Mark Zuckerberg on why startups often beat big companies “Large companies are slow and lack conviction.” Mark wonders why a large company like Google didn’t beat Facebook in social networking: “It wasn’t a super novel idea - there was Friendster and Myspace before… It’s not that they had a lack of talent - I mean we were a ragtag group of children and they had all these serious engineers and serious infrastructure.” Mark thinks it’s because ”people doubt new ideas before they come to fruition.” At first social networking was a fad service for college kids. When it decidedly wasn’t a fad, people were skill skeptical that was going to make money. Once it was making money, people thought the switch to mobile was going to be pretty hard. Then, once Facebook had figured all of these things out, it was too late for anyone - the incumbents had lost their advantage. Mark speculates that there was probably a team deep inside these incumbents that believed in the idea of social networking, but a VP-level person ended up “pouring sand in the gears” because it wasn’t the highest priority. “Even for things that look like they belong to large companies because they have a big distribution advantage, I would guess that big companies are going to fumble two thirds of those. And then there are all these things where there is not an apparent big advantage because it plugs into an existing distribution channel and those are just kind of free.” Video source: @southpkcommons (2024)