Sebastian Thrun

Thrun wore his Google Glasses prototypes through his interview — as he says he does all the time — and talked about that project, Google’s self-driving cars, Google X in general, and his new online education start-up, Udacity. Dorsey talked Twitter and Square, as well as his angel investment in Instagram.

Both videos (each less than 20 minutes) are worth watching, but here are couple of comments that stuck out for me:

Of Google’s glasses, Thrun said, “People talk a lot about augmented reality — looking at objects and faces and finding information — but the compelling use case for us is the sharing experience.”

What does that mean? Taking pictures and sending them to Google+ (via the press of a button and a quick nod, as Thrun demonstrated), phone calls, notifications, email dictation and email reading.

Portrait of Charlie Rose, taken with Google Glass prototype by Sebastian Thrun

Google X has been “overhyped,” Thrun protested somewhat halfheartedly. He said it’s a research group like at any other company, with a slightly different focus — it’s “not for the sake of writing research papers, but for the sake of impacting society.”

For instance, the Glasses project was based on hiring University of Washington professor Babak Parviz and giving him all the resources and engineers he needed to build something interesting over the past two years, Thrun said.

Meanwhile, when asked to describe the next era of technology, Dorsey said it was tools that disappear from sight when they’re irrelevant and only reappear when they’re relevant — like push notifications.

He also spoke a little bit about the myth of the founder, and told Rose it’s not a bad thing that none of Twitter’s founders are the CEO anymore.

“You can have a very shallow view and you can say there were three founders, only at the beginning. But the truly great companies have multiple founding moments through their history, and the truly great companies are constantly reinventing themselves all the time with the people they bring in, with the ideas they have around the table — and with Twitter, with our users. A lot of what you see in Twitter today was invented by our users.”

Dorsey also had some interesting and telling comments on Instagram, in which he was one of the first angel investors — and which Twitter had also made moves to buy, before Facebook acquired it for $1 billion.

“It makes sense that Facebook would pick it up,” Dorsey said. “Facebook’s core competency is photos, but Facebook is known for the past tense. Photos are in the past, they’re in albums, they’re something that you have to maintain; you have to maintain relationships. Instagram represented the now, it represented the present — it represented a lot of the ideas that Twitter brought to the world. Even in the constraints — [Twitter has] a constraint of 140 characters, Instagram has the constraint of the square.”

Here’s the promo, released this morning. The first episode, featuring Assange chatting up bird-flipping Super Bowl performer M.I.A., runs April 17. WikiLeaks says you should be able to watch it on the Web and via Russian cable news network RT, which you can get in the U.S. via the Dish Network and on some Comcast and Time Warner Cable systems.

WikiLeaks says Assange has taped 12 of these so far. I hope one of the guests turns out to be Saturday Night Live’s Bill Hader.

The Twitter investment, through his Kingdom Holding Co., was just announced via press release and confirmed by Twitter.

A spokesman for Twitter said he had no additional details to share beyond the release.

Twitter’s last round of funding, which closed this summer, valued the company at $8.4 billion and was led by Digital Sky Technologies (DST) of Russia.

Of late, the most well-known international Web investor has been DST founder Yuri Milner, who has stakes in Twitter, Facebook and Zynga. Prince Alwaleed has been more active as a media investor, with a large stake in News Corp. (which owns AllThingsD), for instance.

In a statement, a Kingdom Holding Co. executive noted the coming impact of social media on the media industry, and Twitter’s potential to monetize it.

If you’re looking to get a better sense of Prince Alwaleed, here’s a Charlie Rose interview from last year.

Amazon and Apple “are extremely aligned with us,” said Zuckerberg. “We have a lot of conversations with people at both companies just trying to figure out ways that we can do more together, and there is just a lot of reception there.”

Meanwhile, “Google, I think, in some ways, is more competitive and certainly is trying to build their own little version of Facebook,” Zuckerberg said.

Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg added that Facebook’s competitive stance should be pretty clear to others in tech, because it doesn’t want to diversify its products. “We are focused on doing one thing incredibly well,” she said. That is: helping people connect.

Facebook would never build its own games, the two execs insisted. “We just believe that an independent entrepreneur will always beat a division of a big company,” Zuckerberg said.

Facebook is a platform for applications and a social layer for everything, he and Sandberg said.

Rose also got in questions about IPO plans, privacy, hiring, China and more in the interview. Here’s a video highlight and the very long transcript.

Guests:
Mark Zuckerberg
Sheryl Sandberg

Charlie Rose: Tell me what the mission is today for Facebook. You’ve got 800 million and counting –

Mark Zuckerberg: Yeah.

Charlie Rose: – users.

Mark Zuckerberg: Yeah.

Charlie Rose: It’s an extraordinary reach. Someone said it’s the most expansive human enabler of communication, or an enabler of human communication there has ever been.

Mark Zuckerberg: We’re trying.

Charlie Rose: You’re doing well at it too. So what’s the mission? Where is this thing going?

Mark Zuckerberg: So the stated mission of the company is to make the world more open and connected, right? And the idea is that when you give people this ability to stay connected with all the people they care about, and you make it so they can express new things about themselves or in communication with other people who they care about, then you just open up all these new possibilities. You make it so people can stay connected in ways that they couldn’t before. They can learn about new things, whether it’s events that are happening in the world or ability to organize new things or learn about new products or new movies or music that they want to listen to. It opens up a lot of new possibility when you can keep all of these connections open to the people that you care about. So obviously, a big part of our mission is just connecting all these different people in the world. And one of the things that we are really proud of is that now 800 million people around the world are using Facebook every month and perhaps even crazier — it’s mind-blowing from my perspective. But more than half a billion people use Facebook every day. And I just think that’s crazy.

Charlie Rose: 500 million plus people –

Mark Zuckerberg: 500 million people, yeah. That’s growing. And it’s growing every day. And if you just look back, you know, seven years from when we were getting started, I mean, there would have been no way that we would have thought –

Sheryl Sandberg: 500 million people in your dorm room.

Mark Zuckerberg: The funny thing is that, you know, I used to talk to a lot of my friends when I was at — when I was in college. We used to go out to get pizza every night. And we used to talk about what we thought was going to happen in the world and on the Internet. And we thought that there would be something like this, right, that, you know, it seemed pretty much inevitable that people would have a way to connect and that they would be able to express all these things and that there would be tools to make not just a social network, but that every product that you use is better off with your friends. We figured that there would be tools to do that. But the big surprise of this thing is that we’ve played a big role in making that happen. And when we were in college, we just figured, you know, who are we to do this, right? I mean, maybe we can create this cool little community for ourselves in college, but clearly it’s going to be some other company that does it.

Charlie Rose: That’s what it is, a web within a web, is it not?

Mark Zuckerberg: Well –

Charlie Rose: It’s a personalized web within the web.

Mark Zuckerberg: I think it’s shaping — it’s shaping the broader web.

Charlie Rose: Yeah.

Mark Zuckerberg: I mean, right now, if you look back for the past five or seven years, the story of social networking has really been about getting these 800 million people connected, right, so that they can stay in touch with all these people who they care about, and getting them signed up for Facebook and all that. But if you look forward for the next five years, I think that the story that people are going to remember five years from now isn’t how this one site was built. It was how every single service that you use is now going to be better with your friends because they can tap into your friends, right, so whether it’s, you know, music services that we just announced this new product a little more than a month ago and since then some of the music services that are out there, Spotify has grown from a little more than three million users with Facebook to now more than seven million users with Facebook. Another service called Mog [spelled phonetically] has grown from I think it’s a relatively small number of subscribers but it’s grown by four or five times in the last month alone.

Sheryl Sandberg: Yeah.

Mark Zuckerberg: And I think what that just shows is that all of these different products are better when you’re doing them with your friends. I mean think about it, do you want to go to the movies by yourself or do you want to go to the movies with your friends, right? You want to go with your friends.

Charlie Rose: Or do you want to know what your friends like rather than what a whole different [unintelligible] likes.

Sheryl Sandberg: That’s right.

Mark Zuckerberg: Yeah.

Sheryl Sandberg: It’s the wisdom of crowds to the wisdom of friends, you know.

Charlie Rose: The wisdom of crowds means –

Sheryl Sandberg: Yeah.

Charlie Rose: – so that’s Google versus Facebook right there.

Sheryl Sandberg: I don’t think it’s Google versus Facebook. I think it represents –

Charlie Rose: The wisdom of crowds versus the wisdom of friends?

Sheryl Sandberg: Well, I don’t think — I think the wisdom of crowds applies not just to Google but to a phase of the web –

Mark Zuckerberg: Yeah.

Sheryl Sandberg: – which is about information and about links. And it was a lot of wonderful things, mostly based on anonymity and links between crowds.

Charlie Rose: Right, right, right, right, right, right, right.

Sheryl Sandberg: What does the crowd think? What is the best thing? Ours is just structured a totally different place so it is an evolution. The information web still exists, it’s still broadly used, but the social web didn’t exist before. The social web can’t exist until you are your real self online. I have to be me. You have to be Charlie Rose. He has to be Mark Zuckerberg. I have to be Sheryl Sandberg. Once we are online as ourselves, connected to each other and our other friends, then you can have the evolution of what becomes the social web, not just on Facebook but throughout.

Charlie Rose: What is it about that people want to be on Facebook, they want to talk about themselves, what is the sort of essence of that?

Mark Zuckerberg: I think that people just have this core desire to express who they are. And I think it’s always existed.

Charlie Rose: It’s as though –

Mark Zuckerberg: One of the things that I think makes us human. But yeah and obviously to know what’s going on with your friends’ lives or not just your friends but people you care about. Right? You know, people who you’re interested in who aren’t your friends who are maybe on the periphery of your social circle, yeah, I think that those are all just core human needs and until Facebook there wasn’t a great tool for doing that, but I think that a lot of that and building that up was the last five years. I think the next five years is going to be about, okay now you’re connected to all these people, now you can have a better music listening experience, you can have a better movie watching experience, you can see what your friends are reading and learn what news you should read first, all of these things I think are going to get better. And that’s the thing that I’m most excited about for the next five years. And if we do well I think five years from now people are really going to look back and say wow, over the last five years all these products have now gotten better because I’m not doing this stuff alone, I’m doing it with my friends.

Sheryl Sandberg: And it’s personal, it’s not just that you’re bringing your friends with you and then it becomes personal to you. So if you look at how people use most of the web, most products out there, even if you’re logged in, if I looked over your two shoulders, you see the same stuff because it’s basically produced for the masses.

Charlie Rose: Is the key to –

Sheryl Sandberg: And ours is different.

Charlie Rose: Is the key to the monitorization of the future the fact that advertising will believe this is the best way to reach people, who are likely to buy their products?

Sheryl Sandberg: Marketers have always wanted you know personal relationships with consumers or relationships where consumers do two things, consumers buy their products and consumers tell their friends to buy their — that they buy their products. Marketers have always been looking for that person who’s not just going to buy but spread the word to their friends. What we do on Facebook is we now enable marketers to find that and then if I do it on Facebook I’m sharing with an average of 130 people. And so it becomes a word of mouth marketing at scale, so people can tell each other what they like which is for marketers the thing they’ve been looking for I think for a long time.

Charlie Rose: Is there a limit in terms of how many friends you should have?

Mark Zuckerberg: I mean, I don’t think a limit in terms of should, they’re just –

Sheryl Sandberg: It’s very personnel.

Mark Zuckerberg: – I think that humans have a capacity for different amounts of social relationships. And I think it varies from person to person but it’s also not about what you should do. You should use the product to keep in touch with whatever set of people you want to. And we try to build all kinds of products that make it so you can stay in touch with small groups. All right, we have this groups product that you know it’s I think it’s 300 or 400 million people who are using it on a monthly basis now in order to communicate on Facebook with a subset of their friends, right, not their whole friends list, something that’s very widely used and a lot of people want to do that. And then we have functionality where people can publish things publicly, right? And some people have tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands or even in some cases millions of subscribers who they can publish to and communicate with. So I mean people have a variety of different communication needs and we strive to build products that help people set [spelled phonetically] all of those.

Charlie Rose: What’s the valuation today of Facebook?

Sheryl Sandberg: So we’re a private company so we don’t really have a valuation.

Charlie Rose: So then why do you want to be a public company? Why do you even think about an IPO?

Mark Zuckerberg: I actually think the biggest thing for us is that a big part of being a technology company is getting the best engineers and designers and talented people around the world. And one of the ways that you can do that is you compensate people with equity or options, right, so you get people who want to join the company, both for the mission, right, because they believe that Facebook is doing this awesome thing and they want to be a part of connecting everyone in the world, but also, if the company does well, then they get financially rewarded and can be set. And, you know, we’ve made this implicit promise to our investors and to our employees that by compensating them with equity and by giving them equity, that at some point we’re going to make that equity worth something publicly and liquidly, in a liquid way. Now, the promise isn’t that we’re going to do it on any kind of short-term time horizon. The promise is that we’re going to build this company so that it’s great over the long term, right. And that we’re always making these decisions for the long term, but at some point we’ll do that.

