Money and Finance
Mark Zuckerberg’s Letter From The Facebook Filing
As I said above, Facebook was not originally founded to be a company. We’ve always cared primarily about our social mission, the services we’re building and the people who use them. This is a different approach for a public company to take, so I want to explain why I think it works.
I started off by writing the first version of Facebook myself because it was something I wanted to exist. Since then, most of the ideas and code that have gone into Facebook have come from the great people we’ve attracted to our team.
Most great people care primarily about building and being a part of great things, but they also want to make money. Through the process of building a team — and also building a developer community, advertising market and investor base — I’ve developed a deep appreciation for how building a strong company with a strong economic engine and strong growth can be the best way to align many people to solve important problems.
Simply put: we don’t build services to make money; we make money to build better services.
And we think this is a good way to build something. These days I think more and more people want to use services from companies that believe in something beyond simply maximizing profits.
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Facebook, Whatsapp Deal Articles
A couple of reads on the deal that I thought were interesting. Link to: Facebook buys Whatsapp for $19 billion: Value and Pricing Perspectives – by Aswath DamodaranThis week, I was at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth, talking about the difference...
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John Hussman On Facebook And Network Effects
I thought this section from John Hussman’s Weekly Market Commentwas worth breaking out separately, as it is an interesting take on the competitive advantages that come with network effects:“I really don't mean to pick on Facebook. It's a neat...
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Instagram’s Systrom Builds $1 Billion Application In Two Years
Silicon Valley is one of the few places where a 27-year-old Web entrepreneur can parlay a photo- sharing application with no known source of revenue into $1 billion -- in two years. Evidence of that came yesterday, when Facebook Inc. (FB) announced plans...
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Facebook Co-founder Mark Zuckerberg Opens Up
Found via Simoleon Sense.Today, at least one out of every fourteen people in the world has a Facebook account. Zuckerberg, meanwhile, is becoming the boy king of Silicon Valley. If and when Facebook decides to go public, Zuckerberg will become one of...
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Has It Come To This Again?
I first learned about WhatsApp a few months ago when a friend coming to Chicago from overseas asked me if I used the program so that we might avoid expensive international text messaging fees while coordinating our plans. Now, I'm generally a late...
Money and Finance