Zuckerberg's Big Facebook Mistake

The IPO has thus far been a disaster for overy eager investors and maybe that's where the hate from Forbes originates, but the notion that it changes much for Zuckerberg himself is laughable.

"[Facebook] still needed money", is just so wrong. The IPO was about Zuckerberg and close colleageaus being able to cash out a little bit and overcoming the shareholder limit.

I highly doubt it has any impact on his plans for facebook. A pretty poor assesment by a publication like "Forbes"

The mistake, if it turns out to be one, was not in shunning capital markets, but rather, building a business that required capital on a scale that only the capital market could provide.

an IPO is an IPO - aside from all the hyperventilating over share price over these first few weeks, Zuck and Co now have raised the capital they need. Let's see how things are in one year. Facebook's long term prospects will be built on the quality of their products, not the jitters of the short term investor.

I stopped reading here: "The roadblocks he faced in building the world’s biggest social-networking company were tiny, like an overdramatized civil lawsuit" and also wished for a "downvote" button. This trivializes what it takes to build a multi-billion-dollar company—any multi-billion-dollar company.

When it came to monetizing search, Google was lucky in that someone else already figured out how to do that (GoTo.com). No comparably effective model exists for monetizing high traffic websites (social media or otherwise), despite many attempts over the past two decades. Not even close.

If Zuck took Facebook public 5 years ago, they would have gotten much less money, and they would have been distracted by investors calling for them to focus on building out that business model rather than attracting users - and Zuck may have lost controlling power in the company (less money + less users = less leverage for Zuck).

There's a little hyperbole and overly simplified statements in here but this article really hit the nail on the head. Zuckerberg missed the most explosive part of his curve to go out by waiting so long. He took onboard investors who did not push the company - they knew they were good for a great exit no matter what. Now he's going to end up with low morale and scrambling to mature the platform.

He danced with the Devil and right now the Devil is up on points going into the 7th round.......

You can have the greatest product in the world, if you don't make money from it the company is worth zilch! stepping out of SV shows these companies what the real world is. You can take that to the bank.

Mistake?

For Facebook investors perhaps. But not for Zuckerberg. He gamed the IPO system like a champ, extracting far more hard cash from investors and financial institutions than he should have been able to based on the fundamentals of his company.

Consider. Here's this company that is nominally a "publicly traded corporation" that still has over 50% of the stock in one person's hands, Zuck. And it's sitting on a pile of many billions of dollars of cold hard cash (representing well over a decade of potential accumulated profits at present levels). All of the early investors and employees have cashed out to the tune of millions or even billions per person. Meanwhile, Facebook is using its corporate cash hoard to buy up competitors and fill out the empire.

They played this game remarkably. They played the banks, they played the financial analysts, they played the investors. They've got theirs and they are far more secure of a company than they were before the IPO.

Facebook is making money and has a giant warchest from the IPO.

The main risk of being public is to employee morale, but the right internal culture/messaging, and (occasionally) option-repricing/reissuing can manage that.

Where was the content here? What was the point of this article? It's a bunch of cobbled together nonsense with no logical flow.

Pardon someone grumpy to be up early on a Saturday, but please don't post things that make no damn sense.

It my be just me, but did anyone else sense a lot of Wall Street/banker/etc. "Heh, look at those adorable little web people, trying to do something?"

To wit: Start-up entrepreneurs cannot evade the discipline of the capital markets any more than can the prime ministers of Spain and Italy.

Honestly? Isn't that a bit self-congratulatory? How about places like Barclays--can they evade the discipline?

  The roadblocks he faced in building the world’s biggest 
  social-networking company were tiny

Nathan Vardi is just completely ignorant. I'm surprised to see something so colossally stupid in Forbes. Say what you will about them, Zuckerberg fended off dozens of competitors (ranging from Myspace to Apple's Ping to now Google itself) to rise to world dominance. Facebook didn't just "happen".