
Sam Altman talks with Mark Zuckerberg about how to build the future [video] - jameshk
http://themacro.com/articles/2016/08/mark-zuckerberg-future-interview/
======
tedmiston
Refreshing advice: Work on a problem you care about and don't worry about the
rest until it's working.

> Sam: So you were 19 when you started Facebook. One question we hear a lot at
> Y Combinator is, "I'm 19 today. I really want to do whatever I can to make
> the world better. What should I do?"

> Mark: I always think that the most important thing that entrepreneurs should
> do is pick something they care about, work on it, but don't actually commit
> to turning it into a company until it's working, and I think that...if you
> look at the data of the very best companies that have gotten built, I
> actually think a tremendous percent of them have been built that way and not
> from people who decided upfront that they wanted to start a company because
> you just get locked into some local minimum a lot of the time. A local
> maximum, sorry.

~~~
zouhair
And also be extremely lucky.

~~~
eatkinson
"I find that the major objection is that people think great science is done by
luck. It's all a matter of luck. Well, consider Einstein. Note how many
different things he did that were good. Was it all luck? Wasn't it a little
too repetitive? Consider Shannon. He didn't do just information theory.
Several years before, he did some other good things and some which are still
locked up in the security of cryptography. He did many good things. You see
again and again, that it is more than one thing from a good person. Once in a
while a person does only one thing in his whole life, and we'll talk about
that later, but a lot of times there is repetition. I claim that luck will not
cover everything. And I will cite Pasteur who said, 'Luck favors the prepared
mind.' And I think that says it the way I believe it. There is indeed an
element of luck, and no, there isn't. The prepared mind sooner or later finds
something important and does it. So yes, it is luck. The particular thing you
do is luck, but that you do something is not."

\--R.W. Hamming

~~~
jomamaxx
There was a lot of luck in Facebook, even if Zuck is a particularly talented
individual.

Also - if Harvard is a great school - how the F does someone find time to do
the work and make a product at the same time?

When I did Engineering, I didn't have time to take a shower.

~~~
dntrkv
You can say that about any successful person/company.

Sure, luck may have played a large role in Facebook's initial success. But
that was over 10 years ago. Many companies experience that initial success and
then go nowhere, e.g. MySpace. Facebook, on the other hand, has continuously
surpassed everyone's expectations. It's not until recently that people have
began to accept that Facebook is here to stay. Discounting Facebook's repeated
successes as luck is just silly.

Building a $350B company does not happen from luck, it requires a constant
stream of good decision making.

~~~
cookiecaper
I agree that the luck angle needs to be tempered by considering that there are
_many_ ways to accidentally destroy a good thing. It should also be recognized
that luck is required to prevent other, bigger companies from catching on to
you before you're big enough to stand up for yourself.

I don't want to discount merit or work, but we too often seriously discount
luck. Luck plays a large part in every success. That's not to say that people
are justified in being unsuccessful; it's just to recognize that we're all
involved in something larger than ourselves.

As failure doesn't always correlate to incompetence, success doesn't always
correlate to competence.

------
aresant
The TL;DR of how Zuck wants to build FB's future w/his quotes:

1) "Connectivity, so getting everyone in the world on the Internet."

2) "The next one is AI. I think that that's just going to unlock so much
potential in so many different domains."

3) "[The next computing platform] - I think that's going to be virtual reality
and augmented reality."

For all the flack that Zuck is getting in this thread he lays out a pretty
concise vision of what he needs to do to continue the FB's juggernaut run.

~~~
jseliger
_For all the flack that Zuck is getting in this thread_

It's pretty safe to ignore most of the flack in this thread. Most people vote
with their feet (or wallets, or eyeballs, or attention), and they've voted
that they love Facebook, regardless of what a minority of people in this
thread say or upvote.

Nerds have a cantankerous side and are as prone to virtue signalling as any
other group. Those of us who read Slashdot ages ago may remember the Microsoft
hate it hosted and the way every year was going to be the year of Linux on the
desktop. Well, Microsoft is still here; Linux on the desktop is still a
minority pursuit; and most people never cared that much about the OS they
used.

