Bob, thanks for being with us today. We're talking to a room full of CTOs. And I want to start out by asking you about your role as CTO. You've been in place since 2022, I believe. In that short time, I want to hear, you know, we've all read about the changing role of the CTO and how they've taken on a whole lot more responsibilities. How has your role evolved in that very, very short time? Then I have a follow up.
Yeah, I mean, CTO is a much less standardized role than CFO or CEO, which have kind of almost statutory responsibilities. We don't, and that's a consequence. We get away with doing as little as we possibly can, as any good engineer would do. Fundamental premise of engineering is be lazy so that you can build the machine that does the work for you. That's beautiful. Even within my time, 20 years now almost at Facebook now Meta, each of the CTOs that we've had, Bret Taylor and Mike, did very different things with the role and what the role was for them. So part of that's also a strength of Mark's. He kind of takes what we're the best at and puts it there and finds someone else to help us with the rest of it. For me at least, it's been a very, very deep technology dive as CTO into these pioneering new technologies: augmented reality, virtual reality, now robotics. It's the funnest job around. Obviously, for different people, I do a large organizational footprint that I'm kind of managing and I'm advising the company on strategy and AI and technology. So I have a role that is not that different to the job I had before I was CTO. But I actually think it's a great strength that as a discipline we can adapt to whatever is needed by the organization at that period of time.
So when you enter a new role, and by the way, if you don't already read Bazaar.com, I highly recommend it. I have gone way down the rabbit hole on this and it's basically a treatise in management. You may not agree with all the principles, but I guarantee they will challenge you. And I've joked with a couple of my colleagues that having read most of them, I pretty much have an MBA at this point. Thank you very much. But in all seriousness, when you take on new roles, I want you to take me back to something memorable that Mark has said to you that's been memorable and inspiring and motivating for you in adopting a new role.
Yeah. Every time Mark offers me a new job, I say, no, I already have a job. I like it. I'm doing great. We got a bunch of stuff. He really has to sell me on new jobs because I already have a job and he's really good at it. And what I think the really clever thing that he does, he's done it. He did it when I took over the ads organization years ago. He did it again when I took on Reality Labs, at the time was called Air VR. He was like, 'What would this have to look like for you to be excited about it?' And you go off and you're pretty... you already said no twice. So you're like, 'All right, let's imagine that.' And then you end up coming up with a thing that it would have to look like for you to be excited. And he's like, 'Great, make it look like that.' This is the great Mark Zuckerberg jujitsu trick that you can use to get anyone to take almost any job, it turns out. And it's so effective because it gets us out of the present moment of thinking and into a new one. And so, for example, augmented reality, virtual reality. I was just kind of skeptical. I wasn't sure. And I was like, 'Well, for this to really be meaningful, you'd have to be taking on the mobile phone effectively with augmented reality, which is going to take this kind of an investment, which is insane. And for virtual reality, you'd have to be taking on something substantial like remote work, like people not having to physically commute to do education and jobs.' And it's like, 'Great, let's do those.' And so then once that's thrown down and you've already sold yourself, basically, it's a pretty good trick.
You wrote a memo that was circulating in late 2024 and it was published in 2025. You talked about this would be the year of Greatness for Reality Labs, a time determining whether the metaverse would go down as the work of visionaries or a legendary misadventure. We're about halfway through the year. Where are you on that tradeoff between the visionary outlook and the misadventure ahead?
Yeah, history has its eyes on us, so to speak. I don't know if I will judge it at the end of this year, will judge at the end of the decade. But this does feel like the pivotal year. The thing that people will get wrong is we tend to think of years as interchangeable. We're like, 'Yep, every year you just turn the crank, you get one unit of work. It's all equivalent.' And it may average out, but it is definitely not the case that every year is of equivalent opportunity or value. Some years in a decade are just worth more than other years for environmental reasons, for competitive reasons, for technological reasons. Coming into this year, we knew we'd done a couple of interesting things. We'd broken through with the Ray-Ban Meta eyeglasses. It's a convergence of two different investments of ours coming together in a way that was not just exciting to consumers, it's exciting to our competitors. So suddenly we go from toiling in relative obscurity to being very much in the world with a product that is very attractive to consumers and to competitors. So your window, the clock is started on a competition coming, and that just means that the progress we make in this year is of disproportionate value to any year before or after it closes. And so I really wanted to impress upon, especially some of my younger engineers for whom they're like, 'Oh yeah, cool. This is like another year in the career.' This might be the biggest one. You might five or six years from now look back and be like, 'Man, that was the year I should have cranked hard in that year.' And we've had years like that before. 2008 was a crazy year for us at Facebook and there was the downturn. There was also an opportunity that came with that. So we've had crazy years and I look back and they just weren't all of equal value. And the amount of work I put into those special years had disproportionate impact on the ones that followed.
