AllThingsD » Harvard

Zynga Makes Big Claims With IPO Only a Week Away

Tricia Duryee — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 22:03:29 +0000

Zynga is making some pretty big promises during its roadshow as it attempts to woo investors ahead of next week’s public offering.

The San Francisco social games company is looking to raise as much as $1.15 billion, which would make it the largest IPO from a U.S. Internet company since Google raised $1.7 billion in 2004.

Shares will likely be sold on Thursday, with the company trading under the ticker ZNGA for the first time on Friday. In the meantime, the company is trying to jockey for the best price and the most shares sold.

At a luncheon yesterday with potential investors, CEO Mark Pincus made one of his boldest predictions yet when it comes to how well its games will monetize.

Currently, Zynga has about 227 million monthly active users who play games for free on Facebook, such as FarmVille, CityVille, Zynga Poker and Mafia Wars. But only a small fraction — around 3 percent — pay for additional features, such as decorative items for a farm or new clothes for an avatar.

“We could see that doubling,” said Pincus, according to Reuters.

Doubling? That’s sure to whet investors’ appetites.

But it’s hard to know how the company will accomplish that.

To be sure, Zynga is about to enter one of its biggest growth periods yet and anticipates launching several new games over the next few months.

On one level, more games will likely translate to more players. But will it translate to more players willing to pay?

That seems like a leap of faith.

However, based on documents filed with the Securities & Exchange Commission, we have gleaned that some of Zynga’s growth prospects are guaranteed thanks to the company’s close – albeit complicated – relationship with Facebook.

As one of the conditions of its partnerships, Facebook is obligated to help Zynga meet certain growth targets. In return, Zynga has committed to offering Facebook a number of exclusive game titles.

The specific details of the relationship were redacted in the document, so it’s not clear how aggressive those growth targets are over the five-year life of the contract.

Zynga also has close ties with Google, which has recently launched its own games network. Zynga has already launched several titles there, including CityVille. Following the offering, Google will own 3.8 percent of the company.

Also during yesterday’s lunch, Zynga’s executives were grilled about player retention and churn rates and its growth prospects for mobile.

Among several responses, Pincus joked about how Alec Baldwin was recently kicked off a flight after getting caught playing Words With Friends while still at the gate.

It seemed investors were not as interested in hearing about recent negative reports that Pincus’s hard-charging personality has made it an unfavorable working environment or that some employees were asked to give up their stock options.

Plus, it’s a crowd that Pincus should be comfortable speaking in front of. This will be the second company the Wharton and Harvard Business School grad has taken public.

The company will continue to have meetings today and into next week. So far, reports indicate that the conversations are going well.

Zynga has apparently already received enough orders to cover all the shares being sold in its initial public offering, reports BusinessWeek, which talked to two people with knowledge of the situation. Zynga plans to sell 100 million shares for $8.50 to $10 apiece, which would value the company at as much as $7 billion.

When Facebook Bought ConnectU From the Winklevii (Or, Parsing Legal Filings for Fun)

Liz Gannes — Fri, 10 Dec 2010 16:30:36 +0000

Earlier this week there was some confusion about outlets reporting that Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss had filed another lawsuit against Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg for stealing the social networking idea they had asked him to develop for them back when they were all students at Harvard. While the Daily Mail story on the matter has been taken offline, Radar posted a PDF court filing of a Facebook brief to the U.S. District Court in California, where the Winklevii had appealed their argument that the $65 million settlement they had extracted from Facebook was nonbinding and constituted securities fraud, given information Facebook had not shared with the brothers about its valuation.

The brief was actually filed back in June, and I found a better, watermark-free copy of it here on the Web site of the Winklevoss lawyers. Last night I took the time to read it in full, and it was surprisingly not boring.

Perhaps the most revelatory thing in the Facebook filing is that Facebook’s lawyers seem to be having fun with the case. Their writing is laden with imagery and over-the-top exasperation with the Winklevii’s allegedly poorly formed legal arguments. Here’s the dramatic intro to the brief:

This appeal arises from the settlement of rancorous litigation on two coasts. On one side were Appellees Facebook, Inc. and its founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg. On the other side were the Appellants, who founded a failing competitor of Facebook’s called ConnectU. The CU Founders claimed that they had the idea for Facebook first, and Facebook stole their idea. Facebook denied those claims and, for its part, accused ConnectU and its Founders of unlawfully infiltrating its systems, stealing millions of email addresses, and then spamming them. During a global mediation, the parties signed a “Term Sheet and Settlement Agreement.” In the interest of achieving litigation peace, Facebook agreed to purchase ConnectU for [redacted] dollars and [redacted] shares of Facebook stock, one of the hottest startups in the world. Surrounded by a bevy of lawyers, the CU Founders signed the deal. Then they suffered a bout of settlers’ remorse. They ask this Court to relieve them of the deal they struck to plunge back into scorched-earth litigation.

Besides the writing, the other thing that’s interesting is the information about the terms of the relationship between Facebook and ConnectU. While the story has been simplified into a Hollywood-style betrayal as portrayed in “The Social Network,” the outcome of Zuckerberg and the Winklevii’s legal mediation is much less widely reported.

As part of its settlement with the Winklevoss twins, Facebook agreed to acquire their social network ConnectU (which they eventually did find someone to build), and has been “operating” it since Dec. 2008, the filing says (the site itself is offline).

Facebook contends that this earlier agreement to buy ConnectU was final, while the Winklevii are calling it a draft (their co-founder Divya Narendra has publicly said he’s moved past the Zuckerberg vendetta, though he’s mentioned in the filings as well).

The settlement came after closed-door professional mediation in February 2008. Facebook says it’s outraged that the Winklevii and their lawyers are bringing conversations from mediation back into the appeal, because all involved were sworn to confidentiality.

(You can also read the ConnectU appeal brief for the case to which Facebook was responding. However the bits from the mediation that were supposed to be confidential have been blacked out.)

But after the settlement, ConnectU came back to the table asking for its share to be revalued. It had originally negotiated using a publicly reported valuation from when Microsoft invested in Facebook, rather than an internal valuation from around the same time that would have priced the shares much lower ($8.88 versus $35.90). A revaluation of the shares to a smaller amount would give the twins a larger stake in the company.

And also, the Winklevii wanted the transaction to be labeled a merger instead of an acquisition so they could avoid paying some taxes on it.

Facebook replied in the June brief, again in remarkably florid fashion:

Facebook, by the way, to add insult to injury, says the internal valuation of its shares at the time of the Microsoft investment was actually even lower than the Winklevoss lawyers are arguing: Six days before the Microsoft transaction, Facebook had filed a document valuing employee stock options at just $6.61.

The attorney who signed the Facebook brief is Monte Cooper of Orrick, an intellectual property specialist. I hope he also writes novels in his spare time.

