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ZERO TO ONE EVERY MOMENT IN BUSINESS happens only once. The next Bill Gates will not build an operating system. The next Larry Page or Sergey Brin won’t make a search engine. And the next Mark Zuckerberg won’t create a social network. If you are copying these guys, you aren’t learning from them.
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Peter Thiel (Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future)
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Bloody Facebook- and to think I'd enjoyed The Social Network. Clearly Mark Zuckerberg was the devil.
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Lindsey Kelk (The Single Girl's To-Do List)
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The biggest risk is not taking any risk... In a world that changing really quickly, the only strategy that is guaranteed to fail is not taking risks.
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Mark Zuckerberg
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What Musk has developed that so many of the entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley lack is a meaningful worldview. He’s the possessed genius on the grandest quest anyone has ever concocted. He’s less a CEO chasing riches than a general marshaling troops to secure victory. Where Mark Zuckerberg wants to help you share baby photos, Musk wants to . . . well . . . save the human race from self-imposed or accidental annihilation.
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Ashlee Vance (Elon Musk: Inventing the Future)
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Move fast and break things. Unless you are breaking stuff, you are not moving fast enough.
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Mark Zuckerberg
“
When Yahoo! offered to buy Facebook for $1 billion in July 2006, I thought we should at least consider it. But Mark Zuckerberg walked into the board meeting and announced: “Okay, guys, this is just a formality, it shouldn’t take more than 10 minutes. We’re obviously not going to sell here.” Mark saw where he could take the company, and Yahoo! didn’t.
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Peter Thiel (Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future)
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EVERY MOMENT IN BUSINESS happens only once. The next Bill Gates will not build an operating system. The next Larry Page or Sergey Brin won’t make a search engine. And the next Mark Zuckerberg won’t create a social network. If you are copying these guys, you aren’t learning from them.
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Peter Thiel (Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future)
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I made so many mistakes in running the company so far, basically any mistake you can think of I probably made. I think, if anything, the Facebook story is a great example of how if you're building a product that people love you can make a lot of mistakes
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Mark Zuckerberg
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Ideas don’t come out fully formed , they only become clearer as you work on them . You just have to get started.
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Mark Zuckerberg
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We Don't Build Services to Make Money, We Make Money To Build Services.
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Mark Zuckerberg
“
Sure, Mark Zuckerberg had learned to code on his father’s computer when he was ten, but medicine was different: it wasn’t something you could teach yourself in the basement of your house.
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John Carreyrou (Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup)
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A squirrel dying in front of your house may be more relevant to your interests right now than people dying in Africa. —Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook founder
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Eli Pariser (The Filter Bubble)
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Paradoxically, then, network effects businesses must start with especially small markets. Facebook started with just Harvard students—Mark Zuckerberg’s first product was designed to get all his classmates signed up, not to attract all people of Earth. This is why successful network businesses rarely get started by MBA types: the initial markets are so small that they often don’t even appear to be business opportunities at
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Peter Thiel (Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future)
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If you just work on stuff that you like and you’re passionate about, you don’t have to have a master plan with how things will play out.
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Mark Zuckerberg
“
Where Mark Zuckerberg wants to help you share baby photos, Musk wants to . . . well . . . save the human race from self-imposed or accidental annihilation.
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Ashlee Vance (Elon Musk: Inventing the Future)
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Mark has the most long-term perspective I’ve ever seen. This guy is uber uber uber on the long-term view.
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David Kirkpatrick (The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the Company That is Connecting the World)
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Facebook is no longer just a company, I told them. It’s a doorway into the minds of the American people, and Mark Zuckerberg left that door wide open for Cambridge Analytica, the Russians, and who knows how many others. Facebook is a monopoly, but its behavior is more than a regulatory issue—it’s a threat to national security. The concentration of power that Facebook enjoys is a danger to American democracy.
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Christopher Wylie (Mindf*ck: Cambridge Analytica and the Plot to Break America)
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I never wanted to run a company.To me a business is a good vehicle for getting stuff done. Mark Zuckerberg in The Facebook Effect written by David Kirkpatrick
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David Kirkpatrick
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The biggest risk is not taking any risk... In a world that is changing really quickly, the only strategy that is guaranteed to fail is not taking risks.” - Mark Zuckerberg
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Library Mindset (The Art of Laziness: Overcome Procrastination & Improve Your Productivity)
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That’s what Harvard was like: thinking you’re pretty good at something, then meeting someone who is really good or even one of the best in the world. And that doesn’t mean they get good grades. A lot of the most famous alumni left without graduating because their work became more important than school. People like Bill Gates, Matt Damon, and Mark Zuckerberg. And you know who did graduate? The Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski. The point is: Never graduate from Harvard.
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Colin Jost (A Very Punchable Face)
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Strategy is about out-thinking your competition. Mark Zuckerberg, while at Harvard, built a website called Facemash ‘for fun’. Even today, Facebook believe that ‘done is better than perfect’.
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Max McKeown (The Strategy Book)
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Google gets $59 billion, and you get free search and e-mail. A study published by the Wall Street Journal in advance of Facebook’s initial public offering estimated the value of each long-term Facebook user to be $80.95 to the company. Your friendships were worth sixty-two cents each and your profile page $1,800. A business Web page and its associated ad revenue were worth approximately $3.1 million to the social network. Viewed another way, Facebook’s billion-plus users, each dutifully typing in status updates, detailing his biography, and uploading photograph after photograph, have become the largest unpaid workforce in history. As a result of their free labor, Facebook has a market cap of $182 billion, and its founder, Mark Zuckerberg, has a personal net worth of $33 billion. What did you get out of the deal? As the computer scientist Jaron Lanier reminds us, a company such as Instagram—which Facebook bought in 2012—was not valued at $1 billion because its thirteen employees were so “extraordinary. Instead, its value comes from the millions of users who contribute to the network without being paid for it.” Its inventory is personal data—yours and mine—which it sells over and over again to parties unknown around the world. In short, you’re a cheap date.
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Marc Goodman (Future Crimes)
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We don't crash EVER!
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Mark Zuckerberg
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If I may, I’d like to take a moment to praise Mark Zuckerberg’s parents for not procreating sooner. Praise be to all that is holy that Facebook didn’t exist when I was that age and the Internet then was but a Usenet group for Star Trek fans. I feel like the luckiest person in the world to have grown up when cameras used actual film because the only thing that stood between infamy and me was the clerk who developed photos at Walgreens. Thank God for him.
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Jen Lancaster (I Regret Nothing: A Memoir)
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The greatest successes come from having the freedom to fail
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Mark Zuckerberg
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Qué clases de conexiones metafísicas realizan los robots de Mark Zuckerberg para reunirte virtualmente con personas de las que no deseas volver a saber nada.
