Dan Rose Profile picture
Sep 19, 2020 16 tweets 3 min read Read on X
May 18, 2012 - there was a crisp blue sky at FB’s campus as we rang the opening bell. Emotions ran high as we took a brief moment to celebrate our hard work. The stock traded up for the first few hours. Then it traded down for the next 12 months...
Facebook’s IPO coincided with a paradigm shift in technology. The majority of our usage and revenue transitioned from desktop to mobile practically overnight. Facebook’s journey to a mobile-first company started with a strategic error and ended with a pivot. Here’s the story:
Mobile initially presented us with a number of challenges, and our instinct was to innovate our way around them. The heart of our strategy was HTML5, which turned out to be a flawed approach. We spent 2 years sprinting down the wrong path before reversing course. Why?
1/ Our engineers coded in PHP, a web-based language that didn’t translate to native mobile apps. Rather than write native apps for 5+ mobile platforms (this was 2010/11), we used web-based HTML5 so we could write once, read everywhere (just like the web).
2/ Our web gaming platform was thriving which validated our aspiration to be a platform provider. But there was no obvious way to translate our web platform to mobile. Apple rejected our platform aspirations, so we decided to fork Android and build our own OS + HTML5 wrapper.
3/ Our web platform also generated 30% of our revenue (payments + ads), and the rest of our revenue was from ads in the right-hand column of our website which didn’t exist on mobile. It was not obvious how we would be able to make money in a mobile world.
We created a dedicated team to focus on mobile. My team led OEM, carrier and developer relations for a “social OS.” Bret Taylor led our development efforts and Zuck drove our strategy. We were proudly all-in, which is often the right approach in a world of limited resources.
But there were 2 big problems with our approach: HTML5 apps performed worse than native apps, making our products slow/laggy. And mobile started consolidating around iOS and Android as developers and users wanted fewer platforms. We were swimming upstream with a broken paddle.
All of this came to head around the time of our IPO. 6 months after we went public the stock was trading at 50% of our initial offering price with no bottom in sight. It was clear we were on the wrong path and running out of time. We couldn’t bury our heads, we had to take action
Zuck pivoted the company overnight. He shut down our HTML5 efforts and mobile OS aspirations. He put all of our engineers through emergency bootcamp to learn how to code for native iOS and Android. He promoted Boz from our consumer team to rethink ads in a mobile context.
It takes time to move a giant ship, and those next 12 months were very tough. Zuck prioritized app performance over everything else, including revenue and innovation. Our products needed to feel modern and snappy before we could even consider monetizing or adding new features.
Zuck insisted that every product review start with mobile-first designs. And while our apps were being re-written, we started to think about putting ads in News Feed. Our bar was very high - the ads needed to feel as relevant as any other content from your friends.
We originally thought the key to ads relevance would be social context, but this was wrong. Relevance was driven by auction liquidity and targeting (more ads to choose from = better odds of showing a good ad). Once we reached critical mass, users embraced seeing ads in their feed
One year after our IPO we finally turned the corner on mobile and never looked back. Growth and engagement exploded as everyone got smartphones. Users clicked on relevant ads which brought in more advertisers which made the ads more relevant - our revenue flywheel was spinning.
Our mobile app strategy turned out to be way more powerful than our web platform, and the revenue we lost from web games was quickly replaced by News Feed ads. Zuck didn’t give up on his platform aspirations, he just refocused his energy on the next paradigm shift in AR/VR.
Zuck taught me the best leaders are willing to swim upstream when the stakes are high, and swallow their pride when it’s time to change course. Admit mistakes but don’t dwell on them. Whatever your strategy, be decisive and go all-in. And lead from the front at all times.

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More from @DanRose999

Jan 8
My personal habits, insights and inspiration to stay sharp in business and life:
Read biographies before bed

I go to bed every night reading biographies. Studying great leaders from history reveals clear themes and patterns. And by falling asleep to heroic stories, the lessons seep into your subconscious. amazon.com/Churchill-Walk…
Be vulnerable

Deep and lasting relationships are built during moments of vulnerability, leading to a foundation of trust. Nothing is more rewarding (and uncomfortable) than human connection formed through authentic interaction.
Read 12 tweets
May 24, 2023
Watching the movie Air reminded me of a few times in my life when I trusted my gut and put all my chips on the table. You can’t be successful in business without taking risk, and there’s no guarantee it will work out. But when it does… Here’s a story about my big bets:
After my first year of business school at U Michigan I got a summer internship at Amazon. 3 weeks into the job they offered me a full-time position. I had a wife and 18 month-old baby. Amazon was a 5 year-old start-up, though already a public company.
When I told my friends and family I was dropping out, everyone thought I was making a huge mistake. But I knew I would learn more about business at Amazon than in school. Allison & I never looked back, literally. We hired movers to pack our stuff and never set foot in Ann Arbor.
Read 10 tweets
Dec 9, 2022
The best companies always have a strong senior leadership team, filled with people who complement each other and play well together, like a winning sports team. Here’s how I built my career by learning how to play my position at the highest level:
As a kid, soccer was my primary sport. I played center half-back and rarely scored a goal, but I was the leader in assists. I was co-captain of my high school varsity team, along with my best friend who played striker and scored most of our goals.
On the other hand, I made the mistake of thinking I should play quarterback on the football team. I rode the bench as 3rd-string QB until I switched to wide receiver where I had more success. (Eventually I left the team and found a new way to assist, as a male cheerleader!)
Read 12 tweets
Nov 20, 2022
I love to read autobiographies of people who started iconic companies. I was fortunate to work for Zuck and Bezos as their origin stories were still being written, and it's fun to pattern match against other founders. Here’s a list of some of my favorite business biographies:
1/ The Autobiography of a Founder: It’s one thing to be a great founder, it's another thing entirely to write a compelling book about your life and your company's origin story. Each of these iconic CEO’s wrote amazing autobiographies:
Sam Walton wrote an autobiography shortly before he died, and it's so good I’ve read it twice. When Walmart sued Amazon in the 90s for poaching executives, Bezos quoted from Sam’s book in his defense :-)
amazon.com/gp/product/055…
Read 21 tweets
Oct 2, 2022
The best tech companies drive strategy through product. This is why founders and CEOs tend to be product leaders, and product / design / engineering is more important than ops / marketing / finance. Here’s what this looked like for me as a business leader at Amzn and Facebook:
Jeff and Mark were very different, but both of them spent most of their time in product meetings, and they both scrutinized product ideas down to the pixel. They didn’t waste cycles debating strategy in the abstract, they drove it via the roadmap. They never hired consultants.
Everyone in the company understood the strategy because it showed up in the product’s evolution. There was no need for long slide decks explaining where the company was going. Company all-hands meetings simply focused on the product roadmap. Our product leaders were the stars.
Read 8 tweets
Sep 8, 2022
When I first started out in my career, I thought I had to “fake it until you make it.” Later I learned to ask questions and embrace situations where I didn’t have all the answers. Here's how I went from being an insecure manager to a more honest leader:
Amazon was my first real job, and I found myself surrounded by brilliant people with strong opinions. Everyone seemed to know exactly what they were talking about, and Jeff Bezos was the smartest person in the room. It felt to me like a culture where the strongest survived.
In that environment, I thought I needed to project confidence. For example, after a promotion to merchandising manager, I was asked about my forecast for gross margin vs contribution margin. I barely understood these concepts at the time, yet I pretended to have clear answers.
Read 18 tweets

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