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Comment by wpietri | Hacker News Reader

What things would those be? As far as I know his successes are a) 1 idea he had as a 19-year-old plus b) some other things that he bought with the money from that.

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* 1 idea he stole as a 19-year-old

I'm not big on people complaining about "idea stealing", but zuck is in a league of his own with this shit, so worth pointing out that he didn't have the idea for FB.

Excellent point, and I totally agree. Thanks for the correction.

grumble grumble Good artists copy... grumble grumble

Stole or just copied, the 'idea' of a social network wasn't novel by the time fb came around. Credit where it's due, it was executed well in the early stages and had the unique twist of being college-only at the beginning. People don't remember that when fb started gaining traction, friendster was already very much a thing but was stumbling hard on execution. I remember the friendster site being just dog slow. Myspace and Hi5 were also in the mix before or right at the same time as fb. Really just the PR/marketing angle and the not screwing up on execution are fb's claim to fame.

Orkut was also out there and it was wildly more popular than Facebook in some parts of the world.

Bought and killed by Google, all the Brazillians migrated to WhatsApp.

I think it was originally made by google, not bought by them.

> Stole or just copied, the 'idea' of a social network wasn't novel by the time fb came around.

IIRC, the idea he stole wasn't "social networking," it was "social networking for elite kids at Harvard."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Facebook#Facebook:

> Just six days after the launch of the site, three Harvard University seniors, Cameron Winklevoss, Tyler Winklevoss, and Divya Narendra, accused Zuckerberg of intentionally misleading them into believing that he would help them build a social network called HarvardConnection.com, but instead using their idea to build a competing product.[21] The three complained to the Crimson, and the newspaper began an investigation. Zuckerberg knew about the investigation so he used TheFacebook.com to find members in the site who identified themselves as members of the Crimson. He examined a history of failed logins to see if any of the Crimson members had ever entered an incorrect password into TheFacebook.com. In the cases in which they had failed to log in, Zuckerberg tried to use them to access the Crimson members' Harvard email accounts, and he was successful in accessing two of them. In the end, three Crimson members filed a lawsuit against Zuckerberg which was later settled.[21][22]

Honestly, HarvardConnection would have been just MySpace but solely for Harvard users. Forums have been around since what, the 1980s (as BBSs)?

Well, he sure knows what to buy.

Remember when he bought Instagram for a billion dollars? That amount seemed unreasonable high back then. Looking back though ... I'd wish I could spend money as well as Zuckerberg.

Pay young kids to install a VPN on their phone and look at what they're installing and you too can buy as well as Mr. Zuckerberg!

Was that really a risky bet paying off? It seems like the growth you'd expect from a big tech company like Facebook buying an existing, successful platform and monetizing the hell out of it.

If anything, it seems like young people ended up moving to Snapchat as their main social media platform of choice since the purchase. I had a ton of friends who used Instagram frequently but now almost no one posts there, other than occasional stories. The main feed is almost entirely ads now, and I can't remember the last time I had a conversation with someone who said they like Instagram still.

That's not to say it hasn't grown and isn't making them money, but I also don't think Instagram would have had the same trajectory if Facebook didn't buy them. They just integrated it with their existing platform that already had a lot of traffic.

Say what you will about Mark, no informed person could claim with a straight face that he's not one of the savviest business-people in history.

Oh? Maybe give me a brief rundown of his business savvy? I'm especially interested in evidence that can't be attributed to the people he hired or the vast, vast wealth at his command. Not to mention a large PR department working hard to make him look like one of the savviest businesspeople in history.

> that can't be attributed to the people he hired

Isn't hiring the right people an extremely large part of being "business savvy"?

Business savvy people hire the right people, but just because someone turned out to be the right person, doesn't mean the person who hired them was necessarily business savvy.

I mean, if it were that easy to build a trillion dollar company, everyone would, but it's not, so they don't.

People complain that he has too much control but then also, like you, complain that he isn't behind and "real" decisions.

He made that "vast vast wealth" by building Facebook. One had to come before the other.

I'm not complaining, and I'm not claiming he is or isn't behind a given decision. I'm just trying to understand what people see as evidence of his savviness, as I don't see much besides a pile of money and an adequately-maintained natural monopoly that now looks to be in a fair bit of trouble both in the market (thus his recent announcement of a dramatic retooling) and in the public eye (e.g., the latest whistleblowers and the Congressional hearings).

And it's perfectly possible that he is more responsible for the bad choices than he is for the good ones. I've dealt with execs like that. I'd bet many others have as well.

> I mean, if it were that easy to build a trillion dollar company, everyone would, but it's not, so they don't.

It's not easy to win the lottery either, but that doesn't make a lottery winner "one of the savviest business-people in history".

