This is Scale & Strategy, your daily injection of business news, insights, and jokes.
(Lift up your sleeve, this won’t hurt a bit.)
Here’s what we got for you today:
640 Experiments Later: How Meta’s AI Really Performs
Silicon Valley’s Cranking Out Billionaires Like It’s a Side Hustle
640 Experiments Later: How Meta’s AI Really Performs
Meta’s automation is having its moment. Question is—can it actually beat you (or your agency) at running ads?
Haus ran 640 incrementality tests between early ’24 and mid-’25. Tyler Horner sifted through the mess so you don’t have to:
The headline stat: +19% lift on primary KPIs (revenue, new customers, etc.). 96% of campaigns showed significant lift halfway through.
Hidden value: 32% of Meta’s impact happened off DTC—Amazon, retail, the works.
Automation vs. human hands: Platform says Advantage+ ROAS is 2.4% higher than manual. Reality check: 58% of brands got better incremental ROAS manually.
Short-term: Advantage+ did +17% lift vs. +32% for manual in the post-test window. Manual pulled in ~$12 more incremental revenue per $100 reported.
Where Advantage+ wins: new customer acquisition. Killer for launches and promos.
Attribution still lies:
Mid-funnel: 1.3x more incremental revenue than reported.
Traffic: 2.4x more.
Reach/awareness: up to 6x more.
Meta’s new incremental attribution setting is trying to fix this. Early days—43% success rate so far.
The playbook:
Test Advantage+ against manual—don’t just flip the switch.
If you sell omnichannel, stop worshipping platform ROAS.
Upper/mid-funnel drives future revenue, even if dashboards hate it.
Creative quality is still the lever.
Bottom line: Meta’s AI isn’t a silver bullet, but it’s not fluff either. The winners will be the ones testing and tweaking, not hoping the algo falls in love with them.
Silicon Valley’s Cranking Out Billionaires Like It’s a Side Hustle
AI isn’t just hot—it’s printing wealth faster than most people can update their LinkedIn headline.
Anthropic, OpenAI, Safe Superintelligence, Anysphere—massive funding rounds, trillion-dollar valuations, and enough new billionaires to fill a WeWork.
The scoreboard: 498 private AI unicorns worth $2.7T. A hundred of them didn’t even exist before 2023.
Anthropic’s chasing a $170B valuation—triple March’s number.
Mira Murati’s new shop: $12B valuation in months.
Anysphere doubled its valuation in weeks. Their 25-year-old founder? Probably just became the youngest guy in the room who owns a Gulfstream.
Liquidity check: Most fortunes are still locked up in private stock, but that’s shifting. Secondary share sales and acquisitions are unlocking piles of cash.
OpenAI’s reportedly testing a $500B valuation in a new sale.
Bay Area billionaires now outnumber New York’s, and $20M+ homes are flying off the market.
This isn’t the dot-com boom. This is richer, faster, and even more geographically concentrated.
Tech bros? That was two hype cycles ago. It’s AI lads’ season now.