Though I must admit I HAVE NOT being inside zuckerburgs anus day in and day out so I can't judge the guy; I must say that from outside looking in, we have to respect what he's done.
Sure its easy to criticize but its a very simple fact that he had the vision/balls to make pretty bold moves and have them pay off.
How many of you guys can honestly say you could run that big of a company as CEO mind you. Not just some tech guy, some programmer but as C.E.O. AND programmer I have to respect him for that. He has made pretty swift and successful business moves which can't be said for a lot of startups.
Who would turn down 1 billion dollars, only to be valued at 10 times that later? Did we all forget about the success of the facebook api?
It is ironic that I am defending the guy, because I never went to college, so when fb was happening and all my peers were using it - I couldn't .And I do remember the douch-ness of his "a mark zuckerburg production" copyright details coupled with a logo that had HIM IN IT - but that is besides the point.
For the 'law' to be stated equivalently to Moore's law it should state: 1) the rate at which consumers will be able to organize their information, for a given cost, will double every year, or 2) the rate at which facebook will be able to evaluate a quantity of information, at a given cost, will double every year.
The percentage of information consumers choose to share is more of a question of market adoption.
If you have Zuckerberg luck (henceforth known as "Zuckluck")-- the kind of +5 sigma noise that can only befall mediocre talent-- you can sell a rightly-placed fart for billions of dollars.
Unfortunately he just seems to be a twat. I'm not sure exactly what it is about him, but his personality as revealed by his words, body language and attitude just strike the rest of the world as undeniably twattish.
In an alternative universe, Mark Zuckerberg is working as a junior analyst for some large company, and his workmates think he's a bit of a twat. In this universe, he's the CEO of a billion-dollar company and everybody still thinks he's a twat.
His words and body language are no different than lots of young hackers' would be in the same situation.
If you are as successful as he is at such a young age, everyone will be predisposed to hate you unless you seem extremely self-deprecating. He doesn't bother to, either because he's a nerd and doesn't know he should, or because he doesn't want to stoop to being a politician. Ergo people hate him.
Whenever you despise someone you envy, question your motives.
That kind of hate is actually counter productive. It is really hate of assertiveness, and since people try to avoid what they hate, they'll become less assertive and less likely to be successful like Mark. Then, instead of most being like Mark, like we should be, we'll continue to get solitary Marks, and the hate will increase - thus we have a vicious cycle.
This problem is endemic in academia, and most other social settings I can think of where most people feel impotent, such as high school and socialist countries.
That being said, I am solidly on the side of the herd. I am horrible at being assertive and making things happen.
Then why is there no contempt-- absolutely none-- among reasonable people for the likes of Paul Graham++, Mitch Kapor, Steve Jobs, or Sergey Brin?
Hackers aren't, by and large, an envious crowd. We tend to admire those who are far better than we are, and we like working with them because it enables us to learn an incredible amount fast. There's no point in envying the guy who is five times better when it's possible to study up, practice writing good code, and eventually be as good as he is. (Of course, he'll also improve during this time and still be ahead, but this is not an issue, or even relevant; great hackers benefit the entire ecosystem.)
Mark Zuckerberg is different from Graham, Jobs, et al. He's not socially awkward. He's arrogant and annoying and makes terrible design decisions, despite the rather obvious fact that Facebook's rise, at the expense of superior competitors, is entirely the result of fortunate position (Harvard). Most of us wish he would just go away. There's no "hate" for him; we just don't like seeing a person of such mediocre talent and poor decision-making mettle being lifted to the status of our generation's emblem of success. I'd rather let him have his millions and get him out of the way.
++ Edit: did not realize I was replying to Paul Graham when I wrote this. I feel very awkward to have used you as an example in this post, and also to have used your name in third person instead of second.
Really? Because to me he always seemed like an awkward nerd who felt uncomfortable talking to people. But he always seemed nice about it. Just... nice in an "I have a big idea and suddenly I have to speak in front of a hundred people" way.
If you're talking about investment banks, they all start at the same level. Anyone from Harvard who has to settle for I-banking is not worthy of special status.
Facebook is still neither successful or unsuccessful in my eyes. They have yet to turn a profit, but its not clear the company is going to fall off a cliff. They still have a ways to go.
I am concerned they are still raising tons of money and burning through it so quickly.
It gets massive number of page views, and is very popular, but business isn't a popularity contest. If you can't figure out how to make money, you're not a successful business.
I don't know about you guys, but I'm fairly convinced that he stole the idea for Facebook. I admired him before that revelation, and he's done nothing since to regain my admiration.
I'd like to point out, his success is good for everyone in the valley. He succeeds, you all succeed, but that goes for any entrepreneur... who cares about anything else otherwise.
