Meta: How to Conquer the Internet

Meta and Zuck’s Strategy to Build a Successful Company

Just like Google’s Parent company is Alphabet, Facebook’s parent company is Meta, and its “Family of Apps” are Instagram, WhatsApp, Facebook, Messenger, and Threads. The company rebranded the name to Meta when its founder and CEO, Mark Zuckerberg first conceptualized the Metaverse in 2021.

Meta is the only tech company that has truly conquered the internet.

It’s really hard to imagine a day or week without checking WhatsApp messages, Instagram stories, Facebook posts, or unnecessary information on Threads. I’m very confident saying that because the numbers don’t lie: Facebook has 3.065 billion monthly active users, Instagram has well over 2 billion, and WhatsApp too has over 2 billion monthly active users. Said differently, almost half of the world’s total population uses Meta Platforms, which is truly mind-boggling.

And it’s all because Meta and Zuck really understand how to grab people’s attention and keep them addicted to their platforms. The company spends billions of dollars every year to make the Meta Platforms as addictive and pleasurable as possible for users worldwide.

Do you know Americans spend an average of 134 minutes on social media per day? Precisely, Americans spend more than 30 minutes per day on Instagram and WhatsApp alone, which means 210 minutes per week, 900 minutes per month, and 10,950 minutes per year!

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While spending time on social media is constantly going up, spending time reading books is consistently going down, every year. Studies have proved that Gen Z no longer reads books anymore. All thanks to social media, especially Instagram and WhatsApp. But this deep dive is not about what people should do and shouldn't, it’s about how Meta platforms are built.

So how does Meta and Zuck do this all?

Building great products requires great leadership, great team, great culture, unique approaches, strategic decision-making, and more. And frankly, Meta is great at most of them. So this week’s deep dive is about Meta. In today’s deep dive, I’m going to take you through the five different aspects of Meta— the product-building philosophy, the leadership style, the company culture, the recruiting strategy, and the design principle. However, each aspect of Meta offers more than one lesson, but I’m only going to point out the “One” key strategy that really moves the needle and helps the company grow.

Get your popcorn ready and let’s dive in!

The Product Building Strategy

What’s Meta’s product-building philosophy?

Every successful tech company has a moat, I mean seriously, look at Apple, what’s their biggest moat? Beautifully designed perfect products. What’s Amazon’s biggest moat? Obsessing over customers. What’s Google’s biggest moat? Their unique ecosystem. So what’s Meta’s biggest moat? Since the company comes under “FAANG” it also has a moat when it comes to building great products, and that is: Move Fast and Break Things. Actually, that has now changed to Move Fast With Stable Infrastructure.

When the company was new, small, and not serving “Billions” of users, its philosophy on building products was to Move Fast and Break Things, which meant engineers, employees, teams, and leaders of the company were encouraged to ship new products and features as soon as possible (MVP) without chasing perfection. The core idea behind doing this was swift iteration would outpace competitors and foster innovation.

Here’s how Zuck describes it:

The strategy worked very well when the company was new and small. But as things got bigger and the company started serving billions of users worldwide, Meta had to change its product-building strategy, which it did by adopting the following new product-building philosophy in 2014: Move Fast With Stable Infrastructure.

Since the company started serving billions of users worldwide it was impossible for Meta to ship new products and features without having a stable infrastructure, robust system architectures, comprehensive testing frameworks, and scalable solutions. But all thanks to Meta’s new internal motto that forced the company to not just ship new products and features fast, but also to build stable infrastructure and systems so that it could make progress with the same or 2x speed.

Now let’s see a real-world example.

Do you remember when Meta launched its new product, Threads in 2023? The first version of Threads was not good at all because the company took no more than five months to build the MVP—resulting in the company getting many backslashes from the users. But because Meta has built the infrastructure and systems in place already, the company improved the product very fast as it gathered users’ feedback and responses. The results? As of today, Threads have more than 320 million monthly active users, which outpaces X’s (Formerly Twitter) ~300 million monthly active users.

That’s how Meta thinks about shipping new products. They make the MVP (minimum viable product) as fast as possible, ship it, and improve the product as they gather feedback and responses from the users. But Meta is only able to do it because, in the last couple of years, it heavily invested a ton of resources in building infrastructure, data centers, and internal tools.

This is what Mark says about their new product-building philosophy:

This stability is particularly important for Facebook's functionality as a "platform." Users don't just come to Facebook to post on their friend's walls; they're also playing games or using Facebook to log into other services. If somebody is going to use Facebook on their smartphone, it's more likely to be via app rather than browser. Thus the need for a stable application programming interface, or API.

This video of Zuck with Tim Ferriss also says the same thing:

The big takeaway: When you are a startup, move fast and break things—ship things as fast as you can so that you can learn quickly, foster innovation, and out-compete your competitors. But when you become “Big” change your approach—invest in the company’s infrastructure and systems so that you can hold the same product-building philosophy, but in a better way.