The specific target nerd derision has changed some, but the form of the attack
and disdain has not. Any company or country or person's haters is
proportionate to its size. Look at what people do and how they behave rather
than what they say.

~~~
perseusprime11
I don't think he is getting much flack. I think he is more like Bill Gates
with some luck involved. Let us not try to put him in the same bucket as Steve
Jobs or Elon Musk. Facebook started as a way to hook up college students,
remember poke? It did not start out as a vision to connect the world

~~~
mpbm
Since a solid five minutes of the interview are devoted to Mark explaining how
he never expected to start a company, let alone do anything as big as "connect
the world", I don't think this is much of a rebuttal of anything. What makes
you think Steve Jobs belongs in a "better" bucket than Mark? Even at his
grandest vision he just made phones. They were good phones, sure, but he never
tried to do anything bigger.

------
devy
> I heard this story recently that at this conference where

> someone has built a machine learning application where you

> can take a picture of a lesion on someone's skin, and it can

> detect instantly whether it's skin cancer with the accuracy

> of the best dermatologists and doctors in the world. So who

> doesn't want that, right?

I wonder what that app is? Is it SkinVision[1] or IBM's proprietary medical
techonology from T.J Watson Research Center[2]?

[1]:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12299930](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12299930)

[2]: [http://www.computerworld.com/article/2860758/ibm-detects-
ski...](http://www.computerworld.com/article/2860758/ibm-detects-skin-cancer-
more-quickly-with-visual-machine-learning.html)

~~~
a3_nm
> So who doesn't want that, right?

What about privacy? Doctors in my country (France) are legally obliged to
respect the privacy of their patients and the confidentiality of medical data.
A third-party cloud service, not so much.

Edit: To be more precise, I'm not saying that medical apps can't be done
right. I'm just disagreeing with the implication that an efficient medical app
is automatically a good thing.

~~~
welanes
Similar apps have been around a while - [http://www.wired.com/2015/09/social-
network-doctors-swap-gro...](http://www.wired.com/2015/09/social-network-
doctors-swap-gross-pics-patients/)

> And finally, if you’re worried about your own gnarly ER visit showing up on
> Figure 1, the app is very careful about patient privacy. Every time anyone
> uploads an image, the first thing they do is fill out a consent form. Figure
> 1 has an algorithm that automatically obscures faces, and tools that let the
> user erase any pixels containing names, dates, or any other identifying
> details.

~~~
devy
Mark Zuckerberg didn't say this app was brand new - he just mentioned that he
became aware of it recently.

SkinVision has been around for 5 years. "It was founded in 2011 in Bucharest,
Romania based on a PhD study to apply the mathematical theory ‘fractal
geometry’ for medical imaging. Fractal geometry simulates natural growth of
tissue and is widely used and documented in biology." [1]

[1]: [https://skinvision.com/team](https://skinvision.com/team)

------
fbdinglebore
> _And just to make this point, how far into Facebook did it actually become a
> company?_

> _I don 't know. I think it became a formal Delaware company when Peter Thiel
> invested about six months in._

Isn't this an outright lie? He sure stammered over his answer. He's joked
himself about the fact that Edwardo incorporated Facebook as a Florida LLC
originally.

This is how history gets rewritten to be more streamlined...

The fact is Zuckerberg was extremely ambitious about starting a company and
had many attempts. That Florida LLC could've been dissolved easily if Facebook
had failed. There's no downside to incorporating really.

~~~
jeevestobs
There's details of this on page two of this Business Insider article.

[http://www.businessinsider.com/how-mark-zuckerberg-booted-
hi...](http://www.businessinsider.com/how-mark-zuckerberg-booted-his-co-
founder-out-of-the-company-2012-5?page=2)

"His plan: Reduce Saverin's stake in TheFacebook.com by creating a new
company, a Delaware corporation, to acquire the old company (the Florida LLC
formed in April), and then distribute new shares in the new company to
everybody but Saverin."

