Zuckerberg's Stresses Skills Other Than Hacking in Rogan Podcast

Mark Zuckerberg—the computer geek, the coder since puberty, the biopic-ized hacker—now identifies as a designer. But first…

Today’s must-reads:

• Amazon is apparently not buying Electronic Arts, after all

• Facebook agreed to settle Cambridge Analytica lawsuit

• Trademark filings suggest Apple may be securing “reality” names for an upcoming AR/VR headset

The new Mark

In a podcast released last week, Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg spent nearly three hours in conversation with Joe Rogan. It was an eclectic interview, with Zuckerberg discussing everything from martial arts to the metaverse. The most revealing part, though, may have been Zuck’s repeated descriptions (and reminders) of his singular focus on design. “As a product designer…” he told Rogan in one of many similar refrains.

It’s an odd title for the chief executive officer of Meta Platforms Inc., and a telling bit of personal rebranding. Zuckerberg has long celebrated his engineering background, a “code wins arguments” philosophy enshrined in Facebook’s original “hacker way” mission statement. That ethos, in essence, was antithetical to design-centric startups such as Airbnb Inc. and Pinterest Inc., and a far cry from how Apple Inc.’s design-minded Steve Jobs and Jonathan Ive approached product development.

Yet Zuckerberg seems to have come around to their way of thinking—or at least wants to give that impression. “As a product designer, a big part of what you’re designing is the emotional experience that people have using it,” he said. “I just don’t want to build something that makes people super angry.”

Of course, for much of Facebook’s history before it became Meta, the things Zuckerberg built did make a lot of people angry. The company’s services were crafted following “move fast and break things” principles that prioritized rapid software releases and iterating based on granular metrics—a process once described as “A/B testing on steroids.” The resulting products were often geared toward boosting platform engagement, mining data and juicing advertising dollars.

In many cases, they weren’t particularly inspiring or beloved experiences. Zuckerberg may have conquered the social media landscape with the “big blue app,” Like button and News Feed—but his attempts at product innovation were riddled with failures. There was  and pretty much everything from its short-lived Creative Labs group, to name just a few flops. The company was not renowned for homegrown design. If anything, it was infamous for acquiring competitors from InstagramWhatsAppcloning the apps it couldn’t buy, including Snapchat

Meta-era Mark appears to have changed. In his conversation with Rogan, he talked about his dedication to designing experiences over a decade-long period. Echoing a classic Steve Jobs-ism, he explained how data can be misleading and that customers don’t always know what they want. (“Part of the challenge in designing products is sometimes what people tell you that they want to spend their time on is different from what they actually do spend their time on.”) He also kept coming back to the feelings his creations imbue: “What does it look like to design the next computing platform in a way that’s really people-centric?”

Zuckerberg is betting the company’s future on the metaverse—a creation that will require deep trust from users who will immerse themselves in Meta’s digital world. So perhaps it’s not surprising that Zuckerberg wants to convey his more humane, empathetic and mature approach to experience development. Even if it’s mere good PR, it was refreshing to hear him discuss form-factor constraints, voice-and-gesture interactions, and enhancing user physical comfort with virtual avatars—stuff designers would commonly explore, but not necessarily programmers primarily concerned with lines of code. In one interesting exchange, Rogan brought up the film “Minority Report,” in which characters manipulate holograms with their hands. Zuckerberg said that’s an unlikely future because your arms will get way too tired if you have to hold them up all the time to interact with computers. Fair point!

But Zuck clearly hasn’t completely strayed from his engineering mindset, given that he also talked about ways to read input signals from “motor neuron” pathways and how he still gets into a hacker-esque “flow” focus for hours until his wife interrupts his concentration.

In an email, a Meta spokesperson wrote that “Mark is a builder and a technologist at heart.” 

The big story

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What else you need to know

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Despite an economic downturn and Covid-related disruptions, Chinese food delivery giant Meituan reported a better-than-expected revenue.

Affirm’s Max Levchin told Bloomberg TV that the company is “definitely looking quite actively” at acquisitions

Join Bloomberg Live in London for the Bloomberg Technology Summit on Sept. 28 to see Europe’s business leaders, policymakers, entrepreneurs and investors explain how they’re adapting to this new environment—and discuss solution-based strategies.