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Finding Your Inner Zuck

Everything at Facebook starts with Mark
Zuckerberg, but it doesn’t end there

To tell any Facebook story, you have to first put its lead—Mark Zuckerberg—on stage and give him some context. A path to walk, and a reason to walk it. A tribe to belong to. An origin story from a time before the movie, the hacker’s den in Palo Alto and the Harvard dorm room that hints at how this kid from the comfortable embrace of a close, upper-middle-class American family in the leafy Hudson Valley suburb of Dobbs Ferry 20 miles north of New York City would possibly become a global connector whose work may mean more to people in places like Africa, Southeast Asia, Columbia, Egypt and India than it does even to those in the United States.

Steve Jobs, the patron saint of standout CEOs, during his memorable June 2005 Stanford University commencement address, said, “You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward.”

Looking backward through Zuckerberg’s life, we see what Jobs meant: the mission to make the world more open and connected has stayed the same for Zuckerberg since the very beginning, he has simply pursued it at an ever larger scope. A scope so large by now that even he—by his own admission—could not have foreseen it in the beginning.

So we go back to that beginning. To the split-level home on that leafy corner of Russell Place and Northfields Avenue in Dobbs Ferry and a pre-teen Zuckerberg—fresh off having been taught programming basics by his dad—building a simple messaging program dubbed ZuckNet to connect the six Zuckerbergs and the computers in their house with those in his dad’s dentist office attached to the house (the Painless Dr. Z they called him in Dobbs Ferry).

Connecting beyond Zuckerberg’s childhood home is a story of motive and opportunity. Motive because that house was separated from Ardsley High School and his friends by a valley with 10 lanes of traffic in the form of the Saw Mill River Parkway and Interstate 87. And opportunity because Zuckerberg, born in 1984, was an early Millennial growing up in an upper-middle-class suburb, making him a member of the first demographic to have computers and the consumer-accessible Internet throughout their teens, allowing them to feel connected all the time, independent of physical barriers and distances, and to build things on top of that connectivity. Zuckerberg has become a global connector not despite his somewhat privileged upbringing but precisely because of it.

To be sure, the Saw Mill River Valley is no DMZ, no border fence, no cultural, economic, political or religious barrier, but it nevertheless drove home for Zuckerberg the power and potential of digital connectedness. And, while he—like all of us—would use search engines to navigate information on the Internet, he realized in those early days that there was no such tool for people. The origins of Zuckerberg as a leader and of Facebook as a company lie in those twin realizations.

But first came CourseMatch, a system that put the social and academic interests of the Harvard community online so students could know more about prospective classmates. Shortly after followed a site with 500 images of Roman art history, shared with the rest of the students in his class to pool notes in order to study for a final exam (on which the students proceeded to get historically high grades). With FaceMash a few months later, he pushed both his development (based on downloading student’s pictures after hacking into data on nine of Harvard’s 12 houses via local networks or the Internet) and the site’s social interactions (asking users to rate the looks of others students) beyond the lines of good taste, copyright law and privacy, landing himself on probation with Harvard and in need of having to apologize to campus women’s groups. Without the misstep of FaceMash, however, which taught Zuckerberg not only to respect privacy but to make controlled data sharing a central feature, it is much less likely that he would have launched thefacebook.com at Harvard the way he did in February 2004.

Having conquered Harvard, U.S. universities followed. Then high school students. Then all Americans. Through translations, Facebook expanded to dozens of—and eventually to more than a hundred—countries (more on all this in Chapter 5). Not satisfied with connecting people in just one way, Facebook developed Messenger and acquired Instagram and WhatsApp (more in Chapters 9 and 13). With their fastest growing app ever, Facebook Lite, they began to support all those around the world who can scarcely afford occasional Internet access, and with efforts including satellites, drones the size of 737s and lasers, they are now looking to connect even the unconnected (more in Chapter 14).

Every journey of connecting billions starts with connecting the first six in your own house. Zuckerberg has simply not stopped since. Looking back, it’s no exaggeration to say that the 32-year-old has been working to make the world more open and connected for more than two decades.

