-
Facebook
- The Inside Story
- Narrated by: Will Damron
- Length: 18 hrs and 57 mins
- Categories: Biographies & Memoirs, Professionals & Academics
Add to Cart failed.
Add to Wish List failed.
Remove from wishlist failed.
Adding to library failed
Follow podcast failed
Unfollow podcast failed
Buy for $38.50
No default payment method selected.
We are sorry. We are not allowed to sell this product with the selected payment method
Listeners also enjoyed...
-
No Filter
- The Inside Story of Instagram
- By: Sarah Frier
- Narrated by: Megan Tusing, Sarah Frier
- Length: 11 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In 2010, Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger released a photo-sharing app called Instagram, with one simple but irresistible feature: It would make anything you captured look more beautiful. The cofounders cultivated a community of photographers and artisans around the app, and it quickly went mainstream. In less than two years, it caught Facebook’s attention: Mark Zuckerberg bought the company for a historic one billion dollars when Instagram had only 13 employees.
-
-
Well Told Story of the Rise and Reach of Instagram
- By Jenny Jenkins on 05-03-20
By: Sarah Frier
-
Hatching Twitter
- A True Story of Money, Power, Friendship, and Betrayal
- By: Nick Bilton
- Narrated by: Daniel May
- Length: 9 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Twitter seems like a perfect start-up success story. In barely six years, a small group of young, ambitious programmers in Silicon Valley built an $11.5 billion business out of the ashes of a failed podcasting company. Today Twitter boasts more than 200 million active users and has affected business, politics, media, and other fields in innumerable ways.
-
-
The dysfunctional foursome
- By Jean on 08-10-16
By: Nick Bilton
-
Billion Dollar Loser
- The Epic Rise and Spectacular Fall of Adam Neumann and WeWork
- By: Reeves Wiedeman
- Narrated by: Will Collyer
- Length: 10 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
With incredible access and piercing insight, New York magazine contributing editor Reeves Wiedeman tells the full inside story of WeWork and its CEO, Adam Neumann, who together came to represent one of the most audacious, and improbable, rise and falls in American business.
-
-
Engrossing and we’ll researches but narration is annoying
- By ceire Gleeson on 10-27-20
By: Reeves Wiedeman
-
In the Plex
- How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives
- By: Steven Levy
- Narrated by: L. J. Ganser
- Length: 19 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Few companies in history have ever been as successful and as admired as Google, the company that has transformed the Internet and become an indispensable part of our lives. How has Google done it? Veteran technology reporter Steven Levy was granted unprecedented access to the company, and in this revelatory book he takes listeners inside Google headquarters - the Googleplex - to explain how Google works.
-
-
Just ok for me
- By Everyday Mom on 04-23-11
By: Steven Levy
-
The Airbnb Story
- How Three Ordinary Guys Disrupted an Industry, Made Billions…and Created Plenty of Controversy
- By: Leigh Gallagher
- Narrated by: Christine Marshall
- Length: 8 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
This is the remarkable behind-the-scenes story of the creation and growth of Airbnb, the online lodging platform that has become, in under a decade, the largest provider of accommodations in the world. At first just the wacky idea of cofounders Brian Chesky, Joe Gebbia, and Nathan Blecharczyk, Airbnb has disrupted the $500 billion hotel industry, and its $30 billion valuation is now larger than that of Hilton and close to that of Marriott.
-
-
Great book. Bad narrator
- By Chad on 03-30-17
By: Leigh Gallagher
-
Super Pumped
- The Battle for Uber
- By: Mike Isaac
- Narrated by: Holter Graham, Mike Isaac
- Length: 12 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
A New York Times technology correspondent presents the dramatic rise and fall of Uber, set against the rapid upheaval in Silicon Valley during the mobile era. Based on hundreds of interviews with current and former Uber employees, along with previously unpublished documents, Super Pumped is a pause-resisting story of ambition and deception, obscene wealth, and bad behavior, that explores how blistering technological and financial innovation culminated in one of the most catastrophic 12-month periods in American corporate history.