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Ricardo Garza (Hipsteria)
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Hecho” es mejor que “perfecto” – Mark Zuckerberg.
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Nelson Martínez (PROTOTHINKING: Pensamiento de Diseño en Acción (Spanish Edition))
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The internet is a sea full of creepy, cybercriminal fish, and if Mark Zuckerberg can cover his laptop webcam with a piece of tape, I reserve the right to keep things painfully anonymous.
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Ali Hazelwood (Love on the Brain)
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The imbalanced power relationship is in your face all the time. Don’t you feel humiliated using one of the Facebook brands, like Instagram or WhatsApp? Facebook is the first public company controlled by one person.32 I mean, I don’t personally have anything against Mark Zuckerberg. It isn’t about him. But why would you subordinate a big part of your life to any one stranger?
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Jaron Lanier (Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now)
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The Social Network is not a cruel portrait of any particular real world person called Mark Zuckerberg. It's a cruel portrait of us: 500 million sentient people entrapped in the recent careless thoughts of a Harvard sophomore.
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Zadie Smith (Feel Free: Essays)
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The very success of the internet itself is due to its openness, equality of opportunity and innovation. Platforms like Facebook itself would not have been created if Mr. Mark Zuckerberg was accessing the internet via free basics.
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Arzak Khan
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having opinions online can be very dangerous. The internet is a sea full of creepy, cybercriminal fish, and if Mark Zuckerberg can cover his laptop webcam with a piece of tape, I reserve the right to keep things painfully anonymous.
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Ali Hazelwood (The Love Hypothesis)
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The next Bill Gates will not build an operating system. The next Larry Page or Sergey Brin won’t make a search engine. And the next Mark Zuckerberg won’t create a social network. If you are copying these guys, you aren’t learning from them.” •
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Timothy Ferriss (Tools of Titans: The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers)
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The notion of “taking too much space” is born out of a framework of scarcity upon which we have built a world where some people are allowed to build skyscrapers and stadiums or run countries and make laws for the masses, while others are told to stay small, go unnoticed, don’t take up too much room on the sidewalk. But only some of us receive that message. We have yet to collectively tell Amazon gazillionaire Jeff Bezos or Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, “Hey, buddy, you’re just taking up too much space!
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Sonya Renee Taylor (The Body Is Not an Apology: The Power of Radical Self-Love)
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By a “product person,” Loeb and Wolf meant someone who could get teams of engineers and designers to build software tools that consumers find useful, addictive, or fun. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was this kind of executive. So was Apple cofounder Steve Jobs.
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Nicholas Carlson (Marissa Mayer and the Fight to Save Yahoo!)
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Y Combinator’s Paul Graham, one of Silicon Valley’s most powerful men, once told the New York Times:1 “I can be tricked by anyone who looks like Mark Zuckerberg. There was a guy once who we funded who was terrible. I said: ‘How could he be bad? He looks like Zuckerberg!
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Mike Monteiro (Ruined by Design: How Designers Destroyed the World, and What We Can Do to Fix It)
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Zhang was at Harvard at the same time as Mark Zuckerberg, and it’s interesting to speculate on which of them will end up having the most impact on the world. It’s a proxy for the larger question, which future historians will answer, of whether the digital revolution or the life-science revolution will end up being the more important.
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Walter Isaacson (The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race)
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Raffensperger also requested and received a $5,591,800 grant from the privately funded Center for Election Innovation and Research (CEIR), a group funded by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan.84 The group reported Georgia used the funds to push mail-in balloting and to counteract negative messaging about mail-in voting.
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Mollie Ziegler Hemingway (Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections)
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I’m here to build something for the long term. Anything else is a distraction,” Facebook cofounder Mark Zuckerberg said when he declined Yahoo’s $1 billion offer to buy his social networking service in 2006. The average twenty-two-year-old would have accepted millions in profit from a dorm-room experiment, but Zuckerberg kept his eyes on the horizon.
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Amy Wilkinson (The Creator's Code: The Six Essential Skills of Extraordinary Entrepreneurs)
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Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity.
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Mark Zuckerberg
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Finding your purpose isn't enough. the challenge for our generation is creating a world where everyone has a sense of purpose.
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Mark Zuckerberg
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They just can't wrap their head around the idea that someone might build something because they like building things.
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Mark Zuckerberg
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People don't care about what you say, they care about what you build.
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Mark Zuckerberg
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I really want to clear my life to make it so that I have to make as few decisions as possible about anything except how to best serve this community
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Mark Zuckerberg
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Don't discount yourself, no matter what you're doing. Everyone has a unique perspective that they can bring to the world.
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Mark Zuckerberg
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Senator, we run ads.
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Mark Zuckerberg
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Your ability to keep doing interesting things is your willingness to be embarrassed and go back to step 1.
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Mark Zuckerberg
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Dr. Fauci worked with Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and other social media sites to muzzle discussion of any remedies. FDA sent a letter of warning that N-acetyle-L-cysteine (NAC) cannot be lawfully marketed as a dietary supplement, after decades of free access on health food shelves, and suppressed IV vitamin C, which the Chinese were using with extreme effectiveness.
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Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health)
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The world would be so different today if Mark Zuckerberg had not stuck to his ignorant, self-serving interpretation of the US Supreme Court Justice Louis D Brandeis’s aphorism that the way to counter hate speech is more speech. Brandeis said those words in 1927, long before the time of abundance, the time of Facebook, when a lie can now be delivered a million times over.
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Maria Ressa (How to Stand Up to a Dictator)
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A lot of these new start-up founders are somewhat unsavory people. The old tech industry was run by engineers and MBAs; the new tech industry is populated by young, amoral hustlers, the kind of young guys (and they are almost all guys) who watched The Social Network and its depiction of Mark Zuckerberg as a lying, thieving, backstabbing prick—and left the theater wanting to be just like that guy.
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Dan Lyons (Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble)
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The world’s richest man pulled Microsoft out of his butt. All Bill Gates exploited was a line of 0s and 1s as long as a piece of string. Now Microsoft employs 118,000 people. Number six on the rich list, Mark Zuckerberg, created Facebook out of less than that. All Mark had was a dumb idea that all the stupid people want to tell every stupid thing about their lives to all the other stupid people. Current net worth of the person with that dumb idea, $11.2 billion.
