mark-zuckerberg
Facebook's Get-Rich-Quick Scheme
Owen Thomas · 02/26/09 02:50AMAspiring Male Model Left Suicide Note on Facebook
Owen Thomas · 02/20/09 05:30PMHow Mark Zuckerberg TOSsed Facebook Under the Bus
Owen Thomas · 02/18/09 02:29PMFacebook Gets the Fortune Cover Curse
Owen Thomas · 02/17/09 12:02PMFacebook's Value: $3.7 Billion and Dropping
Owen Thomas · 02/11/09 10:16PMFacebook Settlement Revealed by Incompetent Lawyers
Owen Thomas · 02/10/09 05:22PMThe Five Worst '50 Hottest Bachelors'
Hamilton Nolan · 02/09/09 12:47PMFacebook at 5: What the Future Holds
Owen Thomas · 02/04/09 07:30AMFacebook Founders Settle Their Feud
Owen Thomas · 01/30/09 06:44PMDo You Twitter? How Adorable
Owen Thomas · 12/23/08 02:23PM"I Love the '80s" star banned from Facebook
Owen Thomas · 12/18/08 05:29PMFacebook's new value: $1.3 billion?
Owen Thomas · 12/15/08 05:40PMFacebook Movie, Book Deals Confirmed By Fabricating Boston Author
Ryan Tate · 12/14/08 08:41PMWaPo chief's Facebook board seat a $2 billion consolation prize
Owen Thomas · 12/14/08 08:00PMDid Facebook cause the New Depression?
Owen Thomas · 12/09/08 03:20PMFacebook cancels employee stock sale
Owen Thomas · 12/04/08 07:20PMWhy Facebook wants to spam your News Feed
Owen Thomas · 12/01/08 12:00PMSocial networks have a lifecycle: They start with a small core of early adopters, swell as mainstream users get pulled in by their friends, and then see growth taper off as people get turned off by spam. That's why Friendster is forgotten and why MySpace is looking increasingly stagnant. The price for reaching an audience advertisers care about seems to be a site users can't stand. Facebook, however, isn't following the fashionable trend.
Is the great Facebook stock sale over?
Owen Thomas · 11/21/08 04:40PMThrough the golden heart of every world-changing startup pulses an avaricious get-rich-quick scheme. Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the billionaire-boy cofounders of Google, established this doing-well-by-doing-good myth. But Mark Zuckerberg hasn't been able to make the same magic happen for his employees. In his efforts to make good by them, he may end up quashing a nascent market in Facebook shares.It's not for lack of trying. Silicon Valley's stock-options millionaire make money by getting the right to buy shares at a low price and selling them for a higher one. Facebook's soaring valuation — Microsoft invested $240 million for a tiny stake, in a deal which valued all of Facebook at $15 billion — threatened to undo that equation. How is Facebook supposed to soar past $15 billion in value? So Zuckerberg & Co. turned to issuing restricted stock units, or RSUs, instead. (Restricted stock units are common at large companies like Google and Microsoft, but unusual for a company Facebook's size and age.) The restricted-stock plan has created a new complication: Once it has more than 500 RSU holders, SEC regulations may require Facebook to start publishing its financials, even if it doesn't conduct an initial public offering. Facebook's revenues still aren't pretty enough for public exposure. Facebook's lawyers have sought, and obtained, an exemption. Part of the argument they made is that issuing RSUs won't create a market in Facebook shares. Facebook, unusually for most of Silicon Valley's private companies, has not had many restrictions on what employees and other shareholders could do with the shares they own. Most have rules that force shareholders to offer shares to the company first — a right of first refusal — or outright prohibitions on unauthorized sales. But the letter Facebook sent to the SEC says that even when the stock units convert to common shares, they have limits on their sale: "... the Plan has been structured to preclude any trading of RSUs or any interest therein from developing." Even if Facebook permits an employee convert their stock units to shares and sell them, the company can then prevent the buyer from selling. Employees at Facebook — especially the early ones, whose holdings are now substantial — have been agitating for some time to sell their shares, and there are still, even with the public markets taking a beating, interested buyers. Zuckerberg finally bowed to this pressure and set up a program, now underway, to let employees cash out up to $900,000 in shares. (Note the symbolism of the figure: No one will become a millionaire.) But that may be it. If Facebook extends its stock-sale restrictions to common shares, not just the restricted-stock units, both employees and the investors so eager to snap up their shares will be stuck, until Facebook sells out or goes public. Zuckerberg has made it clear he thinks both of those events are far off — and the 24-year-old CEO still owns 27 percent of the company and more or less controls the board. It's a dicey gamble. The prospect of selling Facebook shares privately must surely have attracted some employees who counted on a relatively quick cash-out. But shutting down the prospect of further stock sales will make sure the Facebookers who remain will be more committed to the company for the long haul. Zuckerberg doesn't have much choice. As long as Facebook employees can find buyers for their shares, they'll be tempted to leave rather than stay at a company going through a tumultous adolescence. Already, the company has had far more turnover, from bottom to top, than Google did. Not a single high-ranking exec left Google for the first six years of its existence. Facebook has lost three of its four cofounders, and numerous people underneath them, from former COO Owen Van Natta on down. No wonder Zuckerberg wants to slam the exit door closed.
Mark Zuckerberg wants to know how you feel
Owen Thomas · 11/18/08 04:00PMWhy have social networks blossomed in as antisocial an environment as Silicon Valley? Because they allow computers to become a crutch for a task most engineers find imposing: dealing with other human beings. Turning relationships into a social graph that can be fed into a database and ruled by algorithms is a genius move for tech's clumsy savants. Alex French, a writer for GQ, interviewing Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg for a profile, wonders if his cold stare and cagey responses are an incredibly calculating attempt to intimidate, or merely a sign that he's awkward. Either way, Zuckerberg shows a disdain for displays of emotion. Asked if he celebrated Microsoft's $240 million investment in Facebook, Zuckerberg seems puzzled by the question's premise. And yet emotion is at the core of Zuckerberg's plan for world domination.In a conversation — conducted on instant messenger, the computer-moderated communications mode of choice for the socially impaired — Zuckerberg reveals that he hopes Facebook will one day broadcast its users very emotions. French probes him on this issue in the following exchange: