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Why I doubted Facebook could build a billion dollar business, and what I learned from being horribly wrong at andrewchen

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Facebook, early 2006 Sometimes, you need to be horribly, embarrassingly wrong to remind yourself to keep an open mind. This is my story of my failure to understand Facebook’s potential. In 2006, I was working on a new ad network business that experimented a lot with targeting ads with social network data, broadly known as “retargeting” now. The idea was that we’d be able to take your interests and target advertising towards them, which would lead to higher CPMs. As part of this project, we did a meeting with Facebook when they were ~12 people. I had read bits and pieces about the company in the news, but since I was a few years out of college, I hadn’t used their product much. We got a meeting and since I was based in Seattle at the time, I flew down with some coworkers and chatted with them at their new office in Palo Alto. We met the Facebook team at their office right next to the Sushitomo on University Ave. The place looked like a frat house – a TV and video game console on the gro

Why I doubted Facebook could build a billion dollar business, and what I learned from being horribly wrong at andrewchen andrewchen --> Andrew Chen Archives Subscribe · Featured · Recent · The Cold Start Problem 📘 Dear readers, I have moved to Substack and I will be writing here from now on: 👉 andrewchen.substack.com In the meantime, I will leave andrewchen.com up for posterity. Enjoy! Why I doubted Facebook could build a billion dollar business, and what I learned from being horribly wrong 0 comments --> Facebook, early 2006 Sometimes, you need to be horribly, embarrass

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