Tagged: meta
30 results
The AI Bill Has Come Due: Tokens vs. Humans
This documentary-style video traces how artificial intelligence went from a cheap labor-replacing miracle to a runaway cost center. After ChatGPT's 2022 launch, companies raced to adopt AI and cut tens of thousands of jobs across tech and fast food. But forced internal adoption, token-based performance metrics, and a status-driven culture of 'token maxing' inflated demand far beyond real need. Combined with data-center component shortages and canceled construction projects, token prices more than doubled between late 2025 and mid-2026. Giants like Microsoft, Meta, Uber and Nvidia are now confronting AI bills that rival or exceed the human labor they replaced, and with Anthropic and OpenAI expected to go public and raise prices, enterprises are being forced into an unprecedented choice: tokens or humans.
May Haim Kotlarsky
May Haim Kotlarsky is CEO, General Counsel and Board Director at The Brief (formerly Creatopy), a Romania-and-California based AI marketing platform. A lawyer by training with an LLB from Hebrew University and an LLM from Georgetown Law, she spent years leading privacy and monetization AI legal work at Meta, GitHub, and Rakuten Viki before moving into the operator seat at The Brief in July 2025.
Sukhmeet Toor
Sukhmeet Toor is an engineering leader in San Francisco who works in the leadership office at ID.me, the digital-identity company that verifies who you are for the IRS, state unemployment agencies, and retailers. Before identity, he was in the business of matchmaking: he co-founded Dil Mil, a dating app for South Asians that produced roughly a wedding a day, and then, spotting the same family-and-community values in another group, he and his co-founder built Shalom, a Jewish dating app. A Microsoft Outlook-for-Mac engineering manager turned serial builder, Toor has since worked at Meta and Pencil Spaces and is involved with Actual AI, which builds tools for managers whose teams now mix humans and AI agents.
Tullie Murrell
Tullie Murrell is the CEO and co-founder of Shaped, a New York startup building a real-time retrieval engine for search, feeds, and agents. Before Shaped, Murrell spent about five years at Facebook AI Research, where he created PyTorchVideo, the leading open-source library for video understanding, and was an early core contributor to PyTorch Lightning, a training framework now used by millions of developers. The video models he led powered Facebook newsfeed ranking and Instagram Reels. In 2021 he left big-tech research to package that same personalization machinery into a self-serve product for companies without armies of ML engineers. Shaped went through Y Combinator's W22 batch and raised an $8M Series A led by Madrona Ventures in July 2024.
William Sun
William Sun is the co-founder and CEO of Auctor, a New York AI company building the 'system of action' for enterprise software implementation. He dropped out of Johns Hopkins - where he studied biomedical engineering and computer science - and left a job at Meta to start the company, which he built with three co-founders drawn from Google, AWS, Apple, ServiceNow and NASA. In April 2026 Auctor emerged from stealth with a $20M Series A led by Sequoia Capital, with backers including Microsoft's M12, HubSpot Ventures, Workday Ventures, OneStream, Tercera and Y Combinator. Auctor's AI agents capture discovery calls and workshops, turn them into structured requirements, and generate the artifacts - SOWs, proposals, architecture docs, user stories - that consultants used to hand-build over weeks.
Brittainy Lovett
Brittainy Lovett is a Meta operator who works inside the Office of the CEO, one of the highest-trust seats in a 77,000-person company. A Northwestern-trained mechanical engineer who started in consulting at Deloitte, she has built a career on privacy critical incident response - the unglamorous, high-stakes work of keeping user data safe when something goes wrong. Based in New York, she is the kind of behind-the-scenes operator who makes very large machines run quietly.
Diya Mathew
Diya Mathew is a Senior Manager for Customer Engagement Strategy in the Office of the President & COO at ServiceNow, the enterprise cloud platform company valued at over $100 billion. A graduate of Duke University's Fuqua School of Business and NIT Tiruchirappalli, she brings a rare blend of technical depth and strategic acumen forged across Cisco, Deloitte Consulting, Meta, and now ServiceNow. Based in San Francisco, she works at the intersection of executive strategy, customer engagement, and enterprise operations.
