Tomahawk, WI 9/12/12 (Expedated) – Awkward, Sweaty, Nervous, Drop the Ball, these were not any of the words that could be used to describe Facebook founder & CEO Mark Zuckerberg during his first IPO interview. Zuckerberg has not been known to be smooth and articulate during many of his previous forays onto the public stage. This time however he seems to have taken a step up and gave a particularly smooth press interview this past Tuesday. Zuckerberg appeared at the Concourse in the San Francisco Design Center and spoke confidently and was very candid especially after the rough IPO and drop in stock value his company has experienced in the last several months.
Zuckerberg talked about a lot of topics from the acquisition Instagram the photo sharing app Facebook recently swallowed up to the Facebook search engine, the going mobile problems and the rumors of a Facebook smart phone.
When talking about Instagram Zuckerberg told the audience Facebook paid right around $1 billion and that when they closed the deal Instagram was at the 80 million user level. Since the deal closed in June Instagram has increased it’s user level to 100 million. Facebook also will let them develop their own app and network independently.
As we all know search engines are very important and have been a starting point for many companies to expand their internet presence and advertising base, just take a look at what Google has been doing with Google Plus. Facebook has its own built in search engine that most people use at the moment to look up their friends, but Zuckerberg sees it evolving into something more. Users already have been using the search engine to look up apps and brand pages, so to expand it would be an obvious benefit. Zuckerberg says that there is almost a billion queries a day and they are not even trying to market it. It is bare bones at the moment but with a little work the search engine could come into its own and be a thorn in the side of Google, Bing or Yelp just because of the shear numbers of Facebook users.
Last but not least Zuckerberg talked plain and straight about the mobile troubles and how they banked on HTML5 rather than develop Facebook for the native apps that work on the iphones and Androids. He stated “they really burnt two years, with a really big, painful mistake”. Zuckerberg also repeatedly dismissed the idea of a Facebook Phone simply saying “integrate as deeply as possible into every device”.
I think all in all we have just started to see the growth of this young founder CEO from a smart kid with great drive and ambition into one very smooth and candid businessman. Stay tuned, I am sure there is more to come. By the way since Zuckerbergs interview the stock has gone up everyday!
We have no position in the stocks mentioned above and have no intention of purchasing them in the near future.
