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Comment by SwellJoe | Hacker News Reader

Zuckerberg is proof you only need to get really lucky once. He's basically flailed at leading facebook ever since, going all in on monumentally dumb bets and erratically making headcount and project decisions, and still he somehow keeps getting richer.

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Even if only for how well Instagram and WhatsApp were managed post acquisition, your message doesn’t hold up.

Most large tech companies buy late and struggle to integrate the products and teams they acquire without creating massive damage. He didn’t. Twice.

I am quite far from a fan of what he brought to the world (privacy nightmares), but to say that he’s a proof you only need to get lucky once is quite far off.

also: face tagging in photos, the fb app platform and the like button pioneered concepts that we take for granted today. also, how product is done internally, growth metrics, all borne from facebook.

The like button is an ingenious and insidious invention. It compelled every other external web property to willingly load fb sdk. It’s mind blowing how effective it is.

I am morally against Facebook, but anyone that says zucky was lucky, as a tech person, likely just sour grapes.

We take for granted a lot of things, doesn't mean they meaningfully contribute to our lives, why is face tagging or thumbs up so special? I believe we already had upvotes and reactions on other platforms like early forums and chat platforms. Even if it was the first one to popularize it, it didn't really come about in a vacuum, the Web 2.0 at that time was all about user engagement and interactions.

Zuck is a world class operator. He’s led one of the top richest companies of all time.

I think the world is worse for it but that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. The list is just to refute the idea that it was one weird trick that gave him the keys to the planet.

and it’s not about him being first or coding it himself, it’s that it happened with him at the helm. that’s just how it goes.

> Zuck is a world class operator.

I think his recent fumbles ironically prove your point. How many people could afford to fail so many times in a row (Remember their crypto coin? VR? Now LLMs?) and still be in the big leagues?

I don't like Zuckerberg at all but Instagram and WhatsApp purchases were _very_ good calls

Indeed they were.

Also, it’s interesting to note that in both cases they where two very lean companies (Instagram had 13 employees and WhatsApp had 55) with pretty a pretty large and engaged user base (30 million for Insta and 450 million for WhatsApp)

Yeah, and he threw a huge bunch of cash to acquire them. pretty easy to acquire. Harder to build. He got lucky with facebook because myspace sucked. Good timing.

I always hear reverence around Myspace. Is it really rose-tinted nostalgia? It seemed like a cool core product.

MySpace gave users a lot of freedom. That was great in certain scenarios but at it got bigger it meant there was just more noise and the general atmosphere was very messy for lack of a better word. Facebook was very clean by comparison and it felt natural to connect to people who couldn't handle MySpace, people in your family or at work etc. Then eventually it got big enough through that that it just became the place to connect with your cool friends too because "everyone" was there.

So yeah, it's kinda mixed. The core product was cool but it wasn't as suitable for as a replacement for the phone book in the way Facebook was.

Yes and then Facebook did everything they could to subvert granular privacy controls (Myspace was decent, it had a wall but that was about it) which is of paramount importance for people with real safety issues

FB would have been invented. It's just another layer of authentication anyway. Myspace was an interesting experiment for its time

...Comparisons of Tom to Zuck are rife I'm aware but somehow Myspace isn't known for "they trust me, dumb fucks"

...but most of all, Samy is my hero!

They spied on their mobile users with the Facebook app to detect Instagram and WhatsApp growth early

corporate espionage at global scale to get ahead of existential threats is some pretty insightful leadership, it’s all a matter of what team you’re rooting for.

By the time FB bought WhatsApp it had nearly a billion users. No need for technology conspiracy nonsense.

I guess it's hard to say how much them monitoring their (potential) competitors influenced their decisions but it's definitely _not_ conspiracy nonsense and pretty well documented:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onavo

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-47281906

As another commenter said that he acquired both with the money made on Facebook, they didn't originate within the company.

Sure, they worked out pretty well, but those were 12 and 14 years ago at this point, and aren't the only calls Facebook has made over the years:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitio...

IMO the actual prescient call he made early on is to hang on to 60% of the total voting power of the company. I have to imagine there are several points where he'd have been pushed out quite a while ago if he hadn't have done that.

But if you take the same perspective as a VC: 95% of your bets can fail if the other 5% are spectacular.

He made spectacular bets with Instagram and WhatsApp. Most CEOs don’t make spectacular bets because their business doesn’t allow it, meaning the VC analogy doesn’t hold for them.

Hasn’t Meta failed to monetise WhatsApp?

So it may be popular but they have ultimately failed commercially so far. They just bought an Indian startup and immediately put the founder in charge of WhatsApp.

