It was pretty fascinating to see my French friends reactions and comments on the presidential elections, all of them automatically, in real time, in one location that I can see from my laptop or my phone. I’ve never had that opportunity before, give it up to the Zuck y’all.
The building of Facebook really impresses me. Mark doesn’t give a damn about money, I’m pretty sure that even before starting thefacebook.com, as a Harvard student from a nice New York Jewish family, he didn’t aim to get rich as fuck as he was already out of any need. As a programmer he wanted to build something never done before and something cool. The first 1+ billion people network, which is close to be a reality.
The letter that Zuckerberg included in Facebook’s IPO prospectus is even more direct about his priorities than Bezos’s was. Zuckerberg wrote this letter himself, a Facebook source says, and it begins with the following sentence: “Facebook was not originally created to be a company.”
The fact that he started something just for fun, that this thing exploded, that he maintained control over it first technically -Twitter lost a LOT by not being reliable- and second business-wise to the point of having complete control over the company today, is a massive achievement for a 28 year old. That’s a lot of work. People forget the huge competition in social networks and how Facebook went at its own rhythm, slowly spreading and getting bigger while everybody else was failing. So much can go wrong at that scale, I mean…
It makes me sad too, because this would never happen in France. Not really because of the lack of money and investment, much more because of the risk-averse mentality deeply rooted in my country and because of the work laws, it would be impossible to hire and fire people rapidly as it will happen when growing a start-up in a really fast environment like software is. You need to rapidly find the good people which means you’re going to make mistakes, which means fire people. France’s system just doesn’t allow something like that (and it will not change for the next 5 years, it’s pretty much done).
People argue that FB doesn’t make money, that ads don’t work as great as Google’s. Mark basically got rid of the co-founder of Facebook when he found out that Eduardo had started to run ads on the site without telling him. He probably -like a lot of geeks- hates ads, he’s born in 1984, of course he thinks they’re dumb. He’s also smart enough to know that the ad economy is doomed, even TV knows it now. Ads are totally doomed on mobile as they cripple the experience so much, ask Android.
The point is, you don’t need this retarded way of getting money from users when you serve a closed network of 1 out of 8 people on earth. You can monetize so many services, useful services. There’s a better way to make money.
Even if he has already achieved something, I guess his mind state is the same as in 2004; "what’s the next right thing to build?”
And he needs to find it fast and make it happen nicely. So simple.
2 replies on “On FB IPO”
Nicely worded, Harold!
Yeah, not bad for some one shot rant. Thanks!