After joining NPE two years ago, Archibong is taking the group in a similar direction. That role saw him bouncing around the world to connect with entrepreneurs from both smaller startups and larger companies. This new direction is being led by Ime Archibong, head of Meta’s New Product Experimentation (NPE), an 11-year Meta employee, whose experience prior to NPE included working on Facebook’s developer platform. To ensure it’s not missing out on future opportunities like this, Meta’s NPE team is looking outside Silicon Valley. Some mobile money innovations, meanwhile, grew out of the lack of legacy payment systems in East Africa. WhatsApp, for example, grew in popularity in regions where SMS text messaging wasn’t free before it was adopted globally. Meta, of course, understands that many of today’s universal experiences first emerged from niche communities. But future checks may go to non-metaverse companies to include those with more near-term potential - like startups taking advantage of the mobile internet in new ways. Meta’s recent investment in an A.I.-powered developer platform for building virtual characters, Inworld AI, was directed by NPE. It’s also adjusting its strategy to include making seed-stage investments in small, entrepreneurial teams. To capitalize on that potential, the organization recently set up an office in Lagos, Nigeria, and it will soon open another in Asia. Now, NPE will begin testing out a new thesis: that the next big idea may come from a market outside the U.S. Over the years, the largely Menlo Park-based team launched and retired a number of experiments, ranging from dating and calling apps to meme-makers to TikTok, Twitter and Clubhouse rivals to apps for couples and more. The group, which first launched in mid-2019, has been focused on building consumer-facing apps that would allow the company to test out new social features and gauge people’s reactions. Meta’s (formerly, Facebook’s) experimental app division, the NPE team, is shifting gears.
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