Andrew Bosworth

Andrew Bosworth, known as "Boz", is an American technology executive who is the chief technology officer (CTO) of Meta Platforms and head of Reality Labs, the company's wearables and metaverse organization, which develops its virtual reality and augmented reality hardware. He joined Facebook in January 2006 as one of its early engineers and built the original News Feed.

In August 2017 Bosworth moved from running Facebook's advertising products to leading its AR, VR and consumer hardware work, which included Oculus. He renamed that organization Facebook Reality Labs in 2020. Mark Zuckerberg named him the company's next CTO in September 2021, and he took the post in 2022 while continuing to run Reality Labs. Meta's executive biography says he leads the company's work on its next computing platform and consumer hardware, including Quest, Horizon and the Meta Glasses line. He often discusses Meta's plans for Meta Quest, Horizon Worlds and smart glasses in Instagram question-and-answer sessions and press interviews, and hosts the podcast Boz To The Future.

Reviewed 15 October 2026. Every career date, role, quote and attribution checked against the cited Meta, Los Angeles Times, BuzzFeed News, TechCrunch, UploadVR, Road to VR, Stratechery, NBC News, U.S. Army and podcast-feed sources. About review dates.

Early life and education

According to a 2011 Los Angeles Times profile, Bosworth grew up on a horse ranch and vineyard in Saratoga, in Santa Clara County, California, where his family had lived since 1891. He was a member of the El Sereno 4-H Club and a founding member of the California 4-H Technology Corps, and a friend in 4-H taught him computer programming.

He studied computational neurobiology at Harvard University, which he described to the Times as a combination of the human brain and computer science. In 2004, as a senior, he was a teaching assistant in an artificial intelligence class in which Mark Zuckerberg, then a sophomore, was one of his assigned students.

Career

Microsoft and early Facebook

Bosworth was working at Microsoft in Seattle when a recruiter looking for someone with a background in artificial intelligence contacted him about Facebook, two years after the Harvard class. He joined Facebook in January 2006; Meta's biography describes him as roughly the company's tenth engineer.

His first major project was News Feed, which launched in 2006. Many users protested the feature as intrusive and Facebook made changes to address privacy concerns, but Bosworth told the Los Angeles Times that he could see users were twice as engaged as before. By 2011 he was a director of engineering, had created the company's engineering boot camp for new hires, and had worked on Facebook Groups and Messages. Meta's biography also credits him with building Messenger and early anti-abuse and infrastructure systems, and with overseeing engineering for Events, Places, Photos, Videos, Timeline and Privacy.

He later became Facebook's vice president of ads and business platform. Meta states that during his time leading that group, annual revenue grew from US$4 billion to US$40 billion over five years.

"The Ugly" memo

On 18 June 2016 Bosworth wrote an internal post titled "The Ugly", which argued that "anything that allows us to connect more people more often is de facto good". BuzzFeed News published the memo on 29 March 2018. Bosworth responded on Twitter, "I don't agree with the post today and I didn't agree with it when I wrote it", and Zuckerberg said in a statement that it was a post "that most people at Facebook including myself disagreed with strongly".

AR, VR and consumer hardware (2017-2021)

On 23 August 2017 TechCrunch reported that Bosworth was taking over Facebook's consumer hardware efforts, covering projects in Building 8 and Oculus, in a change that then-CTO Mike Schroepfer announced internally. Mark Rabkin, who had led ads engineering, took over Bosworth's advertising responsibilities. Citing Business Insider, TechCrunch reported that Oculus vice president Hugo Barra and Building 8 head Regina Dugan would both report to Bosworth. Meta's biography says he established Reality Labs in 2017.

As Facebook's AR/VR vice president, Bosworth announced the company's agreement to acquire CTRL-labs, a startup developing a wrist-worn neural interface, on 23 September 2019. "We know there are more natural, intuitive ways to interact with devices and technology. And we want to build them," he wrote.

On 25 August 2020 Bosworth, writing as head of Facebook Reality Labs, announced that the AR/VR team would be renamed Facebook Reality Labs (FRL), a name that until then had referred only to the research division formerly called Oculus Research. The expanded organization covered the Oculus, Portal and Spark AR brands; the research teams continued as FRL Research under chief scientist Michael Abrash, and Oculus Connect was renamed Facebook Connect. TechCrunch wrote, "The entire AR/VR org is run by Andrew Bosworth."

Chief technology officer

On 22 September 2021 Zuckerberg announced that Schroepfer would step down as CTO and that "Andrew Bosworth will become our next CTO". He wrote that Bosworth would continue leading Facebook Reality Labs, "overseeing our work in augmented reality, virtual reality and more", and that "a few other groups will join Boz's team as well". Schroepfer was to remain until the handover in 2022. UploadVR noted that over the previous year or two Bosworth had become a prominent public voice for the company's VR and AR work, hosting Instagram "ask me anything" sessions and moderating talks with Zuckerberg and John Carmack. By the time of a September 2024 Stratechery interview he was described as having become Meta's CTO in 2022.

