The Facebook Effect Part 2

The second part to The Facebook Effect by David Kirkpatrick was very interesting. Starting with chapter 5, Kirkpatrick details the impressive financial offers by wealthy venture capitalists of the west coast. The portrayal of the battle of loyalty between Accel and The Post was very intriguing and quite astonishing. (Kirkpatrick 116) I don’t really know too much about venture capitalism, but reading chapter 5 opened my eyes to how risky these people really are. For a company that was less than 2 years old to be getting offers in the millions was very very impressive. How did these venture capitalists know what they were getting themselves into? And how did they know that facebook was going to be so big? Companies usually take decades to build their capital up to the millions but facebook did it in such a short amount of time. Towards the end of chapter I read that Accel, being the bigger firm, eventually got the deal over The Post and valued facebook at 80 million.

I have already seen the movie The Social Network, and therefore know the brief history of Facebook. So, I find it really interesting when I find conflicting information, or information was wasn’t seeing in the theaters. In the movie, Zuckerberg is portrayed as a cocky intellectual with all the right answers with a fearless attitude. However, Kirkpatrick displays several points where Zuckerberg was scared and frightened – breaking down in tears. Kirkpatrick explains “he did agree to start seeing n executive coach to get lessons on how to be an effective leader.” (Kirkpatrick 164)

Zuckerberg eventually was receiving offers at 1.5 billion dollars. Even at this point, Zuckerberg refuse to even glance at these documents. What I find impressive about Zuckerberg, and account him tremendous success is his composure when it came to big business deals. He knew that the money was going to be coming, but he continued to focus his success on the opportunities, and not the money. I also found it cool how facebook was recruiting employees from established corporate giants. In fact, facebook was actually taking employees from other giant computer companies such as Amazon and Google. Of course this is when facebook was beginning to make a name for it, but I still found it extraordinary that in the public eye, facebook was beginning to make a good, long-term name for itself in terms of employment.