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Comment by grandempire | Hacker News Reader

Zuckerbeg’s super power is actually operating a giant tech company successfully, executing on multi-year visions, and just barely turning 40.

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You might manage the same if you’re rich enough to hire top-tier advisors. Let’s not kid ourselves—OG Facebook wasn’t a tech marvel or even particularly original. It just landed in the right place at the right time and snowballed from there.

I know too many rich people to know this isn’t true.

> hire top-tier advisors

The circle of top-tier leaders who know how to manage giant tech companies is a tiny circle with Zuck being one of them.

In fact that’s what the board of directors did - they used their money to hire Zuck to run their company.

"In fact that’s what the board of directors did - they used their money to hire Zuck to run their company."

doesn't he still have voting control of the stock?

You’re right - but the example stands. The CEO is a professional advisor hired to make the rich people money.

This makes no sense in Zuckerberg's case: he was never hired by the board and they've never had a chance to fire him. Investors can sell the stock if they don't like what he does, but that is not a "professional advisor" relationship.

It's mostly a cult of personality relationship, and you're deep in it with your belief that Zuckerberg is an unusually capable operator.

> This makes no sense in Zuckerberg's case:

I already agreed with the correction - he has voting control.

What is still incorrect is imagining that billions of dollars gets you advisors who know how to run a company - and those people aren't just high level executives already running companies.

> you're deep in it with your belief that Zuckerberg is an unusually capable operator.

The burden is on you to show a successful CEO for over a decade is actually an idiot.

People like him exist a turtles nest full, but there is only one social network effect to rodeo .

Independently on what you think of Zuckerberg as a human being, on the basis of acquisitions alone, he can be judged as an insanely effective CEO. The way Meta managed the shift from Facebook to Instagram is impressive from a strategic point of view.

Heck, Meta literally controls the world most popular chat application. I never liked social media, spent most of the past fifteen years avoiding them as much I could while maintaining just enough presence to stay reachable and a Meta application still remain my most used one.

Let's not forget that Google, for all their billions, utterly failed to significantly attack Meta market.

Meta has been effective at being the owner of Instagram, even though that's because they've smartly mostly been staying hands off on it besides integrating it with Facebook wherever makes most sense. And also even though the platform is also getting long in the tooth, becoming a place dominated by brands rather than the hip kids' club it was in the past. Now it just seems like the default social media profile for people to connect with one another, like how FB was before it.

I wonder what if Facebook's attempts to buy Snapchat had gone through. Would they have been an effective steward of that platform as well, or would it have gone the way of Twitter-acquired Vine? Would Snapchat even have been a good acquisition target? Okay, maybe it's not productive to discuss counterfactuals, but it does make one consider if we're self-selecting for big hits here and ignoring all of the duds that never amounted to anything- and the potential duds that didn't go through because the founders didn't want to just take the money.

WhatsApp I'll grant you, hard to think of any alternate chat app that could've gotten as ubiquitous as it did. Though, again, was that also mostly WhatsApp's own success, amplified by Facebook's ubiquity? Not to mention, Google being as incompetent at chat as it is at social, Apple unwilling to entertain servicing other operating systems, and Blackberry, AOL, MSN Messenger, etc. having disappeared long ago.

Interestingly, Meta hasn't seem interested in trying to compete with "channelized" IRC chatroom-style apps in the vein of Slack or Discord. Maybe there's some enterprise Messenger for Businesses that does that, idk.

In recent years, operating it successfully despite burning through billions for their metaverse boondoggle, sure

Should they be holding cash instead?

Works for Apple. And other companies seem to be able to do R&D, even at a loss, without burning through billions.

Did you forget that apple also has an AR/VR product and doesn’t report that portion of their R&D separately so we don’t know how much it costs?

Cool so even if they burned through $45 billion as Meta did with VR, they still have $53.77 billion on hand as of December

So you just want Meta to carry more cash - the concern wasn't actually about metaverse?

