It's not a sweet spot. It's less then 10 million MAU over 5 years for about $40 billion dollars. How is that a sweet spot. If you can't get 10 million MAUs in 5 years for $40 billion dollars, you're a failure. Quest is a failure. AVP being an even bigger failure doesn't make Quest a success.
One thing that frustrates me with this comment is that you're measuring their state today as if that's the end state.
Is waymo a failure? It's not deployed across the US yet, and it's been over a decade etc
No, they're just trying to solve hard technology problems. I want companies to be ambitious, that's way better than seeing them just focus on cutting costs etc
What is the goal of quest? Is it to get mau? Is it sales and marketing for eng (come work at _, where we have fun projects like these Glasses - sounds familiar), is it to develop and flex hardware muscles? Is it to make sure Meta is competitive if/when there is a paradigm shift away from mobile?
I think Mark is thrilled to have a hardware product that they can deploy their ML models to. Was that intentional? Obviously no, but at some point they're paying for optionality.
They want the option to build a million hardware units in a year, they want the option to build a competitor to Apple's next hardware device (frankly, in the counterfactual that AVP took off, Meta was extremely well-positioned)
Meta is a money-printing machine, and so they have choices: invest in moonshot hardware (or ai) projects, stock buybacks/dividends
They have a huge dividend. What do you want them to do? More stock buybacks? Make less money?
