When Facebook went public, Mark Zuckerberg stopped focusing on sales for a year and instead, rallied the entire company to focus on what was going to be the nextbigwhat of that time – i.e. mobile.
“Since the start of this year, if you turned up at a product review and showed anything other than mobile at the start or for the bulk of the presentation, you’d be asked to go back and do it again” said Facebook’s VP of corporate development Vaughan Smith. Facebook is sending the message that it’s evolved into a mobile-first company ready to thrive on the small screen [TC].
So how did Facebook go from $18.06 per share on Aug. 26, 2012, to $75.91 per share at the end of January? Zuckerberg did something that only the bravest CEOs can pull off. He forced the entire company to hard shift alongside their users (i.e., their customers) and put everyone on “lockdown” to get their mobile strategy right—to make mobile the central focus of Facebook. And, most importantly, it worked—big time. Nearly 70 percent of Facebook’s $3.59 billion of advertising revenue now comes from mobile.[Wharton]
Today, Facebook is pivoting again.
In the middle of all the controversies surrounding the platform, let’s give credit where it is due to the entrepreneur in Mark Zuckerberg.
For a company with ~ trillion-dollar market cap, playing incremental games sounds like a perfect plan. After all, nothing is badly broken. Why not play safe? Everyone around you is doing that.
“I skate to where the puck is going, not where it has been”.
Ice hockey star Wayne Gretzky
Mark Zuckerberg continues to push the envelope and it’s completely fine if you have a problem with Facebook and its privacy efforts, but don’t let the entrepreneur in you become cynic and miss out on these inspiring EPIC pivots.