-
-
Entertaining, but author clearly has an agenda
- By Josh on 11-18-19
By: Mike Isaac
-
No Filter
- The Inside Story of Instagram
- By: Sarah Frier
- Narrated by: Megan Tusing, Sarah Frier
- Length: 11 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In 2010, Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger released a photo-sharing app called Instagram, with one simple but irresistible feature: It would make anything you captured look more beautiful. The cofounders cultivated a community of photographers and artisans around the app, and it quickly went mainstream. In less than two years, it caught Facebook’s attention: Mark Zuckerberg bought the company for a historic one billion dollars when Instagram had only 13 employees.
-
-
Well Told Story of the Rise and Reach of Instagram
- By Jenny Jenkins on 05-03-20
By: Sarah Frier
-
Hatching Twitter
- A True Story of Money, Power, Friendship, and Betrayal
- By: Nick Bilton
- Narrated by: Daniel May
- Length: 9 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Twitter seems like a perfect start-up success story. In barely six years, a small group of young, ambitious programmers in Silicon Valley built an $11.5 billion business out of the ashes of a failed podcasting company. Today Twitter boasts more than 200 million active users and has affected business, politics, media, and other fields in innumerable ways.
-
-
The dysfunctional foursome
- By Jean on 08-10-16
By: Nick Bilton
-
Billion Dollar Loser
- The Epic Rise and Spectacular Fall of Adam Neumann and WeWork
- By: Reeves Wiedeman
- Narrated by: Will Collyer
- Length: 10 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
With incredible access and piercing insight, New York magazine contributing editor Reeves Wiedeman tells the full inside story of WeWork and its CEO, Adam Neumann, who together came to represent one of the most audacious, and improbable, rise and falls in American business.
-
-
Engrossing and we’ll researches but narration is annoying
- By ceire Gleeson on 10-27-20
By: Reeves Wiedeman
-
In the Plex
- How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives
- By: Steven Levy
- Narrated by: L. J. Ganser
- Length: 19 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Few companies in history have ever been as successful and as admired as Google, the company that has transformed the Internet and become an indispensable part of our lives. How has Google done it? Veteran technology reporter Steven Levy was granted unprecedented access to the company, and in this revelatory book he takes listeners inside Google headquarters - the Googleplex - to explain how Google works.
-
-
Just ok for me
- By Everyday Mom on 04-23-11
By: Steven Levy
-
The Airbnb Story
- How Three Ordinary Guys Disrupted an Industry, Made Billions…and Created Plenty of Controversy
- By: Leigh Gallagher
- Narrated by: Christine Marshall
- Length: 8 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
This is the remarkable behind-the-scenes story of the creation and growth of Airbnb, the online lodging platform that has become, in under a decade, the largest provider of accommodations in the world. At first just the wacky idea of cofounders Brian Chesky, Joe Gebbia, and Nathan Blecharczyk, Airbnb has disrupted the $500 billion hotel industry, and its $30 billion valuation is now larger than that of Hilton and close to that of Marriott.
-
-
Great book. Bad narrator
- By Chad on 03-30-17
By: Leigh Gallagher
-
Super Pumped
- The Battle for Uber
- By: Mike Isaac
- Narrated by: Holter Graham, Mike Isaac
- Length: 12 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
A New York Times technology correspondent presents the dramatic rise and fall of Uber, set against the rapid upheaval in Silicon Valley during the mobile era. Based on hundreds of interviews with current and former Uber employees, along with previously unpublished documents, Super Pumped is a pause-resisting story of ambition and deception, obscene wealth, and bad behavior, that explores how blistering technological and financial innovation culminated in one of the most catastrophic 12-month periods in American corporate history.