Charlie Rose: And it will be a liquid dividend for your –

Mark Zuckerberg: Yeah, whether it’s a dividend or not, they’ll be able to trade their equity for money. And you know, that’s something that we take seriously, as a responsibility of running the company. And we just care deeply about all the employees and the investors who have been there with us.

Charlie Rose: Has the Groupon experience and has other things changed your sense of the timing of an IPO?

Mark Zuckerberg: I don’t — I don’t think so.

Sheryl Sandberg: Not really.

Mark Zuckerberg: No.

Charlie Rose: You’ll go when what? When will you decide?

Sheryl Sandberg: When we’re ready.

Mark Zuckerberg: Yeah.

Charlie Rose: No, but how — what will tell you it makes sense?

Mark Zuckerberg: I don’t know. It’s a good question. Yeah.

Charlie Rose: But you’ll just know?

Mark Zuckerberg: I mean, yeah. It’s — honestly, it’s not something I spend a lot of time on a day-to-day basis thinking about it now.

Charlie Rose: How do you measure the impact that we now believe social media play in the Arab Spring?

Mark Zuckerberg: Yeah, my personal take on this is that it’s — the social media’s role is maybe a bit overblown in that. I mean, the way that I think about it is that if people want change, then they will find a way to get that change, right. So, whatever technology they may or may not have used was neither a necessary nor sufficient case for getting to the outcome that they got to, but having people who wanted change was. So, I mean, I hope that Facebook and other Internet technologies were able to help people, just like we hope that we help them communicate and organize and do whatever they want to every single day, but I don’t pretend that Facebook didn’t exist, that this wouldn’t even be possible. Of course, it would have.

Charlie Rose: Yeah, but it certainly accelerated it. And do you know of any effort in terms of where governments, because of that, are trying to shut down Facebook in terms of access?

Mark Zuckerberg: There are examples intermittently throughout the world all the time, but –

Sheryl Sandberg: And there are places we’re not available. Well, China’s obviously the big one. We’re not broadly available.

Charlie Rose: So how do you see that going into China, because — and if in fact it requires some sense of censorship, does that make it a “don’t go”?

Sheryl Sandberg: You know, if your mission is to connect the entire world for all the reasons we’ve been talking about, you can’t connect the whole world and not China.

Charlie Rose: Right.

Sheryl Sandberg: That’s not something we’re working on or focused on right now because it’s not a decision we have to make. So you are correct that when and if we go into China, we’ll have –

Charlie Rose: A billion and a half people.

Mark Zuckerberg: Well, we’ll issues. But since, for right now, we’re not available, and we don’t have an immediate path to become available, it not — these are not policy decisions we have to make.

Charlie Rose: So it’s not on the immediate horizon –

Sheryl Sandberg: Not on the immediate horizon.

Charlie Rose: – to go into China. And the reason is, though, is it because of what happened to Google?

Sheryl Sandberg: So it’s not really our choice. It’s the government’s choice, you know. We’re not available because they’ve chosen to make us not available.

Charlie Rose: Because they acted a certain way, you’ve chosen not to go there. Fair enough.

Mark Zuckerberg: Yes.

Sheryl Sandberg: No, it’s — yeah, yeah.

Mark Zuckerberg: Yeah. And then at some point I think there would be some discussion around what it would take to go there, and then we’d at that point have to figure out whether we were willing to do that.

Sheryl Sandberg: Exactly.

Mark Zuckerberg: But honestly, the way that we look at it now is there’s so many other places in the world where we can connect more people more easily without having to face those hard questions that I think a simple rule in business is, if you do the things that are easier first, then you can actually make a lot of progress. So then I assume, you know, we talk about running Facebook for the long term and over the decades in which we hope to run and build Facebook to be a great company, I would imagine that this will be a question that we have to answer. But, I mean, right now, there’s still so much room for growth in a lot of other countries that it’s just not — it’s not the top thing that we’re worried about right now.

Charlie Rose: To achieve your objectives that you want to do, the expansion, the –

Mark Zuckerberg: Yeah.

Charlie Rose: – connections, the advertising revenue, how important and where do you put making sure that Facebook gets more of the best engineers than anybody else regardless of where you have to steal them?

Sheryl Sandberg: First, second and third.

Charlie Rose: That’s one, two, three, yeah.

Mark Zuckerberg: But it’s really important.

Sheryl Sandberg: Steal is not –

Mark Zuckerberg: Yeah.

Sheryl Sandberg: Attract. We attract them.

Charlie Rose: If you go to Google and you ask about you, they say, “Steal.”

Sheryl Sandberg: Attract. Attract.

Charlie Rose: He brought you from Google, and you brought other people from Google.

Sheryl Sandberg: He attracted me from Google. And I attracted — you know, I wanted to — but it’s — [unintelligible] hiring engineers, so Google –

Charlie Rose: Do you think Larry would believe it was attraction or theft?

Sheryl Sandberg: Well, we’re not proper in the United States. And I’m fairly certain he would say, but you’re getting at a really important question.

Charlie Rose: I am.

Sheryl Sandberg: Which is engineering talent in this country.

Charlie Rose: Yes.

Sheryl Sandberg: Which there is not enough of.

Mark Zuckerberg: Mm-hmm.

Sheryl Sandberg: So we would hire lots more people. Google would hire lots more people. Every company we know of has more desire for engineers –

Charlie Rose: And more need for the talented engineers –

Sheryl Sandberg: – than we have them.

Charlie Rose: And you can’t find them.

Sheryl Sandberg: Can’t find them.

Charlie Rose: How much of that is because of the U.S. immigration policy?

Sheryl Sandberg: Some.

Mark Zuckerberg: I’m not sure. I think some of it is that. But a lot of it is just education. I mean, I think that there’s not enough supply of engineers to meet the demand. I mean, all of my friends who have younger siblings who are going to college or high school, I mean, my number one piece of advice is you should learn how to program. I mean, I think that in the future, all kinds of jobs, not even just straight engineering jobs, but all kinds of different jobs are going to involve some element of programming. And, I mean, I just look at, you know, when I was at school, and I remember the average salary that an engineer, one of my computer science classmates got. And it’s gone up at least 50 percent, maybe even doubled in the last seven years since I was at school. And I think the reason is that the economy is shifting, and there are more companies that are growing that are these technology and software focused companies. And the skill set of being able to write code is so highly in demand that — and the amount of engineers who are graduating isn’t growing at a fast enough rate that the people who are there are just in more demand, and they get paid more.

Sheryl Sandberg: And we have both an education problem and an immigration problem.

Mark Zuckerberg: That’s true.

Sheryl Sandberg: So it’s an education problem. We do not train — we don’t graduate enough kids from high school. We don’t graduate enough kids from college in this country. And having these kind of skills, we’re just absolutely far off. And also, the immigration policy you talked about is very real. So, you know, someone made a joke. We give a huge percentage of the spots in our engineering undergrad and grad program to people from other countries, and then we kick them out. It’s like a company. We’d have Facebook training, and we train everyone, and then we’d say, but you can’t work here. Go work for our competitor. That’s what we’re doing as a country. People have talked about stapling.

Charlie Rose: Right.

Sheryl Sandberg: We should be stapling a visa.

Charlie Rose: Stapling a green card to every diploma.

Sheryl Sandberg: To every high-tech diploma because those people, not only do they not take jobs from other Americans. They create jobs for other Americans if we could keep them here and have them work in our [unintelligible].

Charlie Rose: I don’t understand why they that can’t be changed, other than it’s caught up in the overall immigration politics.

Sheryl Sandberg: Yeah.

Charlie Rose: Otherwise you would think it’s so obvious.

Sheryl Sandberg: We’re not — we’re not experts on the political process.

Mark Zuckerberg: It’s above my pay grade.

Charlie Rose: But you’re having a different — you have to have, today, a company the size of Facebook, a presence in Washington. You have to have a sense of making sure that Washington knows who you are, and you know what they’re about. Do you know?

Sheryl Sandberg: We do.

Mark Zuckerberg: Yes.

Sheryl Sandberg: Yeah, no, we do.

Mark Zuckerberg: It’s an important — it’s an important part, I mean, for these issues and a lot of others. But I think changing the stuff is just such a long process, right. If we were actually going to effect any change in terms of getting more folks, each one be visas so we could not kick some of the best engineers out to other countries, I don’t know, I mean, that’s years, right. I mean –

Sheryl Sandberg: I mean, I think it’s a public education issue. I think, look, we have huge unemployment problem, and we have a growing crisis of people that not only want jobs and need jobs but deserve jobs. And it’s our job to — and so I think people don’t understand that these jobs do not take jobs from other Americans, but they create jobs around them. I mean, there are so many stories on this. We have one guy named Javier Oliveon who works here. He was one of the best engineering students in Spain, nationwide, came to Stanford to get his MBA.

Charlie Rose: Right.

Sheryl Sandberg: Started here, works with us, and he created our internationalization tool. He runs our internationalization projects. We serve most of the world from the United States. It’s the opposite of what everyone thinks is happening. We’re not hiring out there to serve here. We’re serving — we entered the visa lottery for him, and we won. We had the jobs for him.

Mark Zuckerberg: Yeah, yeah.

Sheryl Sandberg: If we had lost, we would have moved those jobs to wherever he could work. But because we got him a visa, those jobs stayed here.

Mark Zuckerberg: Yeah.

Charlie Rose: But let me ask this question, which is at the heart of the debate that’s going on in America.

Mark Zuckerberg: Mm-hmm.

Charlie Rose: Which is, you know, the competition of America with the rest of the world.

Mark Zuckerberg: Mm-hmm.

Charlie Rose: Facebook came out of America. Apple came out of America. Microsoft came out of America. Google came out of America. Are those things going to be coming — those kinds of companies, the kind of company you created –

Mark Zuckerberg: Mm-hmm.

Charlie Rose: – more likely to come from China tomorrow?

Mark Zuckerberg: Well, if you — I think that there’s actually two big ingredients, right. One of the big parts of the Facebook story was that — you know, I didn’t have to have some master plan at the beginning. I didn’t have to have a lot of money. I literally coded Facebook in my dorm room and launched it from my dorm room. I rented a server for $85 a month, and I funded it by putting an ad on the side, and we’ve funded ever since by putting ads on the side.

Charlie Rose: Right, right.

Mark Zuckerberg: And but literally just starting small and growing it. So I think you need two things. One is the ability to have engineers, right, and educate engineers who can just try out their own ideas.

Charlie Rose: Right.

Mark Zuckerberg: And the second is the ability to try out their own ideas, right, and the freedom to do that. And the U.S., I think historically has been extremely good at both. We’ve led in education, and we’ve led in freedom and supporting people trying risky things.

Sheryl Sandberg: Free market economics.

Charlie Rose: Right.

Sheryl Sandberg: Yeah.

Charlie Rose: And a sense of innovation and creativity and –

Sheryl Sandberg: Public policy that supports entrepreneurship.

Charlie Rose: Right, right.

Sheryl Sandberg: In America, you can hire and fire.

Charlie Rose: Right.

Sheryl Sandberg: In America, you can start a company without going through endless bureaucratic red tape, even though it’s growing a bit.

Charlie Rose: Yes.

Sheryl Sandberg: Right? I mean, in America, we’ve had a country of entrepreneurs.

Mark Zuckerberg: Yeah.

Sheryl Sandberg: We have set up our political system so you can start companies. You can close companies. I think people don’t always see the costs of increasing bureaucracy on entrepreneurship. The best people are going to go where they can get the best talent and where they have the best environment to hire.

Charlie Rose: Speaking of environment, how is your culture, say, different from the culture that you saw at Google? What is the Facebook culture?

Sheryl Sandberg: You know, when I think about this, if you compare Facebook and Google to, you know, most of the world, right, to other companies in other industries, they’re actually, in some ways, incredibly similar. They are founder led.

Charlie Rose: Right.

Sheryl Sandberg: Silicon Valley based technology companies that have broad [unintelligible].

Charlie Rose: Driven by engineering.

Sheryl Sandberg: That’s right. Driven by engineering. They’re very similar.

Charlie Rose: Right.

Sheryl Sandberg: In the little Silicon Valley bubble in which we live, they’re truly different, totally different.

Charlie Rose: How so?

Sheryl Sandberg: Couple things. One is that, you know, Google is fundamentally –

Charlie Rose: You’re interested yourself.

Mark Zuckerberg: Yeah, I’m interested in hearing [unintelligible].

