Mark Zuckerberg: Building the Facebook Empire

Mark Zuckerberg was a Harvard freshman with a gift for computer programming less than a decade later he is the baby-faced multi billionaire power broker who rubbed shoulders with the president my name is Barack Obama and I'm the guy who got mark to wear a jacket and tie I think most people still haven't really digested the scale of Facebook or how quickly it's grown the goal is obviously to get to ubiquity I mean Mark Zuckerberg wants everyone to be on the surface he transformed a dorm room project into the internet's biggest global village the site now has over 900 million users can't underestimate how driven work Zuckerberg really hits Zuckerberg is just as visionary as Steve Jobs he's gonna prove just as influential as Bill Gates but for all that success Zuckerberg has confronted bitter battles and lawsuits over Facebook's origins one he wanted to control his own thing and two if he's gonna go against someone he's gonna crush them we spent three months working with mark being essentially let on we were all blindsided we had no idea that he's working on a competing product he is waged an all-out war on his biggest competitors Facebook and Google's relationship is pretty simple they just don't like each other and Zuckerberg has come under fire for pushing the limits on user privacy users have less control over private information they don't fully know how their information is being shared he's not dealing with just a piece of technology he's dealing with people and their behavior and in many ways is doing it on the fly they have amassed this humongous database of information about us because we trusted them so the question is should we still trust them I think that the goal that we went into it with wasn't to make an online community but sort of like a mirror for the real community that existed in real life Mark Zuckerberg we think we know him because we've seen his life unfold in the oscar-winning movie The Social Network the portrait was unsparing a super geek intense cutthroat brilliant and socially crippled I don't understand which part but was it accurate he's always had friends you know he's a pretty social guy um I think in the last time I checked eight hundred and seventy-nine friends on Facebook this is the real Mark Zuckerberg in rarely seen footage shot at Facebook's first corporate headquarters by young filmmakers in 2005 what are we celebrating March got 3 million users 3 million users and how long's basically been around not that long a little more than a year well Zuckerberg pushes the envelope on user privacy he opted out of participating in this program in 2004 at the age of 19 he created Facebook today the 28 year old CEO has accumulated a net worth estimated at fifteen point five billion dollars Marc's mission from the beginning was about connecting people and it was clearly based on this theory that if the world were more connected it would be a better place but there's a lot of surprises when you really dig deep into the story of Facebook the biggest single surprise is the peculiar and tenacious personality of Mark Zuckerberg and to the depth of his convictions and his consistency born in 1984 he grew up in the Hudson River town of Dobbs Ferry a bedroom community north of New York City David Kirkpatrick spent two years researching a book about Zuckerberg and Facebook called the Facebook effect he comes from an unbelievably supportive family in which he's the only son and he has three sisters so he was kind of the prince and in fact I think his parents called him the prince and he was treated accordingly so this is a guy without any problem of self-confidence computer savvy from the start Zuckerberg taught himself the complicated computer language C++ and by ninth grade had created a digital version of the board game risk journalist Jose Antonio Vargas interviewed Zuckerberg for his New Yorker magazine profile he actually created a thing called suck net which is an internal instant messaging system for the family so the computers could talk to each other that's kind of a kid he was when he got sort of tired of his local high school he decided to go to Exeter prep school really because he just wanted more challenge it was at the exclusive Exeter Academy that Zuckerberg and his friend Adam D'Angelo created a music website called synapse it was intended to anticipate what your preferences might be and it was very very popular even before he started Facebook he was fending off offers from Microsoft and others to buy synapse for well over a million dollars like a tech world version of an all-star athlete big-name companies wanted to recruit him right out of Exeter again Zuckerberg was unimpressed and chose instead to enter Harvard in 2002 where it wasn't long before he got himself in trouble Zuckerberg hacked into the school's computers to collect images of students Nicolas Carlson is deputy editor at Business Insider comm you can sort of tell that he's a little bit of a troublemaker he creates something called Facemash it's the first year and Harvard and it's a sort of hot-or-not for the Harvard and it maintained an entire list of Harvard students and which ones were the most attractive ranking them by hotness Ellen McGurk interviewed Zuckerberg for Fast Company magazine Facemash worked in kind of a little bit of a Nikki way it made people upset obviously people felt mocked or exposed and it was one of the first big experiences that mark had with the privacy issues of the masses under pressure Zuckerberg shut down the site the Harvard administration board charged him with breaching security violating copyrights and violating individual privacy but by then Facemash was a campus sensation Zuckerberg had seen his future at the same time