I know it's a movie and not necessarily based on actual events, but people like this always make me think of the line in the social network: "If you had invented Facebook. You would've invented Facebook."
I don't think you are using that correctly, you seem to be using it as a synonym for jealous/hater. I don't get the impression Aaron is disparaging fame or success; he is making the claim that Mark Zuckerberg has a questionable moral compass. That really doesn't relate in any way to the Aesop's Fable you reference. The fox didn't claim to dislike the grapes because they were ethically dubious; he disliked them as a way to feel better about not being able to acquire them.
And once again, in Greenspan's own transcripts, Zuckerberg comes off better -- more focused, more observant, more strategic, seeing opportunities rather than obsessing on risks, and even more generous with offers of collaboration -- than Greenspan himself.
Maybe I'm being too rosy and idealistic here, but I prefer integrity over those other traits you mentioned. Many people have a good balance, so why compromise?
"Perhaps the lesson here is that competing with and using your 'friends' in serial fashion until you totally and completely ravage each relationship is key to achieving financial success—but then it's certainly no way to define friendship."
That's certainly not the lesson. In fact what's always made me believe these sort of attacks against Zuckerberg's character is the fact that you don't see this happen with really any of the other startups that got big. Nobody is accusing Larry and Sergey of these sorts of shenanigans.
I'd say if anything, being a moral person is more blessing than curse when it comes to amassing wealth. It's obviously not a requirement though.
The first person who comes along and hits the web industry jackpot at an unprecedented level who is also not a stereotype antisocial nerd douchebag* is going to thoroughly debunk all theories that correlate this sort of character to financial success without any evidence of causation.
* The degree to which sheer luck and network effects are factors in this particular sector makes this plausible.
>That's certainly not the lesson. In fact what's always made me believe these sort of attacks against Zuckerberg's character is the fact that you don't see this happen with really any of the other startups that got big. Nobody is accusing Larry and Sergey of these sorts of shenanigans.
I think a lot of it is about the product you are making. Google was started by people who would find Google useful. Larry and Sergey were not laughing at people for wanting to search the web. Facebook is just another in a long line of marketing triumphs, similar to movie and record producers who create movies and bands they themselves would never watch or listen to. Facebook is not a tech company, they are the worst part of the entertainment industry, the nonartists.
Larry and Sergey are different from other star founders who've been accused of evil (Jobs, Gates, Zuckerberg) in that they were older so maybe more mature and also relatively less entrepreneurial- their goal was academia, unlike all the young dropouts. Maybe many extremely entrepreneurial people don't respect the law. In Zuckerberg's case it does seem like he doesn't care about patents at all whereas Aaron is still mad about the IP and hates that Zuckerberg ignored the rules (re: patents, Facemash, dropping out, and everything else) and got rewarded for it.
Reading the logs I don't get the sense Zuckerberg is being dishonest or that he even considers Aaron to be a friend. The main conflict seems to be the accusation that Zuckerberg stole ideas, which is a big question for software in general: ideas want to spread so the concept of IP is arguably against the nature of ideas. At the same time, we want people to be able to get rich off a great idea even if they don't implement it successfully. This question re: IP and copyrights is something we're still resolving as a society. Until it gets resolved, if ever, lots of people are going to have lots of unfair things happen to them and it's understandable to be mad about that.
But that's what life is: unfair. Just like we can't go through life feeling guilty about how lucky we are to have survived infancy unlike some absurd percentage of humans in poor countries, we can't constantly hate on other people who are even luckier than we are re: how they don't deserve their success. No one deserves anything. Life is unfair.
1) I don't think Greenspan is mad, he seems more disappointed.
2) It is absolutely possible to treat your fellow human beings well and find richly-deserved success - Mark Zuckerberg however does not seem capable of this.
3) Even though our society might tolerate and even reward (in the short-term at least) this sort of behaviour, should we be happy that a master-exploiter of this unfairness is the guardian of social relationships on the internet?
I don't know Zuckerberg but want to play devil's advocate to give him the benefit of the doubt until he actually gets convicted of something.
> 2) It is absolutely possible to treat your fellow human beings well and find richly-deserved success - Mark Zuckerberg however does not seem capable of this.
From Aaron's account, it looks like Mark does not believe that these software ideas were original or IP. If you buy that perspective, he wasn't wrong to execute far better on the same ideas that have appeared repeatedly in the history of social networks- he was simply a sucky friend, which is unlikeable but not illegal.
He's made a bunch of people very rich with Facebook. Do you think D'Angelo, the Winklevosses, and Saverin would rather have never met Zuckerberg or would rather he never created Facebook?
>3) Even though our society might tolerate and even reward (in the short-term at least) this sort of behaviour, should we be happy that a master-exploiter of this unfairness is the guardian of social relationships on the internet?
The sin Mark's accused of is stealing people's ideas, assuming ideas are steal-able, and thereby breaching the trust of people who considered themselves his friends or coworkers. If he's guilty, I guess the question is whether someone who is immoral/amoral in one respect is able to be ethical in other areas.
Since the movie makes a good case that Zuckerberg betrayed some of his close friends, I don't trust him (or any random person) not to betray me, a random stranger / Facebook user. But I do trust Zuckerberg to want to do whatever is good for Facebook. Are people scared he's going to somehow blackmail them into staying on Facebook by threatening to release their private data to everyone? I'll be scared of that scenario if that ever seems like the best plan for Facebook.
Who else could run Facebook? Most people are less intelligent or less competent or less interested in Facebook's future. Almost anyone in Mark's situation would cash out and grow indifferent but Zuckerberg persuades me he's not doing it for the money. So I guess I'm happy he's running it because regardless of his moral judgment or human loyalty at least I feel like he cares about Facebook.
I think many problems with corporations arise from leaders' interests not being aligned with those of the company. Facebook is one of the few examples where I don't believe that's the case. It might seem psychopathic to care more about Facebook than your best friend and/or cofounder, but is that really a big problem? Maybe from the corporation's perspective (or from the user and shareholder perspective), it's actually a virtue.
I appreciate that building Facebook to the point it is at now, and maintaining focus on the future company despite buy-out offers, is not trivial. Mark is clearly a talented individual.
However what is good for Facebook =/= what is good for Facebook users. And one point that emerges from Greenspan's description of Mark is that the man may be a genius for cutting out friends and building an empire, but when it comes to human warmth, he's lacking. And the problem with that is that it may very well limit Mark's ability to imagine how something like Facebook could evolve and work, and thus limit his ability to better equate what is good for Facebook with what is good for users.
