A Walk in the Woods with Mark Zuckerberg | Hacker News Reader

A Walk in the Woods with Mark Zuckerberg

bits.blogs.nytimes.com

178 pointsluigi60 comments

"He pointed out Apple’s headquarters, then Hewlett-Packard and a number of other big tech companies, the individual explained. Then he pointed to Facebook and said that it would eventually be bigger than all of the companies he had just mentioned, and that if I joined the company, I could be a part of it all."

This sounds vaguely familiar.

Again, the devil taketh him up into an exceeding high mountain, and sheweth him all the kingdoms of the world, and the glory of them; And saith unto him, All these things will I give thee, if thou wilt fall down and worship me. -- Matthew 4:8-9

(edit: it's a common theme, one of the oldest is in the Bible, and most are most likely appropriated from there)

Oh please.

I seriously doubt it played/plays out as described, but it seems too strong a similarity (it's a classic Temptation of Christ description, which m__ pointed out below also makes an appearance in The Lion King) to not be the intent of the author of the OP to be hinting at.

A similar comment was left on the Business Insider[1] post earlier this morning. It does seem quite hyperbolic an insinuation.

[1]http://www.businessinsider.com/mark-zuckerberg-walk-in-the-w...

Search your feelings; you know it to be true.

I was actually thinking of _Star Wars_:

"Join me, and together we will rule the Valley as CEO and employee!"

I was thinking of the Lion King.

Well it works, doesn't it?

That was funny.

It's a design pattern for stories called monomyth or The Hero's Journey. It's the same pattern found in the Bible, Star Wars, and many other epics.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monomyth

Stories are important to humans because that is how we understand the world around us.

My first thought was of Steve Case (AOL CEO), who said something similar in 1998-2000.

(1) http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/1998/... (couldnt find an exact quote though)

Oh. I know how this one ends. Nothing left but a broken and forgotten fragment with "My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings: Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!" carved on it.

“Then he pointed to Facebook and said that it would eventually be bigger than all of the companies he had just mentioned, and that if I joined the company, I could be a part of it all.”

That's how Mufasa pitched Simba.

Judging from most of the comments here, I'm in the minority, but I applaud Mark for taking such a personal approach to recruiting desired talent. Sure, it can be seen as cheesy when you read about it - but I'm sure each person who got this invite was somewhat impressed and/or flattered by the personal attention.

I once wooed a great developer by taking photos of people from my team holding a sign saying, "Hi $Persons_Name!" (where $Persons_Name was the actual candidate's name, of course). Seeing it now, it sounds kinda cheesy and dumb, but it worked. He took the job and rose quickly in the company.

This approach may not work for everyone, but it's still admirable that Mark is taking time out of his hectic schedule to try attracting these candidates.

I know he has to sweet talk employees to join his company, but I can't see this ever happening. Right now Facebook has a valuation of about 80 billion, and a userbase of about 750 million. Assuming he can get the userbase to 1 billion, and assuming he could pass Apple (~200 billion evaluation), that would be $200 per user, when the service is free. I know they get money through advertising and other ways, but that seems kind of high.

Revenues and market cap are losly related at best. Eg Apples revenue last year was around 60 billion while their market cap is currently around 330 billion (around 5.5 times).

Facebooks revenue last year was around 2 billion so if this ratio stays (it probably won't) they would "only" need to grow to 9 billion in revenues and already be bigger than Apple.

Besides I don't think it will be impossible for facebook to increase their revenues to tenth of billions once they provide display adds outside of facebook etc. (doesn't mean that I think it's likely but it's definitely possible once they really start focussing on monetization).

The question becomes, once they start focusing on monetization, will people stick around the service for long?

I think the Facebook brand has a neutral perception in the community at best, unlike Apple or Google, who have brands that people truly like. Facebook does not get users because they are Facebook (unlike Apple where people would buy whatever Jobs sells), Facebook gets users because it is where everyone else is. If they start to heavily monetize their service, and other services are available (Google Plus, for example), I don't think users are going to stick around solely for the Facebook brand.

Depends on the monetization methods. Google turning on the revenue didn't drive people away, in either the original CPM or eventual CPC incarnations.

In fact, extra results ranked by ability-to-pay (rather than other hypertext algorithms) can be uniquely valuable for many commercial searches; Google's AdWords monetization is thus often a boost, not a drain, on its attractiveness to users.

If Facebook finds a similar revenue fountain — and their incremental deliberateness in monetization suggests they want to — look out, world.

You almost defined the P/E - the price earning ratio. Usually, a stock is worth around the order of 10 to 20 times the yearly earnings of the company. If you take all AAPL stocks, their value is around 17 years of earnings. P/E can be higher when investors expect the company to grow in the next years and so soon generate more revenue. An example is Amazon with a stellar P/E of 94. Don't know how long they will sustain that.

