Meta Platforms Inc. META is one of the largest social media companies in the world, with nearly 3.3 billion daily active users using its apps and services. Meta’s rise has made its co-founder and CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, one of the richest people in the world.

But how did Meta grow to be so big, beating out existing tech giants like Microsoft, apart from Alphabet Inc.’s Google, and Yahoo!? Zuckerberg explained it in a conversation on the Minus One podcast by South Park Commons last week.

“Why was it the case that we were able to build Facebook and that some other company didn’t?” he asked.

“It wasn’t it was like a super novel idea, right? There was Friendster before, there was Myspace… all this stuff. Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, they all, like, had versions of it,” he added, explaining that Facebook was built on existing ideas of a social network at the time.

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Google had Orkut at the time, while Yahoo! had multiple services like Messenger, Live, Groups and more.

“It’s not like that they had a lack of talent. I mean, we were like a ragtag group of children and they had serious engineers and serious infrastructure.”

So Why Did Tech Giants Fail While Facebook Succeeded?

While Myspace and Orkut were both notable social networks at some point, big tech companies eventually missed the bus while “fumbling around.”

“Large companies are slow. They lack conviction,” Zuckerberg explained why those companies failed while Facebook succeeded.

“The reason is, people doubt new ideas before they come to fruition. The narrative with social networking is like, ‘ah, it’s just like this college kid thing.'”

He then went on to add that companies can be dismissive about these ideas by terming it as a fad, then doubt that they would be able to make money off it.

When smartphones became popular, the narrative was that the “shift to mobile is going to be pretty hard,” added Zuckerberg. By then, it was too late for the established tech giants to adapt and launch their own competing social networks – Google even tried to launch Google+, emulating the exclusivity strategy it used for Gmail. However, it was eventually shut down after it failed to take off.

Beyond Facebook

Meta did not rely on Facebook alone, too. It acquired Instagram for a consideration of $1 billion in 2012. The social networking giant also outbid Google to acquire WhatsApp for a total consideration of $19 billion two years later.

According to Meta’s latest results, nearly 3.3 billion people use at least one Meta service every day. Essentially, two out of five people in the world are active on at least one Meta platform every day.

Who knew creating a “ragtag group of children” would lead to a social networking giant that would help Zuckerberg amass a wealth of $187 billion, making him richer than Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.