As much as you can criticize Facebook for its privacy fumblings and other missteps I have an enormous amount of respect for Zuck for one simple reason:
For someone of that age with so little experience to guide something that started from his dorm room into a (potentially) $100B company in ~10 years while still maintaining effective control of it is a truly remarkable accomplishment. There would have many, many opportunities (and traps!) to exit, get ousted by investors or whatever.
The fact that he didn't cash out and maintained his singular vision is (agree with it or not) a remarkable trait.
He does seem like he has come a long way since his virtual meltdown at the All Things D conference 2 years ago.
Seeing him speak at Startup School last year was absolutely inspirational for me. I don't like Facebook that much, but he's built a great company, and you can tell he's got a lot of interesting things to say http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rWKUoabjjxg
The crazy thing to me is how well suited people of Zuck's age group are to running companies suited to web technology. A more "mature" CEO would not have the right mindset to steer something as pliable as a web app into a product that keeps up with the non-stop competition for users' attention. If something cooler comes around the corner and enough people latch onto it, you're fucked. Zuck gets this because he probably thinks exactly how his target audience thinks. So the question then becomes: What happens when Zuck is too mature to see what's coming next?
What target audience? Doesn't everyone and their mom use Facebook now, pretty much? Seems to me its biggest competitor for attention is TV.
To me this stuff is fairly simple - but I don't use Facebook anymore fwiw.
There were a bunch of prior attempts at large scale social networking like this and they pretty much all ran into issues with scaling. Facebook handled this adeptly, plus they didn't allow their user-base to turn into a total cesspool through ridiculous customizations + features that made it act like a hookup service ala MySpace, which is why they ate their lunch.
Now the network effects are extreme with nearly a billion served - so it's not exactly hard to keep users' attention when most of their friends and family use the service as well. And I haven't seen any viable competitors come across except Google+ which doesn't seem to be a real threat. So I'm not sure who exactly is nipping at their heels unless we're thinking of a different way of attacking social ala Pinterest (and formerly Instagram :)... which I think is what it will take. You won't outdo them by being a better them. It seems to me most of their innovation has been in a way to set up better ways to monetize or lock in their mass of user data.
I don't understand your point. What does maturity have to do with "the right mindset to steer something as pliable as a web app into a product that keeps up with the non-stop competition for users' attention?"
My point was the product is geared towards the immature, and his being immature for so many years gives him an advantage in understanding both the product and his target audience. Yes you could train a mature person to think like a college kid, and maybe they could even hearken back to their college days for reference, but the times they are a-changin' and what's been considered cool for the past decade won't be next decade. Thus my point was: will Zuck be able to keep up with what's cool as he gets old and out of touch? My opinion is that being mature is actually a detriment here.
It is, but in the reverse factor, I mean the normal factor, that which is stating the common sense fact that the more experienced you are the more you can do difficult things (including putting yourself in the shoes of young immature people)
It seems crazy that just for 2 examples of youngster having been promoted on the front page of magazines suddenly everyone seem to think only young people can do that.
As far as I can tell, and in fact I don;t care that much, Steve Jobs was not very young, neither is Jeff Bezos. The founder on the web company where I work is look young, but not that young, I'd guess over his forties.
I think the best founders are those that have (1) experience and (2) are still hungry.
Zack bypassed requirement #1 simply because it received enough funding to not worry about the first problem you have when starting a business (having revenue). He's also smart and probably picked up the required experience on his way.
On the other hand there are plenty of youngsters that fail because of a lack of experience, once confronted with the harsh realities of running a business, and there are also plenty of seniors that fail simply because they are not hungry enough, which limits their creativity.
Where did he ever have to actually show this quality of keeping up with competition? So far there simply hasn't been any "next big thing" that facebook would have to actually be afraid of. They have so incredibly many users, that alone makes them de-facto untouchable as of now. Even google plus could not change that. All of this might change some time in the future, just like it did for myspace and there was nothing they could have done about it if you ask me.
