@BigBrainBizness
Mark Zuckerberg on why large companies keep losing to startups: "Large companies are slow and they lack conviction." Mark reflects on one of the most puzzling questions about Facebook's rise: why didn't a bigger company build it first? "It wasn't like it was a super novel idea. There was Friendster before, there was MySpace, there's all this stuff. Google, Microsoft, Yahoo — they all had versions of it. Why didn't they do it?" It wasn't a talent problem. The resources were there. The engineers were there. Facebook, by contrast, was built by what Mark calls "a rag tag group of children." So what went wrong inside those big companies? Mark traces it to how large organisations respond to doubt: "People doubt new ideas before they come to fruition. The narrative with social networking is like, 'Ah, it's just a college kid thing.' Maybe it's a fad. Maybe it won't make money. Maybe mobile will kill it." By the time each layer of doubt was disproved, it was already too late. And the real culprit? Middle management. "There's probably some team buried deep inside those companies that believed in it, and probably some VP person who was like, 'Eh, that's probably not the biggest priority,' and just poured some sand in the gears." One cautious decision at one level. That's all it takes to kill a category-defining opportunity. Mark extends this beyond Facebook. Even for opportunities that seem tailor-made for large companies, where they hold a clear distribution advantage, he's blunt about the odds: "I would guess that big companies are going to fumble two-thirds of those." And the opportunities that don't plug into existing distribution channels? He calls those "just kind of free," wide open for whoever moves first. The pattern is consistent: size creates hesitation, hesitation creates delay, and delay hands the market to whoever was willing to act before the idea was proven.