A subsidiary point is that, due to network effects, Facebook's vulnerability to a poor core philosophy is reduced, at least in the short term. Once a social network grows into our lives, it isn't easy to replace. So if Facebook is indeed "rotten at the core" (I'm not arguing it is necessarily... just saying) then it may be able to buy itself a lot of time, even if it acts in its "own" interests, not its users'. But as technology continues to develop and its environment destabilises it won't remain invulnerable forever. Unless you are interested in slavery and extortion, eventually, under our moderated democratic capitalist model, what is good for a company is being good for its users.
I think I agree with your points assuming Mark is evil.
I am not convinced Zuckerberg's lacking "human warmth." It didn't strike me that Mark thought he was actually friends with Aaron or thought he was betraying anything- that's Aaron's perspective, which was understandable but we can't be really nice to everyone who considers themselves our friends or disagrees with us on who owns an idea.
Facebook so far hasn't done anything I really disagree with. But my feelings on privacy etc aren't that strong yet, maybe a failure of my imagination because nothing bad has really happened to me yet (knocking on wood).
People get screwed over all the time. Getting screwed over by Zuckerberg, well, that's an elite club, but time to move on with your life. If you keep it only as a good story for the grand kids maybe it won't eat up the rest of your potential.
Seriously, does this guy not have any parents/siblings/super close friends who can tell him it's time to move on? This is a great happy hour story, but not such a great epitaph.
On the bright side, at least he's thematically consistent! "I keep getting screwed over by life" is the only reason I can think of to start the post with so many words about Final Clubs before the pivot.... Suffice it to say, anyone who can graduate from Harvard with a CS degree and feel screwed over needs some perspective.
I can see how Greenspan's experience would not exactly be easy to move on from. At stake is not his own personal success, but his belief about how the world should work. Greenspan sounds like a pretty moral guy, the kind of guy who gets upset when things happen that he thinks are wrong. Basically, you're asking him to shrug and move on but for him, an antisocial bastard is in the spotlight smiling and waving and being showered with praise by the press. It sounds like, for someone like him, fixing this mistake is more important than any other typical SV-type venture he could throw himself into.
Or he could just be incompetent and bitter. Who knows.
Or... maybe he just needed some traffic to his website.
It seems everyone who had anything remotely to do with Facebook's origins has tried to cash in.
This bothers wantrapreneurs because it highlights just how much luck plays a role in a story like Facebook's. They want to believe that one founder or a few co-founders succeed based on some factor(s) under their control (hardwork, skill, etc.)
Greenspan is just another one of those people who was involved and is trying to cash in.
If anyone needs to "get over it", it's people who just can't accept that huge fads like Facebook are unpredictable and uncontrollable, and that when faced with the possibility of huge sums of "money for nothing" it brings out the worst in people all seeking a share of the bounty.
The web is a lottery.
Time to re-read the recent speech from Princeton's graduation ceremony by the author of Liar's Poker.
This is quite an overstatement. You don't simply move to Palo Alto and then have a 1/65,412 chance of starting the next Google.
Instead you have to have a great vision, great execution, and great luck. Now Zuckerberg may not have Jobsian vision and execution (or maybe he does, only time will tell), but you can't argue that he executed the hell outta Facebook and he definitely has a vision even if you find it morally bankrupt. This definitely did not just magically fall in his lap, and he certainly deserves most of the credit regardless of what individuals he screwed over at various stages.
(except I think it's quite possible for someone to do what's been done with Facebook without also being morally bankrupt)
But is the rest of the comment an overstatement?
Also, you forgot to mention great marketing. In the IM's I believe both of them at one point agree that great visionary ideas, no matter how well they are executed, (alas) do not market themselves.
Re: marketing, meh, I think Facebook pretty much went viral. Maybe there was more conscious effort there than I give it credit for, but it doesn't strike me as important for Facebook's rise.
I'm not saying it's easy to move on from. If he can't, I'm not judging him. But it's just a fact that an ongoing obsession like this will be more self-destructive than right any wrong.
I was thinking the same thing when reading the About page on his website. After the first few paragraphs I was like 'he's not even going to mention Facebook - how baller is that' and thought he had moved on in a very healthy way. But then I kept reading, and he devotes well over half of his about page to the saga. Sad. Really sad, that he is letting this define his life.
I read the transcripts, all very fascinating. Aaron's focus is on building stuff whereas Mark's is human interaction- Aaron focuses on products and consulting whereas Mark was already thinking big picture about social. Aaron seems more ambitious than almost anyone and Mark seems 10x even more ambitious than that.
Even if Aaron is the superior engineer, Mark is the superior psychologist. Vision and navigation of systems constructed by humans turns out to be more important than building a lot of stuff no matter how cool or new it is.
Also seems like mark argues there aren't any ideas to steal and admits facebook's been done before- just this time he's going to execute it better.
Perhaps this is one of the places where legal action is justified? Maybe he should've got a patent like all those monsters out there today. At least his would actually have a product behind it.
It's nice to here it from the horse's mouth instead of second-hand from a movie made to generate revenue though.
It's damn hard to pull emotion out when writing about one's life story, but Greenspan's writing style so distracts from the meat of his story that it's frustrating.
For instance:
"both so-called Facebook veterans (a phrase that actual veterans might find laughable)"
or
"It was an expense I simply could not afford all over again (unlike the Winklevoss twins, my father did not have millions of dollars of disposable income)"
or
"[Mark] didn't understand how to speak like a mature person his age."
Bits like those just scream "I'm a vicitim" and come off as whiny.
If Greenspan laid out the timeline and the documentation sans his editorializing it would be more powerful.
Carry these same points through any follow-up interviews, testimony, etc and I sense that Greenspan would be much happier with his outcome.
The worst was complaining about a cab fare(?) to JFK.
But don't shoot the messenger. There are plenty of facts he's giving us. It is not pure opinion. An eye witness is an eye witness. He was there. As long as he is credible, his character, for our purposes, is irrelevant.
I don't know the right phrase for the opposite of 'preaching to the choir', but that's what I think this post here on HN is: the opposite of preaching to the choir.
The accumulated evidence of Zuckerberg's poor character was already overwhelming. For me, all it took was the infamous "dumb fucks" quote to make me decide to never use Facebook. That alone disqualifies someone to be a responsible custodian of my privacy. This article's evidence isn't as significant as other established facts like Zuckerberg's invasion of other people's email accounts, but it is consistent with everything else we know: in one of the modern world's great ironies, a person with no respect for his fellow human beings is the de facto gatekeeper of "friendship" on the net.
I don't think age matters. We all do/say dumb things, period. I suspect very few people would be happy to be represented by a worst sentences they've ever typed or uttered. If you really want to make a case that Facebook shouldn't be trusted with privacy issues, base an argument on their previous privacy failures rather than something the CEO said years ago.
It's really hard to change a person's character as they get older. In general I think that by the age of 18-21 most of our ideas of right/wrong and how to behave and treat other people are pretty much established.
tl;dr It's hard to stop being an arrogant asshole. I feel bad for the guy.
