I think that's just how business works. The technical impressiveness of his "PHP website" is irrelevant—he was in the right place, at the right time, with a strong initial user base.
Edit: I'm not trying to downplay his business acumen, either. Facebook clearly made lots of good decisions down the line that helped them reach the scale they reached. But the reason that the product took off at first had a lot more to do with how it got in front of users in the early days than its technological superiority.
It's a lot more than right place, right time, strong initial user base - myspace had these as well.
It was the understanding and (ab)use of that position to increase the user base, and to make it into a marketing machine like no other. Purchase of Onavo, that let him spy on users better and realize he needs to buy Instagram and Whatsapp, but not Skype, to maintain monopoly. Quite a few of other data deals, most considered shady by anyone aware of them (though afaik all legal).
Mark Zuckerberg was in the right place, at the right time, and extremely astute and intelligent (if ethically challenged, IMO) -- much like Bill Gates 40 years ago. There were possibly thousands of people in the right place and the right time in the 1980s, but only one Bill Gates and only one Steve Jobs. Similarly, there were thousands of people in the right place and the right time in 2004, but only one Mark Zuckerberg.
Also, I suspect in 50-100 years when things are declassified, we'll find that he also had help from 3 letter agencies in exchange for the data trove he was able to collect.
Exactly. Facebook's founding philosophy "Move Fast And Break Things" was crucial to it's success. I say give Zuck credit where credit's due even if his attitude to user privacy stinks. One thing still puzzles me about Zuckerberg, though. He says in the emails with Greenspan that he has a limited attention span for coding, hence his preference for web technology, yet he also created Synapse in C++ to a standard acceptable enough for Microsoft to offer him serious money. Doesn't add up.
"Whatever you think of Mark Zuckerberg, you can't accuse him of being stupid or lazy"
Whatever you can say about Mark Zuckerberg, I doubt that he was even half as smart as, say, von Neumann or Tesla, or Da Vinci, or probably hundreds if not thousands of other people whose names we all know, not to mention the probably millions of people who were just as smart but have remained unknown.
These people did not achieve riches either because they did not consider them to be important, because they got screwed by people who were less scrupulous or more well connected, were just unlucky, or for a million other reasons than their intelligence.
Instead, the really brilliant minds of humanity are almost always the servants of far less intelligent people.
As for hard work, do you know how many single parents there are who are holding down two or three minimum wage jobs to support their families, dealing day after day and year after year of getting spat on and despised for being poor or having the jobs they have? Or the fish seller who gets up at three in the morning every day to haul his wares to the market, clean fish guts off the sidewalk, and brave the weather to sell you fish day after day. These people aren't doing their work from a comfy McMansion or penthouse office, or ordering people about to do their work for them, but they work just as hard.
But what makes people think that intelligence or hard work make people deserving of money? People fetishize workaholism and intelligence, while there are plenty of smart, hard working sociopaths out there (arguably, they're exactly the kind who attain "success" in the business world, because they're smart and have no scruples to keep them back from doing whatever it takes to succeed, even if it means walking over the backs and faces of hundreds or thousands of people).
To me it's people who help others who are far more deserving of "success". The people who help the poor and disadvantaged, the teachers, the people who sacrifice themselves rather than those that sacrifice others. But most of these people don't attain "success" in the conventional sense. They usually die poor and unknown, and you rarely see books or articles about how great they were.
The fawning is usually reserved for the rich, who, when it comes down to it, usually get that praise because they're rich. If they make the wrong decisions or are unlucky, no matter how smart or hard working they were, they are forgotten and often despised. That would have been Zuckerberg's fate as well, without any change in his intelligence or work ethic, if he hadn't struck it rich.
I think it's comparable to organized crime bosses. (But not that it is as morally reprehensible.)
From what I have seen from huge organized crime bosses from biographies and documentaries is that people like Pablo Escobar aren't necessarily very smart or super talented. But what sets them apart is their willingness to break all laws and moral norms. Crime leaders rise in the ranks because they are willing to kill their competitors. They are willing to do things that even other criminals are not willing to do. They act while others are hesitating with their pesky conscience.
I think this happens albeit to a lesser degree with people like Mark. There are many things about the founding of facebook that most would not do. Most would feel bad about stealing a client's idea or about diluting a co-founder's shares or any of the myriad little choices that an individual founder has to make. A lot of us just don't have it in us to exploit workers or partners like that.
That's not to say you can't be successful without amoral behaviour. But it is more difficult if your competitor is willing to show up at your house and cap you in the back of the head (metaphorically) at a moment's notice.
von Neumann was not out there endlessly trying to figure out ways to make more and more money.
Enormously intelligent and talented people like that are rarely motivated by things like that (though, of course, there are exceptions, but sadly even there they're often not successful, for a variety of reasons having little to do with their intelligence).
In my own reading of biographies of people who managed to accumulate a lot of money or power, it's remarkable how often they come from extremely poor and powerless families.
It's tempting to try to armchair analyze them and attribute their tunnel vision and tenacity at making ever more and more money and aquiring more and more power to their childhood deprivation and fear of ever being destitute again, even long after they've achieved far more than enough to support themselves and their families without working another day in their life again.