------
dineshp2
Interesting interview, but I felt Sam could have asked more probing questions
(for the lack of a better phrase) and I don't mean the controversies from the
early days of Facebook.

What was the thinking behind acquiring WhatsApp for such a large amount of
money and how will they monetize the platform? How is WhatsApp going to be an
important part of the future?

Facebook's mission is to connect the world, but in the case of Free Basics,
they violated net neutrality principles which is clearly not in the best
interest of the users.

Mark Zuckerberg also mentions that he finds it frustrating that people talk
about AI turning against humanity, which is one of the things that Elon Musk,
Sam and OpenAI are trying to educate the population about. Maybe a discussion
about that could have been included in the interview.

If any of the mods are reading this, maybe there could be some way that future
interviews can include questions from HN? We could have a discussion about the
questions that the HN community wants to ask, and the mods can pick out the
questions that generate the most interest from the community?

~~~
HiroshiSan
Seems like a lot of those questions and deeper probing were off the table
before the interview even started. Considering Sam Altman was doing the
interview and the content was geared towards ycombinator, it was very startup
focused.

------
tedmiston
"I think Peter [Thiel] was the person who told me this really pithy quote, 'In
a world that's changing so quickly, the biggest risk you can take is not
taking any risk.'"

------
georgeglue1
I'm not sure what to think about Mark's non-answer to:

"So can you tell us about some of the hardest parts in the history of the
early history of Facebook?"

(He basically says the hardest point was not selling for $1 billion, and that
it was a non-issue months later.)

~~~
fbdinglebore
He also left out the part where investor-genius Peter Thiel was pressuring him
very hard to _sell_ Facebook to Yahoo.

Peter Thiel almost cost Zuck one of the biggest mistakes in business history.

Another inconvenient fact that goes unsaid.

~~~
MichaelGG
Was is it a mistake? What's the probability of massive success there? In 1000
universes with FB, how many times would FB take off like that?

Groupon's looking silly for not selling at 6BN, at least as a company. (I
think they personally made out ok?)

------
bozoUser
Two things that need to be highlighted:

I came looking for a video that would talk about building the future and I am
surprised Sam & Mark spent lot of time talking about FB origins and other
things related to FB and talk future only for the last few minutes.

Its almost palpable the cold nature of the interview, they don`t shake hands
nor greet each other as someone else noted the conversation seems very
detached to say the least.

~~~
elmar
Why shades of Asperger’s Syndrome are the secret to building a great tech
company

[https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/innovations/wp/2015/04/0...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/innovations/wp/2015/04/03/why-
shades-of-aspergers-syndrome-are-the-secret-to-building-a-great-tech-company/)

------
d_burfoot
Is Sam consciously mirroring Mark's body language and style of dress, or is
that just a weird coincidence?

~~~
mturmon
The symmetry of the staging adds another uncanny element: the frontal camera
angles and the identical chairs add on top of the similarity in dress.

And you're right, the similar affect of the two -- the earnestness, the
forward posture telegraphing intensity, the lack of humor -- all together, it
is off-putting. Later in the interview, Sam leans back which seems to break
this unpleasant symmetry.

~~~
Gargoyle
The poor staging and lighting are responsible for most of what people are
reacting negatively to in terms of body language and appearance. Terrible
location for an interview for a number of reasons.

They do seem intensely earnest, but both of them always do in the interviews
I've seen. I personally don't see that as a negative in this sort of context,
however.

------
throwaway29292
He gave away, or atleast appeared to give, 99% of his wealth away. I can think
of better PR stunts for much less money. He is still a net positive person for
me, who inspires me more than most others.

