- “To survive as a company, you have to be willing to focus and prioritize,” wrote Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth on his personal blog.
- Bosworth, an early engineer at Facebook, described some of the problems with the scale in a blog post.
- After a brutal 2022, Meta is scheduled to report its fourth-quarter earnings on Wednesday.
Meta tech lead Andrew “Boz” Bosworth, one of Facebook’s earliest employees, wrote on his personal blog over the weekend that the company was more focused in its early days, describing some of the problems that came with scaling.
In a post titled “Focus,” Bosworth contrasted the startup years, when he was sleep deprived, poorly fed and had “no hobbies,” to mature companies with lots of people involved in product features and enough Money pays for less important things.
“Resources and time are so stretched that you can feel the weight of all the things you’re not doing,” Bosworth wrote, beginning his post by saying he was “kind of like” the company’s 10th engineer. “You really believe that what you’re doing is the most important thing.”
Bosworth’s post comes days ahead of Meta’s fourth-quarter earnings report, which is scheduled to be released after the market close on Wednesday. The company is expected to report its third straight quarter of declining sales, and analysts expect another decline in the first quarter. Meta lost two-thirds of its value last year.
Bosworth is promoted to chief technology officer in 2021, succeeding Mike Schroepfer, who has been with the company since 2008. Bosworth is overseeing Meta’s ambitious and costly effort to develop the digital world of the Metaverse, which CEO Mark Zuckerberg It has been said that it will determine the future of the company.
While he admits he doesn’t miss the entrepreneurial life, “I do miss a deep sense of focus,” Bosworth writes.
With limited funds and resources, “we’ve been stretched thin on servers, memory and bandwidth,” he said.
But over time, Facebook went through some product expansion, throwing energy into too many different projects. He cited nonprofits as an example, noting that early on, employees would ask Zuckerberg to support a group or cause.
An avatar of Meta Platforms Inc. CEO Mark Zuckerberg speaks during the virtual Meta Connect event in New York, U.S., Tuesday, October 11, 2022.
“Mark would always say no,” Bosworth wrote. “He would explain that it’s not that we don’t care about good causes, but that our comparative advantage wouldn’t be making good donations.”
That changed as the company got bigger and more employees asked to donate to Facebook, and there was enough money to do it. Considering there’s nothing wrong with supporting nonprofits, “we’re just going to stop saying ‘no.'”
“I’m picking a cultural example here, but the exact same thing happens in our product, on a much larger scale and with higher stakes,” Bosworth wrote.
Bosworth didn’t specify any areas where the current version of Meta lacks focus, saying the company has a “strong core functionality.” He does provide examples of how companies are still off track.
“A small functional idea emerged that served a subset of the market,” Bosworth wrote. “But it’s not hard to do, and it’s not a bad thing, so we indulged.”
He continued, “Repeat this thought process a hundred times and you’ll end up with a confusing UI, a huge team, a slow product with no obvious way forward.”
Meta investors have been urging the company to focus on its core online advertising business, which is under pressure from a combination of challenges including a weakening economy and increased competition. Altimeter Capital CEO and Meta investor Brad Gerstner, who was critical of the hefty investment in the nascent metaverse, wrote in an open letter to the company in October that the company needed to “stay healthy and focused.”
In November, Meta said it would lay off more than 11,000 workers as part of a plan to cut costs in the tough digital advertising market.
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