Of course, this is rarely the case for tech billionaires, who tend to come from middle class or even wealthy families, but it has often been true of extremely wealthy or powerful people in other fields.
It’s called capitalism: the system under "some shmuck who makes a PHP website" can become one of the richest people in the world.
And it's called America: the country where "a shmuck" can be free enough to be allowed to do the above.
Think the alternative: the places where only the right people, approved, connected and considered "worthy", are allowed to become rich. The mind truly boggles.
I guess I'll be the contrarian here. The real customers of FB (aka advertisers) that I've asked all claim to get their money's worth from their ad spends and obviously they keep going back to the well rather than switching to somewhere else. Fake users and bots can't be spending fake money. So even if the claims about the raw number of users are grossly exaggerated, the performance metrics which actually matter (eg conversions per ad dollar) can't be fake. Therefore the company can't just be an elaborate scam.
Many Madoff investors praised Madoff for many years for the amazing returns they received. Many of them more than doubled their investments many times over. So Madoff cannot have been a scammer.
I don't think this analogy holds. In the Madoff example, returns were quite literally only on paper, as they were fabricated out of thin air.
As someone who runs ads on Facebook, I can tell you that we saw an immediate lift in revenue and profitability as soon as we started. Internally we actually believe Facebook is misattributing Facebook driven purchases to the low side, as various ad blocking tools like uBlock may be interfering with this attribution matching.
For the Madoff analogy to hold, Facebook would have be going to our site and making just enough purchases to convince us to continue to run ads on Facebook.
From the view of the business, I couldn't care less of how many fake accounts are on Facebook. As long as money in < money out, we're going to keep running ads on Facebook.
Yes, this is true in the sense that investor's did actually receive returns, but I was talking about the fund as a whole not actually generating any returns.
Note, the author of this piece has a long-standing grudge against Mark Zuckerberg.
Namely he thinks he co-founded Facebook, and filed lawsuits about it. Back in 2009 they were settled, and he has been a public critic of Zuckerberg since.
The big one is that he claims that Zuckerberg just ripped off his original code. He lost that one in court.
His opinions on Zuckerberg's personality are heavily flavored by that personal conflict.
Second, Facebook does not have a monopoly. Unfortunately for them, social networks are not that sticky. And they can only continue buying every up and coming social network for so long before they miss the critical one. (Perhaps Tik Tok will turn out to have been the one...)
And finally Facebook is not a Ponzi scheme. I think that they are overvalued. But not Ponzi.
I never claimed he copied code line by line, and that issue was never litigated. I never even sued Mark. So I definitely didn't "los[e] that one in court."
Thank you for saying this Ben! Be careful, Greenspan has a history of trying to burry criticism and threatening people who comment about him on the internet. He is probably looking up info about you right now.
Don’t trust Aaron Greenspan, he is a an extremely manipulative liar. He has a 16 year old grudge against mark zuckerburg because he believes that he (Aaron) actually invented facebook. i’m not kidding. after extorting mark zuckerburg for $250,000 in a bogus trademark dispute he then sued the makers of the movie the social network for not putting him in the movie. Aaron Greenspan is a truly monstrous human being who has stalked and threatened many of my friends. he is now suing me and Elon Musk because I spoke out about what he was doing
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 67.2 ms ] threadHe has an army of people doing his bidding now. The mind boggles.
Edit: I'm not trying to downplay his business acumen, either. Facebook clearly made lots of good decisions down the line that helped them reach the scale they reached. But the reason that the product took off at first had a lot more to do with how it got in front of users in the early days than its technological superiority.
Just because you have some traction and user base doesn’t automatically lend itself to building a multi billion dollar business.
You’re going from 10,000 users, completely unmonetized to billions of users while acquiring many other companies and integrating them.
That’s not a minor detail to gloss over. Whether you’re morally aligned or not with Facebook, I think you’d agree.
It was the understanding and (ab)use of that position to increase the user base, and to make it into a marketing machine like no other. Purchase of Onavo, that let him spy on users better and realize he needs to buy Instagram and Whatsapp, but not Skype, to maintain monopoly. Quite a few of other data deals, most considered shady by anyone aware of them (though afaik all legal).
Mark Zuckerberg was in the right place, at the right time, and extremely astute and intelligent (if ethically challenged, IMO) -- much like Bill Gates 40 years ago. There were possibly thousands of people in the right place and the right time in the 1980s, but only one Bill Gates and only one Steve Jobs. Similarly, there were thousands of people in the right place and the right time in 2004, but only one Mark Zuckerberg.
Also, I suspect in 50-100 years when things are declassified, we'll find that he also had help from 3 letter agencies in exchange for the data trove he was able to collect.
Whatever you can say about Mark Zuckerberg, I doubt that he was even half as smart as, say, von Neumann or Tesla, or Da Vinci, or probably hundreds if not thousands of other people whose names we all know, not to mention the probably millions of people who were just as smart but have remained unknown.
These people did not achieve riches either because they did not consider them to be important, because they got screwed by people who were less scrupulous or more well connected, were just unlucky, or for a million other reasons than their intelligence.
