How Alex Schultz left their lane.
Alex Schultz went from Cambridge physics and building websites for fun to helping scale Facebook, Instagram and Messenger – and is now Meta’s first Chief Data Officer.
Alex Schultz trained as a physicist, but he was learning digital marketing at the same time.
While studying Natural Sciences at Cambridge, specialising in experimental and theoretical physics, he was also running websites he had started as a teenager. One was dedicated to paper aeroplanes. Another helped people make cocktails. What began as a hobby became an education in SEO, affiliate marketing, advertising and, increasingly, data – understanding what brought people to a site, what they did when they arrived and what made them come back.
The websites eventually made enough money to help pay his way through university.
They also led him to eBay. Schultz joined in 2004, moving from being an affiliate sending people to the platform to working inside the company on targeting and online merchandising. By then, the connection between his physics training and his emerging career was becoming clearer: form a hypothesis, measure what happens, change the model when the evidence disagrees.
Facebook caught his attention early.
In 2006, Schultz applied to join after experimenting with Facebook advertising and seeing the possibilities created by connecting advertising to real user identities. A visa problem delayed the move, but in 2007 he joined the company. He went on to work across growth, analytics and data science, playing a significant role as Facebook, Instagram and Messenger each grew beyond one billion users.
In 2020, he became Chief Marketing Officer. The following year, he led marketing through the company’s change from Facebook to Meta while continuing to oversee analytics. In July 2026, he became Meta’s first Chief Data Officer, bringing analytics, data science, data engineering, competitive intelligence and user research together under one role.
His 2025 book, Click Here: The Art and Science of Digital Marketing and Advertising, makes the connection explicit: effective marketing is part creativity, part measurement, and usually improved by being very clear about what you are actually trying to learn.
The physics career never happened. The habit of testing, measuring and revising never left.
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