I'm not too impressed with Mark Zuckerberg, there has been way too much smoke around the origins of Facebook.
The settlement (65 million) regarding the ConnectU case is prett much an admission of guilt. So, to take this 'whiz' as a role model basically glorifies the personality of a character that started his meteoric career by stealing designs and businessplans.
HarvardConnection (later renamed 'ConnectU') looked a lot like the classic "3 business guys hire a part-time coder to implement their 'vision'" startup antipattern.
That Zuckerberg, who was already creating social web apps before the 'oral contract' and engagement with HarvardConnection, concluded he didn't need that overhead was his own independent discovery of the YC gospel.
I'm sure the ConnectU crew thinks their special snowflake vision of a social-networking utility that starts on college campuses was a uniquely world-beating idea, but that sort of delusion is common. There are thousands with similar delusions who didn't luck into a brief collaboration with someone who'd eventually make the vision happen, and the accompanying lucrative settlement.
(And a settlement is not an admission of guilt, but a calculation that the costs of fighting exceed the costs of settling. For Facebook, the costs of uncertainty in their fundraising far dominate the potential legal costs/risks, so a settlement says more about the peace of mind wanted by investors than the facts of the case.)
Sorry, I don't buy the 'he didn't need that overhead'.
When you are hired as a programmer to make something that does not give you license to make off with the business plans and designs of your employers.
Imagine a contractor making off with the architectural drawings and other details of a building he's supposed to put up because he 'doesn't need that kind of overhead'.
It is absolutely without honour. The settlement was likely because there was a fair chance of it sticking in court, the other party decided that 65 million / 3 is good enough for them to not risk losing in court.
The costs of fighting were probably a lesser consideration than the cost of losing.
Of course you can't make off with someone else's preexisting detailed plans.
But what if you brought as much or more to the planning as others? If your multitudinous 'partners' want vast credit for concepts and feature requests while you handle all the details and execution? If they're treating you like a 'contractor' (your analogy) when you know you're the prime mover? If there's nothing but vague oral agreements about future possibilities?
I see it as: Zuckerburg realized he could better do what he wanted to do -- indeed wanted to do even before meeting HarvardConnection -- on his own. They parted ways after barely 3 months of informal collaboration (while also full-time students).
No doubt both sides fumbled a lot of the communication. They were undergrads, after all. What did they know about clear agreements, scoping development efforts, clearly assigning IP rights of side projects, managing expectations, the value and novelty (or not) of ideas? A lot less than they all know now, I'm sure.
Let's face it: in this (capitalist) world, cutthroat assholes get ahead. Bill Gates, Larry Ellison, Steve Ballmer, Rupert Murdoch--the same story could have been written about any of them. I'm not saying it's necessary to lie, cheat, and stab one's friends in the back in order to become filthy rich, because there do seem to be some very principled billionaires (I'm thinking of Larry & Sergey, Warren Buffet, Pierre Omidyar). But it certainly seems to help.
He's a Harvard College alumnus, what did you expect? ;-)
Though the origins of FB are shady, Zuckerberg still deserves some credit IMHO. I will be blunt: building a social networking website is piece of cake. Designing it so that the users like it enough to use it on a regular basis, maintain it, and scale it are much harder.
History is full of stories of people taking advantage of other people's ideas. It sucks, I know. Let's face it: scientists, engineers, hackers are the tip of the spear, the guys taking all the bullets and all the risks. Business people are the smart ones coming in the 2nd wave, when the beach has already been secured, to reap most (if not all) the rewards. Some people, myself included, actually enjoy being in the trenches... and cannot imagine being a rear echelon pussy. To each his own. I probably won't ever be rich, but hopefully I will spend my life working on interesting projects...
I'm sorry, but to me the notion that an idea for a website site is something you can steal sounds absolutely ridiculous. Did Larry & Sergey steal the idea of a search engine? Did Hacker News steal the idea of a news site where stories are rated by recency + popularity? Did Etsy steal the idea of an online marketplace? I can't believe that on a site like hacker news, where virtually everybody is trying to do what somebody else has done only a bit better, people would be whining about the notion that one can own idea that others could steal through better execution.
That's not really what the FB vs ConnectU issue is about. ConnectU wasn't upset because Mark took "their idea." By all accounts he was actively working on their product.
So it's not like the Winklevoss brothers approached Mark, pitched him, and he thought, "I can do this better." He actually went to work on their product and then, later, while he was ostensibly working on ConnectU, launched a competing product.
That is, it's not "he stole my idea!" It's "he took our code and confidential information and used the opportunity we gave him to harm our business."
Anyone can have ideas. Few can act on them. Inspiration is easy, while implementation is hard.
I am not whining because I am into hardware, not software. Thankfully, in my field a couple of teenagers could never put a 20-year veteran out of business.
I don't think anyone is claiming that Zuckerberg stole the social network website idea. The crux of the matter is whether he stole the code. On the other hand, coding is easy, so why steal it, right?