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P.J. O'Rourke (How the Hell Did This Happen?: The Election of 2016)
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The thing is,” said J. Karacehennem, whose last name was Turkish for Black Hell, “that we’ve spent like, what, two or three hundred years wrestling with existentialism, which really is just a way of asking, Why are we on this planet? Why are people here? Why do we lead our pointless lives? All the best philosophical and novelistic minds have tried to answer these questions and all the best philosophical and novelistic minds have failed to produce a working answer. Facebook is amazing because finally we understand why we have hometowns and why we get into relationships and why we eat our stupid dinners and why we have names and why we own idiotic cars and why we try to impress our friends. Why are we here, why do we do all of these things? At last we can offer a solution. We are on Earth to make Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg richer. There is an actual, measurable point to our striving. I guess what I’m saying, really, is that there’s always hope.
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Jarett Kobek (I Hate the Internet)
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Starting something new in middle age might look that way too. Mark Zuckerberg famously noted that “young people are just smarter.” And yet a tech founder who is fifty years old is nearly twice as likely to start a blockbuster company as one who is thirty, and the thirty-year-old has a better shot than a twenty-year-old. Researchers at Northwestern, MIT, and the U.S. Census Bureau studied new tech companies and showed that among the fastest-growing start-ups, the average age of a founder was forty-five when the company was launched.
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David Epstein (Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World)
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So we had better call upon our lawyers, politicians, philosophers and even poets to turn their attention to this conundrum: how do you regulate the ownership of data? This may well be the most important political question of our era. If we cannot answer this question soon, our sociopolitical system might collapse. People are already sensing the coming cataclysm. Perhaps this is why citizens all over the world are losing faith in the liberal story, which just a decade ago seemed irresistible.
How, then, do we go forward from here, and how do we cope with the immense challenges of the biotech and infotech revolutions? Perhaps the very same scientists and entrepreneurs who disrupted the world in the first place could engineer some technological solution? For example, might networked algorithms form the scaffolding for a global human community that could collectively own all the data and oversee the future development of life? As global inequality rises and social tensions increase around the world, perhaps Mark Zuckerberg could call upon his 2 billion friends to join forces and do something together?
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Yuval Noah Harari (21 Lessons for the 21st Century)
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Después de tres meses de búsqueda introspectiva, el 16 de febrero de 2017 Mark Zuckerberg publicó un audaz manifiesto sobre la necesidad de construir una comunidad global y sobre el papel de Facebook en dicho proyecto.[1] En un discurso complementario en el acto inaugural de la Cumbre de las Comunidades, el 22 de junio de 2017, Zuckerberg explicó que los trastornos sociopolíticos de nuestra época (desde el consumo de drogas descontrolado hasta los regímenes totalitarios asesinos) son el resultado en gran medida de la desintegración de las comunidades humanas. Lamentó el hecho de que «durante décadas, la afiliación a todo tipo de grupos se ha reducido hasta una cuarta parte.
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Yuval Noah Harari (21 lecciones para el siglo XXI)
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Google had a built-in disadvantage in the social networking sweepstakes. It was happy to gather information about the intricate web of personal and professional connections known as the “social graph” (a term favored by Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg) and integrate that data as signals in its search engine. But the basic premise of social networking—that a personal recommendation from a friend was more valuable than all of human wisdom, as represented by Google Search—was viewed with horror at Google. Page and Brin had started Google on the premise that the algorithm would provide the only answer. Yet there was evidence to the contrary. One day a Googler, Joe Kraus, was looking for an anniversary gift for his wife. He typed “Sixth Wedding Anniversary Gift Ideas” into Google, but beyond learning that the traditional gift involved either candy or iron, he didn’t see anything creative or inspired. So he decided to change his status message on Google Talk, a line of text seen by his contacts who used Gmail, to “Need ideas for sixth anniversary gift—candy ideas anyone?” Within a few hours, he got several amazing suggestions, including one from a colleague in Europe who pointed him to an artist and baker whose medium was cake and candy. (It turned out that Marissa Mayer was an investor in the company.) It was a sobering revelation for Kraus that sometimes your friends could trump algorithmic search.
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Steven Levy (In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives)
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Dr. Fauci’s business closures pulverized America’s middle class and engineered the largest upward transfer of wealth in human history. In 2020, workers lost $3.7 trillion while billionaires gained $3.9 trillion.46 Some 493 individuals became new billionaires,47 and an additional 8 million Americans dropped below the poverty line.48 The biggest winners were the robber barons—the very companies that were cheerleading Dr. Fauci’s lockdown and censoring his critics: Big Technology, Big Data, Big Telecom, Big Finance, Big Media behemoths (Michael Bloomberg, Rupert Murdoch, Viacom, and Disney), and Silicon Valley Internet titans like Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Eric Schmidt, Sergey Brin, Larry Page, Larry Ellison, and Jack Dorsey.
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Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health)
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Os políticos são um pouco como músicos, e o instrumento que eles tocam é o sistema emocional e bioquímico humano. Eles fazem um discurso e uma onda de medo varre o país. Publicam um tweet e há uma explosão de ódio. Não creio que devamos dar a estes músicos um instrumento mais sofisticado no qual tocar. Uma vez conseguindo manipular diretamente as nossas alavancas emocionais, gerando ansiedade, ódio, satisfação e tédio à sua vontade, a política vai tornar-se um mero circo emocional.Por muito que devamos recear o poder das grandes empresas, a História sugere que não estamos mais seguros nas mãos de governos todo- poderosos. Em janeiro de 2018, prefiro que as minhas informações estejam nas mãos de Mark Zuckerberg do que nas mãos de Vladimir Putin(...)
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Yuval Noah Harari (21 Lessons for the 21st Century)
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Until today, Marcos has denied any connection to “trolls,”22 despite the data that we at Rappler exposed in a three-part Marcos propaganda series in 2019. Not so subtly, the messaging on his social media accounts began with changing the past. To begin with, he repeatedly lied about his education at Oxford University and Wharton. After being caught in the lie by a Rappler exclusive,23 his Senate office quietly changed his résumé on the Senate website, but he doubled down on the lie,24 a lesson many people, including Donald Trump and Mark Zuckerberg, have learned is easily facilitated by social media. His disinformation network also hijacked popular pages and news groups with copied-and-pasted comments that slowly chipped away at the legacy of the Aquino family, long seen as his family’s nemesis—all
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Maria Ressa (How to Stand Up to a Dictator: The Fight for Our Future)
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The Struggle is when you wonder why you started the company in the first place.
The Struggle is when people ask you why you don’t quit and you don’t know the answer.
The Struggle is when your employees think you are lying and you think they may be right.
The Struggle is when food loses its taste.
The Struggle is when you don’t believe you should be CEO of your company. The Struggle is when you know that you are in over your head and you know that you cannot be replaced. The Struggle is when everybody thinks you are an idiot, but nobody will fire you. The Struggle is where self-doubt becomes self-hatred.
The Struggle is when you are having a conversation with someone and you can’t hear a word that they are saying because all you can hear is The Struggle.
