MARK ZUCKERBERG -CASE STUDY
There was a time from 2004 to 2007 when huge companies like Google, Myspace, Microsoft, and Yahoo had a big dream to own that company, Facebook. I don't know if people in the world understand how powerful this Facebook app is or not. According to research, Mark Zuckerberg is more powerful than the leaders of 25 countries. He has more power than the president of the country. Just think of the platforms that have the biggest network in the world.
For example, Facebook- 2.936 billion, Messenger- 1.3 billion, WhatsApp- 2 billion, Instagram- 1.21 billion. 7.446 billion in total. The power of the people is in the hands of a single person. Think about what you can do. He became the youngest billionaire at the age of 23. As you are reading this article about Mark Zuckerberg's case study today, some of the things contained in the articles we have written before are related to each other in this article. After reading this article you can lose that disbelief you have about your age. Today we will talk about Mark Zuckerberg's business strategies, hiring techniques, working culture, destroy the competition in this Mark Zuckerberg case study.
If you ask to imagine an 11-year-old child, what kind of picture will come to your head. A child who is playful, stubborn, very dependent on his parents, guided by someone in every little thing, and has a very free mind comes to your mind. But at the age of 11, Mark Zuckerberg is completely against this. Most people in the top 1% of the equation are like this. If you have read our Bill Gates case study article, they also did odd jobs at a young age. At the age of 11, Mark Zuckerberg created a small Mini Internet. Keeping his family members connected to their computers. He is making a small mini-internet inside the house for relevant notification and communication. It is called ZuckNet. At the age of 17, he created an app called Synapse. What is special about it? An app that suggests songs that match your favorite songs.
Just think, by that time, Mark Zuckerberg has been able to create this app by incorporating artificial intelligence. It is so good that Microsoft has even asked to buy it. But Mark Zuckerberg didn't follow it too much. Because he was not very interested in it. Because he only had a passion in those days. There was no financial idea. So what can you and I get out of this? Mark Zuckerberg has been playing this game for a while since he was 17 years old before creating the world's hit Facebook product. Age does not apply to this. Age doesn't matter to achieve success and achieve your dreams.
Then Mark Zuckerberg comes up with the idea of how to create something called Facebook. There is a very beautiful story here. Especially if you are a young person who is about to start a business, you can get a lot of things from this. In 2003, young Mark Zuckerberg had a small breakup with his girlfriend. How are people's characteristics compared to when a breakup occurs? Just wants to be alone, gets angry quickly, very sad, very sad. This is how Mark Zuckerberg had it at that time. He wanted, for some reason, he wanted to embarrass his girlfriend. what did he do Since Mark Zuckerberg had a lot of technical skills, he created a blog and posted pictures of that girl one by one, wrote articles one by one with her name and started sharing this. Then one of his friends came and said that the girl needs to do more than this. You should also remember that among equal friends there are friends like that.
Here's an idea that hit Mark Zuckerberg's head well. He modified it a bit and did something game changing here and there. what is that at that time, Mark Zuckerberg was a student at Harvard University. He went to Harvard's directory and took pictures of every student from there. After that, a separate website was created and all the pictures were put on it. But those pictures were posted without permission. What's more, they posted those pictures and asked others to vote whether they were hot or not. Believe me, 22,000 students participated in the first 04 hours. This went surprisingly viral. Finally, the management of Harvard University heard about it and asked to remove it as soon as possible. Then Mark Zuckerberg removed it from the internet. That's how this started in the first place.
So, after this thing happened, do you think that after the management of Harvard forced him to remove it, do you think that his interest and dream decreased. No, no, it just started increasing. Because Mark Zuckerberg just started thinking as a business person. What did he see? You understand now Mark Zuckerberg, hot or not, he started this but he will understand later, after opening a website and putting it up, so many people participated in this in 04 hours. There is no way to make friends. That means that young people, especially those in these universities, do not have a platform to communicate in this way. That means there is a problem here. That's how many people participated in this which included 04 hours.
So, this is the beginning. In January 2004, Mark Zuckerberg starts writing codes for this platform. In February 2004, that means within a month, Mark Zuckerberg launched this game changing app called The Facebook. Later it became Facebook. So, there is one event that can make or break your life. So what's the story again, twenty-two thousand were collected in 04 hours for one such hot or not, which means that as soon as an app like this was launched, this app became a hit within the university without any problems. Not only that, it quickly expanded to the international market as well. The traffic started to increase. Within a day, the number of people using the Facebook app started to increase rapidly. Then in 2005, Peter Andreas Thiel, a co-founder of PayPal who wrote the Zero to One business book and was an experienced investor and trustworthy, Mark Zuckerberg gave 10% of his company's shares as a maintainer to Facebook. Mark Zuckerberg said, the idea could be mine, I could be the one who started it. But I need someone with more experience to take this to the next level. Not only that, in 2007, Chamath Palihapitiya was joined by Mark Zuckerberg as Head of Growth at Facebook. Chamath Palihapitiya grew Facebook to one billion users. We will bring you a case study about Chamath Palihapitiya next.
