Week in Review - A warmer, less militant Mark Zuckerberg

Saturday, February 06, 2021 • By Lucas Matney

Hello friends and welcome to Week in Review.

Last week, I touched on the meme-ing of America. This week, I’m looking at a friendly start to the kickoff of Social 3.0

If you’re reading this on the TechCrunch site, you can get this in your inbox from the newsletter page, and follow my tweets @lucasmtny.

The big thing

On Thursday night, just a few days after Tesla CEO Elon Musk had joined a chat hosted on the Clubhouse platform, Mark Zuckerberg logged on.

His chat was short, friendly and unannounced, one of the room’s hosts was one of his employees, another was one of his investors, so nobody was asking him about Trump or Myanmar. He talked for a few minutes about the company’s AR/VR ambitions and how he saw the tech improving the global workplace and then he logged off.

In any other time in the past decade of Facebook’s social media dominance, a Zuckerberg appearance would have been a de facto precursor to an acquisition or a competitive onslaught. But in 2021, Facebook sits in a pretty hostile position with American regulatory bodies, both sides of the aisle are unhappy with the network and the company has antitrust suits looming from every agency possible making any high profile M&A of an upstart social media platform like Clubhouse an extremely unlikely proposition.

Zuckerberg’s friendly moment on Clubhouse could be a broader sign that Facebook is moving past its combative phase of squashing any new social upstart that crossed its path.

Then again, Clubhouse could also just be earning a police escort through the typical fray from investment firm Andreessen Horowitz, its co-founder Marc Andreessen is a long-serving Facebook board member and has been a major booster of the Clubhouse platform. His firm has brute-forced the platform by tapping their influence network. Clubhouse hasn’t scaled to slam dunk status quite yet, but it’s certainly showing more promise than any other upstart of the past several years. After already having achieved a reported $1 billion valuation, the app has banked several million new users in the past weeks.

What makes Clubhouse intriguing for investors scoping out a new generation of social media platforms, is what they hope could be a more scalable moderation model that relies more heavily on users than it does central governance. On Clubhouse, users can report or block speakers, but moderators ultimately wield the power and responsibility to remove bad actors from rooms. This is all but assured to go sideways in some regards as unsavory characters set up home on Clubhouse, but there are plenty of reasons to suspect it will have a simpler go than Facebooks has.

Back in 2015, this classic Vanity Fair story detailed the lengths to which Zuckerberg went to inspire his team to crush Google Plus. In 2021, after the ceaseless messiness of Facebook’s past 5 years, I think we’ve also moved pass any era where a deep-pocketed tech giant will aim to take ownership of a slice of Facebook’s problems.

Facebook likely just has bigger fish to fry at this point as it tries to find what can be its post-Instagram play. Rather than wasting its attention on upstart social plays, Zuckerberg is focusing on how it can best Apple and conquer the AR/VR market, the loose topic of Zuckerberg’s chat on Clubhouse.

Other things

Jeff Bezos steps down
The biggest story of the week in the tech world was doubtlessly Bezon announcing that he will be transitioning out of the CEO role later this year. The company just banked $100 billion in revenue in the most recent quarter and Wall Street seems to be pleased with the direction. The abrupt announcement didn’t seem to rattle Amazon’s stock price, especially given his replacement will be long-time AWS boss Andy Jassy. More

Who is Andy Jassy?
AWS CEO Andy Jassy will be taking over the reins as Amazon CEO later this year. He’s a figure incredibly well known to folks following Amazon closely, but what does his promotion mean for Amazon’s future and the future of Amazon Web Services? My colleague Ron dive into the possible ramifications. More

Myanmar military takes on social media access
Fresh off of a democratic crisis in the United States, American social media companies are now dealing with blocked access to their services following the Myanmar military’s coup. While Facebook and Twitter have played hardball with the new regime, the military government has ordered telecoms to block access to the platforms temporarily. More

Uber boozes it up
The big acquisition this week was Uber’s announcement that it is buying alcohol delivery platform Drizly for $1.1 billion in a mostly stock deal. The deal comes just a few month’s after Uber’s Postmates acquisition was approved by U.S. regulators. More

Google kills internal Stadia studios
In a development that will surprise very few long-time readers of this newsletter, Google announced this week that it’s killing its internal game studios building content for its Stadia game streaming service. Those studios never shipped a single game for the platform. More

A new type of camera
A good weekend read from my colleague Devin. Metalenz is creating a very strange “2D” camera that aims to rethink lenses and image sensors, allowing for thinner devices and components. Expect to see more on this tech in the future. More

Extra things

Some of my favorite reads from our Extra Crunch subscription service:

Lightspeed’s Gaurav Gupta and Grafana’s Raj Dutt discuss pitch decks, pricing and how to nail the narrative
“Before he was a partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners, Gaurav Gupta had his eye on Grafana Labs, the company that supports open-source analytics platform Grafana. But Raj Dutt, Grafana’s co-founder and CEO, played hard to get. This week on Extra Crunch Live, the duo explained how they came together for Grafana’s Series A — and eventually, its Series B. They also walked us through Grafana’s original Series A pitch deck before Gupta shared the aspects that stood out to him and how he communicated those points to the broader partnership at Lightspeed.” More

The Future of SaaS is on-demand
“Leading SaaS are now using on-demand experts to revolutionize the customer experience. They’re growing revenue and post-sales retention and even using the insights to build better products. According to Staffing Industry Analysts (SIA), the global gig economy is approaching $5 trillion as project-based staffing continues this digital transformation.” More

TechCrunch’s favorite companies from 500 Startups’ latest demo day
“TechCrunch tuned into 500 Startups‘ 27th demo day today, keen to get our eyes on the accelerator’s latest companies. Demo days are regular affairs, but they always feature a crop of startups that could build the next tech giant, so we pay attention. Especially in the COVID-19 era, when demo days have gone virtual. Now it’s easier than ever for investors, and journalists, to tune in.” More