What is the antonym of "bubble"? Whatever the word, Facebook's stock is now down about twenty-five per cent since its I.P.O. shareholders are suing the company. Mark Zuckerberg is no longer one of the richest forty people in the world. The F.T.C. is requesting information about Facebook's purchase of Instagram. Steve Coll left Facebookistan.
It's been a tough two weeks, but one can argue that the problems will pass. Looked at from one angle, the stock offering went pretty well. When a company's stock price shoots up after an I.P.O, it means that the company itself—which sells shares at the initial offering price—has missed out on revenue. And, regardless of its share price, Facebook still has a dominant position on the Internet. As an article in The Atlantic pointed out earlier this week, we spend twice as much time on Facebook as we do on Twitter, Google Plus, Tumblr, Pinterest, and LinkedIn combined. The author, Alexis Madrigal, wrote, "One in every five page views on the Internet is a Facebook page. If the Internet is valuable, Facebook is valuable."
But the bedlam of the past two weeks does matter in one important way: Facebook, more than most other companies, needs to worry deeply about its public perception. It needs to be seen as trustworthy and, above all, cool. Mismanaging an I.P.O. isn't cool, neither is misleading shareholders. Government investigations of you aren't cool either. To slightly recast a quote from "The Social Network," losing around five billion dollars—as Zuckerberg has done since the stock's peak—definitely isn't cool.
Facebook's business strategy is essentially to colonize the rest of the Web. It wants your Facebook account to become a universal login to other Web sites. It wants news organizations to partner with it, so that your Facebook friends are notified of whatever you read. It wants transactions to go through Facebook, and it wants games played on Facebook. But each of these deals needs a partner, and the partner needs to feel good about Facebook. Facebook has done great things for Spotify, and Spotify has done great things for Facebook. Will such friendships be as easy to forge now that Facebook is a monetary giant?
Facebook is also about to enter a very different new stage in personnel management. For the past few years, the company could recruit and poach almost any engineer it wanted. It was still something of an upstart, and it had stock options. It was the place for hackers where everyone was going to get gold. Facebook was no longer the new new thing, but it was the surest, hippest path to riches. Now, though, most of the options are gone and the money's been handed out. As happened with Google eight years ago, the company has suddenly been transformed into a place with income inequality like Brazil's. Lots of people are really, really rich. And the people who joined later aren't.
So how can Facebook attract smart coders, problem solvers, and free thinkers? It needs, first of all, to maintain its reputation as a place for hackers. Whether Zuckerberg intended it or not, his decision to meet with bankers in a hoodie before the I.P.O. was a smart way to send a signal that he wants to maintain an insurgent culture. The company's decision to host an all-night hackathon the night before the offering was also bright. Recently, David Kushner published a New Yorker piece about George Hotz, one of the most talented hackers in the country. Last summer, Hotz had gone to work for Facebook. "Everything is very fast-moving and the culture is young," he said. He's since quit, and it's not clear how eager young and talented hackers will be persuaded to join the company. A few months ago, I was out at Stanford, the breeding ground for talented engineers, and I asked a computer-science student whether he would work at Facebook. Only for the options, he said. What about using Facebook? "Everyone does it here," he said. "But no one is proud of it."
The reputation of Facebook's management team has also been deeply tarnished, particularly by the accusations that it wasn't entirely open to investors about declining growth in its advertising business. Prior to the I.P.O., the narrative of Facebook was one of redemption, and of the maturation of Mark Zuckerberg. "Incredibly, Mark Zuckerberg has grown up to become an ace CEO," ran the subtitle in a glowing New York magazine feature. Ken Auletta wrote a long Profile of Sheryl Sandberg, Zuckerberg's deputy, a woman who, until the I.P.O. seemed to do nothing wrong. In part because Facebook has centralized an incredible amount of power with Zuckerberg, we need to trust him. Do we still? Yes, but not as much as we did two weeks ago.
No one is going to build a direct competitor to Facebook. Social networks grow from network effects. The more users you have the more users you'll get. Facebook will be with us for a long time, and it will indeed make money. Sandberg's reputation is deserved, Zuckerberg's maturation is real, and the company may quickly steer its way out of its current mess. But things have not gone well of late. And there is a real danger that Facebook becomes like what Microsoft was in the mid- and late nineties: a company that is feared and resented—untrusted and rarely loved.
In the wake of Facebook's troubled I.P.O., Steve Coll quit Facebook. On this week's New Yorker Out Loud podcast, Coll talks with John Cassidy and Nicholas Thompson about how Facebook's goals of community and transparency aren't reflected in the way it does business.
Listen to the mp3 on the player above, or right-click here to download.
Subscribe to The New Yorker Out Loud for a weekly conversation with contributors to The New Yorker. This and other podcasts are available through iTunes, or through our Feeds page.
In the wake of Facebook's troubled I.P.O., Steve Coll quit Facebook. On this week's New Yorker Out Loud podcast, Coll talks with John Cassidy and Nicholas Thompson about how Facebook's goals of community and transparency aren't reflected in the way it does business.
Listen to the mp3 on the player above, or right-click here to download.
Subscribe to The New Yorker Out Loud for a weekly conversation with contributors to The New Yorker. This and other podcasts are available through iTunes, or through our Feeds page.