The Struggle is when you want the pain to stop. The Struggle is unhappiness.
The Struggle is when you go on vacation to feel better and you feel worse.
The Struggle is when you are surrounded by people and you are all alone. The Struggle has no mercy.
The Struggle is the land of broken promises and crushed dreams. The Struggle is a cold sweat. The Struggle is where your guts boil so much that you feel like you are going to spit blood.
The Struggle is not failure, but it causes failure. Especially if you are weak. Always if you are weak.
Most people are not strong enough.
Every great entrepreneur from Steve Jobs to Mark Zuckerberg went through The Struggle and struggle they did, so you are not alone. But that does not mean that you will make it. You may not make it. That is why it is The Struggle.
The Struggle is where greatness comes from.
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Ben Horowitz (The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers)
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Let me tell you why the rest of the world needs to pay attention to what happens in the Philippines: 2021 was the sixth year in a row that Filipinos – out of all global citizens – spent the most time on the internet and on social media. Despite slow internet speeds, Filipinos uploaded and downloaded the largest number of videos on YouTube in 2013. Four years later, 97% of our country’s citizens were on Facebook. When I told that statistic to Mark Zuckerberg in 2017, he was quiet for a beat. “Wait, Maria,” he finally responded, looking directly at me, “where are the other three percent?”
At the time, I laughed at his glib quip. I’m not laughing anymore.
As these numbers show and as Facebook admits, the Philippines is ground zero for the terrible effects that social media can have on a nation’s institutions, its culture, and the minds of its populace.
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Maria Ressa (How to Stand Up to a Dictator)
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Il fatto è che del dio degli Inglesi non ti devi mai fidare. Questi servizi segreti più o meno deviati si fanno i fatti miei e i fatti tuoi, anche se vivi una vita normale e non sei incazzato a morte con il sistema di valori in cui vivi. Sono un po’ quelli che avevano già Facebook prima di te. Prima anche di Mark Zuckerberg. E non devi nemmeno registrarti né pubblicare nulla. Loro ascoltano le tue telefonate. Guardano le tue foto. Se scrivi sul pc si godono i tuoi aggiornamenti di stato. Leggono le tue email come fossero messaggi in bacheca. Non riescono a smettere di farsi i cazzi tuoi. Vigilano su noi poveri cavalli. Su voi poveri buoi. E appena siamo inutilizzabili, ci conducono al macello. Puoi provare a denunciarli per stalking, perché a un certo punto sono davvero un riccio nel culo. Ma ho come la sensazione che non riusciresti a portarli in tribunale.
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Stefano Zorba (Mi innamoravo di tutto: Storia di un dissidente)
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Of course, this is not an innocent activity—even though the tech companies disavow any responsibility for the material they publish and promote. They plead that they are mere platforms, neutral utilities for everyone’s use and everyone’s benefit. When Facebook was assailed for abetting the onslaught of false news stories during the 2016 presidential campaign—a steady stream of fabricated right-wing conspiracies that boosted Donald Trump’s candidacy—Mark Zuckerberg initially disclaimed any culpability. “Our goal is to give every person a voice,” he posted on Facebook, washing his hands of the matter. It’s galling to watch Zuckerberg walk away from the catastrophic collapse of the news business and the degradation of American civic culture, because his site has played such a seminal role in both. Though Zuckerberg denies it, the process of guiding the public to information is a source of tremendous cultural and political power. In the olden days, we described that power as gatekeeping—and it was a sacred obligation.
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Franklin Foer (World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech)
“
Dr. Fauci’s business closures pulverized America’s middle class and engineered the largest upward transfer of wealth in human history. In 2020, workers lost $3.7 trillion while billionaires gained $3.9 trillion.46 Some 493 individuals became new billionaires,47 and an additional 8 million Americans dropped below the poverty line.48 The biggest winners were the robber barons—the very companies that were cheerleading Dr. Fauci’s lockdown and censoring his critics: Big Technology, Big Data, Big Telecom, Big Finance, Big Media behemoths (Michael Bloomberg, Rupert Murdoch, Viacom, and Disney), and Silicon Valley Internet titans like Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Eric Schmidt, Sergey Brin, Larry Page, Larry Ellison, and Jack Dorsey. The very Internet companies that snookered us all with the promise of democratizing communications made it impermissible for Americans to criticize their government or question the safety of pharmaceutical products; these companies propped up all official pronouncements while scrubbing all dissent. The same Tech/Data and Telecom robber barons, gorging themselves on the corpses of our obliterated middle class, rapidly transformed America’s once-proud democracy into a censorship and surveillance police state from which they profit at every turn.
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Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health)
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One of my favorite sayings is that there are two kinds of people in the world: optimists and pessimists. And the saying goes that optimists tend to be successful and pessimists tend to be right.
And the idea is that if you think something is going to be terrible and it is going to fail, then you are going to look for the data points that prove you right and you will find them. That is what pessimists do. But if you think that something is possible, then you are going to try to find a way to make it work. And even when you make mistakes along the way and even when people doubt you, you are going to keep pushing until you find a way to make it happen.
