Meta

Meta exemplifies both the power and peril of thermal regulation at scale. The company (formerly Facebook) operates within a thermal window, having killed 100+ products including Facebook Home, Parse, and Portal - totaling $20+ billion in abandoned investment. This controlled experimentation is thermal window usage: testing whether new products can survive before committing fully.

But Meta also demonstrates controlled cooling when facing overheating. During 2022-2023's 'Year of Efficiency,' the company cut 21,000 employees over 6 months while facing metaverse investment overheating. The cuts reduced Reality Labs investment, refocused on core products, and recovered stock price 200%. Meanwhile, as a major tech talent source (alongside Google and Amazon), Meta serves as gene flow origin - though hiring exclusively from these dominant sources causes companies to converge toward industry norms rather than maintain differentiation.

The lesson: large companies succeed by managing temperature actively - killing experiments that fail to find product-market fit, cooling aggressively when overheated, but maintaining enough thermal window to explore. Meta's ability to cut 21,000 employees while launching AI initiatives shows that thermal regulation isn't about constant temperature, but about expanding and contracting deliberately.