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The Maturation of Mark Zuckerberg
- joelrunyon 14y ago1-page version here --> http://nymag.com/print/?/news/features/mark-zuckerberg-2012-5/ http://nymag.com/print/?/news/features/mark-zuckerberg-2012-...
- mhartl 14y agoMaybe there should be an official HN policy to post one-page stories when available, and perhaps even alter story URIs when necessary?
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- cal5k 14y ago"It is a huge sum, even in context. Zuckerberg’s impending fortune is more money than Wal-Mart’s 10,000-plus stores made last year." This line is a little disingenuous. It's more money than Wal-Mart "earned" last year, not "made". Wal-Mart earned ~$15B on revenues of $447B in 2011. Still, sort of surprising given the company has annual revenues higher than many countries' GDPs...
- wallygold 14y agoI disagree. When I hear/read about someone "making money" I interpret that to mean profit. For example, if revenues were less than costs I don't think anyone would say that they made any money at all.
- rationalbeats 14y agoConsidering the author of the story is permanently banned from Wall Street for fraud, it does not surprise me he is loose with the numbers. I would also question the rest of the analysis as well.
- AVTizzle 14y agoInteresting. Context via Wikipedia: >>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." Link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Blodget http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Blodget
- cagenut 14y agoThis 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.
- thespin 14y agoYou 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.
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- thespin 14y ago"Facebook was not intended to be a company." I'm still not sure it is a company. What exactly does FB produce? It's main asset is your personal information. Which of course it does not own. FB users produce everything, and hand it over for free to the "funethical" crew of FB "engineers" to play with. As Zuckerberg would say, "Dumb fucks."
- zem 14y ago> "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.
- thespin 14y agoYou'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.
- thespin 14y ago"rise to the top"? 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.
- wyck 14y ago>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 Wall Street, meet the wall.
- EternalFury 14y agoThe 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.
- chime 14y agoI'm not at all worried about Facebook failing. I'm worried about them succeeding beyond all expectations.
- EternalFury 14y agoYou shouldn't be worried about either. Smoke and mirrors are always in stock.
- chime 14y agoNot 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.
- coryl 14y agoI can't really see how a successful IPO helps them grow, its not like they need the cash?
- hyperbovine 14y agoI think that ship has already sailed...
- joering2 14y agoWell, 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!"
- flotblot 14y agoAm I the only one who misread the second word in the post title? Maturation is not a word often used, but there is a similar looking word that is... Looking forward to the IPO. Should be a wild ride.
- philwelch 14y agoOh, grow up.
- geraldfong 14y ago> “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?
- EricDeb 14y agoI thought the firing aspect was the one new thread in the entire 5 page article. The rest was simply a rehash.
- peterwwillis 14y agoThe 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?
- chime 14y ago> So the question then becomes: What happens when Zuck is too mature to see what's coming next? He can buy/hire people who are good at that.
- mahmud 14y agoEvery company is staffed with "good" people; some are not that good, and some are not listened to.
- jonny_eh 14y agoBut will he listen to them? What if "they" can't even agree amongst themselves? How would he decide?
- tiles 14y agoA heavy theme of the article is how good Zuck is at building a suitable management team. He'll have to pick a Tim Cook someday.
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- vintagius 14y agoProblem with this is that you wont know who is good at that. And if they do emerge and aren't willing to sell (Think...Zuckberg) you're screwed.
- trickjarrett 14y agoZuckerberg 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?
- planetguy 14y agoHe'd probably be a mid-level software engineer at Sony, a division of Myspace.
- ohashi 14y agoIt seems like hindsight is still 20/20. I wonder how much of this is simply crafting a story loosely around a person/company.
- nikhildaga 14y ago" Zuckerberg all but stopped writing code for Facebook in the summer of 2005." Did he really stop coding? How can one give up coding and focus on managing? I really find it difficult.
- alxv 14y agoManaging a company is not that different from coding: instead of instructing machines what to do, you instruct people.
- nikhildaga 14y agoBut machines are rational and logical, people are not. :|
- alxv 14y agoWell, they are probabilistic machines then! ;-)
- buu700 14y agoActually, 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.
- alxv 14y agoI've found the video of him saying that at StartupSchool http://www.justin.tv/startupschool/b/298808358 http://www.justin.tv/startupschool/b/298808358 Seek at 9:30.
- buu700 14y agoAh, interesting. I was actually referring to this talk he gave here at CMU -- http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/18392445 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).
- cletus 14y agoAs 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.
- simondlr 14y agoWhat happened at All Things D?
- rgrieselhuber 14y agoHe got nervous and started sweating. Might be a bit aggressive to call that a "meltdown."
- stingraycharles 14y agoI think this is what they're talking about: http://allthingsd.com/video/?video_id=f403bcce-661b-451b-8bc8-12536d12a82a http://allthingsd.com/video/?video_id=f403bcce-661b-451b-8bc...
- zmitri 14y agoSeeing 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 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rWKUoabjjxg
- davmar 14y agogreat discussion. interesting topic. garbage article. really. read it. it's absolutely atrocious.
- hfz 14y agoWhy is it atrocious? Care to explain?
- davmar 14y agosure. 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" it's just not my style of writing. at all.
- krakensden 14y agoFor some reason it's written as if the author assumes his audience is filled with disdain for Mark Zuckerberg. Or the author is. It's hard to tell. A deep, petty, and deeply petty disrespect seems sort of strange, given Facebook's ubiquity and general good decision making.
- bsimpson 14y agoInteresting read, but man, those are the most obtrusive displays ads I've ever seen - and I'm in the ad industry.
- brado86 14y agoOf 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 http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html /2cents
- goggles99 14y agoPeople 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).
- jan_g 14y ago>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.
- tensor 14y agoIn 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!
- joering2 14y ago
- sparknlaunch12 14y agoWow, tough life. Another terrible first world problem. Zuck has had the best "learning by experience"opportunity ever. Whatever happens he has done something totally unique.
- tobiasbischoff 14y agoshit, overread *masturbation' initially.
- myspy 14y agoI had to read the headline five times to get what it's really about. (mast) Sorry :/