The Power of the Social Internet
At 38000 feet, halfway between Lihue and the Aleutian Islands, on
United headed to Nagoya, I feel incredibly grateful for our
strength. Hydrocarbons give us around 150 energy slaves, which
we, the billion or so affluent first-worlders, have all deployed to
give us all a lifestyle better than medieval kings. We also have a
financial and industrial system that enables us to hire 3rd world
product producing slaves at less than a dollar per hour. Open
Source software, which is basically shared free programming
62 Inside Facebook
Copyright, Karel Baloun, 2006. All rights reserved.
resources, drives so much innovation. Thanks to this
infrastructure, which enables me to buy a laptop for around a
week’s pay, we technology workers can make contributions way
beyond what a single, average human being could achieve 10, 50
or 100 years ago.
I couldn’t produce by myself even a single part of this laptop, or
the hardware internet behind it, but there it is, ready for me to
write a few lines of code, or a few ideas in book, and if it is good,
thousands of people will run with it, moving society this way or
that way. If it is not good, oh well, too bad for me, but the
attention of the people and their collected power, will go to some
other person, site or idea.
A few internet companies have revolutionized how we live our
daily lives. I don’t need to worry where I’m going anymore,
because I’ll just find it on google maps on my way from my Treo.
I now have way more free email accounts than I need, and I use
these and IM for most of my interaction with people. My
daughters are lucky I haven’t figured out how to brush their teeth
over IM yet, but since I just learned to fold my shirts by watching
this movie, I’m sure that my facebook peers will be somehow able
to computerize their child rearing when they get to it. Look, I’m
not saying this is good, or bad. I’m just saying that’s the way
things are going.
Karel Baloun 63
I’ve found something to put here. Your turn.
My CEO is 21 years young, and lives his Dream
I am 34 years old, and have landed in one of the few situations
that makes me feel really, really, really old. My daughter Mimoli
asks me why I’ve started to collect a few gray hairs. I tell her it’s
her. I’m the only among over 50 engineers who has a kid. My
baby Elin asks where is her bottle. I ask her why at the age of 34 I
find myself to be the corporate age diversity program.
My CEO is living his dream. Can I? Can you?
On the internet no one knows you are a dog. If you know that
joke, you are old. It’s from way back when the New Yorker was an
important print publication, and it was a comic of dog typing on a
computer. The New Yorker also beautifully demonstrates our New
Media, since it has been owned since 1985 by Samuel Irving
Newhouse Sr/Jr51, aka Conde Nast. When Rupert Murdoch’s News
Corp purchased MySpace initially there was user concern of
inappropriate media concentration and talk of a boycott, but this
completely ineffective effort hasn’t nudged Myspace’s growth into
the #6 U.S. internet property.
Not only can you be anyone on the internet, you are free to
achieve anything you can with the internet. A key image hosting
service, pongo.com which helped kick start ebay.com was thought
64 Inside Facebook
Copyright, Karel Baloun, 2006. All rights reserved.
51 who currently shares two prominent characteristics with Mr. Zuckerberg, who is
theoretically maybe halfway to being on the list of Forbes billionaires, where Brin
and Page are #26 & 27 at $13B.
up and run by one lady in Sitka, Alaska. And a few 20 year olds
can create the strongest social network in human history. So
anyone can achieve anything.
So what is it that holds us back? Why isn’t everyone a Mark
Zuckerberg, starting powerful internet applications in their spare
time?
Belief and vision are key part of success. Zuck was blessed with
an amazing early adoption rate at his first schools, so it didn’t
take complex analytics or fuzzy math to project that other schools
would behave similarly. Even an outsider like me or my seniorexecutive-
type friends David or Dion could judge that this was
likely. So he could see it, and rockstar like media interviews
reinforced his belief. Also, Zuck was blessed with two early
executives who could powerfully share his vision. Sean Parker had
seen rocket like success first as a founder of Napster from his
college dorm room and second as a founder of Plaxo. Matt Cohler
had seen it at LinkedIn as well as from his perch as a VC analyst.
For them, phenomenal success was a natural course of business.
I’m challenged to keep this dream vision. I meditate on it
regularly, and I’m certain I’ll soon get to a point where I can keep
it. Protect it. Nurture it. Feed it. Literally like the flame of
creativity and drive within me. It helps that I’ve always been the
dreamer type, in that I easily get excited about a powerful idea,
and can think only of it, of making it work. Keeping that dream
vision strong all the way to the completion of an idea, that is what
makes greatness.