This is untrue on so many levels, and represents a fundamental misunderstanding of how innovation should take place. Facebook's perceived success thus far has engendered a series of investments in startups that (in Facebook's image) produce next to nothing, and its failure might come as a needed wake-up call to venture capitalists and journalists alike, who have forgotten what it is to start a real technology company.
Facebook doesn't produce "next to nothing." Its traffic clearly shows they have produced something a lot of people want. Whether or not they succeed in extracting money from that (and I'd bet they will), there's no question that they've made something valuable.
I wrote that startups crafted in Facebook's image often produce next to nothing, but I think the same statement is actually also valid when applied to Facebook, now that you mention it. Attracting people's attention (as evidenced by traffic) is not the same as producing a valuable product, no matter the company. If Facebook did actually produce something of value, it probably would not have had any trouble extracting money from the site in the first place. As it so happens, the lack of an obvious, sustainable business model was the reason I decided to work on other things, instead.
Facebook does "attract people's attention", but it does far more than just that. Attracting attention is important to get users to make their first visit, but if Facebook doesn't provide something valuable, how do you explain the unbelievable amount of repeat traffic it sees?
I know dozens of non-tech-savvy people who visit Facebook every day. I know people who check Facebook more often than their e-mail. I certainly have issues with aspects of Facebook as well and everyone on this board probably has a list of things they'd change if they were in charge (I know I do), but Facebook's breakneck growth and absurdly high visitor loyalty show that they absolutely produce something of value.
This is the best explanation I can come up with: Due to the nature of the market, there had to be one winner in that particular social networking space, and it turned out to be a completely mediocre choice. Facebook had superior competitors who lost because they didn't start at Harvard, and for literally no other reason.
Zuckerberg, to our generation, is emblematic of the successful mediocrity (not a contradiction)-- often the annoying, arrogant suckup who gets into good schools by doing a hundred extracurriculars not very well, the one who gets ahead by exploiting the system. This ties in well to the fact that the absolute only reason any of us have heard of Facebook (originally thefacebook... :vomit:) is that it started at Harvard and was able to use prestige at each level of market growth (first Harvard, then the Ivy League, then the top ~150 colleges...) to progress to the next. It makes him a symbol of the Elite College Mediocrity (ECM), an archetype that all of us hate. Those of us who went to top colleges will never forgive the ECMs for the damage they did to our college experience. Those who didn't go to top colleges despise ECMs because the ECMs have more competitive resumes and stronger rolodexes for no good reason.
Zuckerberg's not an ECM at all, actually, since he's quite bright compared to the average person and even the average student at Harvard. He is, however, an utter incompetent compared to level of success and prominence to which he has been lifted by the sheer dumb force of +5 sigma luck.
He also gave a talk at Startup School 2007 that was absolutely terrible. In fact, it was so awful as to raise suspicions of sabotage.
Zuckerberg may be less capable than his success indicates, but I am sure we are all capable of better things than sitting behind a screen and hurling mud at the successful. Envy is an ugly thing.
By the way, did you hear Steve Jobs is arrogant? The nerve of the guy, after building the second most successful consumer computer company of all time.
You should not compare Steve Jobs to Mark Zuckerberg. Steve Jobs has vision, at least, and it's that vision that has brought AAPL back from limbo. Mark Zuckerberg just took someone else's vision and ran with it.
It's not Gaussian at all, actually. The sizes of businesses tend to follow a power law distribution, in fact. I was just using "+5 sigma" as a technically sloppy synonym for "extremely improbable".
Mark's Facebook didn't succeed just because it started at Harvard. It succeeded, so far as I can tell, because he and his roommates lived across the sidewalk from the president of the Harvard Crimson in Kirkland House. I was also at Harvard in 2003-2004 with a cool product for students, but unfortunately I didn't have the press on my side.
I don't get your reasoning. He and his cofounders built a product that people wanted. The product spread mostly virally by word of mouth. This is the classic definition of succeeding by one's efforts, not privilege. How does an allegedly elite rolodex (at the time when he was 19, no less) factor into the equation?
facebook.com was originally owned by someone else.
Sure its easy to criticize but its a very simple fact that he had the vision/balls to make pretty bold moves and have them pay off.
How many of you guys can honestly say you could run that big of a company as CEO mind you. Not just some tech guy, some programmer but as C.E.O. AND programmer I have to respect him for that. He has made pretty swift and successful business moves which can't be said for a lot of startups.
Who would turn down 1 billion dollars, only to be valued at 10 times that later? Did we all forget about the success of the facebook api?
It is ironic that I am defending the guy, because I never went to college, so when fb was happening and all my peers were using it - I couldn't .And I do remember the douch-ness of his "a mark zuckerburg production" copyright details coupled with a logo that had HIM IN IT - but that is besides the point.