> “Basically, there are two ways to build an organization,” a former Facebook employee explains. “You can be really, really good at hiring, or you can be really, really good at firing.” Zuckerberg has been really good at firing.
There seems to be a plethora of news about hiring, but when was the last time you saw something about firing?
>>Henry Blodget (born 1966) is an American former equity research analyst, currently banned from the securities industry, who was senior Internet analyst for CIBC Oppenheimer during the dot-com bubble and the head of the global Internet research team at Merrill Lynch. Blodget is now the editor and CEO of The Business Insider, a business news and analysis site, and a host of Yahoo Daily Ticker, a finance show on Yahoo.
>>Blodget received a Bachelor of Arts degree from Yale University and began his career as a freelance journalist and was a proofreader for Harper's Magazine. In 1994, Blodget joined the corporate finance training program at Prudential Securities, and, two years later, moved to Oppenheimer & Co. in equity research. In October 1998, he predicted that Amazon.com's stock price would hit a pre-split price of $400 (which it did a month later, gaining 128%).
>>This call received significant media attention, and, two months later, he accepted a position at Merrill Lynch. In early 2000, days before the dot-com bubble burst, Blodget personally invested $700,000 in tech stocks, only to lose most of it in the years that followed. In 2001, he accepted a buyout offer from Merrill Lynch and left the firm.
>>In 2002, then New York State Attorney General Eliot Spitzer, published Merrill Lynch e-mails in which Blodget gave assessments about stocks which conflicted with what was publicly published. In 2003, he was charged with civil securities fraud by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. He agreed to a permanent ban from the securities industry and paid a $2 million fine plus a $2 million disgorgement."
This is what made me spit out my drink at the top of page 2
But that crash was a product of investors’ and analysts’ overexuberance (sorry!),
not evidence of a fundamental flaw in the tech industry’s start-up ecosystem.
Woah that guy replied to one of my tweets a few weeks ago and I had no idea who he was. Apparently that was a pretty awesome tweet reply, was wondering why my followers went up.
You should read this guy's story. Read his settlement. You might observe that the companies he was reporting on were far more deceptive than he was. He was but a pawn in their game. You might even conclude he was more or less the fall guy for some of the fraudulent individuals running those companies, who, if I'm not mistaken are still active in the industry and probably still taking on investments. Or you might not. It's worth reading anyways, as we make our way through another bubble.
Of late, I'm seeing a lot of articles about Facebook doing this great thing or that. Agreed what they do is technically challenging and they are extremely interesting, but these also seem to be a sequence of puff-pieces meant to whip up the public with feel-good sentiments about the company before the IPO? The HN readership might want to keep that in mind while reading these articles - indeed, we did have another post a couple of days ago about exactly this - http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html
The IPO is timely because there is no telling how long it will take for Facebook to become the next MySpace. It could be 6 months or a couple of years, or never, if they find some way to reinvent themselves before then.
Well, one is for sure: Zuckerberg was very lucky that Instagram owners were not mini-Zucks. Scared to think what will happen next time when Zuck needs to buy a competitor and they owner will greet him with: "Hello, Mr. Mark, I am Bark, CEO of X, Bitch!"
Not the stock I'm concerned with. It's the fact that 1 in 8 people in the world now use Facebook monthly. When that becomes 1/3 or 1/2, what happens? A successful IPO can make that happen.
>Because not only is Zuckerberg declaring that he considers Facebook’s social mission a higher priority than Facebook’s business and financial mission—a view many on Wall Street would consider treasonous
Zuckerberg deserves many of the accolades he's received for his maturation at the helm of Facebook, but I can't help but wonder what would have happened to him had Facebook failed?
I don't see how he couldn't. Managing and coding are both full time jobs. How could he possibly run one of the fastest growing and most influential companies in the world while still remain an effective member of the Engineering team?
On an anecdotal note, I recall reading a story recently about how the FB Engineers gave Zuck a canned 5-minute bugfix which ended up taking him close to an hour. He's clearly rusty, and with good cause.