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my ethics statement.

CBS's "60 Minutes" Revisits Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg (And BoomTown Takes Back "Toddler CEO" Title)

Kara Swisher — Wed, 01 Dec 2010 23:49:09 +0000

This Sunday, the CBS television news magazine “60 Minutes” returns to Facebook after several years to check in on co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

In the first interview by correspondent Lesley Stahl in early 2008, Zuckerberg’s social networking empire was much smaller, beset by a series of management snafus and mired in yet another privacy controversy.

Plus, he was more than a lot more awkward. His “was-that-a-question?” response to an obvious question by Stahl was a near classic in geek communications.

Fast-forward to today: Zuckerberg rules an incredibly powerful tech company worth gazillions more (good), has developed into a very polished leader (good) and even had a big Hollywood movie called “The Social Network” made about him (not so good).

Presumably, Stahl will cover all that in her new chat with him, which includes a visit to Facebook’s new Palo Alto, Calif. HQ.

Stahl also interviewed me again and pistol-whipped me–okay, she just asked–until I took back my snarkiest remark from the first one, in which I called Zuckerberg a “toddler CEO.”

My new take, now sporting smart-lady glasses and much grayer hair: The toddler has turned out to be a prodigy!

In other words, the worm has officially turned.

Stahl also wanted to know about the rivalry with Google, the fallout of the movie, my epic de-hoodie-ing of Zuckerberg at D8 conference and what-up with the Winklevii (whom, I believe, I called “hambones.”)

Here is a small taste of the new piece, which airs at 7 pm this Sunday, followed by the entire one from 2008 and the blog post I did about it:

For those who missed it, here is the entire video of the piece CBS’ “60 Minutes” aired on Facebook last night, helmed by veteran correspondent Lesley Stahl.

It is not exactly the big wet kiss I was expecting the hot social networking company would get, but it was also definitely not an ouch-that-hurts piece that could have been done.

For those who don’t know the tale, it hits all the high (and low) points of the Facebook saga, with a button-pushing efficiency that television does so well. Thus, a synopsis:

Web Wunderkind Mark Zuckerberg, who seems genetically unable to smile (unlike, say, his deeply charming sister). Harvard. Ratty hoodies and flip-flops. Mark makes a Facebook profile for Lesley (how much do we love that she blocked her boss Les Moonves?).

Next stop: Silicon Valley! Dropping out and venture funding. Toddler CEO (that one was coined by BoomTown). Crazy HQ with kooky-looking employees, one of whom you know was forced to ride a unicycle through the office by Lesley.

Big growth. Is Mark Google’s Larry and Sergey rolled into one? Inexplicably, ZERO mention of its bigger rival, MySpace, even once. Worth $15 billion?–an insane number Lesley does not question nearly enough.

Oops, Privacy! Oops, Beacon! BoomTown tsks-tsks that stalkerish advertising idiocy and is asked about Mark’s qualifications as CEO (although no one cares what BoomTown thinks). Mark retorts: Hey, we need to make money. Lesley, so give the Wunderkind a break!

Zynga Chooses Facebook, Yet Again, for Exclusive Launch of Next Game: CityVille

Liz Gannes — Thu, 18 Nov 2010 02:00:20 +0000

Zynga may make “social games,” but they do not foster much in the way of complex or rewarding social interaction. The company is trying to change that, and today is announcing its next game, CityVille, which it calls its most social offering to date. CityVille (of course) is a cutesy simulation game in which users work to turn a small town into a big city.

What’s different is that rather than playing in their own siloed version of the game, friends can place businesses in each other’s cities, and benefit from the success of these franchises. CityVille also uses 3-D rendered buildings and characters and will be released in five languages, both things Zynga has never done before.

But for all those firsts, the game will only be released on Facebook. Zynga is of course working to diversify its platforms, adding iPhone, iPad, Android and Yahoo. But as a matter of priorities, said CityVille general manager Sean Kelly, “We feel like Facebook is the best partner to prove out.”

Kelly, who previously was GM of Zynga’s FishVille, declined to say how long Zynga had been developing CityVille, or how many people were on his team. However, he said this was the “first job ever” for half of his developers, and that his team also included game industry veterans from places like Blizzard, as well as longer-term employees of Zynga. Plus, one CityVille product manager came from Harvard Business School, so he helped the team create its in-game franchising arrangements. And an architect advised on how to properly build structures within the game.

This is only Zynga’s third game launch this year, after Treasure Isle and FrontierVille. The actual release of CityVille will be sometime over the next few ~~days~~ Update: weeks, based on the alignment of the stars and other factors.

Welcome to NetworkEffect!

Liz Gannes — Mon, 08 Nov 2010 08:06:03 +0000

Hi there, I’m Liz Gannes.

You may know me from my writings at GigaOM, where I covered topics like the social Web and online video for the last four years. If this is your first time reading me, I hope you’ll find my writing, reporting and analysis worth sticking around for.

My beat at All Things Digital is All Things Social, and you’ll be able to find my stories under the heading NetworkEffect, named after the idea that a community of users makes a service valuable for everyone who joins.

On the social Web, network effects help us improve the lives of our friends, family and neighbors, when we sign up for the same Web services and share our lives and experiences; they also factor in the power of critical mass to create new businesses from scratch. In the six years I’ve been a tech reporter, companies I’ve watched being born–such as Facebook, Twitter and Google-owned YouTube–have come to be major parts of people’s lives around the world. And I think that’s pretty awesome.

Of course, not everyone agrees. Example du jour: In this month’s New York Review of Books, the author Zadie Smith (whose novels I like very much) applied her considerable forces of perception to Facebook and the implications of its creation myth. Smith’s credentials to analyze Facebook are: She was a fellow at Harvard University when it was founded, she spent only two months trying the service before leaving it, she’s a full nine years older than Mark Zuckerberg (ancient!), and she calls herself a “private person.”

In her piece, Smith charged that Facebook encourages highly superficial, low-effort communication that threatens to replace actual relationships and experiences. She cited Jaron Lanier to assert that computers cannot represent actual human relationships, and, further, that the limitations of a tool can shape what its users think is possible.

So, basically, Facebook is devaluing the way we relate to each other.

Smith thinks her problems with Facebook come back to the site being created by Zuckerberg as an immature college sophomore who desperately wanted to be liked. “If the aim is to be liked by more and more people, whatever is unusual about a person gets flattened out,” she wrote. “[T]o Zuckerberg sharing your choices with everybody (and doing what they do) is being somebody.”

If we really wanted to write to these faraway people, or see them, we would. What we actually want to do is the bare minimum, just like any nineteen-year-old college boy who’d rather be doing something else, or nothing.