-
-
Entertaining, but author clearly has an agenda
- By Josh on 11-18-19
By: Mike Isaac
-
Samsung Rising
- The Inside Story of the South Korean Giant That Set Out to Beat Apple and Conquer Tech
- By: Geoffrey Cain
- Narrated by: Michael Braun
- Length: 10 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Based on years of reporting on Samsung for The Economist, The Wall Street Journal, and Time, from his base in South Korea, and his countless sources inside and outside the company, Geoffrey Cain offers a penetrating look behind the curtains of the biggest company nobody in America knows. Seen for decades in tech circles as a fast follower rather than an innovation leader, Samsung today has grown to become a market leader in the United States and around the globe.
-
-
Misleading title
- By Kevin on 02-25-21
By: Geoffrey Cain
-
That Will Never Work
- The Birth of Netflix and the Amazing Life of an Idea
- By: Marc Randolph
- Narrated by: Marc Randolph
- Length: 11 hrs
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In the tradition of Phil Knight's Shoe Dog comes the incredible untold story of how Netflix went from concept to company - all revealed by cofounder and first CEO Marc Randolph. From idea generation to team building to knowing when it's time to let go, That Will Never Work is not only the ultimate follow-your-dreams parable, but also one of the most dramatic and insightful entrepreneurial stories of our time.
-
-
Cut off at the end of chapter 18
- By ¡Yo! on 09-25-19
By: Marc Randolph
-
Bezonomics
- How Amazon Is Changing Our Lives, and What the World's Best Companies Are Learning from It
- By: Brian Dumaine
- Narrated by: Dan Bittner, Brian Dumaine - introduction
- Length: 8 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Like Henry Ford, Sam Walton, or Steve Jobs in the early years of Ford, Walmart, and Apple, Jeff Bezos is the business story of the decade. Bezos, the richest man on the planet, has built one of the most efficient wealth-creation machines in history with 2% of US household income being spent on nearly 500 million products shipped from warehouses in 17 countries.
-
-
49% balanced
- By Robert ONeill on 05-25-20
By: Brian Dumaine
-
No Rules Rules
- Netflix and the Culture of Reinvention
- By: Reed Hastings, Erin Meyer
- Narrated by: Jason Culp, Allyson Ryan
- Length: 9 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Here for the first time, Hastings and Erin Meyer, best-selling author of The Culture Map and one of the world's most influential business thinkers, dive deep into the controversial philosophies at the heart of the Netflix psyche, which have generated results that are the envy of the business world. Drawing on hundreds of interviews with current and past Netflix employees from around the globe and never-before-told stories of trial and error from his own career, No Rules Rules is the full, fascinating, and untold story of a unique company making its mark on the world.
-
-
Infomercial for Netflix
- By Srikanth Raju on 11-01-20
By: Reed Hastings, and others
-
The Launch Pad
- Inside Y Combinator, Silicon Valley's Most Exclusive School for Startups
- By: Randall Stross
- Narrated by: René Ruiz
- Length: 8 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Twice a year in the heart of Silicon Valley, a small investment firm called Y Combinator selects an elite group of young entrepreneurs from around the world for three months of intense work and instruction. Their brand-new two- or three-person start-ups are given a seemingly impossible challenge: to turn a raw idea into a viable business, fast.
-
-
Soothing
- By Andrew on 12-30-15
By: Randall Stross
-
We Are the Nerds
- The Birth and Tumultuous Life of Reddit, the Internet's Culture Laboratory
- By: Christine Lagorio-Chafkin
- Narrated by: Chloe Cannon
- Length: 16 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Reddit hails itself as "the front page of the Internet". It's the third-most visited website in the US - and yet, millions of Americans have no idea what it is. We Are the Nerds is an engrossing look deep inside this captivating, maddening enterprise, whose army of obsessed users have been credited with everything from solving cold-case crimes and spurring tens of millions of dollars in charitable donations to seeding alt-right fury and landing Donald Trump in the White House.