Don't you think this is somewhat naive and limited? He was 19 years old when he made that comment. Other people with far more power over your life have done and said far worse things. Think about your bank accounts.
Agree 100%. Also take into account the context and intent. I jokingly make statements like this all the time and it has literally ZERO effect on my ability to do any job or manage anything in my life.
"They're f------g taking all the money back from you guys?" complains an Enron employee on the tapes. "All the money you guys stole from those poor grandmothers in California?"
"Yeah, grandma Millie, man"
"Yeah, now she wants her f------g money back for all the power you've charged right up, jammed right up her a------ for f------g $250 a megawatt hour."
Even that doesn't compare to the choke-hold (and the potential for indenture-ment) FB has over your current and continued life.
How much do you know about the CEO of Walmart? Do you trust him or her with all your personal shopping history? What about your apartment's building manager? Do you trust him or her to not have hidden cameras in your apartment? How much do you trust the head of state of your country? Do you trust him or her with the almost limitless amount of your personal information that may have been collected?
Walmart isn't a service. Walmart doesn't have access to your most intimate information like Facebook does.
Heck millions of Virgin Mobile accounts have been compromised. But the potential damage isn't even in the same order of magnitude of something (hypothetically) going foul at FB, either owing to deliberate policy or accidentally.
Same with JetBlue with passenger data some years ago. Not same order. Not same potential damage.
I don't really know what distinction you're trying to make here.
> Walmart doesn't have access to your most intimate information like Facebook does
This probably varies from person to person. Walmart potentially has medical prescription data, which is inherently sensitive, but also a ton of data on nearly every product you buy and your shopping habits (obviously, only for people who buy nearly everything from Walmart, which is a lot of people), and of course credit card numbers. And some people (like myself) don't have a huge amount on Facebook. All I've got is my name, high school, college, current employer, a few movies, books, and musicians I "liked" ages ago when I first signed up, plus a tiny amount of private but nonsensitive chat history and a handful of unflattering photographs.
Regarding Virgin Mobile and JetBlue customer information: I find it hard to imagine that either of these wouldn't have way more sensitive information than Facebook for the average user/customer of each organization.
Walmart, even when it's potential for misuse of customer data is taken to it's negative extreme, is just a vendor. Not a repository of your most private data.
Walmart cannot deduce from your pictures printed at their photo kiosk if you are having an extra-marital affair. It doesn't have that kind of "putting together two and two" power.
Plus it doesn't share that with your other family members or suggest to them that they get to know your extra-marital partner better.
Where am I going with this...scratch this reply.
If you can't see the potential for abuse at FB (or any other similarly massive soc-net) and somehow are trying to draw parallels to some big box vendor with no social tentacles, my explanation will not advance your understanding of it either.
No current corporation, conglomerate or organization - Disney, Visa, Experian, Equifax, Transunion, ExxonMobil, Monsanto - has that kind of established and potential scope for intrusion into your life.
> No current corporation, conglomerate or organization - Disney, Visa, Experian, Equifax, Transunion, ExxonMobil, Monsanto - has that kind of established and potential scope for intrusion into your life.
I think that is a preposterous claim. Airlines know every vacation and business trip you've ever taken. Credit reporting agencies probably know more about your financial well-being than even you do. Heck, credit card companies know every financial transaction you perform.
I don't really buy the argument you started to form about how other companies can't "put two and two together." What makes you think that? Amazon certainly uses their data to make recommendations to me. Walmart can't personally target you in the store, but I'm sure they do with online purchases. There is nothing stopping Walmart from looking at your photos and deducing things, other than company policy and laws (so, the exact situation Facebook is in).
Yeah but airlines don't know if you are flying with your mistress or your sister.
And credit reporting agencies don't have your IMs, or know that you mailed hotchick2012 43 times this week, and started doing so 5 months before you changed your profile status from its complicated to single.
Walmart doesn't have facial recognition cameras up in every store tracking you. So you can just go to another store and make your purchase, keeping all your patterns intact.
The issue with putting 2 and 2 together is an issue which reared its head only post the camibrian era like IT explosion.
The old big box retailers do not have the same level of connection to your thoughts and personal information the same way online companies do.
They could do that, but only after they drastically upgraded themselves to specifically start profiling and tracking each individual - essentially by becoming more like facebook/social networks.
Your argument soars and falls depending on how connected to your personal information/social network a retailer is.
The only likely exception to that is your pharmacist - their domain of knowledge gave them pretty deep insights into your life even before the advent of the net.
> Walmart cannot deduce ... if you are having an extra-marital affair.
Sure they can. Let's suppose my purchasing history fits the profile of a married couple, maybe even with telltale signs like feminine hygiene products. The purchases are made on weekends, at whatever time married couples go shopping for groceries and other household essentials.
But suddenly there's a new pattern--at previously unexpected times, I buy incriminating products like condoms, cologne, unusual jewelry, stuff that doesn't fit the profile. I'm pretty sure Walmart can get a pretty decent probability that I'm having an extramarital affair. Why not? Target can already tell when you're pregnant, for instance.
> Walmart doesn't have access to your most intimate information like Facebook does.
Really? All Facebook knows is what I tell it; a mixture of truth and lies. Walmart knows what I buy from Walmart, which is potentially everything. They know when I'm getting fatter or when I'm losing weight; they know when I'm buying condoms and when I'm not; they know what I eat, what I read, whether I have pets, what kind of pets I have, and they can data mine me a hundred ways to figure out everything else. Facebook doesn't actually know anything I care much about keeping private. Walmart knows a lot more.
Walmart probably has more actionable data - from those purchases of condoms by a married man who did not last year, to the purchases of pregnancy tests of the woman who curiously appears just after him at the till register on lunchtimes.
Add in the bottles of wine and the alka seltzer the day after, the purchase of womans underwear in sizes too big for his wife but the same size as his boxers, and the bra that won't fit his girlfriend but will fit has 42" shirt size
there is a lot out there that is not parseable from photos even with gis data embedded
why do you think fb wants us to "share" our shopping data
You can purchase things at Walmart with cash. It's pretty much impossible to track purchases made with cash. You can't pay with an anonymous money source on the internet, and you can't obtain that much anonymity on Facebook.
If you can't wear some kind of mask a store could use face recognition for tracking customers. And I predict stores from the UK will start doing just that.
Yes you can pay with cash, but you have to be physically there to do that and until we'll be able to make anonymous payments on the Internet, nothing can guarantee that you are anonymous.
You can choose to pay with cash.
You can choose to not surf with cookies or use Facebook.
