How To Lead Like Zuck

The facebook founder — and fortune’s business person of the year — has built his social network in to a global phenomenon and a growth power house. Here’s what you can learn from how he manages.

- Adam Lashinsky

THE FIRST TIME I INTERVIEWED Mark Zuckerberg, back in 2005, he was all of 21 years old and could have passed for 16. He had recently dropped out of Harvard to move his startup to Silicon Valley and was obviously enjoying the novelty of being called CEO. Facebook’s website—there was no mobile version yet—had 6 million users and was open exclusively to high school and college students. It had only just added a feature allowing users to upload multiple photos to their profiles. But the company was already a hot commodity, valued at $100 million and coveted by buyers who were willing to pay far more. And despite his callowness, it was obvious that Zuckerberg was an entrepreneur who was, as I wrote at the time, “preternaturally levelheaded.”

If there was one point Zuckerberg was most forceful about that day, it was this: He wasn’t the least bit interested in selling his year-old company. “I’m in this to build something cool, not to get bought,” he said with a bloodless sincerity that was altogether convincing.

Eleven years later Zuckerberg has built something beyond cool: He has willed into being a global phenomenon. Facebook is a nearly 16,000-employee media powerhouse worth $350 billion—and also an advertising-technology juggernaut on track to annual revenues of more than $27 billion in 2016 and gaudy profits of $7 billion. Its core product now has 1.8 billion users, and Zuckerberg has shrewdly assembled a portfolio of properties to buttress Facebook. The complete “family of apps” includes the photo-sharing tool Instagram and the communications service WhatsApp, plus two homegrown apps, Facebook Messenger and Facebook Groups. In addition, Zuckerberg believes the company’s Oculus virtual reality headset represents the next way people will communicate with one another.