我们正处于互联网新篇章的开端，这也是我们公司的新篇章。

近几十年来，科技让人们能够更自然地联系和表达自己。当我创办Facebook时，我们主要是在网站上发文字。当我们有了带摄像头的手机，互联网变得更加可视化和移动化。随着连接速度的加快，视频成为分享体验的一种更丰富的方式。我们从桌面到网页再到手机;从文本到照片再到视频，但这并不是终点。

下一代计算平台将更加身临其境，这将是一个具体化的互联网，你置身于体验之中，而不仅仅是看着它。我们称之为元宇宙，它将触及我们所创造的每一款产品。

元宇宙的定义质量将是一种存在感——就像你和另一个人在一起或在另一个地方。真正感受与另一个人在一起是社交技术的终极梦想。这就是为什么我们专注于建造这个。

在元宇宙中，你几乎可以做任何你能想象到的事情——与朋友和家人聚会、工作、学习、玩耍、购物、创造——以及完全不符合我们今天对电脑或手机的看法的全新体验。我们制作了一部电影，探索未来你可能如何使用元宇宙。

在未来，你将能够像全息图一样瞬间传送到办公室，无需通勤，在朋友的音乐会上，或者在父母的客厅里。无论你住在哪里，这都将为你打开更多的机会。你可以花更多的时间在对你重要的事情上，减少交通时间，减少你的碳足迹。

想想你今天有多少实物在未来可能只是全息图。你的电视，你完美的工作设置与多个显示器，你的棋盘游戏和更多-而不是在工厂组装的实体东西，它们将是由世界各地的创造者设计的全息图。

你将在不同的设备上跨越这些体验——增强现实眼镜让你留在现实世界中，虚拟现实让你完全沉浸其中，手机和电脑让你从现有的平台跳入其中。这并不是说要花更多的时间在屏幕上;而是让我们已经度过的时间变得更好。

我们的角色和责任

元宇宙不会由一家公司创建。它将由创造者和开发者创造全新的体验和数字道具，它们能够互操作，并开启一个比当前平台及其政策所限制的更大的创意经济。

在这段旅程中，我们的角色是加速基础技术、社交平台和创造性工具的发展，将元宇宙带入生活，并将这些技术编织到我们的社交媒体应用程序中。我们相信元宇宙能够提供比今天存在的任何东西都更好的社交体验，我们将致力于帮助实现它的潜力。

正如我在最初的创始人信中所写的那样:“我们创建服务不是为了赚钱;我们赚钱是为了提供更好的服务。”

这种方法对我们很有用。我们已经建立了我们的业务，以支持非常大的和长期的投资，以建立更好的服务，这是我们计划在这里做的。

过去的五年在很多方面都让我和公司蒙羞。我学到的主要经验之一是，仅仅制造人们喜欢的产品是不够的。

我越来越认识到，互联网的故事并不简单。每个章节都会带来新的声音和新的想法，但也会带来新的挑战、风险和对既定利益的破坏。我们需要一起努力，从一开始，让未来成为最好的样子。

从第一天起，隐私和安全就需要被植入元宇宙。开放标准和互操作性也是如此。这不仅需要新的技术工作——比如在社区中支持加密和非功能性项目——还需要新的治理形式。最重要的是，我们需要帮助构建生态系统，让更多的人在未来拥有利益，不仅作为消费者受益，而且作为创造者受益。

这段时间也让人感到羞愧，因为作为一家大公司，我们也了解到在其他平台上开发游戏是什么感觉。在他们的规则下生活，深刻地塑造了我对科技行业的看法。我开始相信，消费者选择的缺乏和开发者高昂的费用正在扼杀创新，阻碍互联网经济的发展。

我们尝试了一种不同的方法。我们希望尽可能多的人能够获得我们的服务，这意味着努力降低成本，而不是提高成本。我们的手机应用是免费的。我们的广告模式旨在为商家提供最低的价格。我们的商业工具可在成本或适度的费用。因此，数十亿人喜欢我们的服务，数亿企业依赖我们的工具。

这就是我们想要帮助构建元宇宙的方法。我们计划以成本价或补贴的方式出售我们的设备，让更多的人可以使用它们。我们将继续支持pc上的侧边加载和流媒体，让人们有更多选择，而不是强迫他们使用Quest Store去寻找应用或接触用户。我们的目标是在尽可能多的情况下以较低的费用提供开发者和创造者服务，这样我们才能最大化整体创意经济。我们需要确保我们不会在这个过程中损失太多的钱。