Smith noted in the piece that she doesn’t actively use Facebook herself, but she looked up some of Zuckerberg’s recent public comments and keenly observes that the Facebook CEO “uses the word ‘connect’ as believers use the word ‘Jesus,’ as if it were sacred in and of itself.”

Personally, I see my relationships extended and improved on Facebook, whether it’s knowing what my extended family is up to on a daily basis, or the great conversations I’ve had in the past few days about Death Valley, after I posted an album of pictures from my between-jobs road trip to the desert last week.

Still, I don’t often find visiting Facebook to be deeply satisfying either. But, whereas Smith sees reasons to run away screaming, I see an opportunity to better address some of the parts she finds lacking.

The real story here?

It’s about the capability of the social Web to improve so it better serves and extends our real-world relationships. It’s about the fact that these sites and apps are created by people whose versions of the world are expressed in them. It’s about the potential to communicate with people you don’t know, to cultivate and reward passionate fans and to learn the dark art of self-promotion. It’s about the wide-open opportunity to improve on and compete with Facebook, which is still really far away from delivering on its potential to improve the lives of the half-billion people who already use it regularly and the many more who don’t. Simply put, there’s a lot more to be done.

And that’s what I want to write about.

(P.S. As detailed in my ethics statement, which I will keep updated, my husband is a part-time employee at Facebook. His work is not a part of my reporting, and I obviously find the company fascinating and will not shy away from writing about it–both the good parts and the bad ones. )

Mark Zuckerberg Really, Really Wanted to Work With Sam Lessin

Peter Kafka — Tue, 02 Nov 2010 17:19:14 +0000

Facebook’s acquisition of online storage start-up Drop.io last week looks like the standard-issue “acqhire”: Big company buys a small company because it wants its employees, but doesn’t really care about the business they’ve built.

The difference here? Apparently, Mark Zuckerberg really, really wanted to work with Drop.io founder Sam Lessin. That’s why Facebook not only gave Lessin’s investors a return on their money, but paid for the deal with Facebook stock instead of cash.

People familiar with the transaction tell me that Drop.io’s investors–primarily DFJ Gotham and RRE Ventures–ended up with something close to double the $10 million they put into the company over the past two years, and that they were paid out in common stock.

At one point in Facebook’s history, that wouldn’t have been remarkable. But as Facebook has shot up in usage, employee size and valuation, its managers have become loath to hand out shares in advance of an IPO.

For instance, after the company bought Hot Potato and founder Justin Shaffer this summer, there was some sotto voce grumbling from investors that only Shaffer received Facebook equity, while his backers got cash.

With the exception of the payment, the Drop.io deal looks very similar. Like Shaffer, Lessin will move from Brooklyn to Palo Alto to work at Facebook headquarters. And like Hot Potato, Drop.io will be shut down.

So what makes Lessin worth precious Facebook shares?

We know that Lessin and Zuckerberg have been tight since they met at Harvard ( Caroline McCarthy has more on that here). Perhaps as important: I’m told that prior to the deal Drop.io had begun work on a new product that was meant to supplant its consumer-facing storage service. (UPDATE: Samuel Clay, via Twitter, suggests that Drop.io was working on a “a wrapper for [content delivery networks]. Auction-style bidding for lowest cost delivery of content.”. That synchs up with what I’ve heard. But if true, not sure it explains Zuckerberg’s interest.)

Love to know more, but Facebook and Lessin are staying mum for now.

For Facebook, Movie Damage Control

Lauren A.E. Schuker and Geoffrey A. Fowler — Fri, 24 Sep 2010 17:00:39 +0000

Facebook Inc. executives have sought to discredit a new film’s unflattering portrayal of Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg, even as they worked behind the scenes to influence the movie.

Those efforts range from attempting to massage the script, according to one of the film’s producers, to promoting an alternative corporate history.

The movie, “The Social Network,” depicts Mr. Zuckerberg as a socially awkward egomaniac who may have stolen the idea for his company from fellow students while he was an undergraduate at Harvard University.

The film—which premieres Friday night and will be widely released Oct. 1 by Sony Corp.’s (SNE) Sony Pictures—takes as its narrative framework two lawsuits over the company’s origins. Facebook later settled the cases.

On Friday, Mr. Zuckerberg will announce on “The Oprah Winfrey Show” that he is donating $100 million to the public schools in Newark, N.J.— his first major act of philanthropy.

According to a person familiar with the matter, Facebook didn’t time Mr. Zuckerberg’s gift for the film’s premiere.
Mr. Zuckerberg, through a company spokesman, declined to be interviewed for this article.

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The New Yorker's "Face of Facebook"

Kara Swisher — Mon, 13 Sep 2010 11:52:53 +0000

The New Yorker finally came out with its profile of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg today, titled “The Face of Facebook.”

And while the magazine piece by Jose Antonio Vargas reads well, there is not much new in it for those who have followed the career of the innovative young wunderkind of social networking.

Exeter computer prodigy, Harvard computer prodigy, Silicon Valley computer prodigy. Throw in the Winklevii’s ceaseless quest to say they could have been somebody (they couldn’t have been), mix in Sean Parker and set to bake to billions.

Vargas did score a few interviews with Zuckerberg, including a visit to his current home and a short glimpse of him interacting with his longtime girlfriend Priscilla Chan.

But, like Zuckerberg himself, it’s kind of all gray T-shirt and hoodie and working at Facebook.

The best part is Hollywood writer Aaron Sorkin, who penned the upcoming Zuckerberg-slasher, “The Social Network,” finding out his subject loves his television classic “The West Wing.”

“I wish you hadn’t told me that,” he responded to Vargas.

Oh, suck it up, Aaron, as Mark surely will have to when the movie comes out October 1.

Until then and as usual: Gray T-shirt, hood and, of course, Facebook.

My Kid Is an Honor Student at iTunes U

John Paczkowski — Tue, 24 Aug 2010 17:00:45 +0000

Downloads from Apple’s iTunes U program topped the 300 million mark today–a formidable feat for a virtual insitution of higher learning that’s just three years old. Today, roughly 350,000 audio and video lectures (and commencement speeches) are available for download from some 800 universities, among them Harvard, Brown, Berkeley, Stanford, MIT and Oxford. And that list is growing quickly as universities in China, Japan, Mexico and Singapore join the initiative.

A nice little bit of back-to-school marketing for Apple (AAPL), which likely has an eye trained on education sales as the new school year begins.

Q&A: WikiLeaks and the Future of Whistleblowing

Jennifer Valentino-DeVries — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 17:35:55 +0000

The disclosure of 76,000 reports on the war in Afghanistan by WikiLeaks has set off a round of damage control by the White House. But what does the release mean for citizen journalism online, and how does technology play into such leaks?

Digits spoke with Jonathan Zittrain, a law and computer science professor at Harvard and one of the founders of Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, about technology’s role in facilitating the release of information. Highlights of his responses are below.