Sheryl Sandberg: Yeah, but Google is fundamentally about, you know, algorithms and machine burning.

Charlie Rose: Right.

Sheryl Sandberg: And that — and that has been very important and continues to be very important. They’re doing a great job. We start from a totally different place. We start from an individual. Who are you? You know, what do you want to do? What do you want to share? You know, for us, the vision of the world is that we are like a hacking culture, and we mean that in the best of ways. We do not mean scary people breaking into your home or anything.

Charlie Rose: Or espionage.

Sheryl Sandberg: Or espionage. What we mean is we build things quickly and ship them. So we are not aiming for, you know, perfection that comes over, you know, years, then we ship a product. We don’t work on things for years and then ship it. We work on things. We ship them. We get feedback from the people who use it. We get feedback from the world. We iterate, we iterate, we iterate. We have these great signs around, you know, “Done is better than perfect.” “What would you do if you weren’t afraid?” we’re very much a culture.

Charlie Rose: Because the notion of perfect is the enemy of good.

Sheryl Sandberg: Yeah.

Mark Zuckerberg: Yeah.

Sheryl Sandberg: And a culture of very, very rapid, very rapid innovation.

Charlie Rose: Okay. You set out — did you have a belief in a certain culture when you were building this company, that this is the kind of place I want to work? And this is how I want to –

Sheryl Sandberg: Well, he’s never worked anywhere else.

Charlie Rose: That’s true. So therefore how did you know what kind of culture you wanted?

Mark Zuckerberg: Well, I think it sits [spelled phonetically] from the type of things that we want to build, right? So we’re trying to help people connect with all these different folks, right, and that map of all those different connections needs to get built from the ground up, right? So it is fundamentally about giving people the tools that they need to share the things that they want with the people that they want, make the connections that they want, and bootstrap from nothing to something that’s broader.

It is really different from a culture where you’re already taking the web and your primary mission is okay I want to organize something that’s out there, we have this culture where we place a really big premium on moving quickly right and one of the big theories that I had about that was that all technology companies and probably all companies just slow down dramatically as they grow, but if we can focus at every step along the way and moving quicker then maybe when we’re around 2,500 or 3,000 people now maybe we move as quickly as you know a company that only has 500 people, right, because we’ve invested so much in building up the infrastructure and tools and also the culture that tells people to take risks and try things out. And I just think that, that ability to build stuff quicker will be a big advantage for us and will help us build better products over the long term.

Charlie Rose: I want to talk about the future and competition. There are many people who look to the Silicon Valley and they say there are four platforms out here. It’s Amazon, it’s Apple, it’s Google, it’s Facebook. And what we’re going to witness over the next 10 years is a flat-out war between the four of you for the future. How do you see that?

Mark Zuckerberg: I mean, people like to talk about war. You know, there are a lot of ways in which the companies actually work together. There are real competitions in there. But I don’t think that this is going to be the type of situation where there’s one company that wins all the stuff.

Charlie Rose: But you’re already getting in each other’s businesses. You know that. They have something called Google+.

Mark Zuckerberg: Yes, and no. I mean, I think, you know, Google, I think, in some ways, is more competitive and certainly is trying to build their own little version of Facebook. But you know, when I look at Amazon and Apple and I see companies who are extremely aligned with us, right. And we have a lot of conversations with people at both companies just trying to figure out ways that we can do more together, and there is just a lot of reception there. I mean, I can’t think of an Apple product or an Amazon product that I look at and it’s like, oh, that’s really –

Charlie Rose: Yeah, but come on. Look at it. Apple just — Amazon just announced a new Kindle Fire, which is –

Mark Zuckerberg: I know, and they’re tablet –

Charlie Rose: – could deeply compete with the iPad.

Mark Zuckerberg: And that’s cool. I mean, we don’t have tablets, though, so we could care less about that.

Charlie Rose: There are no borders out here in terms of what you might want to do. Come on, Sheryl.

Sheryl Sandberg: There are no borders for us, certainly, right, because we want everything to be social, and we want — prefer everything to be social with Facebook. And so, for us, our goal is really to work across. We want to work on every tablet.

Mark Zuckerberg: Right, this is the important stuff.

Sheryl Sandberg: And Apple and Amazon, you know, God bless them. They can compete and build lots of different tablets.

Charlie Rose: You found a device, and we want to be seen on it.

Sheryl Sandberg: That’s right.

Mark Zuckerberg: Yeah, yeah. So if you’re Amazon, and one of the big strategies is sell Kindles so you can sell more things, right. If you’re Apple, a big part of your strategy is sell devices because that’s how you make money. If you’re Google, they want to get Android as widely adopted as possible, and our goal –

Charlie Rose: Therefore, they go out and they buy Motorola.

Mark Zuckerberg: Yeah, but our goal, I mean –

[talking simultaneously]

Charlie Rose: And there are rumors that Microsoft may buy Nokia or something like that.

Mark Zuckerberg: Sure, but our goal is not to build a platform; it’s to be across all of them. I mean, because our mission is to help people connect and stay connected with people no matter what devices they’re on, we want to be in all these places.

Charlie Rose: You — go ahead — you — go ahead.

Sheryl Sandberg: This is also really — sorry — but this is really important. It actually gets back to the differences before retirement with Google and Facebook. There’s one thing that I think is most important that’s to Facebook, which is that we are focused on doing one thing incredibly well. We only really want to do one thing.

Charlie Rose: Social media.

Sheryl Sandberg: Connect the world.

Charlie Rose: Connect the world. Okay, fair enough.

Sheryl Sandberg: And be the social technology people use. I think if you look at other companies, all of these companies are doing lots of different things, but we are still, as we grow, doing exactly one thing.

Charlie Rose: But here’s the thing. There’s nothing you think you can’t do. I mean, you look at –

Mark Zuckerberg: [unintelligible] were going to go in a different direction with this, because, I mean, it is true, there’s a corollary to what you just said, right. So, it is true we are focused on this one thing, but because there’s all this other stuff out there, that means that Facebook has evolved as a partnership company.

Sheryl Sandberg: That’s right.

Mark Zuckerberg: – which is very different from the way that Apple or Google or Amazon or Microsoft or any of these folks are, right. I mean, if Apple or Google want to build a product, they typically go build it, right. Whereas if Facebook wants to make it so that, you know, we want to help rethink the way that people listen to music or watch movies. What do we do? We build a platform on top of which people connect, and we enable all these different companies, dozens of companies to plug in, companies that are big companies, companies that are small companies, things that don’t even exist. It’s a really different approach than what all these other companies have.

Charlie Rose: But the end result is you want to provide a means for people to look at movies, to listen to music, to do all kinds of things.

Mark Zuckerberg: But they’re all [unintelligible] other people’s services.

Sheryl Sandberg: We don’t want to provide the means. This is the thing. Our one thing that is the basis of our partnership strategy and our partnership approach, we build the social technology. They provide the music.

Mark Zuckerberg: Yeah, exactly.

Sheryl Sandberg: They — we don’t — we don’t want people to use Facebook to watch movies or read newspaper articles.

Charlie Rose: You want to do what? You want to –

Sheryl Sandberg: We want to provide the social technology. So we want them to listen to music on the iPhone or through Apple or through Spotify, anything they want. We want them to watch movies anywhere.

Mark Zuckerberg: Yeah.

Sheryl Sandberg: We just want Facebook to be how they share wherever they are. And so we do this one thing which is — underlies this huge partnership strategy, and it does make us, I think, pretty different than many of the other companies you’re talking about.

Mark Zuckerberg: Just take the movies thing as an example.

Sheryl Sandberg: Yeah.

Mark Zuckerberg: I mean, the biggest movie company –

Sheryl Sandberg: We don’t care where you watch.

Mark Zuckerberg: – is that — our partners right now and are building on top of our platform are Netflix and Hulu.

Charlie Rose: Right.

Mark Zuckerberg: Right? And I guess Hulu’s more on the TV side. But people can share all kinds of videos that they’re watching. You can see the top things that your friends are watching. So I go to your profile or your timeline and if you want, you can have a box up there that’s what are the TV shows that you watch the most? And I can go ahead and click on it, and it’ll take me right to the Hulu app, and I can start watching that. That, I think is really powerful. The piece that Facebook is doing is saying, okay, we’re friends, right, and allowing you to share that — I want to express to people what are the TV shows that I like. And now Facebook is giving me a place to go see what you want to watch if you want to share that. But then from there, you click on it, and it takes you to Hulu or takes you to Netflix. Or if you want to listen to music, it takes you to Spotify, or it takes you to one of these other companies.

Charlie Rose: But is central your sense that the future belongs to social networking, that that’s the future?

Mark Zuckerberg: I think that a big piece of it is –

Charlie Rose: Finish that.

Mark Zuckerberg: It’s not everything.

Sheryl Sandberg: Yeah.

Mark Zuckerberg: I mean, if you think about it, in your own life, right, with all the things that you do, how much — how many of the things that you do are better when you’re doing them with other people or with your friends? Probably a lot. But not everything, but a big piece of that.

Charlie Rose: Almost everything.

Mark Zuckerberg: And I think that we can help power that. But for all of those things, then, you know, some of them we’re going to build ourselves, right, so the core experience where I can go learn stuff about you, right, based on what you’ve shared, we’re going to build that piece, right. The core piece where you can see all of the stuff that’s going on with all of your friends that they wanted to share. We’ll build that piece.

Charlie Rose: Yeah.

Mark Zuckerberg: But the piece where, you know, you go to try to consume a specific type of content, right, I want to see what news my friends are reading. There will be newspapers.

Sheryl Sandberg: This is why this matters, right, because we can win along with lots of other people winning.

Mark Zuckerberg: Yeah.

Sheryl Sandberg: And that is totally different, I think about the strategy of what we’re trying to build.

Charlie Rose: What don’t you want — go ahead, finish.

Sheryl Sandberg: So we can — if — if news becomes more social, that’s great for Facebook if it happens with our technology. But –

Charlie Rose: Because you’re the great connector of the world.

Sheryl Sandberg: – it is great for the Washington Post and the New York Times and the Huffington Post and anyone who chooses to use our technology which we make available to every news service out there. We’re not trying to replace everyone or do everything. We want to enable everyone — everything to be more social for everyone else.

Mark Zuckerberg: Yeah, I think — it’s actually — it’s a lot more extreme even than you’re saying. I mean, take — and we’ve talking a lot here about –

Sheryl Sandberg: It’s always more extreme.

Mark Zuckerberg: One thing that we haven’t talked about at all here are games, right. I mean, games is probably the biggest industry today that has gone really social, right. I mean, the incumbent game companies are really being disrupted and are quickly trying to become social. And you have companies like Zynga.

Charlie Rose: Yeah, well –

Mark Zuckerberg: – which are going public soon and will be valued at most likely at multibillion dollar valuations. And basically all of their games are built on top of Facebook for the most part.

Charlie Rose: Exactly.

Mark Zuckerberg: And a huge number of other companies as well. So I mean, does Facebook build any games? No. We build no games.

Charlie Rose: You say that today –

Mark Zuckerberg: No, we –

Charlie Rose: You say that today.

Mark Zuckerberg: Actually –

Sheryl Sandberg: I’m pretty sure we’re not going to –

Mark Zuckerberg: No, I’m pretty sure we’re not going to build any games.

Sheryl Sandberg: [unintelligible] we’re not going to build games.

Mark Zuckerberg: We build –

Charlie Rose: Well, why are you so sure?

Mark Zuckerberg: Here’s why. Here’s why.

Charlie Rose: I’m only saying this because people thought that Steve Jobs –

Mark Zuckerberg: I’ll tell you why.

Charlie Rose: – would never go into retail, and he did.

Mark Zuckerberg: I’ll tell you why.

Charlie Rose: All right.

Mark Zuckerberg: Because building games is really hard. And so that’s –

Charlie Rose: So that’s the only reason.

Mark Zuckerberg: And we’re doing — what we’re doing is really hard. And we think that we’re better off focusing on this piece. I think that building a great game service is really hard. Building a great music service is really hard. Building a great movie service is really hard. And we just believe that an independent entrepreneur will always beat a division of a big company which is why we think that the strategy of these other companies trying to do everything themselves will inevitably be less successful than an ecosystem where you have someone like Facebook trying to build the core product to help people connect and then independent great companies that are only focused on one or two things doing those things really well.

Sheryl Sandberg: And those companies can’t — don’t have the discipline to do it, right. They get big, and everyone wants to do everything, and they just say yes. And then they don’t do everything well.

Charlie Rose: At this point, enter this name, Steve Jobs. I’ve had an experience with him once at TIME 100. And he walked over to say hello, and there was — I was talking to a young entrepreneur who was obviously in awe and in — you know, thrilled. It was the greatest moment of his life. There was Steve.

Mark Zuckerberg: Mm-hmm.

