🤖 The metaverse/Web3 label is empty hype — Meta's pivot is the loser trade

“It seems like there's no leadership on the Facebook side that actually wants to take swings over there. They just are obsessed with this one thing. It makes no sense to me.”

“And unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be a great engaged user base in the software layer of what he's built here today, making it very difficult to track a path, to get consumer feedback and to identify where that goes over time.”

“The question is really just about the magnitude of the investment level. But I think there is a future in VR and AR.”

“I think what people don't understand is where is this quarter of a trillion dollars going? And is it going to be a leap in humanity at the scale of the Apollo program? Because it now is becoming the single largest capital allocation program in capitalism history.”

“Facebook just canceled like two of their prototypes they were working on to save money. So that whole $10 billion into VR, I think they're trying to make that number look smaller.”

“what folks on Wall Street have been telling me is that, you know, Facebook has become what's called a funding short, meaning there is no bid to buy that from institutional owners. They'd rather on the margin sell it to generate the cash to then take and invest in other things.”

“It's a great point you bring up because they also started investing in their own chipset. And I think all of that chipset innovation gives them a dramatic advantage in having smaller batteries and more processing power in a headset. If it does work, which what chips does, what chip asset does Facebook have? None.”

“In all of these things, when you build hardware, I think you can take a lot of parallels from what happened in the PC space. ... The value created to the application layer, to the operating system, and the people that can actually build ecosystems are typically the ones that win, and the people that already have an ecosystem and all they have to do is port somebody from, you know, platform A to platform B, has a meaningful advantage over somebody that has to convince you to come to a new platform altogether. ... If you play that out in VR, what you really need is just a bag full of cash because if you give developers a subsidized incentive to build for your platform, they'll do it. So then, again, if you rank the companies, you just need to look at how much cash do they have because those with the most cash have it.”

“Have you played the games where you like move continuously through space? And like when you do that, it's like you're going to throw up. I mean, I'm not sure that this notion that that becomes the new computing modality is like a fair and true notion. ... it may end up becoming kind of a niche entertainment device, almost like a Nintendo Switch where there's a, you know, a mode when you're using it. But I'm not sure it replaces traditional static two dimensional computing in front of you. The jury's still out.”

“Yeah, I mean, it's a bubble move. Because, look, when you're in an up market and the market is super frothy, we had in hindsight last year was a giant asset bubble funded by all this liquidity coming out of the Fed and the federal government. So yeah, in a bubble like that, all investors care about is the growth story. And so Facebook went all in on this story around Metaverse ... They lost 6 billion last year. They lost 10 billion this year. So the losses are escalating. ... But Facebook basically took themselves out of the sort of the market leader bucket and put themselves in the growth bucket.”

“My worst trend was the metaverse. I think it's like the renaming of something that's been going on for a long time as if it's some new future thing. ... the notion that we call this thing the metaverse and everyone's trying to reclassify it as some future singular universe and therefore they can own that singular universe is a pretty misguided kind of concept.”

“I picked all things Metaverse and Web3. ... And so I just think that this whole concept of Metaverse and Web 3 goes away and we replace it with real solutions for people that give them value and then we'll be obsessed with these companies. And this too will be transitory.”

“Metta was a complete flop. It was a stupid idea to change the name of the company. ... I think that their VR efforts, AR efforts will be beaten handily by Apple and by the metaverse and, you know, open source slash decentralized solutions.”