Meta attempts a work culture reset

Welcome to the first edition of Command Line.

I’m sending this from my room in Las Vegas, where I’m roving between hotels for CES and hoping I can sneak in some poker time before my flight back to LA tomorrow.

This week: Meta’s CTO attempts a culture reset, a Roblox scoop, a chat with Jack Dorsey, what I’m hearing so far on the ground here at CES, and more.

Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth has one of the toughest jobs in tech this year. On one hand, he has to deliver on CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s grand metaverse ambitions as Apple and ByteDance are entering the space. At the same time, he’s also attempting a dramatic cultural reset within Reality Labs, the sprawling division responsible for those ambitions.

In an internal memo I obtained that he sent to employees just before the holidays, Bosworth acknowledged a sentiment I’ve been hearing from current and ex-employees for a while: “We have solved too many problems by adding headcount. But adding headcount also adds overhead. And overhead makes everything slower.”

“Every week I see documents with 100+ editors,” he wrote to the roughly 18,000 people in Reality Labs. ”A meeting with 50+ people that took a month to schedule. Sometimes there is even a ‘pre-meeting’ with its own document. I believe the current situation is untenable.”

While less blistering in its tone, Bosworth’s memo is in line with another internal post that already leaked by John Carmack, a software engineering legend who joined Meta through its 2014 acquisition of Oculus and announced he was leaving last month. The most interesting suggestion from Bosworth’s memo is that Meta’s performance management system should be reworked to focus less on rewarding “absolute impact” — a fairly hazy term I’ve anecdotally heard has encouraged unnecessary empire building over the years — to “return on investment,” thereby rewarding “those who do more with less and avoid the overhead altogether.”

Externally, Bosworth is focused on combating the growing sentiment that Meta is burning — or, as he was quick to reframe to me in an interview a few weeks ago, “investing” — too much money with Reality Labs. He told me that 80 percent of Meta’s investments are in its core business of social media and that it would be “irresponsible” to not invest in future stuff. “I think it’s a poor use of things. You’re basically embracing the wrong side of the innovator’s dilemma in that case.”

That said, he acknowledged times have changed from the heady rebrand days. “We’re changing our investment strategy. For some things that means they have more time and we’re going to get a lower burn rate and higher confidence [before shipping]. For some things that means they have less time. They’ve got to demonstrate value sooner or there’s going to be too much pressure for them to continue at the burn rate that they’re at.”

Given the struggles Meta has had with Horizon, its social metaverse platform for VR, I asked Bosworth if it was one of the initiatives on the shorter end of the leash. He was clear that, even though “obviously it hasn’t expanded as much as we’d hoped it would in 2022,” Horizon is not going away. “Indeed, if you took away every single other part of Reality Labs, Horizon is the thing that we would keep doing because it’s the social application upon which we get to build on our core of what we deliver to people across all platforms.”

Speaking of pressure, there is a lot of it riding on the next consumer Quest headset Meta is planning to announce later this year. Even though overall headset sales dipped last year, the current Quest 2 has done far better than Meta anticipated, shipping game console-level units.

Meta may have an ace up its sleeve on the VR app side, too. I’m hearing that Roblox is planning to come to Quest in the back half of this year. Like Fortnite, Roblox has so far not embraced VR, leaving the medium to much smaller players like Rec Room. Now that it’s planning to make the plunge, my hunch is that its highly engaged, young user base could be the biggest driver of Quest sales to date.

Reps for Meta and Roblox declined to comment, and as always, plans are subject to change. If you know more about what’s going on here, please reach out.

Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey hasn’t been tweeting much lately. That could have to do with how Elon Musk is running things. It could also be because he is spending a lot of time on Nostr, a decentralized social media project he recently funded with a grant of 14 Bitcoin. I won’t get into much of the technical details of Nostr here beyond that it’s, surprisingly, not blockchain-based. Every user has a public key used for authentication, and the network works through so-called relays to build a simple, P2P-like network. The creator of Nostr is anonymous.

Dorsey seems to be advising the first iOS client for Nostr called Damus, which I managed to download from a TestFlight build. It feels like a very basic, early version of Twitter with a much more cyberpunk, Bitcoin maximalist crowd. (Damus is currently in App Store review and having a difficult time getting approved due to not having content moderation in place.) as Dorsey put it in a Pastebin post last month,

Dorsey has been pretty media shy as of late. After he wrote a Pastebin post about the need for “a native internet protocol for social media,” I reached out to him through Damus to ask why he’s so bullish on Nostr. Here’s our conversation:

Another company trying to attack meeting culture is Shopify, which essentially banned large meetings this week and shut down a bunch of its Slack channels. It’s also moving from an annual planning process to a shorter, quarterly planning cycle. I called Kaz Nejatian, Shopify’s COO and VP of product, to learn more about the changes.

Nejatian on why Shopify is getting rid of meetings: “In order to become operationally excellent, we must be a faster company. And we’re not a widget factory. We make software, which means our most precious resource is the uninterrupted time of the craftsperson, of someone building a thing… Modern companies are just set up improperly. Modern companies are set up to optimize for managers rather than builders.”

And why Shopify is moving from annual to quarterly planning: “There’s a fatal conceit that most companies have, which is that they think they can imagine a world 12 months away from now. And you definitely cannot. Therefore, the most important thing is to build the type of company that can respond to real world events.”

With the news this week that Salesforce is cutting 10 percent of its workforce and Amazon is laying off 18,000 employees, it’s clear that the bloodletting is just getting started. To get a sense of where things stand already, here’s a look at the 10 biggest RIFs by tech firms last year, courtesy of data pulled from Layoffs.fyi:

CES is back with a bang this year, and we have a big team at The Verge covering everything on the show floor. It’s officially day one of the conference, and I haven’t had a chance to check the floor out myself yet. But I have managed to gather some notes on what I’ve seen and heard in the 24 hours I’ve been here:

Thanks again for subscribing. I hope you enjoyed this first edition. I’ll be back in your inbox next Thursday. If you have any feedback on how I can improve this thing, questions, or strong opinions on pre-meetings, I’m all ears.