Member of a Very Small Group

During those two decades, he has become a member of a very small group of people who run consumer technology companies that invent the future for us, create the things we cannot live without, and touch hundreds of millions and sometimes billions of lives. Abstract people that, like Beyoncé or Batman, go by a single name: Grove, Jobs, Bezos, Hastings, Page, Zuckerberg, Musk. They become someone we seemingly cannot know, so we settle for the media—and in very special cases, Aaron Sorkin—possibly explaining them to us in oversimplified shorthand: paranoid, mercurial, focused, renegade, cerebral, socially awkward visionary.

They built the microprocessors in our computers and then had the audacity to make us care about what was “inside.” Triggered the advent of the personal computer and ushered in the most sweeping change in consumer technology ever with the iPhone. Built us a store for everything after starting with books out of a garage. Made us “feel lucky” with the quality of search results and launched an operating system now used by 80% of smartphones. Let us watch what we wanted when we wanted and first beat Blockbuster and then traditional television itself. Wrote down a three-step plan to building the first new public American car company to be founded in a century, proceeded to build the best-selling car in its category—which just happened to be electric—and then received nearly 400,000 preorders for a car that didn’t exist. Connected a billion people a day and considered it just a beginning.

They are very unique but have three profound similarities (beside the regrettable fact that they are all white men, an important subject for an entire collection of books that still need to be written beyond Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In):

1. They have the will to keep acting on an “achievable-unachievable” mission: Because they aim for long-term change at large scale, they are doubted, mocked and eventually competed with. Consistently leading progress toward things that do not yet exist in the face of opposition from the outside—and complexity on the inside—may wear down more ordinary leaders, but not this tribe. Steve Jobs’ biggest breakthrough in “building tools for the mind that advance humankind” came thirty years after his first. Jeff Bezos is in his third decade of building “earth’s most customer-centric company.” Kids born the year Larry Page started “organizing the world’s information and making it universally accessible” will be waiting for college acceptance letters this year. Zuckerberg (“make the world more open and connected”) and Elon Musk (“accelerate the advent of sustainable transport”) are just getting warmed up in the second decades of their missions.

The notion of mission had its defining moment in front of the U.S. Congress on May 25, 1961, when the newly elected John F. Kennedy proposed that “this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to earth.” Sadly, the vast majority of corporate versions—the thing we feel compelled to have but dread writing—dramatically undershoot the “stirring (wo)men’s souls” bar of Kennedy’s moonshot. Only a tiny few have gone on to exceed it. Not satisfied with merely setting a decade-long goal, these “achievable-unachievable” missions are so big they may never be fully realized but allow for victories along the way to sustain the confidence of both their purveyors and consumers. They attract talent and define company culture at all moments, not just the quarterly all-hands and annual shareholders meeting. (You don’t have a great mission until people are saying it to each other voluntarily, and you definitely don’t have a great mission if it still includes the words “revenue,” “profit” or “shareholders.”)

2. They are “clever-foolish” visionaries: They see things others cannot. Or, better yet, that others dismiss. Foolish ideas are a race to nowhere. Clever ideas that everyone can see are a food fight. The ideas that matter far above all others are clever but considered foolish until it’s too late for the competition to react.

How hard is it to be clever-foolish? You have to see it before anyone else does, have the confidence to move forward without hesitation amid great uncertainty, build it before anyone else can and then do it all over again if you want to ensure your advantage because even clever ideas that are originally considered foolish eventually reveal themselves. You have to see the opportunity for microprocessors that would go on to make the consumer-scale Internet possible for both PCs and servers two decades before the first web browser. For a consumer-ready computer in 1977, when there was no demand for such a thing. For Internet-based e-commerce in 1994, when consumers thought it was nuts to give out their credit card number on the Internet. For a service named Netflix in 1997 (when we were driving to thousands of Blockbuster stores) that intended to eventually deliver television over the Internet. For a better search engine in 1999 when Yahoo! completely dominated that category. For a social network that connects billions in 2004 when the leaders in the category had a few million users. For a single piece of glass in your pocket connected to everyone everywhere in 2007 when those devices all had physical keyboards and sold a few million high-end units a year. And for an electric car better than everything in its category in 2012 after many decades of abject failure for that very product from the world’s biggest carmakers.

