Facebook’s Next Big Thing

Facebook is facing some challenges as it searches for new growth engines. Its growth hacking team propelled it to hundreds of millions of users, and through keen, quick identification of potential future trends, it made investments/acquisitions in important spaces such as:

Messaging — WhatsApp & Messenger
Photos & ephemeral content — Instagram & Stories
VR — Oculus

As a result, Facebook has achieved phenomenal growth and has managed to keep its growth engine humming, but, as of now, it is unclear where its future growth will come from.

It is my belief that Facebook’s biggest opportunity for future growth can come from figuring out how to best connect people with people they SHOULD know.

Bear with me as I take you through my thought process.

In its current implementation, Facebook has done a phenomenal job connecting people who know each other. Let’s divide the potential relationships between people into the following buckets:

Connecting with people you ALREADY know (e.g. Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.)
Connecting with people you MAY know (e.g. Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.) Connecting with people you WANT to know (e.g. Tinder, FB, LinkedIn, etc.)
Connecting with people you SHOULD know (nonexistent)

Over the past few years, I have spent a lot of time thinking about how to address the latter two buckets. I have seen a variety of approaches that attempt to connect you with people you WANT to know in the hope of ultimately connecting with the people you SHOULD know.

The problem with “WANT”, is that it is more likely to be what one THINKs they want, rather than what one actually WANTs. I contend that our ability to define “WANT” is challenged by our need to project to the world and to ourselves a certain public persona that is, quite often, very different than who we actually are.

I have seen first-hand the challenges in situations where people are asked to express what they want.

A decade ago, I used to run one of the largest music services in the US (10 years ago 750,000 paying subscribers was considered large… J). It was evident that people had both a private persona and a public persona. Publicly, they would state that they liked the hottest bands/singers, but privately, they would listen to something completely different (say, Frank Sinatra or Barbra Streisand, artists who were not considered as hip). The dilemma for the system was — what music should we recommend to them? Music they SAID they liked or the music that we KNEW they would enjoy?

Conclusion I: People have a public persona and a private persona.
Conclusion II: People wish their public persona to be what they perceive to be correct/right/cool.

Several years ago, I ran one of the world’s largest online dating services. There too, users would explicitly specify what they were looking for (e.g. tall, dark, and handsome) but the system would know what they were actually looking at (short, pudgy, with a sense of humor). The same dilemma occurred — who should the system recommend? What the user said they liked, what we knew they really wanted, or what we knew would have the highest probability of a good match?

Here, the phenomenon was much more baffling. Why would someone not say they are looking for exactly what they were looking for? What was there to be gained from “lying?”

Conclusion III: People tend to behave in a way they believe is in accordance with socially accepted norms, disregarding their own personal desires.
Conclusion IV: People are not fully aware of what they actually want.
Conclusion V: People are not able/willing to articulate what they actually need.

A couple of years ago, I launched Quiv.com, a service that would allow you to get access to people in return for a charitable donation to their cause. Simply put, if a person wanted to pick the brain of a certain individual — they would donate to that person’s cause (a legitimate charity/non-profit) and in return that person would answer the question, do a phone call, or have a meeting.

I modeled the service after the annual lunch meeting, where people would donate ~$3 million for the privilege of having lunch and discussion with Warren Buffet. Given that most people are not Warren Buffet, and most other people cannot afford such a pricey donation, the price would have to be adjusted to match the needs of the masses. Quiv allowed us to democratize this concept.

However, the real challenge lies in the fact that people WANT to connect to famous people they have heard of, which are not necessarily the RIGHT people for them. Everyone wants to get sage advice from Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk. Sadly, even if they wanted to, Mark and Elon do not have enough time to answer all these people. Even if they did, the value of their time would be far too high for people to afford. To illustrate: a young entrepreneur wishes to get some advice about growth hacking. She would get much more value from a junior unknown person who has been focused on that subject in 2018 than from Mark or Chamath. That junior unknown person would also be much more likely to be able to spend some time mentoring an entrepreneur.

Wouldn’t it be great if there was a system that would understand what a person needs, and match them with someone who can provide them with actual value?

So, how do we create such a match? How can we build a system that understands what a person needs (when quite often, they either do not know themselves, or are unable/unwilling to articulate it), and find the most suitable person to connect them with?

Enter Facebook!

Facebook has copious amounts of data representing human behavior based on what people do proactively (posts, comments, etc.), actively (clicks, likes, shares, etc.), and passively (views and time spent consuming certain content).

This data should allow Facebook to figure out two derivatives of human behavior:

Derivative I: How people wish to be seen based or what they perceive is the correct way for them to appear to others.

Derivative II: Who people really are and what they really want.

Derivative II is the holy grail, as it allows Facebook to know (better than the person themselves) how to connect them to the RIGHT person.

Connecting with people you SHOULD know is the next logical step in Facebook’s strategy.

The opportunities and use cases are vast:

Connecting entrepreneurs to the right mentors and Founders to the right investors.

Matching potential and deal business partners, pen pals, travelers with tour guides, companies to consultants & advisors, vendors to service seekers, etc.

Ultimately it may even be possible for Facebook to help people find their ideal romantic match…