To me, this seems like the start of the decline of facebook. Gideon Yu's work has been stellar with Youtube and getting that $15B valuation. The reason may be the board and not Mark. That being said he doesn't have the it factor I see in a lot of successful CEOs.
The "It" factor? Have you read anything about his past? Or read what he's written? He started a company in high school that Microsoft offered to buy just to land him as an employee. That's pretty impressive.
It doesn't matter, because we'll criticize anybody who isn't Steve Jobs for thinking they're Steve Jobs, but Zuckerberg is largely responsible for Facebook's formation, from what I've read, and for all his criticism he's managed to get a hell of a lot done for his company. So I'm willing to give him a chance and see if he's as good as he thinks he is - and failing that, if he falls I'll hope he pulls an SJ and comes back in 10 years with something even better.
Most of his writings are him trying to assuage his users after making them very upset (redesigns, terms, newsfeed). He just doesn't impress me on a personal level. And he still hasn't effectively monetized.
Having just heard about Sam Altman a few days ago I am already much more impressed:
You can't judge Zuckerberg by his Facebook blog. The guy is a complete recluse. Yeah, all he writes is apologies, because he can delegate everything else. But try to find some of the leaked letters he wrote people that he tries to suppress for privacy. Reading them you get the image of an extraordinarily focused mind. He's arrogant, but if you can judge people on the confidence of their writing alone the guy is pretty brilliant.
I saw Altman's speech and was pretty impressed. He doesn't dick around. He's also a more confident speaker than Zuckerberg. But with respect to him, Facebook is better designed (Loopt is horrendously generic), and it's done more to change the web than most web sites. The Facebook Platform changed a lot. Making money isn't the only part of design.
Part of being a great CEO is being a cheerleader. You can't do that being hidden.
There are many different types of leadership, some of which Zuckerberg has. Making Facebook into the culture mainstay it is has been a huge accomplishment. I am sure a lot of this is due to him. But he needs to be an effective communicator both internally and externally in order to succeed. He can have awesome ideas that are technically groundbreaking, but he needs to make others believe.
He's the best cheerleader Facebook could have. He gives speeches, but hides personal information. If you're a spokesperson for a company whose number-one selling point is privacy, the best marketing move you can make is to stay hidden. When I was younger I wrote him a friend request and a little message, which he promptly ignored, and my respect for him swelled for that. In a Silicon Valley that's becoming infamous for celebrity and over-the-top drama, he's a breath of fresh air.
He's not great because he ignored me, he's great because he made Facebook. So even if he was a complete socialite, he'd have my respect. But I like that instance because it made me think that he wasn't primarily making Facebook for money, he was making it for his own privacy.
There are good reasons to be social to people. I'm a social person. That said, I respect immensely the people who don't feel pressured to talk to every person that writes to him.
I would strongly disagree with this. I used to feel this way about Mark Zuckerberg, but not anymore. Just consider these observations about facebook:
1) When it started, there were already many social networks
2) Because it positioned itself as a social network for college students, it got the early growth and adoption any "social" website needs to survive
3) They've grown REALLY fast since then, and have started to really lock in the users
4) It's not unthinkable for them to have a billion users. Once they have all the users they want, they can pick and choose their business model.
5) Mark Zuckerberg can't be removed from the CEO position, and probably holds more than 20% of the company
6) Facebook is hiring top talent, on par with Google and probably better than Microsoft.
These things don't just happen out of the blue. For someone who has consolidated power in a company that could rival Google, I don't think Zuckerberg gets enough credit. If I were pg, I would have put him in my top 5.
The monetization need not be direct (i.e. charging people to use the site). It could be better ad placement, a search engine that knows more about you than google does, monetary transactions (auctions, payments), as well as other stuff...
Like it or not, facebook has real utility (just like central park), and people are willing to pay for real utility in one way or another.
What I'm surprised they haven't done already is extend their event planning mechanism to partner with ticket agents, train companies/airlines, cinema chains, restaurant booking systems, pizza delivery, etc etc.
It's still trivially easy and often very enticing to bail out of Facebook entirely. I still don't see anything that Facebook is doing that successfully locks in customers, not even in the way that Amazon locks in book-buyers and certainly not in the way that Google becomes most people's default approach to Web search.
Moreover, if every user loses money for Facebook, what's the financial model of the company? Even if I like Facebook, if I'm not providing it with cash flow, when it does it have to bail out of its business?
It is not as easy as it seems. I use facebook because it easily allows me to see what is going on in a lot of people's lives. There are no huge technical or design hurdles to beating Facebook. The problems are social.
Only sites with a lot of users, like Myspace, could quickly become a threat to Myspace. Facebook has surpassed a critical mass of users, so they probably would have time to respond to any technical challenges.And Myspace seems to have a different and less successful focus than Facebook that would need to be changed. I don't really care about telling everyone who my top friends are, designing my page, or using Myspace as a blog. Basically, I just want to quickly and easily find out the major events in my friend's lives. It does not matter how brilliantly designed a site is, I cannot adequately meet my needs with a site until it has a good portion of my friends as users.
So to go against Facebook successfully, a company would need to start in an extremely small niche and grow, or provide value unrelated to social networking. It is a lot easier to reach critical mass in a very small niche. And if you aren't solely in social networking, people are going to be using your network before it provides decent social value.
Don't compare Facebook to Twitter. It's enormous in comparison. Twitter may be getting lots of press, but my friends who've tried it have nearly all abandoned their accounts.
I'd have said the same about Google and Microsoft when Google was Microsoft's age. Google didn't get their business model (ads) until they were a year older than Facebook.
Looking at things now I wouldn't say that Facebook would rival Google, but it's definitely not out of their mind to imagine that they could.
> 5) Mark Zuckerberg can't be removed from the CEO position, and probably holds more than 20% of the company
Really? I've never heard this. Is there a condition in the companies charter that forbids it?
Usually all you need is a majority of the board to vote the CEO out and since he only has one vote and there are more than 2 people on the facebook board it seems like he could be voted out.
