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| Zuckerberg. Pix: olorisupergal.com |
Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t usually observe sentimental
anniversaries. This year he’s confronted by three of them. On Feb. 4,Facebook (FB), the
company he co-founded in a Harvard University dorm, turns 10 years old. The
prodigy himself turns 30 in May. It’s also been a decade since his first date
with Priscilla Chan, now his wife, whom he first met in line for the bathroom
at a Harvard fraternity party.
So last fall, Zuckerberg began
typing up dozens of pages of musings, often pecking out the words on his phone.
He shaped his thoughts into 3-, 5-, and 10-year plans. He also gave himself a
specific goal for 2014. He’s fond of annual challenges, and in previous years
he’s vowed to learn Mandarin (2010), to eat only animals he slaughtered himself
(2011), and to meet someone new each day (2013). For this year he intends to
write at least one well-considered thank-you note every day, via e-mail or
handwritten letter.
“It’s important for me, because
I’m a really critical person,” he says at Facebook’s sprawling corporate campus
in Menlo Park, Calif. “I always kind of see how I want things to be better, and
I’m generally not happy with how things are, or the level of service that we’re
providing for people, or the quality of the teams that we built. But if you
look at this objectively, we’re doing so well on so many of these things. I
think it’s important to have gratitude for that.” He’s still unnaturally boyish
and is wearing his customary uniform: hoodie, gray T-shirt, and jeans. No
Adidas shower sandals, though; in what could be construed as a sign of creeping
maturity, he’s wearing black Nike sneakers.
Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chairman
and chief executive officer, has many reasons to be grateful. His social
network is used by 1.23 billion people around the world. The company is worth
around $135 billion and will probably become the fastest in history to reach
$150 billion. Its recent financial results have impressed Wall Street, in part
with the success of its shift to mobile phones. In the fourth-quarter earnings
report it filed on Jan. 29, Facebook disclosed that for the first time sales
from ads on mobile phones and tablets exceeded revenue from traditional PCs.
The shift to mobile was “not as quick as it should have been,” Zuckerberg says,
but “one of the things that characterizes our company is that we are pretty
strong-willed.”
Facebook’s challenge is to keep growing. With almost half the world’s
Internet-connected population using the service, the company is facing the
immutable law of large numbers and simply can’t keep adding users at its
previously torrid rate. At the same time, Facebook must defend its highly
profitable business against several threatening trends. Internet
users—particularly young ones—crave different kinds of online experiences and
new ways of connecting with one another. Many lead online lives that begin and
end without Facebook. Rivals such as Twitter (TWTR) and Snapchat, with their embrace of pseudonyms
and different ways of sharing publicly and privately, have grown up outside the
once-inexorable Facebook ecosystem. Silicon Valley’s smartest product
developers, who used to make games and other diversions that lived on Facebook,
are instead applying their talents to creating apps that compete with it. “No
one individually has quite yet displaced Facebook,” says Keith Rabois, a
partner at Silicon Valley venture capital firm Khosla Ventures. “But as more
and more people choose another social platform as their primary hub, it’s a
real problem. They could be losing one segment at a time.”
Zuckerberg says companies often lose
their way during major transitions. His company hasn’t, he says, so “we’re
really at this point where we can take a step back and think about the next big
things that we want to do.”
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