You talked about things like interoperability and the importance of openness and you referenced your experience being an app on someone else’s platform and how that influenced your thinking. But there is a tension here where to deliver on a metaverse vision, particularly when you talk about things like being able to carry, say purchases, across different experiences, where it actually may be easier if there is one company providing the totality of the fabric, and that does seem to be this vision where Facebook is the water in which you swim when you’re in the metaverse, not Facebook, but whatever the new name, the new idea for this metaverse is, and then other people can plug into it. Is that a good characterization of the way you’re thinking about it? Or do you see this really being a peer-to-peer thing, where there are other metaverses and those are also interoperable? What’s your vision on how that plays out?

MZ: I think it’s probably more peer-to-peer, and I think the vocabulary on this matters a little bit. We don’t think about this as if different companies are going to build different metaverses. We think about it in terminology like the Mobile Internet. You wouldn’t say that Facebook or Google are building their own Internet and I don’t think in the future it will make sense to say that we are building our own metaverse either. I think we’re each building different infrastructure and components that go towards hopefully helping to build this out overall and I think that those pieces will need to work together in some ways.

Stratechery

Thank goodness the interview is in Stratechery so they talk about interesting subjects!