The Strange Story Of “Faceless Book”
Friday, June 1st, 2012 by admin | Posted in Unconventional Thinking | Comments
So this Harvard coding geek agrees to program an idea for an electronic yearbook\gossip board, the thing strikes a chord, Hollywood brings it to mythical status, Wall Street rings the bell and the media swoons because the billionaire founder claims to hate money. (The so-called ”press” adores capitalists who profess to be disgusted by Adam Smith).
I’m not sure whose idea the yearbook was — Hollywood wants us to detest the rich twins– but that’s not the real issue here. What is fascinating is that if Jonas Salk took his polio vaccination public when it first proved itself in the 1950’s, the miracle drug that has saved generations of children from that crippling disease, would have met with a relative yawn compared to Zuckerberg’s media darling of a half-baked business that will go the way of My Space and Friendster in what, two years? Max.
At the same time that “The (Face)Book” went public with all the hoopla of the practical application of an immortality pill, a real business put a privately owned rocket into space. That genuine entrepreneurs with NASA brains forged a new frontier at precisely the same time the president of the United States decided that America should no longer lead in space — that we should be forced to beg for hitchhiker status with Russia, China or best of all his buddy Hugo Chavez–hardly made news. Why? The brains behind the rocket will make the Surrender-In-Chief look like a fool and unlike the Zuck-the-Reluctant-Billionaire, they admit to a profit motive.
The fact is, business is serious stuff. For the millions of men and women running, fueling, financing, risking the small businesses that run our economy, employ our people, give birth to our innovations, pay our taxes….there is no fanfare. No headlines. No multi-billion dollar paydays based on flawed and fleeting business models.
For the legion of companies that make America tick, it is a life’s work, an entrepreneur’s passion, a slow build, an organic growth that provides a space for people to flourish in, to test life, to fail and succeed, to build wealth, to provide a proud, independent, frontier-like alternative to a desk job and a rubber stamp at the All States of the world.
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June 1st, 2012 at 11:38 am
Weird how a guy like you who is so pro entrepeneurs and always talking about the lack of initiative, has the need to attack FB simply because its CEO has (Or may have) different motives and motivations then your old skool Wall Street focused entrepeneur.
I suggest you look at the Scandinavian mentality of doing business which is (in my humble opinion) very much like Zuckerberg’s mentality and open up to what may be a new generation of entrepenuers.
A generation who isn’t necessarily driven by optimizing profits or just money, but who just want to build great, useful companies. And then you may realize this is what business was like before Wall Street fucked it up: one guy or a bunch of people creating value for an audience and getting paid for it in return.
And then ask yourself the question what the value is of this privatly owned rocket, other then for those handful of billionaires who may use it just to have a great weekend that they can brag about at their glof club.
If you’d ask me, I would bet you that Facebook will be around longer then this space company. And for all the right reasons. Just because you can or because it has never done before, doesn’t mean it has value.
June 1st, 2012 at 12:22 pm
Brilliant post. In an age where most have forgotten the true foundations of capitalism (and it’s results), this was indeed refreshing.
Thanks.
June 1st, 2012 at 3:50 pm
Kurt, you sound so … well … curt or better said, naive. There’s an article you should read titled, “The Power of Cool” http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/300700/power-cool-victor-davis-hanson?pg=2. This might enlighten you a bit.
Brent I’m with you!
Carry on Mr. Stevens, you’re a beacon and my respect for you immense.
Always, abundant thanks!
Elena
June 1st, 2012 at 4:54 pm
Mark,
Great insight. The real achievement was SpaceX’s, a private business, launch of a payload to the International Space Station. As a retired “rocket engineer”, I can attest to the enormity of the challenge and achievement.
Government regulation is crushing business, quietly like a constrictor, but surely. A cautionary tale for the nation comes to us from aerospace.
In the early 1950s, Lockheed Martin’s Skunkworks under the leadership of Kelly Johnson, and without all of the government regulations, designed and built the first U2 in less than a year. Twenty of them were sold to the government at a total price of $20 million. That $1 million each would be $10 million each in today’s dollars.
Boeing just won a decade long competition to build a refueling tanker for the Air Force. It will take them most of another decade to build and deliver the first one. That’s 15-20 years to deliver the first aircraft, compared with less than 1 year. Their price is $1.2 billion each, which is about 60x what the U2 cost in inflation adjusted dollars.
That is what government interference does to an industry. The moral of it all is the prosperity does not lie in the direction of more government.
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June 5th, 2012 at 2:49 pm
Elena,
By no means did I meant to be curt, and what you define as naive, I would rather call open minded. Or perhaps a different perspective.
As a marketer, working for a large US based global corporation, living in Norway, I’m exposed to many different cultures, including the American. And I’m always surprised how other ways of doing successful business and different cultures are being dismissed or patronized here, again in Mark’s last post about France.
Yes, America has been a fantastic partner for a lot of countries in the past, I’m just concerned that clinging on to the old skool way of doing things may hurt you going forward. I believe a bit of open mindedness (is that a word?) for other countries successes would be beneficial for the US to remain a leading country in the world.
So maybe my opinion comes across curt or naive because I’m from another part of the world and have a different view based on my upbringing, that doesn’t mean my intentions are different.