Ben Gilbert: belief

Transcript context

…Totally. Also though, to his skill as a strategist, even at this very young age, yes Ben, you and I just made a compelling argument about why you could have believed Facebook was going to top out with the college market at this point in time. Mark knew though, and he had planted the seeds that both newsfeed and open registration were going to be coming later that year. He was definitely making that calculus here too of, well I don’t know what the probability necessarily is that those are going to hit, but Mark had the belief: (a) if they do, they’re going to be really big, and (b) I think the probability is higher than the people around me think it is. Yup, that’s totally fair. Even if you weren’t going to bet on the growth, the user engagement was still currently great, and you had a lot of reason to believe that it was going to get even greater. You compare all the metrics with Friendster and MySpace as time went on and got worse. People churned, their daily active to monthly active would just go down over time, the page loads times would take forever. Especially with, well actually with both. Friendster just was not architected properly. It was a software engineering computer science issue. Myspace was this weird thing that was born out of this combined media conglomerate, and they just never really had excellent tech architectural talent. As you looked at not the high level metrics of how many users have ever signed up, because MySpace and Friendster, I think we’re still way ahead at this point, if you looked at how’s this going to play out if it keeps compounding and you looked at the deeper metrics, you thought, oh, I’m running the better company by a lot. Once especially, we got to figure out the business, but I am running the better product by a lot. Okay, to figuring out the business coming out of this episode with Yahoo.…

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