SAN FRANCISCO At a last-minute meeting in the San Francisco Bay Area, Mark Zuckerberg, the founder and chief executive of the company formerly known as Facebook, called his top lieutenants for the social network. On the agenda: a meeting to discuss the road map for improving the main Facebook app, including a revamp that would change how users browse the service.
For weeks in advance, Mr. Zuckerberg had been messaging his managers about the overhaul, urging them to increase the speed and execution of their work, people with knowledge of the matter said. Some executives who had to read a 122-page slide deck about the changes began sweating with an unusual level of intensity, they said.
Facebook's leaders flew in from around the world for the summit, the people said, and Mr. Zuckerberg and the group pored over every slide. Within days, the team unveiled an update to the Facebook app to better compete with top rival TikTok.
Mr. Zuckerberg is setting a relentless pace as he leads his $450 billion company, which has been renamed Meta, into a new phase. In recent months, he has cut spending, cut benefits, reorganized his leadership team and made it clear he would cut low-performing employees. Those not on board can leave, he said. Managers sent out memos to convey the seriousness of the approach—one that was shared with The New York Times was titled "Operation Increased Intensity."
Mr. Zuckerberg, 38, is attempting to shift his company's focus away from social networking and toward the immersive — and thus far theoretical — world of the so-called metaverse. Across Silicon Valley, he and other executives who built what many refer to as Web 2.0—a more social, app-focused version of the internet—are rethinking and upending their original vision after their platforms were plagued by privacy stumbles, toxic content, and misinformation.
The moment is reminiscent of other bet-the-company gambles, like when Netflix killed off its DVD shipping business last decade to focus on streaming. But Mr. Zuckerberg makes these moves when Meta's back is against the wall. The company is staring down the barrel of a global recession. Competitors like TikTok, YouTube, and Apple are in decline.
And success is far from guaranteed. In recent months, Meta’s profits have fallen and revenue has slowed as the company has spent lavishly on the metaverse and as the economic slowdown has hurt its advertising business. Its stock has plunged.
"When Mark gets super focused on something, it becomes all hands on deck within the company," said Katie Hipbath, a former Facebook policy director and the founder of Anchor Change, a consulting firm that works on tech and democracy issues. "Teams will quickly drop other work to pivot to the issue at hand, and the pressure is intense to move fast to show progress."
Meta declined to comment. The company plans to report quarterly earnings on Wednesday.
Mr. Zuckerberg’s repositioning of Meta started in earnest last year, when he began rearranging his bench of lieutenants.
In October, he elevated a longtime friend and colleague, Andrew Bosworth, who is known as BOZ, to the position of chief technology officer, leading hardware efforts for the metaverse. He promoted other loyalists, too, including Javier Olivan, the new chief operating officer; Nick Clegg, who became president of global affairs; and Guy Rosin, who took on the new role of chief information security officer.
In June, Sheryl Sandberg, who was Mr. Zuckerberg’s No. 2 for 14 years, said she would step down this fall. While she spent more than a decade building Facebook’s advertising systems, she was less interested in doing the same for the metaverse, people familiar with her plans have said.
Mr. Zuckerberg has moved thousands of workers into different teams for the metaverse, training their focus on aspirational projects like hardware glasses, wearables, and a new operating system for those devices.
"It’s an existential bet on where people over the next decade will connect, express, and identify with one another," said Matthew Ball, a longtime tech executive and the author of a book on the metaverse. "If you have the cash, the engineers, the users, and the conviction to take a swing at that, then you should."
But the effort is far from cheap. Facebook’s Reality Labs division, which is building augmented and virtual reality products, has dragged down the company’s balance sheet; the hardware unit lost nearly $3 billion in the first quarter alone.
At the same time, Meta is grappling with privacy changes from Apple that have hampered its ability to measure the effectiveness of ads on iPhones. TikTok, the Chinese-owned video app, has stolen young audiences from Meta’s core apps like Instagram and Facebook. These challenges are coinciding with a brutal macroeconomic environment, which has pushed Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Twitter to freeze or slow hiring.
So, Mr. Zuckerberg has kicked his company into overdrive with a strong message: It’s time to do more with less.
This month, Meta lowered its engineering hiring targets for the year to 6,000, from 10,000 to 12,000, and said it would leave some open positions vacant. Budgets that were once fat are being trimmed, and managers have told not to expect an unlimited head count for their teams. In a memo last month, Chris Cox, Meta’s chief product officer, said the economic environment called for "leaner, meaner, better-executing teams."
In an employee meeting around the same time, Mr. Zuckerberg said he knew that not everyone would be on board with the changes. That was fine, he told the employees.
"I think some of you might decide that this place isn’t for you, and that self-selection is OK with me," Mr. Zuckerberg said. "Realistically, there are probably a bunch of people at the company who shouldn’t be here."
Another memo circulated internally among workers this month was titled "Operating With Increased Intensity." In the memo, a Meta vice president said managers should begin to "think about every person on their team and the value they are adding."
"If a direct report is coasting or a low performer, they are not who we need; they are failing this company," the memo said. "As a manager, you cannot allow someone to be net neutral or negative for Meta."
Mr. Zuckerberg is focusing the efforts of those who remain on areas he believes will benefit Meta the most in the long term. Those include the metaverse; messaging; Instagram Reels; privacy; artificial intelligence; and higher revenue from products that currently bring in little to none, according to Mr. Cox’s memo, which outlined six "investment priorities" for the company in the second half of this year.
Meta is pulling back in some areas, including low-selling products like the Portal video chat device, which will no longer be offered to consumers and will instead be aimed at businesses. Mr. Bosworth has also halted development of a dual-camera smartwatch, according to people with knowledge of the matter, though the company is working on other prototypes. Bloomberg reported earlier on the smartwatch.
Just days after the "work station" with Facebook managers this month, Mr. Zuckerberg posted an update to his Facebook profile, noting some coming changes in the app. Facebook would start pushing people into a more video-heavy feed with more suggested content, emulating how TikTok operates.
Meta has been investing heavily in video and discovery, aiming to beef up its artificial intelligence and to improve "discovery algorithms" that suggest engaging content to users without them having to work to find it.
In the past, Facebook has tested major product updates with a few English-speaking audiences to see how they perform before rolling them out more widely. But, this time, the 2.93 billion people around the world who use the social networking app will receive the update simultaneously.
It is a sign, some Meta employees said, of just how much Mr. Zuckerberg means business.
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