When Mark Zuckerberg met Seattle

GeekWire

Technology, Tech News, News

4.4 • 116 Ratings

🗓️ 12 November 2022

⏱️ 22 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The year was 2011, Facebook was serving a mere 600 million users, and Mark Zuckerberg was making his pitch to a crowd of prospective hires inside the company's office near Pike Place Market — explaining why the social network had chosen Seattle for its first remote engineering hub.

"We were like, alright, at some point, we should probably think about opening up offices in other places," he said. "And we figured that Seattle would be a good starting place, because it's culturally pretty similar to the Bay Area, pretty close by. ... It's the same time zone. So it's easier to schedule time to hang out and talk with folks."

Originally an experiment, it quickly became much more than that.

"We've been totally overwhelmed with awesome folks we've had the opportunity to talk to, from Microsoft, Amazon, Google, different startups here," he said. "And it's just really impressive. It has definitely blown away our expectations for how quickly we were going to be able to find good people."

The trend only continued from there. In the decade that followed, Facebook grew to more than 8,000 people across numerous offices in the Seattle area, as the company grew to reach nearly 3 billion users across the globe, and dramatically expanded its footprint under the Meta umbrella ... until this week.

On this episode of the GeekWire Podcast, we discuss Zuckerberg's decision to cut 11,000 jobs, or 13% of Meta's workforce; examine the company's growth in the Seattle region as an emblem of Silicon Valley's global ambitions; and consider the new realities of popular tech business models in the face of the economic downturn.

With GeekWire co-founders John Cook and Todd Bishop.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Transcript

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0:00.0	I think it's going to be a really exciting few years and that's what I'm excited about now.
0:04.0	I think the last five years have been about connecting all these people.
0:07.5	The next five years are going to be about all the crazy things that you can do now that all those people are connected.
0:11.8	I want to say, you know, up front,
0:15.2	that I take full responsibility for this decision.
0:18.8	This was ultimately my call.
0:20.9	And it was, it was, you know, one of the hardest calls that I've had to make in the 18 years of running the company. Welcome to GeekWire. I'm GeekWire. I'm GeekWire co-founder Todd Bishop.
0:38.0	And I'm GeekWire co-founder John Cook.
0:40.0	We are coming to you from Seattle where we get to report each day on what's happening around us in business technology and innovation.
0:46.0	What happens here matters everywhere and every week on the show we get to talk about some of the biggest stories in the news.
0:52.0	John, I've got a question for you. If you were to
0:57.2	name the defining stories, the defining trends of the Pacific Northwest technology market and
1:05.4	specifically Seattle over the past decade. What would they be just off the
1:11.0	top of your head? I'm hitting you with this cold.
1:13.1	Okay, well, you know, we've talked about this a lot.
1:15.4	So, top three or four, I think you've heard these before.
1:18.8	The meteoric growth of Amazon, the rebirth of Microsoft under Satya Nadella, the arrival of
1:28.0	engineering centers from Silicon Valley tech giants that have redefined the landscape of Seattle's
1:35.8	tech market beyond just what it's known for with Amazon and Microsoft.
1:41.2	Those are three biggies right there, but there are others too.
1:44.1	For sure.
1:45.1	And I would argue that some news we saw this week marked the end of the third defining
	...

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