After Listening to Mark Zuckerberg for some time, it is obvious we can all learn something here.
I have had my Facebook page for some time now, and have been watching the young CEO receive a significant amount of fame, money and power in a very short period of time. I even saw the movie and really enjoyed it (as an entrepreneur, it was very energizing). The character I saw in the movie was nothing like the individual I have been watching in interviews and in the media. Maybe he isn’t the smoothest operator in interviews, but he is the real item.
As we learned from Spiderman several years ago, “along with great power comes great responsibility”. This, in fact, is what Mr. Zuckerberg owns and carries with an ease that I have not witnessed among men for some time. This is no exaggeration. He has had a devotion to all the right values and ideals when you are talking about what it means to operate a business with such significant influence.
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- He is committed to the social experience. First and foremost, he wants to mirror how people interact with each other in person.
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- He jealously guards open infrastructure and wants to enable entrepreneurs.
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- He is not chasing after the most lucrative option (they would be public already if that were so).
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- He is more interested in Facebook itself than who it makes him or how much it makes for him.
For the man who owns most of the website where 250 million people use it every day, these are important values.
I can’t help thinking about Bill Gates when I think of Zuckerberg. While Bill Gates was an aggressive business man when it came to protecting his Windows base and through bringing more and more functionality into the operating system, Bill Gates has always been a committed proponent of collaborative computing and what contribution his operating system could make to society as well. It is his largest contribution to the world (aside from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation).
(Update) Mark was raised Jewish, but most of what we find online seems to indicate he claims to be an atheist. While a disappointment for me personally, it would be my hope he would correct this to say he is agnostic, as atheism is extremely unreasonable (it makes a claim that you can know for sure there is no God which makes no sense at all).
He may be surprised to find out many of the values he is committed to are important to God as well.
What do you think? Do you think I am fooled, or do you agree? Do you think he is like Gates in this context?
