[bayarearefugee]

Sure, they worked out pretty well, but those were 12 and 14 years ago at this point, and aren't the only calls Facebook has made over the years:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitio...

IMO the actual prescient call he made early on is to hang on to 60% of the total voting power of the company. I have to imagine there are several points where he'd have been pushed out quite a while ago if he hadn't have done that.

[earthnail]

But if you take the same perspective as a VC: 95% of your bets can fail if the other 5% are spectacular.

He made spectacular bets with Instagram and WhatsApp. Most CEOs don’t make spectacular bets because their business doesn’t allow it, meaning the VC analogy doesn’t hold for them.

[fsuts]

Hasn’t Meta failed to monetise WhatsApp?

So it may be popular but they have ultimately failed commercially so far. They just bought an Indian startup and immediately put the founder in charge of WhatsApp.

Only this week they announced WhatsApp would allow usernames rather than rely on phone numbers. All the other competitors apps (signal,telegram etc) did this years ago.

[owebmaster]

Whatsapp is by far meta biggest potential. If they could turn it into a superApp like WeChat they would make a lot of money but only if that don't destroy the app.

[fsuts]

Think that means 95% of bets over a small period of time? (A single fund within the VC) as opposed to the whole VC since inception.

And so not comparable.

VC investing is also a tax write off for rich investors which is offset against their gains elsewhere, wasted company money is a loss for the share buyer.