Dissent Is Dead At Facebook, Employees Complain
businessinsider.com
businessinsider.com
But, there is one thing I can comment on. The role of any Software Company CEO is to create a system that translates brain waves into dollars.
That's what software companies do. Creating software isn't like creating a car. It's about generating "abstract ideas" that can be understood by a computer and are useful to humans.
You take smart people, give them the environment they need to do great work, and say "ok, now think me up some software".
Discouraging dissent, in general, is equivalent to turning off brain waves.
The thing about smart people is that they have ideas. A lot of them. By definition, thinking is what smart people do best. In a software company those are the kind of people you want, because that's what you are selling: re-packaged thoughts.
When you say "this is the way we are going to do things, because I'm the boss and I know best, so please don't come to me with reasons why this might not be good, instead just shut up and do what I so, or else go away" you are explicitly encouraging people to not think.
Encouraging people in your software company not to think is stupid. It's encouraging them not to produce the one thing you need them to produce in order to make money.
I'm not saying you want a democracy. The CEO, at the end of the day, is responsible for the company's performance. He's the one who makes the decisions. But, being responsible for the company's performance means the "burden of greatness" is on you. If you hear a voice of dissent, it's not the dissenter's responsibility to prove her case. It's your responsibility to listen to what she has to say, and figure out if there's any hidden merit to it.
The goal is to build a profitable business, not to be a powerful executive. Leave your ego at the door. If the person who is suggesting "maybe there is a better way" had a perfect, well crafted message, that seemed obvious and completely brilliant, why on earth would she bring it to you. She could just take her perfectly formed product to the market and wipe the floor with you.
You are the boss precisely for one reason: because you can take other people's brain waves and convert them into money. Because of this, your goal should be to get the people who work with you to generate as much brain wave activity as possible. That means encouraging dissent.
If you aren't doing that, then you are not leading.
So, if this is happening at Facebook, then it's a shame.
It doesn't matter, because we'll criticize anybody who isn't Steve Jobs for thinking they're Steve Jobs, but Zuckerberg is largely responsible for Facebook's formation, from what I've read, and for all his criticism he's managed to get a hell of a lot done for his company. So I'm willing to give him a chance and see if he's as good as he thinks he is - and failing that, if he falls I'll hope he pulls an SJ and comes back in 10 years with something even better.
Having just heard about Sam Altman a few days ago I am already much more impressed:
I saw Altman's speech and was pretty impressed. He doesn't dick around. He's also a more confident speaker than Zuckerberg. But with respect to him, Facebook is better designed (Loopt is horrendously generic), and it's done more to change the web than most web sites. The Facebook Platform changed a lot. Making money isn't the only part of design.
Part of being a great CEO is being a cheerleader. You can't do that being hidden.
There are many different types of leadership, some of which Zuckerberg has. Making Facebook into the culture mainstay it is has been a huge accomplishment. I am sure a lot of this is due to him. But he needs to be an effective communicator both internally and externally in order to succeed. He can have awesome ideas that are technically groundbreaking, but he needs to make others believe.
There are good reasons to be social to people. I'm a social person. That said, I respect immensely the people who don't feel pressured to talk to every person that writes to him.
1) When it started, there were already many social networks
2) Because it positioned itself as a social network for college students, it got the early growth and adoption any "social" website needs to survive
3) They've grown REALLY fast since then, and have started to really lock in the users
4) It's not unthinkable for them to have a billion users. Once they have all the users they want, they can pick and choose their business model.
5) Mark Zuckerberg can't be removed from the CEO position, and probably holds more than 20% of the company
6) Facebook is hiring top talent, on par with Google and probably better than Microsoft.
These things don't just happen out of the blue. For someone who has consolidated power in a company that could rival Google, I don't think Zuckerberg gets enough credit. If I were pg, I would have put him in my top 5.
I think you may be getting ahead of yourself on that one.
Why? Popularity as a free service doesn't necessarily imply that said popularity will be retained upon introduction of a monetary fee.
Like it or not, facebook has real utility (just like central park), and people are willing to pay for real utility in one way or another.
A lot of people don't think Facebook is a business either.
Moreover, if every user loses money for Facebook, what's the financial model of the company? Even if I like Facebook, if I'm not providing it with cash flow, when it does it have to bail out of its business?
Only sites with a lot of users, like Myspace, could quickly become a threat to Myspace. Facebook has surpassed a critical mass of users, so they probably would have time to respond to any technical challenges.And Myspace seems to have a different and less successful focus than Facebook that would need to be changed. I don't really care about telling everyone who my top friends are, designing my page, or using Myspace as a blog. Basically, I just want to quickly and easily find out the major events in my friend's lives. It does not matter how brilliantly designed a site is, I cannot adequately meet my needs with a site until it has a good portion of my friends as users.
