IMHO Mark Zuckerberg is a textbook case of someone who got lucky once by basically being in the right place at the right time, but who attributes his success to his skill. There’s probably a proper term for this.
Facebook made the transition to mobile faster than other competitors and successfully kept G+ from becoming competition.
The instagram purchase felt insane at the time ($1b to share photos) but facebook was able to convert it into a moneymaking juggernaut in time for the flattened growth of their flagship application.
Zuck hired Sheryl Sandburg and successfully turned a website with a ton of users into an ad-revenue machine. Plenty of other companies struggled to convert large user bases into dollars.
This obviously wasn't all based on him. He had other people around him working on this stuff and it isn't right to attribute all company success to the CEO. The metaverse play was obviously a legendary bust. But "he just got lucky" feels more like Myspace Tom than Zuckerberg in my mind.
> The instagram purchase felt insane at the time ($1b to share photos) but facebook was able to convert it into a moneymaking juggernaut in time for the flattened growth of their flagship application.
Facebook's API was incredibly open and accessible at the time and Instagram was overtaking users' news feeds. Zuckerberg wasn't happy that an external entity was growing so fast and onboarding users so easily that it was driving more content to news feeds than built-in tools. Buying Instagram was a defensive move, especially since the API became quite closed-off since then.
Your other points are largely valid, though. Another comment called the WhatsApp purchase "inspired", but I feel that also lacks context. Facebook bought a mobile VPN service used predominantly by younger smartphone users, Onavo(?), and realized the amount of traffic WhatsApp generated by analyzing the logs. Given the insight and growth they were monitoring, they likely anticipated that WhatsApp could usurp them if it added social features. Once again, a defensive purchase.
And what did he do to keep G+ from becoming a valid competitor? It killed itself. I signed up but there was no network effect and it kind of sucked. Google had a way of shutting down all their product attempts too
That has a lot to do with the fact that it's a business centric company. His acumen has been in user growth, monetization of ads, acquisitions and so on. He's very similar to Altman.
The problems start when you try to venture into hard technological topics, like the Metaverse fiasco, where you have to have a sober and engineering oriented understanding of the practical limits of technology, like Carmack who left Meta pretty frustrated. You can't just bullshit infinitely when the tech and not the sales matter.
Contrast it with Gates who had a serious programming background, he never promised even a fraction of the cringe worthy stuff you hear from some CEOs nowadays because he would have known it's nonsense. Or take Apple, infinitely more sane on the AI topic because it isn't just a "more users, more growth, stonks go up" company.
There are literally books that make this argument from insider perspectives (which doesn't mean it's true, but it is possible, and does happen regularly).
A basketball team can be great even if their coach sucks.
You can't attribute everything to the person at the top.
He is a very hands CEO, not one who is relying on experts to run things for him.
In contrast, I’ve heard that Elon has a very good senior management team and they sort of know how to show him shiny things that he can say he’s very hands on about while they focus on what they need to do.
It’s easy to cherry pick a few bets that flopped for every mega tech company: Amazon has them, Google has them, remember Windows Phone? etc.
I see the failures as a feature, not a bug - the guy is one of the only founder CEOs to have ever built a $2T company (trillion with a T). I imagine part of that is being willing to make big bets.
And it also seems like no individual product failure has endangered their company’s footing at all.
While I’m not a Meta or Zuck fan myself, using a relatively small product flop as an indication a $2T tech mega corp isn’t well run seems… either myopic or disingenuous.
Oculus Quest are decent products, but a complete flop compared to their investment and Zuck's vision of the metaverse. Remember they even renamed the company? You could say they're on betting on the long run, but I just don't see that happening in 5 or even 10 years.
As an owner of Quest 2 and 3, I'd love to be proven wrong though. I just don't see any evidence of this would change any time soon.
Even if they aren’t great products or just wither into nothing, I don’t think we will be see a HBS case study in 20 years saying, “Meta could have been a really successful company, but were it for their failure in these two product lines”
the product is used by advertisers to sell stuff to those humans.
Then they can bankroll their own new entrepreneurial ideas risk-free, essentially.
I have hundreds of hours building and tinkering on the original kickstarter kit and then they sold to FB and shut down all the open source stuff.
Google gave me a paywalled link to FTCWatch that supposedly has the details, but I can’t check.
FB acquired IG because it was blowing up in SF and MZ (other leaders too) were looking at how quickly it appeared to be growing and how good it was.
Insta was a huge hit for sure but since then Meta Capital allocation has been a disaster including a lot of badly timed buybacks
It is no secret that the person who turned Facebook into a money-printing machine is/was Sheryl Sandberg.
Thus, the evidence is clear that Mark Zuckerberg had the right idea at the right time (the question is whether this was because of his skills or because he got lucky), but turning his good idea(s) into a successful business was done by other people (lead by Sheryl Sandberg).
Wouldn’t that indicate, at least a little bit, a great management move by Zuck?
etc. etc.
How many people also where at the right place and right time and were lucky then went bankrupt or simply never made it this high?
Do I think he stole it? Dunno. (Though Aaron Greenspan did log his houseSYSTEM server requests, which seems pretty damning) But given what he's done since (Whatsapp, copying every Snapchat feature)? I'd say the likelihood is non-zero
Maybe he's just gambling that Altman is right, saving his money for now and will be able to pick up AI researcher and developers at a massive discount next year. Meta doesn't have much of a presence in the space market right now, and they have other businesses, so waiting a year or two might not matter.