How does technology help the distribution of this type of information?
I think technology in general facilitates the flow of information from one place to the other. It’s pretty amazing that you have thousands of classified documents released at once, and the government seems implicitly aware that they can’t put the genie back in the bottle.

The technology structure being used here is not very advanced; it’s very Web 1.0. The fact that it can be mirrored and remirrored makes a difference. But to actually get something out without being traced is still difficult.

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Weekend Viral Video: Mark Zuckerberg Gets the Kid-Glove Treatment From ABC's Sawyer

Kara Swisher — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 22:58:39 +0000

After a tough summer–including creepy trailers for a Hollywood movie, “The Social Network,” in which he seems to be portrayed as the awkward villain and also his sometimes difficult session at the eighth D: All Thing Digital conference with me and Walt Mossberg–Mark Zuckerberg catches a break in an easy-peasy multi-part television interview with ABC’s Diane Sawyer.

It aired earlier in the week, and a smilier-than-usual Facebook co-founder and CEO does a good job lobbing back Sawyer’s queries, which touch on the usual controversies (privacy, I-know-what-you-did-at-Harvard), the usual gee-whiz Silicon Valley oohing and, of course, the obsession with Zuckerberg’s age (upon which I declare an official BoomTown moratorium, since he is no longer that young).

If you don’t know a lot about the social networking powerhouse, you’ll find it useful; if you do, watch it anyway.

Enjoy:

Hello Facebook!

Meet Mark!

Free Food! Also Drycleaning!

Uh-oh, Privacy!

Double Uh-Oh, That #@&*% Movie!

Viewer Questions!

A Dislike Button!

The Scale Anticipation Fallacy

Ben Horowitz — Fri, 07 May 2010 21:55:10 +0000

The other day, I was talking to a couple friends of mine, one a VC and the other a CEO. During the meeting, we were discussing one of the executives at the CEO’s company. The executive in question performs exceptionally, but lacks experience managing at larger scale. My friend the VC innocently advised the CEO to carefully consider whether the executive would scale to meet the company’s needs in the future. I responded swiftly, aggressively, and loudly saying, “That’s a horrible idea and makes no sense at all.” Both of my friends startled at my outburst. Normally, I am disciplined enough to refrain from letting my feelings pass straight through my mouth without stopping at my brain for review. Why the outburst? Here is my answer.

As CEO, you must constantly evaluate all of the members of your team. However, evaluating people against the future needs of the company based on a theoretical view of how they will perform is counterproductive for the following reasons:

Managing at scale is a learned skill rather than a natural ability–Nobody comes out of the womb knowing how to manage a thousand people. Everybody learns at some point.

It’s nearly impossible to make the judgment in advance–How do you tell in advance if an executive can scale? Was it obvious that Bill Gates would learn how to scale when he was a Harvard dropout? How do you go about making that decision?

The act of judging people in advance will retard their development–If you make a judgment that someone is incapable of doing something such as running a larger organization, then will it make sense to teach those skills or even point out the anticipated deficiencies? Probably not. You’ve already decided that the person in question can’t do it.

Hiring scalable execs too early is a horrible mistake–There is no such thing as a great executive. There is only a great executive for a specific company at a specific point in time. Mark Zuckerberg is a phenomenal CEO for Facebook. He would not be a good CEO for HP (HPQ). Similarly, Mark Hurd does a terrific job at HP, but he would not be the right person to manage Facebook. If you judge your team in advance and have a high sense of urgency, you will bring in executives that can manage at high scale in advance of needing them. Unfortunately, you will probably ignore their ability to do the job for the next 12 months, which is the only relevant measure. As a result, you will swap out good executives for worse ones.

You still have to make the judgment at the actual point in time when you hit the higher level of scale–Even if you avoid the trap of hiring a scalable executive too early or retarding the new executive’s development, you still haven’t actually bought yourself anything by making the prejudgment. Regardless of what you decided at point-in-time A, you still have to evaluate the situation with far better data at point-in-time B.

It’s no way to live your life or run an organization–Deciding (with woefully incomplete data) that someone who works his or her butt off, does a terrific job, and loyally contributes to your mission won’t be with you three years from now takes you to a dark place. It’s a place of information hiding, dishonesty, and stilted communication. It’s a place where prejudice substitutes for judgment. It’s a place where judgment replaces teaching. It’s a place where teamwork becomes internal warfare. Don’t go there.

So, if you don’t prejudge people’s ability to scale, how do you make the judgment? You should evaluate your team at least once a quarter on all dimensions. Two keys can help you avoid the scale anticipation trap:

Don’t separate scale from the rest of the evaluation–The relevant question isn’t whether an executive can scale; it’s whether the executive can do the job at the current scale. You should evaluate holistically and this will prevent you from separating scale, which often leads to a prediction of future performance.
Make the judgment on a relative rather than an absolute scale–Asking yourself whether or not an executive is great can be extremely difficult to answer. A better question is: For this company at this exact point in time, does there exist an executive I can hire who will be better? If my biggest competitor hires that person, how will that impact our ability to win?

In summary, predicting whether or not an executive can scale corrupts your ability to manage, is unfair, and doesn’t work.

The Unused Cellphone App: "Calling"

Joseph De Avila — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 08:00:46 +0000

Harvard University senior Drew Robb is so attached to his cellphone that he keeps it by his bedside at night and in his front jeans pocket every day. He uses the Apple (AAPL) iPhone to check email, text his friends and play games, pretty much for everything–except phone calls.

Calling “really slows you down,” says the 22-year-old physics and math major from Honolulu.

The way Mr. Robb and his friends use their phones offers a glimpse of where consumer technology is heading. Their phones are used non-stop for their social lives and their group project to design a mobile guidebook to Cambridge. The friends also show how quickly change is happening: When Mr. Robb’s friend Winston Yan, a 21-year-old physics major from Alexandria, Va., arrived as a freshman in 2006, he had a phone that couldn’t send or receive email.

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FCC Considers Opening Up the Pipes

Amy Schatz — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 00:10:37 +0000

Should the U.S. adopt rules that would require Internet providers to share their broadband lines with rivals, like other countries?

Debate over that controversial idea took center stage at the Federal Communications Commission Thursday, where agency officials are considering a Harvard study that suggested the approach would help improve U.S. broadband availability and affordability.

“U.S. performance [in Internet speeds and availability] is not at the kind of level that we can say no matter what others are doing, we’re doing better. We’re not doing better,” said Yochai Benkler, co-director of Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society, at an FCC workshop.

The workshop was the latest in an exhaustive series held by FCC officials as part of their efforts to write a National Broadband Plan for the U.S. The plan would offer a blueprint for what the government could do to improve the availability of high-speed Internet service.

The agency has estimated it could cost anywhere from $20 billion to $350 billion to ensure every American has access to high-speed Internet service.

