Facebook’s Boy Wonder: the new Bill Gates?

As a headline from Reuters recently put it: "Facebook sees ad potential bigger than Google search ads." Could Facebook really be bigger than Google one day? Zuckerberg, for one, has no doubt. A man who's only of late begun to look like a fully fledged adult, he has long been profiled as a cliché, one of those super-smart, arrogant, socially awkward and yet creepily precocious Silicon Valley über-geeks.

Rolling Stone magazine last year described him as "oblivious" and looking like "a boy in a bubble", while trying to wrestle with the seeming contradiction that this same guy was also potentially worth billions. How could that be?

America loves the story of the Boy Nerd Made Good. It gets told as a kind of morality tale, of which there are two versions. Very occasionally, the boy starts a technology company, grows it, stays on top of it and becomes both immensely wealthy and widely reviled as a result, like Bill Gates. More typical, though, is the alternative version.

Here, the Boy Wonder comes up with a great idea, finds venture capitalists to help him build a company, and before long the overconfident but naive youth is ditched by his investors, who go on to behave like bandits when the company either goes public or is sold. The Boy Wonder, meanwhile, just gets forgotten.

Zuckerberg's apparent inability to transcend his age — commentators have made much of the fact that this "oblivious" young man seems to have started Facebook to get girls — coupled with a history of alienating his co-founders, has led to the widespread expectation that his story will, in the end, be of the latter kind.

"When will you cash out and sell Facebook?" is a question its boss has faced for years now. Zuckerberg's reply is invariably a riff on what he told Rolling Stone last year: "I'm here to build something for the long term."

That's long been seen as hiding a deeper truth: that Zuckerberg was just waiting for the right time to jump. And if he didn't jump soon, many were thinking, he was most likely going to blow it, like so many Boy Wonders before him.

Meanwhile, though, some firm facts about Zuckerberg are getting ever harder to ignore: most significantly that he has pursued a single, great idea for years in a row now with admirable persistence, perfect market timing, and enormous success.

So ubiquitous has Facebook become that it's hard to believe Mark Zuckerberg launched it with three other Harvard University friends just five years ago. The son of a dentist and a psychiatrist from the New York suburbs, Zuckerberg had the idea of creating an online version of the facebooks popular on US campuses — print directories showing the faces and names of all the students at the school. The site was an immediate hit.

Within months, Zuckerberg and several co-founders quit their studies and moved to Palo Alto, ground zero of Silicon Valley's entrepreneurial scene, to develop it further, figuring they'd return to Harvard later in the year if nothing panned out.

But students across the US were loving Facebook, and before long it was clear Zuckerberg wouldn't be leaving Palo Alto anytime soon. In 2005, the site allowed high school students to join. A year later, anyone over 13 years old with an email account could be a member. By 2007, Facebook had 19 million users. By the end of 2008, it had passed the 100 million mark. Today it has more than 300 million users worldwide.

In their early years, the young Facebook team did everything they could to conform to the startup-as-all-night-nerdy-frat-party cliché, with Zuckerberg as their Chief Executive Geek. They rented a house in Palo Alto which they never left, surviving on junk food as they coded through the night. Zuckerberg met with Venture Capital luminaries in his pyjamas, just because he could.

Even today, he has some of the trappings of the stereotypical über-geek. Despite being 158th on the Forbes 400 Richest Americans list, he has few possessions and hasn't bothered to buy himself the trophy home most people on the Forbes list would consider de rigueur. Instead, he rents a small, virtually unfurnished house near Facebook's new Palo Alto headquarters.

He walks the couple of blocks to work everyday at around 11am, not because he's lazy but because, like many graduate students (and junior Facebook employees) his age, he's been up working half the night. It's not unusual for senior Facebook executives, the kinds with long resumés and kids sleeping in the room next door, to be woken at 2am by Zuckerberg wanting to run something by them.

Those executives, however, are now telling the world that the company is making real money. Chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg (positively ancient at 40 years old) has just floated the idea that Facebook's potential market was larger than Google's. If she's right, Zuckerberg could be more than just a success — he could be the next Bill Gates.

People who know him say Zuckerberg's changing, too. He's getting more comfortable socially, for one thing. And he now wears a tie to work every day — a very conscious effort to defy his Boy Wonder image and get taken more seriously.

Still, the ties are the ones Zuckerberg brought with him from Boston. He's not doing anything as conventionally adult as shopping for work clothes just yet. Most of us get to grow up in private. If we're lucky enough to become business leaders, we tend to get noticed only when leadership turns out to be something we're good at. Zuckerberg hasn't had that luxury.

Blessed with a great idea just out of his teens, he has been learning very publicly on the job. Remarkably, though, he has endured in the face of enormous pressure from a great many very rich and powerful people who would very much like to take the company off his hands.

It's not in the least surprising, perhaps, that someone with the fortitude it takes to believe in their own vision and the drive needed to bring it to 300 million mostly very happy customers would have a few rough edges and eccentricities. Maybe the remarkably odd nerd really is just a remarkably gifted individual.

Nothing is ever a given in Silicon Valley but these days Facebook, still under its founder's control, is looking like an ever better bet. A friend with links high up in the company describes Facebook insiders as feeling that in the past few months they've collectively "entered the zone".

Zuckerberg is still planning to wait several years before taking his company public, and a great many of his employees very rich. But the smart money should be betting that Facebook will eventually do just that and, when it does, Zuckerberg will still be there, and still running the show.