Inside Facebook

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“Please bhaiyya, mujhe bhi chahiye…” urged my little cousin, as I sat before my computer, connected to the Internet. The site that flashed on the monitor was a simple and sober one, like a child’s imagination, like a pretty drawing on a blue canvass- It’s inarguably one of WWW’s most popular web page. He’d seen me sitting before it- clicking, scrolling, typing, browsing, but basically idling, which is what’d caught his attention. He’d seen pictures, places, words, names, faces… smiling faces.

My brother’s 10 and he says he wants a Facebook ID. It did not take me any time to convince him he must have a Yahoo ID to do this, and you must be 18 to do that! (Pays when you are way smarter than somebody else.)

That is just a miniscule exhibition of the revolution the world’s most popular social network has wrought in cyberspace. It’s been months since I saw the wonderful film “The Social Network” and weeks since I read the amazing book “The Accidental Billionaires” but neither has quite left me yet.“We lived on farms, we lived in cities and now we live on the internet”.What is more mesmerizing than the effect of this freakishly addictive ‘Blue Booze’ on the common man is the tale of its inception and growth.

As a prolific programmer, a Harvard undergraduate with a 1600 in his SAT, the curly, hoody, geeky freshman with his flip-flops and a typical self defeating awkwardness, Mark Zuckerberg, 19, had already achieved a lot to be proud of. But somehow all of this just didn’t sum up to a conclusion of his lifetime achievements. It was very soon then, that he decided to take up his next big project, which would soon transform into the BIGGEST venture of his lifetime. One he himself didn’t anticipate would someday manifest itself as one of the biggest fortunes in the history of Silicon Valley and script his name in golden letters in the annals of corporate history as the World’s youngest self-made Billionaire ever at 26!

Facebook is an excellent example of ‘innovation’ and ‘entrepreneurship’, which are the 2 big lessons for us here.

First, speaking of talent, it’s simply mindboggling to see how a bashful young lad in his 20s coming from nowhere, within 6 years, starting from his college dorm room, establishes a billion dollar evaluation. He was smart (Pays more when you are way smarter than everybody else!) A boy who didn’t care about ‘money’ or a ‘successful career’ but was simply driven by the zeal to do something different and innovative, but more importantly- FUN. He sticks to this dictum till date, as we see the Facebook home page, simple and elegant, no flashy ads or anything- “It’s free and always will be”, making money to build services and not the other way round.

Second, talking of entrepreneurship, successful ventures have always been founded by pairs of entrepreneurs who shared a common vision for success. It had happened at Microsoft with Bill Gates and Paul Allen, at Apple with Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, at Google with Larry Page and Sergey Brin, at Yahoo with Jerry Yang and David Fillo. But with Facebook, when it came to innovation, it was always a lone individual. The way he transformed Facebook from a virtual image of a happening college life to a complete social experience were everybody- perhaps from amazed 10 year olds to the retired aged- fit perfectly, is terrific.

But can we even start to imagine something like this here in India, a place where profound emphasis is always on salaries and an esteemed career? Where only professions like engineering, doctorate and civil services are considered respectable, sometimes even acceptable? In this never ending rat race, any room for innovation, initiative and interests is methodically killed- at homes, at schools and finally at colleges. The desire to do something different is deemed as heresy and lunacy.

Entrepreneurs in India, save a handful, are barely icons. They all represent a class of individuals who have made it big on the corporate scale by learning to establish precise contacts and grease the right palms- competing on bribing and not innovation. They adopt unscrupulous ways, rely on ugly backdoor government-businessman nexus and resort to anti-social activities to make money. The 2G and ‘Coalgate’ (whoever named it that way!) scams are testimonies to this. In the midst of this bravado, can India ever produce a Mark Zuckerberg who can create a company worth billions without adopting unfair means?

The beautiful success story of Facebook is a lesson that we should not promote money and power but talent and character. With the right environment conducive to ideas, talent and thinking, India can be a much better place to live in. With all that said and done, it doesn’t seem hard to picture (perhaps) another successful maverick, an unkempt sophomore smitten by an ‘Erica Albright’, relaxing on an arm chair in a lavish board room in his office, reading these words on a card aloud to himself with the smallest hint of a grin sprawling across his face-

“I’m CEO-Bitch.”