Reality Labs (2022-present)

Bosworth has used Instagram question-and-answer sessions to explain decisions about Meta's VR platform. In February 2023 he discussed the planned closure of Echo VR, saying its player base was "measured in the low 10 thousands", and said that Carmack "would not have shut down Echo VR".

In June 2024 he announced that Reality Labs would be split into a Metaverse group responsible for Quest and a Wearables group covering other hardware, including the Ray-Ban Meta glasses. In the memo, first reported by Alex Heath of The Verge, he called the glasses "a much bigger success than we expected" and wrote that "the org chart doesn't primarily determine whether we succeed or fail, our execution does."

After Meta showed its Orion AR glasses prototype in September 2024, Bosworth told Stratechery that Orion was "a real proof point" and that the focus would turn to "getting geared up for a consumer launch of a version of these", a timeline he put at "years, not decades". In a November 2024 memo to Reality Labs staff titled "2025: The Year of Greatness", later reported by Business Insider, he called 2025 "the most critical year in my 8 years at Reality Labs" and wrote that the year "likely determines whether this entire effort will go down as the work of visionaries or a legendary misadventure." He also wrote that Horizon Worlds on mobile "absolutely has to break out for our long term plans to have a chance."

At Meta Connect 2025, several live demonstrations of Meta's smart glasses failed during the keynote. In an Instagram Q&A afterwards, Bosworth said the cooking demo had triggered Live AI on every Ray-Ban Meta pair in the building and that, because the traffic was routed to a development server, "we DDoS'd ourselves, basically". He attributed a failed WhatsApp call on the Meta Ray-Ban Display to a previously unseen "race condition" bug in which the display went to sleep just as the call arrived.

In January 2026 The New York Times reported that Meta was laying off 10% of Reality Labs staff, and CNBC reported plans to shut down VR studios including Armature Studio, Twisted Pixel and Sanzaru, according to TechCrunch's summary of those reports. Business Insider reported that Bosworth had called an in-person meeting for 14 January that he described as the "most important" of the year. Interviewed by Axios's Ina Fried in Davos later that month, he said the metaverse push had caused a "lack of focus" that "comes at an expense of user experience and a great expense in terms of development cost", and that "on net, Reality Labs isn't downsizing" because roles were being redirected toward wearables. In a Davos interview with journalist Alex Heath, reported by UploadVR in February 2026, he said Meta had "two devices on the roadmap that we're super excited about".

On 19 March 2026, after Meta had announced plans to end Horizon Worlds support in VR, Bosworth said in an Instagram Stories Q&A, "We have decided, just today in fact, that we will keep Horizon Worlds working in VR." Asked in a July 2026 Instagram session whether Meta had given up on VR, he answered "No" and said, "We've talked openly about the fact that we're building multiple next-generation headsets." During the Meta Connect 2026 keynote he placed a call to Zuckerberg using Meta's realistic Hologram avatars, which had not yet shipped to customers.

As of October 2026, Meta's biography lists him as CTO and head of Reality Labs, and says he also leads the newly formed Agent Transformation Accelerator (ATA), a group focused on using AI agents to change how Meta works.

U.S. Army Reserve

On 13 June 2025 the U.S. Army swore Bosworth in as a lieutenant colonel in the Army Reserve as one of four technology executives in Detachment 201, the Executive Innovation Corps, which brings senior technology leaders into part-time service as senior advisors. The others were Shyam Sankar of Palantir, Kevin Weil of OpenAI and Bob McGrew, a former OpenAI chief research officer.

Boz To The Future

Boz To The Future is a podcast produced by Reality Labs at Meta and hosted by Bosworth. Its first episode, with guest Rebecca Van Dyck, was published on 25 June 2021, and the feed listed 29 episodes by its September 2026 episode with Aparna Chennapragada.

Timeline

Date	Event
January 2006	Joins Facebook as an engineer
2006	News Feed launches
23 August 2017	Reported as taking over Facebook's AR, VR and consumer hardware efforts, including Oculus
23 September 2019	Announces the CTRL-labs acquisition agreement
25 August 2020	Renames the AR/VR organization Facebook Reality Labs
22 September 2021	Named Facebook's next CTO, effective 2022
June 2024	Splits Reality Labs into Metaverse and Wearables groups
13 June 2025	Sworn in as an Army Reserve lieutenant colonel in Detachment 201
19 March 2026	Says Horizon Worlds will keep working in VR

See also

• Reality Labs
• Meta Platforms
• Meta Quest
• Michael Abrash
• John Carmack