Facebook's Translation Growth

A combined story about Facebook's early growth, focusing on Gary Vaynerchuk's investment and the company's breakthrough with language translation.

Gary shares: "In 2007, I took my $236,000 in savings and put $200,000 into Facebook. I haven't sold one share yet."

Shaan adds context about Facebook's biggest growth driver through Alex Schultz's (Facebook's early growth leader) presentation: "He put a chart up on the screen with a bunch of dots representing feature releases. There was one dot where everything starts growing. People in the audience were guessing - photos? photo tagging? mobile? But it was language translation. It was the biggest growth driver in Facebook's history."

The translation strategy was unique: "Facebook had to do like a Wikipedia thing because they had 186 countries to deal with. They needed users to basically retranslate the site for their local region, so they incentivized people to do that. That's how they mass translated overnight. No other social network did this, and it took off."

This strategy was later adopted by others like Mr. Beast, who created channels in Portuguese and other languages for his content.