------
elmar
Peter Thiel view on the $1B offer from Yahoo

Starts at 1:15
[https://youtu.be/54NIcx3HJSE?t=75](https://youtu.be/54NIcx3HJSE?t=75)

------
sparkzilla
All these comments, yet no mention of how Zuckerberg stole the project from
the Winklevoss twins? My, the memory hole is really working great.

~~~
nickpsecurity
It was shocking me too. You're not alone though:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12302303](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12302303)

------
tn13
Election campaigners of Trump/Hillary would cringe at this video.

Zuck's body language looks bad because of the chair their are using. It is
slanted and Zuck is sitting straight. It makes him look less relaxed (like a
job interview). Same with Sam Altman.

Complete lack of emotions in Zuck's eyes. It might be part of his personality
but it makes him look very detached from what he is talking about.

~~~
gerby
I can relate to Mark having to disconnect from emotion or feeling in business.
It's a very personal thing for me that I don't really want to get into, but it
has to do with being consciously aware of free choices.

~~~
tn13
I am not judging Zuck at all. I am just saying it is a pretty bad way to
showing a leader.

------
harscoat
Calling BS on Mark, with FB new sponsored links in FB feed... this is total
Business, not solving my problem or making my life better. To make the world a
better place, Mark should have worked for FriendFeed.

~~~
mpbm
It's disingenuous to claim that because a new feature isn't making your life
better means he's failing at making the whole world better.

Maybe you're one of those 10-100K experiments where some engineer pushed
something out to see if it worked. Maybe a new feature boosts revenue so they
can build solar-powered internet planes that bring entire cities a connection.
Maybe it's just noise and isn't actually relevant.

------
thisisbad
Is the photo below the future? Zuckerberg zombies living in a virtual Plato's
Cave.

[http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2016/02/22/16/3173A83C0000057...](http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2016/02/22/16/3173A83C00000578-0-image-a-1_1456157751384.jpg)

------
jey
Anyone have a link to the transcript that's not trapped inside scribd?

Really, just plain HTML would've been fine, but instead it's trapped in a PDF
that's trapped inside Scribd!

~~~
tedmiston
I downloaded the plain text, stripped the line wraps, and put it on Genius.

[http://genius.com/Mark-zuckerberg-how-to-build-the-future-
ma...](http://genius.com/Mark-zuckerberg-how-to-build-the-future-mark-
zuckerberg-annotated)

------
shklnrj
Is someone else surprised that Peter Thiel invested in Facebook when it had
100000 users and Mark Zuckerberg said that he planned to go back to college?
What are the chances of that happening with a product today?

~~~
qaq
Today people get an order of magnitude bigger rounds with 0 users :)

~~~
shklnrj
Hmm...that can happen, but does that happen for a 19 year old college guy?
That happens today but mostly with experienced founders.

~~~
qaq
After FB any 19 year old with a product that has 100K users and is growing at
a rate of FB I would guess would be showered with money (I am not a VC so my
guess might be very wrong).

~~~
shklnrj
I guess so. Even I am not sure though :) I would love it if someone can
provide some data on the inside of such deals with numbers :)

------
prodigyboi
It's somewhat comforting to know that Facebook relies on the learn startup
framework to constantly experiment and innovate.

------
jomamaxx
No mention of MySpace?

Because that was a pretty big deal back in the day.

The Lycos or Excite of Social ...

Without MySpace, I'm not sure if FB would be.

Oh - and remember 'Friendster' ?

:)

------
tim333
After turning down the YHOO offer:

> ...It was the fact that after that, huge amounts of the company quit because
> they didn't believe in what we were doing. If you look at the management
> team that we had...

>Interviewer: Did that whole management team leave?

>Mark: The whole management team was gone within about a year after that.

That's an eye opener. Guess most people are in it for short term cash. I bet a
lot of them regret leaving now.

------
brendyn
Σ$0.02: Perhaps a way to contribute to the world would be to figure out how to
get rid of Facebook:
[https://stallman.org/facebook.html](https://stallman.org/facebook.html)

Σ$0.04: Mark Zuckerberg mentions talk on the threat of AI as fear mungering,
however, [https://intelligence.org/](https://intelligence.org/) (MIRI) argues
that advanced AI is a legitimate existential threat. Note that when MIRI
speaks of "AI", they are not talking about fancy neural networks, but the fact
that since humans are no where near any kind of upper bound on intelligence,
and the space of possible Turing machines and self modifying algorithms is
overwhelmingly large, plus reams of other arguments you , humans will
eventually be able to produce computer programs with the capability of
destroying civilisation. N.B: This is my brief summary of what their stance
seems to be, and isn't a direct quotation or paraphrasing of MIRI's official
opinion.

------
toephu2
Founders of successful companies don't spend their time reading about how
other founders became successful. When Zuckerberg was 19 do you think he spent
all his time reading interviews about billionaire startup founders? Thinking
that copying their traits, following their do's and don'ts and imitating them
will lead to success? No, he spent his time working on the product. That and
being lucky. Some of these people lucked out more than others, and because of
that they get famous, get interviewed and spiel out some B.S. about how to be
successful as if everyone could do it (and that they 'made it' because of
intelligence, skill, and hard work).

