EightBlack.

I think a lot of people forget that Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg is still only 23. Most of us cant remember what we were doing when we were that age. Well, we probably can, but we just don’t want to talk about it or admit it.

Safe to say that most of us weren’t being courted by the world’s leading technology companies, or being offered just shy of a billion dollars to sell something we cooked up in our dorm room at University.

Fast forward to now whereby the valley is placing a valuation on the social networking juggernaut somewhere in the vicinity of $15 billion. He’s got Venture Capitalists salivating all over him like Pavlov’s dog, the world’s leading search company playing second fiddle for once, an ad partner in Microsoft probably so determined not to lose this deal that they’ll probably pay anything to gain control and the entire technology sector watching his every move. The kid can’t fart without someone noticing.

Poor bastard.

And people still don’t think we’re in a bubble. Anyway.

After a brief intro by Web 2.0 Summit founders, John Battelle and Tim O’Reilly - the slightly awkward Mark Zuckerberg appeared on stage. Jeans and sandals as per normal.

I’m sure there are times when he wishes that all this attention would go away. Unfortunately, today at Web 2.0 was one of those days when it wasn’t.

Here’s my take on the session.

(JB = John Battelle, MZ = Mark Zuckerberg)

JB: Hows the financing going?

MZ: Well, almost wrapped up…

JB: Don’t you think you’re selling yourself short at $15 billion?

MZ: We’ll see…(uncomfortable, yet slightly cheeky grin…)

JB: Lets talk about what you do…How do you spend a day, what % on corporate development and what % on Financing and the IPO?

MZ: Financing and the IPO, none. Building the team….all the time.

JB: What about the revenue model?

MZ: We spend a lot of time on product development.

JB: But don’t you sit there and sometimes say “Damn it, we’re not making our numbers!”

MZ: No, because they’re so good

JB: Ok, not so much then on revenue model…

MZ: We don’t focus on exceeding – just break even. Even when we started out in my dorm room at Harvard, and our server costs were less than $100 bucks a month, all we’d make sure we did was to sell enough to cover those costs.

JB: Lets talk about growth. How many people are onboard now?

MZ: A little more than 300…I think.

JB: And in a year from now…?

MZ: Probably 700 or more in another year

JB: That’s massive growth by anyone’s standards? Do you have a process? How do you get a job at Facebook, especially before say an “event” might occur? (Battelle cheekily refers to the pending IPO, audience laughs, but Zuckerberg remains straight faced. He obviously played a lot of poker when he was at Harvard).

MZ: The IPO is years out…

JB: Are you sure…? What about recruiting then…?

MZ: Most of the recruiting is happening via referral and that in itself is providing far more than we can handle in terms of people to talk with.

JB: Can you define the term “social graph”?

MZ: I think the term is a misconception…we talk about the set of connections, our friendships, people we do business with, etc. We want to map out the real connections people have in the world. Once we have it, we can map it out and match it to a set of applications. No one has a social graph, but I think Facebook has a model of one.

JB: Is it heir to pagerank? Is the Facebook social graph akin to the secret sauce of Facebook?

MZ: The social graph is a structural thing, what can you learn by your connections, shared values, perceptions.

JB: When was it that you figured out you wanted to build Facebook?

MZ: Facebook wasn’t the original idea, but the ramp up has been incredible, and we’re still in it’s early stage. When we did decide to build Facebook, we wanted to release it quickly. We could have delayed it 6 months and ironed out all the bugs, but we decided to launch (lesson here, when at 80% it’s good enough, refinement and fine tuning can be done in real time)

JB: Lets talk about the developers Terms of Service (TOS) – Can you stop anyone anytime you want?.

MZ: I think Facebook has built incredible trust with the community we have. We have gone out of our way to open up the platform so anyone can develop anything. The intent of the actual TOS is not as harsh as the language in it sounds.

Battelle then continues to probe about the TOS issue as it relates to developers…

MZ: I don’t think it would be a good idea if we became too draconian..

JB: Do you see areas where FB might want to expand in….?

MZ: There might be something in ads…

JB: Do you want to elaborate on that…?

MZ: No! That’s enough. More in a few months…

JB: What about media? Integrated media, music etc Is media something that FB is interested in?

MZ: We’re not really a media company.

JB: One more question on ads. Hows the deal with Microsoft going?

MZ: We’re both happy?

JB: Are you sure?

MZ: I think so…

JB: Do you want to build a syndicated version of that, adwords, adsense?

(Zuckerberg avoided this and said we’ll talk in 3 months. There’s something brewing with this).

JB: What is your view re privacy?

Mark then referred to an example of someone putting up a Photo album on Facebook – ie you can share it with just a few people (ie friends) or a lot. He stated that Facebook take privacy very seriously and spoke about “a granular control of sharing information…”

JB: Would you endorse the statement “don’t be evil”

MZ: We probably would, but we wouldn’t expound it.

JB: Whose data is it Mark?

MZ: It’s the users data.

Questions from the floor then started. Some moron waffled on about how a profile was created in his name without his permission. Waste of time and Zuckerberg was starting to lose the will to live and clearly perplexed as to how the guy actually made it to the gig in the first place.

Thankfully, Charlene Li from Forrester went next and asked a more sensible question referring to the 6000 apps Facebook has. She wanted to know which one is still yet to be developed and was Mark happy with all the apps out there.

John Battelle then asked when was Facebook going to adopt the same approach Google took and bring in an adult to run the place. I thought Zuckerberg handled this exceptionally well. He stated that the Facebook model isn’t the same as Google and all he’s concerned with is building the right team.

Summary: Was there a lot of insight into Facebook? Perhaps not. But what I am sure after watching Mark Zuckerberg is this. He know’s a lot more than he lets on (obviously). Facebook is just getting started and there is sure to be a play in the online ad space - of that I am convinced. It’s also very clear that he is getting some very smart advice now from probably a handful of trusted “adults”. All staff now have equity and no there are no plans to change that. International expansion is a key driver, as is customisation of the FB applications to suit each market.

As someone on just the wrong side of 40, I never took much notice of Facebook. Until recently. There is a huge play in the corporate world - more so perhaps than in the individual one. Facebook can evolve with you from the time you create your first profile as an awkward yet fearless teenager, to an adult with a career and family.

It clearly is the company to watch. More so than MySpace. And it’s here to stay. There is good coverage from this session here and here.

(Image courtesy the SMH website).

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This entry was posted on Friday, October 19th, 2007 at 12:18 am and is filed under Facebook, Web 2.0. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.