-
-
6 out of 5, better than not bad
- By Joshua Wilson on 11-12-18
-
Billion Dollar Brand Club
- How Dollar Shave Club, Warby Parker, and Other Disruptors Are Remaking What We Buy
- By: Lawrence Ingrassia
- Narrated by: Sean Patrick Hopkins
- Length: 8 hrs and 34 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
As Lawrence Ingrassia shows in this timely and eye-opening audiobook, a growing number of digital entrepreneurs have found new and creative ways to crack the code on the bonanza of physical goods that move through our lives every day. They have discovered that manufacturing, marketing, logistics, and customer service have all been flattened - where there were once walls that protected big brands like Gillette, Sealy, Victoria’s Secret, or Lenscrafters, savvy and hungry innovators now can compete on price, value, quality, speed, convenience, and service.
-
-
Enjoyed it!
- By S J on 06-18-20
-
How to Turn Down a Billion Dollars
- The Snapchat Story
- By: Billy Gallagher
- Narrated by: Billy Gallagher
- Length: 7 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In 2013 Evan Spiegel, the brash CEO of the social network Snapchat, and his co-founder Bobby Murphy stunned the press when they walked away from a three-billion-dollar offer from Facebook: how could an app teenagers use to text dirty photos dream of a higher valuation? Was this hubris, or genius? In How to Turn Down a Billion Dollars, tech journalist Billy Gallagher takes us inside the rise of one of Silicon Valley's hottest start-ups. Snapchat began as a late-night dorm room revelation, the brainchild of Stanford English major Reggie Brown who was nursing regrets about photos he had sent.
-
-
Good start, bland finish, hero worship abound
- By Bamagrad03 on 03-18-18
By: Billy Gallagher
-
The Innovation Stack
- Building an Unbeatable Business One Crazy Idea at a Time
- By: Jim McKelvey
- Narrated by: Jim McKelvey
- Length: 6 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Frustrated by the high costs and difficulty of accepting credit card payments, McKelvey joined his friend Jack Dorsey (the cofounder of Twitter) to launch Square, a startup that would enable small merchants to accept credit card payments on their mobile phones. The Innovation Stack is a thrilling business narrative that's much bigger than the story of Square. It is an irreverent first-person look inside the world of entrepreneurship, and a call to action for all of us to find the entrepreneur within ourselves and identify and fix unsolved problems - one crazy idea at a time.
-
-
The one business book you should read this year
- By JamalJ on 07-18-20
By: Jim McKelvey
-
The Everything Store
- Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon
- By: Brad Stone
- Narrated by: Pete Larkin
- Length: 13 hrs
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Amazon.com started off delivering books through the mail. But its visionary founder, Jeff Bezos, wasn't content with being a bookseller. He wanted Amazon to become the everything store, offering limitless selection and seductive convenience at disruptively low prices. To do so, he developed a corporate culture of relentless ambition and secrecy that's never been cracked. Until now.
-
-
Loved the honesty!
- By Paul on 01-29-14
By: Brad Stone
-
Invent and Wander
- The Collected Writings of Jeff Bezos, with an Introduction by Walter Isaacson
- By: Jeff Bezos, Walter Isaacson - introduction
- Narrated by: L. J. Ganser
- Length: 8 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In this collection of Jeff Bezos' writings - his unique and strikingly original annual shareholder letters, plus numerous speeches and interviews that provide insight into his background, his work, and the evolution of his ideas - you'll gain an insider's view of the why and how of his success. Spanning a range of topics across business and public policy, from innovation and customer obsession to climate change and outer space, this book provides a rare glimpse into how Bezos thinks about the world and where the future might take us.
-
-
Do the right thing.