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Facebook's Privacy Chief (And California Attorney General Candidate) Chris Kelly Speaks!

Kara Swisher — Tue, 12 May 2009 09:52:53 +0000

BoomTown tried to get Chris Kelly (pictured here) to give up more during an onstage interview I did with the Facebook chief privacy officer last night at the third “Tech Policy Summit” and was only moderately successful in the endeavor.

He talked about the recent Terms of Service debacle as a snafu that got sensationalized by the media, the Beacon advertising controversy as a snafu that got sensationalized by the media and the Free-the-Scoble-5,000 data-sharing debate as a snafu that got sensationalized by the media.

But Kelly also managed to say that the media were sensational for keeping Facebook–the dominant social-networking site in the whole wide world–honest as it grows into a behemoth grasping a scary amount of personal information on its 200 million users in its claws.

Oh, he is a smoothie all right, as a lawyer and now as a wannabe politician.

Kelly–who is still working at the start-up, where his job it is to make sure consumer data, privacy, the children and CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s reputation are all safe and sound–is also running for the job of California’s attorney general.

(Here is his Facebook page about the effort.)

Born in Silicon Valley, with a troika of diplomas from fancy schools (undergraduate from Georgetown in 1991, a master’s from Yale in 1992 and a law degree from Harvard in 1997), Kelly worked as a lawyer and also as a policy adviser for President Bill Clinton’s White House Domestic Policy Council and Department of Education before coming to Facebook four years ago.

For a closer look-see at the candidate for the Golden State’s top cop position, here’s a video interview I did with him after the onstage chat in San Mateo, Calif.:

[ See post to watch video ]

Facebook at 5: Remembering the Early Years, and Measuring Up Against Google

Peter Kafka — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 11:00:18 +0000

Happy Birthday, Facebook! You’re 5 years old today, and that’s pretty cool. But the party you’re throwing yourself? Not much fun.

How about this instead: Some brief reminiscing, via this June 2004 Harvard Crimson article, written “nearly a semester after” 20-year-old Mark Zuckerberg had launched thefacebook.com. At the time, it had 160,000 users.

It’s a great story (thanks to the excellent Nieman Journalism Lab for pointing this out via its Twitter feed), but let’s just zoom right ahead to the end:

Zuckerberg participated in a live television interview for CNBC, and says he has been wined and dined in Harvard Square by representatives from major software companies.

Still, he is maintaining the same approach: don’t sell.

“That’s just like not something we’re really interested in,” he says, referring to selling out thefacebook.com. “I mean, yeah, we can make a bunch of money—that’s not the goal…I mean, like, anyone from Harvard can get a job and make a bunch of money. Not everyone at Harvard can have a social network. I value that more as a resource more than like any money.”…

“My goal is to not have a job,” he says matter-of-factly. “Making cool things is just something I love doing, and not having someone tell me what to do or a timeframe in which to do it is the luxury I am looking for in my life.”…”I assume eventually I’ll make something that is profitable,” he allows.

The site is currently running some advertisements, but Zuckerberg says they are only being used to offset server costs. Nonetheless, the facebook’s business manager has posted notices soliciting ads on multiple websites, and a thefacebook.com rate card shows that the site is interested in attracting national advertisers….

“There are a couple ads on the facebook because [the site] costs money and servers don’t grow on trees,” Zuckerberg says.

But will the facebook ever be auctioned off to the highest bidder?

“Maybe when I’m bored with it, then we’ll work something out,” he says. “But I don’t see that happening anytime in the near future.”

Cool foreshadowing, huh? (Harvard kids! So smart!) But let’s put Facebook’s success in context–by comparing it to Silicon Valley’s most successful start-up of the last couple of decades. Here’s how Facebook today stacks up against the Google of 2003, when that company was 5 years old.

I’ve pulled the Facebook stats from various sources, so please consider them estimates. The Google (GOOG) stats are much more solid: I’ve pulled most of them from the company’s 2004 IPO prospectus.

Facebook:
Workforce: 700+
Revenue: $260 – $300 million
Net income: None (EBITDA of perhaps $50 million)
Valuation: Something in the $4 billion range, based on reports of share sales
Motto: “Facebook is about helping people to share information and share themselves.”

Google:
Workforce: 1,907 (as of March 2004)
Revenue: $962 million
Net income: $106 million
Valuation: Something in the $20 billion range, based on press reports
Motto: “Don’t be evil. We believe strongly that in the long term, we will be better served–as shareholders and in all other ways–by a company that does good things for the world even if we forgo some short term gains. This is an important aspect of our culture and is broadly shared within the company.”

So take a bow, Mark Zuckerberg. You’ve built something really cool. But if you want to keep up with Larry and Sergey, you’d better get back to work.

[Image Credit: deneyterrio]

Nothing's Ever Good Enough for You Uppity Harvard Folk, Is It?

John Paczkowski — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 16:37:07 +0000

Harvard University, which eagerly signed onto Google’s controversial book scanning project in 2005, isn’t so keen on the project now that the company’s agreed to settle the lawsuits questioning its legality. Troubled by uncertainties in the settlement, Harvard will not participate in Google’s in-copyright book scanning effort–even if Google’s recent $125 million settlement with the Authors Guild and an alliance of five major publishers is approved.

“As we understand it, the settlement contains too many potential limitations on access to and use of the books by members of the higher education community and by patrons of public libraries,” University Library Director Robert C. Darnton said in a message to library staff. “The settlement provides no assurance that the prices charged for access will be reasonable, especially since the subscription services will have no real competitors [and] the scope of access to the digitized books is in various ways both limited and uncertain.”

Which is not to say that Harvard doesn’t believe that universal access to the world’s books is mission-critical for universities. It clearly does, and will continue to work with the company to digitize books that have fallen out of copyright. But until the quality of the book scans improves (see sample below) and Google (GOOG) sets a clear pricing scheme, the university can support, Harvard will be providing the company only with out-of-copyright works pulled from its Depository collection.

Nothing's Ever Good Enough for You Uppity Harvard Folk, Is It?

John Paczkowski — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 16:37:07 +0000

Time to Poach a Few More Googlers, Eh, Mark?

John Paczkowski — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 21:11:13 +0000

Facebook really is That company. Which company? That one. That company that shows up once in a very long while–the Google of yesterday, the Microsoft of long ago. That company where large numbers of stunningly-brilliant people congregate and feed off each other’s genius. That company that’s doing with 60 engineers what teams of 600 can’t pull off. That company that’s on the cusp of Changing The World, that’s still small enough where each employee has a huge impact on the organization, where you think about working now and again, and where you know you’ll kick yourself in three years if you don’t jump on the bandwagon now, even after someone had told you that it was rolling toward the promised land. That company where everyone seems to be having the time of their life. … I’m serious. I have drunk from the Kool-Aid, and it is delicious.”