Apple, founded 1976, first reached a $70 billion market cap after 30 years of operation in 2006 (roughly eyeballing it from stock price).

Facebook, founded 2004, is now at a roughly $70 billion market cap from private transactions after 7 years of operation.

It's not unthinkable.

It doesn't really make sense to extrapolate future stock performance from past stock performance.

The market says: If you consider all publicly available information, we think that facebook will earn its shareholders the present day equivalent of 70bn dollars. Apple will earn its shareholders 330bn.

These numbers reflect expected future performance and expected growth is already priced in.

Of course that's true as an outside investor working under the efficient markets hypothesis, which is hard to beat. But it's not how a principal like Zuckerberg, who can actually affect the valuation through strategy and recruiting, should view or portray things.

And I'm not making an extrapolative prediction of Facebook's value, just reminding people that the idea of Apple as a $300B-plus behemoth is itself fairly recent, and required an at-the-time unforeseeable surge in value from its Facebook-like $70B valuation just 5 years ago.

Thus rather than Apple providing an example of a height Facebook can't reach, as the great-grandparent post seems to imply, Apple suggests the opposite, that a $70B company can become a $330B company, in less time than pure faith in the market valuations might suggest.

Finally, the $70B valuation is not a market prediction that the actual trading value of Facebook will remain $70B in the future: merely that $70B is the best consensus average from public information, weighted over all considered futures. Very roughly, maybe there's a 4/5 chance Facebook falls back to $10B, and a 1/5 chance it races forward to $310B. Voila, that risk-neutral average value is $70B. So, a Facebook of Apple's size is 'thinkable', and there's essentially no chance that $70B is its actual value after this all plays out.

I didn't mean to imply that markets were efficient or that MZ can't have information that suggests that fb will surpass Apple in market cap or otherwise.

I really just meant that historic trends don't imply future trends.

Your (and maybe also the previous poster's) point that Apple is an example of valuations changing rapidly is obviously valid.

Every time I see someone cite the Facebook user count, it goes up by 100 million. Why is that?

Edit: <Joke> At this rate, they'll have more users than there are people on Earth by the end of the year.</Joke>

750M is the latest oficial user count as of FB-Skype integration

I am a Skype user and not a FB user and I have no intentions of ever using the FB product again (I deleted my account around 2 years ago). I wonder how many of those 750 are the same as I.

Facebook reports monthly active users - people who have visited the site in the last 30 days. You (and anyone else who hasn't visited in last 30 days) are not included in that number.

Refs:

http://techcrunch.com/2010/11/10/dear-tech-press-lets-cut-th...

http://www.insidefacebook.com/2011/07/06/facebook-750-millio...

Given that some people have separate accounts for games, I wonder how accurately that number reflects the actual number of users.

There's also accounts for people's cats, cars, bands, and loads of other silliness. So we can discount that claimed 750m some, but probably in the ballpark of not much more than 10%. And OTOH, perhaps Facebook knows this and already considers account-to-person dilution in figuring its revenue expectations.

Also, 250 million of the 750 million actives are mobile users, and those are much more unlikely to be fake. ref: https://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?statistics

I still find some pets and companies using profiles, but most of these are pages these days (since there really aren't advantages to making a profile vs. a page for them), and there is a process for converting these to pages - https://www.facebook.com/help/?page=18918 - and it is the way to reactivate a non-human account that is reported.

None, Facebook user counts are people who actively use the service.

I got one of those email invites, to work on my specialty (accessibility features). It was a bit of a fiasco as my chair got stuck in some mud on the trail. MZ kept walking and talking while my wheels spun and dug me ever deeper into the slime. Thank God some other guys came along. I think it was a Honda service manager courting a new mechanic, because they both had tools and the older guy had a "Honda" patch on his shirt. Anyway, I lived, but I didn't get the FB job.

Wait, he just left you there?!

In his defense, I had made a somewhat obnoxiously worded point about not wanting special treatment because of my handicap. I was in no danger. Those woods are rife with people making job offers and someone was bound to come along sooner or later.

Kind of a cute idea, although if I'm seeing this trail correctly, you wouldn't be starting at the edge of the Facebook parking lot--you cross a hill, then cut through an elementary school, walk a few blocks to Junipero Serra and start up the trail there. Also, the trail itself is not very wooded--more like grassy.

http://maps.google.com/maps?q=Facebook+Offices,+South+Califo...

I lived in the neighborhood of Facebook's office for a few years. I suspect the "wooded trail" is actually just walking up to the top of the small hill by Peter Coutts Circle. It's actually a pretty nice view for how short a walk it is. If it's not that, it's the trail to the dish, which is not wooded at all.