Charlie Rose: And I said to Steve, “What should he do?” and Steve said to me, “He should focus on his knitting. Not try to do everything. Do one thing well.”

Mark Zuckerberg: Yeah.

Charlie Rose: Did you ever have that conversation with Steve Jobs?

Mark Zuckerberg: I don’t know.

Sheryl Sandberg: [unintelligible] conversations with –

Mark Zuckerberg: Well, you know, one of the funny things is when you agree with someone, you tend not to talk about it for too long because you just take it as an assumption. So I mean, I think in some of our conversations it might have been like, yeah, that thing, okay, now let’s go talk about something else.

Charlie Rose: So what were the conversations like? I mean, here is someone who’s –

Mark Zuckerberg: Oh, I don’t know. I mean, he — he’s amazing. He was amazing. I mean, he — I had a lot of questions for him on –

Charlie Rose: Like what?

Mark Zuckerberg: How to build a team around you, right, that’s focused on building as high quality and good things as you are. How to keep an organization focused, right, when I think the tendency for larger companies is to try to fray and go into all these different areas. Yeah, I mean a lot just on the aesthetics and kind of mission orientation of companies. I mean, Apple is a company that is so focused on just building products that — for their customers and their users. And — and that’s like — it’s such a deep part of their mission is build these beautiful products for their users. And I think we connected a lot on this level of, okay, Facebook has this mission that’s really more than just trying to build a company, right, that has a market cap or a value. It’s like we’re trying to do this thing in the world. And I don’t know, a lot of it I just think we connected on that level.

Charlie Rose: Did he ever suggest that Apple might buy Facebook?

Mark Zuckerberg: No. I don’t think it ever really got there. I mean, nor would I have wanted to sell it. He — and I remember talking to him –

Sheryl Sandberg: And I think he would have known that.

Mark Zuckerberg: Yeah. And I — I mean –

Sheryl Sandberg: I talked to you about this and like I think –

Charlie Rose: About what, about the buying –

Sheryl Sandberg: I think he understood Mark enough to know that Mark didn’t want to sell his company because he didn’t want to sell –

Charlie Rose: Did he raise the question with you?

Sheryl Sandberg: No, but he — I think he –

Mark Zuckerberg: Yeah.

Sheryl Sandberg: – having talked to him about Facebook and Apple, I — he didn’t raise it, but I don’t think he would have because he would have understood that about Mark.

Mark Zuckerberg: Actually, I mean, I think there was –

Sheryl Sandberg: He’s just like him. He wouldn’t have wanted to sell his company.

[talking simultaneously]

Charlie Rose: Go ahead.

Mark Zuckerberg: There is this quote I think in the book that just came out about him where, I mean, it’s –

Charlie Rose: The Walter Isaacson book.

Mark Zuckerberg: Yeah. I mean, it’s — and I took it as this amazing compliment. He said, I admire Facebook because you guys don’t want to sell out.

Charlie Rose: Right.

Mark Zuckerberg: Right, so I actually think that –

Sheryl Sandberg: And I don’t think he would have asked.

Mark Zuckerberg: I know that’s one of the ways in which — in which we saw eye to eye on kind of what we were trying to do in the world. And I just think because of that, it probably –

Sheryl Sandberg: Yeah.

Mark Zuckerberg: – just wouldn’t have come up.

15:17:31

Charlie Rose: You’ve had — I mean, Microsoft owns a piece of Facebook.

Mark Zuckerberg: Mm-hmm.

Charlie Rose: You’ve had an opportunity I’m sure to sell. You will never sell. Is that fair? Is that a fair –

Sheryl Sandberg: No one even asks any more.

Mark Zuckerberg: Yeah.

Charlie Rose: It’s too big. Nobody can afford you anymore.

Sheryl Sandberg: Exactly.

Charlie Rose: Is that the essential idea?

Sheryl Sandberg: Yeah.

Charlie Rose: But — and you, I mean, can you imagine wanting to buy somebody?

Mark Zuckerberg: We buy companies all the time.

Charlie Rose: I know, but they’re small, small companies.

Mark Zuckerberg: Yeah.

Charlie Rose: And they’re companies driven by certain expertise.

Mark Zuckerberg: Yeah, you know –

Charlie Rose: – or certain software.

Mark Zuckerberg: I don’t think that buying a company or selling a company is necessarily a good or a bad thing. I just think that the key thing that you need to realize is that when you go through a transaction like that, what you are changes, right. And if you’re now owned by someone else, then your goals are going to either quickly or over time become their goals, right? So there are actually I think a lot of compelling reasons why someone would sell a company and why it would advance their mission. I mean, I think, for example, YouTube might have been a good version of this right where they had these huge expenses, and Google funded it and has grown it, and it’s grown into, I think, a really good product, maybe beyond what the founders had even hoped.

Charlie Rose: And maybe if Microsoft were able to buy Yahoo!, it might have worked.

Mark Zuckerberg: Maybe. It’s hard to tell. But I mean, a lot of the acquisitions that we make at Facebook are, you know, we look at great entrepreneurs out there who are building things. And often, the acquisitions aren’t even to really buy their company or what they’re doing. It’s to get the really talented people who are out there trying to build something cool and say, you know, if you joined Facebook, you could work on this completely different problem. Isn’t this a more important problem? And for the people who answer that question yes, they join. And that’s how we’ve had the most success so far.

Charlie Rose: All right. Let me talk about what you know about all of us, it is this notion that constantly comes up, is there anything you do not want to know about –

Mark Zuckerberg: I just don’t even think we think about it that way.

Sheryl Sandberg: Yeah.

Mark Zuckerberg: I mean, it’s –

Charlie Rose: Okay, well, help me think about it in the right way, how you think about it, because I mean, like the “like” button, you know, it’s a powerful tool.

Mark Zuckerberg: It’s not for us though, right, I mean, it’s for –

Charlie Rose: It’s for advertisers.

Mark Zuckerberg: – people to express — no, not for advertisers.

Sheryl Sandberg: Other people.

[talking simultaneously]

Mark Zuckerberg: This is a core part of what makes Facebook, Facebook, is that we really are focused on users first and for the long term, right? And we believe that if we build a product where people can connect and can express all the things that they want about themselves, that over the very long term we’ll have a lot of people doing that because that’s a core human thing where people want to do that, and they’ll be very active, and we’ll have opportunities to sell advertising and do all these things and build a great business but none of that is the leading thing that we’re pushing for. What we’re pushing for is the mission, we think that if we succeed on that then we’re going to build a great business. Now, if — I just think that there’s this core part of people where they want to express things about themselves. So the question isn’t what do we want to know about people, it’s what do people want to tell about themselves. Right?

And we try to answer that question continuously, you know, what do people want to tell about themselves that they can’t tell now? Right, we think this year that one of the big things that people want to express that they haven’t had a way to are what are my favorite songs and different media that I consume. And you know there’s always — there’s been a way for you to type in, okay, my favorite band is Green Day or the Beatles or whatever, but there hasn’t been a way to say okay out of all the songs that I’ve listened to in the last month, here are the top ones, but in the month or so since we’ve launched that functionality on top of platform, people have already chosen to publish more than a billion songs that they’ve listened to into Facebook through partners. And it’s amazing so and it’s because they want to do that.

Sheryl Sandberg: And it’s really important to understand that we don’t want people to express anything, we want them to have an opportunity to express what they want to express to the people they want to express it, so privacy has been very core to this service. I think it’s actually one of the big innovations Facebook had, if you think about online services before Facebook, they’re basically open or closed, you know, something you publish on a blog, the blog is open, you’re corporate email [spelled phonetically] closed. Facebook was the first place that one of the core innovations Mark had was actually around privacy. I can take this photo, I can take a photo of the three of us here, I can share it just with my parents, I can share it just with my little group of my high school girlfriends, or I can share it with all of Facebook or the whole world, and every single time you share something on Facebook you have an opportunity to choose who you’re sharing it with.

Mark Zuckerberg: Yeah.

Sheryl Sandberg: And that commitment to our users, that their trust is sacred, that privacy is the most important thing we do, is something that’s been here throughout, and it’s really important for people.

Charlie Rose: But having said all of that, when you’ve gotten in trouble it’s bulk [spelled phonetically] on the issue of privacy.

Mark Zuckerberg: Yeah, I agree, and I mean it’s something that — I think that just speaks to how important and fundamental of an issue that is.

Sheryl Sandberg: Yeah.

Mark Zuckerberg: All right, when I was talking a minute ago about what are the ways that people want to share that we can make happen this year, one of the core things that flows through all of this is that I’d say probably this point still the vast majority of people don’t want to share everything, or don’t want to share anything with everyone publicly. But if you give people tools so that they can share with just their friends, or just one group of friends, or just their family, then they’ll do that.

Charlie Rose: Okay, but are they always the wisest people to know what they want to share and how sharing might be bound.

Mark Zuckerberg: I believe that they are. I mean, I think that –

Charlie Rose: You trust the judgment of most people to know who they want to share with.

Mark Zuckerberg: Yeah, and I think that people go through a learning process too where I mean maybe when social networks were first ramping up on the web some people shared a few things too broadly but I think that, that’s part of the reason why I think Facebook has grown is I think Facebook largely existed after that the friends [spelled phonetically] during the MySpace phase of the social web and at a point where people were already sophisticated enough to realize hey, you know, I want to share different things with different people, I’m going to use these privacy control that Facebook has given me, that Facebook is really the first company that has built these controls so that you can share things with just your friends or I can share vacation photos from my family vacation with just my family if I want, or I can do all these different things, and I think that, that’s one of the big enablers on the service.

Sheryl Sandberg: And it’s something we continue to evolve so control is what matters here. People want control. They want to share what they want with who they want and as long as, as we will allow [spelled phonetically] products, we continue on the control, so for example we are launching, we’ve already unveiled, Mark unveiled a number of weeks ago in the next bunch of weeks we’re making our timeline, our new profile available to everyone.

Charlie Rose: What is that?

Sheryl Sandberg: It’s — so right now you have a profile, and the timeline is a more visual representation of who you are and includes further back in your life, not just when Facebook started, but further back. So I’ve actually spent the last week uploading childhood pictures. But here’s what matters. I can go back and change the privacy controls on something I’ve already — so if I go back now and build my timeline and I say, “Oh, I shared that with this group of people. I actually want to share that with more people or fewer,” we are giving that control. So it matters as people learn is that they have the controls they need to share with who they want. And that’s something we are continuing to work on.

Charlie Rose: There are also these stories that you read about in terms of if somebody has something on their Facebook page that somebody got access to and therefore they didn’t get hired, something did not happen that might have happened because they were silly enough or somehow to put something on their Facebook page that rebounded to their detriment.

Sheryl Sandberg: And people make cell phone calls that rebound to their detriment.

Charlie Rose: Or e-mails as well. I mean –

Sheryl Sandberg: E-mail as well, or they put something down on their resume. It’s not that people don’t make mistakes, but the information you put on Facebook is only available to employers if you’ve shared it to those people, if you’ve shared it openly.

Charlie Rose: But once it’s there –

Mark Zuckerberg: Yeah, if you choose to –

Sheryl Sandberg: And there’s a responsibility individuals have. Certainly we want to teach people, and people want to teach people to share the things they want to share. I think that if you look at the history of technology, what you always find is that every new technology brings unbelievable opportunities for advancement and living our lives differently, and it’s also scary. I mean, one of my favorite stories on this is caller ID. When caller ID was rolled out, and I’m actually old enough to remember this, unlike my friend over here –

Mark Zuckerberg: No, I had caller ID.

Sheryl Sandberg: Do you remember before caller ID?

Mark Zuckerberg: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Sheryl Sandberg: Oh, oh, that’s good. Normally, normally –

Charlie Rose: But you don’t remember before caller ID. That’s the point –

Sheryl Sandberg: No, he says he does.

Charlie Rose: Oh, you do?

Mark Zuckerberg: I remember before everyone had it. And maybe it was –

Charlie Rose: Oh.

Sheryl Sandberg: All right, that kind of sort of counts, but when caller ID came out, there was a big privacy uproar. People thought it was a violation of the caller’s privacy that they’re number would show. There was talk of legislation. There was talk of states banning it.

Charlie Rose: There was talk of a way you could avoid it being seen and all that.

Sheryl Sandberg: Ways you could avoid it being seen because it was considered — I don’t know anyone who answers a call that doesn’t have caller ID now because it’s not considered a violation of that privacy. It’s considered my right to know who’s calling me. Otherwise, why would I answer? And so, yes, when you are an early leader like we are in technology, there is always concern, and you’re going to continue to hear concerns.

Charlie Rose: You know why I have caller ID? Because when I’m calling people, I want them to know it’s me calling, other than “unknown” because I feel that they’re more likely to answer my call if they know it’s me.

