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