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  New Intelligence Report

He was dubbed the "Second Gates";

He is a Harvard dropout who majored in computer science and psychology;

He started from scratch and became the youngest billionaire in the world within seven years.

Yes, this is the story of Zuckerberg, the head of Meta (formerly Facebook).

Behind this Silicon Valley hero, there is another name worth noting - Andrew "Boz" Bosworth, the current CTO of Meta.

It was Boz who made Zuckerberg full of ambitions for Meta's "Metaverse": Boz founded the AR and VR departments in Meta, which eventually developed into Reality Labs.

It was also Boz who once caused Facebook to fall into a public opinion storm, forcing Zuckerberg to follow him to refute rumors about the company.

The deep friendship that the two people established at work lasted for nearly twenty years. Their identities have undergone wonderful changes, but what remains unchanged is that they have always fought side by side, realized their dreams together, and shared victories.

Boz and Zuckerberg met at Harvard University, when he was a teaching assistant for Zuckerberg's artificial intelligence course.

In 2005, Zuckerberg dropped out of school in his sophomore year to start his own business, and Boz joined Facebook in 2006 when it had only 15 employees.

How did Boz get from being a teaching assistant at Harvard University to becoming the CTO of Meta and Zuckerberg's important deputy? And what happened between the controversial Boz and Zuckerberg?

Around 2003, Harvard University was full of talented people, and Bosworth studied computer science at Harvard University, where he met Mark Zuckerberg.

Boz was the teaching assistant for Zuckerberg's artificial intelligence course. Zuckerberg was still an undergraduate at the time, so Boz could be considered half of his teacher.

Although artificial intelligence and neural network technology were still in their early stages of development, Zuckerberg and Boz were very interested in them.

They often discussed the future development of AI after class, shared their views and insights, and gradually established a deep friendship.

"Facebook was officially launched on February 12, two weeks after the CS182 final exam, so he was obviously studying and starting Facebook at the same time," Boz wrote in Harvard University's 2020 alumni profile.

"Zuckerberg started his own business from scratch, but none of us knew what Facebook would become."

In 2005, Zuckerberg dropped out of Harvard during his sophomore year to start a business full-time, focusing on the operation and development of Facebook.

After graduating from Harvard in 2004, Boz worked briefly at Microsoft.

According to his Meta profile, before coming to Facebook, he worked as a developer for Microsoft Visio (flowchart and diagramming software) for almost two years.

In a 2021 interview with The Verge, Boz said his short time at Microsoft taught him a lot about "professional software development and management."

He officially joined Facebook in 2006 and can be considered a veteran employee. At that time, the company had about 15 engineers, and only five or six employees joined earlier than him.

Building News Feed

If we talk about Boz's contribution to Facebook, we cannot avoid News Feed.

In 2006, news feed ads first appeared on Facebook. Facebook can be regarded as the originator of news feed ads. Zuckerberg himself regards News Feed as one of the biggest and most successful bets in the past decade.

News Feed changed the way news is distributed in Europe and the United States, and also brought huge advertising revenue returns to Facebook. By 2014, more than half of Facebook's advertising revenue came from news feed ads.

And Boz was responsible for building Facebook's first News Feed.

"I built all the artificial intelligence and ranking behind the information flow, and I was the first one."

But it also put a lot of pressure on Boz himself. In 2011, Boz told the Los Angeles Times, "It consumes me more than anything else in my life."

Although News Feed was later proven to be a very successful business model, it was strongly opposed by users in the early days of its launch and was considered too "intrusive."

"News Feed fuels users' passionate emotional outbursts, most of which are negative. I prefer fan groups to 'bad reviews'."

“But that was also when I realized how big the opportunity was for Facebook. It was very humbling and eye-opening to see how passionate people were about the product.”

As Boz's career at Facebook developed, he later led the team to develop products such as Facebook Messenger and Groups.

Take over advertising business

In 2012, Boz was supposed to take a six-month sabbatical from the company, but instead he took over the company's advertising business.

Boz recalled in a 2015 interview with Wired that six months before his planned sabbatical in 2012, Zuckerberg asked him to figure out how to monetize advertising on the mobile platform.

According to Boz's recollection, Zuckerberg painted a pie for him at the time: "In the next six months, there will be at least four billion-dollar opportunities in the mobile field. You can grab one or two, and then you can go on vacation."

This request from Zuckerberg made Boz feel crazy, but he decided to give it a try. “Why not?”

Two days before Boz was to go on leave, Zuckerberg asked him to take charge of the engineering design of all Facebook advertising products, and Boz accepted.

Boz ended up taking a two-month trip and added some extra vacation time at the end of the year.

Until 2017, Boz was in charge of Facebook's advertising business.

Creating Reality Labs

After leading the construction of Facebook's advertising business unit and developing major features such as News Feed and Groups, in 2017 Boz founded Meta's Reality Labs, covering areas such as VR, AR and virtual worlds.

Reality Labs changed its name several times, initially being simply called AR/VR, then Facebook Reality Labs, and finally Reality Labs.

Reality Labs has been responsible for producing Facebook's hardware products, including the Meta Quest VR headset and Meta's Ray-Ban smart glasses.