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Mark Zuckerberg
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Except then a local high school journalism class decided to investigate the story. Not having attended Columbia Journalism School, the young scribes were unaware of the prohibition on committing journalism that reflects poorly on Third World immigrants. Thanks to the teenagers’ reporting, it was discovered that Reddy had become a multimillionaire by using H-1B visas to bring in slave labor from his native India. Dozens of Indian slaves were working in his buildings and at his restaurant. Apparently, some of those “brainy” high-tech workers America so desperately needs include busboys and janitors. And concubines. The pubescent girls Reddy brought in on H-1B visas were not his nieces: They were his concubines, purchased from their parents in India when they were twelve years old. The sixty-four-year-old Reddy flew the girls to America so he could have sex with them—often several of them at once. (We can only hope this is not why Mark Zuckerberg is so keen on H-1B visas.) The third roommate—the crying girl—had escaped the carbon monoxide poisoning only because she had been at Reddy’s house having sex with him, which, judging by the looks of him, might be worse than death. As soon as a translator other than Reddy was found, she admitted that “the primary purpose for her to enter the U.S. was to continue to have sex with Reddy.” The day her roommates arrived from India, she was forced to watch as the old, balding immigrant had sex with both underage girls at once.3 She also said her dead roommate had been pregnant with Reddy’s child. That could not be confirmed by the court because Reddy had already cremated the girl, in the Hindu tradition—even though her parents were Christian. In all, Reddy had brought seven underage girls to the United States for sex—smuggled in by his brother and sister-in-law, who lied to immigration authorities by posing as the girls’ parents.4 Reddy’s “high-tech” workers were just doing the slavery Americans won’t do. No really—we’ve tried getting American slaves! We’ve advertised for slaves at all the local high schools and didn’t get a single taker. We even posted flyers at the grade schools, asking for prepubescent girls to have sex with Reddy. Nothing. Not even on Craigslist. Reddy’s slaves and concubines were considered “untouchables” in India, treated as “subhuman”—“so low that they are not even considered part of Hinduism’s caste system,” as the Los Angeles Times explained. To put it in layman’s terms, in India they’re considered lower than a Kardashian. According to the Indian American magazine India Currents: “Modern slavery is on display every day in India: children forced to beg, young girls recruited into brothels, and men in debt bondage toiling away in agricultural fields.” More than half of the estimated 20.9 million slaves worldwide live in Asia.5 Thanks to American immigration policies, slavery is making a comeback in the United States! A San Francisco couple “active in the Indian community” bought a slave from a New Delhi recruiter to clean house for them, took away her passport when she arrived, and refused to let her call her family or leave their home.6 In New York, Indian immigrants Varsha and Mahender Sabhnani were convicted in 2006 of bringing in two Indonesian illegal aliens as slaves to be domestics in their Long Island, New York, home.7 In addition to helping reintroduce slavery to America, Reddy sends millions of dollars out of the country in order to build monuments to himself in India. “The more money Reddy made in the States,” the Los Angeles Times chirped, “the more good he seemed to do in his hometown.” That’s great for India, but what is America getting out of this model immigrant? Slavery: Check. Sickening caste system: Check. Purchasing twelve-year-old girls for sex: Check. Draining millions of dollars from the American economy: Check. Smuggling half-dead sex slaves out of his slums in rolled-up carpets right under the nose of the Berkeley police: Priceless.
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Ann Coulter (¡Adios, America!: The Left's Plan to Turn Our Country into a Third World Hellhole)
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By collecting data from the vast network of doctors across the globe, they added dozens of new compounds to the arsenal—all proven effective against COVID-19. Dr. Kory told me that he was deeply troubled that the extremely successful efforts by scores of front-line doctors to develop repurposed medicines to treat COVID received no support from any government in the entire world—only hostility—much of it orchestrated by Dr. Fauci and the US health agencies. The large universities that rely on hundreds of millions in annual funding from NIH were also antagonistic. “We didn’t have a single academic institution come up with a single protocol,” said Dr. McCullough. “They didn’t even try. Harvard, Johns Hopkins, Duke, you name it. Not a single medical center set up even a tent to try to treat patients and prevent hospitalization and death. There wasn’t an ounce of original research coming out of America available to fight COVID—other than vaccines.” All of these universities are deeply dependent on billions of dollars that they receive from NIH. As we shall see, these institutions live in terror of offending Anthony Fauci, and that fear paralyzed them in the midst of the pandemic. “Dr. Fauci refused to promote any of these interventions,” says Kory. “It’s not just that he made no effort to find effective off-the-shelf cures—he aggressively suppressed them.” Instead of supporting McCullough’s work, NIH and the other federal regulators began actively censoring information on this range of effective remedies. Doctors who attempted merely to open discussion about the potential benefits of early treatments for COVID found themselves heavily and inexplicably censored. Dr. Fauci worked with Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and other social media sites to muzzle discussion of any remedies. FDA sent a letter of warning that N-acetyle-L-cysteine (NAC) cannot be lawfully marketed as a dietary supplement, after decades of free access on health food shelves, and suppressed IV vitamin C, which the Chinese were using with extreme effectiveness.
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Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health)
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Finding the right mentor is not always easy. But we can locate role models in a more accessible place: the stories of great originals throughout history. Human rights advocate Malala Yousafzai was moved by reading biographies of Meena, an activist for equality in Afghanistan, and of Martin Luther King, Jr. King was inspired by Gandhi as was Nelson Mandela.
In some cases, fictional characters can be even better role models. Growing up, many originals find their first heroes in their most beloved novels where protagonists exercise their creativity in pursuit of unique accomplishments. When asked to name their favorite books, Elon Musk and Peter Thiel each chose “Lord of the Rings“, the epic tale of a hobbit’s adventures to destroy a dangerous ring of power. Sheryl Sandberg and Jeff Bezos both pointed to “A Wrinkle in Time“ in which a young girl learns to bend the laws of physics and travels through time. Mark Zuckerberg was partial to “Enders Game“ where it’s up to a group of kids to save the planet from an alien attack. Jack Ma named his favorite childhood book as “Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves“, about a woodcutter who takes the initiative to change his own fate.
… There are studies showing that when children’s stories emphasize original achievements, the next generation innovates more.…
Unlike biographies, in fictional stories characters can perform actions that have never been accomplished before, making the impossible seem possible. The inventors of the modern submarine and helicopters were transfixed by Jules Vern’s visions in “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea” and “The Clippership of the Clouds”. One of the earliest rockets was built by a scientist who drew his motivation from an H.G. Wells novel. Some of the earliest mobile phones, tablets, GPS navigators, portable digital storage desks, and multimedia players were designed by people who watched “Star Trek” characters using similar devices. As we encounter these images of originality in history and fiction, the logic of consequence fades away we no longer worry as much about what will happen if we fail…
Instead of causing us to rebel because traditional avenues are closed, the protagonist in our favorite stories may inspire originality by opening our minds to unconventional paths.
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Adam M. Grant (Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World)
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A LITTLE BIT before Adeline made her unforgivable mistake, a billionaire named Sheryl Sandberg wrote a book called Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead. Sheryl Sandberg didn’t have much eumelanin in the basale stratum of her epidermis. In her book, Sheryl Sandberg proposed that women who weren’t billionaires could stop being treated like crap by men in the workplace if only they smiled more and worked harder and acted more like the men who treated them like crap. Billionaires were always giving advice to people who weren’t billionaires about how to become billionaires. It was almost always intolerable bullshit. SANDBERG BECAME A BILLIONAIRE by working for a company named Facebook. Facebook made its money through an Internet web and mobile platform which advertised cellphones, feminine hygiene products and breakfast cereals. This web and mobile platform was also a place where hundreds of millions of people offered up too much information about their personal lives. Facebook was invented by Mark Zuckerberg, who didn’t have much eumelanin in the basale stratum of his epidermis. What is your gender? asked Facebook. What is your relationship status? asked Facebook. What is your current city? asked Facebook. What is your name? asked Facebook. What are your favorite movies? asked Facebook. What is your favorite music? asked Facebook. What are your favorite books? asked Facebook. ADELINE’S FRIEND, the writer J. Karacehennem, whose last name was Turkish for Black Hell, had read an essay called “Generation Why?” by Zadie Smith, a British writer with a lot of eumelanin in the basale stratum of her epidermis. Zadie Smith’s essay pointed out that the questions Facebook asked of its users appeared to have been written by a 12-year-old. But these questions weren’t written by a 12-year-old. They were written by Mark Zuckerberg. Mark Zuckerberg was a billionaire. Mark Zuckerberg was such a billionaire that he was the boss of other billionaires. He was Sheryl Sandberg’s boss. J. Karacehennem thought that he knew something about Facebook that Zadie Smith, in her decency, hadn’t imagined. “The thing is,” said J. Karacehennem, whose last name was Turkish for Black Hell, “that we’ve spent like, what, two or three hundred years wrestling with existentialism, which really is just a way of asking, Why are we on this planet? Why are people here? Why do we lead our pointless lives? All the best philosophical and novelistic minds have tried to answer these questions and all the best philosophical and novelistic minds have failed to produce a working answer. Facebook is amazing because finally we understand why we have hometowns and why we get into relationships and why we eat our stupid dinners and why we have names and why we own idiotic cars and why we try to impress our friends. Why are we here, why do we do all of these things? At last we can offer a solution. We are on Earth to make Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg richer. There is an actual, measurable point to our striving. I guess what I’m saying, really, is that there’s always hope.
