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Disaster: Zuckerberg Interview Gone Bad
I started to write this post yesterday before Zuckerberg took the stage. My focus was "interview with boy billionaire." That was before I knew that "woman prima donna" was going to be the interviewer. This session is now the buzz of SXSW and not in a good way. For one, it made Techmeme yesterday. It also has become a common thread on Twitter with Scoble and Arrington leading the charge. It's also spilled over the BlogHaus (sponsored by AMD among others - thanks guys.) In fact, I've spent the last hour discussing the mess with Allen AKA @centernetworks, Stowe Boyd, Chris Brogan and David Parmet.
Here's what I think the key take aways are from the disucssions:
- Facebook missed an opportunity to earn a little street cred and endear themselves to the South-by crowd. I validated this fact with Shel Israel and Scoble.
- Sarah Lacy (who is a legit wrtier for BusinessWeek) completely fell on her face. You can read the gory details on several blogs including Sam Lawrence's, and CenterNetworks.
- Sarah keep digging her hole deeper by continuing to whine, not follow any of the people following her on Twitter back (877 are following here | she's following 33.)
There are a few things that Sarah (and the organizers of SXSW) could have made this better:
- SXSW should have got someone that had more credibility with the audience - @sarahcuda (her Twitter handle) was not this person.
- When things started to head south, she could have done something cool and pulled out her iPhone and fielded live questions on Twitter.
- She definitely could have been more self-deprecating in her response to the community crowd - through responding to blogs, not whining in her video interview and by attempting to talk to the 877 people following her.
With all that said, I did actually take notes during the session. There was some interesting dialog between the two in spite of the obnoxious nature of the interview. Here are the details. Enjoy!:
Zuckerberg: Facebook is about helping folks connect their lives better.
SIDE BAR - Mark just mentioned that they just launched Facebook in Spanish back in February. The interview yelled "go Spain." Ummmm, Sarah, you know there are people in other parts of the world who speak Spanish.
Zuckerberg: "Facebook is becoming huge in Columbia and it's helping them channel some of their discontent with the government. He never would have predicted this kind of effect."
Sarah Lacy: Why do people need Facebook to connect?
Zuckerberg: The internet is a great platform for people to build on. It allows tools like Facebook to connect people who are part of existing communities more efficiently.
Sarah Lacy tells a story about how the first time she interviewed Zuckerberg, she thought he was going
to be brash and self-important but instead, he was nervous and by the end of the interview, his t-shirt was soaked with sweat.
Zuckerberg: Back to what I was saying. We're trying to build the infrastructure to help facilitate conversations and connections that allow people to solve important problems like world hunger. This needs to be built from the bottom up (not created by a huge organization.)
Sarah Lacy: Facebook is launching in France tonight. (She just broke his news. Oops!)
Zuckerberg: Umm, yup. Way to get the news before me. Yes, we are launching in France tonight.
Sarah Lacy: Speaking of needs. You guys need to make money. Let's talk about ads (I hope this goes where I think it will go - let's get into the dirt.) Can we also talk about Microsoft.
Zuckerberg: Let's take a step back. A lot of people has talked about our $15 billion valuation due to the Microsoft investment. The way we at Facebook think about making money is that it should be in line with what people are doing with the site. For example, people express their identities through which movies, songs, etc. that they like. So one of the ways they can monetize these preferences is to sell ads and Microsoft has helped them do this.
Sarah Lacy: Would you say that Microsoft is happy?
Zuckerberg: Yes, I think they are pretty happy with the way things are going.
Sarah Lacy: So you've mentioned that the way you're doing advertising will change things more than they've changed in the last 100 years.
Zuckerberg: Yes. Although I would have to admit that we got a little ahead of ourselves in terms of how we were trying to implement it. It didn't go the way we planned.
Sarah Lacy: Okay, so let's talk about Beacon. [to the audience] 'Everyone please try and keep an open mind!'
Zuckerberg: Let's start with the fact that Beacon is actually not part of the Ad team, it's actually a part of the platform team. Part of this is because some of Beacon will be outside of Facebook. Some will be inside Facebook.
The goal with Beacon was to allow people outside FB to share their information back into FB. And yes, it does tie into the ad system.
SIDENOTE: Zuckerberg says that they see Beacon as a key piece of how the web outside of FB can communicate information back into FB and vice versa.
Zuckerberg: Giving people granular control over who they share information with is very powerful. One of our biggest mistakes was that we didn't give people enough control.
Sarah Lacy: Or you didn't communicate the control well enough, because there actually were more controls in place then you made people aware of.
Zuckerberg: Yes, that's true.
Sarah Lacy: Is there a point where you're inserting more controls over users and the platform.
Zuckerberg: Actually, were trying to give more control to the users. We want to make it more open. However, we don't want that to contribute to spaminess.
Sarah Lacy: What about the rumor in the Financial Times that FB is going to be the iTunes killer? Can you talk about that?
Zuckerberg: What do you mean [coyly]? Seriously though, music has not been a vertical that we've focused on, although there are a number of music apps on FB that outside developers have created. But for right now, we don't have anything to announce. No plans to kill iTunes.
Sarah Lacy: According to Forbes, you are the youngest billionaire.
Zuckerberg: We don't focus on that stuff. We don't think about that.
Sarah Lacy: I love FB and think it's the coolest site but seriously, you don't really think that FB is worth $15 billion do you?
Zuckerberg: We really don't focus on the financials. We obviously want to avoid dilluting the company as much as possible. But we really our looking at the bigger picture. This does have an impact on who we hire. We really don't want people coming to work for us because they think that they can make a lot of money.
Sarah Lacy: Let's talk about Cheryl (new COO from Google). She's a "grown up" and the bottom line is that investors look to have "grown ups" in serious organizations.
Zuckerberg: Yes, we're very lucky to have her. She has a great track record. I think she's going to do great things.
Sarah Lacy: You recently put Matt Koehler [spelling] in charge of product. This marks the first time you won't be in charge of product. Is that strange to you?
Zuckerberg: Well, we are trying to build out a product team and strategy. I also think that I was hesitant to admit how much time and energy being CEO required.
SIDEBAR: This is where things started to get out of hand. Sarah made a statement to Zuckerberg and expected him to react. He says to her "ask a question." With that, the crowd cheers like crazy and you hear heckles like "get off the stage [directed at Sarah] and "stop talking!) Two minutes later, after much jeering, Sarah says, "You know this isn't as easy as it looks." [boos from the crowd] "Okay, what should I ask him [sounding pissed]. "Q&A" the crowd yells out. "Okay" she says. Let's go to questions digg style.
Question: What is the single biggest obstacle that Facebook faces?
Zuckerberg: Allowing people to maintain control over their information while at the same time keeping the platform open. It's a tricky balance. It's hard to give people enough control when opening up the platform to developers.
Question: Do people get pissed that you're trapping so much information within Facebook?
Zuckerberg: I don't think they get pissed. We're working to find the balance of not sharing private or semi-private information with the Web at large.
Question: Why don't you allow people to search and sort their data. E-mail has done a good job at this for the past 20 years.
Zuckerberg: We didn't set out to be a competitor to e-mail. As a result, we didn't think about providing e-mail functionality.
I try and chase Mark to ask him for a podcast interview but his entourage whisks him out the door. Oops - not this time!
Mon, Mar 10 2008
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