Twins’ Facebook Fight Rages On
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
This applies not only to Zuckberg, but also to the employees at Facebook who have been busy working nights and weekends building, scaling out and monetizing the site. Apparently, however, society thinks nothing of a wealth transfer from the workers to the privileged elite (i.e., the twins).
I'll be the first to say: even if the allegations are true, fuck these jocks[1]: everybody and their mother had a "social network for X" idea; the idea wasn't unique, turning it into an a product users love was.
[1] It's popular to portray Zuck as some PHP script kiddie, but that's not the case. He's written a Winamp plugin in high school, for which Microsoft offered him a $1mm bonus if he signed on as a full time employee (forgoing Harvard). His initial technology choices may be disagreeable, but he's still one of us.
To be completely honest, I have no more affinity for Zuckerberg than I do for the Winklevii. One is new money, one is old money, but they both share a severe lack of idealism and social responsibility.
Disagree strongly. Old money usually came through parasitic exploitation. New money was earned in fair and honest ways: by building something. We like to talk about how our society it's meritocratic, but extra ordinary wealth earned at a young age is still looked down upon in our society. Witness the hatred of Yuppies and (outside of the Silicon Valley) dislike of startups: you're supposed to join $big_corp and work your way up through the ladder; if you shortcut by getting a high paying job right out of college you're a hated yuppie; if you shortcut by leaving for a startup, you're a traitor and a job hopper.
I barely use Facebook: I didn't enjoy high school (I have no desire to learn that the dude who slammed me into a locker just got engaged and is eating a sandwich) and I went to a small university where it's easy to keep in touch with classmates. I find other sites more interesting.
Facebook is not just Zuckerberg. It's now a corporation. The only social responsibility of a corporation (thank you Dr. Friedman) is to generate profit for their shareholders: this profit will channel into mutual funds which individuals use to retire, to philanthropic endeavours. The engineering work that goes on at Facebook (they're now endowing research fellowships) will go towards better machine learning algorithms, more efficient data centres, etc... It's almost certain that the work Facebook has put into Hadoop, for example, is helping make protein sequencing an easier task (e.g., HDFS RAID-node means being able to use a smaller replication factor, which means being able to store more data on less physical hardware!). That's the beauty of capitalism. Capitalism is sometimes horribly unfair and inefficient, but it's far better than the other systems (an immigrant from a communist country speaking here...).
Would the Winklevii had any interest in building our such a business? Their plan was to use hired help (what they think of you and I) to perhaps build it into a $100mm acquisition target that would rot at Yahoo, Microsoft or Newscorp; their plan wasn't to build a world class technology company.
Legally, yes. But that's an ethical black hole if we stop there. My expectations of an institution increase as their resources increase. The greater the resources, the greater my expectations on their social responsibility.
I'd rather not simply acquiesce to power just because Milton Friedman (or anyone) considers it a good idea.
You're confusing is and ought here. It's not that they consider it a good idea, it's just it's empirically observable that the society is better off as a result. You can challenge Friedman and a propose a new economic theory. Indeed others have modified his theories to take account of externalities such as pollution: if you want to make such an argument here, I'm ready to listen. I don't mean it in a polemic way, I am curious about research into externalities of social networks and economics-conscious ways of dealing with them e.g., equivalent of pollution credits.
Friedman isn't Austrian school (he was against the Gold standard and he suggested Income Tax withholding!). If you want a horrible analogy, think of Austrian school as Haskell, Chicago school as OCaml (Hayek being a link between the two, just as HM type inference is the link between ML and Haskell), Keynes as Smalltalk and more modern theories as something like Scala.
1. New money doesn't mean it is clean. Zuck might be the first honest billionaire, but I highly doubt it. Highly.
And, even if he was above board on every business dealing, partner agreement or equity stake (we know this not to be the case already), there is still the little matter of Facebook privacy issues, which are well known.
Again, not clean money.
2. Facebook today, doing what they are doing with the money the have, is great. But we don't know what the twins would have done with the money and facebook of today and it is silly to speculate (it only shows biases).
