[jomamaxx]

There was a lot of luck in Facebook, even if Zuck is a particularly talented individual.

Also - if Harvard is a great school - how the F does someone find time to do the work and make a product at the same time?

When I did Engineering, I didn't have time to take a shower.

[optforfon]

Some people are just much better organized. I studied physics at a pretty good school. A lot of my classmates were very smart and hard workings. We spend easily 8 hours a day doing problem sets. Then we had an exchange student who cam from France (from the Prepas system) and he was just so much more organized with his work. He would sit down and very carefully read the chapter, make sure he understood everything. Then work through each problem carefully and then spend the rest of the day relaxing. Till he was done he wouldn't get distracted, check his phone, shoot the shit classmates. Just a very focused mind.

Looking back at college it was easily 80% worrying about doing work and 20% actually doing it. With something like programming, knowing how to use a debugger, profiler and an IDE give you a huge leg up. Easily 95% of CS students never take the time to learn the tools b/c you have to do it on your own time - but you have other homework to stress out about.

[dntrkv]

You can say that about any successful person/company.

Sure, luck may have played a large role in Facebook's initial success. But that was over 10 years ago. Many companies experience that initial success and then go nowhere, e.g. MySpace. Facebook, on the other hand, has continuously surpassed everyone's expectations. It's not until recently that people have began to accept that Facebook is here to stay. Discounting Facebook's repeated successes as luck is just silly.

Building a $350B company does not happen from luck, it requires a constant stream of good decision making.

[cookiecaper]

I agree that the luck angle needs to be tempered by considering that there are many ways to accidentally destroy a good thing. It should also be recognized that luck is required to prevent other, bigger companies from catching on to you before you're big enough to stand up for yourself.

I don't want to discount merit or work, but we too often seriously discount luck. Luck plays a large part in every success. That's not to say that people are justified in being unsuccessful; it's just to recognize that we're all involved in something larger than ourselves.

As failure doesn't always correlate to incompetence, success doesn't always correlate to competence.

[zouhair]

Of course it is luck. When they decide to do something new they never know if it's gonna work. If it doesn't work out or if it does work out tons of people come afterwards with tales of "they were stupid if they thought that was the answer" or "These people are smart and they surely knew what they were doing".

I am not trying to lessen his feat but just saying that luck is a big part of it.

[beambot]

Pareto principle applied to homework, study, and grades.

I spent way too much time worrying about grades. I'm not sure it mattered. It would have been just as good (and probably more enjoyable) to be a B-student with awesome side projects rather than an A-student with none.

(And often, esp. for college, one doesn't even need to make that trade-off when homework is largely immaterial, and your grade only depends on exams.)

[tedmiston]

I feel like everyone thinks this way in retrospect, but at the time it's so much harder. It's hard to accept not being at the top of everything even when you know they're just local maxima.

[nibs]

There was an HBS article about how both Microsoft and Facebook were started during Harvard reading week because putting all the smart people there and making them bored during time off resulted in productive projects. Trying to find it...

[L_Rahman]

Harvard is a notoriously easy school - once you get in classes are relatively easy. Grade inflation is rampant.

I say this as someone who got in (eventually chose to attend a different school for a variety of reasons) and with many friends who went there.

At Harvard, the primary thing you do is the extracurricular in your field of interest - whether that's law, activism or startups - is up to the individual student. Your grades, your education and your brand in society - Harvard takes care of that.

[perseusprime11]

I agree. Think if Friendster & Myspace were on top of things, they would have bested Facebook. What made them suscpetible for disruption?

[jomamaxx]

Friendster was a clumsy product.

MySpace was limited in features, and a fugly interface.

Neither had talented people.

Zuck started at Harvard. That was his core user base. The Ivy League. Basically marquis 'customers' in social.

Think of how massively that affected recruiting and attention? The network effect of Ivy League x 1000. It would have been trivial for him to get investment.

But in the end - forget culture - the basic features were just better, and for every great feature, there are 'smart things' happening internally that are good. Zuck deserves credit for that.

I used to work a little bit with MySpace. Their culture was 'LA Cool Kid' i.e. 'The Standard' hang-out types.

They reminded me of a Record Label - totally hip - totally useless. I feel sorry for any Engineer that had to work at MySpace.

If you knew the culture at Lycos, Excite etc. - and compare it to Google, it's a little bit of a similar story.

[doomlaser]

Yes, Facebook had better strategy. They embraced new tech to streamline the pain factor of navigating the website, whereas MySpace tried to optimize for discrete page views to serve more ads. MySpace would serve an entire interstitial page load with nothing but ads to get to different parts of its interface, whereas Facebook would embrace ways to jump to your friends' profiles or read your messages quickly, often without reloading the page.

It reminds me of how Google won the search engine war by delivering a more streamlined, less exploitative product.

And then of course there were a couple innovations that neither MySpace or Friendster had: photos with tags of your friends, and the concept of the News feed. It's hard to imagine a social network without those features, but they didn't exist before Facebook introduced them.

[Smirnoff]

I believe Facebook didn't invent newsfeed. They acquired a company (Friend Feed) that did just that and was quickly becoming popular.

[tim333]

Facebook's newsfeed was launched in 2006 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Facebook_features#News...

Friendfeed was launched October 2, 2007 and acquired 2009 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FriendFeed

[perseusprime11]

Agreed. I think the larger point I was trying to make is there is always a bit of luck somewhere somehow that contributes to overall success. In the case of Facebook, it came in the form of lousy products such as Friendster and Myspace.

[Animats]

MySpace had a record label - "Myspace Records". Founded in 2006, ended somewhere around 2012.

[jomamaxx]

MySpace had a record label - but they also got their start in music.

MySpace started out as a way for bands in LA to post gigs.

So their initial user-base/NDA was musicians, LA culture.

Facebook was a little more academic/ivy league.

It's hard to change one's genes :)