– Facebook manager Justin Rosenstein, June 15, 2007

Facebook manager Justin Rosenstein once described the social network as “the Google (GOOG) of yesterday, the Microsoft (MSFT) of long ago.” Today, Rosenstein perhaps views it as the Facebook of So Totally Last Week because he’s leaving the company, along with departing Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz. Together the two hope to develop some sort of new extensible enterprise productivity suite, something that will be “to your work life what Facebook.com is to your social life,” according to a post on Rosenstein’s Facebook page.

“We see this new venture as very complementary to Facebook,” Rosenstein explained. “We hope our products will become to your work life what Facebook.com is to your social life. Our software will use Facebook Connect as the default option for identity and authentication. Our user interface will adopt many of Facebook’s conventions, creating a seamless and familiar experience for current Facebook users. And if our new development tools turn out to be useful, we hope the Facebook engineering team will come to adopt them.”

The departures are a blow to Facebook, which has been suffering something of a brain drain recently, and more specifically, to CEO Mark Zuckerberg who founded the company with Moskovitz while the two were undergraduates at Harvard.

Yahoo Annual Meeting Countdown (4 Days to Go!): Who Will Be the New Board Members?

Kara Swisher — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 10:14:28 +0000

Well, it will not be nearly as interesting as it would have been had activist shareholder Carl Icahn been attacking in a full-throttle proxy fight.

But Yahoo’s annual meeting on Friday will be more of a humdinger than usual (and BoomTown is all signed up to go and waiting for confirmation, after agreeing to a long fascist list of no-you-can’ts from Yahoo PR).

So many moving parts, including who, who, who will Yahoo (YHOO) and Icahn decide on for the two other board members to join besides Icahn (pictured here)?

Actually, I mostly want to know who gets to sit next to Icahn at the first board meeting. I vote Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang!

But I digress, let’s hazard a guess, shall we, of who the newbies will be?

The Icahn slate includes: Lucian A. Bebchuk, Frank J. Biondi, Jr., John H. Chapple, Mark Cuban, Adam Dell, Keith A. Meister, Edward H. Meyer, and Brian S. Posner, as well as the late addition of former AOL (TWX) head Jon Miller.

Yahoo must consent to Icahn’s choices and don’t actually have to seat the new members until August 15. Sources said it is interviewing all the candidates right now.

Miller is obviously a shoo-in, given that Yang suggested him to Icahn. Icahn harbors hopes of Miller taking over from Yang (he has talked to a lot of folks about that, in fact!), so getting Miller on board is step one.

But Yang will surely deny everyone the exquisite pleasure by picking Cuban (pictured here), the former Broadcast.com honcho who got rich via a Yahoo acquisition in Web 1.0, never looked back and never ever said “Thanks!”

You can guess longtime Icahn cronies Biondi and Meister are unlikely, given that it would be like having Carl times two (although I am not completely ruling out the more media-experienced Biondi).

Meyer certainly has the advertising chops as former chairman and CEO of Grey Global, but he might be considered too old-school for Yahoo.

Investor Adam “Brother of Michael” Dell seems more of a long shot, although he is certainly not objectionable to Yahoo. But if the company is looking for experience in Yahoo’s businesses going forward, Yahoo might not consider Dell the strongest of the group.

Same for mutual fund star Posner. An obvious brainiac, but just knowing how to make money on Wall Street does not really make him an ideal person to be on the board of an Internet company.

Now, Bebchuk is indeed intriguing, given his Harvard law professor/shareholder activist background and his pay-for-performance clarion cry. But Yang and some other current board members, who have recently been dinged by some proxy-advisory services for too much compensation compared with their record, might not like having Bebchuk so close by.

Thus, overall, from good-fit perspective, I like another former exec, John Chapple (pictured here) of Nextel best of all because mobile will be increasingly important to Yahoo in Web 3.0 (frankly, it better be, as Web 2.0 has not been too kind to Yahoo).

Via Sprint (S), Chapple knows from big mergers and he knows how to makes deals. He has been the operator of a digital company, unlike many of the others. And he is also an entrepreneur, which is a plus.

But whoever from the Icahn group gets the nod, one thing is certain: If they’re looking for friends on the old Yahoo board, they might want to get a dog instead.

Bill This Triple Espresso to My Flexible Spending Account …

John Paczkowski — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 13:30:50 +0000

To increased endurance, capacity for mental and physical labor, gastrointestinal disturbance and other effects of coffee add one more: longevity.

According to a new study of coffee drinking, people who drink several cups of coffee every day are less likely to die of heart disease than those don’t. The study, one of the largest and longest on the subject, tracked 129,000 men and women for between 18 and 24 years and found that men who drank more than five cups of coffee a day were 44% less likely to die of heart disease. Women who drank four to five cups per day were 34% less likely to die. “Our results suggest that long-term, regular coffee consumption has several beneficial health effects,” explained Esther Lopez-Garcia, lead author of the Harvard School of Public Health report. “The more coffee you drink, the less risk of mortality you have.”

[Image credit: Shannon Wheeler]

Harvard Dropout Zuckerberg Feted by, Well, Harvard!

Kara Swisher — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 12:12:52 +0000

Oh the sweet irony of Facebook Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg getting awarded a big round glass object, suitable for mantel-showing-off, from Harvard types.

Especially since he is now the school’s second most famous tech mogul dropout–after Microsoft’s Bill Gates.

But that was the case last night at the San Francisco Airport Hyatt Regency, where the 24-year-old Zuckerberg collected the 30th Entrepreneurial Company of the Year Award from the Harvard Business School Association of Northern California.

As is required at dinners like this, Zuckerberg had to sing for his supper in a post-meal interview about the hot social-networking site’s past and future.

At first, he did clarify that he was technically “on leave” from Harvard, as Gates also is, which the crowd loved.

(But, memo to Harvard Yard: Neither Gates nor Zuckerberg is coming back, so don’t leave the lights on.)

Zuckerberg (pictured here with me) also used the term “share information” in the interview, perhaps even more than he did onstage when I interviewed him at the D: All Things Digital conference last month.

And so much so that it could be the basis for a raucous drinking game where you take a shot every time he says “share information,” which would make you dangerously inebriated within 56 seconds.

Zuckerberg also strongly reiterated his statement that Facebook was not for sale, which is especially important now that it looks like a tastier treat to Microsoft (MSFT), in the wake of its failed takeover of Yahoo (YHOO).

But Zuckerberg specifically nixed a sale to Microsoft, which invested $240 million in Facebook and gave it its infamous $15 billion valuation.

He was joined onstage by Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg–who is an academically scary double whammy, holding a master’s degree in business administration with highest distinction from the Harvard Business School and a bachelor’s degree summa cum laude in economics from Harvard University.