Instead, the really brilliant minds of humanity are almost always the servants of far less intelligent people.
As for hard work, do you know how many single parents there are who are holding down two or three minimum wage jobs to support their families, dealing day after day and year after year of getting spat on and despised for being poor or having the jobs they have? Or the fish seller who gets up at three in the morning every day to haul his wares to the market, clean fish guts off the sidewalk, and brave the weather to sell you fish day after day. These people aren't doing their work from a comfy McMansion or penthouse office, or ordering people about to do their work for them, but they work just as hard.
But what makes people think that intelligence or hard work make people deserving of money? People fetishize workaholism and intelligence, while there are plenty of smart, hard working sociopaths out there (arguably, they're exactly the kind who attain "success" in the business world, because they're smart and have no scruples to keep them back from doing whatever it takes to succeed, even if it means walking over the backs and faces of hundreds or thousands of people).
To me it's people who help others who are far more deserving of "success". The people who help the poor and disadvantaged, the teachers, the people who sacrifice themselves rather than those that sacrifice others. But most of these people don't attain "success" in the conventional sense. They usually die poor and unknown, and you rarely see books or articles about how great they were.
The fawning is usually reserved for the rich, who, when it comes down to it, usually get that praise because they're rich. If they make the wrong decisions or are unlucky, no matter how smart or hard working they were, they are forgotten and often despised. That would have been Zuckerberg's fate as well, without any change in his intelligence or work ethic, if he hadn't struck it rich.
From what I have seen from huge organized crime bosses from biographies and documentaries is that people like Pablo Escobar aren't necessarily very smart or super talented. But what sets them apart is their willingness to break all laws and moral norms. Crime leaders rise in the ranks because they are willing to kill their competitors. They are willing to do things that even other criminals are not willing to do. They act while others are hesitating with their pesky conscience.
I think this happens albeit to a lesser degree with people like Mark. There are many things about the founding of facebook that most would not do. Most would feel bad about stealing a client's idea or about diluting a co-founder's shares or any of the myriad little choices that an individual founder has to make. A lot of us just don't have it in us to exploit workers or partners like that.
That's not to say you can't be successful without amoral behaviour. But it is more difficult if your competitor is willing to show up at your house and cap you in the back of the head (metaphorically) at a moment's notice.
von Neumann was not out there endlessly trying to figure out ways to make more and more money.
Enormously intelligent and talented people like that are rarely motivated by things like that (though, of course, there are exceptions, but sadly even there they're often not successful, for a variety of reasons having little to do with their intelligence).
In my own reading of biographies of people who managed to accumulate a lot of money or power, it's remarkable how often they come from extremely poor and powerless families.
It's tempting to try to armchair analyze them and attribute their tunnel vision and tenacity at making ever more and more money and aquiring more and more power to their childhood deprivation and fear of ever being destitute again, even long after they've achieved far more than enough to support themselves and their families without working another day in their life again.
Of course, this is rarely the case for tech billionaires, who tend to come from middle class or even wealthy families, but it has often been true of extremely wealthy or powerful people in other fields.
And it's called America: the country where "a shmuck" can be free enough to be allowed to do the above.
Think the alternative: the places where only the right people, approved, connected and considered "worthy", are allowed to become rich. The mind truly boggles.
Previously on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20507251
facebook's aggressive expansion into developing-nation markets is no accident:
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/01/the-f...
As someone who runs ads on Facebook, I can tell you that we saw an immediate lift in revenue and profitability as soon as we started. Internally we actually believe Facebook is misattributing Facebook driven purchases to the low side, as various ad blocking tools like uBlock may be interfering with this attribution matching.
For the Madoff analogy to hold, Facebook would have be going to our site and making just enough purchases to convince us to continue to run ads on Facebook.
From the view of the business, I couldn't care less of how many fake accounts are on Facebook. As long as money in < money out, we're going to keep running ads on Facebook.
Namely he thinks he co-founded Facebook, and filed lawsuits about it. Back in 2009 they were settled, and he has been a public critic of Zuckerberg since.
See https://www.adweek.com/digital/facebook-announces-settlement... for verification that there was a lawsuit that got settled. And see the end of the article for the fact that he still maintains that he was the original founder of Facebook.
His opinions on Zuckerberg's personality are heavily flavored by that personal conflict.
Second, Facebook does not have a monopoly. Unfortunately for them, social networks are not that sticky. And they can only continue buying every up and coming social network for so long before they miss the critical one. (Perhaps Tik Tok will turn out to have been the one...)
And finally Facebook is not a Ponzi scheme. I think that they are overvalued. But not Ponzi.
I never claimed he copied code line by line, and that issue was never litigated. I never even sued Mark. So I definitely didn't "los[e] that one in court."
Anti-trust scholars and Congress agree that Facebook has a monopoly and has engaged in monopolistic behavior. See https://judiciary.house.gov/online-platforms-and-market-powe.... It's an open question as to whether the FTC will sue on these grounds.
You don't provide any justification at all for your assertion regarding a lack of Ponzi-type behavior, so I'll just note that I disagree.