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Facebook’s Second Act Is Happening in the Places the Internet Forgot
The original social network is no longer the internet’s newest room. It may be something harder to replace: the noticeboard, video channel, classifieds section and community hall used by billions.
Emma Qian
Emma Qian is the co-founder and CEO of Nova Intelligence, a San Francisco startup building an agentic AI platform that analyzes, modernizes, and generates custom code for SAP systems. A former research engineer at Google DeepMind and software engineer at Meta AI, Caltech-trained Qian left frontier AI research to attack one of enterprise software's least glamorous and most expensive problems: the migration of decades of custom SAP code to S/4HANA. Nova has raised over $40 million, including a $31.5 million Series A led by Chemistry with backing from Accel, Conviction, and SAP.io, and counts customers like Festo who report working roughly five times faster. She is a Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree.
Zheqing (Bill) Zhu
Zheqing (Bill) Zhu is the founder and CEO of Pokee AI, a Bellevue, Washington startup building foundation AI agents that plan, reason, and use thousands of tools to execute real online workflows. A Stanford PhD in reinforcement learning, he previously led the Applied Reinforcement Learning team at Meta AI, where he shipped the open-source Pearl platform and RL systems credited with over $500M in annual revenue impact. In 2025 Pokee AI raised a $12M seed round, 3x oversubscribed, led by Point72 Ventures with backing from Qualcomm Ventures, Samsung NEXT, and angels including Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan.
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.