我们希望在未来十年，元宇宙将覆盖十亿人，承载数千亿美元的数字商务，并为数百万创造者和开发者提供就业机会。

我们是谁

在我们开始下一章的时候，我想了很多，这对我们的公司和我们的身份意味着什么。

我们是一家专注于联系人们的公司。虽然大多数科技公司专注于人们如何与技术互动，但我们一直专注于开发技术，让人们可以相互互动。

今天，我们被视为一家社交媒体公司。Facebook是世界历史上使用最多的科技产品之一。这是一个标志性的社交媒体品牌。

开发社交应用对我们来说一直都很重要，而且还有很多东西需要开发。但这并不是我们所做的一切。在我们的DNA中，我们创造技术来将人们团结在一起。元宇宙是连接人们的下一个前沿领域，就像我们刚起步时的社交网络一样。

现在我们的品牌与一种产品紧密相连，它不可能代表我们现在所做的一切，更不用说未来了。随着时间的推移，我希望我们被视为一个元宇宙公司，我希望将我们的工作和身份定位于我们正在朝着的方向发展。

我们刚刚宣布要对公司进行根本性的改革。我们现在将业务分为两个不同的部分:一个是应用系列，另一个是未来平台的工作。我们在元宇宙上的工作不仅仅是这些部分之一。元宇宙包含了社会体验和未来技术。当我们扩大视野时，是时候采用一个新的品牌了。

为了反映我们是谁和我们希望建立的未来，我很自豪地告诉大家，我们现在的公司是Meta。

我们的使命没有变，仍然是把人们团结在一起。我们的应用和他们的品牌也没有改变。我们仍然是一家围绕人设计技术的公司。

但我们所有的产品，包括我们的应用程序，现在都有一个新的愿景:帮助实现元宇宙的生命。现在我们有了一个能反映我们工作广度的名字。

从现在开始，我们将是元宇宙优先，而不是facebook优先。这意味着随着时间的推移，你将不再需要Facebook账户来使用我们的其他服务。随着我们的新品牌开始出现在我们的产品中，我希望世界各地的人们开始了解Meta品牌和我们所代表的未来。

我以前学过古典文学，“meta”这个词来自希腊语，意思是“超越”。对我来说，它象征着总有更多的东西需要建造，总有一个故事的下一个篇章。我们的故事开始于一间宿舍，超越了我们的任何想象;成为一系列应用程序，人们用这些应用程序彼此联系，寻找自己的声音，并创建企业、社区和运动，改变了世界。

我很自豪我们的到目前为止,我兴奋接下来会发生什么,今天我们超越什么是可能的,超出了屏幕的限制,超越的极限距离和物理,和走向未来,让大家都能相互存在,创造新的机会和体验新事物。这是一个超越任何一家公司的未来，它将由我们所有人创造。

我们创造了让人们以新的方式走到一起的东西。我们从艰难的社会问题和封闭的平台中吸取了教训。现在是时候把我们所学到的一切，帮助我们建立下一个篇章了。

我将把我们的精力奉献给这一事业——比世界上任何其他公司都要多。如果这是你想看到的未来，我希望你加入我们。未来将超出我们的想象。

——马克·扎克伯格

英文原版：

Founder’s Letter, 2021

October 28, 2021

We are at the beginning of the next chapter for the internet, and it’s the next chapter for our company too.

In recent decades, technology has given people the power to connect and express ourselves more naturally. When I started Facebook, we mostly typed text on websites. When we got phones with cameras, the internet became more visual and mobile. As connections got faster, video became a richer way to share experiences. We’ve gone from desktop to web to mobile; from text to photos to video. But this isn’t the end of the line.

The next platform will be even more immersive — an embodied internet where you’re in the experience, not just looking at it. We call this the metaverse, and it will touch every product we build.

The defining quality of the metaverse will be a feeling of presence — like you are right there with another person or in another place. Feeling truly present with another person is the ultimate dream of social technology. That is why we are focused on building this.

In the metaverse, you’ll be able to do almost anything you can imagine — get together with friends and family, work, learn, play, shop, create — as well as completely new experiences that don’t really fit how we think about computers or phones today. We made a film that explores how you might use the metaverse one day.

In this future, you will be able to teleport instantly as a hologram to be at the office without a commute, at a concert with friends, or in your parents’ living room to catch up. This will open up more opportunity no matter where you live. You’ll be able to spend more time on what matters to you, cut down time in traffic, and reduce your carbon footprint.

Think about how many physical things you have today that could just be holograms in the future. Your TV, your perfect work setup with multiple monitors, your board games and more — instead of physical things assembled in factories, they’ll be holograms designed by creators around the world.

You’ll move across these experiences on different devices — augmented reality glasses to stay present in the physical world, virtual reality to be fully immersed, and phones and computers to jump in from existing platforms. This isn’t about spending more time on screens; it’s about making the time we already spend better.

Our Role and Responsibility

The metaverse will not be created by one company. It will be built by creators and developers making new experiences and digital items that are interoperable and unlock a massively larger creative economy than the one constrained by today’s platforms and their policies.