~~~
cookiecaper
Absolutely correct. Zuckerberg lucked into Facebook after stealing the concept
from a client. Zuck's self-esteem would be destroyed if he had this same
honest evaluation of himself, so he has to tell himself that he made it due to
his unusually high work ethic, intelligence, or other personal traits.

~~~
downandout
Probably the biggest thing I've learned through hard experience is that great
ideas by themselves have very little value. At this point it's irrelevant
whether he copied the idea from his client(s), or from Friendster or MySpace.
Out of pure luck, Zuck's version appealed to the masses enough to get them to
register for the site and use the contact importer. After that, skill took
over - Zuck knew that if a high enough percentage of users allowed the site to
spam their contacts, growth to billions of users was a mathematical certainty.

This is instructive for many startups. You don't need amazing or even original
ideas. You do need to have growth features in place that, if users choose to
use them, will make world domination an inevitable conclusion. Then it's just
a matter of optimizing until a high enough percentage of users use that
feature. If you are successful at this, you will have perpetual growth.

~~~
tedmiston
> Actually, startup ideas are not million dollar ideas, and here's an
> experiment you can try to prove it: just try to sell one. Nothing evolves
> faster than markets. The fact that there's no market for startup ideas
> suggests there's no demand. Which means, in the narrow sense of the word,
> that startup ideas are worthless.

> —PG, Ideas for Startups (2005)

[http://paulgraham.com/ideas.html](http://paulgraham.com/ideas.html)

~~~
davidivadavid
I think that view is a little simplistic in more ways than one.

The first is that, erm, yes, there's a huge market for startup ideas. It's
called the get-rich-quick-scheme industry. Sells billions of dollars worth of
goods every year trying to teach people what business ideas will make them
rich.

The second is that it depends what you mean by "idea." If you mean some
generic one sentence pitch about some vague idea ("Uber for pets"), then,
sure, it's probably not worth much.

If you have a very precise plan that includes details about go to market
strategies and execution, and that is based on data only you are in possession
of, it can be worth a lot of money. That's essentially what Peter Thiel talks
about when he mentions good startups being based on "secrets" (the way I
understood it, anyway).

That there's no liquid market for such ideas doesn't tell you much about their
value.

~~~
tedmiston
I think when Peter Thiel talks about "secrets" in Zero to One, he's referring
to truths you hold that aren't (yet) generally accepted.

> What important truth do very few people agree with you on?

> Recall the business version of our contrarian question: what valuable
> company is nobody building? Every correct answer is necessarily a secret:
> something important and unknown, something hard to do but doable. If there
> are many secrets left in the world, there are probably many world‐changing
> companies yet to be started.

The text of that chapter is on Genius: [http://genius.com/Peter-thiel-zero-to-
one-chapter-8-secrets-...](http://genius.com/Peter-thiel-zero-to-one-
chapter-8-secrets-annotated)

~~~
davidivadavid
Yep. And presumably such secrets (or "ideas" for some value of the word
"idea") are incredibly valuable.

Which, _of course_ , is not to say that ideas in and of themselves build
companies. But that point is so obvious it seems a little stupid to have to
point it out.

That's the thing with "ideas don't matter, it's all about execution." It's
either true by definition (every company has to execute something at some
point to even exist), or incredibly shallow and wrong (as long as you execute
something you'll get great results).