Sheryl Sandberg: But that is something that caller ID is widely accepted. It was a privacy uproar at its time. And so –

Charlie Rose: Okay, so, but tell me where the boundaries are about privacy, that you think that we ought to take note of at this moment. Because the privacy question most frequently comes back to Facebook.

Mark Zuckerberg: Well, here’s the way that I think about it. I think it’s really about control, right. People have things that they want to share with maybe a single person or a small group, and they have things that they’d want to share more broadly. And the real question for me is do people have the tools that they need in order to make those decisions well. And I think that it’s actually really important that Facebook continually makes it easier and easier to make those decisions, because the demographics of people who are using Facebook are changing as well, right. I mean, we started off with these people in college, right, who use computers every single day. And now, you know, we’re up to 800 million-plus users. We have people using the site who it’s one of the only things that they do on a computer, and maybe they’re not computer savvy, right, or they don’t have — they don’t spend a lot of time trying to figure out privacy control. So what we’ve done in the last year is we’ve made it so that any time you to share anything, the privacy control is now right there, and it says exactly who you’re going to share with. If you’re going to be sharing publicly, there’s a little globe and it says the word “public.” And if you’re going to be sharing with friends, there’s this icon of a few people and it says the word “friends,” and you can just click and you can change that really easily every time you post anything.

And back where we were getting started seven years ago, I don’t know if that was necessary because the college students and early adopter-type folks just had this intuitive understanding of how the service worked. But now, I just think that the boundaries, it’s getting more and more important to be increasingly clear and give people those controls. And that’s what we’re trying to do. And I don’t think we’re at the end. I think we’re going to need to keep on making it easier and easier, but that’s our mission, right. I mean, we have to do that because now, if people feel like they don’t have control over how they’re sharing things, then we’re failing them. I mean, we’re making it so they can share a lot of the stuff that they want to.

Sheryl Sandberg: I think it is the case that people talk about Facebook and privacy a lot, and I think it will continue to be the case, but it’s because we lead in this area, meaning that we are the most privacy-focused place for anyone to share anything.

Charlie Rose: Well, no, it’s because you have more information about everybody than anybody else.

Mark Zuckerberg: This is an important point though.

Sheryl Sandberg: Well, Elliot Trig [spelled phonetically] has this great — Elliot Trig has this great story he tells. He works [unintelligible] company. He says there’s this old joke, where, you know, the man loses his keys and he’s looking for the keys under the lamppost, and someone says, “Well, why are you looking under the light? They’re clearly not here.” He’s like, “Well, this is the only reason I can — only place I can see. If I go over there.” We are focused on privacy. We care the most about privacy. Our business model is by far the most privacy friendly to consumers. And we talk about it the most. And I think we’re the light. We’re the light. We are the transparent place where people can understand and I think you will continue to see conversations about Facebook in privacy. But it’s because we lead and we care so much about it.

Mark Zuckerberg: I think it’s worth explaining this a bit more, though.

Sheryl Sandberg: Yeah.

Mark Zuckerberg: I mean, when you’re saying that we’re the light, it’s because, sure, people have a lot of information on Facebook. But that’s information that they’ve put into the service.

Sheryl Sandberg: Exactly.

Mark Zuckerberg: If you look at companies, whether it’s Google or Yahoo! or Microsoft, right, that have search engines and ad networks, they also have a huge amount of information about you. It’s just that they’re collecting that about you behind your back, really. And it’s like you’re going — you’re going around the web, and they have cookies, and they’re collecting this huge amount of information about who you are. But you never know that. And I mean, some of these companies make an effort to give you a product where –

Charlie Rose: But do you find that a bit scary?

Mark Zuckerberg: Well, I just — I think it’s — it’s just less transparent –

Sheryl Sandberg: There’s no light.

Mark Zuckerberg: – than what’s happening on Facebook.

Sheryl Sandberg: It’s the dark.

Mark Zuckerberg: So on Facebook someone wants to –

Sheryl Sandberg: Contact.

Mark Zuckerberg: – target say, okay, I want to — I want to advertise — like I’m a band, and I’m coming to the Bay Area, I’m going to advertise to people who like a band, and they’re going to — those people only fit if they’ve put in that they like that band.

Charlie Rose: Right.

Mark Zuckerberg: On those other services, you can still do that kind of advertising, but you’re going to find people based on what they’ve browsed around on the web and the people have little or no control over the information that a company like Google or Yahoo! or Microsoft has about you. And, I don’t know, I think that some of those companies have made an effort to give people to give a payage that they can go see all the information that the company has about them. But, I mean, very few people are actually going to go do that. So in reality I think that these companies with those big ad networks are basically getting away with collecting huge amounts of information, likely way more information than people are sharing on Facebook about themselves. But I think because people can see how much information people are sharing about themselves on Facebook –

Sheryl Sandberg: Yes.

Mark Zuckerberg: – it appears scarier. But in reality, you have control over every single thing that you’ve shared on Facebook. You can take it down and — [unintelligible].

Charlie Rose: If you take it down, you say look, enough, gone.

Mark Zuckerberg: Yeah.

Charlie Rose: And what else? What happens if you die? What happens then?

Sheryl Sandberg: If you let us know, we memorialize the page.

Mark Zuckerberg: Yeah, yeah.

Sheryl Sandberg: If a family member lets us know that someone has deceased –

Charlie Rose: And so anybody who wants to –

Mark Zuckerberg: – we’ll memorialize the page.

Charlie Rose: – take them down and erase forever.

Sheryl Sandberg: Yeah, you can erase forever.

Mark Zuckerberg: Yeah.

Sheryl Sandberg: It’s not perfect in the sense of if I put something up, I can take it down, it’s gone.

Charlie Rose: But –

Sheryl Sandberg: If I’ve shared it and someone’s reshared it –

Charlie Rose: Right. Exactly.

Sheryl Sandberg: – won’t go down. It’s out there. And that’s one of the things. But it really is the point that the only thing Facebook knows about you are things you’ve done and told us. It is self-reported.

Charlie Rose: But the genius of Facebook is that it has the possibility of sending it out like nothing else to more places.

Sheryl Sandberg: We never — Facebook never sends any information out about anyone.

Charlie Rose: I understand that. But it goes out because Facebook has a system that allows that.

Mark Zuckerberg: Yeah, because Facebook –

Sheryl Sandberg: Yes.

Mark Zuckerberg: – allows people –

Sheryl Sandberg: Allows other people to share.

Mark Zuckerberg: Yeah.

Charlie Rose: Exactly right.

Sheryl Sandberg: That’s right.

Charlie Rose: Right, right.

Mark Zuckerberg: Yeah.

Charlie Rose: Let me talk two things about, one you, the empowerment of women and then a sense of who you represent. This is a place that you are — you stand out because you and Marissa and a few others, you know, is — is technology a place that women can find the kind of opportunity that you want them to find? Does it need mentoring and all kinds of other things that people like Sheryl Sandberg can deliver?

Sheryl Sandberg: Look, I think the issue of women in the economy and the country is a huge one. It’s something that I care passionately about and Mark cares passionately about and has helped me too. You know, we have basically a stalled revolution for women. You know, women became 50 percent of the college graduates in this country in 1981 and then made steady progress, more college degrees, more graduate degrees, more manager positions. Over — and we’re still making progress. Over the last ten years, women have stalled out at the top. Women in corporate America have 15 to 16 percent of the board seats and of the kind of CEO [spelled phonetically], the high-level jobs, and that has not moved in ten years.

Charlie Rose: Why?

Sheryl Sandberg: Oh, it’s probably longer than we have time for. A lot of reasons, but I really think we need more women to lean into their careers and to be really dedicated to staying in the work force. I think the achievement gap is caused by a lot of things. It’s caused by institutional barriers and all kinds of stuff. But there’s also a really big ambition gap. If you survey men and women in college today in this country, the men are more ambitious than the women. And until women are as ambitious as men, they’re not going to achieve as much as men –

Charlie Rose: And you know, there’s that famous [unintelligible] between, you know, they changed the name in one case it was Howard, in another case it was –

Sheryl Sandberg: Howard and Heidi.

Charlie Rose: – Howard and Heidi, yeah.

Sheryl Sandberg: Yeah. And the point of that study is that success and likability are positively correlated for men and negatively for women. So as a man gets more powerful and more successful, everyone — men and women like him more. And as a woman gets more powerful and successful, everyone, including women like them less. Canaleta [spelled phonetically] called it self-doubt and self-defense.

Charlie Rose: Now, what does it mean to be Mark Zuckerberg today, in terms of what — the revolution, in terms of the attention? I mean, a sense of how you adjust and how you assimilate and how you, in a sense, make sure that you are in command of it, and it’s not in command of you.

Mark Zuckerberg: I don’t know. I think a big piece is just to try to stay grounded and, I don’t know, have a pretty simple life, right. I mean, I don’t — so people say that, you know, the company is so valuable, and there are all these people there and all that. But I think the number of people who I work with I stay focused on keeping them who I think are really good people, really smart, intellectually curious. I spend a lot of time just, you know, with my girlfriend and my dog. And I mean, we don’t have a lot of furniture in our house, so it’s really simple. And we’re trying to build products for everyone in the world, right. And you don’t want to get isolated to do that. We have a very open culture at the company where we foster a lot of interaction between not just me and people but between everyone else. It’s an open floor plan. People have these desks where no one really has an office. I mean, I have a room where I meet with people. But it has all glass so everyone can see into it and see what’s going on.

I don’t know. I just think that — actually, it’s really connected to the mission of the company. I think that more flow of information, the ability to stay connected to more people makes people more effective as people. And I mean, that’s true socially. It makes you have more fun, right. It feels better to be more connected to all these people. You have a richer life. But I also think in terms of doing work and in terms of learning and evolving as a person, you just grow more when you get more people’s perspectives and when you’re more connected and have more of a flow from people. So I don’t know. I think that’s really it. I mean, I really try to live the mission of the company and embody that for the company and keep everything else in my life extremely simple.

Sheryl Sandberg: Yeah. It’s interesting to watch as closely as I have. Like since I’ve known Mark over the last four years, in some ways, everything’s changed, in some ways, nothing has changed. So what’s changed is, you know, he was on his way to being Mark Zuckerberg four years ago. But now he’s like Mark Zuckerberg.

Charlie Rose: He is Mark Zuckerberg.

Sheryl Sandberg: He’s Mark Zuckerberg. Well, you know what I mean, right. Like we used to –

Charlie Rose: Halloween, kids come to his house and knock on the door. It’s like –

Sheryl Sandberg: Yeah, we used to walk around — right.

[talking simultaneously]

Sheryl Sandberg: But we could walk around Palo Alto four years ago, and people didn’t like look. And now they do. But when you actually know him, like nothing’s changed. He wears actually exactly the same thing even though it’s a new T-shirt. But he wears the same thing. He has the same girlfriend.

Charlie Rose: Right.

Sheryl Sandberg: He likes the same restaurants, not necessarily the restaurants I like, right. Like really nothing’s changed. He has the same group of friends. And I think the ability — I think we all focus on it here, but like stay grounded. Don’t change your social circles. You know, I have the same best friends I’ve had since I was in high school. Mark has the same friends he’s had since I was here. And that stuff really matters. Live your regular life and just try to build stuff that matters. It’s what we’re just trying to do.

Charlie Rose: Thank you for this. Great to see you.

Mark Zuckerberg: Thank you.

Sheryl Sandberg: Thank you for visiting us.

Charlie Rose: Thank you. It’s a pleasure to be here. Conversation with Sheryl Sandberg and Mark Zuckerberg at their place in California. Thank you for joining us. See you next time.

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my ethics statement.

Though Sandberg speaks often about women and ambition as well as Facebook’s business, and Zuckerberg has introduced all sorts of products this year like the upcoming Timeline redesign and “frictionless” auto-sharing, Rose is known for his wide-ranging interviews, so look out for big-picture questions like Facebook’s competition with Google, its evolving approach to user privacy and its IPO plans.

(The PBS listings I checked varied, but at least for me it looks like the show will air at 11 PT tonight.)

Update from the interview: Zuckerberg Says Amazon and Apple Are Allies, While Google’s Building “Their Own Little Version of Facebook”

Here’s Zuckerberg and Sandberg appearing at D6 in 2008:

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my ethics statement.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20111107/facebooks-zuckerberg-and-sandberg-will-make-rare-joint-appearance-on-charlie-rose-tonight/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20111025/viral-video-snl-honors-steve-jobs-sort-of/ http://allthingsd.com/20111025/viral-video-snl-honors-steve-jobs-sort-of/#comments Tue, 25 Oct 2011 07:31:46 +0000 Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=136322

This did not make it onto “Saturday Night Live” last weekend, but it is still very funny — a mock interview by Charlie Rose of Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, the Huffington Post’s Arianna Huffington, Reed Hastings of Netflix and the world’s oldest “mean girl,” Rupert Murdoch of News Corp., all talking about Apple’s Steve Jobs.