Vatsal Bhardwaj
Vatsal Bhardwaj is the founder and CEO of Jabali.ai, a Los Altos startup building a no-code, generative-AI game engine that lets anyone create and publish video games from text prompts. A 20-year product and engineering executive, he helped build the Oculus App Store at Meta (which generated $1.5B+ in cumulative revenue), led AWS Game Tech, ran Studios at Storm8, and served as Chief Product Officer at Skillz. In 2024 Jabali raised a $5M seed round led by BITKRAFT Ventures with Sapphire Ventures and Sony Innovation Fund.
Josh Butler
Josh Butler is the founder and CEO of CompScience, a San Francisco AI company that turns ordinary workplace cameras into a real-time safety system. He was building perception software for self-driving cars when a family member was badly hurt on a construction site, and he redirected that same computer-vision technology toward stopping workplace injuries. Today CompScience detects more than 50 behavioral and environmental hazards on camera, bundles the analytics into a workers' compensation insurance product, and counts hundreds of enterprise customers across construction, manufacturing, warehousing and food service.
Meta
Meta Platforms is the company behind Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger, and Threads - a Family of Apps used by more than 3 billion people daily. Founded as Facebook in 2004 and renamed Meta in 2021, it runs one of the world's largest digital advertising businesses while pouring tens of billions into artificial intelligence (the open-weight Llama models and Meta AI assistant) and wearable computing (Quest headsets and Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses). In 2025 it reported roughly $201 billion in revenue.
Anya Cheng
Anya Cheng is the Founder & CEO of Taelor, an AI-powered men's clothing rental and styling subscription service that raised $5M+ and ranked #1 in U.S. menswear rentals by GQ. A Taiwanese-American first-generation immigrant who spent 15+ years at Target, McDonald's, eBay, and Meta (where she helped launch Facebook Shopping), she pivoted to entrepreneurship to solve a problem she saw everywhere: busy professional men who needed to look sharp but hated shopping. Taelor combines AI trend forecasting with human stylists to deliver curated wardrobes to subscribers, tackling fashion's 30% waste problem along the way. Cheng also teaches at Northwestern's Medill School and mentors at 500 Startups.
Jerry Qian
Jerry Qian is the Co-Founder and CEO of Reacher, an AI-powered creator marketing platform headquartered in San Francisco. After stints at Meta and NASA and graduating from UC Berkeley, Qian co-founded Reacher in 2024 with Bora Mutluoglu to automate influencer discovery, outreach, and campaign management for brands on TikTok Shop, Instagram, YouTube Shopping, and Amazon. The company is a Y Combinator S25 alum, holds the #1 spot on the TikTok Shop App Store, serves 1,000+ brands including Under Armour and Logitech, and has crossed seven figures in ARR.
Julian Park
Julian Park is the Co-Founder and CEO of Bezi, a San Francisco-based AI assistant for Unity game developers that helps with debugging, code generation, shader creation, and prototyping through deep project-level context. A UC Berkeley computer science grad, Park cut his teeth at Facebook building WebGL design tools and then at Oculus leading VR multitasking and UI framework projects before co-founding Bezi in 2021. The company raised $13M across Seed and Series A rounds, with Benchmark leading the Series A, and has evolved from a collaborative 3D design tool into a powerful AI coding companion purpose-built for Unity pipelines.
Yinan Na
Yinan Na (also known as Steven) is the co-founder and CEO of Creatify AI, an AI-powered video ad platform that lets marketers produce, test, and optimize short-form video ads in minutes. Built on a decade of engineering at Meta and Snap, Creatify crossed $9M ARR within 18 months of launch, raised a $15.5M Series A co-led by Jeffrey Katzenberg's WndrCo, and now serves over 1 million marketers across 10,000+ teams including Alibaba.com, Comcast, and Binance. Na holds a Master's in Computer Science from Stanford and a Bachelor's in Automation from Tsinghua University.
Laura Mediorreal
Laura Mediorreal is a Colombian-American entrepreneur and AI/ML product leader, currently Co-Founder & CEO of a stealth-mode startup based in San Francisco. She earned her MBA from Harvard Business School (Class of 2025) and holds degrees from Stanford University. Her career spans product management roles at Microsoft and Meta, a venture capital fellowship at True Ventures, and now building her own company at the intersection of artificial intelligence and enterprise software.
