Acquired · Meta · History
History
Meta was founded in 2004 (Cambridge, Massachusetts (Harvard dorm room); moved to Palo Alto, California in 2004). The timeline below traces every inflection point Acquired identified — founding, leadership changes, strategic pivots, crises, cultural moments.
The story
Mark Zuckerberg launched Thefacebook at Harvard in February 2004. Within 24 hours 1,200 students had signed up. The key insight was real identity: Facebook was the first online network where your profile was tied to who you actually were. The social graph of real relationships, once seeded, created a network effect that made Facebook indispensable to its members. By summer 2004 Zuckerberg moved to Palo Alto, took $500K from Peter Thiel, and hired Sean Parker as the first president. Facebook hit 1 million users in December 2004, 5.5 million by 2005, and 100 million by 2008. The strategic moat was the same from the dorm room to the IPO: the real-identity social graph was impossible to recreate elsewhere once your friends were already on Facebook.
Inflection points · grouped by decade
2000s
- 2004Founding
Thefacebook.com launches at Harvard
1,200 Harvard students sign up in 24 hours. Real-identity social graph from day one: your Facebook profile is you, not a username.
[Acquired Meta episode]
- 2004Financing
Peter Thiel invests $500K — moves to Palo Alto
Thiel's angel investment is Facebook's first outside capital. The move to Palo Alto the same summer signals Zuckerberg's intent: this is not a college project.
[Acquired Meta episode]
- 2006Strategic shift
Facebook opens to everyone — not just college students
Opens registration to any email address. Within months Facebook has 12 million users. The social graph scales beyond the campus.
[Acquired Meta episode]
- 2006Strategic shift
Yahoo offers $1B — Zuckerberg declines
Board votes to accept; Zuckerberg votes no. He walks out of the meeting and refuses. The refusal — enabled by his founder-control structure — preserved the company for a public that valued it at $104B six years later.
[Acquired Meta episode]
- 2007Product
Facebook Platform + News Feed launch
The News Feed (2006) made Facebook a consumption product, not just a profile page. The Platform (2007) turned Facebook into infrastructure for other apps — 24,000 apps within a year. The combination of feed and platform defined social media.
[Acquired Meta episode]
2010s
- 2012IPO
Facebook IPO — $104B market cap, largest tech IPO at the time
IPO priced at $38/share. Nasdaq glitches caused $500M in losses for market makers. The stock fell 50% in the first 3 months. By 2013 mobile ads reversed the decline.
[Acquired Facebook IPO episode]
- 2012Acquired co.
Instagram acquired for $1B
13 employees. Zuckerberg identified Instagram as the next photo-sharing behavior before it had a business model. The acquisition was approved by the FTC in 90 days; in 2024 it would not be.
[Acquired Meta episode]
- 2014Acquired co.
WhatsApp acquired for $19B
55 employees, 450 million active users. Jan Koum and Brian Acton had been rejected for jobs at both Facebook and Twitter. WhatsApp's end-to-end encryption and international user base complemented Facebook's ad-supported network.
[Acquired Meta episode]
- 2016Strategic shift
Oculus + VR — the long-horizon platform bet begins
Facebook acquired Oculus for $2B in 2014. By 2016 the VR bet is clearly a long-horizon play, not a near-term product. Zuckerberg's dual-class shares mean he alone can absorb the sustained losses.
[Acquired Meta episode]
2020s
- 2021Strategic shift
Facebook rebrands to Meta — metaverse bet declared
The rebrand to Meta signals that Zuckerberg's thesis is the metaverse, not social media. Reality Labs losses accelerate. The stock falls ~65% in 2022 before 'Year of Efficiency' reverses it.
[Acquired Meta episode]
- 2023Strategic shift
Year of Efficiency — $30B+ in cost cuts, stock triples
Zuckerberg declares 2023 the Year of Efficiency. Layoffs of ~21,000 employees (25% of workforce). Meta's stock tripled in 2023, making it the best-performing stock in the S&P 500 that year.
[Meta earnings + Acquired Zuckerberg interview]