Meta exec warns philanthropy and worker perks can 'create drag' on a company. 'You must be willing to focus and prioritize.'

• Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth said he misses the days when the company was more focused.
• In a blog post, he called out the firm's philanthropy and worker perks as areas that could "create drag."

Meta Chief Technology Officer Andrew Bosworth said he misses the days when the company was smaller and more focused — noting that time and money spent on philanthropy and on employee perks can, in his view, distract from its primary mission.

In a post on his personal blog titled "Focus," the tech exec — often referred to as "Boz" — reflected on the company's early days and highlighted some of the problems he said companies like Meta can face when they get too big.

Bosworth became the company's CTO in 2021. He is leading the company's development of its Metaverse products — an initiative that the company has dumped billions of dollars into and Mark Zuckerberg has said represents the future of the company.

The CTO said it's easy for a company's principles to slowly erode as it grows. One example he gave was Meta's shift toward giving charitable donations from its early days when it focused solely on product. Giving to charity "isn't a bad thing," but he warned that the company's philanthropic work had "hidden costs."

"Each individual digression from our core competency like this can probably be measured positively on ROI [return on investment] when considered locally. But I believe they collectively add up negatively," Bosworth said in his blog post. "There are hundreds of them, each individually reasonable, but they take people and money and altogether they start to outweigh the core and create drag."

It's not clear how much Meta donates to charity every year or how many people are working on its charitable activities. Bosworth and a spokesperson for Meta did not respond to a request for comment regarding the company's charitable donations.

Bosworth also pointed to Meta's office perks and even specialized features on its social platforms. The tech chief said such focuses put the company in the precarious position of "attempting to please everyone" and distracted from the company's core feature offering, which he added is "very strong." The tech chief said this "pernicious problem" has even higher stakes than the shift toward charitable donations.

"A small feature idea comes up that serves a subset of the market, but it isn't too hard to do and it isn't a bad thing, so we indulge," Bosworth said. "Repeat that thought process a hundred times and you have a cluttered UI, a large team, a slow product, and no obvious path forward."

Ultimately, Bosworth, who says he was "something like the tenth engineer" to join the company, said that while he doesn't miss the company's "pretty brutal" startup days when he worked about 120 hours a week, he does miss the "profound sense of focus."

"Resources and time were so tight that you could feel the weight of all the things you weren't working on," Bosworth said. "You had real conviction that the thing you were doing was the most important thing."

The tech chief ended his blog post with a call to action of sorts. "The best time to stop a distraction is before it starts," Bosworth wrote. "The second best time is now."

Bosworth has made similar comments in the past. Earlier this month, the Verge reported that the CTO had told employees in an internal email that Meta had "solved too many problems by adding headcount" which "makes everything slower." The email came after Meta had already laid off about 11,000 employees.

The company is set to release it fourth quarter earnings report on Wednesday. Meta has more than halved its value since the company changed its name and Zuckerberg announced the company was pivoting to focus on the metaverse.

Bosworth's nostalgia for days when the company was more focused, echoes similar sentiments from investors. Last fall, Brad Gerstner from Altimeter Capital published an open letter, telling Meta it has "lost the confidence of investors" and telling the company to throw in the towel on its metaverse project.