getting trouble for the building this mischievous web tool he built a mischievous web tool that was really popular I imagine that he had a couple of sleepless nights worrying about how how bad this thing was going to be was relieved when it all blew over but was also incredibly curious about what he could then make next if you're a genius with genius friends sitting in a dorm room suddenly the world looks like a big happy open place if you can just get into that database at the time the technology landscape was changing dramatically Brad stone is a senior writer at Bloomberg Businessweek the internet was it was really a much different world back in 2004 Friendster really demonstrates that a social network needs to have technical chops the site goes down all the time it's unreliable myspace also it's full of ads it's very distracting it also begins to have technical instability at Harvard Zuckerberg met classmate and future business partner Eduardo Saverin author Ben Mezrich is one of the few to have interviewed Saverin about the early days of Facebook Eduardo met Mark Zuckerberg in an underground Jewish fraternity the underground scene at Harvard you know these were not really fun event these were kind of strange little social settings really bad parties mostly all guys and so Eduardo and Mark met in this scene and they became friends pretty quickly because they were both kind of Outsiders Facemash gods Zuckerberg noticed by three insiders upperclassmen building a social networking site called Harvard connection Olympic rowers and twins Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss with partner Divya Narendra Harvard connection was an idea that I'd come up with when I was a junior in college at the end of 2002 the team had been building the site for nearly a year two of their original programmers had moved on and they desperately needed a new partner the three of us are not computer programmers by trade or practice we did need it an actual programmer to write the actual hard lines of code and we thought mark was that guy the trio reached out to Zuckerberg he was enthused excited and clearly his his eyes were letting up what happened next sparked a furious battle over how Facebook was actually created the details unfold in email exchanges between Zuckerberg and the harvardconnection team at first Zuckerberg appeared eager I wrote over all this stuff he sent and it seems like it shouldn't take too long to implement so we can talk about that after I get all the basic functionality up tomorrow night then Zuckerberg began to delay the project December 4th sorry I was unreachable tonight I just got about three of your missed calls I was working on a problem set December 10th the week has been pretty busy thus far so I haven't gotten the chance to do much work on the site or even think about it really Zuckerberg was stalling because he was busy working on a similar social networking site based on Harvard student directory called the Facebook he and Saverin partnered to fund it mark came to him and said you know you put up a thousand dollars and will launch this site and you know there were no contracts these were just two kids in a dorm room really but that's where it started writer nicholas carlson interviewed more than a dozen people involved in the founding of Facebook and found instant messages retrieved from Zuckerberg computer he said Zuckerberg sent two Saverin according to Business Insider the i.m suggests Zuckerberg was deliberately misleading the Winklevoss twins things like look at this site that I'm working on harvardconnection haha they made a mistake they asked me to do it for them because I'm working on my own Facebook we were always under the impression that mark was working on harvardconnection comm there was never an indication from him that he could not do the work didn't want to do the work or was working on something identical on the side called the Facebook when he met with the Winklevoss brothers the last time he saw that he probably should tell them that he's been working on a competing product he sort of conferred about it with friends but in the end he said you know what I'm gonna do I'm gonna blank them I'm gonna blank them in the ear on February 4th 2004 just as he was expected to complete work on their site Zuckerberg and his friends instead launched the Facebook the Winklevoss brothers and Narendra found out about it the same way nearly everyone else at Harvard did it completely blindsided us we definitely did not expect that Mark wanted to have control over his own project he saw that they were onto something cool the Winklevoss brothers but he saw that he could do something cooler and so one he wanted to control his own thing and two if he's going to go against someone he's going to crush them and that's what he did Mark Zuckerberg snoo Harvard based social networking site the Facebook was mired and controversy from the start just days after he launched it in February of 2004 the Winklevoss twins and Divya Narendra sent him a letter to cease and desist in a nutshell our complaint against Mark Zuckerberg is fraud unjust enrichment and breach of contract Zuckerberg responded with a letter denying any wrongdoing claiming his site was a separate venture and used none of the same code the Winklevoss twins and Narendra would later appeal a 65 million dollar settlement with Facebook they lost in federal court but that settlement could now be worth 200 million dollars but none of the vicious legal wrangling slowed the incredible momentum of the Facebook and that's why my roommates were kind of like you know this is pretty cool like I thought this would work at other schools so we launched it at Columbia Yale and Stanford the end within a couple of weeks each of those three schools