Meta, the company formerly known as Facebook, has been experiencing some challenges lately— that may be putting it lightly. The tech giant, run by CEO Mark Zuckerberg, was hit with a record-setting one-day plummet of $240 billion in its stock price. Meta, a perennial member of the top largest companies ranked by market valuation, has unceremoniously dropped out of the top 10.
The drubbing was due to a confluence of events. This included the ascendancy of TikTok taking away its members, the vast sums of money spent on building the metaverse, revelations by whistleblowers and leaks that showed the harmful effects the social media platforms have on teen users and privacy changes made by Apple. In a new policy, users of Apple’s ecosystem will have control over how they want to share their data. A substantial number of people elected to opt out of allowing their privacy to be violated.
For Meta, collecting data and knowing everything about you is the core of its business model. Without the data, it will be hard for Zuckerberg to target ads to people. This shift makes it less effective for brands and companies to advertise on the platform.
Meta has seen about a $10 billion revenue drop after the privacy policies took hold. This may have serious long-term repercussions for its revenue and profits moving forward. To add more pressure, Google is believed to start enacting similar privacy rules too. The Wall Street Journal reported that advertisers are moving their ad budgets away from Meta and its ecosystem of companies to Google.
In response to these headwinds, Zuckerberg wrote in a company blog post his new game plan for the company, “As we build the next chapter of our company as Meta, we just updated the values that guide our work.” In the memo, the founder and CEO said, “We will continue hiring around the world, and it’s helpful for people to know what it’s like working at Meta and what makes us different from other companies.”
He added, “Now is the right time to update our values and our cultural operating system. These values capture how we must act as a company to bring our vision to life.”
Here are the highlights of his message to the staff:
- [Moving fast] helps us to build and learn faster than anyone else. This means acting with urgency and not waiting until next week to do something you could do today. It’s about moving fast together—in one direction as a company, not just as individuals.
- Focus on long-term impact emphasizes long-term thinking and encourages us to extend the timeline for the impact we have, rather than optimizing for near-term wins. We should take on the challenges that will be the most impactful, even if the full results won’t be seen for years.
- [Building] awesome things pushes us to ship things that are not just good, but also awe-inspiring. We’ve already built products that are useful to billions of people, but in our next chapter we’ll focus more on inspiring people as well. This quality bar should apply to everything we do.
- [Living] in the future guides us to build the future of distributed work that we want, where opportunity isn’t limited by geography. This means operating as a distributed-first company and being the early adopters of the future products we’re building to help people feel present together no matter where they are.
- [Being] direct and [respecting] your colleagues is about creating a culture where we are straightforward and willing to have hard conversations with each other. At the same time, we are also respectful and when we share feedback, we recognize that many of the world’s leading experts work here.
- Meta, Metamates, Me is about being good stewards of our company and mission. It’s about the sense of responsibility we have for our collective success and to each other as teammates. It’s about taking care of our company and each other.
- At the end of the day, values aren’t what you write on a website, but what we hold each other accountable for every day. I encourage you to reflect on these values and what they mean to you, as we start working on this next chapter for our company.
Source: Forbes