Nikunj Bajaj
Nikunj Bajaj is the Co-Founder and CEO of TrueFoundry, a San Francisco-based enterprise AI infrastructure platform that lets companies build, deploy, and govern machine learning and generative AI applications on Kubernetes - in cloud, on-prem, or hybrid environments. An IIT Kharagpur and UC Berkeley alum, Bajaj previously led machine learning at Facebook where he helped launch the company's first on-device model on Messenger and built the Proactive Assistant. He founded TrueFoundry in 2021 alongside two IIT Kharagpur batchmates, raised $21.3M (including a $19M Series A led by Intel Capital in 2025), and counts Siemens Healthineers, NVIDIA, and Automation Anywhere among customers - compressing typical AI deployment timelines from 14 months to under four.
Sam D'Amico
Sam D'Amico is the founder and CEO of Impulse Labs, a San Francisco-based startup building the world's most powerful and precise home appliances. A Stanford-trained electrical engineer who cut his teeth writing battery firmware for a solar car, then spent a decade building AR/VR hardware at Google Glass, Oculus, and Meta, D'Amico founded Impulse in 2021 after eating a pizza in 45 seconds at a wood-fired restaurant in Tokyo and deciding he needed to bring that power home. The result: a $5,999 battery-integrated induction cooktop that plugs into a standard outlet, boils a liter of water in under 40 seconds, and moonlights as a distributed grid storage node. Impulse has raised $25 million from Lux Capital, Fifth Wall, Lachy Groom, and Construct Capital.
Stefanos Loukakos
Stefanos Loukakos is the Co-founder and CEO of Connectly.ai, a San Francisco-based AI conversational commerce platform that raised a $20M Series B led by Alibaba in September 2024, bringing total funding to $37.2M at ~$100M valuation. A native of Greece, he previously served as Head of Facebook Messenger Business and Director of Blockchain at Meta, and as Country Director of Google Greece. He built Connectly to let retailers sell through WhatsApp, Instagram, SMS, and web chat - turning customer messages into revenue.
Yuval Bachar
Yuval Bachar is the founder and CEO of EdgeCloudLink (ECL), the company building the world's first off-grid hydrogen-powered modular data centers. A 20+ year veteran of hyperscale infrastructure at Cisco, Juniper Networks, Facebook/Meta, LinkedIn, and Microsoft Azure, Bachar co-founded the Open19 open hardware standards project and holds eight U.S. patents. At ECL, he is reimagining what a data center can be - deploying capacity in nine months (vs. the industry's 3-4 years), generating zero emissions, and producing cooling water as a byproduct of hydrogen fuel cells. In May 2024, ECL unveiled the world's first off-grid hydrogen-powered AI data center in Mountain View, California, and Lambda deployed the first hydrogen-powered NVIDIA GB300 NVL72 systems there. ECL's TerraSite-TX1 near Houston is planned as a 1-gigawatt AI factory on 600 acres.
Joshua Lu
Joshua Lu is GM and Partner at a16z Speedrun, Andreessen Horowitz's accelerator program that bets on founders at the intersection of gaming, entertainment, and AI. With over a decade of operating experience across Zynga, Blizzard (Diablo Immortal), and Meta (Horizon Worlds), he brings rare founder-operator credibility to a program that accepts fewer than 0.4% of applicants and has backed hundreds of early-stage companies with up to $1M checks plus $5M in vendor credits.
Tommy McGlynn
Tommy McGlynn is a Los Angeles-based engineering manager at Meta's Reality Labs, where he leads the AI Character Platform team building AI-powered characters for the mixed-reality metaverse. A self-taught hacker who cracked an ad referral platform at 12, he went on to design scalable server architectures for Apple's TestFlight, speak on stage at WWDC for three consecutive years, and author the Oculus Developer Hub launch. He bridges design thinking and deep engineering - from Flash games and real-time multiplayer systems to VR developer tooling and interactive AI agents.
Nathan Sharp
Nathan Sharp is the Co-Founder and CEO of Retro, a friends-only photo journal app built on the belief that social media can be better - more intimate, more honest, more for the people you actually care about. A Harvard grad and Dartmouth Tuck MBA, Sharp spent six years at Meta where he helped launch Instagram Stories in 2016 before leaving to build Retro with his co-founder Ryan Olson. Backed by Thrive Capital, Dylan Field, and a constellation of top-tier VCs, Retro hit #1 photo app in Canada and broke into the US top charts in 2025, proving that people still want a social app that actually feels like talking to friends.
