Hacker News Reader

Comment by wpietri | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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...

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".

> 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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com