What keeps Mark Zuckerberg up at night? Going public isn’t one of them, he has revealed. “Honestly, it’s not something I spend a lot of time on a day-to-day basis thinking about now,” Facebook CEO declared when asked the million dollar question – when The Social Network is going public, during an interview screened in the US last night.
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“A big part of being a technology company is getting the best engineers and designers and talented people around the world,” the Facebook CEO & Founder told Charlie Rose in an TV interview screened in the US last night.
“You get people who join the company for the mission” he added. “And one of the ways that you can do that is you compensate people with equity or options.”
However, during the 54 minute long broadcast, Zuckberg appeared comfortable in his own skin and a technology fanatic enjoying his mission in life – to spread the Facebook word – and doing very well at it.
800 million users later and all rumblings have pointed towards a public offering since last year, and with internet start ups Linked In and this week Groupon going public.
‘In a liquid kind of way’
As for IPO’s and the like, all in its own good time, in a liquid kind of way, he says.
The Facebook founder also denied Groupon experience has changed or increased his hunger for going to the trading floor.
“At some point we’re going to make that equity worth something publicly and liquidly, in a liquid way,” he said. “Now, the promise isn’t that we’re going to do it on any kind of short-term time horizon.
“The promise is that we’re going to build this company so that it’s great over the long term,” he said. “And that we’re always making decisions for the long term, but at some point we’ll do that “
The 2010 Time Magazine man of the year, appeared confident of the future for Facebook, despite the emergence of rivals like Google+: saying Spotify music service and other associated service have now spurted major growth on the back of the tie-in with Facebook.
Ex Google employee and now Zuckerberg’s right hand woman Cheryl Sandberg was also interviewed.
And on the internet giant, Gogole, now among its main rivals with Google+, he noted it was competitively “trying to build their own little version of Facebook” but brushed off the rival apparent as not much for it to worry about.
He also cited giants like Apple and Amazon as being far in sync with Facebook than the search engine.
“I mean, I think, you know, Google, I think in some ways, is more competitive and certainly is trying to build their own little version of Facebook. But you know, when I look at Amazon and Apple and I see companies who are extremely aligned with us.”
“I mean, people like to talk about war. You know, there are a lot of ways in which the companies actually work together. There are real competitions in there. But I don’t think that this is going to be the type of situation where there’s one company that wins all the stuff.”
“Google is fundamentally about, you know, algorithms and machine burning,” Sandberg added.
The Harvard drop-out and 2010 Time Man of The Year also revealed 500 million users use the network devised in a college dorm every day.
Here’s another interesting tit-bit from Time Magazine: if Facebook were a country its would be the world’s third largest after China and India.
Watch interview here.
