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IMHO Mark Zuckerberg is a textbook case of someone who got lucky once by basically being in the right place at the right time, but who attributes his success to
by steve1977 1y ago
IMHO Mark Zuckerberg is a textbook case of someone who got lucky once by basically being in the right place at the right time, but who attributes his success to his skill. There’s probably a proper term for this.
- breitling 1y agoTo be fair, buying Instagram so early + WhatsApp were great moves too.
- beagle3 1y agoBut they were less “skill” and more “surveillance”. He had very good usage statistics (which he shouldn’t have had) of these apps through Onavo - a popular VPN app Facebook bought for the purpose of spying on what users are doing outside Facebook.
- disgruntledphd2 1y agoInstagram was acquired before Onavo.
- beagle3 1y agoThat’s true, but I remember rumors at the time that Onavo already supplied analytics to FB at the time of instagram purchase. Google gave me a paywalled link to FTCWatch that supposedly has the details, but I can’t check.
- disgruntledphd2 1y agoYes, they did supply data to FB (under the same contracts as everyone else). However, it was only supplied to the sales org, not the product org. FB acquired IG because it was blowing up in SF and MZ (other leaders too) were looking at how quickly it appeared to be growing and how good it was.
- tempusalaria 1y agoWhatsApp is certainly worth less today than what they paid for it plus the extra funding it has required over time. Let alone producing anything close to ROI. Has lost them more money than the metaverse stuff. Insta was a huge hit for sure but since then Meta Capital allocation has been a disaster including a lot of badly timed buybacks
- JKCalhoun 1y agoTypically when a company is flush with cash, acquisitions become an obvious place to put that money.
- thrance 1y agoThe term you're looking for is "billionaire". The amount of serendipity in these guys' lives is truly baffling, and only becomes more apparent the more you dig. It makes sense when you realize their fame is all survivorship bias. Afer all, there must be someone at the tail end of the bell curve.
- sumedh 1y agoExcept a company like Google with all its billions could not compete with Facebook. o Mark did something right.
- spicyusername 1y agoOr it's really hard to overcome network effects, no matter how good your product is.
- sumedh 1y agoYou can do a lot of things with billion dollars and when you have the biggest email service.
- arcticbull 1y agoHe's really not. Facebook is an extremely well run organization. There's a lot to dislike about working there, and there's a lot to dislike about what they do, but you cannot deny they have been unbelievably successful at it. He really is good at his job, and part of that has been making bold bets and aggressively cutting unsuccessful bets.
- thrown-0825 1y agolaughs in metaverse
- arcticbull 1y agoAbsolutely, not everything they do will succeed but that's okay too, right? At this point their core products are used by 1 in 2 humans on earth. They need to get people to have more kids to expand their user base. They're gonna throw shit at the wall and not everything will stick, and they'll ship stuff that's not quite done, but they do have to keep trying; I can't bring myself to call that "failure."
- thrown-0825 1y agotheir core product IS 1 of 2 humans on earth. the product is used by advertisers to sell stuff to those humans.
- butlike 1y agoSo you're saying the ad revenue sort of allows them to "be their own bank?" Then they can bankroll their own new entrepreneurial ideas risk-free, essentially.
- thrown-0825 1y agoThey are a publicly traded company, shareholders are their bank.
- bitexploder 1y agoEhh. You don’t get FB to where it is by being incompetent. Maybe he is not the right leader for today. Maybe. But you have to be right way, way more often than not to create a FB and get it to where it is. To operate from where it started to where it is just isn’t an accident or Dunning-Kruger.
- UncleMeat 1y agoI think that meta is bad for the world and that zuck has made a lot of huge mistakes but calling him a one hit wonder doesn't sit right with me. Facebook made the transition to mobile faster than other competitors and successfully kept G+ from becoming competition. The instagram purchase felt insane at the time ($1b to share photos) but facebook was able to convert it into a moneymaking juggernaut in time for the flattened growth of their flagship application. Zuck hired Sheryl Sandburg and successfully turned a website with a ton of users into an ad-revenue machine. Plenty of other companies struggled to convert large user bases into dollars. This obviously wasn't all based on him. He had other people around him working on this stuff and it isn't right to attribute all company success to the CEO. The metaverse play was obviously a legendary bust. But "he just got lucky" feels more like Myspace Tom than Zuckerberg in my mind.
- librasteve 1y agoWhatsapp was also an inspired move
- alex1138 1y agoYeah and also much deserving of antitrust
- stogot 1y agoBuying competitors is not insane or a weird business practice. He was probably advised to do so by the competent people under him And what did he do to keep G+ from becoming a valid competitor? It killed itself. I signed up but there was no network effect and it kind of sucked. Google had a way of shutting down all their product attempts too
- aleph_minus_one 1y ago> IMHO Mark Zuckerberg is a textbook case of someone who got lucky once by basically being in the right place at the right time, but who attributes his success to his skill. It is no secret that the person who turned Facebook into a money-printing machine is/was Sheryl Sandberg. Thus, the evidence is clear that Mark Zuckerberg had the right idea at the right time (the question is whether this was because of his skills or because he got lucky), but turning his good idea(s) into a successful business was done by other people (lead by Sheryl Sandberg).
- apwell23 1y agoit wasn't sheryl
- aleph_minus_one 1y agoWho was it then?
- butlike 1y agoIt was YOU! As an IC, remember: you're one of the most valuable assets at Meta! Without you, we couldn't build cool products like... etc. etc.
- Esophagus4 1y agoAnd isn’t the job of a good CEO to put the right people in the right seats? So if he found a superstar COO that took the company into the stratosphere and made them all gazillionaires… Wouldn’t that indicate, at least a little bit, a great management move by Zuck?
- butlike 1y agoI mean, there's also a reason the board hasn't ousted him.
- MagicMoonlight 1y agoAnd he didn't even come up with the idea, he stole it all. And then he stole the work from the people he started it with...
- alex1138 1y agoYou're probably going to get comments like "Social networking existed before. You can't steal it". Well, on top of derailing someone else's execution of said non-stole idea (or something) which makes you a jerk, in the case of those he 'stole'/stole from, for starters maybe it was existing code (I don't know if that was ever proven), but maybe it was also the Winklevosses idea of using .edu email addresses, and possibly other concepts Do I think he stole it? Dunno. (Though Aaron Greenspan did log his houseSYSTEM server requests, which seems pretty damning) But given what he's done since (Whatsapp, copying every Snapchat feature)? I'd say the likelihood is non-zero
- mrweasel 1y agoIt is at least a little suspicious that one week he's hiring like crazy, then next week, right after Sam Altman states that we are in an AI bubble, Zuckerberg turns around and now fears the bubble. Maybe he's just gambling that Altman is right, saving his money for now and will be able to pick up AI researcher and developers at a massive discount next year. Meta doesn't have much of a presence in the space market right now, and they have other businesses, so waiting a year or two might not matter.
- butlike 1y agoYou have to assume they all have each other's phone numbers, right?
- konart 1y ago>IMHO Mark Zuckerberg is a textbook case of someone who got lucky once by basically being in the right place at the right time How many people also where at the right place and right time and were lucky then went bankrupt or simply never made it this high?