3. They foster product-centric Medici Academies that attract the best builders: The success of the kinds of missions they pursue depends on the quality of their products, and that depends on the quality of the people building those products and the means and urgency with which they are building them. These leaders have a very strong point of view about what makes a better future, and they make the time to recruit the best and to work directly with them to create that future.

Five hundred years before Silicon Valley—around 1450—Florentine patriarch Cosimo de Medici began to build facilities, bestow patronage and host Platonic discussion societies for the brightest minds of Renaissance Florence, a practice that continued to flourish as Cosimo’s grandson Lorenzo came into power in 1469—at the age of twenty (roughly Zuckerberg’s age when he started Facebook)—and ruled until 1492. The Medicis would host and enable the most talented “makers” of their time (including Michelangelo, DaVinci and Botticelli), create supporting resources (such as the Medici Library), set and pursue a vision (humanism, a focus on human agency and science over “revelation”) and forward-invest in infrastructure (including architectural commissions).

The reason Silicon Valley’s giants are doing the same now is that although people are a company’s greatest assets, a more subtle truth is that its very best people are its disproportionately greatest asset. Steve Jobs has said a great maker is 25 times more valuable than an average one. Zuckerberg has said the difference is 100 times. Marc Andreessen thinks five great makers are worth 1,000 average ones. And Bill Gates once said they were 10,000 times more valuable. Even though each of them has acknowledged that their assessments are not scientific, they make it clear how strongly these legendary leaders feel about attracting the best talent.

Jeff Bezos, in his 2016 letter to Amazon shareholders, captured the outsized impact of this effect on business:

The difference between baseball and business, is that baseball has a truncated outcome distribution. When you swing, no matter how well you connect with the ball, the most runs you can get is four. In business, every once in a while, when you step up to the plate, you can score 1,000 runs. This long-tailed distribution of returns is why it’s important to be bold.

It’s impossible to be bold without the best people, and for the very best people, it’s not a matter of where they can work but where they want to work. Where can they do what engages them most—keeping in mind that, for these “outlier makers,” their efforts are often driven by an emotion deeper than engagement and closer to compulsion—and what has the biggest likelihood of impact on people and the world?

So there it is: “all” you need to be incredibly successful is a clever-foolish visionary with the will to keep acting on his or her achievable-unachievable mission who fosters a product-centric Medici Academy. The members of this group are as valuable as they are rare. As of May 2016, four of the world’s six most valuable companies have this kind of leader: Apple (1st), Alphabet (2nd), Facebook (5th), Amazon (6th). And only eight of them have operated in consumer technology in the last forty years: Grove, Jobs, Bezos, Hastings, Page, Zuckerberg, Musk and Uber CEO Travis Kalanick.

That’s why you would have given fleeting odds to the kid from Dobbs Ferry joining this group, but join it he has, especially if you can see him in action inside “MPK,” the shorthand for Facebook’s headquarters in Menlo Park, California.

What Can We Learn from Zuck?

Watching Zuckerberg, however, you’re left wondering—as you would be with all Time magazine Persons of the Year—how you could possibly emulate him. It would be nearly impossible to learn to do what Zuckerberg does: vision and intuition are hard to coach.

We can, however, learn from how he does it. Zuckerberg is entirely, consistently, matter-of-factly committed to Facebook’s mission. He is out to create change, not to prove himself right or others wrong. To do this—to really do this—you have to not only see a great destination, you have to fearlessly and imperviously keep walking toward it. You will look naive and even arrogant to outside observers, and you may be branded delusional—or even “socially dysfunctional” (thanks, Aaron Sorkin)—for appearing not to react to their signals. If you are able to shake off these judgments—and it will feel personal at times—you may be ready for the hard part, and the key to finding your inner Zuck: doing is better than dogma.

Although Zuckerberg is as passionate about his mission as anyone, he is not a preacher but a doer. Both inside Facebook and publicly, he prefers to show rather than tell. Since ZuckNet, with the original development of thefacebook.com, and ever since, he has done the work while others have watched or waited or done both.

