Life and Business Lessons from the Social Network movie and Facebook
Being interested in dot com start up and dot com millionaires’/billionaires stories, especially being worth a million or more at a relatively young age fascinates me and almost anyone; one movie to watch during this period of time, other than Harry Potter will be the Social Network. The Social Network is a movie about the founding of Facebook – world’s largest social networking site and also a story about dot com billionaires. It’s like you are working in a dead end job watching movie about dot com billionaires makes you feel inspired and got some hope about the future. One can also reflect some life and business lessons from this particular movie.
1. Allows freely exchange of ideas in your head
Humans like to compare faces of opposite sex and having unclean thoughts about the better one and they like to look around their surroundings for faces of opposite sex to compare. This is an idea, taking it online is also an idea, like Amazon.com took retailing giant Walmart online, Groupon.com took the coupon cutting experience online.
Two ideas from Facemash.com freely exchange with each other resulted in Facebook.com, Facemash.com is not the first website to show two faces and compare which one is the better one for having unclean thoughts, hotornot.com is the first to come up with that idea, the success of Facemash.com within a few hours at Harvard university showed or surface the idea that a subset of an original large idea/market in the online world can also achieved some success as well, like Facemash.com operate on the same concept as hotornot.com but only contain faces of Harvard University students, while Facebook.com, a social networking site initially only opens to Harvard students, also has some level of success as well. Another example is like what Beeconomic.com is to Groupon.com.
As people go through life itself, we are constantly bombarded by many ideas, insights, concepts and other types/kinds of knowledge. It is how these ideas and insights interchanged and freely exchanged with each other that result in innovation. Sergey Brin and Larry Page observation of citations in academic publishing, that the more relevant and better a published academic article is, the more it will be cited in other academic essays can be used in determine the relevancy of a web page much more accurately than keywords density. This idea later transplanted in search engine algorithms become the foundation of Google Pagerank technology.
Between, one may wondered, how come somehow there is always the sex and pornography niche for every website idea that people come up with. Like when Friendster as the first social networking site is founded result in adultfriendfinder.com some time later, while the idea of video sharing site like YouTube also result in similar outcomes in a particular niche for video sharing websites. And guess what, when there is Facebook, a fellow come up with Fuckbook.
2. The beauty of blue ocean strategy
Friendster and MySpace together got more than 100 million users at the time Facebook is founded in year 2004, and throughout the years, users grow at a certain rate and stagnate at that rate. People assumed that is the market size for online social network as they thought those who wanted to join an online social networking service has already been on Friendster and My Space already. What is a fact is that humans have social needs and social networking site took the entire social networking experience online. The then largest social networking site Friendster and Myspace having only 90 million and 130 million registered users respectively doesn’t mean that Facebook is competing with them for the 90 + 130 million people, it means that there are more than 90% of the Internet population of the whole world that got access to the Internet who still have not connect to a social network yet for some reasons and Facebook provides the reasons for them to do so and stay connected with other people. In other words, there is Blue Ocean and not really completing in the bloody red ocean.
As an employee and in a traditional corporate environment, the higher you go, the harder it is to go up further due to its pyramid hierarchy structure. But this is not the case in other areas.
3. The wealth generated from political and economic freedom
In the movie, Mark Zuckerberg mentioned that there are hundreds of thousands people with almost the same programming genius and capability as him in China yet none of them founded companies like Facebook and YouTube, or the first to come up with technologies like MSN messaging. Almost all their versions of Facebook, Twitter (i.e. Weibo.com) YouTube (i.e. Tudou) and MSN messaging (China version is QQ) arises because the Chinese Communist Party blocked the first mover and their domestic companies become a substitute.
In a short span of 30 years, one was to see the most creative output in the entertainment industry from a population of 7.5 million people in Hong Kong. In contrast, China with 1 billion people, Taiwan with 22 million people and South Korea with 20 million people and another country even with 6.5 million people most probably nothing good will ever come out of it due to its strifling political climate, during the same period of time does not managed to produce movies and dramas that were to match the quality of Hong Kong. In fact, the size of Hong Kong movie industry then were second only to Hollywood and Bollywood.