Plus Sandberg has a really effective hairy eyeball that she used to stop me from stalking her or Zuckerberg with my Flip camera.

Still, BoomTown managed to get some video of those attending the event, which was heavy with tech types.

My various quarry dispensed business advice, all while I mocked Harvard (lovingly, so don’t gripe that I am envious–am not).

So, here’s my video of last night’s event, which includes: Piczo CEO Jeremy Verba (HBS); Facebook’s Ben Ling (not Harvard) and Elliot Schrage (Harvard undergrad, masters, law!); Greylock Partners’ James Slavet (HBS) and David Sze (horrors–Yale!); Accel Partners’ Jim Breyer (HBS); and the glass award itself (totally HBS!).

[ See post to watch video ]

And, once again, here’s Zuckerberg and Sandberg in action, somehow withstanding my withering questions at D6:

Part One

Part Two

Sharing Information and Ourselves: Facebook Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg and COO Sheryl Sandberg

John Paczkowski — Thu, 29 May 2008 00:56:42 +0000

Because Mark Zuckerberg is barely in his mid-20s, his résumé is a bit thinner than others here. Well, except for his first job as founder and CEO of Facebook, perhaps the most explosively popular social-networking company ever and the most high-profile Web 2.0 start-up. Mr. Zuckerberg created Facebook in 2004, while still an undergraduate at Harvard University, where he studied computer science. He brought the company to Silicon Valley before he had a chance to graduate from college, but managed to get a $15 billion valuation for the company anyway.

Sheryl Sandberg was Facebook’s first high-profile hire, coming to the social-networking site from Google earlier this year. At Facebook, she manages a wide swath of the company’s business operations, including sales, marketing, business development, human resources, public policy, privacy and communications. Ms. Sandberg was vice president of global online sales and operations at Google, where she built and managed the online sales channels for advertising and publishing and operations for consumer products globally. She was also instrumental in launching Google’s philanthropic arm. Ms. Sandberg was previously chief of staff for the United States Treasury Department under President Bill Clinton. She was also a management consultant with McKinsey & Company and an economist with the World Bank. She holds an MBA from the Harvard Business School and was also an undergraduate at Harvard.

Zuckerberg and Sandberg take the stage bearing gifts. Sandberg notes that Barry Diller described Facebook as the Princess Phone, so they hand Kara one of the devices. Sandberg says she hopes the gift will convince Kara to stop writing about the company so much. Kara: I won’t ever stop until you’re either the biggest thing around, or you’re dead.
Kara to Zuckerberg: Define Facebook. Facebook, he says, is about helping people to share information and share themselves. It’s also about providing people complete control over their information and privacy (whawhaWHA?). [For a bit of background on that statement , check out the following Digital Daily posts:]
Who did you look to for inspiration, Kara asks, when you first started? (ConnectU.com? No such luck.) AOL, apparently.
Kara asks what it was like to come to Silicon Valley and get the sort of attention Facebook was given so quickly. Zuckerberg says Facebook didn’t become a phenom as quickly as many think. Originally, he’d moved out to California just for the summer. And he wasn’t really thinking about starting a company. “At the end of that summer, a bunch of us ended up staying in California …” And the rest, presumably, is history.

Kara: Were you lonely at Harvard? Did you like college? Zuckerberg says he did, adds that it was funny listening to Bill Gates’s reminiscences about Harvard yesterday evening. (Cut from the same cloth, apparently, Gates and Zuck). Zuckerberg says he skipped class quite a bit as well. He was too busy working on Facebook. As the final in a course that he’d skipped pretty much in its entirety approached, a very unprepared Zuckerberg created a study tool Web site and encouraged his classmates to contribute to it. They did and he passed the course.
Kara asks Sandberg about her early career. She recalls realizing tech’s importance while working for Larry Summers in the U.S. Treasury Department. She subsequently moved out to California, met Larry Page and Sergey Brin and took a job at Google. She says she was drawn to Google because of its concern for the user.
Kara turns back to Zuckerberg. Tell me why you want to be CEO of Facebook and why you’re the guy for the job. Zuckerberg recites some PR bullet points (Facebook is about helping people to share information and share themselves ….). Kara, attempting to force Zuckerberg to do just that, takes a different tack: What did the Beacon fiasco teach you about leadership? Zuckerberg says that Facebook learned that if you give people control over their information, they’re more willing to share it. He concedes that Beacon was a big mistake. Kara asks if Beacon really was a mistake conceptually. Its execution was obviously a disaster, she notes, but its concept was interesting. Zuckerberg says there were other issues with its UI. (Privacy protections too, if you ask me.)

Turning to Sandberg, Kara asks why she left Google (GOOG) to take a job at Facebook. She recites another variation of the same bullet points Zuckerberg offered earlier. Facebook, we are to understand, is about helping people to share information and share themselves. (Huh. Appears that there may be some sort of Facebook hive-mind at work here.)
Discussing the opening of the Facebook platform now … Zuckerberg says that he felt that building our development platform so that anyone could make the same applications we were making would drastically expand the platform. And it did. He notes that within four days of the platform’s launch, iLike had developed an application that had 1 million users. Left unspoken for the moment: Facebook is about helping people to share information and share themselves. But you know he’s thinking it …
Noting the generally juvenile nature of Facebook apps, Kara wonders if such applications have to become useful at some point. Zuckerberg answers that utility and usefulness don’t have to be a huge application. There’s a trend toward smaller, useful applications that aren’t Microsoft Word, he says, but still address a need. (Yeah, like Hotties …)

