Meta's Zuckerberg interview with Gary Vaynerchuk and Web 3 buys the Constitution
The Update:
Over the weekend Gary Vaynerchuck (or GaryVee) released a haphazard, but remarkably authentic interview with Meta’s Zuckerberg. I thought this was an important public relations moment for Meta for two reasons:
This interview was strategically picked with Vaynerchuk. He is a pre-IPO investor in Facebook, and has been a pioneer in digital advertising capitalising on the rise of social media over the last decade. He has also become something of an evangelist for Web3, cryptocurrency, and the burgeoning NFT community. As opposed to Ben Thompson’s deeply philosophical and intellectual interview with Zuckerberg, this round was to appeal to a more mainstream audience.
The more comfortable setting of the interview revealed a few gems as to the direction of Meta’s potential platforms. It is clear that this carefully planned campaign of media appearances with alternative (but wildly influential) media sources means that Zuckerberg is really trying to communicate directly with those audiences who will be most likely to pick up his mantle - and adopt his platforms.
AR and VR Adoption and Timeline:
GV: Is it your intuition that [mass adoption] is 3-5 years away?
MZ: So you want to think about it on the Augmented Reality side and the Virtual Reality side. VR is here. Quest was really the form factor that was necessary that make it mainstream. Quest 2 was a meaningful step beyond that… There are all these different use cases in VR. The fencing hologram you saw with Lee Kiefer will need augmented reality glasses. That is a harder problem because you will need to create an entirely new optical stack… For augmented reality the important form factor is that you can wear normal looking glasses, right?
GV: Do you think [for AR] this ever becomes a contact lens instead of cumbersome glasses?
MZ: Some people are working on that but it is quite a ways off. Whatever is projecting the image needs to have an internet connection, and it needs to be powered. I think we are going to see normal looking glasses that can project images into the world within 5 years, and I think, you know, that’s a conservative estimate.
The fact that Virtual Reality has already arrived in a form fit for mass adoption, and will be improved incrementally from here says something about the narrowness of its use case. Zuckerberg was holding his cards to his chest when he continued onto say that Quest now has millions of users. Whether VR can be as ubiquitous as the PC or mobile phone is an open question, but one that probably take many years to play out.
The future of Augmented Reality is less foreseeable, Zuckerberg recognises that the technology to enable mass adoption doesn’t exist yet. As I have written about before Meta’s strategy with respect to AR is positioned around making adoption easy and fashionable. To this end, the glasses that can project images into the real world will need to look normal. It is important to not that Meta’s current Stories product, still look different from a normal pair of Ray Bans, and this is with them housing technology that will only be a portion of what will ultimately need to be. We have the destination, and the timeline but not yet the path, nor the UX we can expect.
Recruiting and Reorientating the Organisation
MZ: You would be hard pressed to find any other organisation that cares as much about this [Metaverse generally] and is putting this much energy into building all these different parts of the future. What you get for that is that Meta has become this premiere place where if you care about these problems that’s, where you will go to work on them.
Here Zuckerberg touches on an acute problem which has been levelled generally at Big Tech. That problem is the ability to recruit top talent to your firm. Unlike the other firms of its ilk, Meta probably experiences the lowest level of monopolistic characteristics. It is likely that Meta needs the ability to continue to recruit talented engineers to a much higher degree than its peers for this very reason. Until now, the Facebook brand, and even Zuckerberg himself, was reaching a nadir in general public opinion. The best engineers will, by definition, always have their pick of career options, and the idealistic and socially minded amongst them wouldn’t want to work for the next News Corp.
The step to Meta leaves behind the Facebook brand, and re-orientates the company toward white space again. Whether or not that white space is a legitimate commercial opportunity is another question. Until this very moment, it has never been acknowledged that this was a problem but even a tacit acknowledgement is acknowledgement in my eyes.
Interoperability:
MZ: I like your Nicks hoodie, but just imagine if the only place where you could wear it was at the sports arena where you bought it?
This was a fascinating point. The Metaverse as we know it today, is a large number of silo’d digital arenas, with little or no interoperability. If you buy a special skin in Roblox, you cant use it in Minecraft. Zuckerberg’s logic is that interoperability within a large digital environment will make the value of existing digital goods greater. True networks get more valuable with each new user, and this was key to Facebook Blue’s ascent so the logic here is sound. Offering to be the platform of that interoperability is an extremely valuable opportunity, and only gets greater and greater as the number of digital goods, assets, and currencies proliferates.
To some of the less relatable parts of the Web3 movement a platform that is familiar, for which you might find an on ramp through an existing Web2 application, could be an enormous boon in terms of user adoption.
Web3 buys the Constitution:
In much stranger news, a Decentralised Autonomous Organisation known as ConstitutionDAO, is raising funds via its own token offering to purchase the last publicly available 1st edition of the United States Constitution. As of this writing they has raised almost $3M to purchase this historical artefact from a Sotheby’s Auction on Thursday. While I have generally been credulous at the developments of NFT, and the ecosystem that has been built up around Ethereum, this is certainly bringing the world crypto and digital assets to the real world. When asked where the copy will be held after the auction is won:
I will be a keen onlooker to see how this develops. Ancient and (ultra)modern history collide!