Karel Baloun 65
I’ve found something to put here. Your turn.
But I’ve lived through the dotcom collapse 6 years ago, and even
before the dotcom frenzy, I was at Geoworks, which lost to
Microsoft at least twice, before selling its engineering team to
Amazon. Geoworks had excellent engineering, with a tiny
memory footprint PC windowing system well before windows that
ran amazingly fast on my first Pentium laptop in 1996, but was
serially murdered by business failures. Many dreams foundered
on those rocks.52
A quick Geoworks aside, Microsoft has smashed many companies,
including Netscape, Corel, Apple (once), IBM (piecemeal), Sun
(maybe) but Geoworks has the unique distinction of getting
smashed by Microsoft twice in exactly the same way. In the
cartoon below, replace Rove with Bill saying “We will go directly to
the OEMs53, give our software away for cheap or free, leverage our
dominant position in other markets, and persist until you run out
of money.” and you have how M$FT beat Geoworks (the donkeys)
in both the PC and mobile handset markets about a decade after
each other.
66 Inside Facebook
Copyright, Karel Baloun, 2006. All rights reserved.
52 I feel like a serious Silicon Valley old timer when I write that I was nearby at the
founding of Ebay. About 2 miles from where Omidyar was typing our the initial
perl code for ebay, I was on the same old ISP (best.com) typing perl code for
agoodstore.com, which was going to be a marketplace where the profits from all
sales were given to the charity of the buyers choice. On Memorial Day 1996, the
ebay site and I got the same amount of traffic, according to my own logs and “The
Perfect Store” by Adam Cohen. This is the original source of my cynicism in my
own business acumen, or maybe persistence. If you are a Talented Business
Person free of dotcom cynicism, I’d like to try that idea again.
53 Original Equipment Manufacturer. Companies which make, market and
sometimes directly sell PCs, e.g. HP, Dell, IBM (well, before they sold their PC
business away to a Chinese company), Sony.
A second way this comic resonates with this book is that
Facebook is a rare company that doesn’t benefit much from
history or experience. There is no clear “again” in the social
networking space. Each new successful social networking entry
brings a new angle, new features, new strengths. “Making money
on the internet” is a known challenge, as are technical challenges
around scaling php/apache websites and massive storage
solutions, so experience in these known problems is valuable, but
in the overall product and business, Facebook must create
everything from scratch.
Karel Baloun 67
I’ve found something to put here. Your turn.
So I have some lingering business cynicism shared by many late
90s dotcom investors and one canine sock puppet. I loved my
early facebook days so much, because Zuck and company are
completely oblivious to this cynicism. And therefore immune to
being paralyzed by it. Many Geoworkers cured themselves and
went onto greater things54, but only by believing they could
succeed, and seeing that in the business environment around
them, such as the lucky folks at the Seattle office who were sold
to Amazon.
I leaped to Looksmart, which proceeded to lose the search and
portal wars to Yahoo and Google. One fond Looksmart memory I
have is of an executive, at an all hands meeting Q&A session in
mid-1999 at an expensive San Francisco hotel ballroom, being
asked about purchasing Google, and replying to everyone that this
would highly dilute Looksmart stock.
I’m eternally grateful that I could bask in the Facebook optimism
bath for many months. May you all have a chance to experience
something like that! It is heaven for the human spirit. And it
really makes folks strive to make it real. Whether it succeeds or
not in the end doesn’t matter, because I believe the memory of
this feeling can persist, survive the failure. It is so wonderful, that
the memory of it outlives anything that follows. I arrived at both
Looksmart and Geoworks too late in the lives of those companies
to feel the startup fire.
68 Inside Facebook
Copyright, Karel Baloun, 2006. All rights reserved.
54 such as David Thatcher’s securities fraud which took down Critical Path. And
going to CommerceOne to get shafted by Microsoft again.
If there is another dotcom like shakeout after the Web 2.0 boom,
how many current wonder-boys will see dreaming as something
they did in their 20s?
For even without those experiences of colossal, dramatic failure,
for any good idea there are countless critics and numerous
competitors. So we try to stay away from negative, critical people.
