Mark Zuckerberg: the face behind Facebook
When Mark Zuckerberg turned down a reported $1bn offer from Yahoo last year, he was ridiculed in the blogosphere for his hubris. Twelve months and several million users (but still no profits) later, the baby-faced Facebook founder looks to be having the last laugh. Microsoft has just paid $240m for a 1.6% stake, valuing the social network du jour at an eye-watering $15bn.
Zuckerberg, who turned 23 in May, often remarks he feels “old”, says The Times. Who’s surprised? His youthful looks may still give him trouble with barmen, but he’s packed more into four years than most achieve in a lifetime.
Zuckerberg’s rise owes more to fellow Harvard dropout Bill Gates than to Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, to whom he is often compared. It was a talk by Gates at his former alma mater which inspired Zuckerberg to suspend his studies to develop Facebook in 2004, and it is Gates who has now ensured his coming of age.
The site’s purported value is “based more on the hope of world domination” than reality, says the FT. There is scepticism even among the top brass at Microsoft: chief Steve Ballmer has dismissed social networks as probable “fads”. Why then the buy-in? It can be partly explained as a straightforward spoiler to Google, which has long hoped to neutralise the Facebook upstart. But it’s tempting to assume a degree of sentimentality on the part of Gates. The new prince of hi-tech is the closest His Billness has ever come to finding a worthy protégé and heir.
On the geek stakes, Zuckerberg certainly comes up to scratch. He padded into a recent interview with Fortune barefoot and unshaven, and proceeded to wipe the white board with his knitted hat (somewhat spoiling the insouciance of the gesture by pointing it out to the journalist). Socially awkward, he often comes across as shy and defensive; yet his language is “jarringly grandiose”. He calls Facebook “the most powerful distribution mechanism that’s been created in a generation”. Central to the claim is the idea of the site as a “social graph”: a pattern of human nodes connected by the growing number of applications it carries.
Critics say the concept is hardly new. But Zuckerberg, who compares his human graphing to the work of Renaissance mapmakers, has pulled off the trick of persuasion, says The Economist. In mere months, “the idea of the social graph has become the favourite, if not the only, topic of conversation among the Valley’s geeks, venture capitalists and internet moguls”.
The son of a psychiatrist and a dentist, Zuckerberg “was born with a silver mouse in his hand”, says The Times. He won a place at the Phillips Exeter Academy, “the Harvard of American boarding schools”, where he developed interests in psychology and computer programming. At Harvard, these came together in The Facebook, an online version of the student yearbook. The birth of the site in 2003 is mired in controversy – Zuckerberg is still locked in a legal dispute with two fellow former students who claim he stole their idea. But it took off immediately, spreading through US campuses and gained momentum in the outside world when Zuckerberg moved to California during a summer vacation and secured seed funding from influential internet backer Peter Thiel. The deal with Microsoft values Zuckerberg’s remaining 20% stake of Facebook at $3bn on paper. Not bad for someone who still hasn’t graduated.
Facebook: a nice idea, but is it really worth $15bn?
With 50 million users, Facebook has just half the membership of Rupert Murdoch’s rival MySpace. Yet that statistic fails to convey the euphoria around “Crackbook’s” progress from its US college heartland into markets such as chattering Britain. “If the Summer of Love captivated San Francisco in 1967... London in 2007 was most definitely the summer of Facebook,” says James Harkin in FT Magazine. But having had their fill of snooping on acquaintances, exhausted the possibilities of sending electronic cocktails and zombie hugs, and amassed respectable numbers of “friends”, users wondered what on earth to do with them.
Social networking is, by definition, a fickle game in which Groucho’s Law is paramount, says John Naughton in The Observer: once everyone’s allowed in, the attraction wanes. Even if Facebook numbers continue to mount, its overblown valuation only makes sense if the site has the same growth potential, and advertising pull, as Google (which this week overtook ITV in quarterly UK ad revenues). It doesn’t. No matter, say those backing the site. The potential lies in its emergence as the de facto operating system of the net: hence the move to open the site to independent programmers. The plan is to seduce users into organising virtually everything they do online in Facebook’s “walled garden”. Nice idea, says David Prosser in The Independent, but is it really worth $15bn? “The short answer is no – the long answer is not now and not any time soon.” There’s more than an echo of 1999 in the hype. “Facebook friends should be poking Mark Zuckerberg and urging him to sell up while the going is so good.”