I dislike Zuckerberg as much as another fellow, but he is one of the few founder/CEOs who managed to not only maintain control of his company, but maintain complete, uncontested control over his company. There are so few businesspeople that can claim that, as it is typical that either fundraising or corporate politics (or both) eventually ousts the founding members or dilute their absolute power. To claim that he somehow accidentally negotiated and maintained complete control throughout the entire lifetime of Facebook is disingenuous at the very least. People do not accidentally maintain power. Any number of other ambitious people would have loved to become the power broker at Facebook by taking Mark down, and preventing that every step of the way is foundational to the definition of business savvy.

It's far too rare for a founder to maintain control in that way while also growing the company to the size of Facebook is. For example, Basecamp has managed to maintain control but it's nowhere near their size.

I didn't claim that he "accidentally" did that.

But he has uncontested control because of an unusual dual-class share structure. And isn't the explanation for Facebook's founder-favoring structure basically that Peter Thiel wanted it that way?

My recollection is that founder-favoring share structures go in and out of fashion historically, and that Facebook rose during a period when that was popular. So yes, props to young Mark Zuckerberg for pushing for that when it was achievable.

But even Mark Zuckerberg describes himself as lucky in this regard:

“So one of the things that I’ve been lucky about in building this company is ... I kind of have voting control of the company, and that’s something I focused on early on. And it was important because, without that, there were several points where I would’ve been fired. For sure, for sure,” https://www.cnbc.com/2019/10/03/zuckerberg-if-i-didnt-have-c...

His ability to hold on to pole position once he gets it is definitely unprecedented, especially in an industry that's known for it's volatility. But in terms of original creativity, he scores extremely low.

lol, people don't remember all of the stern talking-to's zuck had to have from his investors in the beginning. The investors made him go to business classes to learn how to 'business' and talk to people. The one thing I could give him was to retain the ownership stake that he did, but that even could be said to be largely due to sean parker's influence and his experience with VCs.

How about building one of the largest companies in the world? Would others be able to do that if they had that idea as a 19-year-old? Let's not reduce all his accomplishments to a single idea. Ideas don't matter, execution matters.

That would still be one success. And I'm pretty sure other people had something to do with that. So I'd like a little more evidence, thanks.

Lol...you want him to have built more than one of the most successful businesses in history? It isn't one idea that got him here.. Everyone's a critic.

This is just coming across as completely ridiculous.

You really think building one of the biggest companies in the world, with billions of users, is just one success?

Building a company with 1000 users is a success. A million is another success. A billion is hundreds of successes.

After a point, that success tends to build on itself. Positive returns to scale, network effects, monopoly influence, corruption, strong-arm tactics.

I'd argue the 1st million users is much harder than the 3rd billion.

In the sense of the point I'm addressing, yes. "Zuck is pretty successful at things he wants to do." Facebook is a thing he wanted to do. It was a success. (And a big one, but just because an elephant is very large for an animal means that it counts as 3 animals.) I just want to know what the other things are.

- Einstein was a pretty successful physicist.

- Well, I wouldn't say that... what else did he do other than relativity?

Scroll up. I didn't say Zuckerberg wasn't successful. Indeed, I've been quite clear that Facebook was one very big success.

And for what it's worth, Einstein did a lot more than one thing. Off the top of my head, Einstein's annus mirabilis had 4 papers that were all major accomplishments, including the E=mc² equation popularly associated with him: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annus_Mirabilis_papers

His work on relativity came later. As did a fair bit of other work, that I'm less familiar with but that I could easily look up and provide sources for.

And that's the kind of list I'm looking for here. People have claimed that he has other successes. I'm asking what they are. I've now given you the kind of list I wanted for Einstein, and I've given it elsewhere in this discussion for Steve Jobs. So will you give me that list for Zuckerberg? Because as far as I know it has one thing on it: Facebook.

If building Facebook isn't enough evidence of success for you, I don't know what is. Pretty sure most people with the same idea could not have turned it into what Facebook is today. Also, Facebook isn't just one idea - it's many ideas.

It's enough evidence of one success. But "Zuck is pretty successful at things he wants to do" sounds like he has more than one success. I'm just asking what those other things are.

You are exposing your lack of knowledge on what it means to run a multinational corporation. It isn't one lucky choice, it is strategy and execution over the long term. This is the same for any successful company.

Facebook hasn't been around long enough to talk about its "long term".

Oh? In which case, given your mastery of the topic, you should be easily able to produce the list I'm asking for.

Given that nobody has so far, and given all the handwaving like yours, I think you all have answered my question.

Most of us would be glad to have one really big idea per lifetime. Zuck's was pretty shitty on all dimensions except moneymaking, but I'd probably still take it.

a) 1 idea that he stole

b) having absolutely 0 moral compass

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