Mark Zuckerberg founded Facebook in his college dorm room six years ago. Five hundred million people have joined since, and eight hundred and seventy-nine of them are his friends. The site is a directory of the world's people, and a place for private citizens to create public identities. You sign up and start posting information about yourself: photographs, employment history, why you are peeved right now with the gummy-bear selection at Rite Aid or bullish about prospects for peace in the Middle East. Some of the information can be seen only by your friends; some is available to friends of friends; some is available to anyone. Facebook's privacy policies are confusing to many people, and the company has changed them frequently, almost always allowing more information to be exposed in more ways.
According to his Facebook profile, Zuckerberg has three sisters (Randi, Donna, and Arielle), all of whom he's friends with. He's friends with his parents, Karen and Edward Zuckerberg. He graduated from Phillips Exeter Academy and attended Harvard University. He's a fan of the comedian Andy Samberg and counts among his favorite musicians Green Day, Jay-Z, Taylor Swift, and Shakira. He is twenty-six years old.
Mark Zuckerberg founded Facebook
Zuckerberg cites "Minimalism," "Revolutions," and "Eliminating Desire" as interests. He likes "Ender's Game," a coming-of-age science-fiction saga by Orson Scott Card, which tells the story of Andrew (Ender) Wiggin, a gifted child who masters computer war games and later realizes that he's involved in a real war. He lists no other books on his profile.
Zuckerberg's Facebook friends have access to his e-mail address and his cell-phone number. They can browse his photograph albums, like one titled "The Great Goat Roast of 2009," a record of an event held in his back yard. They know that, in early July, upon returning from the annual Allen & Company retreat for Hollywood moguls, Wall Street tycoons, and tech titans, he became Facebook friends with Barry Diller. Soon afterward, Zuckerberg wrote on his Facebook page, "Is there a site that streams the World Cup final online? (I don't own a TV.)"
Since late August, it's also been pretty easy to track Zuckerberg through a new Facebook feature called Places, which allows users to mark their location at any time. At 2:45 A.M., E.S.T., on August 29th, he was at the Ace Hotel, in New York's garment district. He was back at Facebook's headquarters, in Palo Alto, by 7:08 P.M. On August 31st at 10:38 P.M., he and his girlfriend were eating dinner at Taqueria La Bamba, in Mountain View.
Zuckerberg may seem like an over-sharer in the age of over-sharing. But that's kind of the point. Zuckerberg's business model depends on our shifting notions of privacy, revelation, and sheer self-display. The more that people are willing to put online, the more money his site can make from advertisers. Happily for him, and the prospects of his eventual fortune, his business interests align perfectly with his personal philosophy. In the bio section of his page, Zuckerberg writes simply, "I'm trying to make the world a more open place."
The world, it seems, is responding. The site is now the biggest social network in countries ranging from Indonesia to Colombia. Today, at least one out of every fourteen people in the world has a Facebook account. Zuckerberg, meanwhile, is becoming the boy king of Silicon Valley. If and when Facebook decides to go public, Zuckerberg will become one of the richest men on the planet, and one of the youngest billionaires. In the October issue of Vanity Fair, Zuckerberg is named No. 1 in the magazine's power ranking of the New Establishment, just ahead of Steve Jobs, the leadership of Google, and Rupert Murdoch. The magazine declared him "our new Caesar."
Despite his goal of global openness, however, Zuckerberg remains a wary and private person. He doesn't like to speak to the press, and he does so rarely. He also doesn't seem to enjoy the public appearances that are increasingly requested of him. Backstage at an event at the Computer History Museum, in Silicon Valley, this summer, one of his interlocutors turned to Zuckerberg, minutes before they were to appear onstage, and said, "You don't like doing these kinds of events very much, do you?" Zuckerberg replied with a terse "No," then took a sip from his water bottle and looked off into the distance.
This makes the current moment a particularly awkward one. Zuckerberg, or at least Hollywood's unauthorized version of him, will soon be starring in a film titled "The Social Network," directed by David Fincher and written by Aaron Sorkin. The movie, which opens the New York Film Festival and will be released on October 1st, will be the introduction that much of the world gets to Zuckerberg. Facebook profiles are always something of a performance: you choose the details you want to share and you choose whom you want to share with. Now Zuckerberg, who met with me for several in-person interviews this summer, is confronting something of the opposite: a public exposition of details that he didn't choose. He does not plan to see the film.
Zuckerberg––or Zuck, as he is known to nearly everyone of his acquaintance––is pale and of medium build, with short, curly brown hair and blue eyes. He's only around five feet eight, but he seems taller, because he stands with his chest out and his back straight, as if held up by a string. His standard attire is a gray T-shirt, bluejeans, and sneakers. His affect can be distant and disorienting, a strange mixture of shy and cocky. When he's not interested in what someone is talking about, he'll just look away and say, "Yeah, yeah." Sometimes he pauses so long before he answers it's as if he were ignoring the question altogether. The typical complaint about Zuckerberg is that he's "a robot." One of his closest friends told me, "He's been overprogrammed." Indeed, he sometimes talks like an Instant Message—brusque, flat as a dial tone—and he can come off as flip and condescending, as if he always knew something that you didn't. But face to face he is often charming, and he's becoming more comfortable onstage. At the Computer History Museum, he was uncommonly energetic, thoughtful, and introspective—relaxed, even. He addressed concerns about Facebook's privacy settings by relaying a personal anecdote of the sort that his answers generally lack. ("If I could choose to share my mobile-phone number only with everyone on Facebook, I wouldn't do it. But because I can do it with only my friends I do it.") He was self-deprecating, too. Asked if he's the same person in front of a crowd as he is with friends, Zuckerberg responded, "Yeah, same awkward person."
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