Comment by steve1977 3 days ago
IMHO Mark Zuckerberg is a textbook case of someone who got lucky once by basically being in the right place at the right time, but who attributes his success to his skill. There’s probably a proper term for this.
No one else is adding the context of where things were at the time in tech...
> The instagram purchase felt insane at the time ($1b to share photos) but facebook was able to convert it into a moneymaking juggernaut in time for the flattened growth of their flagship application.
Facebook's API was incredibly open and accessible at the time and Instagram was overtaking users' news feeds. Zuckerberg wasn't happy that an external entity was growing so fast and onboarding users so easily that it was driving more content to news feeds than built-in tools. Buying Instagram was a defensive move, especially since the API became quite closed-off since then.
Your other points are largely valid, though. Another comment called the WhatsApp purchase "inspired", but I feel that also lacks context. Facebook bought a mobile VPN service used predominantly by younger smartphone users, Onavo(?), and realized the amount of traffic WhatsApp generated by analyzing the logs. Given the insight and growth they were monitoring, they likely anticipated that WhatsApp could usurp them if it added social features. Once again, a defensive purchase.
Buying competitors is not insane or a weird business practice. He was probably advised to do so by the competent people under him
And what did he do to keep G+ from becoming a valid competitor? It killed itself. I signed up but there was no network effect and it kind of sucked. Google had a way of shutting down all their product attempts too
I hate pretty much everything about Facebook but Zuckerberg has been wildly successful as CEO of a publicly traded company. The market clearly has confidence in his leadership ability, he effectively has had sole executive control of Facebook since it started and it's done very well for like 20 years now.
>has been wildly successful as CEO of a publicly traded company.
That has a lot to do with the fact that it's a business centric company. His acumen has been in user growth, monetization of ads, acquisitions and so on. He's very similar to Altman.
The problems start when you try to venture into hard technological topics, like the Metaverse fiasco, where you have to have a sober and engineering oriented understanding of the practical limits of technology, like Carmack who left Meta pretty frustrated. You can't just bullshit infinitely when the tech and not the sales matter.
Contrast it with Gates who had a serious programming background, he never promised even a fraction of the cringe worthy stuff you hear from some CEOs nowadays because he would have known it's nonsense. Or take Apple, infinitely more sane on the AI topic because it isn't just a "more users, more growth, stonks go up" company.
He's really not. Facebook is an extremely well run organization. There's a lot to dislike about working there, and there's a lot to dislike about what they do, but you cannot deny they have been unbelievably successful at it. He really is good at his job, and part of that has been making bold bets and aggressively cutting unsuccessful bets.
Facebook can be well run without that being due to Zuck.
There are literally books that make this argument from insider perspectives (which doesn't mean it's true, but it is possible, and does happen regularly).
A basketball team can be great even if their coach sucks.
You can't attribute everything to the person at the top.
That is true but in Meta’s case, it is tightly managed by him. I remember a decade ago a friend was a mid-level manager and would have exec reviews to Zuck, who could absorb information very quickly and redirect feedback to align with his product strategy.
He is a very hands CEO, not one who is relying on experts to run things for him.
In contrast, I’ve heard that Elon has a very good senior management team and they sort of know how to show him shiny things that he can say he’s very hands on about while they focus on what they need to do.
He created the company, if it is well run it was thanks to him hiring the right people. Regardless how you slice it he is a big reason it didn't fail, most companies like that fails when they scale up and hire a lot of people but facebook didn't, hiring the right people is not luck.
I can’t tell if you’re being tongue in cheek or not, so I’ll respond as if you mean this.
It’s easy to cherry pick a few bets that flopped for every mega tech company: Amazon has them, Google has them, remember Windows Phone? etc.
I see the failures as a feature, not a bug - the guy is one of the only founder CEOs to have ever built a $2T company (trillion with a T). I imagine part of that is being willing to make big bets.
And it also seems like no individual product failure has endangered their company’s footing at all.
While I’m not a Meta or Zuck fan myself, using a relatively small product flop as an indication a $2T tech mega corp isn’t well run seems… either myopic or disingenuous.
Parent comment says "aggressively cutting unsuccessful bets" and Oculus is nothing like that.
Oculus Quest are decent products, but a complete flop compared to their investment and Zuck's vision of the metaverse. Remember they even renamed the company? You could say they're on betting on the long run, but I just don't see that happening in 5 or even 10 years.
