MTV offered Facebook $800 million cash plus a $900 million earnout in 2005, making it the first company to bid on the platform.

“We were the first people. We offered like $800 million cash with like a $900 million earnout if you can imagine.”

Many marquee public companies including Amazon, Netflix, and Facebook all broke their IPO issue price, undermining the idea that trading below issue price signals a failed offering.

“What do Salesforce, Netflix, Square, Amazon, Palo Alto Networks, Facebook, Snap, Proof Point, Netswuite, and Coree have No idea. They all broke issue.”

Users who quit Facebook and Instagram saw their Net Promoter Score shift from positive 35 to negative 35.

“When people quit Facebook and quit Instagram, they went from a plus 35 to a negative 35.”

Masad maps platform reach to the technology adoption bell curve. X and Hacker News serve the ingroup and early adopters. Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube are the channels that reach the early majority and beyond.

“Twitter's influence is amazing, but it tends to be elite kind of inside group influence. I think Instagram, Facebook, still YouTube is where you get to the early majority.”

Greg Isenberg draws a direct parallel between the 2013 Facebook/Google ads agency wave and the 2026 AI employee management agency opportunity.

“It reminds me so much of marketing agencies in like 2013, 2014 who learned Facebook ads, Google paid ads, and I mean it was just like such a great opportunity to be early on something like that. This is happening all over again 2026 with managing AI employees for businesses and making like an agency out of it.”

Greg Isenberg on the counterintuitive staying power of Facebook ads for older demographics.

“Everyone keeps telling me, 'Jonathan, Facebook ads don't work anymore because no one uses Facebook.' You're wrong. A very large amount of people use Facebook. They're just not in your age range.”

The 2013-2014 paid-ads agency playbook is the clearest analogy for why AI employee management agencies represent a durable early-mover opportunity in 2026.

“It reminds me so much of marketing agencies in like 2013, 2014 who learned Facebook ads, Google paid ads, and I mean it was just like such a great opportunity to be early on something like that. This is happening all over again 2026 with managing AI employees for businesses and making like an agency out of it.”