> I find that hard to believe. Looking at https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/META/meta-platform..., they had a good revenue growth in the early ‘10s.

So, how they hired salespeople was based on revenue per head. If there wasn't enough revenue in a particular part of the business, no new hires for you. Obviously, that's gonna be a lagging indicator.

And they were honestly leaving a lot of money on the table there, but honestly not as much as they were leaving on the table by having a really, really, really bad and buggy self-serve interface that made it hard for small advertisers to spend money.

When they fixed that, the small businesses all got good results (e.g. hairdressers etc) and those people then convinced all the agency people to put more money into the platform.

Up till 2015 or so, it was a real struggle to convince people to even try FB ads, but after that it was like shooting fish in a barrel.

> I find that hard to believe. Looking at https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/META/meta-platform..., they had a good revenue growth in the early ‘10s.

Also, up to 2013 or so (when feed ads became a thing), most of that money was coming from payments for f2p games, so they had lots of partner managers there, but not enough ads sales people.