But one of them is always with us - our inner voice can spew fear
and self doubt, whenever we let it, if we don’t train it. Are my
ideas worth anything? Maybe everyone whatever I’m thinking,
other people know it. Maybe my best idea, some smarter guy at
google is already finishing it.
I don’t think Zuck has ever had much self-doubt. Why would
anyone pay attention to me? Or take time to use what I have built.
Everyone is so busy. Even my friends, even my good friends, can’t
always invest time to look my ideas, and if they can’t, why should
I believe anyone else will? Obviously, Zuck wasn’t always listened
to, and his first few public ideas didn’t take off. Being naive so
oblivious to doubt and fear can cover for a while, but reality will
just make any such weaknesses more apparent later. Zuck isn’t
naive. He pragmatically just tries again with his next idea, and
persists tenaciously into any success.
For every success, there are hundreds with the same or similar
idea, who gave up, couldn’t find or keep the passion to succeed.
Every one of them would have faced different challenges towards
success, some being prepared in these ways, others having these
strengths, others having help in these areas, but the passion
Karel Baloun 69
I’ve found something to put here. Your turn.
which could have lead to success is a flower which withers in selfdoubt,
criticism and loneliness.
The emotional fortitude I’m writing about is essential for winning
with a startup, and it applies to any creative endeavor.
Many scientists and artists had rich patrons who commissioned
his work, but most inspiring, purely amazing are the stories of
men and women who pursued an idea, devoting their lives,
without external reward or recognition. Many of these passionate
strivers are lost to history, few traces last more than a millennium,
and even fewer of those keep any of their original meaning55. Will
Bill Gates, Linus Torvalds or any of our generation of technological
heroes be remembered in 300 years? Will Google and Yahoo be
superseded, just like so many other high-tech companies in the
last 30 years, including DEC, Compaq, Alta Vista, Atari, Silicon
Graphics, etc. How can I create anything really meaningful? What
is the average age of the billion dollar companies atop the the
alexa top 25? It must be less than 10, and why does that feel like
a long time? Or are we all really just aiming for money in the
dotcom lottery?
At Facebook, we all believe that we are building a social platform
that will really change people’s lives, and continue to be useful for
a long time.
At 38000 feet, halfway between Lihue and the Aleutian Islands, on
United headed to Nagoya, I feel incredibly grateful for our
strength. Hydrocarbons give us around 150 energy slaves, which
we, the billion or so affluent first-worlders, have all deployed to
give us all a lifestyle better than medieval kings. We also have a
financial and industrial system that enables us to hire 3rd world
product producing slaves at less than a dollar per hour. Open
Source software, which is basically shared free programming
62 Inside Facebook
Copyright, Karel Baloun, 2006. All rights reserved.
resources, drives so much innovation. Thanks to this
infrastructure, which enables me to buy a laptop for around a
week’s pay, we technology workers can make contributions way
beyond what a single, average human being could achieve 10, 50
or 100 years ago.
I couldn’t produce by myself even a single part of this laptop, or
the hardware internet behind it, but there it is, ready for me to
write a few lines of code, or a few ideas in book, and if it is good,
thousands of people will run with it, moving society this way or
that way. If it is not good, oh well, too bad for me, but the
attention of the people and their collected power, will go to some
other person, site or idea.
A few internet companies have revolutionized how we live our
daily lives. I don’t need to worry where I’m going anymore,
because I’ll just find it on google maps on my way from my Treo.
I now have way more free email accounts than I need, and I use
these and IM for most of my interaction with people. My
daughters are lucky I haven’t figured out how to brush their teeth
over IM yet, but since I just learned to fold my shirts by watching
this movie, I’m sure that my facebook peers will be somehow able
to computerize their child rearing when they get to it. Look, I’m
not saying this is good, or bad. I’m just saying that’s the way
things are going.
Karel Baloun 63
I’ve found something to put here. Your turn.
My CEO is 21 years young, and lives his Dream
I am 34 years old, and have landed in one of the few situations
that makes me feel really, really, really old. My daughter Mimoli
asks me why I’ve started to collect a few gray hairs. I tell her it’s
her. I’m the only among over 50 engineers who has a kid. My
baby Elin asks where is her bottle. I ask her why at the age of 34 I
find myself to be the corporate age diversity program.
My CEO is living his dream. Can I? Can you?