also like had thousands of users who are like alright this is pretty sweet like let's just all out see how many schools we can launch the status group as possible about this point in time they started to take meetings with venture capitalists and with bigger advertisers and this is all kind of Eduardo's doing they got a pretty early deal with Visa and they had a deal with American Express they had a number of advertisers that came and went then record companies started getting interested and they began to get some pretty good revenue from the music industry enter Sean Parker who had his own connection to the music business on a trip to New York Zuckerberg and his partner Eduardo Saverin had dinner with a 24 year old co-founder of Napster the seasoned entrepreneur and a truly creative individual extraordinarily interesting person who had worked his way into a network in the valley that is just to die for it particularly at that point for Zuckerberg Parker was a hero and a role model partner Saverin didn't agree Eduardo did not think hi leave Shawn from the very beginning he thought that Shawn was a snake oil salesman that they didn't need Shawn that Shawn talked a big game but with living out of a duffle bag and had been kicked out of two companies in the summer of 2004 with Saverin remaining on the East Coast Zuckerberg left Harvard we came out hello Alto for the summer just hanging out because Palo Alto is kind of this mythical place where you know all the startups come crowded government to launch in another 150 schools from the year started one of the things that mark did that was very smart by going to Palo Alto was to actually enter the petri dish of entrepreneurial ISM particularly for new technologies Zuckerberg and his friends moved into a large frame house with a swimming pool and he reconnected with Shawn Parker who later became Zuckerberg roommate he was the adult supervision he's the guy who showed them how things are done in Silicon Valley he's the one who showed them how to meet investors how to negotiate with them who to hire Marcus told me stories of just all of the guys coding late at night around dining room tables in eating chicken McNuggets and cereal and there's partying going on Sean Parker's bringing them around to the different kind of cool Silicon Valley hotspots and meanwhile all the website is growing astronomically fast I mean there's a million member party by December of that year during this time Parker gave Zuckerberg some shrewd advice he took to heart he sort of looked at him and said you need to be the founder of this thing and you need to be the CEO forever you know you can't turn this over to investors and Mark is able to negotiate a series of increasingly important investment deals that do two things one allow him enough operating cash to hire some of the smartest engineers in the business and to help him retain majority control in the company but tensions began to grow with Zuckerberg original partner Eduardo Saverin who remained on the East Coast Eduardo felt that you know he was the business head of the company and he was no longer being treated that way you know mark and Shawn were taking meetings all over California they were meeting with venture capitalists and they were kind of ignoring it wardo he retaliated at froze the bank accounts to try and get Marc's attention and mark and Shawn began to sort of figure out a way to build the company without Eduardo Zuckerberg responded and froze Saverin out the duardo was removed from the company masthead and he essentially became a nonentity he became a non-person he was thrown out and he became very upset Facebook had a million active users on college campuses nationwide and big money was starting to pour in Sean Parker the new president of Facebook introduced Zuckerberg to Silicon Valley angel investor Peter Thiel who put five hundred thousand dollars into the company then in the spring of 2005 the venture capital firm accel partners offered Zuckerberg twelve point seven million dollars for an eleven percent stake in the company and didn't ask for much control at all walking away from that investment mark controlled three out of five board seats which is a bizarre and unprecedented situation to have one individual have absolute effectively dictatorial control over the disposition and direction of an increasingly giant company overnight the Excel investment gave Facebook evaluation of 100 million dollars as Facebook's public profile grew so did Zuckerberg control this time Shawn Parker was edged out in August of 2005 Parker was arrested for suspicion of cocaine possession although not formally charged with a crime and immediately released it led to his abrupt resignation as president of Facebook he was the primary outside face of the company and it was felt that somebody who was under any kind of a cloud with drugs was not the right guy to be the public face of Facebook so mark reluctantly agreed that he ought to leave Facebook was growing with remarkable speed and Zuckerberg moves the company from its frat like house with the pool to a larger and more conventional space in downtown Palo Alto 3 but the college atmosphere remained the same one of the things that I do focus on at Facebook is making sure that the culture is very friendly you know and that people hang out in terms of managing this whole process nothing you know no like I have no idea what I'm doing even their employee interviews were different chris kelly was brought on in the new position of chief privacy officer to deal with facebook's increasingly contentious privacy issues at a time when the entire company numbered only a couple dozen employees the first time i met mark we we climbed out on the roof out through the the window and did our interview