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Comment by arcticbull | Hacker News Reader

He's really not. Facebook is an extremely well run organization. There's a lot to dislike about working there, and there's a lot to dislike about what they do, but you cannot deny they have been unbelievably successful at it. He really is good at his job, and part of that has been making bold bets and aggressively cutting unsuccessful bets.

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Facebook can be well run without that being due to Zuck.

There are literally books that make this argument from insider perspectives (which doesn't mean it's true, but it is possible, and does happen regularly).

A basketball team can be great even if their coach sucks.

You can't attribute everything to the person at the top.

That is true but in Meta’s case, it is tightly managed by him. I remember a decade ago a friend was a mid-level manager and would have exec reviews to Zuck, who could absorb information very quickly and redirect feedback to align with his product strategy.

He is a very hands CEO, not one who is relying on experts to run things for him.

In contrast, I’ve heard that Elon has a very good senior management team and they sort of know how to show him shiny things that he can say he’s very hands on about while they focus on what they need to do.

He created the company, if it is well run it was thanks to him hiring the right people. Regardless how you slice it he is a big reason it didn't fail, most companies like that fails when they scale up and hire a lot of people but facebook didn't, hiring the right people is not luck.

hmm... Oculus Quest something something.

I can’t tell if you’re being tongue in cheek or not, so I’ll respond as if you mean this.

It’s easy to cherry pick a few bets that flopped for every mega tech company: Amazon has them, Google has them, remember Windows Phone? etc.

I see the failures as a feature, not a bug - the guy is one of the only founder CEOs to have ever built a $2T company (trillion with a T). I imagine part of that is being willing to make big bets.

And it also seems like no individual product failure has endangered their company’s footing at all.

While I’m not a Meta or Zuck fan myself, using a relatively small product flop as an indication a $2T tech mega corp isn’t well run seems… either myopic or disingenuous.

Parent comment says "aggressively cutting unsuccessful bets" and Oculus is nothing like that.

Oculus Quest are decent products, but a complete flop compared to their investment and Zuck's vision of the metaverse. Remember they even renamed the company? You could say they're on betting on the long run, but I just don't see that happening in 5 or even 10 years.

As an owner of Quest 2 and 3, I'd love to be proven wrong though. I just don't see any evidence of this would change any time soon.

I don’t think their “flops” of Oculus or Metaverse have endangered their company in any material way, judging by their stock’s performance and the absurd cash generating machine they have.

Even if they aren’t great products or just wither into nothing, I don’t think we will be see a HBS case study in 20 years saying, “Meta could have been a really successful company, but were it for their failure in these two product lines”

The VR venture can also be seen as a huge investment in hard tech and competency around issues such as location tracking and display tech for creating AI-integrated smartglasses, which many believe is the next gen AI interface. Even if the current headsets or form factor do not pay off, I think having this knowledge coud be very valuable soon.

laughs in metaverse

Absolutely, not everything they do will succeed but that's okay too, right? At this point their core products are used by 1 in 2 humans on earth. They need to get people to have more kids to expand their user base. They're gonna throw shit at the wall and not everything will stick, and they'll ship stuff that's not quite done, but they do have to keep trying; I can't bring myself to call that "failure."

their core product IS 1 of 2 humans on earth.

the product is used by advertisers to sell stuff to those humans.

So you're saying the ad revenue sort of allows them to "be their own bank?"

Then they can bankroll their own new entrepreneurial ideas risk-free, essentially.

They are a publicly traded company, shareholders are their bank.

What's a buyback?

You laugh, but the Oculus is amazing. I use it as part of my daily workouts.

fuck oculus and lucky palmer.

I have hundreds of hours building and tinkering on the original kickstarter kit and then they sold to FB and shut down all the open source stuff.

I agree, but that does not make Oculus a commercially successful and viable product. They are still bleeding cash on it, and VR is not going mainstream any time soon.

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