Heh:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20111025/viral-video-snl-honors-steve-jobs-sort-of/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110609/walt-talks-about-icloud-with-charlie-rose/ http://allthingsd.com/20110609/walt-talks-about-icloud-with-charlie-rose/#comments Thu, 09 Jun 2011 22:21:14 +0000 Walt Mossberg http://allthingsd.com/?p=85014 This week, post-WWDC keynote, Charlie Rose sat Walt down to discuss the implications and impact of Steve Jobs’s iCloud announcement, and of cloud computing in general. In clip one, Walt lays out cloud computing basics. In clip two, Rose asks Walt about Jobs’s vision of the “post-PC” era.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110609/walt-talks-about-icloud-with-charlie-rose/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110315/mossberg-and-ipad-2-on-charlie-rose/ http://allthingsd.com/20110315/mossberg-and-ipad-2-on-charlie-rose/#comments Tue, 15 Mar 2011 17:49:01 +0000 Walt Mossberg http://mossblog.allthingsd.com/?p=605 Walt appeared on The Charlie Rose Show last night, along with David Carr of the New York Times, and discussed the social and cultural impact of the iPad 2. Here are two clips from the show. You can watch the entire interview on The Charlie Rose web site.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110315/mossberg-and-ipad-2-on-charlie-rose/feed/ 5 http://allthingsd.com/20101221/livingsocial-ceo-has-big-plans-now-that-amazon-is-in-his-back-pocket/ http://allthingsd.com/20101221/livingsocial-ceo-has-big-plans-now-that-amazon-is-in-his-back-pocket/#comments Tue, 21 Dec 2010 15:07:27 +0000 Tricia Duryee http://emoney.allthingsd.com/?p=871 Groupon’s co-founder and CEO Andrew Mason has stolen the spotlight recently, by appearing on the “Today Show” and being interviewed on “Charlie Rose.”

But it’s hard not to make news when you turn down a $6 billion buyout offer from Google.

Meanwhile, Tim O’Shaughnessy, CEO and co-founder of LivingSocial.com, has remained relatively quiet. As the head of the second-largest company in the local, group-buying space, it wasn’t because he didn’t have anything to talk about.

Just about 24 hours before Groupon’s rejection leaked out, LivingSocial announced it had secured $175 million from Amazon, and $183 million in total new investments. In that same release, the Washington, D.C.-based company confirmed that it was booking revenues of more than $1 million a day on average and is projected to book well over $500 million in revenue in 2011.

To be sure, Groupon and LivingSocial are pulling away from the pack when it comes to defining the nascent daily-deals market. O’Shaughnessy, who claims that the two have 90 percent market share combined, said: “I think the idea conceptually that you can buy things online and go interact with merchants in offline is starting to take hold and be widespread. But it’s really been less than two years…It’s definitely the first couple of innings right now.”

Here’s our interview with O’Shaughnessy:

eMoney: Give me an update on where your business is today.

O’Shaughnessy: As of yesterday [Dec. 16], we were in 136 markets. We launched five new markets yesterday. We tend to do them in batches, and five or eight will go out at once. Overall, we’ve been averaging a market a day.

What about up-to-date figures on uniques?

We are at more than 10 million, or I think the last number we said publicly was 12 million. That’s primarily Canada and the U.S. that are signed up for the daily deal. We are in five countries today. [LivingSocial is in the U.S., Canada, the U.K., Ireland and Australia.]

What’s the competition like internationally?

Groupon has been acquisitive, and they’ve become established in lots of places. The U.S. is the most mature by a large margin, and there’s some countries with a few players that have established themselves, and finally, there’s some countries out there that’s a fairly green-field environment.

It’s fairly established that Groupon is No. 1, and LivingSocial is No. 2. But there’s a huge debate about who is No. 3?

There’s a pretty big gap. One of the things I’ve said is that it’s a pretty easy business to get into. All you have to do is know how to process a payment, and have a brother-in-law that has a restaurant that is willing to participate. But it’s a hard business to scale.

We have a competitive spreadsheet with 200 names on it, and if you do a couple of filters on how many deals someone has run, starting with 100, the vast majority drop off. And then if you up it to 500, you are up to the top two. It’s a pretty big drop-off.

Six months ago, we [Groupon and LivingSocial] collectively had 90 percent market share, and last month that was still true.

In that time, the market got bigger, and some others have grown for sure, but our market share has grown quite a bit. The signal-to-noise ratio is off, relative to who is doing what.

Is that what gives you confidence?

That’s one data point to look at, but what gives me confidence is what I see and I know we do every day. The degree of effort that goes into it and how many things can go wrong when you are managing merchant relationships, that’s what gives me the confidence.

What about the critics who say there’s no loyalty in this business–a consumer will always go with the provider who has the best deal for the business they want to visit.

There’s some loyalty that’s there, and I think people buy through us pretty regularly. They know that it’s going to be a merchant that’s vetted, and we work really hard at that. We are a good solid legit company that’s able to deliver. People place value on that. The brand matters, and enhancing user trust is an important thing.

What about the critics who say the margin will erode over time?

I think that the erosion of margins is just like any single other business if you stop innovating and do the same thing over and over. If we continue to innovate and provide additional value to merchants, the value per dollar increases. I don’t tend to be hugely concerned about the margin front.

The conduit has been 50 percent off a service, but there’s additional value we can provide to merchant communities and consumer communities. Overall, we aren’t not going to do the same thing over and over.

Can you give me an example?

We’ve started working with merchants in completely different ways, and sometimes we are going and operating events. We just did something called “tubbing and tasting,” where we worked with three merchants.

You could pick 10 to 12 Saturdays, and you’d meet in Midtown Manhattan, where a coach bus would take you to a snow hill, where you’d go snow tubbing. At the lodge, there was a bonfire and s’mores, and a beer tasting with a bunch of microbrews.

In that circumstance, we worked with three merchants–a coach company, a ski mountain and a brewery–in an entirely different way than how they associate with folks. I think it cost $60 and it sold out virtually every Saturday in January and February. I don’t see anyone else doing that, by finding unique hand-picked, curated ways to work with local businesses.

So, how will you be working with Amazon?

Right now, our first step is focusing on getting the relationship from a financial perspective locked down, and we’ll figure it out at a later point.

I assume the funding will go toward expansion?

We will be very aggressive on additional market launches as we build up our brand and user base. It’s very much a global game, and this is a global opportunity. We’ve gone from one country to five, and we’ll likely continue to expand globally.

A lot of this year was laying a foundation and the building blocks, and adding more value for the merchants, like LivingSocial Escapes. It’s on fire right now. It’s a weekend getaway, or a “staycation.” They are curated packages that are within a short driving distance from where you live. We also have LivingSocial Family Edition, which has things parents can do with their kids.

Your plans include tripling your employee count next year to 1,800 and more than doubling the number of cities you are in to 300?

We will continue to be pretty aggressive. Earlier this year, we were in six markets and we added 130 markets this year. We are a little more mature and one would hope that means we could move faster next year. We were around 30 employees, and over 600 now. It’s been a pretty crazy ramp-up.

The timing of your investment was so closely timed to Groupon-Google’s negotiations.

I’m a firm believer that we can’t control what other people do. Obviously, the deal we did with Amazon takes time to put together. We had decided awhile ago, if we want to become the biggest player in local commerce, we should be aligned with the biggest e-commerce company. That’s a lot of [what was] driving it. The timing was very coincidental.

So, no regrets?

No, not at all. We are thrilled and excited and expect to gain more market share over the coming year.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101221/livingsocial-ceo-has-big-plans-now-that-amazon-is-in-his-back-pocket/feed/ 1 http://allthingsd.com/20101213/viral-video-groupons-andrew-mason-doesnt-kiss-google-and-tell/ http://allthingsd.com/20101213/viral-video-groupons-andrew-mason-doesnt-kiss-google-and-tell/#comments Mon, 13 Dec 2010 08:16:02 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=38443

It seems as though there is no one that Groupon’s Andrew Mason won’t talk to in the wake of the failed acquisition of his social buying site by Google.

In a series of interviews over the last week, the Groupon CEO and co-founder chitchatted about the start-up’s fast growth, waxed poetic over its Chicago roots and marveled about what it’s like riding a digital rocket ship to the moon.

Plus, Mason is quite charming doing it, making all kinds of quips and crazily endearing statements that reporters eat up with a big spoon.

Except that he goes all coy about the single biggest gorilla in the room–or, shall we say, Borg. That would be telling us exactly why the search behemoth did not gobble Groupon up, despite a $6 billion price tag.

At least Mason is funny, as you will see here on a segment last week on the “Charlie Rose” television show.

The interview includes Mason’s explanation at the end about how not talking about what happened with Google is like not talking about old dates. (Personally, I am a veritable blabfest about old dates, Andrew, so call me sometime, as I have some very good stories!)

Enjoy:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101213/viral-video-groupons-andrew-mason-doesnt-kiss-google-and-tell/feed/ 1 http://allthingsd.com/20100629/mossberg-appleiphone-4-charlie-rose/ http://allthingsd.com/20100629/mossberg-appleiphone-4-charlie-rose/#comments Tue, 29 Jun 2010 15:37:17 +0000 Walt Mossberg http://mossblog.allthingsd.com/?p=502 On June 25, Walt was on “The Charlie Rose Show” to talk about the iPhone 4. In a wide-ranging interview, he covered various topics such as the current competitive landscape in the super-smartphone category, the iPhone 4′s biggest weakness with AT&T’s network, the debate between Adobe and Apple regarding Flash, and the future of paid content on the Internet.

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Complete iPhone 4 Coverage »

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100629/mossberg-appleiphone-4-charlie-rose/feed/ 6 http://allthingsd.com/20100405/mossberg-talks-ipad-on-the-charlie-rose-show/ http://allthingsd.com/20100405/mossberg-talks-ipad-on-the-charlie-rose-show/#comments Mon, 05 Apr 2010 20:03:54 +0000 Walt Mossberg http://mossblog.allthingsd.com/?p=484 The day before the iPad was released to the public, Walt Mossberg and David Carr from the New York Times were interviewed on “The Charlie Rose Show” about Apple’s latest device.

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More iPad Coverage »

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100405/mossberg-talks-ipad-on-the-charlie-rose-show/feed/ 19 http://allthingsd.com/20100205/mossberg-ipad-on-charlie-rose-show/ http://allthingsd.com/20100205/mossberg-ipad-on-charlie-rose-show/#comments Sat, 06 Feb 2010 03:17:01 +0000 Walt Mossberg http://mossblog.allthingsd.com/?p=408 Thursday’s “Charlie Rose Show” featured a discussion with Walt Mossberg, David Carr and Michael Arrington about the upcoming Apple iPad. Their wide-ranging discussion covered topics such as the surprising price point, the omission of Flash and Apple’s (AAPL) challenges in this new market.

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]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100205/mossberg-ipad-on-charlie-rose-show/feed/ 34 http://allthingsd.com/20091124/a-clicker-to-watch-tv-online/ http://allthingsd.com/20091124/a-clicker-to-watch-tv-online/#comments Wed, 25 Nov 2009 01:43:07 +0000 Katherine Boehret http://solution.allthingsd.com/?p=934 Finding TV shows online can be a major hassle. If you can remember which network hosts the show, you then must hunt through a maze of listings of several other television shows on that network’s Web site to find it. The show you want to watch might not even be available since many networks rotate only a handful of recent episodes online at a time. And if you do finally find the correct episode, you may be required to download a special media player to watch it.

Some services make this process a little easier. Hulu holds episodes from 1,200 television shows, but is still missing many. Apple’s (AAPL) iTunes Store offers over 50,000 episodes, but unlike network sites or Hulu, it requires viewers to pay to download and watch them (though they are commercial-free). Video search engines like Truveo browse the entire Web, returning an often-overwhelming number of results. And while YouTube is the king of Web video, it can too easily return a search result that isn’t a complete and genuine episode of the show you’re seeking.

This week, I’ve been testing Clicker, a free Web site that aims to be the TV Guide for all full episodes available to watch on the Web. It searches over 1,200 sources, so it can index some 400,000 episodes from 7,000 shows. Results include television programs as well as “Web originals,” or shows that are native to the Internet and are of broadcast quality. Clicker either plays the video on its site or links you to where this content is shown on another hosting site—like NBC or Hulu. If a show isn’t available online, Clicker tells you so you don’t have to keep hunting all over for it.

I like Clicker and found it to be a quick resource for finding all sorts of shows online. In many cases, it directed me to find the episodes I wanted to watch and saved me the hassle of less efficient searching. It also suggested shows I might like and offered a playlist where I could subscribe to receive episodes as they became available or save available videos to watch later.