I don’t want Meta to do anything. All I want to do is mock the idea that Zuckerberg has been some sort of exemplary CEO the last few years in the face of the Metaverse project being such a resounding dud- what’s the punchline, billions spent to add feet to the avatars? Not to mention how he’s allowed his actual site to go fallow, between the Feed being inundated with AI slop and Reels being an imitation of Instagram Shorts being an imitation of TikTok and Snapchat shorts and Vine.

> what’s the punchline, billions spent to add feet to the avatars?

I think the metaverse imagery you are referring to was about 10 years ago.

Less than two years ago

https://www.pcmag.com/news/avatars-in-meta-horizons-finally-...

Maybe he’s just good at not rocking the boat too much? I’m fairly certain these things mostly keep moving without any input.

The boat is constantly rocking though, and it's actually incredible how he's kept the boat afloat and increasingly profitable. You can despise their impact on society, but he's an incredible example of a very successful CEO.

Political investigations, anti-trust, terrible media and brand image. GDPR. DMA. Etc. A literal genocide associated with their product.

The shift from desktop to mobile, and the continued evolution of the distribution channel - eg. the "Anti-tracking" requirement on apple devices.

The shift from text posts to images, to stories, to short-form video. From broadcast to DMs and groups.

The shift from "social" media to celebrity and influencer followings, to a feed entirely algorithmic.

The shift in advertisement formats, the shift across what gets advertised (eg. apps didn't exist at all when Facebook started, now they track ad-click-to-install rates through ML models).

I get your point about what he has accomplished. But at the same time, right after saying he's an incredible example of a very successful CEO, you acknowledge "a literal genocide associated with their product." I really wish we could shift how we define success for these CEOs.

I suppose I just don’t find any of those things very admirable? The fact that their product is associated with so much bad shit and still alive is a terrible thing for society. I just cannot reasonably call someone that led all that a ‘good CEO’, because they represent nothing that I’d like a CEO to be, regardless of what Wall Street things.

I’d also argue that it just means that Facebook was very successful at following all the trends and purchasing what they couldn’t replicate.

The CEO is captain of their ship.

Saying ‘I hate their ship, and that it hasn’t sunk’ doesn’t mean they are a bad CEO.

If anything, it means they might be an even better CEO because it’s still doing well, running around rampaging, despite all the hate.

After all - who is the better pirate? The one who is hated and infamous (and still alive pirating), or the one no one has ever heard of?

Your definition of "good" is weird, man. He's good at making money, that doesn't make him a good CEO. A good CEO should be able to make money and have some goddamn principles.

It's like staying that Putin is a good leader, because he's managed to stay in power for so long. Like what the fuck?

should == I wish, eh?

> associated with so much bad shit

Reputation vs harm ethics.

> I’d also argue that it just means that Facebook was very successful at following all the trends

Yeah foreseeing and executing on those trends is the hard part.

Each one of these platform empires from IBM to Microsoft to Google to Amazon to Uber has been very successful at foreseeing and executing on trends, until they're not. Meta was so for a long time, but not necessarily in recent years. That will, inevitably, be the fate of TikTok and whatever future empires arise from the current environment.

I am not saying Zuckerberg hasn't achieved much in the past. It's just funny to crow about his "super power" when Facebook reached critical mass over a decade and a half ago and has been able to coast along as a money printer based on network effects. And also as a Xerox copy printer- I always like to bring up the time they cloned HQ Trivia.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31691294

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27933874

It's good for a platform empire to spent some of its lavish riches on R&D, even if it's just to diversify its moat and further entrench itself. But less so when that ends up as a quixotic boondoggle no one asked for (Metaverse) or as a blatant unoriginal copy (Reels, Confetti). At some point it's not really brilliance to be "foreseeing and executing on those trends" when you have the resources to chase after every trend. Then you've just turned your megacorporation into a VC fund, throwing anything and everything at the wall until something sticks. As we can see, there are a ton of initiatives, projects, departments that don't stick, and some quite spectacularly (Metaverse, again).

Eventually you just end up with the unoriginal silliness of LinkedIn Stories or every single platform including FB having its own Clubhouse, even when Clubhouse itself was a fad that faded as quickly as it appeared during the height of the pandemic.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27580241

What I'm saying is, what has Zuckerberg done lately?

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