- By FULL Creative on 12-06-20
By: Jeff Bezos, and others
-
The Upstarts
- How Uber, Airbnb, and the Killer Companies of the New Silicon Valley Are Changing the World
- By: Brad Stone
- Narrated by: Dean Temple
- Length: 10 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Ten years ago the idea of getting into a stranger's car or walking into a stranger's home would have seemed bizarre and dangerous, but today it's as common as ordering a book online. Uber and Airbnb have ushered in a new era: redefining neighborhoods, challenging the way governments regulate business, and changing the way we travel. In the spirit of iconic Silicon Valley renegades like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, another generation of entrepreneurs is using technology to upend convention and disrupt entire industries.
-
-
Are You a Wartime CEO or a Peacetime CEO
- By Dan Collins on 06-14-17
By: Brad Stone
Publisher's Summary
One of the Best Technology Books of 2020 - Financial Times
"Levy’s all-access Facebook reflects the reputational swan dive of its subject.... The result is evenhanded and devastating." (San Francisco Chronicle)
"[Levy’s] evenhanded conclusions are still damning." (Reason)
"[He] doesn’t shy from asking the tough questions." (The Washington Post)
"Reminds you the HBO show Silicon Valley did not have to reach far for its satire." (NPR.org)
The definitive history, packed with untold stories, of one of America’s most controversial and powerful companies: Facebook
As a college sophomore, Mark Zuckerberg created a simple website to serve as a campus social network.
Today, Facebook is nearly unrecognizable from its first, modest iteration. In light of recent controversies surrounding election-influencing "fake news" accounts, the handling of its users’ personal data, and growing discontent with the actions of its founder and CEO - who has enormous power over what the world sees and says - never has a company been more central to the national conversation.
Millions of words have been written about Facebook, but no one has told the complete story, documenting its ascendancy and missteps. There is no denying the power and omnipresence of Facebook in American daily life, or the imperative of this book to document the unchecked power and shocking techniques of the company, from growing at all costs to outmaneuvering its biggest rivals to acquire WhatsApp and Instagram, to developing a platform so addictive even some of its own are now beginning to realize its dangers.
Based on hundreds of interviews from inside and outside Facebook, Levy’s sweeping narrative of incredible entrepreneurial success and failure digs deep into the whole story of the company that has changed the world and reaped the consequences.
Critic Reviews
"Steven Levy is the founding guru of technology journalism. Few other writers can harness both access to top figures and critical insight informed by decades of reporting on Silicon Valley. His Facebook book will be a blockbuster, a penetrating account of the momentous consequences of a reckless young company with the power to change the world." (Brad Stone, author of The Everything Store and The Upstarts)
"The social-media behemoth Facebook comes across as an idealistic but also shady, exploitative, and increasingly beleaguered entity in this clear-eyed history.... Levy had extensive access to Facebook employees and paints a revealing and highly critical portrait of the company as it wrangled with charges that it violated users’ privacy by sharing their data with advertisers and political operatives, and served as a vector for manipulative fake news, pro-Trump Russian propaganda, and hate speech." (Publishers Weekly)
"Respected tech writer Levy (In the Plex, 2011) presents the definitive story of Facebook.... Given unfettered access to Zuckerberg and the company during the last three years, Levy is able to illustrate how the company developed under the influence of Zuckerberg’s acknowledged hypercompetitiveness.... This absorbing book will inspire important conversations about big tech and privacy in the twenty-first century." (Booklist)
"The value of this book lies in its putting together all the pieces of Facebook's privacy troubles, algorithms, and the Cambridge Analytica affair." (Library Journal)
More from the same
What listeners say about Facebook
Reviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- Rodney
- 12-02-20
Not a history of Facebook
This is a brief overview of the founding of FaceBook wrapped on hours and hours of fake news Democrat talking points. If you still believe the Russian collusion narrative - this is for you. If you just wanted a history of FB, go away, this isn’t it.