You can choose not to buy, with cash or not, trackable devices like cameras, phones, video games
But people do not choose these things en mass
The issue lies in how we regulate - I believe any form of tracking or surveillance on or offline should be required to produce raw near real time feeds. There is no reasonable way we can regulate without knowing what is being collected - and becoming outraged by it's collection.
Either these should be restricted by identifiable people or published if unidentifiable.
Uh, are you kidding me? If I'm ever buying anything questionable at Walmart, I just use cash. I usually buy condoms from Walmart, and I always use cash (and no, I'm not cheating on my girl). You're not thinking this through.
The point I was making was that with electronic transactions, discovering or infering information about a person from their purchases has just as much value as say working out someon is gay from their friends list or choice of netflix.
Use cash. But be aware it is slowly but surely becoming a ghetto.
> Use cash. But be aware it is slowly but surely becoming a ghetto.
How exactly is it becoming a "ghetto"? I have never seen any retail stores or restaurants refuse to take cash. In fact, the only place where I've encountered that issue is for buying gas. In big cities, like NYC, there are still restaurants where they only take cash.
> "...and the directors and officers of any person that controls the applicant are of good character and sound financial standing." Here, the "good character" requirement would clearly preclude Mark, whose character has now been called into question more times than most of us can count.
I'm not aware of a common definition for "good character," but merely having your character "called into question," especially as a high-profile CEO (and celebrity, at that), should not be the sole grounds for being denied a license to transact money. I'm not saying there couldn't have been more to it in the case of Facebook/Zuckerberg, but in general, public defamation should not be, in itself, enough to prevent someone from building a legal business.
Regardless of Greenspan's own character or his particular situation, he gives us a peek at the facts, which others are so quick to ignore.
I think there will be poetic justice in this story. Because the web is much bigger than Zuckerberg, or Facebook or even Google. The world is still getting online. It's early yet.
But what Zuckerberg has done, how he has carried himself in the presence of enormous luck, he cannot erase. He will live with this reputation as a con his entire life. Building a website, millions of people signing up, enormous hype, making millions from display ads might seem impressive today. It won't remain that way in years to come. We're just getting started. Technology will be taken for granted. There will be more attention to the things Zuckerberg carelessly disregarded.
"Dumb fucks" indeed.
Thank you Mr. Greenspan for telling your side of the story.
It's jib - as in the the front sail of a sailboat ahead of the mast. The saying is 'I like the cut of your jib' in that the way the sails are set determines both direction and style of sailing.
Who cares? More to the point, who will care? Facebook will fall eventually. In the 10 or 20 years from now that you talk about, Facebook will be a distant memory.
Does anyone care about what may or may not have gone on at IBM 30 years ago? At MySpace? Facebook is not a bank and it's not a government. It's a social media site. Nobody will care.
Aaron is (understandably) still butthurt from failing to make his houseSYSTEM successful. And Mark clearly was not only deceiving him but also downright stealing his work. Ultimately though that lack of character doesn't really matter - Mark was obviously more driven and had a clearer vision. I think the only lesson we can learn here is that dedication always wins over talent. And besides: Stealing and building a students directory across universities is one thing, creating a profitable business and amassing 900 Million users is a completely different story (and a task to which zuckerberg had a comparatively small contribution).
Here is what I don't get about this whole thing:
Friendster - 2002
Myspace - 2003
LinkedIn - 2003
Not to mention the dozens of other social media clones around that time (I remember being members of countless social media sites in those days)
Its not like anyone at Harvard stumbled upon an amazing new idea that was going to change the game. They were building what they hoped would be better versions of things already out there. Mark registered thefacebook.com because "Face Book" is a very common phrase/object.
For better or worse, Zuckerberg won the social networking race. Congrats to him, everyone else at Harvard at that time trying to stake a claim needs to just get on with their lives.
Well put. While he may be simply "telling his side of the story", Aaron Greenspan comes off in his own writing as a sanctimonious, sour-grapes-y, whinger.
I disagree. For someone at the very least arguably cheated out of a lot of wealth and at worst simply deceived and mistreated in a very nasty way by another human being, I think Greenspan writes with a tremendous amount of calm and balance, and also I don't think he is writing simply to vent bitterness or jealousy.
I think this lacks a bit of compassion. It's one thing to have some idea, not work on it, and then later see someone who made it happen. It is another thing entirely to work on an idea for years, bring someone into the group that is working with you on it (or at least advising) and then have them roll off with it and become one of the richest people in the country. Sure a zen master might take some comfort in validation of your ideas, but man it has to really hurt to not be a billionaire. That can really screw over your psyche in a bad way.
I know I would be pretty bitter in a similar situation.
I'm never going to be a billionaire. I would prefer that billionaires not get themselves elected President to cut the top tax rates, but that's about as far as it goes. We are sailing on an ocean of executable ideas, and we've got some of the best winds we've had in 10-15 years. Who has time to write 3000 words on someone else's "unjustified" success?
Generally I agree with this philosophy except that in this case Aaron had been executing on this idea, and had a lot of it up and running. If the narrative is accurate he has cause to be bitter. Had he not done anything with this great idea he felt he had I would be more sympathetic to the 'ideas are worth nothing' theme.
Tally up how many words you type into HN each day. Is it close to 3000?
I think he said at one point in the IM's to Zuckerberg Greenspan said that he writes stuff to vent. And Zuckerberg said he could understood the need for that, but kept such thoughts to himself. (See e.g. Greenspan's White Paper enronforkids.pdf)
It's one thing to study others' work and take ideas from it. Everyone does that.
It's another thing to actively engage others, talk to them as if you are friends or enter into agreements to work together, and then take ideas from their work. It's the betrayal of people's trust that's gotten him the reputation for being a con and a thief.
In one of the most telling IMs of their entire correspondence (see page 62 of The Complete Timeline), Zuckerberg stated: "i kind of view you as a friend." This came up when Zuckerberg was annoyed that Greenspan made a security hole public. Greenspan handled the situation with immense professionalism, while Zuckerberg simply could not accept responsibility. Mark's friends are only entitled to the appellation when it's convenient for Mark.
Glad to see someone else caught that. But by the same token we have to consider that Greenspan may have hand-picked these IM conversations. It does not appear he's giving us a data dump. More like another one of his White Papers where he is venting.
None of this should be even remotely interesting until you consider hundreds of millions of people have sent their personal information to the manipulative kid in the IM's. Crazy.
I agree that we're only getting limited information. I'd love to see his personal IMs, because I think those would shed even more light on his character. It's curiously ironic how the man who has access to the secrets of millions of people has revealed so little about himself.
I believe the greatest con of all was likely in reference to this line:
He may, in fact, be the greatest con of all time, having effectively convinced an entire nation, including the President of the United States, to believe in his extremist philosophy of radical openness.
