Mark Zuckerberg: 'I've made so many mistakes'
Isn't it good to know that the world's youngest billionaire and the co-founder and CEO of the world's biggest social network is just like one of us?
Despite his enormous success with his business, Mark Zuckerberg admitted he is fallible in front of an audience of hundreds of journalists, industry peers and admirers.
Of course we are all too aware of some of those blunders when it comes to the issue of privacy on the site, which is home to over 500 million users. But it was nice to hear him admit it during the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco.
"I've made so many mistakes in running the company so far," he said.
"Basically, any mistake that you can think of I've made or will make in the next few years. If you're building a product that people love you can make a lot of mistakes."
The trouble, he said, is figuring out which of the company's myriad problems "really matter."
When users shout from the rooftops and jump up and down on Facebook as they did with Beacon and as they did with privacy changes that is the time to act.
With every product announcement the company makes, the issue of privacy always bubbles to the surface. Mr Zuckerberg once famously said "privacy is dead". Despite the backlash he endured as a result, he told the conference that as time goes by those that are asking for more control today, are going to get more and more comfortable of letting go of it tomorrow.
"My guess would be that over the next few years...the data portability and openness side of this, it will become a lot more obvious about why this is valuable and the great things that can be created from this."
He also held his hand up over a recent spat the company has had with Google over importing users contacts from Gmail. Google blocked Facebook because the social networking site does not reciprocate.
"I'm not sure we're 100% right on this," admitted Mr Zuckerberg.
"The correct answer isn't completely obvious. I'm not sure that we're completely right, but I think it's not completely black and white."
As part of his on-stage confessional, the 26 year-old said he had a soft spot for the scrappy underdog and for budding entrepreneurs some of whom told him they were inspired by his story as portrayed in the movie The Social Network. Be it fact or fiction.
As to the ethos of the company, Mr Zuckerberg said they have a pretty straight forward set of beliefs:
"We have five values we write down. Two especially: move fast and be bold. Technology companies are interesting, they get slower with scale.
"One of the things I think about every day is how do we make this company move as quickly as possible. That's a really big deal. A company with a few hundred engineers putting out the quality of products we do, I'm really proud of it."
For weeks the young CEO has been talking about how the world is moving to be more social. For businesses he has said there will be a lot of disruption and it was a theme he echoed again during his conversation at the Web 2.0 Summit.
Gaming was the first industry to become more social on Facebook. Earlier in the week, the Summit heard from the founder of Zynga games which created Farmville and Mafia Wars. Mark Pincus said that to date 320 million people had played his companies games.
Mr Zuckerberg predicted that other industries such as music and television would experience the same kind of growth and disruption in the future:
"Over the next five years, most industries are going to be rethought and designed around people. Our view is every product is going to get social.
"I think this is going to be a really exciting period. Some are going to make things around people. Some aren't going to make it. But over the next five years, everyone's going to have to think about this, just like they have to think about mobile.
"I think people will get there. They just need to take the steps to get comfortable. A slow approach isn't necessarily bad."
And for those not so sure, some succinct advice from the guy now in charge or a company estimated to be worth $40bn, he told them to "Get on the bus."
~RS~q~RS~~RS~z~RS~08~RS~)
Comments
Facebook eh? That's a rarity on this blog. Though while you ask,
"Isn't it good to know that the world's youngest billionaire and the co-founder and CEO of the world's biggest social network is just like one of us?"
No, not really. I'm sure most people that read your blog would respond to this with a big 'Who cares?'
He got lucky, and as such got rich. But don't try and pretend he's a genius or some great mind.
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I struggle with my privacy online, I flit from the camp of deleting everything, with false details everywhere so its hard to link my profiles together, to wanting everything being linked so people can find me.
Idealogically I really like the idea, of everyone having a profile linking everything together and that is the way that the world is going. But at the moment the various security aspects are to numerous.
But maggie isn't there anything more interesting going on?
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The American dream, has turned out as the American Nightmare for hundreds of thousands, for sure a great many of these poor souls only mistake was trusting in this American utopian dream.
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This comment was removed because the moderators found it broke the House Rules.
As an American I can only say that most if not all social networks are a complete waste of time. They degrade communications, reducing same to catch phrases and half thoughts.
One other vapid concept is closeness and transparency. Both will go unrealized do to the fact that history, and fact have no value in this virtual universe of pointless dribble.
Netravler
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Zuckerberg is NOT like one of us, not me anyway. He treats his customers with utter contempt, I don't.
I can't wait for the next Facebook blog, only had 3 in 3 days.
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Hey Mark,
Congrats on the new messaging system,
I wanted to comment on you saying in your 26 years you've made your share of mistakes, learning from them so you want make them again separates the best from the rest in your case you where born to be CHAMPION, your the best keep up the great work and the universe will revolve around U.
love Sonya
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Can we vote to rename this blog "The Facebook Blog" please? Boring Maggie, very boring. Again. Not that you will even look at this comment.
As for mister Facebook creator. Lucky break. Also, money changes people always, therefor it is very unlikely he is much like me. I don't fake who I am for the media for starters, I don't need to thankfully.
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@ MacBookPro
Success and intelligence/greatness are two seperate things. I do not dispute his success, but I do dispute the way Maggie portrays him as some groundbraking superman.