on the roof of what was then a world raps and it was clear he was young but he had a very sophisticated understanding of what had happened so far and where he wanted to take the company determined to keep facebook's unusual creative culture alive all night hackathons were one way to do it we have these hackathons that the company write work basically everyone gets together and just hacks on something and build something all night long and the only the only rule is that you aren't allowed to work on it a hackathon what you work on the rest of the time so people work on crazy stuff hackathons were some of the most kind of creative focus that you could ever imagine in a company imagining these incredibly talented engineers coming together for a night and saying we're going to stay up all night and we're just going to program and we're going to we're going to pick a project and we're going to get it done that night it's like great make it will prototype it and there'll be a prototype war and see who wins it can be a contentious environment get all the way across from marks point of view is where good ideas come from quickly and efficiently good ideas were flowing zuckerberg then made a change that would give facebook a sudden and dramatic boost allowing people to identify or tag themselves and their friends in photographs that was a huge huge change that led to massive new use of facebook and photos became very rapidly by far the most used part of facebook and became the single biggest driver of its growth that growth continued in one direction up according to facebook's internal tracking its user had shot to 5.5 million users in less than two years and media giants were banging on the door in 2006 Yahoo baited the 22 year old Zuckerberg with an extraordinary offer a buyout for 1 billion dollars even more extraordinary Zuckerberg turned them down now if you are a parent of someone about marks age you're looking at the yahoo decision and thinking why did you not take that money I've never been about money if it was it would have just sold out we just felt that doing that and going down that path would not help us build facebook out to what we thought it could be in 2006 Mark Zuckerberg rejected a 1 billion dollar pitch from Yahoo when MTV pushed the ante even higher Michael J wolf was CEO of MTV Networks Mark had taken me on a walk around Palo Alto and show me his apartment and afterwards we sat down for a lunch and I told him we'd be willing to pay as much as a billion and a half dollars to buy Facebook outright his answer was I think it's worth a lot more and besides you've seen my apartment I don't really need that pun of money and at the same time I may never have an idea as good as this one so I'm not that interested in selling there was internal strife around it no question there were a lot of people who wanted to sell ultimately you know mark decided to turn down the offers Zuckerberg wasn't ready to sell because he had some ideas that he thought would make Facebook even more popular one of them was called newsfeed a kind of real-time wire service of updates about what users were up to newsfeed is what everybody is doing at that point or what they're posting what they're linking to the world that they live in which is really what a newspaper is right it's a living breathing newspaper of people around you but many Facebook users thought that new paper sent out too much information and violated their privacy 750 thousand of them launched an online protest to say that it was unpopular at first is a dramatic understatement they were under siege at the office they couldn't leave they were surrounded by news trucks almost 10% of our user base at the time joined the students against Facebook newsfeed group Zuckerberg was forced to apologize he wrote his apology note himself it was probably a good learning experience when Facebook changed some of the privacy controls that was an overstep I do think he takes those seriously but I do think that he's willing to continue to overstep for the for the purpose of making a product that he wants to make the apology was not a surrender Zuckerberg was sure that users would get used to this new level of sharing and he turned out to be right after tweaking newsfeed it became one of the most popular elements of the Facebook experience it just happened that the first time I ever met mark was two days after that happened and I can tell you even though his members were an open revolt he was not the slightest bit flustered he had complete confidence that everything was going to work out all right Zuckerberg decided it was time to take facebook beyond its college roots and introduce it to the general public the response was stunning membership doubled shooting up to 12 million by 2006 Zuckerberg radically altered the Facebook experience again went for the first time the 23 year old CEO invited programmers from around the world to develop apps for Facebook it was another turning point expanding Facebook from an insular world of information to a platform and it was like the gold rush now you open up this wonderful platform and in comes every kind of developer with every kind of idea from video sharing to games the things that blink to things that turned into you know ballerinas and hippos and just every kind of fun wonderful thing the platform companies or the operating system companies always do the best I mean think of Microsoft you know it had this ubiquitous Windows platform and all these other companies wrote programs for Windows you know Facebook's really trying to create itself in that model and in 2007 Microsoft itself entered the picture this time with a deal Zuckerberg couldn't turn down and for the first time the world got a glimpse of what Facebook may really be