Only this week they announced WhatsApp would allow usernames rather than rely on phone numbers. All the other competitors apps (signal,telegram etc) did this years ago.

Whatsapp is by far meta biggest potential. If they could turn it into a superApp like WeChat they would make a lot of money but only if that don't destroy the app.

Think that means 95% of bets over a small period of time? (A single fund within the VC) as opposed to the whole VC since inception.

And so not comparable.

VC investing is also a tax write off for rich investors which is offset against their gains elsewhere, wasted company money is a loss for the share buyer.

> Instagram and WhatsApp purchases were _very_ good calls

Elementary call when you have the data no-one else has thanks to illicit means and explicitly decided on a buy or bury strategy

A very HN comment... At the time, almost nobody felt spending billions acquiring these companies was "elementary". Instagram was bought so early that spending a billion on a startup was unheard of. And WhatsApp was so expensive that they questioned Zuck's sanity.

You mention two strategic enablers that made these unusual acquisitions seem obvious to FB leadership. So were those two not good calls?

The parent comment is referring to a “VPN” installed by Facebook on users phone that surreptitiously sent telemetry data to Facebook. No one else had that information.

And also even if they never had Onavo you have Zuck furiously backpedaling in an email about I'm not saaaaaaaying we should acquire IG to wipe them out from the landscape of competition, but........

And then you have the WA founder (Acton) famously saying delete facebook

Some acquisitions make the product better or are altruistic. Zuck's war chest isn't one of them

Just because he fails publicly sometimes does not mean he only makes bad decisions. Facebook is still incredibly successful. The market may apply a Zuckerberg discount compared to other tech companies, but that is not the same thing as saying he has been a bad operator.

As a founder who has gone through scaling processes, I am quite impressed at Zuckerberg's ability to remain relatively competent and relevant at the top role throughout the whole journey. The skillset required changes quite a lot in each phase.

There are very few cases where the archetypical young garage-founder has stayed on top in the long-run.

Don't mistake tenure for competence. Meta's stock structure is such that Zuck cannot be forced out by the board or the shareholders regardless of how many mistakes he makes.

HN is so extreme sometimes. I remember when Llama was gaining popularity, everyone here was praising him for releasing open models. Same for other works in this area. Also remember praise for some VR devices.

And it's all back to Facebook, nothing in between. It doesn't look any different from general population influenced by TV and other social media.

> I remember when Llama was gaining popularity, everyone here was praising him for releasing open models. Same for other works in this area. Also remember praise for some VR devices

Neither of which have been great commercial successes. Open source LLM's and VR devices have have been cool products for HN readers, but haven't made much impact on the public or Meta's revenue.

Whilst Instagram and Facebook Ad revenue is coming in it means Zuckerberg could spend billions pivoting the company to country and western themed steak houses and the share holders wouldn't (couldn't) do anything about it.

I am not HN. I'm just one guy. And, I have not, in recent memory, said anything nice about Zuckerberg.

> and still he somehow keeps getting richer.

Just a stab in the dark, but it's likely because FB and meta are wildly successful businesses, and it's almost impossible to attribute that to one "lucky" event at the inception of the business.

If I'm being honest I'm actually kind of shocked at the engagement this comment is getting and the fact it's still visible. Like him or not, if you're capable of being objective, he is doing the opposite of failing...

You know that a lot of acquisitions is equity hire. How do you get engineers to be excited about fixing something low level in Facebook, a hard task; you don't. Better to wrap those problems in green field projects and have engineers excited, and adopt that tech back into Facebook. Google done this forever (DeepMind). Seems like the work of a genius?

Zuckerbergs comment from 2010: «We have not once bought a company for the company. We buy companies to get excellent people.»

Getting a company to IPO is not about getting lucky once - it's making hundreds of good decisions daily. From hiring to product direction to fundraising.

Like or hate the guy you gotta give credit where it's due. (Same for Musk, etc.)

There was no luck involved, just stealing and legal swindling.

A real proper true American! No wonder he gets along well with Trump

The power of network effects. Same with Elon and Twitter

The man has its flaws but to deny that he has been a very good operator is just putting your head in the sand.

- acquired WhatsApp and Instagram and grew them into the most popular apps on the planet - created an gigantic ad business that enables entire new types of SMBs to exist that rely on Meta to find their customers - which is pretty much a money volcano - bought a ton of GPUs right at the inflection of early LLM take-off

None of this was obvious when he started Facebook but obviously well executed in hindsight.

People who never built a company have the craziest takes on company building, I swear.

You talking about me?

And the guy will never ever be laid off by the board while he lays off thousands and tens of thousands each time he fails and loses billions

All thanks to Silicon Valley's ridiculous stock structures

He’s got that Epstein class luck

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