Clicker makes descriptive pages about each show

Though it has a search box, Clicker feels more like a directory than purely a robotic search engine that relies mainly on algorithms. In fact, Clicker created a descriptive page for almost every show, and these pages can be edited or created via user submissions, which Clicker will review before posting them to the site. And because it’s focused on TV shows or Web originals, it won’t clutter your results with kids’ birthday parties or cats on skateboards.

The site is still rather new, so it has some kinks to work out—like links to videos that didn’t actually play if, for example, they were pulled by the network. But these were rare, and for the most part, if a video wasn’t available, a clear, brief explanation was displayed at the top of the page. Also, if Clicker sends you back out to a network’s site and that network uses a special player for videos, you’ll still have to download that player.

Filtering Results

Clicker’s program pages contain a description of the show, and a way to filter results by season, airdate or popularity. And the site shows the actual airdate of each video—something that not many other sites do. A column on the right side of each page displays several related shows, like the suggestion of “Modern Family” for fans of “How I Met Your Mother”; and “Roswell” and “Dead Like Me” suggested for people who like “Heroes.” In December, these recommendations will become even more personalized.

Some of Clicker’s sources include NBC, Fox, ABC, PBS, the Food Network and Web original content (i.e. “The Onion”). It also can search movies and music videos; the movies can be watched free in some cases, or paid for via Amazon’s (AMZN) Video on Demand or Netflix (NFLX) Instant Streaming. In January, Clicker plans to incorporate shows and movies from iTunes, using Apple’s pay-and-download method.

Clicker is especially handy when you’re looking for a show that isn’t where you think it should be. “Seinfeld,” for example, is on TBS rather than NBC, where it originally aired, and only nine episodes are available at once before they rotate out and are replaced by nine more. “Friends” is found on theWB.com, rather than on NBC’s site. “Damages” isn’t available on its network site, FX; instead, it can be found at Crackle.com, another video-hosting site. It’s easy to understand why people settle for missing an episode rather than trying to find a show online.

Clicker finds over 400,000 television and Web-original episodes so you can search less and watch more.

Clicker also comes in handy when you’re querying something or someone you need to learn about. By typing in a term like “Thanksgiving travel,” I get news results from NBC’s “Nightly News with Brian Williams,” the “CBS Evening News” and the Associated Press. I also get tips for traveling during this busy time of year from an AOL Travel online video, as well as a 1968 episode of “The Beverly Hillbillies” called “The Thanksgiving Spirit.”

Clicker isn’t the site to use if you want to find the hot video clip that everyone is watching. When I searched for “Whitney Houston” the morning after the American Music Awards, the most recent video I found was the singer performing on “Good Morning America” in September—not the one showing her singing during the awards show the night before.

But the fact that Clicker can find Whitney Houston on “Good Morning America” is useful in itself. A search for Warren Buffett’s most recent appearance on the “Charlie Rose” show can be conducted in a similar manner—either by typing his name into the box at the top of the page or by opening the show’s page and searching within that show for anyone who has appeared as a guest. Performing a search within a show like this anywhere else is nowhere near as easy as on Clicker.

Playlist of Your Shows

Clicker can be used as a TiVo (TIVO) of sorts if you create a username on the site or simply sign in using Facebook Connect, which I did.

Users can make playlists where they can add just one episode, all episodes, or new episodes to this list—subscribing to receive all new episodes in the playlist as they become available. I added episodes of “The Amazing Race” and “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” to my playlist. This list can be accessed anytime, and it’s helpful for people who don’t have enough time to watch a show that they found. In December, email and Facebook notifications will be added to tell users that new episodes are in their playlists.

If you spend a lot of time in front of your computer and find yourself searching all over the Web for the TV shows you’d like to watch, Clicker will be a huge help. And even if your show isn’t available, you might find something similar—or better—in Clicker’s recommendations.

Edited by Walter S. Mossberg. Email mossbergsolution@wsj.com

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20091124/a-clicker-to-watch-tv-online/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20090705/new-vc-marc-andreessen-speaks-about-the-dark-side-and-more/ http://allthingsd.com/20090705/new-vc-marc-andreessen-speaks-about-the-dark-side-and-more/#comments Mon, 06 Jul 2009 04:00:22 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=15407

It’s finally official: Marc Andreessen has crossed over to what he once called “the dark side” and is now a venture capitalist.

Several weeks ago, BoomTown broke the news that the Silicon Valley legend and serial entrepreneur (pictured here) and his longtime investing partner, Ben Horowitz, had completed the raising of $300 million for a new venture fund.

And, indeed, the new firm–which is made up of just the two of them–is now launched and called Andreessen Horowitz. It has $50 million over the $250 million the pair had initially planned.

In an interview with me last week, Andreessen said that unlike many VC firms, Andreessen Horowitz will invest in companies at any stage of life–from early stage to late–and of any size and in any kind of digital sector.

That will mean about 60 to 80 seed investments, 15 that need following rounds and two to three late-stage companies.

In addition, the firm is able to take large equity stakes in public companies.

“We are unafraid of investing in 400 people instead of 40 people,” said Andreessen. “And we could invest $50,000 to $50,000,000.”

He noted the new firm would aim for areas the founders were more familiar with, such as the consumer Internet and mobile.

One certainty, though, was that the firm would focus on companies led by tech-savvy founders.

“We believe in entrepreneurs and those who live and breathe the tech product that they have created,” said Andreessen.

Andreessen said several major institutional investors–universities, for example–have invested large chunks in the fund, while a spate of tech luminaries has put in smaller amounts.

The quick completion of the fund raising, in the midst of a national econalypse, is a good sign. But the reputation of both longtime entrepreneurs seems to have helped.

Andreessen co-founded Netscape–the iconic browser company that was key to introducing the modern Internet to consumers in Web 1.0–and a lot of other start-ups.

He has also morphed into a mentor to many Web 2.0 entrepreneurs.

Andreessen made news when he announced on the “Charlie Rose” television show in February that he was creating the new fund.

“For the first time in my life, I am crossing over into the dark side,” said Andreessen at the time, in a joke about VCs being like Darth Vader.

Andreessen said he was essentially professionalizing the active angel investing that he and Horowitz had been doing.

Over the last several years, either together or apart, the pair have invested in a large variety of start-ups, such as Twitter, Aliph, Digg, LinkedIn and many more.

Andreessen is on the board of Facebook and an adviser to Twitter too.

Now, as a VC, he is upping the ante. “It’s important to have more capital,” he said. “Sometimes having a huge checkbook is a great thing.”

But, more important, he said, was to develop a knack for investing in successful companies with a fearlessness he said he learned from well-known VC John Doerr.

“John is always swinging for the fences,” said Andreessen. “I want to get into a cycle of backing radical ideas.”

Here’s a video interview I did with Andreessen about his new venture firm:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090705/new-vc-marc-andreessen-speaks-about-the-dark-side-and-more/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20090623/verizon-ceo-on-iran-iphones-and-android/ http://allthingsd.com/20090623/verizon-ceo-on-iran-iphones-and-android/#comments Tue, 23 Jun 2009 19:54:29 +0000 Andrew LaVallee http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=12894 Last night’s “Charlie Rose” featured an interview with Ivan Seidenberg, chief executive of Verizon (VZ), who talked about communications in Iran, the company’s prospects for carrying Apple’s (AAPL) iPhone and the recent news that Verizon Wireless will carry a Google (GOOG) Android-powered cellphone.

Mr. Seidenberg called Iranian citizens’ use of technology and wireless communications “a great thing,” saying “for us as a network operator, it’s the network effect. The more people on a network, the more valuable the entire network becomes. There’s no question in my mind that that model will get repeated over and over and over again.”

He also said that efforts to block Internet use in China, Iran and other countries will only work for a short time. “It can’t work long term. The power of the people will override that without any question. And it’ll happen sooner than they think because the technology is just too pervasive.”

Read the rest of this post on the original site

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090623/verizon-ceo-on-iran-iphones-and-android/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20090612/andreessen-completes-raising-dough-for-his-300-million-venture-fund-let-the-investing-begin/ http://allthingsd.com/20090612/andreessen-completes-raising-dough-for-his-300-million-venture-fund-let-the-investing-begin/#comments Sat, 13 Jun 2009 02:14:55 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=14464

Even in the midst of a tough investing environment, Silicon Valley legend and serial entrepreneur Marc Andreessen (pictured here) and his longtime investing partner, Ben Horowitz, have completed the raising of a new venture fund, according to numerous sources close to the situation, and it is oversubscribed.

Sources said the fund–which was nicknamed “Project A” but is actually called Andreessen Horowitz–will be $300 million. It is $50 million over the $250 million he and Horowitz had planned.

Several major institutional investors–from universities, for example–have invested large chunks of up to $20 million or more, while a spate of Silicon Valley luminaries has put in amounts of $1 million or less.

The quick completion of the fund raising, in the midst of a national econalypse, is a good sign perhaps for the forward-leaning culture of tech, which has seen some pullback by VCs over the last six months.

Andreessen, who co-founded Netscape–the iconic browser company that was key to introducing the modern Internet to consumers–and a lot of other start-ups, announced on the “Charlie Rose” television show in February that he was creating the new fund.

“For the first time in my life, I am crossing over into the dark side,” said Andreessen at the time (see the video below).

Although he gave few specific details about the fund in that interview, Andreessen essentially said he was simply putting a structure around his own active angel investing, which has included start-ups like Twitter, Facebook, Digg, LinkedIn and many more.

Andreessen, who is on the board of Facebook and an adviser to Twitter, has turned into one the the digital sector’s most influential mandarins for innovative start-ups.

His new effort will focus on early-stage investments, he said in the interview with Rose, noting that “our claim to fame is, we’ve actually, you know, by entrepreneurs for entrepreneurs, we’ve done it, we’ve been on that side of the table for a long time; we know what it’s like.”

Andreessen said then that he and Horowitz had made 36 investments over the last three years of up to $200,000, but that his new firm will make up to $1 million bets on companies they decide to invest in.

Plus, he said then he would be patient: “Like with our new fund, if we fund a company today, we’re thinking about a return in seven to 10 years, so we can go through three or four or even five years of economic downturn, as long as, at some point, we come out the other end.”

Here is the video of Andreessen on the Rose show (he starts to talk about the new fund in the interview at around 18:33 minutes, again at 46:55 minutes and at the very end):

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090612/andreessen-completes-raising-dough-for-his-300-million-venture-fund-let-the-investing-begin/feed/ 4 http://allthingsd.com/20090424/project-playlist-names-former-mtv-exec-sykes-as-ceo-replacing-van-natta/ http://allthingsd.com/20090424/project-playlist-names-former-mtv-exec-sykes-as-ceo-replacing-van-natta/#comments Fri, 24 Apr 2009 16:09:03 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=12842

Legendary MTV Networks exec and co-founder John Sykes (pictured here in an interview on PBS’s “Charlie Rose” show) will replace Owen Van Natta as CEO of the controversial music-sharing site, Project Playlist.

He is a high-profile choice to take over for Van Natta, who was officially named CEO of MySpace this morning by News Corp. (NWS).

Van Natta, who also worked at Facebook, will remain an adviser to Playlist, which is based in Silicon Valley. It is not clear where Sykes will be located.

Sykes–who is on the Playlist board–was one of the original executives who launched the iconic music-focused cable channel 25 years ago, before leaving last year. He was also a key exec at both VH1 and Infinity Broadcasting.

He is well regarded in the music industry, an important criterion since Playlist has been dealing with legal attacks from some music labels. Settling with them will be key to the start-up’s survival.

Former AOL and MTV exec Bob Pittman, who is an investor in Playlist, worked closely with Sykes at the Viacom (VIA) unit.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

Playlist Names Board Member and Veteran Media Executive
John Sykes as CEO

MTV Co-founder and Former VH-1 President Replaces Owen Van Natta

Palo Alto, Calif., April 24, 2009–Playlist, the leading social media network where over 43 million music fans discover, create and share playlists, announced today that Board Member and industry veteran John Sykes has joined the company as Chief Executive Officer. As a Co-founder of MTV, President of VH1, and CEO of Infinity Broadcasting, Sykes brings extensive operating experience and industry relationships to the company as it partners with the music industry to provide advertising, subscription and e-commerce services to music consumers.

Owen Van Natta will serve as an Advisor to Playlist.

“John was a pioneer of the MTV revolution that forever changed the music industry landscape by giving fans a whole new way to discover and enjoy music,” said Bob Zangrillo, Chairman of Playlist. “Playlist looks forward to leveraging John’s tremendous track record operating media businesses and deep relationships in the music industry as it builds out the world’s premier social media service.”