worth by the time people were finally giving this the idea that anyone would pay a billion dollars for Facebook Microsoft comes along and pays 250 million dollars for 1.6 percent of the company it was outrageous it valued the company at fifteen billion dollars this took Facebook from a thing that a lot of people use to a thing that everyone was talking about the 15 billion dollar company but for a 15 billion dollar company Facebook was only making a meager 30 million dollars in profits to remedy that Zuckerberg announced a sweeping new advertising system in the fall of 2007 one part of it led companies set up their own Facebook pages and advertise using social ads Luke earner covers social media and own shares in Facebook social ads on Facebook are ads where they would say that your friends meg and Ryan like Virgin America and it turns out not surprisingly that when you see that your friends like a product you're more likely to click on that ad so social ads have been very successful on Facebook virtually from the beginning but another part of Facebook's new advertising plan beacon gave users far more than they wanted and they let Zuckerberg know about it Zuckerberg made a lot of mistakes the next mistake which was a really big one was beacon you go to a third-party ecommerce site and you buy something and unless you tell it not to really quickly it's going to go back and tell all your friends that you just bought a diamond engagement ring and obviously you know that sort of secret revealing can cause a lot of trouble there was the great rallying cry that Facebook ruined Christmas because suddenly everyone's purchases were being broadcast to their entire network Zuckerberg really tried to defend it for a while it took him a while to realize how wrong it was on December 5th 2007 Zuckerberg made another apology he had overreached yet again but as with previous mistakes it wouldn't really matter Facebook was just too popular and it wasn't long before Zuckerberg was loosening up the network's privacy controls one more time more than four years after co-founding Facebook Zuckerberg still seemed uneasy in the public spotlight what's your next finger to do get bought yeah none of these rumors are true right by 2009 rumors were indeed swirling that Facebook would go public instead Zuckerberg took money from a new investor yuri milner CEO of the russian internet investment firm Digital Sky Technologies offered a two hundred million dollar deal for just 1.9 percent of the company deals of that size are kind of never easy there's a lot of back-and-forth this deal was about the vision that was shared how big this company can get everything else was sort of secondary Milner's investment allowed Facebook to continue to expand and it kept the development of the company firmly in the hands of its founder Zuckerberg knew that pushing Facebook advertising even further was the key to continued growth for years Zuckerberg believed that Facebook was in a unique position today even with the most advanced advertising systems that exist they only have estimates of what someone's gender might be or what someone's age might be or what they might be interested in but on Facebook we know exactly what gender someone is and exactly how old they are and exactly what they're interested in Jeremy Smith is chief strategy officer for SecondMarket a company that brokers shares and privately held companies which cannot yet be traded on the public market what makes Facebook so desirable from the perspective of advertisers is that they are able to accumulate information on their users like nobody else the funny thing is the pictures don't really view it as data its themselves it's their information it's their lives that they're putting on there but as far as advertisers are concerned it is the the holy grail of data pushing the boundaries of that holy grail of data was about to get Zuckerberg in trouble again in December 2009 he revamped the privacy settings for Facebook's then 350 million users unless users individually restored their settings previously private information was now available to everyone on the internet many people just sort of took that default and somewhat inadvertently allowed a lot of their information to become public and many privacy advocates believe that they didn't explain that or disclose it sufficiently a firestorm of complaints from users and consumer groups forced Zuckerberg to backtrack again sparking concerns in Congress we are here today to urge Facebook's creator and CEO Mark Zuckerberg to revisit this new policy as soon as possible we believe Facebook should reverse its policy to begin exploring guidelines so users know upfront what's happened adding fuel to the fire was the surfacing of still more instant messages Business Insider published messages they said showed a friend asking then college-aged Zuckerberg why people shared their emails with him Zuckerberg response was curt and profane you know I I mean I asked him point-blank about it and he was very embarrassed by them by the fact that he had sent these im's less than one month later he was put on a hot seat and a memorably awkward interview at the all things digital conference do you feel like you're violating people's privacy you know there were real learning points and turning points along the way in terms of in terms of building things if I knew what I knew now then then I hope I wouldn't have made those mistakes but I can't go back and change the past I can only do what we think is the right thing going forward you know anybody who's ever kind of doubted what Facebook is about or want to question his integrity I mean they can begin it they can keep pointing back to that right to that instance of like I can't trust that guy that is that is going