~~~
tedmiston
> Which, of course, is not to say that ideas in and of themselves build
> companies. But that point is so obvious it seems a little stupid to have to
> point it out.

It seems stupid to us, but I run into people every few weeks who "have the
next big idea if only they can find a dev" but are hesitant to share more than
a two-sentence pitch of fear that their coveted idea would get "stolen".

Fixed mindset vs growth mindset is still a battle for many people, especially
(would be) first time non-technical founders.

------
asurty
is this available as a podcast?

~~~
katm
It's on Soundcloud: [https://soundcloud.com/ycombinator/how-to-build-the-
future-m...](https://soundcloud.com/ycombinator/how-to-build-the-future-mark-
zuckerberg)

~~~
flinty
Weird, searching for ycombinator
[https://soundcloud.com/akharris](https://soundcloud.com/akharris) this
podcast comes up and not the one linked on soundcloud above

------
limsup
His low point was when Yahoo offered to buy FB for a billion dollars. Dark
times.

~~~
roymurdock
"The part that was painful wasn't turning down the offer, it was the fact that
after that, huge amounts of the company quit because they didn't believe in
what we were doing...the whole management team was gone in about a year after
that."

~~~
hawkice
Making a choice that led to the entire management team leaving is tough, no
doubt. Making any massively unpopular decision that leads to some of the
smartest people working with you to actively flee your enterprise would be
hard for anyone.

That being said, there is something to be said about how this comment was
made. Because the hard part wasn't turning down the offer. It wasn't even
dealing with the outcome of an unpopular choice per se -- hard to imagine
these people thought "acquired by Yahoo" was the road to product success, even
back then. It was dealing with the outcome of telling people they'd have to
wait, possibly forever, to see their efforts rewarded (it took them 6 more
years to IPO, with Zuckerberg famously devaluing the stock of early
contributors along the way).

Noticing the lack of trust (possibly in both directions) _is_ a dark time, but
it's hard to come to that conclusion when these things are referenced so
obliquely ('people left' isn't a dark time, it's business).

~~~
mpbm
"Dark time" strongly implies a subjective experience. Maybe Mark meant that
was an event he personally experienced as intensely dark.

That's more or less the same situation that the TV show Silicon Valley used to
stress out their founder. He's got something with potential and an offer to
buy it for more money than he's ever thought about before. What do you do?
Maybe go throw up in the bushes? How would it feel when you make your decision
and then most of your team leaves? What if they're right and you ruined
everything?

That scenario is dramatic enough when you get to watch it happen to someone
else. Living through it could easily be "dark."

------
dkarapetyan
Sigh. Mark Zuckerberg is not the fellow to listen to if you want to build the
future. He's only managed to re-invent the past. AOL, MySpace, FriendFeed, and
probably a few others I'm forgetting.

edit: Folks are getting a bit philosophical so I'll clarify. There are better
models to look up to if you want to invent the future: Bret Victor, Elon Musk,
Alan Kay, Richard Feynman, etc. Each of those people did invent the future or
is currently in the process of actually doing it. Study the great minds, not
the great businesses and business practitioners.

~~~
melling
Sigh, you've overlooked the fact that he built a hugely profitable business so
now he can now throw money into "building the future". AI, VR, etc.

Google was probably the 20th search engine. They make most of their money
selling ads.

Microsoft just rebuilt CP/M and bought many of their big apps.

It's what you do after you build a great business that matters.

~~~
nostromo
Making gobs of money and making the future are orthogonal though.

Exxon makes tons of money but is likely irrelevant to the future.

~~~
melling
"It's what you do after you build a great business that matters"

~~~
dkarapetyan
Why's that? Why not just skip the business step entirely? There is some kind
of fallacy in your argument.