“Creating and sharing playlists has become a phenomenon in our culture. With over 43 million registered users, Playlist is the number one site where fans go to discover, share and enjoy their favorite music,” said John Sykes, CEO of Playlist. “Leveraging our newly forged partnerships with the music community, we can now offer consumers deep access to their music and provide the industry with powerful new revenue streams.”

Playlist, one of the fastest growing sites on the Internet, continues to establish partnerships with the entertainment industry in an effort to offer a comprehensive collection of content that can be discovered, shared and monetized at www.playlist.com.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090424/project-playlist-names-former-mtv-exec-sykes-as-ceo-replacing-van-natta/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20090220/marc-andreessens-new-venture-fund-project-a/ http://allthingsd.com/20090220/marc-andreessens-new-venture-fund-project-a/#comments Fri, 20 Feb 2009 20:16:56 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=10053

Last night, well-known Internet entrepreneur Marc Andreessen appeared on the “Charlie Rose” television interview show, talking about the digital sector and unveiling the news that he is creating a new venture fund.

I had heard rumblings about Andreessen’s funding efforts earlier this week, with sources I talked to nicknaming it “Project A.”

Actually, Andreessen said the new firm is called Andreessen Horowitz (zzzz), because he is doing it with longtime investing partner Ben Horowitz.

“For the first time in my life, I am crossing over into the dark side,” said Andreessen.

Although he gave few specific details about the fund, Andreessen essentially said he was simply putting a structure around his own active angel investing, which has included start-ups like Twitter, Digg, LinkedIn and many more.

His new effort will focus on early-stage investments, he said, noting that “our claim to fame is, we’ve actually, you know, by entrepreneurs for entrepreneurs, we’ve done it, we’ve been on that side of the table for a long time; we know what it’s like.”

Adding that he and Horowitz had made 36 investments over the last three years of up to $200,000, Andreessen said his new firm will make up to $1 million bets on start-ups.

Of course, for most of the interview, Rose zeroed in on hot topics like Facebook, the social-networking site on whose board Andreessen serves.

The voluble tech star did his job, talking about how Facebook could turn on the spigot and make all sorts of money anytime it wants and about the recent controversy around its Terms of Service kerfuffle.

He also talked about the Andreessen-backed Ning social network service, the Apple (AAPL) iPhone, Twitter, why the New York Times irks him, Google (GOOG), the Amazon (AMZN) Kindle e-book reader and gaming.

Ironically, the Netscape co-founder and his Xbox from Microsoft (MSFT)–eek–“have a very close personal relationship.”

But Andreessen also told Rose a little bit about the new fund he is raising money for, for example, while discussing the economic meltdown.

Talking about the fact that innovation will survive, Andreessen said: “Like with our new fund, if we fund a company today, we’re thinking about a return in seven to 10 years, so we can go through three or four or even five years of economic downturn, as long as, at some point, we come out the other end.”

Here is the video of Andreessen on the show (he starts to talk about the new fund in the interview at around 18:33 minutes, again at 46:55 minutes and at the very end):

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090220/marc-andreessens-new-venture-fund-project-a/feed/ 2 http://allthingsd.com/20081222/charlie-rose-gives-his-laid-off-employees-an-on-air-salute/ http://allthingsd.com/20081222/charlie-rose-gives-his-laid-off-employees-an-on-air-salute/#comments Mon, 22 Dec 2008 22:08:22 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=2383 I was all set to try to lighten the mood today with some good news: A small town newspaper owner who had a job opening for a reporter, at a decent wage.

Alas, the owner has asked me not to publish the salary he was offering, so I’m not going to act as his headhunter. Though I will say that he says he’s really looking for someone to buy his paper, and that “I always tell people that journalism is a dead-end job unless you own your own newspaper.” So this may not have been the job for you, anyway.

Instead, we’re back to layoffs. I hesitate to say that we’re done with layoffs for the year because the last time I did that, I got feedback from freshly fired readers who said I was premature. But even if we are done canning media workers in 2008, we are most assuredly going to be at it again in January.

With that in mind, here’s one way to send off your employees. Here’s southern gentleman Charlie Rose’s broadcast from last week:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20081222/charlie-rose-gives-his-laid-off-employees-an-on-air-salute/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20081202/michael-wolff-has-been-trash-talking-the-internet-since-1998-see-the-video/ http://allthingsd.com/20081202/michael-wolff-has-been-trash-talking-the-internet-since-1998-see-the-video/#comments Tue, 02 Dec 2008 10:39:40 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=7269

Ah, Michael Wolff! Always throwing stink bombs and making deliciously wackadoo declarations about the Internet.

This time, it’s in a dinner interview the author had with BusinessWeek’s media columnist Jon Fine recently.

Wolff (pictured here) slaps around the News Corp. (NWS) social-networking site MySpace with a series of his trash-buckling phrases, some of which are true and some a bit more of a stretch.

But he sure is entertaining!

One of Wolff’s more controversial moments:

“If you’re on MySpace now, you’re a [expletive] cretin. And you’re not only a [expletive] cretin, but you’re poor. Nobody who has beyond an 8th grade level of education is on MySpace. It is for backwards people.”

This is vintage Wolff, to make a big hissy-fit fuss at an opportune time.

Surprise! His latest book, a bio of media mogul Rupert Murdoch (who owns this site), titled “The Man Who Owns The News,” is coming out right about now.

And speaking of vintage, Wolff can be seen in the video below whacking away at the early Internet just over a decade ago, with me and Feed’s Steven Johnson in an appearance on the “Charlie Rose” television show.

It was the era of AOL’s dominance, with Yahoo (YHOO) as the comer and Web 1.0 in its fully overvalued glory.

“It’s craziness, it’s loco, it makes no sense,” said Wolff about the Internet, circa July 27, 1998.

His caustically funny book “Burn Rate” on his naughty early Internet adventures, wherein he was the only person not to get rich in Web 1.0, had just come out.

(And I had just come out with my book on the rise of AOL–the fall of AOL sequel came out in 2003.)

Later in the interview, Wolff could not help himself and makes a truly bad prediction: “I think the myth of the Internet is that it is going to come into everybody’s home.”

Oops, the Web is pretty much ubiquitous only 10 years later.

But Wolff does go on to make a lot of the same salient points he makes today about MySpace and the Web’s hot-today-gone-tomorrow ethos.

The video of our segment starts at the 30-minute mark.

Michael has not aged a day, but please, please excuse my shoulder pads and deeply unfortunate haircut (how did I ever get a date?):

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20081202/michael-wolff-has-been-trash-talking-the-internet-since-1998-see-the-video/feed/ 5 http://allthingsd.com/20070827/monday-morning-quarterback-the-cant-we-all-get-along-edition/ http://allthingsd.com/20070827/monday-morning-quarterback-the-cant-we-all-get-along-edition/#comments Mon, 27 Aug 2007 08:34:54 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/20070827/monday-morning-quarterback-the-cant-we-all-get-along-edition/ Interoperate’s Just Another Word for Nothing Left to Lose

Here is that video from MarketWatch about the joint interview PBS’s Charlie Rose did with John Chambers of Cisco and Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer, where they trotted out that old saw about coopetition.

In other words, how the tech giants might compete, but also interoperate for customers’ sake. Let’s say we keep this one near the top of the pile, just in case it turns out differently.

“The Newspaper Is Dead. Long Live the Newspaper.”

That’s a nice kicker at the end of an excellent essay on the shift in newspaper reading from Slate’s Jack Shafer (full disclosure–I once worked for him when I was but a wee lass).

Shafer’s not saying much new here: Guess what? People are increasingly getting their news on the Web and they like it that way!

But, as usual, he says it well:

Horrible as it may sound, on many days the newsprint front page tastes of already chewed gum.

“I’m not the average reader, but anecdotes convince me that the average reader is becoming more like me every day—reading tomorrow’s news today.”

And he has some good suggestions for the troublesome trend, too: more succinct stories; better use of graphics on heftier inside pages; and, of course, acceptance of inevitable change.

I would add: Pray fervently that the trend is not moving quite as fast as it actually is.

Go Ahead and Use That SUV and Feel Better–Not

OK, I will admit I have been somewhat dubious about these carbon-offset credits you can buy to balance out your energy consumption.

Now, I am even more disturbed after seeing this video about the topic, given that Michel Gelobter of the think tank Redefining Progress and founder of Climatecooler.com says some companies that can cause increased global warming are being planned, so we can pay them not to be created.

In the meantime, also read Valleywag Owen Thomas’s entirely on-point screed about the global warmingness of the techie-heavy Burning Man event, now taking place in the Nevada desert.

Confused?

Here’s the video:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20070827/monday-morning-quarterback-the-cant-we-all-get-along-edition/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20070821/steve-ballmer-hoo-ha-reveals-yahoo-nightmare-scenario/ http://allthingsd.com/20070821/steve-ballmer-hoo-ha-reveals-yahoo-nightmare-scenario/#comments Tue, 21 Aug 2007 10:53:39 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/20070821/steve-ballmer-hoo-ha-reveals-yahoo-nightmare-scenario/

Could Yahoo ever become a takeover target?

This kind of patently annoying answer from a CEO could certainly help fuel such a scenario–this time in an interview Microsoft head Steve Ballmer had yesterday with Charlie Rose:

Rose: Are you in talks to acquire Yahoo?
Ballmer: If I were, I wouldn’t say anything, and if I weren’t, I wouldn’t say anything.

Translation for those who don’t speak corporate hoo-ha: There were talks. They did not work out as yet. But we thought we could still keep Yahoo in play all by ourselves by being vague.

It’s a technique perfected, in this case, by the master of this particular deal-making game, Rupert Murdoch, who put an $8 billion value on his MySpace property by floating the idea of trading a 25% stake of Yahoo for MySpace in an earlier interview with Time magazine:

But as MySpace showed signs of reaching saturation, Murdoch began very preliminary, exploratory talks about trading the site for 25% or more of Yahoo. ‘Terry Semel was enthusiastic about it,’ he says of the then Yahoo CEO. ‘We were looking to see if it was a good idea. I wasn’t sure.’ ”

It is all very interesting in a top-level kind of way at this point, as I doubt new CEO Jerry Yang, who is ferreted away working on a master plan to fix Yahoo right now, has any intention of selling Yahoo before he is done with his top-to-bottom evaluation of the company, even if a sale is the right option in the end.

He might not have a choice, though, as a rival Web exec pointed out to me the other day, noting that the downturn in the stock market, helped by the continued speculation and goosing of the rumors of a Yahoo sale, could spell trouble for the Internet portal.

Why?

If the market continues to decline, bringing down the economy, even fast-growing online ad sales will surely take a hit. His theory went that if Yahoo has a weak quarter or two, its shares–already down at lows not seen for more than three years–could get sliced and diced further.

Some think Yahoo is currently not as much of a bargain at about $23 a share now, especially given its turnaround status. Still, its market value remains a lofty $31 billion.

But what if the price to own Yahoo–hit hard by economic forces it could not overcome, as it sought to heal itself–declined to $15 billion?

Corporate anti-takeover measures notwithstanding, of course, that would then make it a screaming buy for players like News Corp., Microsoft and even Google. And that leaves out more rapacious private equity funds, who would surely jump into a race to buy a company that still has gigantic traffic, enormous brand equity and a spate of terrific online properties.

Former analyst Henry Blodget had his own interesting take in a recent piece about the possible recessionary impact on both Google and Yahoo. While Google’s Bad and Ugly scenarios include flattened revenue and a huge drop in operating profits, Yahoo faces an even more dire landscape.

Writes Blodget:

For Yahoo, the situation is scarier, because the company is growing slowly even now. In our GOOD scenario, revenue growth slows to 5%, as do expenses. In this case, operating profit grows slightly. In our BAD scenario, revenue drops 5% and expenses stay flat, cutting the operating margin and operating profit nearly in half (this is perfectly plausible). In our UGLY scenario, revenue drops 20% and expenses stay flat–and suddenly the company loses $600 million a year.”

Although Blodget might be ramping up the volume a bit too much here, it’s always good to be mindful of the worst-case scenario.

Please see this disclosure related to me and Google.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20070821/steve-ballmer-hoo-ha-reveals-yahoo-nightmare-scenario/feed/ 1 http://allthingsd.com/20070701/iphone-charlie-rose/ http://allthingsd.com/20070701/iphone-charlie-rose/#comments Sun, 01 Jul 2007 19:01:27 +0000 Walt Mossberg http://mossblog.allthingsd.com/20070701/iphone-charlie-rose/ On Friday, the day Apple’s iPhone debuted, I appeared on “Charlie Rose” on PBS to discuss how the handheld device works and what it means for the future of cellphones. The interview appears below. You can read the review of the iPhone by me and Katherine Boehret here.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20070701/iphone-charlie-rose/feed/ 2