Mark Zuckerberg and Peter Thiel
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Peter Thiel and Mark Zuckerberg on Facebook, Millennials, and predictions for 2030
From: Nick Clegg
Sent: Friday, December 20, 2019 8:13 PM
To: Peter Thiel
Subject: Milennials
Hi Peter
Sheryl suggested I reach out to you as she says you and Mark have been discussing the need for FB to remain more attuned to Milennials. Would be great if I could hear your thoughts so that I can help support the direction of travel.
Do tell me if/when you might be able to have a chat on the phone -- I am in London/Madrid from tomorrow till Jan 4th, but generally available.
Hope this finds you well otherwise.
Best
Nick
From: Peter Thiel
Date: Tuesday, December 31, 2019 at 1:03 AM
To: Nick Clegg
Cc: Mark Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg, Marc Andreessen
Subject: Re: Milennials
Hi Nick,
I thought it might be helpful to put some of my thoughts in writing and am taking the liberty of cc'ing a few others here.
In important ways, Facebook is the Millennial company par excellence. It was started by a team of Millennials and remains by far the most successful Millennial company; as measured by market capitalization, the next closest ones are Stripe and Airbnb, which at $35B and $30B, respectively, are each barely 5% the size of Facebook. The product was initially used by Millennial college students and became an important way in which the generational experience of Millennials differed radically from that of older people; and even today, Millennials remain our most active users.
As a result of this history and success, there is a certain sense in which Mark Zuckerberg has been cast as *the spokesman* for the Millennial generation — as the single person who gives voice to the hopes and fears and the unique experiences of this generation, at least in the USA. Some examples: When Mark shares on Facebook, a part of the narrative is a generational narrative, e.g., that young people are more comfortable with technology and therefore share more on Facebook than their elders. When Mark and Priscilla commit to giving away 99% of their wealth during their lifetimes (and do so at a much earlier age than, say, Buffett or Gates), then this story again gets understood in generational terms, e.g., that Millennials are more generous and philanthropic and start thinking about these things at a much earlier point in their lives. And more dramatically and powerfully, when Facebook connects the world, this gets cast in generational terms, e.g., that the younger generation will bridge the many divisions in our world and build a more peaceful world than past generations were able to build; and when these utopian hopes disappoint, Mark and Facebook receive a disproportionate amount of blame. [This whole arc was traced by David Kirkpatrick, whose 2011 book "The Facebook Effect" encapsulated his utopian projections for younger people generally and whose derangement in recent years can best be understood as the disappointment of these same unrealistic hopes.]
Of course, there are numerous ways in which this role (Mark as Millennial spokesman) is both pretty unfair and highly inappropriate. It is unfair because this much of a burden should not be placed on any single person; and it is inappropriate because Mark is a highly *unrepresentative* example of the Millennial generation, for a whole range of reasons that we do not need to enumerate. But even with these caveats, I believe that we might be better served by understanding that something like this is going on and trying to think about what it would mean for Mark to think of himself as a Millennial spokesman... and perhaps to contrast this with what I take to be our current policy (at least implicitly) — of Mark as a Baby Boomer construct of how a well-behaved Millennial is supposed to act. If forced to make a choice, I would always rather win popularity contests with Millennials than with Boomers!
[You can think of Pete Buttigieg as a (political) example of what Mark absolutely should *not* be: Buttigieg is very popular with older Baby Boomer voters and shockingly unpopular with Millennial voters of his age and younger. Buttigieg's basic message is that the system is working reasonably well and this is precisely why younger voters do not like him — he is the sort of super annoying Millennial who tells the Boomers what they want to hear and thereby glosses over the many ways in which the generational compact in our society has been badly broken.]
Now, it is much easier to describe a problem than to describe the solution, and I think a "Millennial tilt" or "Millennial message" needs to be thought through in very context-specific ways. Some of the following examples may be a bit unfair because 20/20 hindsight is always easier:
(1) As seen through a Boomer vs. Millennial lens, Mark's commencement speech at Harvard probably was a major missed opportunity. I take it as self-evident that universities worked for Boomers and do not work for younger people; and therefore the choice was between giving a positive speech that reassured the 60-something parents or a more critical speech that resonated with the 20-something graduates. In my judgment, we tilted way too far towards the former. [And I suspect that we never even thought that we were doing just that — if we are going to tilt in a Boomer direction, it should always be a matter of conscious choice.]
(2) From a Boomer vs. Millennial lens, one would have a very different set of philanthropic priorities. I would be tempted to draw a very sharp contrast between CZI and the Gates Foundation by asking questions about what kinds of philanthropy resonate with the younger generation (vs. what kinds of philanthropy Boomers think younger people should be doing!). As it is, CZI strikes me as a "me too" version of the Gates Foundation — which is problematic for the various reasons Marc and I discussed with Mark and Priscilla in Kauai.
