

Mark Zuckerberg's Most Valuable Friend - wallflower
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/03/business/03face.html

======
rdl
Mark Zuckerberg's most valuable friend is/was Sean Parker. Thanks to Sean,
Mark retained control of the board, and thus was able to avoid the utter
disaster of a $1b sale to Yahoo.

Sean got to see what happens when shortsighted VCs get control before (at
Napster and then Plaxo); he's smart enough to not get screwed the same way
thrice.

~~~
adrianwaj
How did Mark retain control of the board specifically?

~~~
bootload
_"... Donald Graham, the chairman of the Washington Post Company, who once
tried to hire Ms. Sandberg, says that in the last two years a lot of questions
about Facebook’s viability have been put to rest. ..."_

I'd argue that Zucks most valuable friend post Sean is Graham. Graham helped
set the company up so control falls to the owner and not the board. The
Washington Post is set up the same way. Facebook isn't going away till the
founder wants it to.

~~~
adrianwaj
So beyond just having the founder take up the majority of the board seats? I
suppose one needs to first find investors comfortable to let this all happen.

~~~
rdl
You make it a negotiating point; you might have to accept lower valuation or
other terms to protect investors if you push on board control. Being obviously
brilliant, responsible, and experienced (Parker) goes a long way in those
negotiations too.

------
mturmon
As a response to the movie, they know it would be a good time to put a human
face in front of the press. Hence, they're pushing her forward rather than
Zuckerberg. And the NYT slurped it up.

I wonder how long the back-and-forth over how the story was to be structured
took.

[edit: I'm _not_ saying Zuckerberg is not human, just that he's overexposed in
the media at the moment, and they need to connect Facebook to something else.]

~~~
jv22222
I'm betting it's an overarching PR strategy that will be executed over the
next few months. To try to fix Zuck's reputation by association, rather than
directly.

------
mikedanko
Oh Jesus, can't we all stop gawking at Facebook bullshit? No one can figure
out what Facebook is, but if you haven't succumbed to it, you're intimidated
by it. It's worth billions of dollars and for what? The pure evil of having
everyone's marketing data?

In the mindset of Rodney King, can't we all just move on? Can't we all just
get past not being Zuckerberg? Can't we all get back to being hackers who do
things because they make our minds happy?

~~~
najirama
Downvote the above if you will, but there is truth in those words, if only
masked behind palpable bitterness...

...and honestly - I feel the guy.

We humans have a tendency towards the shameless worship of heroes. We seem to
need to create legends and demigods and to praise and glorify acts that upon
careful examination are little more than the progeny of good fortune and
timing. Providence itself isn't worthy of our praise nor our consideration -
which makes the ascension of men of 'lesser stuff' a bitter pill to swallow
for those few 'in-the-know'.

I think back to first grade, and recall how desperately I wanted to be a
scientist/composer/hero/great man/demigod. I had no idea what these things
were _really_ , but in my mind, they were the people who _knew_ ; and what
they didn't know they _sought_. They were the gatekeepers, arbiters,
discoverers, and composers of knowledge, truth, and frankly most of what
mattered. A few years later, when asked who/what I wanted to be when I grew
up, beyond my father I could think only of Newton, Einstein, Maxwell, Bach,
Beethoven, Chopin, et al...

My, how quickly things change. The pursuit of knowledge and beauty for its own
sake is an ideal which has perhaps never existed, or existed in so few men as
to have practically never done so. But we're waaay past that. A man not too
long ago solved Fermat's Last, how many know his name without Wikipedia? What
impresses us now? What is deemed worthy of our 'shameless worship"?A man not
too long ago solved Poincare's; beyond the story about his rejecting a million
dollars, who gave a shit?

No one. We save our shits for the pirates of Silicon Valley these days.

That, if I am ever blessed with a son or daughter, and they are one day asked
in their youth who or what they want to become when they grow up, and in turn
respond with Gates, Jobs, Zuckerburg, et al, we have all failed. And I, them.

~~~
btmorex
That's one of the aspects of the HN community that I most dislike. It's like
Puritan divine providence, but applied non-religiously to business. X
succeeded so he/she must be great. HN sees these people as masters of
business: smart, ambitious, persistent, etc. What if they were lucky?
Unscrupulous? Manipulating? I'm not saying it has to be all one way or all the
other, but I often think only one point of view gets seen here.

~~~
smakz
"Great minds discuss ideas. Average minds discuss events. Small minds discuss
people."

\-- Eleanor Roosevelt

Completely agree, the name dropping around here can get tiresome quick. There
was a great article on Mint vs. Wesabe posted here recently - in my opinion we
need more articles like that and less Jobs is a design master/Zuckerberg is a
genius/etc.

~~~
gruseom
Eleanor Roosevelt didn't say that. From Wikiquote, which is slowly approaching
authoritativeness on quotes online:

 _This has been quoted without citation as a statement of Eleanor Roosevelt.
It is usually attributed to Admiral Hyman G. Rickover, but though Rickover
quoted this, he did not claim to be the author of it; in "The World of the
Uneducated" in The Saturday Evening Post (28 November 1959), he prefaces it
with "As the unknown sage puts it..."_

~~~
vdm
<http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Eleanor_Roosevelt#Disputed>

Its still a nice quote regardless of who its attributed to.

------
aspir
I think a great deal of Facebook's recent, and coming, success is not just
that Sheryl Sandberg was brought on, but when she was brought on. They allude
to the rapid growth that Facebook has seen lately, but Mark Zuckerberg may not
have been able to effectively handle that growth without her. She joined on at
the crucially perfect time, which is a credit to both of them.

------
NZ_Matt
Here's a cached version of the article for those of us without a nytimes
account.
[http://www10.nytimes.com.nyud.net/2010/10/03/business/03face...](http://www10.nytimes.com.nyud.net/2010/10/03/business/03face.html?_r=5&pagewanted=all)

------
jv22222
Great PR placement and spin about Mark Zuckerberg. Congrats to the PR agency!

------
dchs
I think this will go down in history as one of the great working relationships
in the technology industry along with Larry & Sergey and Jobs & Woz.

~~~
aspir
It also seems a bit like a Gates/Ballmer relationship as well: sharp hacker
and a sharp MBA.

~~~
stuhacking
..but with a sharp MBA.

------
ebaysucks
Is Donald Graham (Washington Post chairman / Facebook board member) related to
Paul Graham?

~~~
mahmud
If my XPath is correct, there are 168 people with the Graham last name that
are noteworthy enough to merit their own wikipedia pages.

Either Paul Graham and his immediate family[1] have done well for themselves,
or maybe, just maybe, it's one of the top 10 most common names for people from
the British-Isles.

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graham_%28surname%29>