What do you need to see by the end of this year to help you answer that question to determine whether this was make and not break?
Yeah, I think the way this will be judged in the limit of time is always the market. The market is always the determining factor. Do people adopt the technology or do they not? And that is what ultimately will drive competitors and industries to standardize or formalize around those things. The market is actually, especially when it comes to hardware, a trailing indicator. So you look for early indicators to some degree. You do have to have a level of confidence and taste in-house. You know, this is something I learned from Sheryl Sandberg. You're sure these two always talk about? Most companies don't fail because they got beaten by a competitor. Most companies fail because they didn't execute their own plan correctly. And so what I try to do with the team is really focus us not so much on the competitive landscape as on are we executing to our standards. And so we have a set of ambitious plans for the year. Right now we're on track, but admittedly a lot of these plans are kind of back weighted, especially some of these research programs are yielding now. So what we'll know at the end of the year is whether we executed on our plan or not. What we'll know in five years' time is whether that was enough.
We'll come back to some of your specific plans in just a second. I want to talk a little bit about the announcement that came down just last week with Anduril and the role you're going to jointly develop extended reality for the military. Last year, you said Meta would let U.S. government and contractors working on national security use your AI models for military purposes. Obviously, there's a shift at hand. What's driving? Is it political? Is it economic?
Well, no, it's for quite a few of us. It's personal. I mean, so in my case, I have family members in the armed services. I want them to have the best equipment available. And I have always been a very patriotic American and believe in the importance of our role, not just inside the nation, but globally. So there's a much stronger patriotic underpinning that I think people give Silicon Valley credit for. But taking a step deeper, this is actually a return to grace for the valley, potentially not just from Meta, but from Google and other companies. The Valley was founded on a three-way investment between the military, academics, and private industry. That was the founding of it. There would be no technology if we weren't all tasked with the problem of computing naval ballistic trajectories during the first two world wars. That is the heart and soul of the investment that led to what we are today. And that really got severed for a while there. And some of that is because of the procurement laws that changed in the sixties and seventies. Some of that's the Last Supper that happened in 1985. We ended up kind of going our separate ways and I think we're worse off for it. I think we're spending more money for worse technology in the public sector. And I think the private sector is not attacking some of the most valuable challenges for us to solve. And I think it's a mismatch. So I'm pretty excited about the opportunity to bring these two things together. And it makes a ton of sense if you think about the amount of private investment that Meta has put into developing novel technologies, things like silicon carbide for our Orion AR glasses. These have obviously positive applications for the military and not just the military, but also more broadly inside of government. There's a bunch of research that would benefit from this. And we would benefit from them being partners of ours. So you really can work together on these pieces. I'm pretty excited about that. I think there was a period for, let's say, the last decade where a silent majority of people wanted to pursue this technology for public benefit and really felt like they couldn't do that for whatever reason. And I think the tide has turned enough where that majority is actually much more comfortable being vocal about their belief that this is good for not just us as a business, but for us as contributing to the whole of mankind.
How much bigger do you anticipate military will become as a segment for you?
It's way too early to say that. So far it's like a zero. So, you know, let's start with one and go from there. I think there's no reason it couldn't be meaningful in the impact that it has. Realistically, consumer markets are the markets that are going to drive costs down for the military benefit when they adopt consumer technologies or consumer technologies are developed at scale with their applications in mind. That's when the American taxpayer benefits. That's when the American soldier, a service member, benefits. Because now you've got technology that's at scale, proven for consumer grade, which is really the only way to get cost effective new technology. And that's what, by the way, it's not just us. This goes back to pick a favorite, Lockheed, probably the most famous example in the Valley. One of the main reasons that Fairchild is even in the Valley is because of Lockheed. So there's a really long history here that we are kind of hoping to return to. But it is not even day one yet.
Are there technologies you will not develop for the military? You're working on a framework and what does that tell you? Like, what shouldn't you do?
Yeah, well, first and foremost, you know, we're not a defense contractor. So the reason we have this great partnership with Anduril, a real defense contractor, they've got a system and a program. We're supplying them with parts. So everything that we're doing is for consumers. We're developing technology with a target on consumer audiences. It turns out a lot of that technology could be multi-use. And that is really where I want to establish the partnership. So we're not changing anything that we're doing one way or the other so much as we're now extending the connection to and through Anduril to the government. If they want to take that technology and kind of run the last mile with it.
Got it. So speaking of early days, still early days in terms of Reality Labs still generating about 1% of revenue, if my math serves, for Meta in the first quarter. A decade from now, if you have your druthers, will we think about Meta as much a hardware company as a social media, as a communications company?