I mean seriously, look at facebook and think to yourself - what makes this creation amazing? Is the website itself that is a particular achievement, or is it the number of users that makes it what it is. He was lucky to get a foothold which snowballed into something massive.
There are literally 100s of thousands of people that could have created a website like facebook.
I wonder if he was a nobody today, and tried to come up with a different idea whether it would succeed or not..
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No it isn't good to know that he is just like one of us, for sure he's had the opportunism to be at the top of something that has become utterly massive and dictating where the world might go, but the portrait you are drawing of him is wrong.
I, for one, don't use Facebook at all, created an account long ago and noticed after 2 days how much of a pain it is to maintain. It certainly didn't help me enhance communication with my friends, there is no substitute to meeting people face to face (well, especially those you are really close to, like family). Let's not even talk about how the privacy of personal information is handled.
Sure enough that he has made mistakes, he's 26, that doesn't make him terribly experienced for a CEO but his quality was to make the most of the opportunity that was in front of him : his site was appreciated by many, and so he (and plenty of others now) could make a living out of it.
Now strictly on a technological front, his project of creating a messaging system for Facebook is quite interesting. The idea of somewhat merging emails and messages could be attractive to commoners. Gmail has attractive features of its own but I'm actually looking forward to Facebook trying to take on Google, though I expect Google to give Facebook a pretty hard time because they tend to be the best at creating absolutely brilliant software (not that the guys at Facebook are bad, I just think Google might come up with something better).
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@jizzlingtons - I take it you have no experience of web development, then? If you did, you'd know how much work a complex site like Facebook is to design, build, and maintain. And he did it in a week.
Whether or not you LIKE Facebook is a whole other matter, but the guy is smart. End of.
It also takes intelligence to come up with a good business model. The fact he limited his market to certain schools then waited until other schools and individuals throthed at the mouth for access and therefore jumped on it when they got the chance shows - again - how smart the guy is. That was a very good marketing tactic, and it was probably central to Facebook's success.
The fact loads of other people could have come up with the idea means nothing. Anyone can come up with an idea. But it takes the right person - someone willing to take risks, make decisions, and show determination - to actually impliment the idea properly. And it is implimentation of an idea which is important in the long run, not the idea itself.
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MacBookPro wrote:
@jizzlingtons - I take it you have no experience of web development, then? If you did, you'd know how much work a complex site like Facebook is to design, build, and maintain. And he did it in a week.
No he didn't - he wrote the first crappy, bug-laden version in a week. Today's incarnation has taken many man years of work, very little of which was written by Mark Zuckerberg I suspect.
His biggest achievement is making so much money out of something which appears to have no way of generating any revenue!
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@John Davies - what, you mean that the first website wasen't perfect? You don't say!
That's like saying Steve Jobs didn't make the iPod just because it evolved over the years. The fact remains that Zuckerberg started Facebook off and Jobs started the iPod off. Both of those have evolved and had a lot of work put into them over the years, but their originial innovaters - the people who first implimented the idea well enough for it to catch - are still smart.
As for not generating revenue, they make billions from advertising! Whether or not it's profitable is another matter, of course, but I believe they announced profit a few years back.
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MacBookPro
Please direct me to where I wrote about my personal opinion of Facebook. You assume because I don't think it's a particular achievement that I don't like the product?
You contradict yourself by first saying that he designed, built and maintained it within a week, then go onto say that it evolved over years. Well which is it?
You are indeed right in saying that he started Facebook off. That's what he did within a week, started it off. It took a long time before it became anything like what it is today.
You make it sound like he had this big masterplan to take over the world from the beginining. In actual fact he had a fairly smalltime local idea that happened to spread, due to a big smattering of luck. A very good marketing tactic? No. Great business model? Absolutely not.
The fact that loads of people have the skill to create what he did is important, as it indicates (as you point out) that the initial creation was not the deciding factor in it's success - the implementation of it was. I'm trying to point out to you that the success of his implementation was just him being very fortunate.
He's obviously no fool. I've never said he was. But I was merely objecting to Maggie making out like he was some superhuman that we should aspire to, and mystified by the fact that he makes mistakes. Facebook is hardly Nobel prize winning territory!
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Did somebody mention Steve Jobs? Here's another guy who is NOT like one of us, he treats his customers with utter contempt as well. Are we supposed to accept abuse from Facebook, Apple, Google, Microsoft just because they are mega-rich?
Come on Maggie, lets talk about software on its merits, give us some Mozilla, Ubuntu, Fedora, LibreOffice, MariaDB news. Software is like art, music, film, literature and should be judged on its merits, not how much money it makes.
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Maggie
You seem to have accepted all Zuckerberg says at face value. 'Privacy is dead', everything needs to 'get social'...
This is simplistic and gullible, it also misses the point about social networks and how they are used in ways that significantly affect our lives. Ultimately they are marketing tools for large corporations. This isn't a new wave fashion 'must have', it's informal ways of analysing and affecting user opinion and behaviour. It's used by very large corporations, because they are the ones that can analyse, use and influence the very large datasets that are presented.
If you don't understand that your missing the point.
BBC, you have a duty to inform. Its my(our) money your spending
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