As an owner of Quest 2 and 3, I'd love to be proven wrong though. I just don't see any evidence of this would change any time soon.
Absolutely, not everything they do will succeed but that's okay too, right? At this point their core products are used by 1 in 2 humans on earth. They need to get people to have more kids to expand their user base. They're gonna throw shit at the wall and not everything will stick, and they'll ship stuff that's not quite done, but they do have to keep trying; I can't bring myself to call that "failure."
their core product IS 1 of 2 humans on earth.
the product is used by advertisers to sell stuff to those humans.
fuck oculus and lucky palmer.
I have hundreds of hours building and tinkering on the original kickstarter kit and then they sold to FB and shut down all the open source stuff.
Yes, they did supply data to FB (under the same contracts as everyone else). However, it was only supplied to the sales org, not the product org.
FB acquired IG because it was blowing up in SF and MZ (other leaders too) were looking at how quickly it appeared to be growing and how good it was.
WhatsApp is certainly worth less today than what they paid for it plus the extra funding it has required over time. Let alone producing anything close to ROI. Has lost them more money than the metaverse stuff.
Insta was a huge hit for sure but since then Meta Capital allocation has been a disaster including a lot of badly timed buybacks
> IMHO Mark Zuckerberg is a textbook case of someone who got lucky once by basically being in the right place at the right time, but who attributes his success to his skill.
It is no secret that the person who turned Facebook into a money-printing machine is/was Sheryl Sandberg.
Thus, the evidence is clear that Mark Zuckerberg had the right idea at the right time (the question is whether this was because of his skills or because he got lucky), but turning his good idea(s) into a successful business was done by other people (lead by Sheryl Sandberg).
And isn’t the job of a good CEO to put the right people in the right seats? So if he found a superstar COO that took the company into the stratosphere and made them all gazillionaires…
Wouldn’t that indicate, at least a little bit, a great management move by Zuck?
And he didn't even come up with the idea, he stole it all. And then he stole the work from the people he started it with...
You're probably going to get comments like "Social networking existed before. You can't steal it". Well, on top of derailing someone else's execution of said non-stole idea (or something) which makes you a jerk, in the case of those he 'stole'/stole from, for starters maybe it was existing code (I don't know if that was ever proven), but maybe it was also the Winklevosses idea of using .edu email addresses, and possibly other concepts
Do I think he stole it? Dunno. (Though Aaron Greenspan did log his houseSYSTEM server requests, which seems pretty damning) But given what he's done since (Whatsapp, copying every Snapchat feature)? I'd say the likelihood is non-zero
The term you're looking for is "billionaire". The amount of serendipity in these guys' lives is truly baffling, and only becomes more apparent the more you dig. It makes sense when you realize their fame is all survivorship bias. Afer all, there must be someone at the tail end of the bell curve.
It is at least a little suspicious that one week he's hiring like crazy, then next week, right after Sam Altman states that we are in an AI bubble, Zuckerberg turns around and now fears the bubble.
Maybe he's just gambling that Altman is right, saving his money for now and will be able to pick up AI researcher and developers at a massive discount next year. Meta doesn't have much of a presence in the space market right now, and they have other businesses, so waiting a year or two might not matter.
Ehh. You don’t get FB to where it is by being incompetent. Maybe he is not the right leader for today. Maybe. But you have to be right way, way more often than not to create a FB and get it to where it is. To operate from where it started to where it is just isn’t an accident or Dunning-Kruger.
I think that meta is bad for the world and that zuck has made a lot of huge mistakes but calling him a one hit wonder doesn't sit right with me.
Facebook made the transition to mobile faster than other competitors and successfully kept G+ from becoming competition.
The instagram purchase felt insane at the time ($1b to share photos) but facebook was able to convert it into a moneymaking juggernaut in time for the flattened growth of their flagship application.
Zuck hired Sheryl Sandburg and successfully turned a website with a ton of users into an ad-revenue machine. Plenty of other companies struggled to convert large user bases into dollars.
This obviously wasn't all based on him. He had other people around him working on this stuff and it isn't right to attribute all company success to the CEO. The metaverse play was obviously a legendary bust. But "he just got lucky" feels more like Myspace Tom than Zuckerberg in my mind.