FAANG is over. It’s the MANGO era now 🥭
I shared a short LinkedIn post on this and decided to expand it after it got good traction. For over a decade, FAANG (Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Google) was more than an acronym. A North Star for ambitious tech folks. If you landed at one of these companies, you made it. If you held the stocks, you were riding the wave of digital transformation. These were the untouchables. Titans of software, scale, and attention.
In 2025, FAANG feels like a time capsule from a different internet. Today’s momentum belongs elsewhere. To be specific, to the builders of intelligence, not only infrastructure. Enter: MANGO. Meta, Apple, Nvidia, Google, OpenAI.
It’s a signal that the center of gravity in tech has moved from platforms that distribute content, to platforms that understand it.
Why MANGO?
Meta still plays in the big leagues, but it’s no longer the Facebook of your parents’ feed. It’s leaned into AI research, LLMs, Llama, giving 100 million offers to current OpenAI engineers. Meta’s bet is clear: stay relevant by becoming an AI-native company.
Apple remains the ultimate hardware+software integrator. Seems like they’re quietly building the AI ecosystem that doesn’t scream “AI.”
Nvidia. It’s the new oil. Without its GPUs, AI doesn’t run. Jensen Huang went from geek hero to modern-day Carnegie. Millionaire printer. An average IC3 (Senior) Engineer at Nvidia went from a $250k TC at time of offer (2022) all the way to an $850k TC only 3 years later (Source: levels.fyi)
Google (still the G in MANGO) may be catching up with Gemini, VEO 3, but it still controls the web’s backbone, search, and an absurd amount of compute.
OpenAI, the star of this shift, grew into a global intelligence layer. I don’t even need to explain how game-changing things got after ChatGPT launched in November 2022.
The Implication
FAANG was about attention. MANGO is about cognition.
The shift shows where value is: in companies that think, reason, and predict. The future isn’t who can host the most content or deliver the fastest package anymore. It’s who can understand us better than we understand ourselves.
For talent, this means the best minds are drifting toward AI-native orgs. For capital, it means chasing compute, models, and differentiated data. For founders, if you’re not building with intelligence at the core, you’re playing last decade’s game, dot com.
FAANG had its run. But the world doesn’t need more apps. And that future?
It tastes like MANGO 🥭
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Adlet
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