On the internet no one knows you are a dog. If you know that
joke, you are old. It’s from way back when the New Yorker was an
important print publication, and it was a comic of dog typing on a
computer. The New Yorker also beautifully demonstrates our New
Media, since it has been owned since 1985 by Samuel Irving
Newhouse Sr/Jr51, aka Conde Nast. When Rupert Murdoch’s News
Corp purchased MySpace initially there was user concern of
inappropriate media concentration and talk of a boycott, but this
completely ineffective effort hasn’t nudged Myspace’s growth into
the #6 U.S. internet property.
Not only can you be anyone on the internet, you are free to
achieve anything you can with the internet. A key image hosting
service, pongo.com which helped kick start ebay.com was thought
64 Inside Facebook
Copyright, Karel Baloun, 2006. All rights reserved.
51 who currently shares two prominent characteristics with Mr. Zuckerberg, who is
theoretically maybe halfway to being on the list of Forbes billionaires, where Brin
and Page are #26 & 27 at $13B.
up and run by one lady in Sitka, Alaska. And a few 20 year olds
can create the strongest social network in human history. So
anyone can achieve anything.
So what is it that holds us back? Why isn’t everyone a Mark
Zuckerberg, starting powerful internet applications in their spare
time?
Belief and vision are key part of success. Zuck was blessed with
an amazing early adoption rate at his first schools, so it didn’t
take complex analytics or fuzzy math to project that other schools
would behave similarly. Even an outsider like me or my seniorexecutive-
type friends David or Dion could judge that this was
likely. So he could see it, and rockstar like media interviews
reinforced his belief. Also, Zuck was blessed with two early
executives who could powerfully share his vision. Sean Parker had
seen rocket like success first as a founder of Napster from his
college dorm room and second as a founder of Plaxo. Matt Cohler
had seen it at LinkedIn as well as from his perch as a VC analyst.
For them, phenomenal success was a natural course of business.
I’m challenged to keep this dream vision. I meditate on it
regularly, and I’m certain I’ll soon get to a point where I can keep
it. Protect it. Nurture it. Feed it. Literally like the flame of
creativity and drive within me. It helps that I’ve always been the
dreamer type, in that I easily get excited about a powerful idea,
and can think only of it, of making it work. Keeping that dream
vision strong all the way to the completion of an idea, that is what
makes greatness.
Karel Baloun 65
I’ve found something to put here. Your turn.
But I’ve lived through the dotcom collapse 6 years ago, and even
before the dotcom frenzy, I was at Geoworks, which lost to
Microsoft at least twice, before selling its engineering team to
Amazon. Geoworks had excellent engineering, with a tiny
memory footprint PC windowing system well before windows that
ran amazingly fast on my first Pentium laptop in 1996, but was
serially murdered by business failures. Many dreams foundered
on those rocks.52
A quick Geoworks aside, Microsoft has smashed many companies,
including Netscape, Corel, Apple (once), IBM (piecemeal), Sun
(maybe) but Geoworks has the unique distinction of getting
smashed by Microsoft twice in exactly the same way. In the
cartoon below, replace Rove with Bill saying “We will go directly to
the OEMs53, give our software away for cheap or free, leverage our
dominant position in other markets, and persist until you run out
of money.” and you have how M$FT beat Geoworks (the donkeys)
in both the PC and mobile handset markets about a decade after
each other.
66 Inside Facebook
Copyright, Karel Baloun, 2006. All rights reserved.
52 I feel like a serious Silicon Valley old timer when I write that I was nearby at the
founding of Ebay. About 2 miles from where Omidyar was typing our the initial
perl code for ebay, I was on the same old ISP (best.com) typing perl code for
agoodstore.com, which was going to be a marketplace where the profits from all
sales were given to the charity of the buyers choice. On Memorial Day 1996, the
ebay site and I got the same amount of traffic, according to my own logs and “The
Perfect Store” by Adam Cohen. This is the original source of my cynicism in my
own business acumen, or maybe persistence. If you are a Talented Business
Person free of dotcom cynicism, I’d like to try that idea again.
53 Original Equipment Manufacturer. Companies which make, market and
sometimes directly sell PCs, e.g. HP, Dell, IBM (well, before they sold their PC
business away to a Chinese company), Sony.