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Jarett Kobek (I Hate the Internet)
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One of the things he (Mark Zuckerberg) told me was that my desire to be liked by everyone would hold me back. He said that when you want to change things, you can't please everyone. If you do please everyone, you aren't making enough progress. (p.51)
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Sheryl Sandberg (Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead)
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I do think there is a certain profound lack of empathy in asserting that the only reason someone could have voted the way they did is they saw some fake news. If you believe that, then I don’t think you have internalized the message the Trump supporters are trying to send in this election,” Zuckerberg said.61
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Mark Dice (The True Story of Fake News: How Mainstream Media Manipulates Millions)
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As CEO of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg only earns $1 a year.
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Lena Shaw (1000 Random Facts And Trivia, Volume 3 (Interesting Trivia and Funny Facts))
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At the end of 1996, the five most valuable companies in the world were General Electric, Royal Dutch Shell, the Coca-Cola Company, NTT (Nippon Telegraph and Telephone), and ExxonMobil—traditional industrial and consumer companies that relied on massive economies of scale and decades of branding to drive their value. Just twenty-one years later, in the fourth quarter of 2017, the list looked very different: Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and Facebook. That’s a remarkable shift. Indeed, while Apple and Microsoft were already prominent companies at the end of 1996, Amazon was still a privately held start-up, Larry Page and Sergey Brin were still a pair of graduate students at Stanford who were two years away from founding Google, and Mark Zuckerberg was still looking forward to his bar mitzvah. So what happened? The Networked Age happened, that’s what. Technology now connects all of us in ways that were unthinkable to our ancestors. Over two billion people now carry smartphones (many of them made by Apple, or using Google’s Android operating system) that keep them constantly connected to the global network of everything. At any time, those people can find almost any information in the world (Google), buy almost any product in the world (Amazon/ Alibaba), or communicate with almost any other human in the world (Facebook/ WhatsApp/ Instagram/ WeChat). In this highly connected world, more companies than ever are able to tap into network effects to generate outsize growth and profits.
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Reid Hoffman (Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies)
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Congress today reauthorized funding for Facebook, the massive online surveillance program run by the CIA. According to reports, Facebook has replaced almost every other CIA information-gathering program since it was launched in 2004. [A mock CIA official noted,] “After years of secretly monitoring the public, we were astounded so many people would willingly publicize where they live, their religious and political views, an alphabetized list of all their friends, personal e-mail addresses, phone numbers, hundreds of photos of themselves, and even status updates about what they were doing moment to moment. It is truly a dream come true for the CIA. Much of the credit belongs to CIA agent Mark Zuckerberg, who runs the day-to-day Facebook operation for the agency.
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Marc Goodman (Future Crimes)
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Most of the world’s most successful innovators see problems through a different lens from the rest of us. Why didn’t Hertz come up with a Zipcar-like product first? Kodak came close to creating a kind of Facebook product long before Mark Zuckerberg did. Major yogurt manufacturers understood that there might be a demand for Greek yogurt well before Chobani founder Hamdi Ulukaya launched what is now a $ 1 billion business. AT& T introduced a “picture phone” at the 1964 World’s Fair, decades before Apple’s iPhone. Instead of looking at the way the world is and assuming that’s the best predictor of the way the world will be, great innovators push themselves to look beyond entrenched assumptions to wonder if, perhaps, there was a better way. And there is.
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Clayton M. Christensen (Competing Against Luck: The Story of Innovation and Customer Choice)
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When Yahoo! offered to buy Facebook for $1 billion in July 2006, I thought we should at least consider it. But Mark Zuckerberg walked into the board meeting and announced: “Okay, guys, this is just a formality, it shouldn’t take more than 10 minutes. We’re obviously not going to sell here.
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Blake Masters (Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future)
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Brian Chesky of Airbnb defines culture in a simple and concise way: “a shared way of doing things.” Clearly defining the way an organization does things matters, because blitzscaling requires aggressive, focused action, and unclear, hazy cultures get in the way of actually implementing strategy. Netflix cofounder and CEO Reed Hastings told me, “Weak cultures are diffuse; people act differently, and don’t understand each other, and it becomes political.” Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg have done many wonderful things at Facebook, and one of them is building a unified culture that is devoted to aggressive experimentation and data-driven decision making, as summarized by Mark’s original motto “Move fast and break things.” Facebook’s culture helps employees understand that they shouldn’t be afraid to try things that might fail. This allows Facebook to move faster, and to move on from failed experiments quickly. Imagine if someone asked a random employee from your start-up the following questions: What is your organization trying to do? How are you trying to achieve those goals? What acceptable risks are you incurring to achieve those goals more quickly? When you have to trade off certain values, which ones take priority? What kind of behavior do you hire, promote, or fire for?
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Reid Hoffman (Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies)
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Peter ha escrito en otro lugar: «El próximo Bill Gates no creará un sistema operativo. El próximo Larry Page o Serguéi Brin no hará un buscador de internet. Y el próximo Mark Zuckerberg no creará una red social. Si copias a estos tipos, no estás aprendiendo nada de ellos».