Sandberg notes the continued popularity of Superpoke. Says that whimsical applications have been the ones that have gained the most traction. Clearly a “Zombies” freak, this Sandberg.
What about the monetization issue? What about advertising? (Yes, yes, Kara. But what about helping people to share information and themselves? Hmm?) Sandberg addresses the monetization issue by talking about demand fulfillment. She notes that Facebook has an extraordinary amount of information about its users (their “Hottie” valuations, perhaps?) and can work with advertisers to create real user engagement by addressing user demands. She describes a free-cone promotion Facebook held with Ben and Jerry’s that was so successful that it generated some 53 million page views on Ben and Jerry’s Web site and forced the company to give away 250,000 more cones than it had planned. Aha! Not only is Facebook about helping people to share information and themselves, it’s about sharing ice cream as well.
Kara: What sort of company are you? Zuckerberg: We’re not a media company. We’re a technology company. Kara: OK, what’s a technology company, then? Zuckerberg replies that it’s a company that creates technology. (Tell me again why Facebook is reportedly worth $15 billion?)
Sandberg also feels Facebook is a technology company. (Looks like we’re all in agreement here about technology companies and how they develop technology, as well as how Facebook is all about helping people to share information and share themselves. Moving on …)
Kara: So are you interested in selling to Microsoft (MSFT)? If Ballmer approached you right now and offered you $15 billion, what would you say? Zuckerberg replies that selling the company to Microsoft doesn’t really advance the company’s mission. Unlike Facebook, Microsoft, apparently, is not all about helping people to share information and share themselves.
What’s your view on the Microsoft-Yahoo situation in light of your own relationship with Microsoft? Kara asks. Sandberg says the partnership is working out. Kara pushes her a bit more. No luck. She follows up with a question about Google. Asks if relations between the two companies haven’t been a bit tense lately over all that Open Social business? Zuckerberg disagrees with that characterization and claims to have had dinner with Google founders Brin and Page recently. “They actually came over to my house,” says Zuckerberg (quite the Silicon Valley street cred moment we’re witnessing here). “Page got one of the two chairs and Schmidt wound up on the floor.” You cooked them dinner? asks Kara. Zuckerberg: “I don’t have the proper things in my house to make dinner.” Presumably, he does have the proper things to help people share information and themselves.
Question from filmmaker Barry Sonnenfeld, who says his daughter gives up all sorts of private information on Facebook. Doesn’t this portend a dreary future for our children that privacy is forfeited so easily? (What the hell’s wrong with you Barry? Don’t you know that Facebook is about helping people to share information and share themselves?) Zuckerberg says that there are privacy checks on the site and that teens and everyone else can take them to ensure their privacy.

Another question: Tell us three applications that don’t yet exist that you’d like to see. Zuckerberg says he’d like to see applications based around sharing information about sports, politics and religion. (Aren’t there thousands of apps like this already?) “Religion,” says Zuckerberg, “that’s a big thing around the world.” Straight into Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, that one.
Question: What are developers doing with all the information they request when you download a third-party application? Sandberg fields this one. She says Facebook has strict policies about the use and transfer of that information, adds that users control how much of that information is disclosed. She also notes that most of these developers are invested enough in the platform that the threat of being kicked off it for the exploitation of user information is an effective deterrent. The community is very effective at policing itself. Facebook, she adds, is about helping people to share information and share themselves and protecting their privacy.
Ed. note: For those of you just joining us, “Facebook is about helping people to share information and share themselves.”
Another question: As Facebook users become more connected, how do they manage their connections? Kara points out that once you hit critical mass on the site, your profile page and newsfeed become unwieldy. Zuckerberg says the company is working on tools to address this issue.
Question from Tim O’Reilly: Facebook’s model is built around categorization and lists. At what point does it need to build on search? And isn’t Facebook falling behind on that front? Zuckerberg says that seems to be a reasonable theory. As the site gets larger it needs to get better at filtering and searching its contents. After all, Facebook is about helping people to share information and share themselves, is it not?

For more coverage, see Barron’s Tech Trader Daily and The Wall Street Journal.

A note about our coverage: This live blog is not an official transcript of the conversation that occurred onstage. Rather, it is a compilation of quotes, paraphrased statements and ad-lib observations expeditiously written and posted to the Web as quickly as we were able. It was not intended as a transcript and should not be interpreted as one.

The Sheryl Sandberg PR Tour Rolls Into Town!

Kara Swisher — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 12:55:23 +0000

Mark Zuckerberg? Who’s that? Now, at Facebook, it’s apparently the Season of Sandberg!

Ah, the appeal of a fresh face is just irresistible to the press–OK, including BoomTown, except we posted more than a month ago!–with two major pieces, in Fortune and The Wall Street Journal, rolling out this week alone, with everything you wanted to know about the new COO of the social-networking site, former Google (GOOG) exec Sheryl Sandberg (pictured here).

But if you don’t have time to read them, here’s a quick synopsis of both:

Fortune: “Meet Facebook’s New Number Two” by Jessi Hempel

Details: Just 14 days into new job; Leg-tucking white Eames chair (pictured here); as Google’s VP global online sales and ops, ran everything!; she and Zuckerberg met cute at holiday party; aced Larry Summers’s midterm and final at Harvard public economics course, much to his shock, since he implies she was kind of chatty in class with friends.

Also Harvard MBA; obligatory McKinsey stint; Treasury Department in Clinton administration; picked 300-person Google over investment banking; always 10 steps ahead; Google.org mover and shaker.

Facebook aims: A need for corporate structure pronto; also time for the bigger picture; no more one-off decisions; more international growth; hiring senior managers; oh, yes, also must invent a new ad model for social networks.

But no silver bullets!; kicks ass, talks tough, then hugs all around (we did not make this up!); take out trash from Mark’s all-night Pizza-My-Heart-and-Red-Bull party (OK, we made that one up!).

Money quote: “This feels like Google when I started.“

The Wall Street Journal: “New Face at Facebook Hopes to Map Out a Road to Growth” by Carol Hymowitz

Details: Two weeks into new job; Biz dev guy Dan Rose is already sick of her (“It feels like she’s been here six months already.”); flip-flops endangered?; is able to argue why she is right by arguing how she is wrong; dangles data before engineers like fish before seals; easygoing but intense (when will these opposing dichotomies end?); crashed Harvard computers, but it was worth it.

Taught aerobics and was a stretching fascist; more cute dinner chatter with Zuckerberg before hiring; grew Google team from four to 4,000; a feminist and hangs with Gloria Steinem and Jane Fonda (see aerobics!) too!; Facebook pix of Argentine waterfall-leaning; went to high school in Miami; small kids, hubby; more 10 steps ahead and shoving people out of comfort zone.

Facebook aims: Employee performance reviews; processes for identifying and recruiting new employees; management-training programs; rally troops; stop the cash burn and up ad sales; close-knit culture must go, but you get hundreds of millions of new friends!

Also must figure out how to save Beacon’s bacon; earn trust of users, while frantically searching for a business model; wants frank feedback from staff and will publicly thank such person who gives it.

Money quote: “Facebook is a different space than Google, with tremendous potential to connect people, but it needs scale, it needs systems and processes to have impact, and I can do that.”

In the Valley, They Say, Larry’s Small Heart Grew Three Sizes That Day

John Paczkowski — Tue, 11 Dec 2007 03:56:49 +0000

Larry Ellison’s other company is finally going public. Today, NetSuite–the software-as-a-service company of which Ellison is a majority owner–opened bidding on the 6.2 million common shares it plans to sell in a modified Dutch auction.

Assuming the IPO goes off as planned–and given the healthy market for tech IPOs, there’s every reason to believe it will–NetSuite shares will price out in the range of $13 to $16, raising the company some $99 million with which to pay off some debt, make new investments and further enrich Ellison, who controls about 60% of NetSuite’s outstanding stock.

To be fair, though, he does plan to set aside some 31.9 million shares for charitable purposes–perhaps another $115 million pledge to make and then withdraw from Harvard University?