It isn't clear if getting someone to believe in your 'extremist philosophy of radical openness' is necessarily a con, unless of course you yourself don't believe in it and/or are doing so only in furtherance of some other interest which you are obscuring.
"It isn't clear if getting someone to believe in your 'extremist philosophy of radical openness' is necessarily a con, unless of course you yourself don't believe in it and/or are doing so only in furtherance of some other interest which you are obscuring."
I do believe this is what Greenspan was getting at.
I thought the same thing. As you see him listing the logs of every Zuckerberg login to houseSYSTEM in the pdf you think "Geez, this is a bit much." And then you consider that sort of snooping is Facebook's core business. They love this sort of information and their engineers have zero conscience about working with it. In fact their logs are probably much more detailed (device, geolocation, etc.) The irony is incredible.
I don't understand why this person thinks Mark owed him all the information he complains about not being given. Am I obliged to inform my competitors of my intentions at every turn? Am I obliged to tell them when I change my mind about my plans? Am I indeed obliged not to deceive them? How do we know that Mark even viewed this guy as a friend, rather than perhaps as a friendly acquaintance? I can say for sure that I had many more and longer conversations on AIM with my real friends.
Maybe this guy has a reasonable beef, but it's far from clear to me.
I don't think Greenspan is complaining - I think this is meant as a warning. He's not saying that Mark acted unfairly and that he should have been nicer to Aaron (which would come across as petulant, and I think Greenspan seems quite realistic and calm about what happened), but that Mark has acted with only ruthless, narrowly-defined "self-interest", displaying no loyalty or kindness, and this bodes very poorly for the company, its investors and its users. Facebook is Mark's creation, and at the core of the company, beneath its social-open-sharing buzzwords there is no philosophy of human relationships, only Mark's shallow, self-centered heartlessness and lust for power and profit. We might think so what, but maybe we've been desensitised by the often shitty and kinda sociopathic (or socio-agnostic) behaviour of web entrepreneurs. Anyway point is the arbiter of "friendship" on the internet is a megalomaniac who seems to understand nothing about friendship - a strange situation perpetuated by a star-struck, gutless press too busy slathering him with praise to think critically. Greenspan is just pointing this out, fairly it seems.
Neither Tesla nor SpaceX rely on millions of fickle web users handing over their personal information and regularly signing in to a website to look at photos and status updates. Nor can they be easily replicated by a competitor who is not a jackass.
I see. You get to baldly assert that SpaceX and Tesla are hard to copy, though few have yet tried, but when I point out that people have tried and failed to beat Facebook at their game, these things take time?
Yes, fads have a certain lifetime. There is a long list of fad websites that shows this.
I think the comparisons to SpaceX and Tesla are strange in terms of what those companies are _producing_ vis-a-vis a social networking website, but that's just me. If you see them as comparable base on what's being produced, carry on.
Everyone is entitled to an opinion.
You don't hear stories about Elon Musk shafting his friends and acquaintances, stringing them along and stealing their ideas.
Apparently Musk was a bit of a jerk when x.com merged with PayPal, and is supposedly difficult to work for even today (he works 100 hour weeks, probably demands the same high standards of his employees as he does of himself), but there's none of the skeletons in the closet with Musk as there is with Zuckerberg.
Plus there's the fact that Musk is tackling really difficult problems like online payments (fraud), mass-producing electric vehicles, making solar installations viable and aiming to make humans a multi-planetary species. Zuckerberg just created the latest social fad, IMO which is now in the process of self-destructing.
If you read all the IM's, carefully, and you know a bit of Facebook history, you should see that the targets Zuckerberg chose from which he stole the ideas he used for Facebook, like Greenspan, were the type of people who could easily be taken advantage of. He knew who he was dealing with. But there is no empathy.
In the IM's Zuckerberg goes so far as to tell Greenspan he considers him to be "like a friend" (see IM for exact wording). This is really sickening.
So it happened that in my junior year of college, I came across the web site of one of the many finals clubs on campus, the Fly Club.
It's "FINE-UHL clubs" not "FINE-UHLZ clubs."
And he shockingly did not understand why information privacy might be a controversial issue.
And then
He had been searching the houseSYSTEM Facebook for the twins' profiles
So much for privacy.
Aside from the Facebook, the sites had overlapping features for course schedulers, photo albums, message boards, digital posters for student groups, and eventually exchanges for buying and selling on campus and mapping your network of friends.
Irrelevant. People only used Thefacebook for obvious and simple things: connecting with people they knew, poking, messaging, and photos. No one used mapping your network of friends (which sucked, incidentally, and also was faily most of the time) and no one even used the course scheduler. To state the obvious, facebook was not successful for its features, it was successful because how it was executed!
This was claimed to have been written for historical significance, but I know that every time an article is written by this author and about this subject dozens of people are thinking the same thing: move on. Create a successful company first, then retire and write about this topic. I'd love to see blog posts regarding Think Computer's technology. As it stands, this blog post gained a lot of attention but there isn't even a a sidebar with "Hi, I'm Aaron Greenspan and I'm the CEO of Think Computer. We have this product, click here to learn more." It's a marketing failure to not capitalize on such an opportunity.
At the bottom of the blog post, it says: Aaron Greenspan is the CEO of Think Computer Corporation and author of Authoritas: One Student's Harvard Admissions and the Founding of the Facebook Era. He is the creator of the FaceCash mobile payment system, ThinkLink business management system, and PlainSite legal transparency project. (and there are hyperlinks)
There's a reason there is no such link. FaceCash is currently prohibited from doing business in California by the Money Transmission Act. Aaron is trying to resolve this, but until he does his hands are kind of tied.
> FaceCash is currently prohibited from doing business in California by the Money Transmission Act.
Aaron Greenspan has a whole song and dance about how the state of California screwed him over, too. The guy comes across as nothing but a professional victim.
It's a marketing failure to not capitalize on such an opportunity.
Geez, we're supposed to think less of the guy for not milking his controversial history with Zuckerburg for cash? If there's ever a right time to refrain from marketing yourself, it's when you're accusing someone else of being an opportunistic sociopath.
I do. My chat clients are set to automatically log, so that when I talk to someone a week later, I can look at the history. More importantly, a lot of questions get asked and answered over IM, so I can check it for answers to "why is X broken" or "How do I Y, again?", or "what was your mailing address?" without having to actually _ask_ the person again.
I've never looked back at archived IMs from years past, though, but they are still squirreled away on the removed hard drives from past machines.
Agree with all of you who say it is all about execution and timing. Zuckerberg had the right vision for what he wanted of Facebook though: a casual place to procrastinate. That is something that nobody else saw as clearly as him...and that's why his product won.
