Facebook Founder, CEO Mark Zuckerberg
Todays world is ever-changing. In business, real estate, and life in general, the greatest risk is not taking any risks at all. Agree or disagree, this was the stance of Facebooks founder and CEO, Mark Zuckerberg. An interview at Y Combinators Startup School revealed a great deal about Zuckerbergs overall vision as it relates to entrepreneurship and product development.
What was rather shocking to learn was that Zuckerberg insists that if he could go back in time, he would have preferred to keep his company working out of Boston. Zuckerberg and his associates felt sucked into the vacuum that is Silicon Valley. Although there has been immense success for Facebook, what the young CEO feels is the difference in location is that in places like Silicon Valley, people are only focused on the short-term. It is a place where people come and go, where new minds are soon replaced by the next scholars and where Facebook was just temporarily supposed to take root. Moreover, Boston, the place where Zuckerberg first came up with the Facebook idea during his time at Harvard University, is a city full of young and energetic people. Boston is far more passionate about the long-term and where people care more about the product and are not just unbelievably well educated inserts concerned with complicated tasks working in a short-term culture.
The overall message from Zuckerberg was that people must be passionate for what they do and not jump too quickly at things you believe you are simply supposed to do. Moving to Silicon Valley in the end was not essential to doing what he has done for Facebook, Zuckerberg believes. Dashing off before his company was even established was a mistake, despite where it stands currently as the worlds leading social network.
As we blogged about last week, Boston has also been named the third fasting growing city for commercial real estate internationally. This coupled with a new up and coming generation of tech savvyentrepreneurs from our city's universities will make Boston a very, very interesting place to live over the next ten years.
For more information view on Mark Zuckerberg's decision to move Facebook to Silicon Valley and his opinion on Facebook, view this article on Tech Crunch.
