WSJ’s Kara Swisher asks the inevitable question: Who Will be Mark Zuckerberg’s Eric Schmidt?
Some time ago, we asked whether Zuckerberg’s hubris would lead to Facebook’s downfall, listing Zuck’s inexperience as one of the reasons why Facebook might become a thing of the past. Bear in mind, while the VCs and Board members that surround Zuckerberg are smarter and richer than God, who says they have a clue about the future of social networking or advertising. Chances are, they too are flying by the seat of their pants.
Conventional wisdom is for Facebook to bring in someone who can:
a) coexist with Mark Z.
b) knows a thing or two about social networks
c) has advertising experience
d) has worked with platforms - since Facebook has bet the farm on this.
She runs through a myriad of candidates but settles on Mark Andreessen, Netscape’s founder and current Chairman on Ning. I doubt Mark is the best man for the job. Incidentally, she includes many females, and I think ultimately it very well might be a female but the point is, Andreesseen isn’t the man for the job.
For one, he himself had to have a manager/executive in Jim Barksdale to manage Netscape. He hasn’t managed anything per se, he’s always been the ideas guy who has brought in others to manage. He himself admitted to not being interested in the CEO job (at least he did so at Tech Crunch 40).
Anyway, one thing that he had in common with Eric Schmidt - the executive that Google brought in - is that both men have lost battles to MSFT. Google wanted to beat both Yahoo! and MSFT, but Yahoo! lost the battle itself by being so inept, frankly.
So Google knew that it wanted to displace MSFT. Schmidt’s career was littered with losses against MSFT so that made hungry to beat MSFT.
In that sense, Andreessen too has lost battles to MSFT, running Netscape when MSFT launched Internet Explorer, which today garners 75% of the market share in browsers relative to Netscape’s 1%.
Problem is, winning at Facebook has nothing to do with beating MSFT, MSFT is Facebook’s ally in the battle against Google, I think Facebook needs someone who has actually taken on Google and won. I cannot think of too many people who have done that. YouTube comes to mind in online video, for sure, though that was not really a business in the revenue, profits and stand-alone capability basis. Who else? Not too many come to mind.
Anyway, the biggest reason why I think few will accept the CEO job have little to do with Zuckerberg’s quirkiness. I think very few people feel that they will be able to appreciate the company’s value from a base of $15B. This is arguably the biggest obstacle.
When Schmidt came on board at Google, the paper value of the company was small enough that it gave Schmidt a “margin of safety”. Any executive coming in to Facebook today would be expected to deliver a miracle, why? Because as I wrote this week, most VCs do not get how online advertising works, and they blindly assume that generating meaningful ad sales is easy. It’s not, and it’s even harder for Facebook by virtue of their resistance to accepting that media, publishing and advertising has not really changed fundamentally.
In fact, I do not mean to pick a fight with anyone, lest not Jim Breyer or Peter Thiel, but judging by Mr. Breyer’s background, I don’t see anything that spells out “ad sales” while Thiel made his name - and fortune - at Paypal, the site that sold for $1.5B without selling $1.50 in ad sales.
This is the problem: Google created a $200B ad-supported technology company that became the envy of Silicon Valley and Madison Avenue, but the Valley does not want to admit it doesn’t really understand advertising and Madison Avenue can’t admit it doesn’t get technology.
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February 26th, 2008 at 10:57 am
hmmmm…Dick Costolo?
Or maybe someone from DoubleClick…
February 26th, 2008 at 10:59 am
Interesting suggestion. I don’t know Dick personally, obviously he can build an interesting business via Feedburner, but didn’t Feedburner have limited revenues of $10M?
That is a great sum but with Facebook at $150-250M in revenues already, I think they need someone who gets media and advertising, two things that Mark Z., and the Facebook Board seem limited in… Again, Dick might in fact be a perfect candidate, as they can bring in someone else to handle ad strategy.
I wonder when he will earn out his millions… and of course, would he leave Chicago for the Valley?