The SXSWi keynote address of
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg had the Austin Convention Center room packed with
an audience eager to hear what he had to say in the on-stage interview with BusinessWeek’s
Sarah Lacy.
The interview wasn’t exactly what
the audience would have expected, as Zuckerberg wasn’t given the chance to properly
respond to questions he had been asked, but leaving all that aside, he did
manage to say something about Facebook, Beacon, Microsoft and other matters.
Zuckerberg didn’t exactly end up
giving first time info on Facebook’s latest plans or achievements, except maybe
for the launch of a French version of the site, one week after the German
version was also announced.
The 24-year old billionaire
stated off by answering to one world-revolving question: “Did you ever think
that people would be using Facebook to revolt against the government of
Colombia?”, referring to the Spanish version of the site. The world’s youngest
billionaire replied: “The thing that we are trying to do at Facebook is just
help people communicate and connect.”
Moving on from ‘critical’
questions to things actually concerning Facebook, Zuckerberg got to talk about a
more ‘delicate’ matter: Beacon. Delicate indeed, as one of the audience members
shouted “Beacon sucks” right before he got to talk about it.
“Thank you”, Facebook CEO
replied, adding in a more serious note that “we probably got a little ahead of
ourselves and said we had more of it figured out than we actually did,” and
admitting to making a lot of mistakes: “We’re still learning as a company.”
On the $15 billion the company
has been valued to after the Microsoft deal, Zuckerberg commented they wanted
as little dilution as possible and to raise money in favorable terms, and said
the deal was going well. On a more relaxed note, he also made one remark for
the audience’s delight: “Some people wanted the deal, and some people didn’t.
We made some management changes,” he said, also referring to the departure of
Owen Van Natta, who was the chief revenue officer for Facebook.
Referring to the company’s new
chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg, the Facebook CEO said: “We’d been
looking for someone who could help us scale our operations…it’s growing really
quickly and so having someone who can help us scale is just going to be very
important for the coming years.”
As for the “iTunes killer”
everyone has been talking about, Zuckergerg wasn’t ready to confirm anything,
except maybe for the talks that they have with a lot of companies all the time,
and that there are music applications of Facebook already, but about a music
service, he simply had “nothing to talk about right now.”
With only 10 minutes before the
end of the interview, Lacy gave up the mike for the audience and ended up telling
Zuckerberg she was sorry for the one-hour torture she submitted him to: “I don’t
think this has been that painfull!” he replied.