Tony Xu
Tony Xu is the co-founder and CEO of DoorDash, the food delivery giant commanding roughly 60% of the U.S. market. Born Xu Xun in Nanjing, China, he immigrated to the United States at age four, grew up washing dishes alongside his mother, and turned that lived understanding of the service economy into a company now valued near $100 billion. He led DoorDash through its blockbuster 2020 IPO, the $8.1B acquisition of Wolt, and the $3.9B acquisition of Deliveroo, while also serving on Meta's board of directors.
Aigerim Shorman
Aigerim Shorman is VP of Product Management for Meta's Horizon product, where she leads the platform connecting billions of people across virtual worlds. Born in Kazakhstan, she bootstrapped her way from community college to USC, taught with Teach For America, worked at UBS, and co-founded Triptrotting - a travel startup that raised $1.8M and grew to 150+ countries - before joining Meta where she built the avatar system used by 3+ billion people. One of the most senior women in Meta's metaverse organization, she's also an angel investor backing early-stage consumer and social startups.
Alexandr Wang
Alexandr Wang is the co-founder of Scale AI and current Chief AI Officer at Meta Platforms. Born in 1997 to Chinese immigrant physicists in Los Alamos, New Mexico, he dropped out of MIT at 19 to build Scale AI, which became the backbone of AI training data infrastructure for companies like OpenAI, Google, Meta, and the U.S. Department of Defense. By 24, he was the world's youngest self-made billionaire. Scale AI grew to a ~$29B valuation after Meta's $14.8B strategic investment in 2025, and Wang now leads Meta's AI superintelligence efforts.
Kevin Systrom
Kevin Systrom co-founded Instagram in 2010 with Mike Krieger, transforming mobile photography into a global phenomenon with over 1 billion users before selling to Facebook for $1 billion in 2012. After leaving Instagram in 2018, he launched Artifact, an AI-powered news app, later acquired by Yahoo in 2024. A Stanford-educated engineer with a passion for photography and design, Systrom serves on the boards of Walmart and Snowflake while continuing to invest in and advise tech startups from San Francisco.
Sheryl Sandberg
Sheryl Sandberg is a technology executive, author, and philanthropist who served as Meta's COO for 14 years, transforming Facebook into a profitable advertising powerhouse and becoming one of the most influential voices in business leadership. The author of 'Lean In' and founder of LeanIn.org, she's a champion for women's leadership and currently runs Sandberg Bernthal Venture Partners, investing in AI-native companies while serving on Meta's board and advising early-stage founders.
Jan Koum
Jan Koum is the Ukrainian-born co-founder of WhatsApp who built one of the world's most-used messaging platforms on a foundation of radical privacy and zero advertising — then sold it to Facebook for $19.3 billion in 2014. A self-taught programmer who arrived in the US at 16 on food stamps, Koum's journey from a Soviet surveillance state to the pinnacle of Silicon Valley is one of the most unlikely origin stories in tech. He left WhatsApp in 2018 rather than compromise its privacy principles, and now runs Newlands, a secretive investment firm, while giving billions through the Koum Family Foundation.
Mike Vernal
Mike Vernal is a General Partner at Conviction Partners, an AI-native venture firm led by Sarah Guo. Before that he spent seven years as a Partner at Sequoia Capital, where he backed companies like Rippling, Clay, Notion, and Statsig. His investor instincts were forged at Facebook, where he spent eight years rising to VP of Product and Engineering - co-creating Facebook Login and the Graph API, managing the platform's pivotal mobile transition, and helping invent the modern 'growth team' playbook. A Harvard computer scientist turned operator turned investor, Vernal is known for his 'Market Curve' framework, his early-morning discipline, and a blunt skepticism about data moats.
Alex Kantrowitz
Alex Kantrowitz is an independent technology journalist, author, and the founder of Big Technology - one of the most widely read independent tech newsletters in the world with 150,000+ subscribers. A former BuzzFeed News senior reporter and CNBC on-air contributor, he wrote 'Always Day One,' a deeply reported look at how tech titans like Amazon, Apple, Google, and Facebook maintain dominance through constant reinvention. Kantrowitz covers the systems and mechanisms driving big tech, not just the headlines, and has been named one of the ten most cited technology reporters in the world.