A second way this comic resonates with this book is that
Facebook is a rare company that doesn’t benefit much from
history or experience. There is no clear “again” in the social
networking space. Each new successful social networking entry
brings a new angle, new features, new strengths. “Making money
on the internet” is a known challenge, as are technical challenges
around scaling php/apache websites and massive storage
solutions, so experience in these known problems is valuable, but
in the overall product and business, Facebook must create
everything from scratch.
Karel Baloun 67
I’ve found something to put here. Your turn.
So I have some lingering business cynicism shared by many late
90s dotcom investors and one canine sock puppet. I loved my
early facebook days so much, because Zuck and company are
completely oblivious to this cynicism. And therefore immune to
being paralyzed by it. Many Geoworkers cured themselves and
went onto greater things54, but only by believing they could
succeed, and seeing that in the business environment around
them, such as the lucky folks at the Seattle office who were sold
to Amazon.
I leaped to Looksmart, which proceeded to lose the search and
portal wars to Yahoo and Google. One fond Looksmart memory I
have is of an executive, at an all hands meeting Q&A session in
mid-1999 at an expensive San Francisco hotel ballroom, being
asked about purchasing Google, and replying to everyone that this
would highly dilute Looksmart stock.
I’m eternally grateful that I could bask in the Facebook optimism
bath for many months. May you all have a chance to experience
something like that! It is heaven for the human spirit. And it
really makes folks strive to make it real. Whether it succeeds or
not in the end doesn’t matter, because I believe the memory of
this feeling can persist, survive the failure. It is so wonderful, that
the memory of it outlives anything that follows. I arrived at both
Looksmart and Geoworks too late in the lives of those companies
to feel the startup fire.
68 Inside Facebook
Copyright, Karel Baloun, 2006. All rights reserved.
54 such as David Thatcher’s securities fraud which took down Critical Path. And
going to CommerceOne to get shafted by Microsoft again.
If there is another dotcom like shakeout after the Web 2.0 boom,
how many current wonder-boys will see dreaming as something
they did in their 20s?
For even without those experiences of colossal, dramatic failure,
for any good idea there are countless critics and numerous
competitors. So we try to stay away from negative, critical people.
But one of them is always with us - our inner voice can spew fear
and self doubt, whenever we let it, if we don’t train it. Are my
ideas worth anything? Maybe everyone whatever I’m thinking,
other people know it. Maybe my best idea, some smarter guy at
google is already finishing it.
I don’t think Zuck has ever had much self-doubt. Why would
anyone pay attention to me? Or take time to use what I have built.
Everyone is so busy. Even my friends, even my good friends, can’t
always invest time to look my ideas, and if they can’t, why should
I believe anyone else will? Obviously, Zuck wasn’t always listened
to, and his first few public ideas didn’t take off. Being naive so
oblivious to doubt and fear can cover for a while, but reality will
just make any such weaknesses more apparent later. Zuck isn’t
naive. He pragmatically just tries again with his next idea, and
persists tenaciously into any success.
For every success, there are hundreds with the same or similar
idea, who gave up, couldn’t find or keep the passion to succeed.
Every one of them would have faced different challenges towards
success, some being prepared in these ways, others having these
strengths, others having help in these areas, but the passion
Karel Baloun 69
I’ve found something to put here. Your turn.
which could have lead to success is a flower which withers in selfdoubt,
criticism and loneliness.
The emotional fortitude I’m writing about is essential for winning
with a startup, and it applies to any creative endeavor.
Many scientists and artists had rich patrons who commissioned
his work, but most inspiring, purely amazing are the stories of
men and women who pursued an idea, devoting their lives,
without external reward or recognition. Many of these passionate
strivers are lost to history, few traces last more than a millennium,
and even fewer of those keep any of their original meaning55. Will
Bill Gates, Linus Torvalds or any of our generation of technological
heroes be remembered in 300 years? Will Google and Yahoo be
superseded, just like so many other high-tech companies in the
last 30 years, including DEC, Compaq, Alta Vista, Atari, Silicon
Graphics, etc. How can I create anything really meaningful? What
is the average age of the billion dollar companies atop the the
alexa top 25? It must be less than 10, and why does that feel like
a long time? Or are we all really just aiming for money in the
dotcom lottery?
At Facebook, we all believe that we are building a social platform
that will really change people’s lives, and continue to be useful for
a long time.
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