Comment by corford | Hacker News Reader

Comment by corford | Hacker News Reader

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Except it isn't quite as "rags to riches" or "one man's dogged perseverance against the odds" as "one guy and his computer" implies, is it? Mark stumbled upon the thing while at Harvard after goofing around with a few different concepts for fun (like most teenage/college hackers do). The site took off due to a mix of:

a). being birthed in Harvard (with all the clout, connections, mentoring and cachet that brings)

b). good timing (in terms of 2004 being long enough after the first dot com bust and before the crisis of 2008)

c). taking a fairly straight forward idea and improving on those before (live journal, myspace etc.)

The only cool thing about facebook as far as I'm concerned is the backend. Scaling a system to support 1 billion odd users is very cool and very interesting. Appreciating and respecting it on a technical level doesn't mean you have to appreciate Facebook "the whole", what it stands for or what it does. Also, just because it's an impressively engineered system doesn't mean it's worth 100+ billion dollars.

Edit: I guess I (and presumably some others) feel that the reward (a 100+ billion dollar valuation and 1000 millionaires created over night) doesn't immediately seem to translate to the effort spent getting there.

Do you think that maybe, just maybe, Zuckerberg might have contributed in some way? I don't know, maybe he took a good concept at a good time and executed it so well that it's now worth $100B?

FFS, give the man (and the rest of his now giant team) some credit. $100B doesn't just happen.

You're right and I should have said that. Of course I give him some credit. However, I wouldn't necessarily give him as much credit as he gets (and to be fair to him, I doubt he seeks the crazy accolades either).

Frankly, it almost goes without saying that if you and your team put together a system that handles a billion users, you deserve some credit. The question is simply: how much?

I dunno, I think he deserves a massive amount of credit. The guy was 18 when this thing started, and he was competing against 800lb gorillas (myspace etc).

The other thing to note is that everything has gone right for Facebook. I don't believe that would have happened if their execution wasn't so fantastic. Major major props are due to Zuckerberg and the entire early team (and I find this hard to disagree with, regardless of whether one thinks it's worth $100B or not)

I'm with you on the major props to the team (of which MZ is a big part). Execution is king, and Facebook's execution of their strategy thus far has been exquisite. What that should translate to in dollar terms I don't know but, for me, it feels like it should be quite a bit less than a hundred billion.

Well, company valuation and stock exchange pricing have no relationship to effort at all. $100B is nothing to do with rewarding effort.

The stock exchange is a game where people bet on what the price will be in the future. Everything is based on perceived value, and there's no requirement to have any relationship to objective reality. I would wager that many of the people betting today do not themselves perceive that Facebook is "worth" $100B, but believe that there are others who perceive it is worth more.

True but it's also true that if MZ or any other shareholders choose to sell some of their equity, they will convert that paper money in to real money. Assuming the current share price holds long enough, that's a lot of real money.

But I take your point that there isn't really a strong connection between stock price and effort expended (although maybe there's more of an implied connection at the initial IPO price versus the share price a few months after trading). If I think about it a bit more, MZ and team are effectively bystanders in all this. It's not as if they got to decide the IPO price (if I've understood the process correctly i.e. the banks recommend the starting price?). Unfortunately, that's where my knowledge of high finance stops. Sometimes, I wish I'd taken a finance degree just to be equipped to understand the real game that's going on.

Growing to a billion users is harder than you think. There were many other social networks, including ones started at other top schools, but only one survived, and it was because they understood what makes a site like fb work.

Yes, but is it $100 billion's worth of hard work? I guess that's what the market gets to decide.

Edit: also half the problem is caused by assuming 1 billion users translates to anything meaningful. Apart from being an impressive number in its own right, what exactly does it mean? Facebook is free to use and helps satisfy basic human social desires in a digital way. Great but would they have 1 billion users if it wasn't free? No.

If I could distribute beer for free and and offered every male on the planet over the age of 18 a free keg, I'd probably have a billion takers.

So your basic issue is that in your judgement the founders and employees don't deserve their level of success?

Which internet company does, in your judgement?

Frankly, I struggle to see how virtually any internet company warrants a valuation north of $100 billion dollars. Especially those with a P/E ratio approaching or beyond 100.

$100,000,000,000 is a VERY big number. It feels almost absurd (to me at least) that a single company can create that much "value" in less than 8 years. But maybe I'm the one with the problem and I just can't get my head around "web scale" economics.

I tend to look at prices as a joke. An illusion that I'm willing to play a part in.

When I apply that logic to FB's 100bn valuation, it makes sense. Doesn't make us all look any less stupid though.

i would argue that indeed 1 billion users translates to something very meaningful. They built something people wanted, someone get Zuck a shirt.

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