Zuckerberg: If I Were Starting A Company Now, I Would Have Stayed In Boston

I saw the talk, and felt his point was hypocritical. He said that FB couldn't have made it outside of the valley, but that knowing what he knows now, it probably could were he starting it today.

In other words, he needed the valley when he was young and inexperienced, but it's not necessary if you have the experience and connections already.

[Edit: The reason I'm saying it's hypocritical is because his point was initially obfuscated, and if you took that statement at face value, you wouldn't get the whole point.]

It's probably the most damning and valid critique of The Valley.

How many Twitters/Facebooks/Dropboxes/Airbnbs don't exist because the founders sold them for $15M in 18 months?

Sometimes it's because the founders aren't really passionate enough about what they're working on.

Other times it's just financially insane to say no. A great example is Mint.com. How do you tell Aaron Patzer not to sell, when he's going to make $40M personally? That's more than he might have made in an IPO after many years.

One reason to live in the Valley is the opportunity to exercise outdoors in shorts and a t-shirt 365 days a year. That's why I want to move out there, anyway.

Winter is highly overrated.

I get that it is expensive and challenging to keep the best engineers in Silicon Valley for years at a time. However, it seems really odd to conclude from that that the solution would be to start a consumer web startup in Boston.

I can name almost no consumer web startups from the past decade that weren't built in Silicon Valley. Stack Overflow? MySpace? Some fashion startups in NYC? Anything else?

For most of its early life (and perhaps still), Facebook had less than one engineer per million users. Is that kind of talent available outside of the Valley? How many people that have worked at the scale of Google/Facebook/Yahoo!/Twitter (with all that it entails in terms of coding standards, infrastructure, and so on) exist outside of the Valley? Maybe the Seattle area has enough ex-Amazon/ex-Microsoft people to launch a big consumer web startup, but even there, a substantial part of Bing seems to be based in Silicon Valley.

I'm not sure if anyone else caught Jessica trying to follow up about the serendipitous meetings of people like Sean Parker in the Valley. I think he's completely discounting some of the experiences and chance happenings that acted as a catalyst to Facebook's success.

It goes back to what PG said at YCNYC that apparently he caught a lot of flack for - these types of occurrences, while they happen, are just far too infrequent in other places with less vibrant tech communities.

Zuckerberg's answers were really bizarre (though I appreciate what he was saying about Silicon Valley, which is a reaction to his belief there are too many tech employees who don't commit to a long term vision.)

But bizarrely, he said 1) he had no intention of forming a company when he came to Silicon Valley, even though, 1) they brought interns and 2) had already incorporated badly.

Even more odd was his assertion he started with the idea of building a social graph identity system and then built Facebook. I'm not knocking either of those innovations, but I seriously doubt this narrative. I think the graph grew out of watching what people did on Facebook and then realizing, brilliantly, how he could build an extensible social-identity service that would turn Facebook into internet infrastructure, instead of a MySpace replacement that could be jettisoned by users when the next cool social network (Google+, for instance) came around.

If Zuckerberg really thinks that Silicon Valley VCs are short-sighted (and I'm not saying that they are or they aren't), why doesn't he put his money where his mouth is? He's in a unique position to be investing in companies that could achieve success on a timespan that exceeds the five to ten year horizon that VCs are constrained by.

Also, which of these Boston investors are investing long-term? I want to meet some of them.

My biggest concerns on this article is "He explained that he had a conversation once with Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos about this, and the average time someone stays in job at Seattle is twice as long than it is in Silicon Valley. "

Could we say "higher liquidity in labor markets empowers disruptive innovation" or "disruptive innovation needs higher fluid labor markets."? If someone knows the report about this issue, please share with us.

Actually, the labor market in Japan is very lower liquidity. The reasons will be that most Japanese prefers stability in their life, and that recruiters in big firms prefer lower number of career changes in a specific period, 5 or 10 years. Concurrently, we have experienced social slumber, so-called "Lost Decade".

But, for reference, here is the interesting point about Japan History.

When we experience drastic social change, such as The Meiji Restoration and The Defeat in WW2, most Japanese suddenly abandons the preference for stability and drastically drives themselves to creative destruction. Sony and Honda were born right after WW2.

3.11 Tohoku Earthquake might have been a good trigger for drastic social change in Japan.

His Q&A at Startup School was not so good as the rest of the speakers that were invited. The girl that was making the questions was not so good at it either. There was no consistency about what he wanted to say. Many times he lost his own trail of thought. Maybe you need such an article to extract some meaning out of everything he talked.

[EDIT] Well, someone doesn't like that I speak up my mind. So I can't make an opinion about this now without being downvoted?

It's important to remember that Zuckerberg kept saying 'I don't know', because he was thinking out loud, not speaking from a script.

Zuckerberg said he would stay in Boston or move to New York, in consideration with moving to Silicon Valley, if he was starting Facebook right now, and knew what he knows already. He would start a company in a location where it was commonplace to build sustainable businesses, with employees who grow within a company. He admitted that six or seven years ago, when he didn't know anything or anyone, he could not have done Facebook without being in Silicon Valley.

