Zuckerberg takes a Mulligan on the 60 minutes interview of three years ago, while simultaneously launching the new look for Facebook.
At this point, I have to say that the evolution of Mark Zuckerberg from the seed stage until now is one of the most exciting things to happen to Silicon Valley – not only the evolution of himself as CEO but the evolution of the company as a whole. Zuckerberg has created a social revolution, the likes of which hasn’t been seen since the first Fraternity Party EVER or the creation of wine and cheese get togethers, or, at the very least, since Brad Pitt decided to date Angelina Jolie instead of Jennifer Aniston. There are funds being raised in the name of social, companies being created that are valued in the billions off of social and meanwhile, features of Facebook are being integrated into every webpage, everywhere. Facebook is the defining company in this generation.
Kleiner Perkins, or KPCB for those who know what’s up in the valley, recently raised a social fund. Kleiner Perkins is one of the bad ass Venture Capital firms in Silicon Valley. The SFund as they are calling it, is a 250 million dollar fund targeted toward social companies, or targeted toward the “social web”… which is a snazzy way of saying that they are going to be funding companies that “Use facebook to do something” on the internet. By putting forth such funds and support behind the social concept, Kleiner is illustrating the next wave of the internet. The social internet. Facebook pretty much owns the net if this claim is correct.
One of the companies that caused the creation of this Social wave concept was Zynga, the social gaming company, which also happens to be one of the companies in the Kleiner Perkins portfolio. Mark Pincus has created a company that was based off of another company, Facebook, and Zynga still has an estimated market cap of around 5 Billion Dollars. Pincus educated the valley on how powerful Facebook had become, and how that power could be monetized.
Facebook has changed the way that things are done. For example they added a “Like” button earlier this year. A “like” button seems like the most simple thing that anyone could ever do, but this simple gesture changed the way webpages, and news articles are ranked. People have a number of how many people “like” articles and pages. Now, a mere few months after the release of this tiny button, you cant go to a news article site, or just generally any site without finding that little hand giving you the thumbs up (speaking of which there is one next to this article right now, so make sure to click it, now that you know why it’s there). The company is creating an internet that gives every user a face as well as a voice.
Zuckerberg and his team have grown a company from nothing to a company who has an estimated market cap of 35-50 Billion dollars. In order to put that into perspective, that estimated market cap is nearly double that of the Yahoo today. Yahoo: the company that attempted to buy Facebook in 2006 for 1 Billion Dollars. The tides have turned, and if Facebook really wanted to, they could buy a majority share in Yahoo… and if they wanted, they might be able to try to do it for 1 Billion… but that would be douchey.
In this interview, you can see how much Zuckerberg has learned about public speaking, becoming a leader, and answering questions that have been asked to him 1000 times by everyone. No matter how you feel about his personality, or how he was portrayed in the movie “The Social Network,” there is no denying that Facebook would not be Facebook without Mark Zuckerberg. Facebook is his life, and for that I respect him. He takes pride in what he does, and what he does affects 500 million people a day. So say what you want about him… I think he’s here to stay.
…. Also the new Facebook look is pretty epic. I highly recommend shifting to that.
See the 60 Minutes interview here.
