The NPE team is shifting gears. The group has been focused on building consumer-facing apps that would allow the company to test out new social features and gauge people's reactions.
Over the years, the team launched and retired a number of experiments, including dating and calling apps, meme-makers, and more. The next big idea may come from a market outside the U.S., according to a new thesis being tested by NPE.
The organization set up an office in Lagos, Nigeria, to take advantage of the potential and will soon open another in Asia. It is adjusting its strategy to include making seed-stage investments in small, entrepreneurial teams.
One check has already been written. NPE directed Meta's recent investment in a platform for building virtual characters. Future checks may include companies with more near-term potential, like startups that are taking advantage of the mobile internet in new ways.
Many of today's universal experiences first emerged from niche communities. In regions where text messaging wasn't free before it was adopted globally, the popularity of the messaging service, like that of the app, grew. There was a lack of legacy payment systems in East Africa that led to some mobile money innovations.
Meta's NPE team is looking outside Silicon Valley to make sure it doesn't miss out on future opportunities.
Meta's Ime Archibong is the image.
Ime Archibong, head of Meta's New Product Experimentation (NPE), is an 11-year Meta employee with experience working on Facebook's developer platform. He was able to connect with entrepreneurs from both smaller and larger companies. Two years after joining NPE, Archibong is taking the group in a similar direction.
He explained that it was similar to what he was doing for the previous 10 years, which was attracting entrepreneurial talent and small teams, and getting them access to the resources they needed to build their ideas. Some of the seeds of the ideas that we can build could be very big.
The team will focus on markets in Asia, Africa and Latin America as it pursues a new direction. Some may look different than they have in the past. NPE is experimenting with projects that help citizens in the U.S. re-enter society after being imprisoned and another that helps LGBTQ families on the journey to becoming parents. These are definitely more meatier than a TikTok clone.
NPE will be looking for ideas that may start off small, but have the potential to scale, as the expanded focus to include the global stage will see.
The future is going to be built in some of the regions that have been overlooked andunderappreciated. I believe that the problems, solutions, opportunities and new experiences that are going to be built are going to be built by people who are closest to the communities that they are trying to serve. He said that the solutions will be more sustainable and viable in the long run.
The thesis sounds solid, after all, history has proven it right before. The question remains as to whether the global entrepreneurship community will welcome checks written by Meta, given its history of borrowing ideas from smaller companies.
Meta is well known to have copied a product from another company. Its own version of Bitmoji was launched. It is currently expanding its clones. Meta is being sued by a startup called Phhhoto, which decided to build its own version of the technology after being promised a partnership opportunity. Meta didn't copy, but it did acquire future rivals like Giphy, or an up-and-comer like tbh.
Inworld AI may have felt comfortable working with Meta, but other seed-stage startups may not feel the same. There will be enough people who will take the chance.
I think there are more opportunities like that. He said that people who see working with us, a mission-aligned organization with what they're trying to do, an organization that's pretty excited about similar technology trends, are likely to be the ones.
The company hasn't said how much capital it plans to deploy over what period of time, but the checks will be "really, really small."
