Those who had the chance to watch “The Social Network” film can remember Jesse Eisenberg playing Mark Zuckerberg; always wearing jeans, a t-shirt and regular sneakers. That’s exactly how the comedian Andy Samberg portrays him as well, especially in his skits on Saturday Night Live. Samberg was also pretended to be Zuckerberg at last year’s f8, where it took a few minutes for people to realize that it was Samberg and not Zuckerberg on stage.
What started as something small – Facebook – today can be translated to 3,200 employees and 845 million users and counting.
The problem that Zuckerberg has encountered is his age, which has contributed to him having an identity crisis. Perhaps not for himself, but for the rest of the world that saw him as a boy who could face difficulties dealing with the real world and real business. Many would point out his lack of experience since he didn’t have history of any stable jobs, and even though the internet was going strong, his actions could have destroyed Facebook.
Nevertheless, this didn’t seem to faze him and even stated that if you worry about what people are going to say, then you won’t ever take risks. He moved to on to detail a principle guide for his investors as they prepared to go public. Of course Zuckerberg has come a long way since they started, and he has relied on his own disciple to become that CEO who has the capability of running such a business.
As Ellen McGirt describes it, Zuckerberg was late to their first meeting and didn’t even “appear” to be a social media guru, but rather a regular and exhausted paper boy. Nevertheless, he was always open to the idea of helping people connect with each other, hence the entire idea behind Facebook.
Around 2006, big corporations and media giants were trying to buy Facebook from him. The intense attention that it was generating made him attend numerous meetings, making his absence quite noticeable at the Facebook HQ. Many members of the staff realized that they were in the dark regarding the negotiations of the company. Moreover, Zuckerberg came to the realization that he wasn’t being open enough with his staff.
A coach was hired to assist Zuckerberg to be open with his staff in the process of working in a company that was growing constantly and very rapidly. This improved the relations within the company, since members would hold forums and discuss ideas as a group.
As the company grew, Zuckerberg found himself in front of the masses and at times he was seen a bit fragile and inexperienced. But they kept on moving forward, hiring only but the best in the market, especially because they had to go strong against MySpace – which was the most powerful social network just a few years ago.
By 2009, Facebook had hired about 1,200 members in their staff and there were 400 million users on their site. Zuckerberg had also learned immensely about business and continued to read and learn about other successful companies. In a lot of ways, this was done to find the flaws in the way other companies did things. After all, Facebook was about helping people connect with each other, and about creating a new culture.
The company’s way of hiring people (through recommendations of their own staff) allowed them to add only the best of the best. They all worked together to reach the same goal, and they also managed to make things easier. Their mission was pretty clear and they managed to push the masses to communicate with each other via Facebook. Like Zuckerberg stated, email was not designed in the best way possible, and using Facebook can make things more fun and easy when communicating with friends and family.
Today, Facebook has a humongous headquarter office, and their staff includes some of the best-known in the field, such as ex-Google star Lucy Zhang. Undoubtedly, Facebook has achieved what they intended to do and they will continue to grow in the future.