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Timothy Ferriss (Armas de titanes: Los secretos, trucos y costumbres de aquellos que han alcanzado el éxito (Deusto) (Spanish Edition))
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They will donate the money throughout the course of Zuckerberg’s life. Mark
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MouseWorks Publishing (1,001 Interesting Facts & Useless Crap: Social Media)
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He’s less a CEO chasing riches than a general marshaling troops to secure victory. Where Mark Zuckerberg wants to help you share baby photos, Musk wants to … well … save the human race from self-imposed or accidental annihilation. The
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Ashlee Vance (Elon Musk: How the Billionaire CEO of SpaceX and Tesla is Shaping our Future)
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Where Mark Zuckerberg wants to help you share baby photos, Musk wants to . . . well . . . save the human race from self-imposed or accidental annihilation.
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Ashlee Vance (Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future)
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Why did Steve Jobs , Mark Zuckerberg & Barack Obama decide on wearing identical clothes every day ?
Should you weigh yourself everyday ?
What is the best way known to mankind to deal with unfinished corporate tasks ?
What are the best foods for corporate success ?
If you don’t know even one of these answers for sure then you risk working seriously below your potential & will never be as successful & as rich as you have the opportunity to be
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Dharmendra Rai (The Corporate Willpower Book)
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Musk has developed that so many of the entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley lack is a meaningful worldview. He’s the possessed genius on the grandest quest anyone has ever concocted. He’s less a CEO chasing riches than a general marshaling troops to secure victory. Where Mark Zuckerberg wants to help you share baby photos, Musk wants to . . . well . . . save the human race from self-imposed or accidental annihilation.
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Ashlee Vance (Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future)
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Mark Zuckerberg is an optimist, whereas Elon Musk and Bill Gates are very much the opposite, as was the late Stephen Hawking.
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Douglas E. Richards (Unidentified)
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As a federal official sworn for four decades to uphold the Constitution, Dr. Fauci should have been the champion of free speech and vigorous debate during the pandemic. Instead, he worked hand in glove with Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, and other Big Tech titans to censor criticism of his various mandates and suppress information about vaccine injuries, including discussions of pathogenic priming.16,17 Email traffic shows that Dr. Fauci colluded directly with Mark Zuckerberg and the social media platforms to censor doctors who reported vaccine failures, harms, and deaths, to deplatform public health advocates like myself, and to evict and muzzle patients who reported their own injuries.
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Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health)
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By September 2004, Zuckerberg was referring to Parker as Facebook’s president, and Parker was steering Zuckerberg away from conventional venture capitalists. He told Benchmark and Google to back off, preferring to take a leaf out of Google’s own book; he wanted to raise capital from angels. His first port of call was an entrepreneur named Reid Hoffman, who had coached him through the Plaxo denouement. Hoffman declined to lead an investment in Facebook; he had himself founded a social network called LinkedIn, and there might be some rivalry. So Hoffman put Parker in touch with a Stanford friend named Peter Thiel, the co-founder of an online payments company called PayPal. Pretty soon, Thiel agreed to kick in $500,000 in exchange for 10.2 percent of the firm, with Hoffman providing a further $38,000.[11] A third social-networking entrepreneur named Mark Pincus also wrote a check for $38,000.
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Sebastian Mallaby (The Power Law: Venture Capital and the Making of the New Future)
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When Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook was asked about the best advice he’d ever received, he replied, “In a world that’s changing so quickly, the biggest risk you can take is not taking any risk.
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Mark Sochan (The Art of Strategic Partnering: Dancing with Elephants)
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What stands out for me in this story is the seeming fact that Mark Zuckerberg and co. only pay attention to internal resistance when it reaches critical mass, which it only seems to do when the cause is American. I am aware of a number of attempts Facebook employees have made over the years to raise concerns about the handling of, for example, wrongful takedowns of Palestinian content or inattention to the growing problem of harassment … all of which were dismissed.
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Jillian York (Silicon Values: The Future of Free Speech Under Surveillance Capitalism)
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To be sure, most dropouts do not become geniuses or success stories. But prominent among the dropout titans of recent history are Bill Gates (Harvard), Steve Jobs (Reed College), Mark Zuckerberg (Harvard), Elon Musk (Stanford), Bob Dylan (University of Minnesota), Lady Gaga (New York University), and Oprah Winfrey (Tennessee State). Jack Ma never went to college, and neither did Richard Branson, who dropped out of high school at age fifteen. Creative force Kanye West dropped out of Chicago State University at age twenty to pursue a musical career; six years later he released his first album to great critical acclaim and commercial success: The College Dropout (2004). The point is not to encourage dropping out but rather to observe that these transformative figures were somehow able to learn what they needed to know. Here successful people and geniuses share a common trait: most are lifelong learning addicts. It’s a good habit to have.
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Craig Wright (The Hidden Habits of Genius: Beyond Talent, IQ, and Grit—Unlocking the Secrets of Greatness)
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As Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg said in 2017, “Optimists tend to be successful, and pessimists tend to be right. . . . If you think that something’s going to be terrible and it’s going to fail, then you’re going to look for the data points that prove you right. And you’ll find them. That’s what pessimists do. . . . But if you think that something is possible, then you’re going to try to find a way to make it work.
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Craig Wright (The Hidden Habits of Genius: Beyond Talent, IQ, and Grit—Unlocking the Secrets of Greatness)
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Mark Zuckerberg had recently announced the creation of Facebook’s “Supreme Court,” an oversight board7 designed to take content moderation to an independent court-style setup. That board addressed the wrong issue: content, which had never really been the problem. The first problem was the company’s distribution model: an oversight board on content could never match the speed of the dissemination of information online.
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Maria Ressa (How to Stand Up to a Dictator: The Fight for Our Future)
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Think about it: Would Michael Milken have been sentenced to ten years in federal prison in 2021? Likely not if we’re basing that outcome on the government action handed down to Mark Zuckerberg. He continues to smear lipstick over the cancer that is Facebook, and until we see a financial disincentive for his relentless systemic misconduct, we’ll continue to see no more than a Band-Aid put on the crises his company creates.
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Scott Galloway (Adrift: America in 100 Charts)
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Sune had seen a photograph of Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, standing in front of a room of people who were all wearing virtual-reality headsets. He was the only person standing in actual reality, looking at them, smiling, pacing proudly around. When he saw it, Sune said, 'I was like - holy shit, this is a metaphor for the future.' If we don't change course, he fears we are headed towards a world where 'there's going to be an upper class of people that are very aware' of the risks to their attention and find ways to live within their limits, and then there will be the rest of society with 'fewer resources to resist the manipulation, and they're going to be living more and more inside their computers, being manipulated more and more'.
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Johann Hari (Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention— and How to Think Deeply Again)
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For his part, Mark Zuckerberg has described Musk’s worries as “hysterical,” and indeed, a few weeks after the Tesla baron made public his fears, the Facebook baron announced that he was building a helpful AI to run his house. It would recognize his friends and let them in. It would monitor the nursery. It would make toast. Unlike Musk, Zuckerberg perkily explained, he chose “hope over fear.