As smart as Greenspan is he has no clue whatsoever what it takes to create a widely used service. He is constantly stuck on legal matters and splitting hairs that no one else cares about. He would be so much better off spending his considerable intellect and productivity on more valuable activities.
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[ 2.2 ms ] story [ 263 ms ] threadAnd once again, in Greenspan's own transcripts, Zuckerberg comes off better -- more focused, more observant, more strategic, seeing opportunities rather than obsessing on risks, and even more generous with offers of collaboration -- than Greenspan himself.
Maybe I'm being too rosy and idealistic here, but I prefer integrity over those other traits you mentioned. Many people have a good balance, so why compromise?
That's certainly not the lesson. In fact what's always made me believe these sort of attacks against Zuckerberg's character is the fact that you don't see this happen with really any of the other startups that got big. Nobody is accusing Larry and Sergey of these sorts of shenanigans.
I'd say if anything, being a moral person is more blessing than curse when it comes to amassing wealth. It's obviously not a requirement though.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Jobs#Early_career
* The degree to which sheer luck and network effects are factors in this particular sector makes this plausible.
I think a lot of it is about the product you are making. Google was started by people who would find Google useful. Larry and Sergey were not laughing at people for wanting to search the web. Facebook is just another in a long line of marketing triumphs, similar to movie and record producers who create movies and bands they themselves would never watch or listen to. Facebook is not a tech company, they are the worst part of the entertainment industry, the nonartists.
Reading the logs I don't get the sense Zuckerberg is being dishonest or that he even considers Aaron to be a friend. The main conflict seems to be the accusation that Zuckerberg stole ideas, which is a big question for software in general: ideas want to spread so the concept of IP is arguably against the nature of ideas. At the same time, we want people to be able to get rich off a great idea even if they don't implement it successfully. This question re: IP and copyrights is something we're still resolving as a society. Until it gets resolved, if ever, lots of people are going to have lots of unfair things happen to them and it's understandable to be mad about that.
But that's what life is: unfair. Just like we can't go through life feeling guilty about how lucky we are to have survived infancy unlike some absurd percentage of humans in poor countries, we can't constantly hate on other people who are even luckier than we are re: how they don't deserve their success. No one deserves anything. Life is unfair.
2) It is absolutely possible to treat your fellow human beings well and find richly-deserved success - Mark Zuckerberg however does not seem capable of this.
3) Even though our society might tolerate and even reward (in the short-term at least) this sort of behaviour, should we be happy that a master-exploiter of this unfairness is the guardian of social relationships on the internet?
> 2) It is absolutely possible to treat your fellow human beings well and find richly-deserved success - Mark Zuckerberg however does not seem capable of this.
From Aaron's account, it looks like Mark does not believe that these software ideas were original or IP. If you buy that perspective, he wasn't wrong to execute far better on the same ideas that have appeared repeatedly in the history of social networks- he was simply a sucky friend, which is unlikeable but not illegal.
He's made a bunch of people very rich with Facebook. Do you think D'Angelo, the Winklevosses, and Saverin would rather have never met Zuckerberg or would rather he never created Facebook?
>3) Even though our society might tolerate and even reward (in the short-term at least) this sort of behaviour, should we be happy that a master-exploiter of this unfairness is the guardian of social relationships on the internet?
The sin Mark's accused of is stealing people's ideas, assuming ideas are steal-able, and thereby breaching the trust of people who considered themselves his friends or coworkers. If he's guilty, I guess the question is whether someone who is immoral/amoral in one respect is able to be ethical in other areas.
Since the movie makes a good case that Zuckerberg betrayed some of his close friends, I don't trust him (or any random person) not to betray me, a random stranger / Facebook user. But I do trust Zuckerberg to want to do whatever is good for Facebook. Are people scared he's going to somehow blackmail them into staying on Facebook by threatening to release their private data to everyone? I'll be scared of that scenario if that ever seems like the best plan for Facebook.
Who else could run Facebook? Most people are less intelligent or less competent or less interested in Facebook's future. Almost anyone in Mark's situation would cash out and grow indifferent but Zuckerberg persuades me he's not doing it for the money. So I guess I'm happy he's running it because regardless of his moral judgment or human loyalty at least I feel like he cares about Facebook.
I think many problems with corporations arise from leaders' interests not being aligned with those of the company. Facebook is one of the few examples where I don't believe that's the case. It might seem psychopathic to care more about Facebook than your best friend and/or cofounder, but is that really a big problem? Maybe from the corporation's perspective (or from the user and shareholder perspective), it's actually a virtue.
However what is good for Facebook =/= what is good for Facebook users. And one point that emerges from Greenspan's description of Mark is that the man may be a genius for cutting out friends and building an empire, but when it comes to human warmth, he's lacking. And the problem with that is that it may very well limit Mark's ability to imagine how something like Facebook could evolve and work, and thus limit his ability to better equate what is good for Facebook with what is good for users.
A subsidiary point is that, due to network effects, Facebook's vulnerability to a poor core philosophy is reduced, at least in the short term. Once a social network grows into our lives, it isn't easy to replace. So if Facebook is indeed "rotten at the core" (I'm not arguing it is necessarily... just saying) then it may be able to buy itself a lot of time, even if it acts in its "own" interests, not its users'. But as technology continues to develop and its environment destabilises it won't remain invulnerable forever. Unless you are interested in slavery and extortion, eventually, under our moderated democratic capitalist model, what is good for a company is being good for its users.
I am not convinced Zuckerberg's lacking "human warmth." It didn't strike me that Mark thought he was actually friends with Aaron or thought he was betraying anything- that's Aaron's perspective, which was understandable but we can't be really nice to everyone who considers themselves our friends or disagrees with us on who owns an idea.
Facebook so far hasn't done anything I really disagree with. But my feelings on privacy etc aren't that strong yet, maybe a failure of my imagination because nothing bad has really happened to me yet (knocking on wood).
On the bright side, at least he's thematically consistent! "I keep getting screwed over by life" is the only reason I can think of to start the post with so many words about Final Clubs before the pivot.... Suffice it to say, anyone who can graduate from Harvard with a CS degree and feel screwed over needs some perspective.
Or he could just be incompetent and bitter. Who knows.
It seems everyone who had anything remotely to do with Facebook's origins has tried to cash in.
This bothers wantrapreneurs because it highlights just how much luck plays a role in a story like Facebook's. They want to believe that one founder or a few co-founders succeed based on some factor(s) under their control (hardwork, skill, etc.)
Greenspan is just another one of those people who was involved and is trying to cash in.
If anyone needs to "get over it", it's people who just can't accept that huge fads like Facebook are unpredictable and uncontrollable, and that when faced with the possibility of huge sums of "money for nothing" it brings out the worst in people all seeking a share of the bounty.
The web is a lottery.
Time to re-read the recent speech from Princeton's graduation ceremony by the author of Liar's Poker.
