Facebook's Dilemma

In 2012 Facebook was in trouble.

Mobile first upstarts like Instagram, and Path were growing extremely fast, while Facebook was focusing solely on the desktop experience for FB. The stock price hit a low of 19.76, nearly 50% down from the initial IPO price.

In recognition of this crisis, Zuckerberg would do two major things

• buying out Instagram for 1 billion
• bet the entire company to a mobile first strategy.

One of the biggest issues with this initial strategy was the difficulty of developing cross platform. While the upstarts could just focus on developing solely for iOS, given FB’s scale and userbase, they needed to develop (and maintain) Web, iOS, Android, and any other platform that would take form later – this is in addition to quality of life issues like long build times, new skillsets, that hampered mobile development.

They had tried to develop a solution to this multiplatform issue before in 2010, focusing on web technologies – specifically HTML5.

After two years of slog, it was a complete flop – HTML5 just wasn’t ready to handle the complexity of Facebook.

As part of this ambitious effort, they developed React Native – a solution which followed React syntax, but allowed the code to be compiled down to specific platforms. In other words – write once, use everywhere.

By 2015, this bet paid off – 70% of their 5 billion in 2015 revenue came from mobile, in one of the boldest and most successful pivots in history, having been one of the first major companies to execute on a mobile first strategy.

They open sourced React Native the same year, and the rest is history.

Conclusion

While Zuck is a one of a kind operator, the payoff from investing in creating React Native illustrates what’s been known in tech for a long time: there are significant gains in process innovation.

As the influence of tech grows across different verticals, the most powerful idea of them all is a relentless focus on process improvement.

Some specific examples: - SpaceX – and their focus on quickly iterating on rockets and driving down the cost of iteration

• Metascience – and work around reproducibility to cut down on scientific waste
• Frontier Fund – a 100 million dollar climate commitment that has ballooned into 1 billion dollars, and a host of new companies and funding

I'm trying to write more this year, targeting at least one post a month!

I don't have any specific topics in mind, but I hope to write about things that I'm very interested in