to be our check on him for as long as he remains CEO you know and in charge of that company it's gonna be like okay you're not that guy we'll prove to us that you're not Chris hoof Naugle the director of privacy programs at the University of California Berkeley believes Mark Zuckerberg purposefully pushes the envelope on privacy in most situations where a company does something that's unpopular they have blowback they lose the ability to do something but in Facebook's case we have something called I call blow forward where they take two steps forward there's some type of public reaction and they just take a little step back and so over time they've been able to open up profiles more and more Marc does not think you should be a different person at work than you are at the bowling alley in bed at school you know he basically thinks you should be consistent across all these environments so that's a very radical view for many older people you by the time Mark Zuckerberg turned 25 in 2009 he had accumulated so much notoriety wealth and power that author Ben Mezrich had written a book about him and the founding of Facebook this story started for me at an email I received just out of the blue to my website and Eduardo Saverin was angry he wanted to tell his story he had co-founded Facebook with Mark Zuckerberg and he said had been kicked out of the company and he felt betrayed and he wanted to talk Saverin talked to Mezrich for six months about a lawsuit he filed against his former Harvard classmate for diluting Saverin share of the company according to Mezrich Facebook found out Eduardo was talking to him and they essentially settled with Eduardo nobody knows for sure what happened but what I've heard is he got 5% of Facebook and he had to sign an agreement that said he would never speak to Ben Mezrich again but Mezrich already had enough material for his book my proposal had leaked out on the web Aaron Sorkin saw it Scott Rudin saw it so Sorkin immediately signed on to write the screenplay and everything happened very quickly from there the pre-release publicity surrounding the movie also seemed to force Zuckerberg to go on a PR offensive the previously press shy Zuka Berg was suddenly everywhere if you build something great that's what people care about when people don't care about what someone says about you in a movie he gave Oprah a tour of his house in 2010 and announced on her show a 100 million dollar donation to public schools in Newark New Jersey 100 million dollars the social network opened in wide release on October 1st 2010 people want to go on the internet check out their friends so why not build a website that offers that friends pictures profiles I'm talking about taking the entire social experience of college and putting it online zuckerberg complained about his on-screen portrait as a ruthless socially challenged power geek with no friends he said there were factual errors in the script his frame it as if the whole reason for making Facebook and building something was because I wanted to get girls or wanted to get into some kind of social institution and I mean the reality for people who know me is I've actually been dating the same girl since before I started at Facebook they just can't wrap their head around the idea that someone might build something because they like building things though he initially said he wouldn't see the movie Zuckerberg ended up taking his entire staff to it he even showed up on Saturday Night Live you ever end up seeing seeing the film that social yeah I did cool thanks I and what did you what do you think it was interesting I do the social network won a Golden Globe Award for Best dramatic picture as well as three Academy Awards first Tunisia now Egypt what's next but to an increasing number of people around the world Facebook wasn't just a Hollywood movie it was affecting new life in late 2010 demonstrators started taking to the streets in Tunisia and later in Egypt to protest the repressive governments by this time more than 70% of Facebook's half a billion plus users lived outside the United States in Egypt one flashpoint for the anger was a case of police brutality at the center of the protests was a Google employee ran a Facebook page well gonna was the manager in Egypt of a page that was a memorial to this guy who had been beaten tortured and killed by the secret police and that group became very very large many many hundreds of thousands of members during the period leading up to the revolt against Mubarak Facebook expedited the ability of people to express their dissatisfaction which clearly sped up the process of these revolts the governments of Tunisia and Egypt fell protesters expressed their gratitude to Facebook on the streets one named his newborn daughter Facebook and Wael Ghonim sang the social networking sites praises on CNN I want to meet Mark Zuckerberg one day and thank you I'm talking on behalf of Egypt this revolution started on Facebook when hundreds of thousands of Egyptians started collaborating content you know like we would post a video on on Facebook they would be shared by 50 thousand people on their world within few hours Facebook itself was was very quick to try to distance themselves from that political activity I mean obviously they supported it but they don't really want to be seen as a tool of change because obviously Facebook wants to be active in regimes like China they don't necessarily want themselves viewed as a tool of insurgency Zuckerberg has taken on a personal goal that might help him with his mission to connect the world he says he spends an hour a day studying Chinese which could potentially help him gain a billion new friends it's the fastest-growing and the biggest internet market in the world there are hundreds