Topic

META

A collection of 43 issues

Less is more?

Just yesterday, I was wondering about the profound impact “the cat paper” had on so many companies and wrote “Perhaps someone is going to publish a paper today or in a couple of years that may fundamentally alter the tech landscape 5-10 years from now. This makes analyzing some of

Meta's monetization game

Back in 2022, Meta was facing onslaught from multiple directions: a) Apple’s App Tracking Transparency (ATT), b) regulatory threats from Europe (and sometimes even the US), c) competition from TikTok, d) rising capex with uncertain pay-off, and e) persistently rising operating losses in Reality Labs with even more uncertain

First impression of Meta Ray-Ban Display, Taking a big swing at Airbnb

Yesterday, I drove for 40 minutes to go to a Best Buy store where I scheduled my demo for Meta Ray-Ban Display glasses. When I reached there, I could see that Best Buy had a prominently displayed corner for Meta Ray-Ban. I saw a guy who missed their demo on

Expanding the scope of digital advertising

Every once in a while, you may have heard (or wondered it yourself) that Meta must be listening to us given how well targeted its ads are compared to almost any other platform. Indeed, compared to most other platforms (other websites, apps, or TV, radio, podcast ads), Meta’s ads

What if there's an overinvestment in AI?

A programming note: In case you missed it, I published my Deep Dive on ASML yesterday which you can read here. Without the benefit of hindsight while it can be hard to figure out where we are in the AI capex cycle, it is extremely likely that we will at

The Data Center Story: Part 1

I came across this recently launched podcast named “stepchange”. The podcast is basically Acquired-style story telling of “human progress through the lens of transformative technologies, systems, and infrastructure”. They have covered two topics so far: Coal, and Data Center. Naturally, I started with their Data Center episode. Since I grew

Thoughts on Meta Connect 2025

I bought my first Meta Ray-Ban Glasses back in 2023. After using it for a few days, I reviewed my initial thoughts here. For almost the last two years, I have been a Daily Active User (DAU) of these glasses. In fact, after losing a pair early this year, I

Notes and thoughts on Meta and Microsoft discussion at GS Communicopia

Correction: I would like to issue a correction from yesterday’s piece on Synopsys. I mentioned the company is trading at ~56x LTM EBITA. The problem is Synopsys’ LTM EBITA doesn’t incorporate Ansys’ EBITA which they just acquired. As a result, while the EV includes the impact of acquisition,

Meta's (lack of) Agency

Back in 2018, Mark Zuckerberg wrote on Facebook: “One of our big focus areas for 2018 is making sure the time we all spend on Facebook is time well spent. …recently we've gotten feedback from our community that public content -- posts from businesses, brands and media --

Golden age of Digital Ads, LLM P&L

Golden age of Digital Ads Last month, some researchers at Meta published a very interesting paper that highlighted Meta’s ability to monetize LLMs through its core advertising platform. Meta management sort of alluded to some of these during earnings calls, but this paper really drove the point home for