The Leadership Style

The founder and CEO of Meta, Mark Zuckerberg is undoubtedly a great leader.

He has built many great leadership principles running the company for more than two decades. And one of his “Controversial” leadership styles that he has openly talked about is: He doesn’t believe in delegating things “That” much. This means Zuck tries to be involved in as many projects and decisions as possible.

Here’s how he describes it:

But I think like probably one of my most controversial leadership or management things is like, I don't actually believe in delegating that much. I kind of think like the way a founder should work is you should basically make as many decisions and get involved in as many things as you can. And like, I mean, you need to know where your limits are and where like you're just thrashing people because you're involved in something that a half assed way and like you can't you're not actually you don't have all the context.

Don’t get his context wrong. When he says he tries to be involved in as many decisions and projects as possible, he doesn’t mean he sits beside the company’s graphic designers or accountants and helps create a visual or complete the Excel Sheets. When you’re running a multi-billion dollar company, you can’t “Actually” be involved in many things, but you can always choose the biggest problems or projects that'll move the company forward for the better, and that's what Zuck actually does.

Doing so is not easy, certainly not easy for Zuck. But the guy is able to do it because of his years of experience and knowledge in different fields from programming to product development to finance to strategic decision making. And frankly, he wouldn’t be doing this and approaching this leadership style, if he didn’t have a grasp on various sectors of the company.

And the reason he said it “Controversial” is because not many founders or leaders can do the same, or subscribe to his approach, which is fine. But doing so also has many advantages too. When you are involved in as many company decisions and projects as possible, you understand the nuances and the real problems the team or company is having, which helps you make better decisions and learn from them, which ultimately helps grow the company.

Isn’t it the same thing Steve Jobs did at Apple? He would wander around Apple’s office and try to be involved in as many decisions and projects as possible. Here’s the short clip:

“And so what I do all day is meet with teams, work on ideas, and solve problems to create new products and marketing programs—whatever is needed.”

The big takeaway: When you’re a startup, try to be involved in as many decisions and projects as possible. But when you become “Big” choose carefully and only be involved in the projects and decisions that’ll move the needle and help grow the company.

The Company Culture

Meta is one of those “Sweet” companies that you don’t hear about their toxic work culture—for the simple fact that it doesn't exist! I have never heard of Meta being accused of a toxic work culture or going aggressive with its employees, have you? And that’s their superpower. Though, there are not one, but two things that stand out about Meta’s work culture:

1. Transparency

2. Values WLB (Work-Life Balance)

Meta tries to be transparent about as many things as possible internally with its team members and leaders—as it believes, transparency creates trust and holds people accountable. From the office layout to internal tool communication & collaboration to weekly sessions with Zuck is centered around believing in transparency. For example, at Meta, any employee can wander around any group, read messages, take a look at customers' email queries, and ask questions to any department about the things they are interested in or just want to know, and no one really says “Why are you asking?”

One of the software engineers at Meta, Mai H. says: “There’s this strong culture of collaboration and transparency that I’ve never seen before.” When a Meta employee is saying that, I believe it’s 100% true.

Another transparency aspect of Meta shows in the weekly sessions with leaders and Zuck. No matter who you are in the organization, from a newly-hired designer to a senior software engineer, anyone can ask anything related to the company to Zuck and the leader involved. Because Meta believes: People deserve to be heard and to have a voice — even when that means defending the right of people we disagree with.

So that’s about Meta being extremely transparent. However, I have heard that with the recent controversies and dramas, Meta has slightly tweaked its approach to what level it should be transparent to its employees and team. And that’s why the company doesn’t share sensitive documents, reports, or press releases anymore unless it thinks it’s the right time to share.

Now let’s talk about another great work culture Meta has: Values Work-Life balance.

I’ve heard about Tesla’s toxic work culture, I’ve heard about Amazon’s toxic work culture, and I’ve heard about Uber’s toxic work culture—the work culture that really destroys the employees’ work-life balance. But Meta has had no toxic work culture from the beginning. I’ve searched about Meta’s toxic work culture on Google, Reddit, and Quora, and tried to find videos on YouTube. Surprisingly I found none, which is pretty impressive!

Meta really prioritizes Work-Life Balance, and this Reddit post sums up everything:

I think WLB is fine on my team. My manager encourages everyone to use their days off, there's never any expectations to work late, and deadlines are pretty reasonable. The company has also been giving a few extra company-wide days off, and even a few extra PTO days on top of what we already have, which is quite generous (at least for the US). In other words, there is fortunately alignment with leadership on encouraging people to take time off, even though expectations are still quite high otherwise.

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Let’s be clear: Toxic or hustle work culture doesn’t work in the long run as it’s not sustainable. If a company wants to create exceptional products again and again and again for 10 to 20 years consistently, it can’t have a toxic work culture. Period. The company has to value employees’ work-life balance. And that’s what Meta has been doing for the last two decades—resulting in building and creating exceptional products and services.