Also note that the far left author completely failed to mention any details of the Lucky Palmer scandal - where Lucky was forced by Zuck (literally written by Zuck who told him to sign and release the note under Palmers name) to issue a statement that he didn’t support Trump and then was told he created a hostile work and was basically fired. That didn’t make the cut for this book, but hours and hours and hours of Russians buying ads did make the book. What didn’t make the book, a finding by USA Today that showed the Russia literally ran as many anti-Trump ads as anti-Hillary ads - because, as anyone with a brain knows, their entire point was to stir the pot. Finally the book doesn’t go into the fact the Fake Russian dossier was literally funded by Hillary, literally and directly.
Overall this is a completely worthless book and only your typical leftist nut jobs would think otherwise.
9 people found this helpful
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- Robert ONeill
- 03-11-20
Two thumbs up for truth
Big fat thumbs up. Excellent journalism. Amazing detail in Cambridge analytica Steve bannon and trump and the Russians, and kushners hire that swung the election by manipulating the morons who read the newsfeed. Unintentionally this is a story of zuckerbergs greed and the willingness to sell out his users. Nothing has changed since he stole the idea at Harvard and said about his users if they are dumb enough to give me personal information that’s their fault.
5 people found this helpful
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- Ian Kilpatrick
- 09-10-20
Went great until RUSSIA
This book is super informative and reads like history, that is until you get to the chapter called The Election. That’s when it suddenly reads like a spy novel. I’m disappointed that the author injected bias into an otherwise solid, informational book. The claim that this Russian-owned page that “might” have been seen by a couple hundred thousand FB users, changed the election outcome is laughable and far fetched.
I am in the middle of building my own social network and am reading this book as a way to know what to expect from Mark Zuckerberg in the future. Also to know how he thinks, his end goals for building Facebook. To that end this book has been extremely helpful and I appreciate the time and thought the author put into its content.
Well worth the read especially if you’re in the space.
2 people found this helpful
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- AOV
- 03-12-21
A book that promotes liberal agenda
A book to promote liberal agena. a one sided view about elections. waste of time.
1 person found this helpful
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- Kevin Venner
- 10-30-20
Confirmation Of A Dangerous Man
Like Hitler, Mark Zuckerberg is a smart and driven man. And, I believe zuck to be just as dangerous because of his manipulation of information and hunger for power.
The narration performance was excellent.
Levy wrote a well-documented book and I enjoyed the history lesson about FB and it's tyrannical founder. At the end, however, I still wondered if Levy respects Zuckerberg or fears him.
1 person found this helpful
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- Cody Konior
- 06-20-20
Fascinating
I hate Facebook and Zuckerberg but wanted to know what was going on. The book covers a whole lot of inside information and now I understand though my feelings haven’t changed. Some have complained about a lack of detail but this is a journalistic piece and I think the correct amount of depth. Recommended if you’re interested in free speech, privacy, world events, or IT.
1 person found this helpful
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- Terryhu
- 05-03-20
Facebook, a big social experiment in the digital world
A fascinating and detailed narrative of Facebook’s history, published only a few months ago, by the technology savvy journalist Steven Levy, who spent over 3 years interviewing all people relevant to Facebook, with “unlimited access”.
For a start-up aiming only at connecting the Harvard students 16 years ago to an online empire now connecting over 3 billion global users, It’s an amazing entrepreneurial success story, driven by a mentality that is all about “Growth” and “Winning”, a motto of “move fast and break things”; It’s a story of the power of creativity, an unprecedented power unleashed by technology; yet at the same time, it’s a story of how Facebook has become a perfect example of unchecked big corporate power; a story of humiliating failure and disgrace in protecting privacy; a story of confusion and struggle with choices, for Facebook the corporate, its community and the society at large, as digital social media evolved and continue to evolve.