To show Facebook employees what the “What would you do if you weren’t afraid?” posters around campus mean to him, he took billions of dollars of risk to expand connectivity around the world, acquired Instagram and WhatsApp to protect Facebook’s future after spending years building personal relationships with their CEOs, and occasionally failed publicly with products for which he had strongly advocated (here’s looking at you, Facebook Home).

Although he is the recognized leader of technology’s younger generation, he continues to seek out the leaders that came before him, meeting with Andy Grove about the will to execute, with Jeff Bezos about keeping your eyes on the long term, and with Bill Gates about effective philanthropy with tens of billions of dollars. Even though he structurally controls Facebook’s board of directors, he still recruited challenging and highly opinionated thought leaders like entrepreneur, venture capitalist and software-eats-the-world evangelist Marc Andreessen; PayPal mafia kingpin, venture capitalist, futurist and contrarian Peter Thiel; Netflix CEO and old-world television slayer Reed Hastings; and Don Graham, the former owner of The Washington Post.

To advance human potential, he doesn’t just teach in Menlo Park primary schools. He and his wife (San Francisco pediatrician Priscilla Chan)—who were already among the most prolific and youngest philanthropists ever at the time¹—marked the birth of their first daughter Max in 2015 by pledging 99% of their Facebook holdings (worth $45 billion at the time) to their Chan Zuckerberg Initiative dedicated to driving equality and human potential in the world. It is one of the most profound philanthropic efforts ever announced—as if Bill and Melinda Gates had launched their highly impactful foundation while Gates was still the young CEO of Microsoft—and emblematic of Zuckerberg’s learn-faster ethos and inclination to take a risk and determine the best future course sooner rather than later.

To mature into an industry statesperson, he has gone from being the teenager who made regrettable comments about user privacy that emerged in the Winkelvoss trial and showed up at a meeting with venture capitalists in his pajamas to meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping, speaking at the United Nations on global Internet connectivity and hosting Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, all within a few days in September 2015.

To broaden and deepen his perspective on the world in the middle of Facebook’s historic rise to global influence, during his 2015 A Year of Books, he read a book every two weeks (including the likes of Vaclav Smil’s Energy: A Beginner’s Guide, Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson’s Why Nations Fail, Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness and Daryl Collins, Jonathan Morduch, Stuart Rutherford and Orlanda Ruthven’s Portfolios of the Poor: How the World’s Poor Live on $2 a Day) and actively discussed them with the nearly 700,000 followers of the project.

To get closer to both his own extended family—Chan’s grandparents are Chinese—and the culture and business of the world’s most populous market, he spent five years learning Mandarin and then used it in conversations with Chinese politicians and for entire lectures at Tsinghua University in China where he is a member of the Advisory Board of the School of Economics and Management.

To show why he felt the new Facebook Live video product was so valuable, he hosted the likes of President Barack Obama, comedian Jerry Seinfeld and the astronauts of the International Space Station on his own Facebook account—with its 70 million fans—and got more viewers than the vast majority of television shows.

And to face his discomfort with public speaking, he instituted in 2008 a weekly company-wide Q&A—he prefers the hard questions—which to this day remains the heart of Facebook’s culture.

Just when we thought Steve Jobs’ famous reality distortion field would be the standard by which all future change-makers would be measured, Zuckerberg offers us an approach that may look slightly awkward to the average observer but gives up nothing to Jobs in its effectiveness. Zuckerberg’s doing does more for getting what he holds dear to jump from him to others at Facebook—and beyond—than any keynote. His Facebook is less a “cult of personality” (he is no Jobs, Oprah Winfrey or Bill Clinton) reliant—and waiting—on a single person than it is a “cult of mission” where employees (down to the intern shipping code for a hundred million users in her first week), partners (entire new media companies like Vice and Buzzfeed have been built on Facebook’s distribution) and users (from Egyptian activists to Vin Diesel and his 100 million fans to Southeast Asian micro businesses reinventing commerce, and from the joy of Chewbacca Mom to the profound fear of Diamond Reynolds) can see Zuckerberg’s example and feel not only part of a community but like they can make contributions that may change the world.