It was 8:30 on a Monday morning when I got in to work. I was just back from my vacation. My office was a shambles. It had been torn apart. There was dust everywhere. My whiteboard had been taken down and was leaning against a chair, the edge of which had rubbed out part of a work of inspired genius from a Friday “chalk talk” with our lead architect just before I left. It was the perfect image of destruction. Thank god I had taken my laptop with me. My docking station was encased in a plastic cover, but that cover was full of dust.
In the middle of what once was my office was a stranger in a yellow hard hat staring at at the skeleton that was my wall, with the aluminum studs exposed. Another was on his knees, monkeying with the bottom of a stud that he appeared to be wiggling back and forth.
What the hell was going on here? Continue reading
Change the game... 
Did Zuckerberg do it on purpose?
A post has been making the rounds on the internet titled, “It’s Becoming Clear That No One Actually Read Facebook’s IPO Prospectus Or Mark Zuckerberg’s Letter To Shareholders.”
I had to admit that I was on the people who hadn’t read it. Of course, why would I? I wasn’t going to be buying any Facebook shares.
I didn’t need the prospectus to know that the hype was not justified. No matter how I looked at it, I couldn’t find a rationale that supported the price.
Where do I start?
If you understand what is going on in the world of on-line advertising — if you did the slightest bit of homework — it would be obvious that it would have taken a small miracle for Facebook to deliver earnings that would justify the sale price. The only people who were going to make money on this deal were the original shareholders and those same people who gave you the mortgage backed securities debacle that nearly torpedoed the US economy.
Or even without understanding the industry, if you looked at the fundamentals alone — earnings versus share price — there was no possible support for the share price.
The only explanation I could find for the price? P. T. Barnum once said, “There’s one born every minute.” I wasn’t going to be part of it. So I paid no attention.
And frankly, I wrote off Zuckerberg.
That, as it turns out, was a mistake. Continue reading →
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Filed under Commentary, People, Strategy
Tagged as Facebook, internet, People