Zuckerberg: Why I stayed CEO even though many people thought I should quit | Hacker News Reader

Zuckerberg: Why I stayed CEO even though many people thought I should quit

businessinsider.com

55 pointsAdrock29 comments

Remember the good old days when the internet was text and it took 3 minutes to read an article versus 30 minutes to watch it?

Can someone link to a transcript?

too bad there's not a transcript. however, i just watched it and would highly recommend it.

some of the highlights:

- 3 key values: move fast. be bold. focus on impact(helps attract the best people; at fb each engineer is responsible for >1M users).

- the more control you give users over their own information, the more they will share

- unless you're breaking some stuff, you're not moving fast enough.

I know the feeling - I try to torrent a book and there's ten 300 mb mp3s of someone READING it but not 3 meg book itself....

I say this with all sincerity: It must have been hard work for him to learn how to not come across as an arrogant douchebag like he used to.

Kudos to a nerd who learned how to hack his personality and become a positive PR force instead of a negative one.

He also had some very interesting stuff to say about Facebook. ;)

and kudos to you for sticking at it through the ads. care to summarize his interesting stuff about FB?

I guess I wasn't paying attention to him during that phase.

Any representative examples you could link to?

I found this article about a 2005 interview but the video linked appears to have been taken down. http://www.marketwatch.com/story/the-facebook-phenomenon

Edit: OK, here it is. http://bambi.blogs.com/bambi_francisco/files/zuckerberg_256k...

Personally I don't think he sounds that arrogant; the only thing that stands out is the question/answer "What was your pitch?" "Oh... we didn't do one."

Can someone find examples of Zuckerberg in 2006/2007 for us to compare?

This was one that I particularly thought was a little bit of him reading his own press a bit too much:

“the next hundred years will be different for advertising, and it starts today. As marketers pushing our information out is no longer enough. We are announcing anew advertising system, not about broadcasting messages, about getting into the conversations between people. 3 pieces: build pages for advertisers, a new kind of ad system to spread the messages virally, and gain insights. ... Once every hundred years media changes. the last hundred years have been defined by the mass media. The way to advertise was to get into the mass media and push out your content. That was the last hundred years. In the next hundred years information won’t be just pushed out to people, it will be shared among the millions of connections people have. Advertising will change. You will need to get into these connections."

http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/11/06/liveblogging-facebook-a...

I actually just got out of an advertising class (like, literally 3 minutes ago), and we discussed this. It's dead on. Television advertising is in many ways the exact same as radio advertising: New techniques have been developed, but the philosophy behind it remains the same. Internet advertising is a much, much different beast.

"I'm CEO...bitch!"

Can you please provide some facts about his previous "douchebag" personality?

I am not trying to put you on the spot here. It is the second time I come across this sort of statement about Mark and I would like to know other people's experience.

A story relayed to me by a colleague goes something like this:

He and his group went to Facebook about a year ago to seek out a relationship, spent weeks setting up the meeting. The day came, they finally arrived, sat around in the conference room with some of the other FB execs (sans Mark). About 20 minutes after the meeting was to start, Mark walks into the room, looks around at everybody there for a few seconds says a flat "No" then walks out of the room.

The FB execs then jumped in to handle the situation and actually get down to negotiating the deal with lots of utterances of "he's just like that" and "he didn't mean anything by that" and then handled all the business stuff you would expect to happen at a high level meeting like that.

OK, I apologize in advance, but that's a funny one.

All i gotta say is that those random ads in the video are super annoying. DO it either before or after.

And they split the thing into 3 so that they could put more midrolls in. It's really horrible.

I didn't see a single ad while watching all three videos. I must be lucky or something.

terrible.. i gave up after the second ad interrupted him mid-sentence.

Out of curiosity, would you rather pay to watch?

No I wouldn't pay to watch a 60 second clip.

60 seconds? The interview is 30 minutes.

Agreed. But It was broken up in too many parts. If it was a single video, with no ads I might pay.

Good question. I personally would not rather pay. I chose to not watch it.

The thing that bugs me about the "founders should run the company" line of thought is that it's not entirely true. Bill Gates handed the business side of the company over to John Shirley in 1983 and Steve Jobs did the same with Apple and John Sculley. And both were right to do so (Gates often says Microsoft might not have made it without Shirley, Jobs is still a little bitter about the whole "pushing him out of the company thing")

Both realized it would be better to have someone with experience run the company while they learned the ropes (since both eventually took over their respective companies though we all know Jobs' road to CEO of Apple was a longer one)

So it's' not like there's some grand tradition of founders holding onto the reigns of power and never letting go. Just the opposite. The truly smart founders got someone who knew what they were doing and used the opportunity to learn from them.

Zuckerberg did the same thing: he hired Sheryl Sandberg as COO, and she manages the business side of things.

FTA: "In this model, the founder remains CEO of the company and surrounds himself or herself with a strong executive team."

Sculley nearly buried Apple. It's by no means clear that was a smart decision.

Best part: "If you're not breaking things, you're not moving fast enough" [...] "The goal of building something is to build something, and not to avoid making mistakes"

"If you don't make mistakes, you can't make decisions."

-Warren Buffett

Direct link to whole 30 min interview: http://www.businessinsider.com/mark-zuckerberg-innovation-20...

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