How Andrew Bosworth, Mark Zuckerberg’s old teaching assistant at Harvard, rose to become his key lieutenant in building the metaverse

Bosworth was a senior when Zuckerberg was a sophomore, and Zuckerberg was assigned to Bosworth.

"He didn't attend my lessons as often as most of my students, but to be fair he was quite literally building Facebook at the time," Bosworth told The Los Angeles Times.

Mark Zuckerberg dropped out of Harvard during his sophomore year in 2005 to focus on Facebook full-time.

"I built all the AI, the ranking, and we built the first, as far as I know, the first ranked content feed, and I built all the rank and the AI behind it," Bosworth told The Verge.

"It consumed me more fully than anything in life had ever consumed me," Bosworth told The Los Angeles Times in 2011.

Bosworth also told The Los Angeles Times that the News Feed was initially met with a backlash from users, who found it too intrusive.

"That passionate outpouring of sentiment, much of it negative, was being fueled by News Feed itself. That's when I realized how big the opportunity was at Facebook. I would have preferred a fan group to a protest group, but the fact that people felt that passionately about the product at all was very humbling and eye-opening," Bosworth said.

As Bosworth's career at Facebook progressed he went on to lead teams that built products, including Facebook Messenger and Groups.

Reality Labs has undergone many name changes, having been called simply AR/VR, then Facebook Reality Labs, and now Reality Labs.

Reality Labs has been responsible for producing Facebook's hardware products, including the video-calling device Facebook Portal and the Oculus VR headset.

Protocol reported in July on recall documents which indicated Facebook had sold 4 million Oculus Quest 2 headsets in the US alone since its launch in September 2020.

Bosworth announced alongside the wider Meta rebrand in October that the Oculus brand will be sunsetted. From 2022, the Oculus Quest headset will be named the Meta Quest.

When Zuckerberg announced the formation of Meta as Facebook's new parent company in October, he said the business would be split into two strands. The first is Facebook's Family of Apps, its traditional social media business, which encompasses its Facebook app, Instagram, and WhatsApp.

The second and more metaverse-centric strand will be Reality Labs.

"From now on, we'll be metaverse first, not Facebook first," Zuckerberg said during the company's announcement of its rebrand.

The word metaverse is a term borrowed from science-fiction. It refers to a future version of the internet, which people access using technology such as virtual-reality and augmented-reality headsets, rather than screens on phones and laptops.

The $299 "Ray-Ban Stories" glasses launched in September 2021, and allow users to capture photo and video.

Bosworth shared a video taken with his own Ray-Ban Stories ahead of the product launch, which included footage of himself repeatedly throwing pillows at Mark Zuckerberg.

Bosworth will be replacing current CTO Mike Schroepfer, marking the biggest leadership change in the company's history.

In a Facebook post announcing his departure, Schroepfer talked about Bosworth's experience at Facebook's AR/VR division.

"These contributions are foundational components of our broader efforts to help build the metaverse," Schroepfer said.

Zuckerberg echoed this in a statement on Facebook's blog.

"As our next CTO, Boz will continue leading Facebook Reality Labs and overseeing our work in augmented reality, virtual reality and more, and as part of this transition, a few other groups will join Boz's team as well. This is all foundational to our broader efforts helping to build the metaverse, and I'm excited about the future of this work under Boz's leadership," Zuckerberg wrote.

Bosworth made headlines in 2018 when BuzzFeed published an internal memo he had sent around two years previously. The memo was entitled "The Ugly," and in it, Bosworth appeared to justify any number of horrible things happening on Facebook, so long as the company continued to grow.

"The ugly truth is that we believe in connecting people so deeply that anything that allows us to connect more people more often is *de facto* good. It is perhaps the only area where the metrics do tell the true story as far as we are concerned," Bosworth wrote in the memo.

"That isn't something we are doing for ourselves. Or for our stock price (ha!). It is literally just what we do. We connect people. Period," he added.

Bosworth's technology podcast began in June 2021 and has featured appearances from fellow Facebook executive Chris Cox, as well as tech journalists Ina Fried and Casey Newton.