This is quite an overstatement. You don't simply move to Palo Alto and then have a 1/65,412 chance of starting the next Google.
Instead you have to have a great vision, great execution, and great luck. Now Zuckerberg may not have Jobsian vision and execution (or maybe he does, only time will tell), but you can't argue that he executed the hell outta Facebook and he definitely has a vision even if you find it morally bankrupt. This definitely did not just magically fall in his lap, and he certainly deserves most of the credit regardless of what individuals he screwed over at various stages.
/The web is a lottery./d
(except I think it's quite possible for someone to do what's been done with Facebook without also being morally bankrupt)
But is the rest of the comment an overstatement?
Also, you forgot to mention great marketing. In the IM's I believe both of them at one point agree that great visionary ideas, no matter how well they are executed, (alas) do not market themselves.
Re: marketing, meh, I think Facebook pretty much went viral. Maybe there was more conscious effort there than I give it credit for, but it doesn't strike me as important for Facebook's rise.
Even if Aaron is the superior engineer, Mark is the superior psychologist. Vision and navigation of systems constructed by humans turns out to be more important than building a lot of stuff no matter how cool or new it is.
Also seems like mark argues there aren't any ideas to steal and admits facebook's been done before- just this time he's going to execute it better.
It's nice to here it from the horse's mouth instead of second-hand from a movie made to generate revenue though.
For instance:
"both so-called Facebook veterans (a phrase that actual veterans might find laughable)"
or
"It was an expense I simply could not afford all over again (unlike the Winklevoss twins, my father did not have millions of dollars of disposable income)"
or
"[Mark] didn't understand how to speak like a mature person his age."
Bits like those just scream "I'm a vicitim" and come off as whiny.
If Greenspan laid out the timeline and the documentation sans his editorializing it would be more powerful.
Carry these same points through any follow-up interviews, testimony, etc and I sense that Greenspan would be much happier with his outcome.
But don't shoot the messenger. There are plenty of facts he's giving us. It is not pure opinion. An eye witness is an eye witness. He was there. As long as he is credible, his character, for our purposes, is irrelevant.
Not saying they aren't all true, I'm sure they are.
Why focus on the negativity? Recognize it and move beyond.
> zberg02: but probably like 8k
> zberg02: i think that qualifies as real cool
8k isn't cool. You know what's cool...
If "he was young" is a defense, then "he is too young to trust as a CEO" suddenly becomes a very very valid criticism of Zuck.
Considering he has 57% of the voting power, isn't this criticism largely moot?
tl;dr It's hard to stop being an arrogant asshole. I feel bad for the guy.
"They're f------g taking all the money back from you guys?" complains an Enron employee on the tapes. "All the money you guys stole from those poor grandmothers in California?"
"Yeah, grandma Millie, man"
"Yeah, now she wants her f------g money back for all the power you've charged right up, jammed right up her a------ for f------g $250 a megawatt hour."
Even that doesn't compare to the choke-hold (and the potential for indenture-ment) FB has over your current and continued life.
Walmart isn't a service. Walmart doesn't have access to your most intimate information like Facebook does. Heck millions of Virgin Mobile accounts have been compromised. But the potential damage isn't even in the same order of magnitude of something (hypothetically) going foul at FB, either owing to deliberate policy or accidentally.
Same with JetBlue with passenger data some years ago. Not same order. Not same potential damage.
I don't really know what distinction you're trying to make here.
> Walmart doesn't have access to your most intimate information like Facebook does
This probably varies from person to person. Walmart potentially has medical prescription data, which is inherently sensitive, but also a ton of data on nearly every product you buy and your shopping habits (obviously, only for people who buy nearly everything from Walmart, which is a lot of people), and of course credit card numbers. And some people (like myself) don't have a huge amount on Facebook. All I've got is my name, high school, college, current employer, a few movies, books, and musicians I "liked" ages ago when I first signed up, plus a tiny amount of private but nonsensitive chat history and a handful of unflattering photographs.
Regarding Virgin Mobile and JetBlue customer information: I find it hard to imagine that either of these wouldn't have way more sensitive information than Facebook for the average user/customer of each organization.
Where am I going with this...scratch this reply.
If you can't see the potential for abuse at FB (or any other similarly massive soc-net) and somehow are trying to draw parallels to some big box vendor with no social tentacles, my explanation will not advance your understanding of it either.
No current corporation, conglomerate or organization - Disney, Visa, Experian, Equifax, Transunion, ExxonMobil, Monsanto - has that kind of established and potential scope for intrusion into your life.
Not even Acxiom has that kind of potential.
I think that is a preposterous claim. Airlines know every vacation and business trip you've ever taken. Credit reporting agencies probably know more about your financial well-being than even you do. Heck, credit card companies know every financial transaction you perform.
I don't really buy the argument you started to form about how other companies can't "put two and two together." What makes you think that? Amazon certainly uses their data to make recommendations to me. Walmart can't personally target you in the store, but I'm sure they do with online purchases. There is nothing stopping Walmart from looking at your photos and deducing things, other than company policy and laws (so, the exact situation Facebook is in).
And credit reporting agencies don't have your IMs, or know that you mailed hotchick2012 43 times this week, and started doing so 5 months before you changed your profile status from its complicated to single.
Walmart doesn't have facial recognition cameras up in every store tracking you. So you can just go to another store and make your purchase, keeping all your patterns intact.
The issue with putting 2 and 2 together is an issue which reared its head only post the camibrian era like IT explosion.
The old big box retailers do not have the same level of connection to your thoughts and personal information the same way online companies do.
They could do that, but only after they drastically upgraded themselves to specifically start profiling and tracking each individual - essentially by becoming more like facebook/social networks.
Your argument soars and falls depending on how connected to your personal information/social network a retailer is.
The only likely exception to that is your pharmacist - their domain of knowledge gave them pretty deep insights into your life even before the advent of the net.
Sure they can. Let's suppose my purchasing history fits the profile of a married couple, maybe even with telltale signs like feminine hygiene products. The purchases are made on weekends, at whatever time married couples go shopping for groceries and other household essentials.
But suddenly there's a new pattern--at previously unexpected times, I buy incriminating products like condoms, cologne, unusual jewelry, stuff that doesn't fit the profile. I'm pretty sure Walmart can get a pretty decent probability that I'm having an extramarital affair. Why not? Target can already tell when you're pregnant, for instance.
Really? All Facebook knows is what I tell it; a mixture of truth and lies. Walmart knows what I buy from Walmart, which is potentially everything. They know when I'm getting fatter or when I'm losing weight; they know when I'm buying condoms and when I'm not; they know what I eat, what I read, whether I have pets, what kind of pets I have, and they can data mine me a hundred ways to figure out everything else. Facebook doesn't actually know anything I care much about keeping private. Walmart knows a lot more.
