When Mark Zuckerberg and his BBQ sauce announced Meta last year, it was punctuated with aspirations and visions of a future where everybody is interacting with everybody else in virtual reality.
At the time one of our biggest questions was who was going to build all of the functionality Zuckerberg envisioned. That answer has been answered to some extent as more and more companies buy into the idea of the metaverse.
However, an announcement from Meta this week brought the Meta Board of Directors to our attention. The announcement was that chief executive officer and co-founder of food delivery service Doordash, Tony Xu, was joining the board with immediate effect.
“Tony has built a great service for millions of people to get food and more from hundreds of thousands of restaurants and small businesses. I’ve always thought it’s important to have great tech leaders on our board, and Tony has direct experience both running a tech company and solving complex challenges in commerce. I look forward to learning from his perspective as we build towards the metaverse,” Zuckerberg wrote in a press release.
While this is a notable appointment, Xu is hardly the biggest name on the Meta board of directors. In fact, together the members of the board look like a who’s who of Silicon Valley.
The current board of directors includes:
- Mark Zuckerberg;
- Peggy Alford, executive vice president, Global Sales, PayPal Holdings, Inc.;
- Marc L. Andreessen, Andreessen Horowitz;
- Drew Houston, co-founder and CEO, Dropbox, Inc.;
- Nancy Killefer, Retired Senior partner, McKinsey & Company;
- Robert M. Kimmitt, Meta’s Lead Independent director and Senior International Counsel at WilmerHale LLP;
- Sheryl K. Sandberg, chief operating officer, Meta;
- Peter A. Thiel, Founders Fund;
- Tracey T. Travis, executive vice president and chief financial officer, The Estée Lauder Companies, Inc.;
- and Tony Xu, co-founder and CEO, DoorDash, Inc.
We find it interesting that Thiel is still on Meta’s board of directors given his political affiliations and the controversy he courted a few years back when it was alleged that he called Apartheid a “sound economic system”. However, we suspect that Thiel’s involvement is an artefact of his being one of Facebook’s original backers.
We also have to point out the fact that Meta makes use of WilmerHale for its legal counsel. This same firm was hired by Activision Blizzard and was accused of hiding information by the California Department of Fair Employment and Housing.
To be clear, we’re not saying something nefarious is going on, it’s not uncommon for CEOs and other bigwigs to serve on the board of directors for multiple companies. Bobby Kotick for instance still serves on the Coca Cola board of directors despite his failings at Activision Blizzard as its CEO.
However, with a board of directors as illustrious as this, the metaverse may become a reality faster than we anticipated and that in and of itself is worth keeping a cautious eye on what Zuck and his mates are up to.
