More than anything else, what stood out to me was his discipline for knowing how to manage his time in a way that enabled him to build something like this while still juggling the n number of other things on his plate.
I dunno--like any CEO or even VP or SVP-level executive, I'm sure he can afford executive assistants at work and nannies/assistants/drivers/servants at home to take care of all the normal mundane aspects of life that suck up so much of normal people's time, getting in the way of side projects.
I'd guess he has more free time than the random "3rd engineer from the left" on one of his company's projects.
No, it doesn't work that way. CEOs/VPs never had house chores as major time sink. When you are at that level, you are responsible for 1000+ employees, 100s of teams and dozens of projects. Each project and team requires at least quarterly review, funding, strategy, motivation, vision, market analysis, HR, budgeting, PR, partners and so on. A typical CEO/VP works well over 12 hours, often at least 14 hours and many work one weekend days. Their calendars are filled with meetings down the hierarchy and up the management chain and across external people - usually starting at 8 AM and going down all the way to 8 PM. They have to also keep meeting customers, major shareholders, partners and so on in addition to internal people. Its extremely hard to find time for them because everything is important and not doing something can eventually lead to big disaster and loss of millions of dollars. Most developers think these people are lazy and play golf all day long while their underlings do all the work. If you look at their schedules, you had be quite wrong. Zuck is able to make time for all these is extremely amazing and should get respect from anyone for his discipline. I can't recall any other CEO leading same size of company being able to do this level of hands on hacking in past or present.
>If you look at their schedules, you had be quite wrong. //
Do you have any evidence to show your affirmation that CEOs work really hard and "often at least 14 hours and many work one weekend days" is true and other's affirmations that they "play golf all day" is absolutely false?
What makes you think that working and playing golf all day are even different things?
Larry Ellison was renowned for doing massive sales deals of Oracle on golf courses. If you get in 18 holes and leave with $10 million, were you not working?
At executive levels a part of the job deals with relationships, and those are work. Much less so the "nose to the grindstone in front of the computer" sort of work.
Clearly I've been thinking about it all wrong. When the CEO eats a lavish meal with a CEO from another company, they're not having lunch they're working hard; probably just as hard as the peons doing the manufacturing, cleaning the plant, driving the forklifts or whatever. Just because the sales teams have already negotiated the deal and the CEO only has to eat a meal and sign their name doesn't mean they're not working hard, at all.
Indeed if you get invited away to a person's private island and then they later buy from the company you "work" at then that holiday was far more work than someone spending 12 hour shifts, standing, poring over circuit boards with a soldering iron or hefting rocks with a pickaxe. That's why the management deserve 200 times the salary of the workers. /s
Truly the relationships aren't important unless the CEOs make it that way. They could just do business, decide they need X amount of pressed steel, sign the contract and not play golf and have a luxurious meal. But instead they decide that only companies that kowtow to this ideal of greasing the wheels of industry by fattening the C-grades up should win the contracts.
>If you get in 18 holes and leave with $10 million, were you not working? //
No, you're not working, you're exploiting the work of others. What function did the 18 holes of golf serve except to reinforce a despotic nepotism.
The idea that this is work is interestingly both anti-capitalist (it's an inefficient aberration) and anti-socialist (it's setting people over others but providing no useful function).
What are you willing to consider as evidence? The internet is littered with hundreds of articles, interviews, anecdotes of CEOs working long hours to build up the company, bring in new business, keep existing business, etc (and if you're feeling a bit grumpy today, yes, also to enrich themselves).
An old but concrete example: Andy Grove, in High Output Management, describes a fairly typical 8 to 5 day in which he works until he's tired, with level of fatigue vs level of "doneness" being the deciding factor of when he ends his day.
No kidding. I find it impressive both that he put aside (not found, this had to be a very deliberate decision given the demands on his time) 100 hours to do this, AND that he got all of it done in 100 hours.
Is there anything written about his personal schedule/habits? When does he go to sleep at night? When does he wake up? What kind of hours does he work?
I mean really, he has a kid, is CEO of a huge company, exercises, and still has time to do this project. My hands are more than full trying to exercise, learn Chinese, and run a small company, I have no idea where he finds time to raise a kid in there. Incredible.
When you are a billionaire, you can certainly outsource all that mundane stuff (like raising a kid) to extremely capable helpers. He only has to do exactly what he wants to do. Pretty sure Zuck isn't changing any diapers or walking the dog unless he decides he feels like it right at that moment.
Yeah, I see what you mean... I guess I meant that compared to running a multi-billion dollar company, changing diapers or reading Cat in the Hat for the millionth time seems pretty mundane.
You're missing what raising a child entails if you think that's all it entails. If you raise a child without the deep emotional investment that comes from a parent, you're not going to raise a child well at all.
I know, I have a two-year-old boy. I'm just saying he can get more of a break than a regular person that doesn't have nannies and whatnot.
I haven't had two hours to myself since the day my kid was born, so the idea of having 100 hours to do a fun project like automating my house is completely out of the realm of possibility for me.
But he's also showing videos how he interacts with his kid. He seems to put some emphasize on his family. Perhaps he just managed to delegate much more than most other CEOs.
Don't forget that as CEO, likely it is true that if he had a question about direction or implementation, a hundred engineers would almost immediately respond to him. This 100 hours' investment isn't like you think of some lone hacker poking around SO; he's gluing something together with instant handholding available.
Apart from the whole business luminary/billionaire thing, I think Zuck is a pretty cool and insightful guy. I like both the idea of having a "challenge", as well as the specific ones he's done: running, meeting a new person each day, learning Mandarin, doing a cool side project with his house. (I get to hear about a lot of this as one of my best friends works as fb)
At the risk of sounding a little bit self-aggrandizing, I often think about how similar the two of us are, not because I'm particularly special, but just that he's a torch-carrier for guys like me. I'm a month apart from Zuck in age, I'm about to get married to a woman with a serious career, and Zuck and I both grew up in the eastern US (I'm from Chicago). I had a Chinese girlfriend growing up. My family wasn't rich but we also weren't poor. I worked at Microsoft out of college, something Zuck said he might've done if he didn't found facebook.
He's pretty talented though. I definitely didn't create wirehog. I also didn't go to Exeter or have the quality of education he did, either at Exeter, or later at Harvard. I have to wonder how much that stuff influenced his later life, and whether I should try to get my kids into those places.
Controversies aside, I think he's doing an admirable job of casting the tech industry in a positive light, with his positions on taking time off from work, and trying to hire inclusively. I don't use facebook as I have genuine concerns about privacy, but I think he's a real idealist who thinks making the world more "open and connected" is a genuinely good thing. I'd love to meet him some day.