Add in the bottles of wine and the alka seltzer the day after, the purchase of womans underwear in sizes too big for his wife but the same size as his boxers, and the bra that won't fit his girlfriend but will fit has 42" shirt size
there is a lot out there that is not parseable from photos even with gis data embedded
why do you think fb wants us to "share" our shopping data
Yes you can pay with cash, but you have to be physically there to do that and until we'll be able to make anonymous payments on the Internet, nothing can guarantee that you are anonymous.
You can choose not to buy, with cash or not, trackable devices like cameras, phones, video games
But people do not choose these things en mass
The issue lies in how we regulate - I believe any form of tracking or surveillance on or offline should be required to produce raw near real time feeds. There is no reasonable way we can regulate without knowing what is being collected - and becoming outraged by it's collection.
Either these should be restricted by identifiable people or published if unidentifiable.
I want my purchase history from wal mart
Use cash. But be aware it is slowly but surely becoming a ghetto.
How exactly is it becoming a "ghetto"? I have never seen any retail stores or restaurants refuse to take cash. In fact, the only place where I've encountered that issue is for buying gas. In big cities, like NYC, there are still restaurants where they only take cash.
I'm not aware of a common definition for "good character," but merely having your character "called into question," especially as a high-profile CEO (and celebrity, at that), should not be the sole grounds for being denied a license to transact money. I'm not saying there couldn't have been more to it in the case of Facebook/Zuckerberg, but in general, public defamation should not be, in itself, enough to prevent someone from building a legal business.
I think there will be poetic justice in this story. Because the web is much bigger than Zuckerberg, or Facebook or even Google. The world is still getting online. It's early yet. But what Zuckerberg has done, how he has carried himself in the presence of enormous luck, he cannot erase. He will live with this reputation as a con his entire life. Building a website, millions of people signing up, enormous hype, making millions from display ads might seem impressive today. It won't remain that way in years to come. We're just getting started. Technology will be taken for granted. There will be more attention to the things Zuckerberg carelessly disregarded.
"Dumb fucks" indeed.
Thank you Mr. Greenspan for telling your side of the story.
Does anyone care about what may or may not have gone on at IBM 30 years ago? At MySpace? Facebook is not a bank and it's not a government. It's a social media site. Nobody will care.
Not to mention the dozens of other social media clones around that time (I remember being members of countless social media sites in those days)
Its not like anyone at Harvard stumbled upon an amazing new idea that was going to change the game. They were building what they hoped would be better versions of things already out there. Mark registered thefacebook.com because "Face Book" is a very common phrase/object.
For better or worse, Zuckerberg won the social networking race. Congrats to him, everyone else at Harvard at that time trying to stake a claim needs to just get on with their lives.
80 million users!
Facebook gives me great comfort that the race isn't always to the swift.
And the contrast between Facebook and the launch of Google Wave has demonstrated that having a dense social graph early is critical to success.
I know I would be pretty bitter in a similar situation.
I think he said at one point in the IM's to Zuckerberg Greenspan said that he writes stuff to vent. And Zuckerberg said he could understood the need for that, but kept such thoughts to himself. (See e.g. Greenspan's White Paper enronforkids.pdf)
It's another thing to actively engage others, talk to them as if you are friends or enter into agreements to work together, and then take ideas from their work. It's the betrayal of people's trust that's gotten him the reputation for being a con and a thief.
None of this should be even remotely interesting until you consider hundreds of millions of people have sent their personal information to the manipulative kid in the IM's. Crazy.
He may, in fact, be the greatest con of all time, having effectively convinced an entire nation, including the President of the United States, to believe in his extremist philosophy of radical openness.
It isn't clear if getting someone to believe in your 'extremist philosophy of radical openness' is necessarily a con, unless of course you yourself don't believe in it and/or are doing so only in furtherance of some other interest which you are obscuring.
I do believe this is what Greenspan was getting at.
Maybe this guy has a reasonable beef, but it's far from clear to me.
I think the comparisons to SpaceX and Tesla are strange in terms of what those companies are _producing_ vis-a-vis a social networking website, but that's just me. If you see them as comparable base on what's being produced, carry on. Everyone is entitled to an opinion.
Apparently Musk was a bit of a jerk when x.com merged with PayPal, and is supposedly difficult to work for even today (he works 100 hour weeks, probably demands the same high standards of his employees as he does of himself), but there's none of the skeletons in the closet with Musk as there is with Zuckerberg.
Plus there's the fact that Musk is tackling really difficult problems like online payments (fraud), mass-producing electric vehicles, making solar installations viable and aiming to make humans a multi-planetary species. Zuckerberg just created the latest social fad, IMO which is now in the process of self-destructing.
From the perspective of being a decent human being, the answer to this question is pretty much always "yes".
In the IM's Zuckerberg goes so far as to tell Greenspan he considers him to be "like a friend" (see IM for exact wording). This is really sickening.
It's "FINE-UHL clubs" not "FINE-UHLZ clubs."
And he shockingly did not understand why information privacy might be a controversial issue.
And then
He had been searching the houseSYSTEM Facebook for the twins' profiles
So much for privacy.
Aside from the Facebook, the sites had overlapping features for course schedulers, photo albums, message boards, digital posters for student groups, and eventually exchanges for buying and selling on campus and mapping your network of friends.
Irrelevant. People only used Thefacebook for obvious and simple things: connecting with people they knew, poking, messaging, and photos. No one used mapping your network of friends (which sucked, incidentally, and also was faily most of the time) and no one even used the course scheduler. To state the obvious, facebook was not successful for its features, it was successful because how it was executed!
This was claimed to have been written for historical significance, but I know that every time an article is written by this author and about this subject dozens of people are thinking the same thing: move on. Create a successful company first, then retire and write about this topic. I'd love to see blog posts regarding Think Computer's technology. As it stands, this blog post gained a lot of attention but there isn't even a a sidebar with "Hi, I'm Aaron Greenspan and I'm the CEO of Think Computer. We have this product, click here to learn more." It's a marketing failure to not capitalize on such an opportunity.
There's a reason there is no such link. FaceCash is currently prohibited from doing business in California by the Money Transmission Act. Aaron is trying to resolve this, but until he does his hands are kind of tied.
Aaron Greenspan has a whole song and dance about how the state of California screwed him over, too. The guy comes across as nothing but a professional victim.
Geez, we're supposed to think less of the guy for not milking his controversial history with Zuckerburg for cash? If there's ever a right time to refrain from marketing yourself, it's when you're accusing someone else of being an opportunistic sociopath.
I've never looked back at archived IMs from years past, though, but they are still squirreled away on the removed hard drives from past machines.