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At last,
Facebook has embarked on the path toward its IPO, the
ultimate Silicon Valley rite of passage and the end of a
company’s startup phase.
That
makes now a good time to stop and marvel at how far
Facebook has come in the eight years since a Harvard
student got the crazy notion that he could slap together
some code and build a better social network.
Facebook
has long since joined the pantheon of the most important
Web companies: Google. Amazon. EBay. Twitter. In some
ways it feels like it has surpassed them in terms of its
cultural dominance.
One can
feel it in the way Google, which long dominated the Web,
seems to be scrambling to reinvent itself to look more
like Facebook. On a grander stage, we see it in the way
various activists have cited it as a major factor in
their ability to organize a demonstration, a protest, a
boycott, a happening. Even a revolution or two.
In a
remarkable letter to investors that was released along
with the company’s IPO filing, co-founder and CEO Mark
Zuckerberg made clear that his ambitions for the company
have grown even loftier. His intention is to change the
world — personal relationships, economies, governments
— not the grubby business of making money. If he does
the first part, the second part will take care of
itself.
“We
think it’s important that everyone who invests in
Facebook understands what this mission means to us, how
we make decisions and why we do the things we do,”
Zuckerberg wrote. “Today, our society has reached
another tipping point. We live at a moment when the
majority of people in the world have access to the
Internet or mobile phones — the raw tools necessary to
start sharing what they’re thinking, feeling and doing
with whomever they want. Facebook aspires to build the
services that give people the power to share and help
them once again transform many of our core institutions
and industries.”
Grandiose,
yes. But pause to consider Facebook’s user statistics.
They are simply astonishing. The world has about 7
billion people. Of those, 2.1 billion are the Internet.
And of those, almost half are on Facebook: 845 million.
Considering about 500 million Internet users are in
China, and therefore blocked from using Facebook, it’s
fair to say that the company has just about saturated
the planet.
But the
company is not satisfied, writing in the IPO filing:
“There are more than two billion global Internet
users, according to an industry source, we aim to
connect all of them.”
Zuckerberg’s
shareholder letter says the company plans to meet that
goal by running the company in the same way that got it
to this point. Facebook, he writes, achieved success by
being a meritocracy, one that encourages rapid
experimentation with new features, an internal culture
he dubbed, “The Hacker Way.” The company, he says,
has made mistakes and will make more. But it will
continue to prize speed and change over the status quo.
“We
work hard at making Facebook the best place for great
people to have a big impact on the world and learn from
other great people,” Zuckerberg writes. “The vast
majority of hackers I’ve met tend to be idealistic
people who want to have a positive impact on the
world.”
Hard to
argue with the results so far. Indeed, it seems strange
to think that just a couple of years ago, many of us
were skeptics, asking, “Where’s the business
model?” With $1 billion in profits last year, Facebook
should quell any doubters.
Yet
despite this deep integration of Facebook into our
lives, the social network also occupies a strange place
in the Silicon Valley. It never really enjoyed a
honeymoon period, unlike say Google, and in fact it is
decidedly uncool to love Facebook. The taste makers have
moved on to champion more obscure social darlings, like
Path and Pinterest.
And there
are plenty of people here and around the world who
dismiss Facebook as a narcissistic cesspool of trivial
updates.
With its
increasing dominance has come both greater success and
greater scrutiny. Every design change, every new feature
is subject to almost reflexive howls of outrage and
protests. But it’s worth noting that these fits of
disdain indicate both the level of responsibility the
company must now shoulder, and how vital it has become
in our everyday digital lives.
In its
filing, Facebook noted: “We also have posted the
phrase ‘this journey is 1 percent finished’ across
many of our office walls, to remind employees that we
believe that we have only begun fulfilling our mission
to make the world more open and connected.”
Perhaps.
But it will be hard for the next 99 percent to match the
astonishment, impact and transformation of the first 1
percent.
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