Mark Zuckerberg: Facing A Cautionary Tale

It’s hard to believe, but Facebook has been around for 14 years. In Internet I years, that practically makes Facebook middleaged. However, it has outlasted many of its early social media rivals, including Myspace (a shell of its former self), Friendster (completely dead), and even rival Google’s own ham-fisted attempts at social media.

Why? A lot of it is down to “Facebook executed it better”. It had a simple interface, better uptimes than its rivals, and a “cool” factor that lured users. Facebook was the main driver behind the social media revolution. And the driving force behind Facebook is its mercurial CEO, Mark Zuckerberg.

The Zuckerberg most people know is the one depicted by the movie The Social Network: nerdy, insecure, and shady – in no way a mature adult who somehow built the world changing social behemoth. His awkward public appearances over the years have not improved that impression. Despite this, he has learned to lead and prevail in Silicon Valley’s cutthroat environment. He learned from the best brains in the business, but he never let them sway his passion and vision for his business.

Now though, Facebook is embroiled in a crisis where its user data was used to improperly influence the United States presidential election in 2016, a potential violation of American election law. Privacy scandals have dogged Facebook since it entered the popular consciousness, but this recent impropriety has caused Zuckerberg to be hauled up before Congress to face American lawmakers.

So how did the giant rise, and how did Zuckerberg run it? What lessons can we learn from its crises?

THE BIRTH OF A DISRUPTIVE GIANT

When Mark Elliot Zuckerberg attended Harvard University, he wrote a program called “Facemash”, which compiled data from the ‘face books’ of Harvard. A face book is a student directory consisting of photographs and basic personal information, usually distributed by university administrations for students to better know each other.