(3) Perhaps we should consider Millennials as a diversity criterion for our Board of Directors. Besides some of the tech CEOs, who are the Millennials that we would consider adding to our Board? Should we aim to have two or three Millennials on our board? If we did, how would it change the nature of the discussion at the Board level?
(4) A more aggressive investment policy in the tech ecosystem in Silicon Valley would be another way in which Facebook could participate in and identify with the Millennial generation, closer to home. By contrast, the decision to spend money in buying back shares (from our Baby Boomer shareholders or the Baby Boomer money managers invested in Facebook stock) is perhaps the more conventionally Boomer tilt on what one should do with Facebook's positive cash flows.
These are just some brainstorming starters and I'm sure we can think of many other examples.
I will be back in California on January 3 and feel free to call me at [REDACTED]; would be happy to discuss more on the phone or in person.
Best,
Peter
From: Nick Clegg
Sent: Friday, January 3, 2020 10:42 AM
To: Peter Thiel
Cc: Mark Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg, Marc Andreessen
Subject: Re: Milennials
Thanks Peter – hugely thought provoking! I will indeed give you a call over the next few days if I may – I am flying back to California tomorrow.
My own – entirely kneejerk – response is to distinguish between FB's products which both do and should continue to engage Millennials, and the far greater difficulty of garnering any credit/virtue amongst Millennials from being a large, successful company.
In a recent YouGov survey, 70% of US Millennials said they'd vote for socialism. Big Tech – or indeed big anything – is particularly unpopular with Millennials. For Millennials, authenticity, agency, autonomy, idealism, altruism etc all seem to be top of their list of desirable virtues – for better or worse, they are difficult to reconcile with Silicon Valley these days.
And – again, for better or worse – our fate amongst policy makers, notwithstanding Gen X/Millennials like Hawley and AOC, is largely in the hands of Boomers.
So my instinct would be to accentuate Mark's already strong individual credentials as a builder and innovator rather than a leader/ founder of FB – though it is not straightforward to distinguish the two.
Looking forward to discussing.
Happy New Year
Best
Nick
From: Mark Zuckerberg
Sent: Saturday, January 4, 2020 2:36 PM
To: Nick Clegg, Peter Thiel, Antonio Lucio
Cc: Sheryl Sandberg, Marc Andreessen
Subject: Re: Milennials
Peter: thanks for writing this all out and helping us articulate this.
Nick and others: for more background, Peter and I have had a number of conversations about what we expect the world to look like in 2030 so we can plan and position our future work accordingly. One theme we've discussed is that many important institutions in our society (eg education, healthcare, housing, efforts to combat climate change) are still run primarily by boomers in ways that transfer a lot of value from younger generations to boomers themselves. Our macro prediction for the next decade is that we expect this dynamic to shift very rapidly as more millennials + gen Zers can now vote and as the boomer generation starts to shrink. By the end of this decade, we expect more of these institutions to be run by and for the benefit of millennials and younger generations. I would bet we'll even see a millennial president within the next few cycles by 2032. This outlook for the future puts our current tone and positioning in stark contrast and has convinced me that we should shift the center of gravity in our messaging to be more focused on millennials.
From a policy perspective, even if boomers are still defining the policies right now, we should make sure we're setting ourselves up to win the debates over the next 5+ years and not just today. We want to be on the side of the future. So this still feels relevant.
From a marketing and comms perspective, this discussion also helps answer a question I've struggled with for some time: who is our core demographic? In trying to build a service for everyone, it often feels like we're not focused on anyone in particular. But because our service is built primarily by millennials, there has been a clear evolution where as our employees and I age and have kids, for example, our products evolve and get better for people in their 30s with kids. If we embrace that we are a company that is playing a disproportionate role in defining the experience of this generation as we grow and evolve, that could also be clarifying in terms of how we talk and who we're talking to.
Beyond how we talk, there's also a question of which issues we focus on and try to provide solutions for. For example, we work a lot on housing, but perhaps there are specific things we could do to make housing more affordable with an emphasis on younger people who don't have large families yet. Or given that so many people graduate college today burdened with crazy amounts of debt, perhaps we should have a larger program for hiring people who didn't go to college to help show that that's a reasonable path as well.
Finally, I think there's also some distinction between me and the company here. While our company has a special role in the lives of this generation, this is likely particularly important for how I show up because I am the most well-known person of my generation. That's why Peter and I have spent some timing discussing things like my philanthropy and commencement speech beyond just FB policies and products. I think this overall shift is something we should consider for how our company communicates and shows up more broadly, but it's something I'm definitely going to think about more in terms of how I communicate.