Our role in this journey is to accelerate the development of the fundamental technologies, social platforms and creative tools to bring the metaverse to life, and to weave these technologies through our social media apps. We believe the metaverse can enable better social experiences than anything that exists today, and we will dedicate our energy to helping achieve its potential.

As I wrote in our original founder’s letter: “we don’t build services to make money; we make money to build better services.”

This approach has served us well. We’ve built our business to support very large and long term investments to build better services, and that’s what we plan to do here.

The last five years have been humbling for me and our company in many ways. One of the main lessons I’ve learned is that building products people love isn’t enough.

I’ve gained more appreciation that the internet’s story isn’t straightforward. Every chapter brings new voices and new ideas, but also new challenges, risks, and disruption of established interests. We’ll need to work together, from the beginning, to bring the best possible version of this future to life.

Privacy and safety need to be built into the metaverse from day one. So do open standards and interoperability. This will require not just novel technical work — like supporting crypto and NFT projects in the community — but also new forms of governance. Most of all, we need to help build ecosystems so that more people have a stake in the future and can benefit not just as consumers but as creators.

This period has also been humbling because as big of a company as we are, we’ve also learned what it’s like to build on other platforms. Living under their rules has profoundly shaped my views on the tech industry. I’ve come to believe that the lack of choice for consumers and high fees for developers are stifling innovation and holding back the internet economy.

We’ve tried to take a different approach. We want our services to be accessible to as many people as possible, which means working to make them cost less, not more. Our mobile apps are free. Our ads model is designed to provide businesses the lowest prices. Our commerce tools are available at cost or with modest fees. As a result, billions of people love our services and hundreds of millions of businesses rely on our tools.

That’s the approach we want to bring to helping to build the metaverse. We plan to sell our devices at cost or subsidized to make them available to more people. We’ll continue supporting side-loading and streaming from PCs so people have choice, rather than forcing them to use the Quest Store to find apps or reach customers. And we’ll aim to offer developer and creator services with low fees in as many cases as possible so we can maximize the overall creative economy. We’ll need to make sure we don’t lose too much money along the way though.

Our hope is that within the next decade, the metaverse will reach a billion people, host hundreds of billions of dollars of digital commerce, and support jobs for millions of creators and developers.

Who We Are

As we embark on this next chapter, I’ve thought a lot about what this means for our company and our identity.

We’re a company that focuses on connecting people. While most tech companies focus on how people interact with technology, we’ve always focused on building technology so people can interact with each other.

Today we’re seen as a social media company. Facebook is one of the most used technology products in the history of the world. It’s an iconic social media brand.

Building social apps will always be important for us, and there’s a lot more to build. But increasingly, it’s not all we do. In our DNA, we build technology to bring people together. The metaverse is the next frontier in connecting people, just like social networking was when we got started.

Right now our brand is so tightly linked to one product that it can’t possibly represent everything we’re doing today, let alone in the future. Over time, I hope we are seen as a metaverse company, and I want to anchor our work and our identity on what we’re building towards.

We just announced that we’re making a fundamental change to our company. We’re now looking at and reporting on our business as two different segments: one for our family of apps and one for our work on future platforms. Our work on the metaverse is not just one of these segments. The metaverse encompasses both the social experiences and future technology. As we broaden our vision, it’s time for us to adopt a new brand.

To reflect who we are and the future we hope to build, I’m proud to share that our company is now Meta.

Our mission remains the same — it’s still about bringing people together. Our apps and their brands aren’t changing either. We’re still the company that designs technology around people.

But all of our products, including our apps, now share a new vision: to help bring the metaverse to life. And now we have a name that reflects the breadth of what we do.

From now on, we will be metaverse-first, not Facebook-first. That means that over time you won’t need a Facebook account to use our other services. As our new brand starts showing up in our products, I hope people around the world come to know the Meta brand and the future we stand for.

I used to study Classics, and the word “meta” comes from the Greek word meaning “beyond”. For me, it symbolizes that there is always more to build, and there is always a next chapter to the story. Ours is a story that started in a dorm room and grew beyond anything we imagined; into a family of apps that people use to connect with one another, to find their voice, and to start businesses, communities, and movements that have changed the world.

I’m proud of what we’ve built so far, and I’m excited about what comes next — as we move beyond what’s possible today, beyond the constraints of screens, beyond the limits of distance and physics, and towards a future where everyone can be present with each other, create new opportunities and experience new things. It is a future that is beyond any one company and that will be made by all of us.

We have built things that have brought people together in new ways. We’ve learned from struggling with difficult social issues and living under closed platforms. Now it is time to take everything we’ve learned and help build the next chapter.

I’m dedicating our energy to this — more than any other company in the world. If this is the future you want to see, I hope you’ll join us. The future is going to be beyond anything we can imagine.

— Mark Zuckerberg