More than anything else, what stood out to me was his discipline for knowing how to manage his time in a way that enabled him to build something like this while still juggling the n number of other things on his plate.
I'd guess he has more free time than the random "3rd engineer from the left" on one of his company's projects.
Do you have any evidence to show your affirmation that CEOs work really hard and "often at least 14 hours and many work one weekend days" is true and other's affirmations that they "play golf all day" is absolutely false?
Larry Ellison was renowned for doing massive sales deals of Oracle on golf courses. If you get in 18 holes and leave with $10 million, were you not working?
At executive levels a part of the job deals with relationships, and those are work. Much less so the "nose to the grindstone in front of the computer" sort of work.
Indeed if you get invited away to a person's private island and then they later buy from the company you "work" at then that holiday was far more work than someone spending 12 hour shifts, standing, poring over circuit boards with a soldering iron or hefting rocks with a pickaxe. That's why the management deserve 200 times the salary of the workers. /s
Truly the relationships aren't important unless the CEOs make it that way. They could just do business, decide they need X amount of pressed steel, sign the contract and not play golf and have a luxurious meal. But instead they decide that only companies that kowtow to this ideal of greasing the wheels of industry by fattening the C-grades up should win the contracts.
>If you get in 18 holes and leave with $10 million, were you not working? //
No, you're not working, you're exploiting the work of others. What function did the 18 holes of golf serve except to reinforce a despotic nepotism.
The idea that this is work is interestingly both anti-capitalist (it's an inefficient aberration) and anti-socialist (it's setting people over others but providing no useful function).
An old but concrete example: Andy Grove, in High Output Management, describes a fairly typical 8 to 5 day in which he works until he's tired, with level of fatigue vs level of "doneness" being the deciding factor of when he ends his day.
Is there anything written about his personal schedule/habits? When does he go to sleep at night? When does he wake up? What kind of hours does he work?
I mean really, he has a kid, is CEO of a huge company, exercises, and still has time to do this project. My hands are more than full trying to exercise, learn Chinese, and run a small company, I have no idea where he finds time to raise a kid in there. Incredible.
Apart from the whole business luminary/billionaire thing, I think Zuck is a pretty cool and insightful guy. I like both the idea of having a "challenge", as well as the specific ones he's done: running, meeting a new person each day, learning Mandarin, doing a cool side project with his house. (I get to hear about a lot of this as one of my best friends works as fb)
At the risk of sounding a little bit self-aggrandizing, I often think about how similar the two of us are, not because I'm particularly special, but just that he's a torch-carrier for guys like me. I'm a month apart from Zuck in age, I'm about to get married to a woman with a serious career, and Zuck and I both grew up in the eastern US (I'm from Chicago). I had a Chinese girlfriend growing up. My family wasn't rich but we also weren't poor. I worked at Microsoft out of college, something Zuck said he might've done if he didn't found facebook.
He's pretty talented though. I definitely didn't create wirehog. I also didn't go to Exeter or have the quality of education he did, either at Exeter, or later at Harvard. I have to wonder how much that stuff influenced his later life, and whether I should try to get my kids into those places.
Controversies aside, I think he's doing an admirable job of casting the tech industry in a positive light, with his positions on taking time off from work, and trying to hire inclusively. I don't use facebook as I have genuine concerns about privacy, but I think he's a real idealist who thinks making the world more "open and connected" is a genuinely good thing. I'd love to meet him some day.
I haven't had two hours to myself since the day my kid was born, so the idea of having 100 hours to do a fun project like automating my house is completely out of the realm of possibility for me.