Hey all, Robin here—I hope you enjoyed my last Substack on Rec Room. Today we’re going to be doing something a bit different - going forward I’ll also be covering key executives and leaders who are shaping future trends, their past, and what we know about their plans.
Today we’re discussing Andrew Bosworth—Meta’s current Vice President of Augmented and Virtual technologies and future Chief Technology Officer. He’s a key pillar of Zuck’s past, present, and future empire with a rich history at the company.
The Microsoft Five
Andrew Bosworth is an American engineer. Not much is known about his family or their history other than that their blood goes back generations in Silicon Valley—his family consisted of farmers of apricots and prunes in the hills of Sunnydale and Cupertino. He studied Computer Science at Harvard university and apparently has the word latin “veritas” tattooed on his arm, which means “truth”. It’s funny how he chose that word since in many books about Facebook he is described as being a truth teller.
Boz (which I will be referring to him as going forward) signed up for Facebook on the second day it launched and was user 1,681 - just a year and a half later he was courted to become an engineer, but had temporarily declined and sought employment at Microsoft. Within a year, Boz would end up joining the company as an engineer since Microsoft never allowed him to pitch any products and was full of unneeded bureaucracy. He was one of the “Microsoft Five” - a key team at Facebook that would shape the future of the company.
The News Feed
Bosworth’s first job was helping engineer and create Facebook’s infamous News Feed which aggregated events, trends, paid content, and content your Facebook friends would share.
Using Facebook needs to feel like you’re using a futuristic government-style interface to access a database full of information linked to every person. The user needs to be able to look at information at any depth . . . The user experience needs to feel “full.” That is, when you click on a person in a governmental database, there is always information about them. This makes it worth going to their page or searching for them. We must make it so every search is worth doing and every link is worth clicking on. Then the experience will be beautiful.
- Mark Zuckerberg
The dream was for it to be essentially be minority report, but on your computer and eventually on your phone for information.
Post IPO years and Ads Engineering
After the News Feed, not much is known about what Bosworth did, but he purportedly “wandered” around Facebook from team to team until Zuckerberg invited him on a walk to offer him a job as head of the Ads Engineering team—to which Boz thought was a horrible idea. Boz had no experience with ads and he was in charge of consumer products for the most part, but Zuckerberg wanted him to occupy the post since he believed Boz could best tap into ways to monetize the user habits of 800 million Facebook users.
Head of Hardware + AR and VR
In 2018, Bozworth was appointed Head of Hardware after Hugo Barra was binned as the Head of the Oculus division (his role was purportedly temporary at best). Bozworth has overseen the development of the Quest, Quest 2, and Portal (Facebook’s strange version of a video phone that was a colossal failure for privacy reasons and a lack of consumer interest.).
But Bosworth has helped Facebook see pretty solid success, he helped ensure that this Christmas the Oculus Quest 2 was a success by embarking on an incredible marketing campaign (Substack on this coming soon).
Why Bosworth matters?
I know what you’re thinking right now.
"Robin, why would you choose someone like him instead of Sheryl or even Zuck.”
It’s really damn simple: Bosworth is spearheading Meta into the future more so than Mark Zuckerberg. Zuckerberg’s primary focus is being preoccupied - trying to keep up with social commerce on Facebook and Instagram in his day to day as an executive to focus on the short term (while Boz handles the long term).
Web 3.0, the Metaverse, and Boz
Meta not only seeks to shape the Metaverse, they also hope to shape Web 3.0 as well - according to internal documents from the New York Times.
“(the blockchain will have) profound impacts on our industry over the next decade”
“My overall guidance is to target a deep compatibility with the blockchain”
“There aren’t many places where I expect us to depend on it exclusively yet, but if we see an opportunity to work jointly with entrepreneurs in the web3 space I expect it will be worth the effort”
“While most people are happy to use Facebook and Google, some are not, and those that opt out are disproportionately involved in creating a genuinely impressive wave of technology.”
If what Boz is saying here is true then Meta is becoming a titan that I’ve never seen before - a large tech company that can seemingly abandon its ego and explore new markets. For most of history, this has never been true, and in the few cases that is has been true, the businesses that do enter rarely end up controlling the market. However, the market for Web 3 largely does not exist yet, and in the few areas that it does, it’s growing rapidly as people are looking for alternatives to big tech.
If Meta wants to throw their hat in the ring then they know that it is an existential threat to them and their urgency to enter this market indicates that it is about to escape it’s nascency.
It appears that Meta is doing the same thing they did with the Metaverse back in 2019—they identified a large threat and slowly began entering the market to compete with any smaller incumbents.
Facebook Horizons (as it was called then) has been in beta testing since July of 2019. Facebook’s Metaverse ambitions are nothing new.
I’m expecting their Web 3 ambitions to follow a very similar path—they’re probably just starting to develop their first product (probably a wallet of some kind).
Looking towards the future
The fact that Web 3 is even being floated around at Meta is a sign that times are changing.
They know that this will destroy them if they don’t prepare and work with it.
It’s about to become Web 3’s moment.
Just like it was the Metaverse’s moment back in July.
We have the world’s 7th largest company by market cap entering a seemingly obscure market that, at best, poses a minor threat to them 3 years out from now.
Will Meta dominate Web 3 and the Metaverse or will it be the killing blow to them they think it will be?
It doesn’t matter - what matters is that this is happening.
We’ll have the pleasure of watching, investing, and using these future products even if the majority of the world has never even heard of Web 3 or the Metaverse.
But they will in time.
Thank you for reading, do good in the world, and remember to stay innovative!
Disclaimer: This is not financial advice in any way shape or form. I’m literally just an angry and angsty bird writing down my thoughts on the future and technology. Mom said the tendies would be done in 5 minutes but it has been 20.