Why Did Mark Zuckerberg Choose Alexandr Wang?

Mark Zuckerberg says he and Alexandr Wang had talked about once every few months for years, and he was always impressed by how Wang thought about strategy. Wang was running what Zuckerberg calls a very operational data business. Zuckerberg still thought he was the sharpest entrepreneur of his generation among the people he had met.

When the current program's trajectory was not good enough, people asked how the social media guy and the data guy were going to build a frontier lab. After talking to the leaders of the labs and the heads of research, Zuckerberg's conviction was that Wang was the person, and that they could recruit the team they needed. He wanted Wang's strategic clarity, the extreme focus on talent density, and a clear way to communicate the vision they had put together.