4. Without vision, the business perished.
It seems that not only without vision the men perished but businesses also. Google and Facebook metamorphic rise to dominate their respective markets at the same time spell the end of Yahoo and Friendster, when is the last time that you are on Friendster?
While Yahoo made its founders billionaires initially, it has since decrease substantially in total market value since then and Friendster did not do any other thing other than plastering some Google Adsense ads on its site.
Where there is no vision, the people perished.
One just need to look and and compare the vision of Yahoo/Google and Friendster/Facebook and can see the wisdom of this statement. For years since the founding of Yahoo and Friendster, they are guided by vague and unclear mission statements. Yahoo vision is to be the center of people’s online life? What does it mean exactly to be the center of people’s online life, compared with Google’s goal of developing the perfect search engine and to make information universally accessible.
The perfect search engine is something that understands exactly what you mean and gives you back exactly what you want.
Larry Page, co-founder of Google
This is mentioned in an article by Paul Graham that Yahoo couldn’t decide whether it is a media or technology company.
He has first-hand experience — his company, Viaweb, was bought by Yahoo and he worked there for a while. In a nutshell, he felt that Yahoo was too conflicted about whether they were a technology company or a media company.
Paul Graham
5. Surfacing of any business opportunities or creative ideas is limited by your pre-existing frameworks
I once read another blog on financial planning regarding the Scarcity Plato thinking mindset when it comes to having diverse learning and interests. Scarcity Plato thinking is the idea that you need to get As for for your exam subjects or progress in your career, therefore one should do nothing other than learning and thinking about studies or things in jobs only, since spending more time on this means less time for the others. However, this logic is flawed in the first place when it comes to having diverse interests and hobbies. A person learning to play piano for the first time and spending his time struggling with piano keyboards the day before exams is sure going to affect his exams results the next day, however the same person already with piano grade 8 effortlessly playing a piece of music for relaxation is not going to affect his studies or work by any bit.
I wasn’t someone who got play magic cards, and up to this day, I still cannot believe that a deck of magic cards from Japan can worth as much as US$6000, as I found out two years ago from a friend. Think about whether to have the scarcity Plato thinking mindset when it comes to having diverse interests and hobbies or so called only focusing on studies before graduation and work after graduation is better. (Climbing a corporate ladder is like completing in a bloody red ocean while starting companies like Facebook is like a blue ocean strategy?)
As I mentioned in first point on freely exchange of ideas, the more diverse interests and hobbies a person has, the more permutations and combination of them can result, the more likely one can become a millionaire.
6. Focus on strengths and ignore weakness?
Steven Covey, the author of New York Times best seller, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, mentioned about focusing on strengths and ignoring weakness. He does says about this but whether to accept this is up to individual choice.
Mark Zuckerburg most probably won’t be a successful network marketer, going by what is portrayed in the Social Network movie, though not necessarily so in reality. In this movie about him, he is being seem as someone without friends and only got one best friend at Harvard University who is Eduardo Saverin, which he restored as a co-founder of Facebook after a lawsuit in which Mark Zuckerburg is sued by the same best friend of him.
It is fortunate that he focus on his strengths in computing, founded Facebook and became the youngest billionaire in history. Had he thought that the only way to make millions is through networking marketing or insurance man, he will have flopped terribly due to his less than ideal interpersonal skills. In network marketing and insurance sales, one need to have excellent rapport with his downlines so that they can sell some magnetic beds or investment linked policies for you. Note that he got excellent verbal communications skills from the way he talk at technology forums.
7. Look for Sean Parker when aspire to become a dot com millionaire/billionaire
In the movie Social Network, basically after having one night stand with a hot bondie, the Sean Parker(played by Justin Timberlake) open the laptop of the bondlie that he slept with the night before, saw the Facebook website and immediately recognized its potential. The next minute, he already contact Facebook founders about the possibility of joint ventures. At the end of the day, Sean Parker held a 5% stake in Facebook, currently valued at US$2.5 billions.
Sean Parker is by no means a simpleton when it comes to dot com startups companies, being a founder of Napster that caused a storm in the music industry, he not only has the foresight to see the potential viability of a dot com company but also got wide contacts with venture capitalists in Silicon Valley.
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