Interesting Snippets

Zuckerberg didn’t just wait. He obsessively learned what being a CEO was about. He surrounded himself by people who had strengths he didn’t and absorbed from them like a sponge. Unlike nearly every other Internet wunderkind who came before him, he didn’t hire the grown-up to run the company. He became the grown-up to run the company.

There are a lot of reasons Larry Page envies Mark Zuckerberg these days. But the pre-IPO Page would most definitely envy his ability to hold onto the reins, experience and age be damned.

Since 2006, I’ve argued that Facebook is not the prototypical Web 2.0 company: It’s an outlier. It’s one of those companies that comes along every decade or so and does more than just create wealth and jobs and a product we can’t live without. It changes the very nature of what it means to be a startup. It innovates not only on whatever product it is taking to market– it innovates the idea of what a startup is.

There’ve been several of these throughout Valley history: Shockley Labs, Fairchild Semiconductor, HP, Intel, Silicon Graphics, Oracle, Netscape, eBay, Cisco, Google are some of the major ones. Each has in its own way changed the game.