Personally, I think nearly everyone involved in this fiasco is dirty to some degree. I don't wholesale reject the notion that ideas aren't worth that much (your earlier post), but I do reject that they have no value. What Zuck has reported to have done would qualify as intellectual property theft in any industry, why not ours? I don't care what the intentions of the twins were, zuck didn't need to do that (string them along..etc etc) if he was some quality human being.
To your point that the twins wanted to ride on the back of Zuck while making a buck....I'm not sure your argument is as compelling as you think it is. Every corporation has an unjust equity structure at the core. Founder share vs VC share vs first engineer share etc etc. Typical first engineer/non-founder share would be .5%-1.5%. Did Zuck get this deal with the Twins? Is this even fair? Valid questions, but either way it is still valid that Zuck basically aligned himself with the twins and then bolted leaving them with nothing.
Do I agree with them coming back for more money? I haven't thought about it too much nor do I think I will b/c frankly this whole thing bores me.
Lastly, I barely use facebook. I do respect what they've become as a technology organization, but I do not like their semi-shady business practices. I think of Facebook like I do Oracle: I would trust them as far as I could throw them. Both may be the top in their industry, but neither are clean.
First, let me preface this that I am not a big believer in IP to start with: I'm especially opposed to software and business method patents.
When I worked at an EDA company as a contractor (doing random C++ hacking just to make things work, without really understanding them) I heard many interesting ideas on computational physics, computational geometry, graph theory and the like.
I floated some of my own, just out of curiosity and idle thinking. However, as I don't have the qualifications to implement any of them (I may know Boost and STL, but my physics knowledge has been swapped out of the page cache), making those ideas worthless to me -- just as the idea of a social network is worthless to the Winklevoss twins as they can't code.
If accidentally, someone else at the company went and implemented those ideas, I'd have no right to sue: I blindly spouted ideas that I had no insights into (in regards to feasibility and work involved) and if I'm right about them being viable, it's by accident.
In other words, suppose you work at Intel: your boss says, "it'd be nice if we had a more power efficient chip" without giving any idea as to how. You leave and implement such a chip. I doubt there'd be case for IP theft. If, on the other hand, you took the actual layouts for the chip, it's a different matter.
For instance, the various privacy issues that have plagued the company from the beginning, to start.
Also, Facebook has been in a really good position to push for an open, distributed social networking protocol, but instead have focused on maintaining a closed, walled garden. So it's instead up to us in the open source world, severely under-funded and overworked, to build an alternative.
A socially responsible CEO wouldn't sell out their user's privacy for the sake of advertisers, and set a strong, positive precedence right from the beginning of the rise of popular social networking. An idealist would help build an open, decentralized protocol, document it well, and push for it to be adopted as a standard by the W3C.
What Zuckerberg does with his billions doesn't really change any of that for me.
Facebook controls the social graph. Apple controls the App Store. Google controls the search and ads alghorithm. Heck, even open source companies making money through consulting control the list of consultants.
In short: Businesses will control their business model. They'll be for "open source" or "competition" in anything else, especially complementary markets.
E.g. Google ("don't be evil") will push open standards for Android and net neutrality, but only because content and internet access are the complements to their search business, which they will keep closed.
Don't waste your skills being too idealistic. Facebook, Google, Apple, even Microsoft and Yahoo bring huge net value to society.
Businesses will control their business model, but that means we must critique their business model and build open alternatives (which I've been doing), instead of just accepting their actions uncritically.
And sure, they bring huge net value to society. With that kind of money and success, it'd be hard not to. My argument is that they don't bring nearly enough net value to society as they could, given their resources.
Then why didn't they? Oh snap, maybe because they can't code?
Serious note: I think that it's beautiful that an untrained technical person thinks Amazon or Facebook could be built in a weekend. That's a testimony to the excellence of their respective UI teams. Perhaps if your consumer internet site doesn't look like it could be built in a weekend, it's too complex to use.
Simple!
Except that in real life, there are a few more details to work out.
Fuck these jocks
However, there's an interesting point: they spent their time perfecting their rowing skills to an olympic level, that's where their passion lays. It's difficult to be an olympic rower and a top notch hacker at the same time: it's one thing to dabble in both, it's another to master one.