The big takeaway: Be as transparent as you can with your employees and team. Because transparency creates trust. And don’t be a company that is being accused of the hustle or toxic work culture. Understand that work is as important as your employees’ personal lives, and as a company, it’s your job to make sure your employees are having a great time working there. The CEO of Airbnb, Brian Chesky has done a great job saying this: “Don’t Fuck Up the Culture.”

The Design Principle

Steve Jobs has this famous quote about design that I thought was fascinating:

“Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.”

Different companies have different approaches to how they design their products. But all great companies believe in “Great design” and it's one of the integral parts of the company. It’s also worth saying that great design isn’t about fancy logos, fancy colors, and fancy animations. It’s about making customers' lives easier and giving them a great experience.

Here’s how Meta thinks about designing its products:

At Meta, design is a tool for visualizing and evaluating ideas. At Meta, designers are the ones who come together first to paint a clear picture of where we're headed from a user experience perspective. Then we figure out things like the right organizational structure to move the project forward.

So how does Meta do it?

Meta believes in data-driven design. Whatever they build—new products or features, they heavily rely on the data and the user experience. And the way they do it is by A/B testing. It’s the simple framework of doubling down on what works and cutting down on what doesn't. On top of that, instead of shipping a fully finished product, Meta often releases small incremental changes and monitors how users interact with them. If a new feature improves engagement, retention, or time spent on the platform, they gradually roll out to more users. If it fails to meet key performance metrics, they either refine or scrape entirely.

Meta designs its products not for aesthetics or theoretical usability but for engagement and behavioral optimization. Every design decision from the smallest UI tweak to large-scale feature rollouts is backed by behavioral analytics, engagement metrics, and feedback loops.

The perfect example of this would be Facebook News Feed. It initially was in chronological order, but as they gathered feedback and carefully noticed the users’ behavior, they introduced algorithm ranking, personalized recommendations, and a reaction system. Each of these changes was religiously tested on a small group of people before making them live for millions of people worldwide.

Another example of this? Instagram Story. No doubt Meta copied it from Snapchat, but it did a better job than them. How? By analyzing and religiously testing with different angles and placements, observing how people are behaving with each change. The company doubled down on what worked and cut down on what didn’t. The result? Today, Instagram Story is one of the most favorite features for most Instagrammers.

The big takeaways: Solve problems for people, not pixels. It’s easy to fall for the wrong things when it comes to design—the fancy logo, the fancy font, the fancy color, the fancy animations, or the fancy graphics. But in reality, that’s not what the design is about. It’s about solving users' problems and giving customers a great experience. And the way you can achieve this is by data-driven decision-making and observing the users’ behavior.

The Recruiting Strategy

Every single successful tech company posts job offers online, but that’s not what separates them from their competitors. What separates Meta from other tech companies on recruiting aspect is that the company regularly hires new candidates from Employee Referral. To be clear, this isn’t the primary way of hiring new employees at Meta. But they really prioritize this strategy to find talented, smartest, and skilled employees around the world.

The company believes that current employees, who understand the company culture and expectations, are best suited to identify potential hires who would align well with the organization. This works because when employees are involved in the recruitment process, they feel a sense of ownership and investment in the company's growth. Moreover, referred candidates often have a clearer understanding of the company culture and expectations, leading to better alignment and potentially higher retention rates.

But what do employees get in exchange for a successful referral?

Employees are incentivized a “Referral bonus” directly in cash. The bonus amount largely depends on the role of the job, the candidate's location, and things like that—varying from $1,000 to $10,000. However, the employees only get paid the bonus amount if the new candidate is successfully hired. in the following Quora answer, Charles, one of Former Datacenter Site Managers, says he once got $1,000 for referring a new candidate:

I personally believe this recruiting strategy has massive upsides, and is one of the best hiring strategies to find new, talented, and smart employees. Because when you’re running a million or billion-dollar company that has hundreds of thousands of employees, pretty much everyone in the company may know other people who are working in similar fields somewhere else.

So when you incentivize your employees to help you find new employees, they can ping the people they know who might be looking for their next endeavor. This dramatically increases the quality of employees wanting to work for your company. But even if you’re not a big company, let’s say your company has 50 employees, you can still use this strategy to find talented employees when you’re hiring—just incentivize your existing employees.

The big takeaway: Charlie Munger once said: “Show me the incentive and I'll show you the outcome” And this Meta’s recruiting strategy is the same—incentivizing existing company employees to find new, smart, talented, employees. The beauty of this strategy is that anyone, even a newborn startup, can use it. This strategy clearly works for Meta, which you can see on this Reddit thread and this Glassdoor post. So if you are hiring and looking for a new employee, use this approach and see if it works for you.

Thanks for reading, catch you on the next one.