What are some of the problems that a person who is going to start a business or even a person who has started always have? For example, how can I improve my product? How to improve my business model? Will the customer like this? Is there something wrong with the way I do business? How do I know about this? So Mark Zuckerberg also had these same issues. 3 years after starting Facebook, that means in 2007, Mark Zuckerberg held their first hackathon. what is that as the first step in this, Mark Zuckerberg said, he told the engineers and developers to study Facebook well, identify its shortcomings and create some sample products to provide a solution. That's the first step. Second, Mark Zuckerberg invited anyone in the world and said the same thing he said before. What did you do next? They took the internally made samples and took the best samples from the samples that anyone in the world was asked to make and invited them all to the Facebook headquarters. After that, they decided the best product after holding a competition. So that process is what we call a hackathon.
So, many new and good features that came from that process are what you see on Facebook today. For example, many new features like Facebook chat, Facebook groups, Safety check were added after this process. As a founder, do you want to improve the employees of your company, which means to improve the working culture, to increase energies, to increase speed? Do you know what Mark Zuckerberg did to this? Mark Zuckerberg has done many things. For example, 20% of the employees' total working time was given to them as free time. Do you know why? Be that Socialize. Go and see what projects others are working on. If you can help, see how you can help. Build this network. That's one way. Why do people all over the world like to go to Facebook and work? One of the main reasons for that is the Facebook flat organization structure.
What is a flat organization structure and what are its advantages? Even if you take a flat organization structure, there are less layers. Decision making is quick. If there is a talented person in your team, he has the opportunity to be involved in many things in the business. No one is trying to stop another talent from rising to the top. Even an employee at the lower level can reach someone at the top level. You can quickly coordinate with each other because there are no layers. For example, even huge organizations like Tesla, Nike, Google, Apple follow this flat organization structure. But the question is that Mark Zuckerberg followed a flat organization structure in his Facebook company, but many old big organizations in the world follow a vertical structure. What are the problems with this? For example, there is a big gap between the person at the top level and the person at the bottom level. It is very difficult to reach, it is very difficult to take decisions and approvals. It is difficult for young talent to come up in a structure like this. When Mark Zuckerberg hires talent, people prioritize two races. If you are a person in the Human Resources management field, if you are a founder, read carefully.
No. 01- Raw intelligent people: Who is that? For example, people who always do new things, look for innovative things in their field, want to know, and have a free-thinking mindset. These are the people who often challenge the limit.
No. 02- People suitable to work with our Facebook Vision: This is a very important point.
If you are working for a huge company, read it carefully, if you can, read it again and again because it is so important. Mark Zuckerberg says, if you run a huge company, you cannot be on the front line in this uncertain world. You may not always be able to do that. There may be other work, there may be a meeting, it is difficult to do this in a busy life. Then you need to develop some good second line players in your business. Then, as the founder, I need to know how to hire people who are suitable for this. People who respect my vision and can take this forward. The first case study I wrote about Steve Jobs was the first case study I did on this blog site. If you haven't read it, read it. In that, I mentioned that after the death of Steve Jobs, they have been training Tim Cook for this since that time and even before, to carry forward the vision that came from Steve Jobs through the Apple company. That is why a person named Tim Cook was appointed to carry that vision even after the death of Steve Jobs.
Mark Zuckerberg, a businessman with a monopolistic mindset, follows two main strategies to compete when he feels competition is coming. What are those two strategies?
Strategy Number 01: Facebook It looks like someone is coming up to compete with this product. But not a big threat. Is there any good features in that product that are not in our product? If there is, how can we make it more innovative and win that competition? That is the first strategy. For example, you can post stories on Snapchat. It's okay, then let's add the stories feature to our product called Instagram. YouTube is the giant of the video market. Let's strengthen the algorithm of our videos on Facebook.
Strategy Number 02: If someone looks like a competition with a good potential and a good future is coming up, that company will catch up before it overtakes Facebook. For example, Facebook bought WhatsApp for 19 billion dollars, which was not even generating any income but had billions of users. Instagram is bought by Facebook for one billion dollars.
Ok, those who have read the Mark Zuckerberg case study till the end, there are 05 valuable lessons that we can take home.
Lesson No. 01- Age doesn't matter: Mark Zuckerberg has been playing this game since he was 11 years old before starting Facebook.
Lesson No. 02- A business opportunity: When you read Mark Zuckerberg's case study, you should understand that even if it is something that started by chance, if you are focused and looking at the big picture, you don't need to always have a pen and paper in your hand to come up with a business idea. It can happen even by accident.
Lesson No. 03- Customer feedback: Mark Zuckerberg's hackathon was because of that process, new features, new upgrades were added.
Lesson No. 04- Power of 3rd party people: Peter, Mentor on Facebook who developed Facebook, Chamath Palihapitiya contributed to its growth. When your company becomes a huge company, it is important to take such 3rd party people and give them the right place if you want to build a long-lasting business.
Lesson No. 05- Competitor audit: Are your customers going to competitors? What are the competitors' policies? What different strategies are they using regarding their product? Keep an eye on these. Even though Mark Zuckerberg is such a big company, they have a separate team for that. That is why two strategies have been put into it. That's why it is very important to have a good and sharp eye on the competition in your field if you are building a long-term business. Or what happened to Kodak and Nokia will happen to you.
I hope that you will also know many things that are necessary for your success from this case study. So I'll stop here. Good day to you.
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