of millions of users and his mission is incomplete if he's not in China Mark Zuckerberg power had never been greater and once again speculation grew that he would take his company public despite enormous pressure Zuckerberg has been hesitant to pull the trigger and cash in a hundred years two hundred years from now what's gonna be more important the money right or the fact that he has had this kind of impact or the fact that he's you know executed and developed and helped evolve this thing that is more than just a technology site and it's more than just a website and so I think that's why it's never been about money and it's never been about status when companies go public it's a tremendous strain on the management and in fact on top of all of that when you go public you at you open yourself up to even greater government scrutiny aware of that scrutiny Facebook has amped up their presence in Washington with a team that includes several former White House aides and influential Capitol Hill insiders political official after a political official will tell you if you are absent from the debate you're likely to be the person who kind of gets cut out and so presence in that debate particularly when you know Google and Yahoo and Microsoft and a number of other very large players are spending a lot on lobbying as a mistake today several Facebook founders including Marc's friends and classmates have left the company to start new ventures on their own they've been dubbed the Facebook mafia but much of Silicon Valley talent is on their way in top programmers are leading companies like Google to be a part of Zuckerberg momentum and Facebook and Google the two internet behemoths are competing in other ways Ryan's single is a staff writer for Wired magazine Facebook and Google's relationship is pretty simple they just don't like each other they're really I mean they're competing cultures you know Facebook was sort of young brash wild and Google is our you know an algorithm company like these are guys that like any problem there's got to be a way that they can write a little algorithm that'll fix it it's clear that Google missed the rise of social and Eric Schmidt has has admitted to to being a flat-footed around Facebook and around social they've tried a number of things most spectacularly the buzz social network that just hasn't worked then in May of 2011 Facebook was embarrassed when it was revealed that they had launched a secret attack on Google Facebook is doing damage control after revelations it hired a PR firm to plant negative stories about Google Facebook claimed publicly it was not a smear campaign but the exchange revealed just how vicious the competition has become the whole burson-marsteller flap was was really just an in-your-face expression of the animosity that has sprung up not only between these two companies but almost the personal Shakespearean drama that playing out between Google and between Facebook which frankly has a lot of former Google execs who would like nothing more than to supplant their former company you can't underestimate how driven Mark Zuckerberg really is he says his mission is to make the world bar open but her place his mission is also to be number one right he wants to be you know inscribed on granite above bill gates I think he is well on his way like gates another Harvard dropout Zuckerberg is a fierce competitor he moved quickly to vanquish rivals Google and Twitter with a stunning acquisition in April 2012 Instagram is awesome market in an instant Facebook likes the photo sharing up so much it's paying 1 billion dollars for it cash and shares ahead of its IPO but the app is free and has little known revenue still Facebook may need Instagram more than Instagram needs the money instagram has become a photo-sharing competitor and a social network all its own it was considered a radical and defensive move Facebook cannot take any chance that any other social network oriented toward photos could really get traction that would come you know compared to theirs and I think so there's a pre-emptive quality to this also I think almost certainly Google was interested and probably maybe forced Facebook to act now one month later Facebook finally went public in the largest IPO on record for an internet company making Mark Zuckerberg a multi billionaire this is an awesome moment the CEO and hoodie and sneakers retain tight control of his company with 57% of shareholder voting rights Facebook has literally changed the world we've moved from the country to the village to the town to Facebook it's just getting started - I think it's just going to get bigger and bigger and bigger for a site that's able to move from the dorm room to a site where you know my 80 year old mother and myself and my chiropractor and my third grade class all reunites on the site and we all have something to talk about it's an achievement Zuckerberg is just as visionary as Steve Jobs he's gonna prove just as influential as Bill Gates but he's not dealing with a piece of gadget he's not dealing with some program he's dealing with our lives he's dealing with our identity so that's why I think we're all going to have to kind of keep him in check in a way we make decisions at Facebook not optimizing for you know what is going to happen in the next year but what's going to set us up to really be in this world where every product experience that you have is social and that's all powered by Facebook

Channel: Bloomberg

Views: 2,306,315

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Keywords: Bloomberg, game changers, facebook, mark zuckerberg, fb, facebook ipo, internet, social media, nasdaq, winkevoss twins, the social network

Id: 5WiDIhIkPoM

Length: 45min 18sec (2718 seconds)

Published: Tue May 28 2013