My thought is that if a big consumer-facing/social tech company like Facebook was successful in Boston (now or in the future), many more companies like Zynga and other startups would be based in Boston as well. Facebook's and Google's success (and their willingness to buy startups that may or may not have a viable business at the time) causes a side effect where highly paid employees save up money and quit these and similar companies in order to create startups just a few miles away.

After all, Zuckerberg also stated he believed that the next wave of applications will have to integrate with social networks or else will die. If this is true, he must expect that a ton of startups would be started in garages and incubators all around where such social networks are based (Facebook and Twitter, which happen to be in Palo Alto and San Francisco.)

It would probably be more accurate to believe that Zuckerberg means that Silicon Valley is the best place to start a company, but he wishes it had a startup culture that he believes other cities like Boston and New York have right now (while they don't have very many giant web properties headquartered there).

He doesn't realize that a Facebook in Boston would mean that 1) investors were more likely to invest in startups than they really had been and 2) the built-to-flip companies of ex-Google and ex-Facebook employees (and those of other companies) would now be based in Boston or New York, both factors changing the startup culture of that city.

Although I agree there are plenty of people who want to start a company before they have a product or passionate area of interest I don't agree this is a reason for him to have stayed in Boston.

Zuck is not appreciating the fact the one of his most valuable assets (Sean Parker) was out here and help him raise a tremendous amount of capital for facebook. The story could be much different if he was in Boston without Sean Parker. I certainly think they wouldn't be doing better, and he might not have control of the company anymore. I just think its silly to rewrite history in your mind and assume you would have the same success.

Also for non-web companies, I think it's better to be outside the valley -- it's just such an echo chamber there. We're doing a biotech startup and I think locating in Boston was the right choice.

There are first-order consequences to things and there are second-order and n-order consequences. For anything, especially chess, the first-order consequences may well be attractive, but that's not enough to make a decision.

Sometimes, it's better to be an outsider than an insider, you can be advantaged through being disadvantaged, and sometimes, the best way to find milk and honey is to wander the desert.

The Beatles listened to American music from another continent over radio, completely in the dark, working in Hamburg, Germany.

Daniel Lanois, producer of Bob Dylan, Willie Nelson, spent years in Canada, working in a basement, honing skills, plenty of solitary confinement.

Warren Buffett, made it a point to work from a small converted bathroom in his house in Omaha, rather than on Wall Street.

Mark Shuttleworth ran Thawte from a garage in Cape Town, at a time when South Africa had amongst the worst Internet connectivity. Broadband is still an order of magnitude more expensive.

Amazon, Microsoft, and 37Signals were founded and remain outside the Valley.

The problem with this way of thinking is that it works if you are successful, but it doesn't allow much room for failure. And failing can be as important as succeeding. In the Valley if you fail, despite having investors and solid employees, it sucks but you basically close up shop and move on. There may be some short term resentment, but basically you are forgiven and allowed to try again. Zuckerberg criticizes the shorter term employment of most people in the Valley - but that's because better opportunities come along. If a company fails, you don't have to feel as bad cause the employees you've let go should find work elsewhere in a reasonable amount of time. That's not as easy in other cities. But it's important for the ecosystem to thrive.

Having watched the event live in person, I think this point has been taken out of context. Mark's point was that there's no way he could have succeeded with facebook without the valley as he was young and inexperienced, but knowing what he knows now he could have been successful back in Boston.

My interpretation of his comment was that it is easier to be successful through getting noticed in a place where there is less noise from everyone and their dog starting companies, but being in that situation is invaluable if you don't know what you're doing.

Just like most sound bites this one needs context to be accurate. But I'm sure it will continue to make headlines elsewhere.

He said that the valley was very helpful for him early on as a fresh entrepreneur. He also said he could probably have done it in New York as well.

Also the headline mixes present and past tense, "If I were starting a company now" and "I would have". This doesn't mean in retrospect he would have kept Facebook in boston back in 2005 or whenever he moved to the valley. It means right now.

You should also keep in mind that Zuckerburg is originally from the east coast so he may be biased against SV.

What I find mildly offensive is that he's generalizing everybody in the valley as go-getters with short attention spans and no interest in long term value. I guess I've never been anywhere else, but the majority of the people I meet out here have a passion for creating things of value.

The Boston comment may get the most press, but I think the most important thing he said is the next 5-10 years comment, that it will be about what we build now that connections are mapped and, importantly, available to tap into. It's not a secret and not the first time he's said that, but to me it reinforces that FB will keep doing app-friendly things like Open Graph.

The main reason employees do not stick with companies as long in the Valley as in Seattle (or most likely anywhere else for that matter) is because a lot more people that work here want to start or join their own startup. And if they did not think about doing it initially, they will eventually get there since it is so much in the local culture.

I think people are blowing his words out of proportion. I found his comments were delivered casually, with a pretty straightforward message: he wasn't discounting what SV has to offer, he was simply stating it has more to offer to those who know don't know what they're doing.

He didn't know what he was doing when he founded FB (by his own admission), and so moving to SV was immensely helpful for him. He knows how to run a company now, and was simply stating that for those who live outside SV and know what they're doing, there's nothing intrinsically holding you back from success by locale.

I think he was just being off-the-cuff and flippant like a conversationalist. It wasn't some big statement. The q&a format lends itself to this style. He also said he hadn't really thought about it much.