I work out for at least an hour 5-6 days a week, but I'm not an athlete. The hours I have to spend to become proficient at programming don't leave time for equal amount of hours (10,000 according to Gladwell) to be spent on sport. Winklevii made their choices, Zuck made his.
people don't know how to workout....and people don't know what an 'athlete' does when they workout. I've been around professional and collegiate athletes for quite some time and I think most people would be amazed to see how little they actually workout.
The basic thought the past 20 years was 'more is better' when it comes to the body; more working out is better than less working out. What we are learning and something good trainers and athletes have known for some time is that the amount of working out takes a huge backseat to doing the right kind of working out at the right intensity level.
It is more mythos created by the sports industry when we hear that someone is 'in the gym' 10 hours a day. This might be accurate, but the time they are actually working out is minimal (or, rather, it should be if they value their asset aka body).
Now, to someone like you working out 5-6 days a week for (guessing) an hour...I guarantee that if I changed your routine and intensity levels you would become an athlete you never dreamed you could be. I could probably do it in literally half the time as well.
I'll leave you with this...which do you think is more effective as a workout: 60 minutes on the treadmill or elliptical or 10 minutes of sprinting intervals @ 75 max effort? Did you know you can get one of the best and hardest workouts of your life if you just did 5 minutes of Tabata style kettlebell swings (20 seconds swings, 10 sec break for 5 minutes)?
Knowing the body and being able to hack the body are so foreign to most folks they literally have no idea what it means to workout like an athlete.
To get you started, this is a good video. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GtgRcqaOqDo
Just note that you should be going much, much harder (more intense) than she is doing. Remember, 20 seconds all out, 10 seconds rest. You can also vary the intensity by weight of KB and not just speed. I use a 53 pound KB for single arm swings and a 70 pound for double arm swings (at the gym...don't have a 70 for the home yet).
If you have a tough time counting 20 seconds and 10 seconds, the GymBoss timer (http://www.gymboss.com/ ), available on Amazon is a great way to time.
Some quick articles on tabata: http://www.thefitnessmonster.com/2010/02/hiit-for-fat-loss-t...
http://ezinearticles.com/?Kettlebell-Tabata-Workout---Swings...
You can do anything in a tabata fashion. For instance, you can sprint, you can do an exercise bike if you have some issues running (I'm rehabbing an Achilles tear so I stick to KB, swimming and some variants I'll talk about in a minute) or anything you can do for 20 seconds.
I'll even make circuits for Tabata workouts. This is a great one that gets you quite exhausted and will boost your metabolism sky high as well...
2-4 rounds, 20 seconds of each exercise in order, 10 second in between exercises.
Pushup - you can do any type: traditional, military, diamond, plyo. Even vary it up in the different rounds. KB swings - See previous Burpees - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7MGljX4bbps Air Squats or Jack/Power Squats* - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g1FpWEfJW1s - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PEwitPuU0Xg&feature=relat... Plank crunch (or variants) - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=31SbKgmHcmw
Once done...take a 10 second break and start over again going for 2-4 total rounds. If you do 2 rounds, that is 5 total minutes for working out. 4 Rounds is 10 minutes. This is very, very tough (honestly) and sometimes I have a hard time doing all 10 minutes w/ full intensity.
There are competent CS students that are also college athletes. ;)
This whole saga is an media circus. They already made $140MM (current value of previous settlement in escrow), fu money for anyone. 80% of that $140MM (post lawyer fees) is straight up $$, without payouts to VCs, seed investors, or employee options.
If they are serious about being entrepreneurial, maybe they could start an angel fund with $20MM?
[1] http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/news/is-there-anyth...
[2] They are probably making more straight up $$ than the Mint or Heroku founders. Who deserves it more?
Certain types of app development, I think, are a creative act more akin to writing a book than developing a very specific, patentable technology. Sorry to torture an analogy, but this has helped shape my thinking lately... imagine two writers are at a dinner party, and one tells the other "hey, I've been writing a book about Beowulf - except this time, I'm telling the story from the point of view of the beast." The other writer thinks it's a cool idea, and (unbeknownst to writer #1) goes off and codes (er, writes) it up.
