SAN FRANCISCO — Mark Zuckerberg has spent the last nine months against the ropes as his company has made big cuts to its workforce and struggled to gain mainstream traction with its ambitious plans for virtual reality.
On Thursday, he told Meta employees how he planned to get the company back on track. In an all-hands meeting, Zuckerberg offered an explanation for recent layoffs and for the first time laid out a vision for how Meta’s work in artificial intelligence would blend with its plans for the virtual reality it calls the metaverse.
Zuckerberg’s talk was an attempt to rally staff after the most tumultuous period in his company’s 19-year history. The chief executive said he made “tough decisions” about layoffs with the goal of “building a better technology company” that shipped better products, faster — something he believed Meta wasn’t doing well as it swelled to more than 80,000 employees at the peak of the pandemic.
“I want us to use this period that’s going to be a bit more stable in order to evolve and rebuild our culture,” he said, according to two people who attended the meeting and shared remarks and a recording with The New York Times.
Zuckerberg delivered the remarks in a roughly half-hour address to thousands of employees at Meta’s Menlo Park, California, campus. The talk, made on an outdoor pavilion the company calls Hacker Square, was also livestreamed to tens of thousands of employees around the world.