David Kirkpatrick

“I never wanted to run a company.To me a business is a good vehicle for getting stuff done. Mark Zuckerberg in The Facebook Effect written by David Kirkpatrick”

“Facebook also has a fundamental characteristic that has proven key to its appeal in country after country—you only see friends there.”

“He sent Zuckerberg a letter proposing Viacom would pay $1.5 billion to buy the two-year-old company.”

“Mark has the most long-term perspective I’ve ever seen. This guy is uber uber uber on the long-term view.”

“For users, Facebook Connect offers what could turn into a universal Internet log-in. Over 80,000 websites use it in some fashion, as of February 2010, and 60 million Facebook members are actively employing it.”

“Revenues were, according to well-informed sources, more than $550 million for 2009—up from less than $300 million in 2008. That represents a stunning growth rate of almost 100 percent. The same sources say that the company could exceed $1 billion in revenue in 2010.”

“This thrilled Zuckerberg, whose primary measure of the service’s success was how often users returned.”

“Cohler advertised for summer interns, then sometimes told promising applicants when they came for an interview that Thefacebook was only hiring full-timers.”

“By early 2004 Tickle had become the second-largest social network after Friendster, with two million members actively connected to others and exchanging messages.”

“In Friendster's wake, a throng of social networking sites blossomed in San Francisco attempting to duplicate its appeal. Each tackled the idea of connecting people in a slightly different way. One was Tickle, a service which, on observing Friendster’s broad-based appeal, altered its own service, which had previously been based on self-administered quizzes and tests. Two of the other new social sites—LinkedIn and Tribe.net—were founded by friends of Abrams.”

“But like the best empire builders, he was both very determined and very skeptical. It’s like [former Intel CEO] Andy Grove says, ‘only the paranoid survive.”