~~~
melling
How are you going to pay for all those moonshot projects that cost billions
and might not make money for a decade, if ever. Google still hasn't made any
money on the self-driving car. Oculus Rift?

~~~
dkarapetyan
I don't think Oculus Rift is going anywhere. They bungled that project pretty
well. My question was more about your assumption about getting some kind of
cash cow and then milking it to provide for "moonshots". It is one model that
works but it's not the only one. Well, actually, it's debatable whether it
works or not.

~~~
melling
What you think about Oculus is irrelevant. FB has the money to see it through,
along with dozens of other similar projects. Feel free to explain the other
models.

~~~
dkarapetyan
State sponsored fundamental research for one. Pretty much all of the actual
computing innovation was a direct result of fundamental research that was
sponsored by the state either directly or indirectly. Heck, modern compilers
have a direct line back to Grace Hopper working at the naval research lab.

Commercializing stuff is great and all but there is no point in pretending it
is the same or equal to the kind of innovative work that consistently happens
at research universities and arguably a lot of the future is invented there
even if it is not commercialized.

Also what are these dozens of other projects Facebook is currently innovating
on? I do see a lot of duplicated effort across google, facebook, apple, and
microsoft when it comes to AI research though. This is why I don't quite get
how people can argue for commercial innovation and market efficiency all in
the same sentence or paragraph when there is obvious and clear evidence to the
contrary.

~~~
melling
I guess you don't understand the value behind the trillions of dollars of R&D
spent over the past 50 years by tech companies like Xerox, Intel, Microsoft,
IBM, AT&T, Google, etc

~~~
dkarapetyan
Not really. I do see a staggering amount of waste though. Duplicated effort
across the board, re-invention of the same basic building blocks re-packaged
and re-branded, billions spent on patent suits, billions spent on lobbying,
etc. Competition in basic innovation does not make sense. In fact I'm not even
sure how much of those "trillions" contributed to actual innovation. I suspect
a proper analysis would reveal an extremely poor efficiency ratio and only a
few keystones that could trace their history directly back to a university
research projects and other state sponsored projects.

~~~
mpbm
LOL, you see "a staggering amount of waste" in commercial entities and thing
the way to find efficiency is to look to the government? Like government-
sponsored research is going to be more efficient? That's a good one.

~~~
foldr
Basic research is exactly the kind of thing that markets are bad at doing, so
it really wouldn't be surprising. Which country do you see as a model of the
success of privately funded research? As far as I can see, all countries that
are making significant contributions to science are spending lots of
government money on it.

------
aestetix
Does this include Internet.org, the "wolf in sheep's clothing" of technology
initiatives?

------
lossolo
Seeing how he behaved while getting to his success i don't think he should be
idealized. I would rather listen to what Elon Musk has to say about future
than Mark Zuckerberg.

~~~
l33tbro
Elon is coming up in the series. Hopefully up in a few weeks.

------
readhn
Why is M. Zuckerberg qualified to tell us how or to build us our future?
Because he built brain dead website where people waste their precious time and
lives?

Building facebook - glorified yellowpages - is somehow a sign of high
knowledge or achievement these days?

~~~
tribune
Building a $350B tech company from nothing in 12 years might be a sign of
"high knowledge or achievement"...

~~~
zump
Because stock price == value.

------
pcmaffey
Fyi, the parent of the OP
([http://themacro.com/future/](http://themacro.com/future/)) has a header
image that breaks on mobile.

------
honkhonkpants
I'm sure the hardest part was backstabbing all his partners.

~~~
dang
That's neither civil nor substantive. Please don't comment like that here.

We detached this subthread from
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12299823](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12299823)
and marked it off-topic.

------
bsbechtel
Link to Scribd is broken.

~~~
tedmiston
It's working now - [https://www.scribd.com/document/321383212/How-to-Build-
the-F...](https://www.scribd.com/document/321383212/How-to-Build-the-Future-
Mark-Zuckerberg)

------
oliv__
.

~~~
dang
Please don't comment like this here.

