That a Spaniard, in this case Javier Oliván, ascends to the second position of one of the largest technology companies in the world, Meta, and unexpectedly becomes the right hand of the almighty Mark Zuckerberg, is good news if one lives in Spain, but some relevant US media, such as CNBC, already pointed out this Wednesday a fact to take into account: “Javier has a low profile in relation to Sheryl Sandeberg [a quien va a sustituir como director de Operaciones del propietario de Facebook]. He is practically unknown outside of campus.”
The statement may be too exaggerated, although it is true that Oliván has neither the financial profile of Sandeberg (who usually spoke with investors when they presented results) nor the experience of the renowned Silicon Valley director to deal with the company’s political tasks. . This is a key aspect given that the executive, along with Zuckerberg, always defended, as Bloomberg points out, Facebook’s business culture of growing quickly and solving problems later, which led the company to face multiple public scandals linked to privacy. and content moderation. Sandeberg spent years trying to improve Facebook’s relationship with users and regulators. A front that still remains open.
Oliván himself has acknowledged that, although he will have the same position as Sandeberg, “my role will be different. With some exceptions, he will not have the same public presence, since we have other leaders in Meta who do that job,” he said in a message on your Facebook profile.
What nobody can question is the very important role played by the Spanish engineer to bring Facebook to the whole world. Oliván, who has been with the company for almost 15 years, joined the social network as director of international development in October 2007, when it barely had 50 million active users, and its plan to translate the network into other languages and to give more weight to local communities elevated Facebook globally (today it has almost 3,000 million users).
Thus, if Sandberg led the construction of Facebook’s advertising business (he had experience from his previous stint at Google), which still represents 97% of Meta’s total revenue, Oliván can score a point for the company’s international expansion. Today more than 91% of monthly Facebook users come from outside the US and Canada. And Meta currently has four products with more than 1,000 million active users in the world: Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger.
Another key point in Oliván’s history on Facebook is that was the one who bet on the purchase of WhatsApp. According to a 2020 report by a US House antitrust subcommittee, Zuckerberg agreed with the Spanish engineer’s analysis that the messaging app could boost Facebook’s business. Apparently, Oliván convinced the leadership that WhatsApp was used more actively than the social network and gave as an example that “in Spain literally everyone” used it.
Oliván, Sabiánigo 1977, has extensive professional experience. He worked at Siemens and at NTT Data, but his career has been focused on Facebook, which he is currently facing the biggest reconversion of his. “Beyond the traditional rivalry with Google, it is being attacked from two more flanks”, as Fernando Aparicio, CEO of Amvos Digital, points out: “Amazon, with Amazon Advertising, taking away a lot of advertising business, and TikTok, taking over the younger generations.” In addition, Meta will be dedicated, as its founder has recognized, to a purpose that goes far beyond the simple exploitation of social networks, and “which focuses on that idea of the metaverse that they intend in a certain sense to appropriate with their name change ”, adds Enrique Dans, professor at IE Business School.
Aparicio recognizes that Meta may have advantages in the metaverse business, by being able to take advantage of the natural extension of all its networks, and its brutal audience, being able to monetize it through virtual purchases of avatars or NFTs, or through advertising. “But it will not be something with immediate business results and with which to calm the anxiety of Wall Street, which is seeing how the company’s growth slows down. There is a long way to go before it becomes something tangible and, above all, monetizable. Also, the Meta metaverse won’t be the only one.” Meta invested $10 billion in the metaverse in the last quarter of 2021 alone.
immersive world
For Dans, the key is to see if the future metaverse of Meta will be an immersive world in which hyper-targeted advertising will continue to pursue the user, through other formats. “Because if Meta intends to perpetuate a model in the metaverse in which users are nothing more than raw material to sell to advertisers, I am very afraid that it will fail, because no matter how stupid the markets are, it is difficult to fool them twice with the same trick,” he continues.
According to this professor, everything indicates that the so-called Web 3 will be developed through extensive use of cryptography and decentralization, that the identity of users will no longer be managed by companies like Facebook or Google, but by themselves in their walletsand their activity recorded on some kind of blockchain.
Dans points out that the biggest challenge for Meta, and therefore for Oliván, may be how to fit its activity with such premises. “Something that, obviously, was out of the reach of a Sheryl Sandberg who was too identified with the model of advertising exploitation of the voucher everything that the company used to get to where it was, and that the brutal fall of last February, from which the The company has not managed to recover, he evidenced. On whether Javier Oliván and Mark Zuckerberg himself are able to understand the magnitude of these changes, both their future and that of the company will depend, to a large extent, “the professor emphasizes.
More and more voices point out that the metaverse will only work if it is an open protocol suite, as TCP/IP was at the time, to which everyone can contribute and where all kinds of offers, products, services and information can be found. “If Meta insists on building its metaverse as a fenced garden, it will only be a simple video game that will manage to trick some companies into paying to establish a presence in it like Second Life did at the time and buy hundreds or thousands of games. Oculus 3D headsets, but never something worth taking seriously going forward.”
The ball is in the court of Zuckerberg and Oliván, who according to Ismael El-Qudsi, CEO of Internet Republica, is the “typical company man, who has earned the trust of the CEO to commission this task of integrating the various products (Facebook, Instragram, WhatsApp and Oculus) with his mind set on the great commitment of the Company: The Metaverse”.
Both, pressured by the scrutiny of the regulators, will also have to assess whether they want to complete the integration of payment methods with their social platforms to try to be a relevant player in the social e-commerce. An opportunity that, at the moment, they are not exploiting. And the numbers tighten. Meta, which came to exceed a trillion dollar valuation on the stock market last year, is now around 540,000 million. The tech giant posted its slowest growth in a decade in the first quarter of this year, with only 7% more revenue, and in February it suffered a $251 billion capitalization loss in one day, unprecedented in the industry. history of the markets. This after showing their 2021 accounts and revealing that their profit fell by 8% in the last quarter, and Facebook suffered the first drop in daily active users in its 18-year history.