Either way, I don't see how you could possibly see Apple in Cupertino from either place. Take a look at the map, and then look at this random video shot from the dish trail: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aar3EH4y1JA

The camera is pointed in the direction of Cupertino around 1:20 or so. There's no way you can "point out" Apple's campus. You can wave in the right direction, but you can do that from an office too.

Maybe it has something to do with the reporter being from NYC.

[full disclosure: I am from NYC]

given the pictures provided-- it's totally the Peter Coutts hill.

I wonder if Mark and the interviewees know how many Paly/Gunn high schoolers get drunk and stoned on that hill all the time?

I live there now and the hill is on my running path (as is Facebook HQ, sadly). Apple is many miles south. There's no way you can see it, let alone Google.

Next time I talk to Nick Bilton I'm going to give him a hard time over this.

This is so cheesy! I don't know if I could keep a straight face.

It's interesting how different the personalities of different companies are, and how deeply those personalities penetrate the way they operate. And, just like human personalities, you just like some companies and you don't like others. I would be completely turned off by the Zuckerberg-worshipping atmosphere being confirmed explicitly by the man himself, but clearly it must work on a lot of people if they're doing it regularly.

I tend to agree with your sentiments and have never thought of applying at facebook. But if I ask myself honestly, it would be hard to turn down "an offer that couldn't be refused" that came personally from Zuckerberg

See how they treat their engineers. Some of these negative reviews have pretty high ratings: http://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Facebook-Company-Reviews-E4...

Everything is fine and dandy until you see the actual realities and numbers. I'm curious to know what they engineer turnover rate is.

You realize that Facebook is the highest rated company on the whole site?

I think this is expected if you were to work in a company like Facebook.

It's a startup. It's unstable. So things like this bound to happen. They need to quickly change directions if required. People that don't align need to be removed.

I'm quite sure those special hiree would potentially have their own team hence becoming a tech-lead or some sort so they don't necessary work as a bottom-liner.

Don't you think that calling a seven-year-old company with thousands of employees a start-up dilutes the term a little bit?

They treat their engineers like rock stars[1]. It is a very intense environment though, in which not all personality types will flourish.

[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-is-now-the-best-tech...

For all you unfamiliar with sales, this is what's referred to as, "the close". I highly doubt Zuckerberg thought about the biblical overtones. It is, an easy way to close a prospect, and a great way to convince somebody to join Facebook.

It would be the same as a highly recruited athlete in high school. You take the tour of the college campus, then they lead you to the stadium and say, "Imagine Nick, 30,000 fans screaming your name every Saturday afternoon."

It's just a sales pitch, nothing more, nothing less.

Skeptical employee walks into the woods with Mark Zuckerberg. 30 minutes later, pale faced, sweating employee walks out of the woods and into Zuckerberg's office, and hastily signs employment contract.

Slick. As an interviewee I do my best to stand up and walk around during an interview; anything to get the brain and charisma going and the jitters forgotten is good for developing a rapport.

That was nice of him to give them an offer they couldn't refuse.

Although this may sound cheesy, anyone who got the chance to participate in something like this would be geeked. What's more is that Zuckerberg has created something that could take on the major tech companies. The best part, he's got 750 million people riding his coattails. He's conscious of the phenomenon that he's created. You'd Simba the fuck out of your programmers too if you were him.

Perhaps this was something that was left on the cutting room floor of "The Social Network". Very Hollywood to me.

what? that's it? this article was boring. why do peeps care about everything Zuc does or says? I expected a little more juice then a few sentences someone said..

<story> My boss took me on three walks on market st in SF before I was hired. I was the first potential employee and I felt as though I was going to get whacked or something...talking about passion, drive, loyalty, and how I can make a big difference and the world is ours.

We make 3m+ /year and have 19 employees</story>

Im not sure why anyone would care about my story. Was my story interesting? no...articles like this make me feel like the tech world is still in HS :|

People are inherently curious about a young man who had so much success from nothing.

I think the negative reviews need to put into perspective that they just are eliminating people who don't align with the main viewpoints of Facebook - I for one would probably be one of them, the idea of making this giant social networking tool doesn't bring me much joy.

I think those people should say more about what led them to Facebook in the first place. If it isn't a love of "connecting" people, then it probably wasn't that great of a reason (e.g., solely money or fame, though I could be wrong)

Did he track and kill something for food with his bare hands?

TL;DR: no, he did not kill a pig or a goat this time.

If there's an NDA, how are people talking about it?

Seems fishy to me.

They can talk as much as they want, as long as no body names them. You can't sue someone for breaking an NDA if you don't know who it was that broke it :P

facebook is most likely more concerned about the facebook projects/inner workings likely discussed during an interview of this type more so then the fact that an interview took place

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