The acquisition and integration of Instagram and WhatsApp, which contributed significantly to Facebook’s empire building, accounted for with a lot of the background stories in the book, now brought the antitrust scrutiny from the governments and exposes Facebook to the risk of break-up. It is a great lesson for founders of any start-ups who have their own values, visions and ambitions to ponder the potential of their trade sale to observe how Zuckerberg imposed his wills upon Instagram and WhatsApp and broke his own pledge to let them run independently and how this eventually led to the departure of the founders of these two companies. However, one may also marvel at the vision and the gut with which Zuckerburg would acquire Instagram for $1bn valuation one month before its own IPO in 2012 (while he was only 28) and WhatsApp at $19bn in 2014, while both companies were young and small, and their potential were yet to be proven.
As one of the biggest global social media platform, and hence one of the biggest consumer data companies, Facebook and Zuckberg is at the center for controversial topics such as data privacy, fake news, disinformation and misinformation, and the tremendous commercial success of Facebook is equalled by the damage to its reputation, so far.
“People think that we’ve eroded privacy or contributed to eroding it,” Zuckerberg tells Levy in their last interview. “I would actually argue we have done privacy innovations, which have given people new types of private or semiprivate spaces in which they can come together and express themselves.”
Whether you take a cynical view on Facebook being a “twenty-first-century corporate Gatsby, careless in its privileges, self-involved in serving its own needs and pleasures”, or you sympathise with Zuckerberg’s self labelled idealistic perspective that technology will eventually bring more good than bad, you can not argue with the trend that the whole globe is increasingly living in the digital world and increasingly more connected. There is no way going back. Facebook’s successes and failures are part of a big experiment of the entire mankind, as mankind evolves, while evolution takes its own course, with no pre-designed course and end game, trial and error, one thing leads to another, and technology is the “thing” now, leading to various things to happen, with or without our approval. Whether one believes or not in Zuckerburg’s “good” intention to connect the world, in supporting the value of sharing and free speech, the whole society needs to work together to find the right way to connect and to protect free speech. That is how the “trial and error” works in the history of natural selection.
Is Facebook a case of growing pain, huge pain coupled with huge growth, or a case where growth shoot its own foot? Is connecting as many people as possible in a social platform the most important value driven metric and the de facto choice, without which the long term sustainability and survival of the platform comes into question, or, the connectivity Facebook has pursued at all cost, has brought the challenge it could not fix, in a digital world where your system’s vulnerability could be exposed and exemplified overnight and comes back to tear the system apart. What, is the fundamental vulnerability for a digital platform, and is the size of the platform its own curse? Can Facebook fix the vulnerability by itself, or becomes the necessary victim in this big social experiment?
Finally, in Zuckerberg’s own words, “one has to take chances and one will make mistakes, otherwise, how do you know you are living up to your potentials”. That is the entrepreneurship I subscribe to.
1 person found this helpful
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- Ahmed Reza
- 03-07-20
Insightful and through
It was a very insightful expose on the many stories that weave together to make Facebook. It seems like a pretty balanced view of Facebook!
1 person found this helpful
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- Admiralu
- 01-12-21
The Interior Workings of Facebook
This was an interesting and comprehensive look into the history of Facebook. The author spent three years and had unprecedented access to Marc Zuckerberg and his revolving door team. It ends in 2019. Given what happened last year, author Levy may have to do a follow-up on last year alone. This book covers Facebook's birth, growth and many growing pains, including buying former competitors, What's App, Instagram and others. It also shows how blindsided the company was by its misuse of user data that wound up being used by right wing Republicans, that aided Russia and other hackers to influence a US and foreign elections, not to mention becoming a platform for fake news and hate speech. The amount of data collected on users is staggering. Insightful, informative, thought provoking this is an excellent work, ably narrated on audio by Will Dameron. Learn why so many employees left, especially higher ups.
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- David
- 10-26-20
Much More Than Social Network
The book provides in depth back story on Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, and many main characters. A lot more stories beyond the movie Social Network.
The author had first hand access and interviews with many former and current employees, so it provides a comprehensive picture on the evolution, challenges, and future of Facebook.
Although the audible is over 18 hours, I enjoyed listening to it from start to finish.