Becoming Facebook: The 10 Challenges That Defined the Company That’s Disrupting the World

274 Pages·2017·2.93 MB·English

by  Mike Hoefflinger

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Becoming
Facebook
Becoming
Facebook
The 10 Challenges That Defined
the Company Disrupting the World
Mike Hoefflinger
To makers and builders everywhere.
Everyone risking failure one more time.
And everyone tempted to.
Start today. Don’t ever stop.
Contents
Preface
Part 1 Setting the Scene
1: The Bell Tolls: Half the company it used to be
2: Finding Your Inner Zuck: Everything at Facebook starts with Mark
Zuckerberg, but it doesn’t end there
Part 2 10 Challenges on the Road from Also-Ran to
Juggernaut
3: How Facebook Turned Down $1 Billion
LESSON 1: Know whether this is your next thing or your last thing.
4: How Facebook Became Your Lens on the World
LESSON 2: Add by subtracting.
5: How Facebook Grows . . . and Grows
LESSON 3: Know your North Star Metric, Magic Moment and Core
Product Value.
6: How Facebook Built a $10 Billion Business in Three Years
LESSON 4: Everybody wins if you democratize something for customers
of all sizes.
7: How Facebook Goes Fast
LESSON 5: Speed is a feature.
8: How Facebook Beat Google
LESSON 6: Crossing the chasm is the best defense.
9: How Facebook Became More Than Facebook
LESSON 7: Disrupt yourself before someone else does.
10: How Facebook Plays the Long Game
LESSON 8: Some long games are worth playing if you take care of
business in the meantime.
11: How Facebook Wins the Talent Wars
LESSON 9: Employee engagement is everything. Fit to people’s
strengths and ignore weaknesses.
12: How Facebook Became the Biggest of the Big
LESSON 10: Care more.
Part 3 The Future
13: Messaging Becomes the Medium: Two more giant apps and an
artificial intelligence based on trillions of pieces of data.
14: Connecting the Next Billion People: The most questionable business
decision for the best reasons.
15: “Transporting” a Billion of Us with VR and AR: Building the last
screen.
16: What If Facebook “Wins”? Reknitting the Pangea of the mind.
Part 4 Parting Thoughts
17: Failure Isn’t: Facebook doesn’t always hit it out of the park, and
that’s a good thing.
18: Nothing Lasts Forever? No technology company is immune to
disruption.
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
About the Author
Free Sample Chapter from Extreme Teams
Other Best-Sellers from Amacom
Preface
In 2009, Mark Zuckerberg was immortalized in Ben Mezrich’s Accidental
Billionaires—a book that starts with the sentence, “It was probably the third
cocktail that did the trick” and served as Aaron Sorkin’s source material for the
movie The Social Network—as a morally dubious, socially awkward coder
mostly motivated by meeting girls. Facebook, with just 150 million users at the
beginning of 2009 and coming off a year with only $270 million in revenue, was
considered as uncertain a business as MySpace, which was still the largest social
network in the United States.
By the end of 2015, Zuckerberg was feted as one of the greatest CEOs and
philanthropists ever, Sheryl Sandberg as not only a model COO but a leading
light and voice in equality, and Facebook as a company as respectable—and
deserving of credit for changing the world—as Google and Apple. They had
grown the number of people who used Facebook by 15 times, become the home
to four of the world’s top six communication tools (three of which serve more
than a billion users monthly), increased their market value by 30 times to over
$300 billion and their revenue over 60 times to nearly $18 billion annually.
This book is the story of what happened in those seven years and what
may happen in the next ten. From the inside. Facebook’s coming-of-age as
one of the world’s great companies.
As for me, I’m a builder. Have been since 1981 when I got my first Apple ][
computer. Maybe the only thing I love more than building is to observe great
builders. So it’s no accident I’m on my second stint in Silicon Valley. The first
one was back in 1978 when my dad was on a sabbatical at UC Berkeley and
we’d drive around the pre-PC, pre-Internet, pre-iPhone valley and visit Texas
Instruments to see their brand-new Speak’n’Spell toy in the lab. The second
started in 1990. Twenty-five years later, I’m still here.
I had the good fortune to be at Intel to work on the first microprocessor to
have a name and to see the PC take the world by storm in the early 1990s. To
work for Andy Grove when the Internet emerged, and we would visit Google’s
Larry Page and Sergey Brin and their ping-pong table boardroom in Palo Alto,
Amazon’s Jeff Bezos in a converted hospital building in Seattle, and
Loudcloud’s Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz in an industrial park in
Sunnyvale—a decade before they would come to be known simply as venture
capital firm a16z. To work for Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg as they
built some of the most influential services of the tectonic mobile shift.
As general manager of the Intel Inside program, I had already been a
customer of Sandberg’s for a year by the time the two of us sat down in a coffee
shop in downtown Palo Alto in the fall of 2008 to talk about my joining her team
building Facebook’s fledgling advertising business. Long story short, Sandberg
was very convincing, and seven years later the team had grown Facebook’s
advertising business by more than 60 times to $18 billion annually, and I had
built the global branding, positioning, communication, consulting, and consumer
insights teams, for that business who were made up of—as was every team at
Facebook—hundreds of the best people in the world in each of their roles
looking to make their contribution to Facebook’s mission of making the world
more open and connected.
It was always intense and never easy, but the story of how Zuckerberg,
Sandberg, and Facebook’s teams built a business of real consequence—to go
along with the largest mobile consumer services in the world—is one of the all-
time great Silicon Valley stories. I’m grateful to have been a part of it and
thrilled to write it down and share it with you.
I’m not a journalist like Michael Lewis (Moneyball) or a professor like
Clayton Christensen (The Innovator’s Dilemma), but I am a builder and an
observer.
I built with Sheryl and Mark and their 10,000 closest friends.
And these are my observations.
Mike Hoefflinger
Los Altos, California
October 2016