So to go against Facebook successfully, a company would need to start in an extremely small niche and grow, or provide value unrelated to social networking. It is a lot easier to reach critical mass in a very small niche. And if you aren't solely in social networking, people are going to be using your network before it provides decent social value.
You're out of your mind.
Looking at things now I wouldn't say that Facebook would rival Google, but it's definitely not out of their mind to imagine that they could.
Really? I've never heard this. Is there a condition in the companies charter that forbids it?
Usually all you need is a majority of the board to vote the CEO out and since he only has one vote and there are more than 2 people on the facebook board it seems like he could be voted out.
What you are saying is true. But it is unrelated to what is being said. What we're saying is, Zuck needs to drink less of his own kool-aid and start caring about people other than himself. I admire his commitment, but it's a shame that he doesn't recognize, or isn't thankful for, the large amount of luck that played a role in Facebook's success. If he had attacked the problem of "MySpace, but better" at a different school, or in a different way, or any number of things, then Facebook wouldn't be what it is today.
If he's acting like Jobs, he's premature. At least Jobs' company was very profitable in the early days. Also, I just left a company run by a Jobs/Zuckerberg type; good sense of design, but very controlling, and needlessly so. I don't envy Facebook employees. There is more to life than working for the arrogant.
Brush up on your Apple history. Jobs was fired because he was running his company into a financial mire thanks to his over-the-top idealism.
I don't envy Facebook employees. There is more to life than working for the arrogant.
They chose where to work. Just like Apple employees chose. If you're not the sort of person who works well under a very brilliant, very arrogant man, you're allowed to find other places to work.
It's not the positive or critical things that are said in meetings that will harm a company. It's the things that aren't said that will eat away the core of a company.
When things that should be said aren't; there are typically a few reasons. 1.) the person isn't capable of leading 2.) the person is passive aggressive and will use there dissenting opinion in a private and undermine way. 3.) they already said the same thing many times and have had no luck in getting their opinion across.
He's gone from cool tech head to some kind of semi-comedian (to whom owning a credit card is big news) in just over a year.
I repeat this has, umm, nothing to do with any particular company. Yeah. Just so you don't try to copy my trading strategy. I repeat: nothing to do with, um, any particular stock. I'm just asking a technical question about shorting IPOs, now or in the future. Yeah...
Your downside is unlimited.
Just a warning!
Investment banks tend to underprice IPOs by about 10-15% on average, and intentionally so. This makes allocation a favor, because of the obvious expectancy in being in on one. However, the company ends up being undercapitalized for the amount of equity given up. It's utterly sleazy, but it's business as usual on Wall Street.
This also means that if you're not on a bank's favorite clients list, you don't want to be involved with IPOs, because you're only going to be able to get in on the crappy ones.
The concept of shorting Facebook is somewhat of a joke, because of that. I'm no fan of Mark Zuckerberg, but I wouldn't actually claim to know better than the market what the company's worth. That said, if there were a way to have shorted some share of the company at $15B when Microsoft bought in, that would have been awesome.
Buy put options on the underlying stock. This gives you the right, but not the obligation, to force a sale of stock at the strike price.
Say you have a hot Internet IPO which debuts at $10. People assume it will follow the Google trajectory and be worth hundreds within a few years. You can buy puts at $10 for a year from now -- this would entitle you to sell any shares you held at $10, regardless of what the price is. If a hypothetical counterparty believes that the price is going to increase, writing this option (promising to buy X shares from you at the price of $10 from you a year from now if you ask for it, in return for cash money today) is like printing free money: you'll probably let the option expire without acting on it, and otherwise they get the stock they want anyhow.
Now examine what happens if the stock tanks to, say, $2 over the year: your options entitled you to sell X shares at $10 apiece, regardless of the market price of the stock. You can thus buy the stock on the open market ($2 per share) and exercise the option (selling at $10 per share), netting $8 a share minus commissions minus the premium you paid for the option in the first place. (In actual practice, since you can SELL the put option and it has high "intrinsic value" near expiration in that scenario, you don't actually have to ever become an owner of the underlying stock.)
But what if the price balloons to $20? Clearly, you don't want to buy at $20 and then sell the same day at $10. That's the beauty of puts, though: you don't have to. You just walk away from your options, which expire worthless. You are never at risk, in this strategy, of losing more money than you spent on acquiring the puts in the first place. This contrasts favorably to the standard short sale, which has unlimited downside risk.
On considered reflection I'm 75% invested in index funds, after reading Bogle et al and figuring that no matter how smart you are its impossible to reliably beat the market. The other 25% is mentally accounted for as "World of Warcraft except with a higher monthly fee and the slim possibility of better loot". (I bought a nice chunk of BAC back in the fifties, among other brilliant ideas, and am very, very glad I mentally waved adieu to all money invested prior to actually waving adieu to it.)