
Thoughts on Mitch Kapor vs. Mark Zuckerberg at Startup School - mattculbreth
http://photomatt.net/2007/03/24/kapor-vs-zuckerberg/
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rfrey
As a greybeard in the making (36), my instinct is to dismiss comments like
Mark's as inexperience and naivety. Those sorts of attitudes make me
uncomfortable and edgy.

After some reflection, I'm forced to conclude that although such ageism is
annoying, is naive, is arrogant, it's also beautiful. It is exactly that
arrogance, the sure knowledge that the "establishment" is full of it and needs
to be rescued by youth, that _has_ rescued us, many times. Its from that
arrogance that the energy to drive change comes.

There are many examples. A mantra of the 60s was to never trust anyone over
30. Kurt Cobain didn't exactly work with a lot of elder statesmen of the music
world. Bertold Brecht spent his 20s in active rejection of all drama that had
come before. And the art world is chock full of young artists declaring that a
new age had arrived -- Basquiat probably never even talked to anyone under 30,
except Andy Warhol, who was at least pretending to be a teenager.

None of which makes Mark's words easier for me to hear, but I can't bring
myself to dismiss the attitude. It's fuel for radical new ideas. It's the
nuclear reactor of society.

~~~
staunch
A much more noble attitude than plugging your ears and humming -- which is how
many people seem to react to this harsh reality.

The fact is that Kapor himself was very young when he made his mark. There are
far more similarities between him and Zuckerberg than differences, regardless
of their _opinions_.

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BitGeek
You're confusing selection for objectivity. Startups founded by "hot wiz kids"
get more media attention to the fact that they are young. Companies founded by
older people do not have that hook, so there is less emphasis in their age
when the media writes them up.

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Alex3917
Facebook is a product. Lotus is a business.

Facebook doesn't need to keep innovating and re-imagining itself. It's
designed to do one thing and it already does that quite well. All Zuckerberg
needs to do to continue milking his cash cow is to keep the product fresh and
trendy. This means hiring the kind of young and trendy people who his product
targets.

Lotus, on the other hand, is a business. And as such they need to constantly
innovate to survive. That means finding new problems in new markets and
delivering new products to new people. As such they need all the diversity
they can get.

If Facebook wants to become a business, they'll need diversity too. If they're
content to keep milking the cash cow they already have, I'd say Zuckerberg's
strategy is sound.

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chasing
While it's interesting to think about what would be ideal in the abstract, I
think any company that puts hiring someone who fits a demographic (ie,
"young") over hiring the right person for the job is doing themselves a
disservice. We all know woefully boring 25-year-olds and exciting, bleeding-
edge 50-somethings, I'm sure.

That said, teens and 20-somethings tend to have much more time and energy on
their hands -- and a tendency not to be stuck in old ruts. But I imagine
they're also much more chaotic and restless. And simply inexperienced. Which
could be problematic.

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zaidf
What a stupid argument to be honest. Arguments such as this always get a
laughter out of me.

Why does it have to be one way or the other? It is quite understandable that
FB has a leaning for the young as much of FB feeds off of young folks. I
canât imagine too many 50+ guys brainstorming next generation of FB
features. At the same time I canât imagine too many grades in early 20s
coming up with next set of Lotus features.

May be the whole thing was missing a big disclaimer: USE WHAT WORKS BEST FOR
YOU:)

-Zaid 

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jamiequint
aka "limited life experience + overgeneralization = advice"

~~~
joshwa
I was _just_ about to post that...

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mattculbreth
I agree with this guy. Mitch's talk was well put together and thoughtful. I
think building a diverse team (assuming everybody is highly capable of course)
wins most of the time.

~~~
staunch
_"I think building a diverse team (assuming everybody is highly capable of
course) wins most of the time."_

We know diversity over the long-term is safer. Perhaps in startups, where the
timespan is short, specialization and myopic vision win out?

Where do you see examples of diverse startups being successful? From what I
see most are made up of young male geeks who could be brothers.

~~~
RyanGWU82
Good point. But companies should be built to last, not built to flip. If the
corporate culture becomes "don't hire anyone over 30," will it be possible to
change in a few years when you're no longer a startup?

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abstractbill
Mitch's talk was one of the ones I got the most out of. He seems like an all-
round great guy - I have no doubt it'd be a hugely enjoyable experience to
work with him.

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jamiequint
I think what Mark is trying to avoid is the "Curse of Knowledge" (To borrow
the Heath brothers phrase - check out Made to Stick, great book) Facebook is
all about innovation, I think they purposefully avoid old ideas. (preferring
young people = fresh ideas) Thats not to say they aren't young experienced
smart people.

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nostrademons
"Facebook is all about innovation, I think they purposefully avoid old ideas."

Are they, really?

The only new idea I've seen come out of FaceBook is tagging photos by drawing
boxes around the people. Other than that, they're your basic database-backed
social networking app. There's very little new there:
LiveJournal/Flickr/Friendster/MySpace did it all before.

Google innovates. Thinkature innovates. Justin.tv (much as I think their
community is heading for disaster) innovates. FaceBook seems to have
positioning going for them, but they do fairly little technical stuff that
can't be done by a hobbyist programmer in college. Which seems to be what most
of their hires are...

~~~
jamiequint
I think thats overgeneralizing a little, many of the problems they are solving
on the back end are not simple, give them a little credit for scaling from
nothing to the 6th biggest website in the US very smoothly.

All the people I know that work there are far from "hobbyist programmers" and
they are all damn smart, a fair amount have owned and sold companies before
working there.

The innovation that comes out of Facebook is not purely technological, but
more idealistic. They took stuff that had been done before and uniquely
applied in a way that hadn't done before, doesn't that pass as a definition of
innovation?

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BitGeek
In my hiring, there is one thing that is paramount over all- attitude. And
generally the attitude that gets people filtered out is arrogance. Not
confidence, but arrogance.

Discriminating on age is silly. As is technological proficiency for non-
technical positions (to a point.) I'll take a killer sales guy who's just
getting by technologically over one who has accepted patches in the linux
kernel but doesn't have the drive.

Too many people of one age fail to value people of a different age group...
give me two equally proficient engineers, one with 20 years experience and one
with 2 years experience, and I'll try to hire them both. But if either of them
is arrogant, I'm not interested.

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brlewis
"If you want to found a successful company, you should only hire young people"

"Next challenge is to make the world understand that Facebook isn't just a
college thing"

Anybody else see a cause-and-effect relationship between the above quotes?

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danielha
I knew Mark's would be drawing some fast criticism. There were some things he
said that raised my eyebrows, sure. Super arrogant, absolutely. I sure as hell
got something out of it though. He just gets what he's doing. He sees how
critical it is to keep technical people behind the company. And while his
blanket statement about youthfulness made some eyes roll, it holds true for
most of us and especially facebook. No matter what you might think of the guy,
it'd be a really good idea to buy facebook stock when they eventually go
public.

