There's a good feature in Fast Company about Facebook and its founder. Pretty interesting stuff.
There was a lot of buzz that the company could have sold for as little much a billion dollars. This guy, Zuckerberg, is all of 22. Can you imagine that? As he said, quite correctly in my opinion, when you sell, you're out. It's not your thing anymore. Of course, he might just be looking for a bigger pay out too. No one can really know.
The dot-com era has generated so much wealth based on ridiculous perception of company worth. I have to be honest, I don't know that I wouldn't have cashed out if I were Zuckerberg. For that much money, frankly, you can start over and do whatever hell you want. But just as Kevin Rose with Digg, they seem to want to build something that is lasting and real, and profitably in the long run.
That's the challenge of a new business. You can spend a great deal of time losing money, even if everyone loves you. So far in this decade, being an entrepreneur meant you'd build and flip. But I think people are starting to realize that you don't create something great that way.
I wish the Internet would have come sooner, because I think I would've been one of these guys. I could especially see the promise of online community very early on, but I didn't have the expertise or the foundation in it that I would've had if I were in college at the time. That's why I run one reasonably profitable niche community, and not something huge.
But I kind of like where I am in that respect. There are other niches I'd like to explore, but I'm starting to realize that I'm much more interested in the end state than I am the coding. At my core I'm still a media guy who wants to make the show run, not build the printing presses, radio transmitters or video cameras. That, however, is a post for another time.
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