From: Peter Thiel
Date: Sunday, January 5, 2020 at 2:44 AM
To: Mark Zuckerberg, Nick Clegg, Antonio Lucio
Cc: Sheryl Sandberg, Marc Andreessen
Subject: RE: Milennials
There are many themes that could be developed more here; let me make a few quick points for now:
Nick -- I certainly would not suggest that our policy should be to embrace Millennial attitudes unreflectively. I would be the last person to advocate for socialism. But when 70% of Millennials say they are pro-socialist, we need to do better than simply dismiss them by saying that they are stupid or entitled or brainwashed; we should try and understand why. And, from the perspective of a broken generational compact, there seems to be a pretty straightforward answer to me, namely, that when one has too much student debt or if housing is too unaffordable, then one will have negative capital for a long time and/or find it very hard to start accumulating capital in the form of real estate; and if one has no stake in the capitalist system, then one may well turn against it.
What I would add to Mark's summary is that, in a healthier society, the handover from the Boomers to the younger generations should have started some time ago (maybe as early as the 1990s for Gen X), and that for a whole variety of reasons, this generational transition has been delayed as the Boomers have maintained an iron grip on many US institutions. When the handover finally happens in the 2020s, it will therefore happen more suddenly and perhaps more dramatically than people expect or than such generational transitions have happened in the past. And that's why it's especially important for us to think about these issues and try and get ahead of them.
One example of such an "iron grip" from my colleague Eric Weinstein: Of the 67 top research universities in the US, 62 have Baby Boomer presidents (three are Silent Generation and only two are Generation X). Today, the median age of these 67 university presidents is 65 years-old... And this is very different from the recent past. Only thirty years ago, in 1990, the median age of these same university presidents was a much lower 52-years old; the older generation did not completely refuse to give up power; and therefore much greater generational diversity was to be found in university leadership.
Or, to take a small but suggestive example from US Presidential leadership: Three Presidents (Clinton, Bush 43, and Trump) were all born within 70 days of one another, in the summer of 1946. These three people were literally at the head of the Baby Boomer class that was born nine months after World War II ended in September 1945. In my mind, they somehow derived much of their power from the self-referential narcissism of the Boomers as this unusually large cohort of people voted for people like themselves and could afford to ignore anyone younger... and again, this iron grip has been maintained for a shockingly long period of time; but it will not be maintained forever.
--Peter
From: Nick Clegg
Date: Saturday, January 18, 2020 at 7:17 AM
To: Peter Thiel, Mark Zuckerberg, Antonio Lucio
Cc: Sheryl Sandberg, Marc Andreessen, John Pinette, Joel Kaplan
Mark, Peter
Attached an initial scoping doc on Millennial attitudes towards FB, Mark etc. With huge thanks to John Pinette – added here – and his team.
A few suggestions re follow up:
The team will proceed with further research as mentioned in the paper asap so that we have a little more data on how to disaggregate Millennial expectations/hopes (the risk here is we apply a crude one-size-fits-all approach to a whole cohort)
Mark has already started to give us steers in our comms and marketing work (his New Year Post, the generational look/feel of the forthcoming "hear and be heard" ad campaign, less policy and more personal/innovative approach in his own comms plans etc) which the teams will build on.
The forthcoming "hear and be heard" ad campaign is designed to set off a conversation about how people relate to, and speak about, each other which has the potential to appeal to Millennials.
We have a team working on an ambitious long term project on loneliness/isolation which, again, has the potential to hold particular appeal to the Millennial sentiments set out in the paper. The latest plans will be presented to Mark next week.
As for bigger bets – climate change, housing, student debt etc – I suggest we wait for the additional research.
Finally, Antonio, John and I feel that this work should ideally be led by Millennials – not us – so we will circle back on that shortly too.
Grateful for reactions.
N
[This document is from Tennessee v. Meta (2024).]
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Bill Gates: “Internet as a business tool”
From: Bill Gates
Sent: Thursday, April 06, 1995 2:55 PM
Subject: Internet as a business tool
I know I am a broken record on this but I think our plans continue to underestimate the importance of an OPEN unified tools approach for the internet.
The demo I saw today when Windows 95 was showing its Internet capability was someone calling up the Fedex page on the Internet and typing in a package number and getting the status.
Imagine how much work it would have been for fedex to call us up and get that running on MSN and negotiate with us. Instead they just set it up. A very simple way to reach out to their customers.
The continued enhancement of the browser standards is amazing to me. Now its security and 3d and tables - what will it be within the next several years? Intelligent controls, directory — everything we are trying to define as standards.
[This document is from U.S. v. Microsoft (2000).]
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Am I the only one thinking it's delusional to believe Mark Zuckerberg is some kind of spokesperson for Millennials? Is he a likable or even a liked figure among millennials?
"I would bet we'll even see a millennial president within the next few cycles by 2032" - Definitely not in 2024 🤣