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Bill McKibben (Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out?)
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Jangan takut untuk mengambil risiko. Yang paling berbahaya adalah tidak mengambil risiko sama sekali.
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Mark Zuckerberg
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Now Where Do You Find Customers? When novice entrepreneurs search for opportunities, they too often look beyond their Zone of Influence. They think the action is happening somewhere else, in some other location or industry. But seasoned entrepreneurs almost always find and create opportunities within the context of who they are, what they know, and especially who they know. In each of the examples above, the business validation process begins with potential customers in the entrepreneur’s orbit. Actual people with names. Tribes you belong to or are interested in, most of whom are already self-organized online. People you know how to reach, today. Though it’s rarely a part of their official origin stories, the biggest companies in the world—even the viral apps now worth billions—started through personal networks and real human connections. Mark Zuckerberg started Facebook in a weekend by emailing friends to use it. Version 1 did well, validating it. And Microsoft started with Bill Gates building software for a guy in Albuquerque. He had a CUSTOMER FIRST. In the beginning, founders should reach out to their friends, their former colleagues, their communities. You may think your business is unique, but trust me, it’s not. Every successful business can start this way. For example, Anahita loves her dogs and wanted healthier snacks for them. She started taking her homemade organic dog treats to her local dog park. She would sell out every time. A year later she now has a store called the Barkery, a dog bakery. Before you even think about picking a business idea, make sure you have easy access to the people you want to help. An easy way to do this is to think about where you have easy access to a targeted group of people whom you really want to help—like, say, new moms in Austin, cyclists, freelance writers, and taco obsessives (like me!). CHALLENGE Top three groups. Let’s write out your top three groups to target. Who do you have easy access to that you’d be EXCITED to help? This can be your neighbors, colleagues, religious friends, golf buddies, cooking friends, etc. The better you understand your target group, the better you can speak to them. The more specifically you can speak to their problems, the better and easier you can sell (or test products). Note how this process prioritizes communication with people, through starting (taking the first iteration of your solution straight to customers) and asking (engaging them in a conversation to determine how your solution can best fix their problem). Business creation should always be a conversation! Nearly every impulse we have is to be tight with our ideas by doing more research, going off alone to build the perfect product—anything and everything to avoid the discomfort of asking for money. This is the validation shortcut. You have to learn to fight through this impulse. It won’t be easy, but it’ll be worth it.
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Noah Kagan (Million Dollar Weekend: The Surprisingly Simple Way to Launch a 7-Figure Business in 48 Hours)
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When you give everyone a voice and give people power, the system usually ends up in a really good place. So, what we view our role as, is giving people that power.” —MARK ZUCKERBERG
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Perry Marshall (Ultimate Guide to Facebook Advertising: How to Access 1 Billion Potential Customers in 10 Minutes (Ultimate Series))
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Social networks like Facebook seem impelled by a similar aspiration. Through the statistical "discovery" of potential friends, the provision of "Like" buttons and other clickable tokens of affection, and the automated management of many of the time-consuming aspects of personal relations, they seek to streamline the messy process of affiliation. Facebook's founder, Mark Zuckerberg, celebrates all of this as "frictionless sharing"--the removal of conscious effort from socializing. But there's something repugnant about applying the bureaucratic ideals of speed, productivity, and standardization to our relations with others. The most meaningful bonds aren't forged through transactions in a marketplace or other routinized exchanges of data. People aren't notes on a network grid. The bonds require trust and courtesy and sacrifice, all of which, at least to a technocrat's mind, are sources of inefficiency and inconvenience. Removing the friction from social attachments doesn't strengthen them; it weakens them. It makes them more like the attachments between consumers and products--easily formed and just as easily broken.
Like meddlesome parents who never let their kids do anything on their own, Google, Facebook, and other makers of personal software end up demeaning and diminishing qualities of character that, at least in the past, have been seen as essential to a full and vigorous life: ingenuity, curiosity, independence, perseverance, daring. It may be that in the future we'll only experience such virtues vicariously, though the exploits of action figures like John Marston in the fantasy worlds we enter through screens.
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Nicholas Carr (The Glass Cage: How Our Computers Are Changing Us)
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capital expenditures required in Clean Technology are so incredibly high,” says Pritzker, “that I didn’t feel that I could do anything to make an impact, so I became interested in digital media, and established General Assembly in January 2010, along with Jake Schwartz, Brad Hargreaves and Matthew Brimer.” In less than two years GA had to double its space. In June 2012, they opened a second office in a nearby building. Since then, GA’s courses been attended by 15,000 students, the school has 70 full-time employees in New York, and it has begun to export its formula abroad—first to London and Berlin—with the ambitious goal of creating a global network of campuses “for technology, business and design.” In each location, Pritzker and his associates seek cooperation from the municipal administration, “because the projects need to be understood and supported also by the local authorities in a public-private partnership.” In fact, the New York launch was awarded a $200,000 grant from Mayor Bloomberg. “The humanistic education that we get in our universities teaches people to think critically and creatively, but it does not provide the skills to thrive in the work force in the 21st century,” continues Pritzker. “It’s also true that the college experience is valuable. The majority of your learning does not happen in the classroom. It happens in your dorm room or at dinner with friends. Even geniuses such as Mark Zuckerberg or Bill Gates, who both left Harvard to start their companies, came up with their ideas and met their co-founders in college.” Just as a college campus, GA has classrooms, whiteboard walls, a library, open spaces for casual meetings and discussions, bicycle parking, and lockers for personal belongings. But the emphasis is on “learning by doing” and gaining knowledge from those who are already working. Lectures can run the gamut from a single evening to a 16-week course, on subjects covering every conceivable matter relevant to technology startups— from how to create a web site to how to draw a logo, from seeking funding to hiring employees. But adjacent to the lecture halls, there is an area that hosts about 30 active startups in their infancy. “This is the core of our community,” says Pritzker, showing the open space that houses the startups. “Statistically, not all of these companies are going to do well. I do believe, though, that all these people will. The cost of building technology is dropping so low that people can actually afford to take the risk to learn by doing something that, in our minds, is a much more effective way to learn than anything else. It’s entrepreneurs who are in the field, learning by doing, putting journey before destination.” “Studying and working side by side is important, because from the interaction among people and the exchange of ideas, even informal, you learn, and other ideas are born,” Pritzker emphasizes: “The Internet has not rendered in-person meetings obsolete and useless. We chose these offices just to be easily accessible by all—close to Union Square where almost every subway line stops—in particular those coming from Brooklyn, where many of our students live.
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Maria Teresa Cometto (Tech and the City: The Making of New York's Startup Community)