Questions (support your answers using outside resources, such as articles or books)

1. How important is intelligence compared to social skills in most organizations?

2. Was Mark's success accidental? Why or why not?

3. Do you have to be as smart as Mark Zuckerberg to start a successful company? Why or why not?

Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook: Intelligence or Social Skills?

Facebook has become a social networking phenomenon. It has hundreds of millions of members. Not bad for an organization founded as recently as 2004. And it made its key founder, Mark Zuckerberg, rich. With the successful initial public offering of stock (IPO) in May 2012, he's now worth over $19 billion. So what skills and traits enabled Mark to make Facebook such a success?

Because Facebook is a social networking site, you might think that its founder had outstanding social skills. Perhaps a keen social awareness helped Mark recognize the need for a social networking site and understand what features would promote social interactions. But according to The Accidental Billionaires (Mezrich, 2009), Mark was a shy Harvard computer geek who would stand alone in a corner during parties and social networking events.

And Mark's social awareness may not have been particularly keen: He gained infamy (and a disciplinary hearing resulting in probation) by creating a website that allowed people to compare and rate Harvard coeds on attractiveness. As Mezrich (2009) observed, this didn't help Mark's chances of ever getting a date with a Harvard coed.

On the other hand, Mark was a computer genius of the highest order. While still in high school, he invented a program called Synapse that enabled MP3 players to know a person's musical tastes and to create tailored playlists. At Harvard, he created a program called Course Match that let Harvard students check what classes other students were enrolled in. And it was Mark's technical knowledge and genius that allowed him to triumph over the dozens of other competitors that were also trying to create social networking sites. Some of these competitors were at Harvard at the same time as Mark.

For example, identical twins Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss were at the top of the social hierarchy at Harvard as popular athletes from a rich family (they later competed as rowers in the Olympics and finished sixth), and at six feet five inches, they were literally big men on campus. They wanted to start a social networking site at Harvard, and although they had some computer skills, they didn't have the programming brilliance necessary to finish their site.

Consequently, they had tried to get Mark Zuckerberg to join them as their programmer (they later sued Mark by claiming that he had stolen their ideas and delayed the start of their website by pretending to be working with them when he was really creating his own competing website - they won around $65 million). Mark's genius also gave him the upper hand in dealing with his former friend and cofounder of Facebook, Eduardo Saverin. Eduardo had the social skills necessary to gain admittance into one of the most prestigious social clubs at Harvard, the Phoenix, which hosted the best parties, whereas Mark, alas, was not invited to join.

Eduardo joined in the creation of Facebook as its business manager in charge of raising advertising dollars and handling business issues; he also contributed the initial several thousand dollars necessary to start the company. However, because Mark's programming genius was the key to success, he had the majority of the company's initial stock, with Eduardo holding 30% (some other cofounders also owned some stock). When mark and Eduardo argued over business decisions and investment strategies, Mark and the other cofounders removed Eduardo from the management team and diluted his share of ownership of the company to about 5% through some legal maneuvers and by issuing more stock.

Result: another lawsuit with at least a partial victory for Eduardo (dollar amounts not revealed). But mark still retained firm control of the company. Eduardo made about $2 billion in the Facebook IPO, so he's still a winner.

It is possible that The Accidental Billionaires (Mezrich, 2009) underestimated Mark's social skills and interpersonal leadership ability. Mark had a large network of friends and fellow computer hackers that he communicated with over the internet before he founded Facebook. Mark also knew how to generate excitement among his fellow programmers. When interviewing potential interns at Harvard for Facebook, Mark threw a big party with drinking contests and shouting spectators. The contests? Solving computer problems in between taking shots. If you've seen the TV series Chuck, you've witnessed members of the NerdHerd staging similar contests to celebrate their technical prowess.

Why should the jocks have all the fun? And Mark was able to convince a core group of Harvard students to journey with him across the country to Palo Alto, where they lived together in a rented house while they worked around the clock doing programming tasks. For fun, they had run a zip line from the chimney on the roof down to a wading pool in the yard, and they would zip down for a splash during programming breaks (result: another lawsuit over damages to the chimney). And apparently once Facebook became popular, Mark's romantic life improved as well. Moreover, in September 2010, Mark donated $100 million to a school system in New Jersey, and he's shown other signs of increasing maturity and social responsibility as well. Mark was married in 2012.

Sources: Antunes, A. (2012, May 27). Eduardo Saverin Finally Opens Up: ‘No Hard Feelings Between Me And Mark Zuckerberg'. Forbes. Retrieved from

http://www.forbes.com/sites/andersonantunes/2012/05/27/eduardo-saverin-finally-opens-up-no-hard- feelings-between-me-and-mark-zuckerberg/

Mezrich, B. (2009). The accidental billionaires: The founding of Facebook: A tale of sex, money, genius, and betrayal. New York, NY: Doubleday.

Ortutay, B. (2012, May 18). Facebook stock closes nearly flat in debut. The Associated Press. Retrieved from

http://entertainment.verizon.com/news/read.php?id=19080445&ps=915&cat=&cps=0&lang=en

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