Alex Schultz on Meta’s Future: “It Might Be The Next Tier of Business For Our Entire Company”

**Alex Schultz** (0:00)
Like Warren Buffett said this thing years ago, which is the company of the future will be a machine, a man and a dog, and the only job at the dog will be to stop the man from touching the machine. And that was Warren Buffett, and that was a long time ago. It is interesting to see these kind of nerdy things coming true, but I think actually the job of the person in that scenario is taste and having an opinion.

**Sam Ewen** (0:29)
All right, Sam Ewen here. This is CoinDesk Spotlight. Before we jump into the interview, a quick note to say, when we recorded this interview, Alex Schultz was the CMO of Meta. We thought it would be really interesting to talk about what's going on in Meta around Agentic, around all the things that related to what they're working on, the Metaverse, all the things. Since then, it was just announced that he has moved to be the Chief Data Officer of Meta, which I think is even more relevant, because his experience is about building brands through the lens of utilizing data to make creative and performant results, which I think is a great takeaway for anyone trying to build a crypto brand. Meta understands how to build technology, and Alex is one of the best in the game, and now, especially in his role as Chief Data Officer, I think there's a lot to learn. So after the break, come back, our interview with Alex Schultz, former CMO, now Chief Data Officer at Meta.

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**Sam Ewen** (1:58)
Okay. We are here with Alex Schultz, CMO of Meta. Alex, thank you for joining us today. How is your day going?

**Alex Schultz** (2:05)
Yeah, my day is going really well. I am sitting in London in my office with the setting sun in front of me. How could I complain? It's Pride Month. Everything's great.

**Sam Ewen** (2:14)
It is. It's a great day to be in London. We're here in New York. Today was the next Championship Parade. Very good.

**Alex Schultz** (2:20)
We just recently had at Arsenal had their Championship Parade.

**Sam Ewen** (2:23)
Oh, yes, they did. Alex, we have a lot of things I want to talk to you about. But first, I'm interested in you giving me the short pitch. Who are you when you're not the CMO of Meta?

**Alex Schultz** (2:33)
Well, the first thing I'd say is at work, I'm also the head of analytics and I'm pretty convinced that Zack considers that my bigger and more important job.
I think number one, I'm head of analytics. Probably first and foremost, I'm a son. I moved back to the UK to help support my parents and moved them into an apartment building with me. It's great and we're living a lovely life together. I'm a fiancee, I have a wonderful husband to be. We're getting married on 4th of July, which means a lot of Americans can travel because they've got public holiday and I will enjoy bringing them to the UK for it.
Outside of work, I like to think I'm a little bit of a philanthropist. I'm not the richest guy in the known universe, I give money to charities to help end aids and also HIV specifically, and also a lot of money to education charities. That's the place where I'm really focused, is I just think education creates better lives, it did for me.

**Sam Ewen** (3:27)
I love that and congrats on the upcoming wedding.

**Alex Schultz** (3:30)
Thank you.

**Sam Ewen** (3:31)
When I was going into your background, I found some moment when you talked about that, you were originally studying physics. And I was wondering, how does a physicist get to be head of analytics and chief marketing officer of Meta?

**Alex Schultz** (3:45)
My parents were great and they tried to give me a really good education. This is some of how I do money to education.
And what happened was dad lost his job in the 80s recession. We were a bit short of money and I had to find another way to make money to pay for everything, because I was at a private school. And so I got a bursary. And then when I went to university, it was obviously expensive and I didn't want to be a burden on my parents. And so I wanted to make money. And I had these websites that I've been getting traffic with on the side, a paper airplane website because my dad was an aeronautical engineer originally. And I was like, okay, I need to turn these from a hobby into something that makes money. And so I both had this hobby of driving traffic to websites. And then I also had this need to make money. And so I actually reached the point where I was making tens of thousands a year off of affiliate marketing through my websites. And in the end, Google AdSense, very grateful to Google for that. Back in the early mid 2000s, I got up to 10 million views on my YouTube videos, making paper airplanes and got rev share of YouTube.