'One-trick pony' Zuckerberg yet to prove CEO worth
Show me the money... bitch
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Mark Zuckerberg’s CEO abilities are glorified and the Facebook boydroid is yet to prove his worth, according to IT analyst house Forrester.
George Colony wrote on his 'The Counterintuitive CEO' blog yesterday that Zuckerberg was “a one-trick pony – a leader who has expertly refined and polished one very, very big idea – remaining unproven beyond the borders of that idea.”
In recent months Zuckerberg’s media profile has rocketed with the release of David Fincher’s Hollywood movie The Social Network, which the Harvard drop-out has largely dismissed as a fictitious account of Facebook’s early years.
Furthermore, the Zuck one leapfrogged Apple boss Steve Jobs in September to become one of Forbes’s wealthiest Americans, taking the number 35 spot in the top 100 list.
It said the 26-year-old had a net worth of $6.9bn, of which $4bn was dropped into his piggy bank this year.
But, as pointed out by Colony, he’s not actually worthy of such accolades yet.
“The great CEOs in technology navigate their companies through product change, brutal competitive threats, shifts in architecture, and highly fickle customers,” he wrote.
“Steve Jobs is not important because he had one creative moment. He is important because his creativity has yielded important products across three generations of customers and four unique generations of computing.”
At present the valuation of Facebook is “irrational” said Colony, because the world is still waiting for Zuckerberg to turn his business into a “monetary engine”.
The young upstart has a long way to go by Colony’s reckoning. Zuckerberg could yet become a CEO as respected as Amazon’s Jeff Bezos or else he might simply turn out to be more like Yahoo!’s Jerry Yang. In other words, a chief whipping boy for the Web2.0 generation. ®
COMMENTS
Speculation vs investment
Facebook is only worth what one bunch of stupid greedy tossers think another bunch of even more stupid greedy tossers might pay for it. It's effectively formed its own mini dot.com bubble. Best bit is, the most stupid greediest tossers will lose out when it inevitably falls apart. Huzzah!
Magic
Because advertising is like throwing money to the wind, advertisers demand as much detailed information they can get about what they're spending on. Zuckerberg's magic is to collect the astonishingly detailed minutiae of some half a billion individuals' habits and flog them for targeted advertising. That's why nothing you do on Facebook is private, and that's why Zuckerberg is thought to be worth a fortune.
So far, it's working, as evidenced by recent claims that Facebook places more ads than any other US web advertising medium. Whether it continues to work depends on how much revenue those ads generate for (a) Facebook and (b) the advertisers.
Whether it works for Zuckerberg in person depends on whether he can keep up his momentously successful image long enough to sell his shareholding for what he wants investors to think it's worth. It could go either way, because investors aren't anything like as shrewd as they like to think they are, which is exactly why we've sunk into a global financial crisis.
As for Zuckerberg's capabilities as a CEO, anyone who makes enough cash to get into a Forbes list is bound to be held in immensely high esteem ... by the same investors.
Isn't his worth what's "agreed"?
He still retains x% shareholding of Facepalm.
AppGooSoft have offered a gazzilion apples for y% of Facepalm.
Therefore x% is worth a bajillion oranges.
...
Profit!
Or something.
Where's the IT angle in all this?
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