Reality Labs has become an important part of the Metaverse blueprint.

When Zuckerberg announced the creation of Meta as Facebook's new parent company in October 2021, he said Meta's business would be divided into two parts.

One part is Facebook's family of apps, the company's traditional social media business, which includes Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp.

The other part is Reality Labs, which focuses on the metaverse.

When the company announced its name change, Zuckerberg said, "From now on, we will be the Metaverse first, not Facebook." This is enough to show the importance of the Metaverse concept and Reality Labs in the company.

Metaverse is a term borrowed from science fiction.

It refers to a future version of the internet where people use technology like virtual reality and augmented reality headsets to access the internet instead of using their phones and laptops to surf the internet.

Under Boz's leadership, Meta launched a smart glasses product in 2021 in collaboration with Ray-Ban, the main function of which is to allow users to take photos and videos.

Ray-Ban Stories glasses were launched in September 2021 and allow users to take photos and videos.

Before the product launch, Boz shared a video of himself wearing Ray-Ban glasses and throwing pillows at Zuckerberg.

But unfortunately, Reality Labs, which changed its name many times, ultimately could not escape its ill-fated fate.

Last month, Boz announced the reorganization of Reality Labs. This "Dream Island" that Zuckerberg once invested all his efforts in has not yet waited for the moment when the dream of the metaverse comes true.

All teams at Reality Labs have been integrated into two departments, one of which is the "Metaverse" department that was previously responsible for the Quest headset series.

The other is a new "Wearables" division, which will be responsible for Meta's other hardware efforts, including smart glasses in collaboration with Ray-Ban.

The dissolution of Reality Labs resulted in the layoffs of many middle and senior management personnel, but Boz still holds an important position and Zuckerberg has not given up on AR/VR.

In September 2021, the company announced that Boz would succeed Mike Schroepfer as CTO in 2022, marking the largest leadership change in the company's history.

In the Facebook post announcing his departure, Schroepfer talked about Boz's experience working in Facebook's AR/VR division.

“Boz’s contribution is a foundational component in our broader effort to build the metaverse,” Schroepfer said.

Zuckerberg agreed in a statement published on the Facebook blog.

https://about.fb.com/news/2021/09/note-from-mark-zuckerberg/

"As our next CTO, Boz will continue to lead Facebook Reality Labs and oversee our work in areas such as AR and VR," Zuckerberg wrote in the letter.

“This is all foundational work that will help us build the metaverse, and I’m excited about the future of this work under Boz’s leadership.”

Despite his many achievements, Boz is a controversial figure within Meta.

Boz made headlines in 2018 when BuzzFeed published an internal memo he had sent about two years earlier.

In the memo, titled "The Ugly," Boz appeared to defend a lot of the negative news happening at Facebook as long as the company continued to grow.

“The ugly truth is that we believe so deeply in the power of human connection that anything that allows us to connect with more people more often is *actually* a good thing.”

“In our view, this is perhaps the only area where the indicators reflect the true picture,” he wrote in the memo.

“It’s not about us or our stock price. It’s about the thing itself — we connect people,” he added.

After BuzzFeed broke the news, Zuckerberg had to do emergency public relations and come out to condemn Boz's memo.

Zuckerberg said: "Boz is undeniably a talented leader, but he has said a lot of provocative things. This is something that most people at Facebook (including myself) strongly disagree with. We have never believed that the ends justify the means."

In 2018, during a committee hearing before Irish lawmakers, Nimah Sweeney, then Facebook's head of public policy in Ireland, also said Boz had a "mixed reputation within the company for publicizing negative content."

“A lot of us would like to go back to the moment before he sent that message and hit delete,” Sweeney added.

However, despite bringing a public opinion crisis to the company and making himself controversial, Boz does not seem to have any intention of stopping writing.

By doing this, Boz provided excellent material for "Facebook whistleblower" Frances Haugen, which was tantamount to handing a knife to his opponent.

Haugen has exposed many internal affairs of Facebook, which caused a stir. She accused Facebook of putting business growth above public safety.

The evidence is in Boz’s memos — documents leaked by Haugen show that as late as 2020, Boz was still writing memos about hate on the Facebook platform.

In the memo, titled "Demand-Side Issues," Boz appeared to question the futility of Facebook's attempts to address hate speech on its platform.

Even the "unrepentant" Boz posted this memo on his personal blog in early 2021.

“As a society, we don’t have a hate speech supply problem; we have a hate speech demand problem,” he wrote.

Boz added that “online platforms don’t work on the supply side because they don’t control the demand side.”

In addition to writing on his personal blog, Boz also hosts a podcast called "Boz to the Future".

Boz's tech podcast launched in June 2021, and has featured appearances by Facebook executive Chris Cox and tech journalists Ina Fried and Casey Newton.

Boz sometimes talks about his nearly two-decade working relationship with Zuckerberg.

Boz said on Lenny's podcast this year that when Zuckerberg decides to appoint an employee to work on the company's most important project, he looks at the work with "the eyes of Sauron" and focuses on every detail.

And Boz is the person chosen by Zuckerberg's "Eye of Sauron", and they will continue to build the Meta universe.