The year: 2022 The stock: $META Meta Revenues in 2022: ~$115 Billion Analysts & the Market's take on Meta: FB and Instagram are losing to Ticktock, YouTube and Snap. Product usage has peaked. Mark Zuckerberg is stubbornly wasting tens of billions on AR/VR with huge losses and he clearly doesn't get it. Sheryl Sandberg, the COO who is credited with much of Meta's success, sees the writing on the wall and leaves the company. Overall assessment in 2022: Meta is dead. How did that prediction turn out? 2026: $META Revenue: $252 Billion (up ~120% from 2022) Since Meta was declared dead in 2022, the company has added more revenues than it had in 2022! The equivalent of creating a new business, bigger than 2022 Meta! Interestingly, all of that growth has come from the same products that were declared dead in 2022. @finkd's "stubborn" investments in AR/VR also meant that it would be well-positioned (from both a talent and Datacenter perspective), to enter the AI race. So far Meta hasn't had much direct revenue from AI, but it's now releasing new AI products on a regular cadence and is considered 1 of the top 5 players in the AI race. Meta Connect 2026 which is Meta's big annual event where they launch new products and announce there plans is less than 30 days away. I might be more excited about Meta now than I was when I was accumulating it in 2022!

I asked Grok Bot to design a concept that captures heat from a rocket launch and turns it into electricity. It created this entire 3D model and animation by itself. Grok is really good at this. Super cool to see one simple idea turned into this.

I asked 18x Midas Lister Navin Chaddha what it was like IPOing the last company before the Dot Com Bubble popped: "My second company, iBeam, went public in May 2000, the last IPO before the dot-com crash. We built a distributed internet for video, pushing content through satellite to the edge so it was served close to the user. We grew from zero to $100 million in revenue and went public nine months from launch. Then we went from blitzscaling to blitz-failing. Our customers were dot-coms. They all disappeared. In six months we went from $100 million in revenue to $20 or $30 million, and from a $3 billion market cap to $300 million. We ended up getting acquired. It was a two-year journey. That's where I learned company building is a marathon, not a sprint. If it takes nine months or five years, just be patient." Full conversation: