The Social Reckoning Asks No Hard Questions

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Happy Tuesday.

We’re live on YouTube and 𝕏.

The current thing in tech and business is Mark Zuckerberg saying Meta has reached AI ‘frontier’.

Today’s Lineup

Zurich Head of Private Equity and Venture Capital William Chu at 11:40 AM
AMP PBC Founder Anjney Midha at 11:40 AM
Author Neal Stephenson at 12:00 PM
Ithaca Holdings Co-Founders & Co-CEOs Ravi Gupta, John Hegeman at 12:20 PM
Yes Chef Group Co-Founder Jack Goldburg at 12:30 PM
XBOW Founder & CEO Oege de Moor at 12:55 PM
Albert Co-Founder & CEO Nick Talken at 1:05 PM
Atomic Machines Founder & CEO Jeff Holden at 1:15 PM
NFL Champion Eli Manning at 1:25 PM
Chad Powers Executive Producer Michael Waldron at 1:25 PM

Run of Show

The Social Reckoning Asks No Hard Questions

I saw The Social Reckoning this weekend. Not quite a sequel to The Social Network, and the Mark Zuckerberg character (now played by Jeremy Strong instead of Jesse Eisenberg) is much more peripheral, since the story follows data engineer Frances Haugen and The Wall Street Journal investigative reporter Jeff Horwitz.

The whole thing feels out of date in the scaling era. The race towards superintelligence is so dominant in the minds of all tech people right now, I’m not surprised that this movie is underperforming. Worldwide opening was ~$9m on a budget of ~$40m, Rotten Tomatoes has a 55% score across 215 reviews.

The acting is fairly compelling and the story ebbs and flows nicely over the two hour run time, but it feels like a time capsule from a completely different time period. Mark Zuckerberg has so thoroughly reinvented himself, by restyling his wardrobe, renaming his company, and expanding into fashionable smart accessories and AI personal assistants that even hearing the word “Facebook” feels like a blast from the past.

There are hard questions to ask right now. Will Muse margins be comparable to Meta’s core ad business? Will the retention curve smile? Does Muse Wonder change the underlying frontier model margin thesis? Aaron Sorkin shirks his duty to speak truth to power and shies away from “going there” instead focusing on old stories that have already been settled in the courts.

Clip Spotlight: Zach Yadegari, founder of Persona, explains how he's building his AI assistant around that belief:

"The average consumer actually does not value their time. You would think they do, but they really do not.”

"What people do care about is saving or making money.”