Actually, Zuck made a statement exactly like that last fall. He basically described his model of running a company as just another engineering problem, comparing delegating tasks to writing subroutines.
Ah, interesting. I was actually referring to this talk he gave here at CMU -- http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/18392445 -- but he says the same thing almost word for word (spent ~15 minutes trying to find where he says it; I couldn't find it, but I remember him saying it).
sure. the line that was toughest to swallow was this one:
"In a market where speed is critical, venture-capital funding allows young companies to move faster than they could if they had to rely only on revenues to fund product development. Entrepreneurs who understand that tend to stick around to make plenty of money later"
really? do they really stick around to make plenty of money? sentence 1 may be true, but that doesn't make sentence 2 true.
i couldn't finish the article. here are a few more choice phrases:
"Many promising tech companies place too much emphasis too soon on the business rather than the product"
"Most entrepreneurs are creative and impatient, an often fatal combination—trying to do too many things, they spread their tiny companies too thin"
> "Maybe he's not a good guy, but he's not a bad guy."
Translation: He has too much money, and FB has too much potential influence on our readers, for us to tell you what we really think.
that's unduly cynical. if you read the rest of the article, they explain their reasoning - mainly that, when zuckerberg might have fired people ruthlessly in his rise to the top, they did not feel that any of those firings were actually unfair.
You're right. Too cynical. I took it out. But remember we don't know who the executive is. He/she may have been even worse than Zuckerberg on the ethical scale. I don't doubt there are some very creepy "executives" working at Facebook.
I think you mean protecting his position at the top from "executives". Some of who may have little skill to offer the company (as someone above said, age is a factor) but are who are quite adept at maneuvering their way into higher salaries and greater powers of decision-making.
People who bash Zuckerberg fall into 3 categories. Haters, entitlists or are jealous of Mark.
If you are so pissed off at Facebook's privacy stance, don't use them (Yes it really is as simple as that).
If you cry foul and say this is unfair because you won't be able to keep in touch as well with all of your family/friends just remember this. YOU are not entitled make your own rules when using someone elses' company services.
All the whining does nothing - only votes matter. You have your vote (your free choice to use or not use Facebook). if enough people agree with you and decide that it is not worth it to use Facebook - then they will be forced to make changes. All the whining in the world will not make a bit of difference if they still know that THEY HAVE YOU and you along with everyone else will continue to use their service (meaning no significant amount of people are leaving and growth is still good).
>If you are so pissed off at Facebook's privacy stance, don't use them (Yes it really is as simple as that).
While I agree with you in general I think that the matter is not so simple. Of course, it is in fact true that when you don't like something, you simply won't buy/use it.
However, many people have had similar view with regards to Microsoft and Google (and other big companies). But when a big company does something it affects so many people/companies that it's not just an issue of voting with your wallet.
In this case, it really is that simple. Unlike Google, which provides a necessary service, Facebook is not necessary. I have lost nothing at all from not using Facebook. Social media might be important for advertising, but chances are that you personally really don't need Facebook.
Delete your account and go on with life. Some people might not forward you an invite to some event, but they are really not friends if they choose to do this. Writing a short email is not a big time investment. Hell, you can write one email to all your non-Facebook using friends!
I +1 you and agree with you. Its funny how people say "just dont use it". Well, I would have stopped using it have I had opportunity to educate all my friends (at once at one sit!!) that your privacy is at huge risk. But since this is impossible to happen, you keep protecting yourself as much as you can and keep "partying" with friends and family online. Its like with government. Take paying high taxes, for example. Nobody likes it but everyone has to do it, and unless everyone takes on the issue, noone can legally quit it.
For someone of that age with so little experience to guide something that started from his dorm room into a (potentially) $100B company in ~10 years while still maintaining effective control of it is a truly remarkable accomplishment. There would have many, many opportunities (and traps!) to exit, get ousted by investors or whatever.
The fact that he didn't cash out and maintained his singular vision is (agree with it or not) a remarkable trait.
He does seem like he has come a long way since his virtual meltdown at the All Things D conference 2 years ago.