sai_ 1100 days ago
FB ca 2012-13 was a pretty sure bet, imho. They basically had no competition in social. TikTok hadn't come out yet. G+ had perished not long ago. Apple hadn't yet kneecapped them on privacy. They hadn't yet turned into supervillains.

If all I cared about was money and the potential upside, I'd have taken FB any day over all the no/low strings cash Google could throw at me.

Noam talks about the civic breakdown caused by FB and how he is happy he chose Google but that could be a case of post facto justification. Google, sans its "Don't be evil" is no saint either. I'm sure if he had gone with FB, he'd find five different things to ding Google on - e.g. firing the AI ethics team, sunsetting products without notice, dropping "don't be evil" from their charter, having no North Star other than maximizing ad rev.
2 comments
mucle6 1100 days ago
Curious, how much did you make from buying shares in Facebook in 2012/2013?
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Sai_ 1100 days ago
I did okay, can't complain, but I bought in early 2015, not 2012-13 once the upswing was confirmed.
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justapassenger 1100 days ago
FB in those years also had horrible mobile apps, made no money on mobile while world was shifting there. And they kept on investing mostly into their desktop website.

It was sure bet, in a hindsight. They could’ve easily botched mobile, open room for competition to swoop in and become irrelevant in the process.

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Sai_ 1100 days ago
If I remember my tech history, by 2012-13, FB had realized that their html5 FB app wouldn't cut it on mobile devices and had gone all in on a native app.

https://magazine.wharton.upenn.edu/digital/the-pivotal-tale-...

I mean, I myself left Wall Street to work on iOS apps back in 2011. Only a willfully blind person would have ignored mobile/smartphones by 2012-13.

Of course, they could have botched their mobile transition - Reddit's ongoing dumpster fire is an example of corporate self immolation - but even back then Mark Z was no schmuck.

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justapassenger 1100 days ago
There’s big gap between not being a schmuck and getting your company to be one of the biggest tech behemoths.

Rewriting app, means years of no new features (like Twitter did with their backend rewrite). That’s a very vulnerable period of time. And no guarantee that their apps will be any good (especially given their track record of low quality). It wasn’t guaranteed in any way that they will start making meaningful money on mobile.

They could’ve easily end up like Twitter, plagued with reliability issues and no good monetization.

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