Hey guy.Yes Gun safety stalemate, Ukrainian war continues, a gallon of gasoline costs close to a gallon Ethereum Gas Fee. At least we don’t have to deal with Johnny Depp for another week.
plain landscape
Javier Olivier has a problem. It was the early 2010s, and he was in charge of messaging on Facebook’s growth team. Yes, it sounds unintuitive and strange, but growth was (and still is) the driving force of the company, and the mission of this team was infinitely broad. Basically, anything that leads people to Facebook or keeps people on Facebook is fair game. Messaging qualifies because, as Olivan puts it, “it’s a faucet inside Facebook.” If someone sends you a message and you’re not using the service, you’ll have an incentive to sign up.
The problem, though, is that the company’s relentless use of data and analytics marks the messaging hidden within the Facebook app. When users get a message, they won’t know because the notification will be lost in a blitz of other things Facebook is bothering them. “This is probably the 17th notice,” he said when I interviewed him in March 2019. So Olivan and his team came up with a bold solution: “It’s better to put the messaging experience outside the app and make it its own.” That goes against the conventional wisdom that you should make Everything becomes easier for users. Olivan’s plan is a form of extortion: If you want to send a message, be a tough dick — unless you download the company’s new messaging platform. “Users really hate it in the short term because all of a sudden you have to install another app,” he told me. But in the end they did. Not only did messaging take off, but the company eventually grew it into a standalone billion-user social service. “The data suggests that’s the right thing to do,” he told me. “We did it with the best of intentions, and now Messenger is a very successful app.”
Such victories have propelled Olivan, 44, higher and higher at the company, culminating in announcing this week that he will become Meta’s new chief operating officer, a senior aide to CEO Mark Zuckerberg. But the promotion appears to be almost a footnote to the impending departure of current COO Sheryl Sandberg, the only person to hold the role so far. Sandberg left Facebook in a unique way, with every element of the announcement carefully crafted. She prepared a 1,500-word post preloaded with favorite compliments from Facebook users past and present, with Zuckerberg leading the march in “most relevant” fashion. She was interviewed by selected media outlets.In the wake of her impending departure — she’ll be giving up her badge this fall but remains on the board — she’s spawned dozens of hits and reflections, many of which are filled with brutal assessment her tenure. (This is what I wrote.)
In the same true form, Oliver himself was not interviewed.in a fairly painkiller Regarding his promotion, he implicitly acknowledged a huge difference between Sandberg and him: “I mostly work behind the scenes,” he wrote. Few news clips illustrate this. A few years ago, I had to struggle to have a conversation with him for my book. But when we finally met, he was gracious and forthright. His meeting room is filled with a full-size surfboard, reflecting his passion for the great outdoors. This and his love of paragliding are one of the few things an internet search reveals about him. I don’t know anything about his family life, but he mentioned to me that, like his boss Mark Zuckerberg, he has two young daughters. You won’t see a lot of their pictures on his Facebook page. His Instagram account is private. Only 17 people follow it.
One of those followers is his boss. Zuckerberg himself had inspired Oliver to join Facebook. In 2005, the Spanish-born engineer from a small town in the Pyrenees decided to attend Stanford Graduate School of Business after working for a few years on Siemens mobile phones. He took a course that looked at case studies of new businesses, including Facebook. Olivan is already a fan of the young company and even plans to start a similar one in Spain and Latin America. At one point, Zuckerberg came to class, and Olivier then spoke with him, asking the CEO about international growth. In 2007, Olivan became a Facebook employee – working on the product.