> Designing it so that the users like it enough to use it on a regular basis, maintain it
Apparently those components had nothing to do with him
> scale it
That seems to be one of his contributions, the second is to have some staying power.
I've been on the receiving end of a character like mr. Zuckerberg at some point and I think that by glorifying him the people that monitor this sort of stuff might get the idea that this sort of behaviour is ok.
Most people don't understand how technology works. They think it's the "leadership" (I hate that word) of the founder / CEO that, somewhat miraculously, pushes technology forward.
I do not admire nor glorify Zuckerberg. I don't understand why some people do. But then, why do people glorify Steve Jobs? Sure, without Jobs' sense of design and aesthetics, Apple would have never become more than a garage startup, but without Wozniak's technical expertise, Jobs would have never been in a position where his sense of aesthetics could make a difference, and he would have ended up a failed pothead like many of his generation...
People like having a figure-head. Someone or thing to attribute success or failure to. Look at the office of the President. People expected Obama to rush in and fix everything, put people into homes, and make America some sort of utopian society. Is that likely? Is it even possible? I highly doubt it.
True, without the Woz, Apple would be nothing. That doesn't mean that Jobs is nothing. He's the figure-head of Apple. If Wozniak had've taken the position that Jobs now holds, there'd probably be many people preaching the gospel according to Wozniak.
It's much easier to personify a company through an actual person. A company is sort of the amorphous blob that does things. You may never know exactly how a specific company does certain things, but having a person to attribute that to certainly helps. It's not exactly right, but it's not entirely wrong either.
The link between Jobs/Wozniak and Zuckerberg is interesting. I would certainly consider Zuckerberg a hacker, but not nearly in the same realm as Jobs and Wozniak.
Facebook is a product of the modern day web environment. Its longevity has yet to be seen. If 2015 rolls around and its a public company that is still innovating then thats one thing, but if it becomes more of a cluttered site in its pursuit to be more like -insert recently popular site here (currently twitter)- then thats another.
> Let's face it: scientists, engineers, hackers are the tip of the spear, the guys taking all the bullets and all the risks
I used to think this until I started running a business. Business people take the risks. There's nothing stopping a hacker from being a business person and often times there is great overlap, but let's be clear about the semantics here: someone puts up the money for an engineer to do his job, and that's the business person.
Business people fail constantly and with no fanfare. You may not realize this because you're a hacker that's only worked for successful businesses where the management has tricked you into thinking you are responsible for the success of the business, but I assure you that is naive and you are being manipulated successfully because your business people are smarter than you.
I am not being manipulated, and you didn't get the point I was trying to make. My mistake for not wording my thoughts precisely enough....
OK, let's forget the labels "hacker" and "business person" for a second. The point is that the ones who have the money, are the ones who set the rules. Imagine that I am someone who wants to start a business, and that you are someone who has money to invest. I spend 5 years of my life trying to build a business (not necessarily tech related) and I fail. You invested in 99 other companies and, overall, obtain a return on your investment. Since you have the money, you have the power to spread the risk. If I succeeded, you would reap a great deal of the rewards, even though you had little skin in the game.
Sure, I can hire a bunch of programmers for my company, but it's my company, so I am the first wave who's gonna take the heat if things go wrong... the programmers can always get a job elsewhere.
The point is that the rich and powerful can afford a risk-reward profile that someone who is "in the trenches" cannot afford. Being "in the trenches" is what entrepreneurs, hackers, scientists do. Being a rear echelon pussy is what VC's, politicians and managers do. That's what I meant.
> Imagine that I am someone who wants to start a business, and that you are someone who has money to invest
If you are starting a business, then YOU are the business person. It doesn't matter where the money comes from. There are business people who specialize in investing money, but then there are also business people who actually run the god damn businesses.
> Being "in the trenches" is what entrepreneurs, hackers, scientists do.
ENTREPRENEURS ARE BUSINESS PEOPLE. Holy fucking shit, stop reading Hacker News and try to hang out in reality for a little while each day.
Dude, get this once and for all: I said we should forget labels for a while, didn't I? So, fuck the words "hacker" and "business people".
BTW, I am not a nerdy, deluded, emotionally retarded teenager who is enchanted with PG's essays. I have been in the start-up world since 2002, so I know how reality works.
If you had cared to read my previous comment, you would have understood that the distinction is not between hackers and business people, but rather between people who take the risks, and people who reap the rewards. Ideally, high-risk means high-rewards. The whole fucking point I was trying to make is that smart people position themselves to have disproportionally high rewards for the low risk profile they adopt. That's the whole idea.
“I don’t really know what the next big thing is because I don’t spend my time making big things,” he says. “I spend time making small things and then when the time comes I put them together.”
The settlement (65 million) regarding the ConnectU case is prett much an admission of guilt. So, to take this 'whiz' as a role model basically glorifies the personality of a character that started his meteoric career by stealing designs and businessplans.
See here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/feb/12/facebook-ma...
for a lot more info about that.