Clearly, writer #2 has done a crappy thing, but would you call it theft? The reason I like thinking of it this way is that the idea was worth something, but really just as a starting point. The two books produced by the two writers will be dramatically different, even starting from this identical premise. Furthermore, I think that the creative process of actually taking a one sentence idea and turning it into a 300+ page novel will produce an outcome that removes the separation of idea and execution - they will be two different products, two related but ultimately different ideas.
Unless someone went through another writer's book or screenplay and paraphrased sentence by sentence, or perhaps deconstructed the plot to an extreme level of detail and rewrote it changing names and locations only, I'd be disinclined to give much credence to a claim "he stole my idea for a novel", mainly because I'm not sure an idea, in a general sense, is worth all that much, and by the time it has been turned into an actual novel, it will always have been transformed into something different.
Of course, I don't really know the truth about what happened between the winklevosses and zuckerberg, and of course the movie is an entertaining work of fiction and should be treat "stole". He evidenty used none of the code. Did he go through screen by screen and implement all the mock-ups? If so, that would seem like theft to me. Or did he just run with a very general idea and produce something ultimately very different from what anyone else would have produced - different because two creative types will always produce different products, and better because zuck is far more creative than the winks, and capable of executing on his vision as well.
Ultimately, I suspect that the winks got the best outcome they could possibly have hoped for. Hard to believe their "social network idea" would have been worth $65 million. These ideas were a dime a dozen.
Building something that people want is just so much harder than anyone could possibly imagine until they try it. I don't think any typical judge could possibly understand. If they did, a case about "he stole the idea" would be instantly thrown out with prejudice. The idea is so unbelievably inconsequential in the scope of skill, determination, and heart needed to succeed.
Even if Zuck mislead these guys into thinking he was building this exact product for them and on their time, I don't think they are entitled to anything. Even if the Harvard Connection was the most popular social network and Zuckerberg was hired as a 10th engineer and left and build Facebook to compete. I don't think they'd be entitled to a dime. Love him or hate him, Zuckerberg built an incredible business with a stellar team in a remarkably short time period. Luck was involved, but this was no accident.
I mean, there's the whole "the idea is not the important part" slogan, which is true to at least some degree, which seems completely lost on the twins.
And take this quote: When asked if they could have turned ConnectU into a site with hundreds of millions of users, like Mr. Zuckerberg did with Facebook, the twins replied in unison, “Absolutely.”
Seriously, have you ever heard anyone who would say that they could absolutely succeed with any startup? The optimistic chances of success for any startup aren't huge, what makes them think they would absolutely succeed? Moreover, they're not talking about the kind of success that YC is happy with, or even the kind of success that VCs are happy with. They're talking about the kind of success of a once-in-a-decade company.
Lastly, I've worked on my own startup for almost the past year. It's been a year of attempts, false starts, "pivots", eventually throwing out some ideas altogether and starting from new. From what I understand, after the Winkelvoss twins approached Zuck, less than 2 months passed before he went and released Facebook. 2 months, to me, seems like such a tiny, inconsequential amount of time when you're talking about starting a startup.
Any way you look at it, from the facts as I understand them, this just seems like 3 people who have no idea what they're talking about, trying to squeeze money out of someone successful just because they can.
MySpace were written off as lucky spammers, Zuck a theif, Bill Gates stole MS-DOS, etc. etc.
MySpace were 'lucky' in that people latched on to their horrible interface because it had features that they wanted (to put music, videos, media on their 'homepage'). People could have easily rejected the interface despite yearning for the features.
Zuckerberg isn't necessarily a thief, but he certainly should have covered his ass a lot better with contracts and such. Though, with the amount of money that's on the line, there would be people coming out of the woodwork no matter how airtight of a contract they had.
> It seems you can't be successful, especially in tech/web,
Zuck and Bill deserve absolute credit for their successes.
I see Gate's/Microsoft's genius as being able to bring a usable computer into every household. Of course there are other factors, but, man, it's impressive what Microsoft helped bring about. Think of it! We live in a SF world today, and Microsoft, for all their flaws, helped it come to pass.