I really applaud Zuckerberg for positively embracing all the attention that's been shouldered on him, really. I think stuff like this SNL skit or him taking his core team at Facebook to watch "The Social Network" together at a movie theatre just shows tremendous inner strength and maturity on his part. It's great to see him be able to laugh it off and joke about it.
He's come a long way in his public speaking skills too, he was pretty natural and comedic during his talk at Startup School. I think he's only going to get better from this point on too.
Right... his PR team couldn't have possibly told him to take his entire team to go watch "The Social Network" when it came out. Of course his PR team is going to guide him along the way, but it shouldn't discount how serious he is about confronting this stuff -- not for himself, but for the sake of Facebook.
Seriously? I think if someone makes a movie about myself (or my company), I'd be LOLing too, and certainly flattered.
Zuck is also human you know? There's nothing special about him embracing the attention, there's no "tremendous inner strength and maturity on his part".
In the end, he's a hacker and hackers don't care too much about their personal brand or public appearance. Don't you think he would be a better public speaker a long time ago if he actually cared about it? He's not Paris Hilton, his "fame" is not driven by his public apparences.
Zuck is concerned with the future of Facebook, as a company and as a service, far more than all this personal bullshit and his own brand, and I think that's what makes him a good leader irrespective of what anyone might think of his past.
When your company is servicing close to a third of the world's internet population and is actually making an iota of history, I'd like to see you LOL real loud when someone is out there trying to publicly defame you and ruin what you've built.
I know plenty of hackers who are obsessed with their personal brands. Every niche has their celebrities. And in turn, every niche has their Paris Hiltons.
As Sportsguy says, it's all about reps. I'm increasingly impressed but only because I've seen the money put into coaching and seen those guys since they moved to PA. He's learned well, but if your startup grows organically you get to practice (and sweat) all the way up.
And let's be honest, I know some of those guys and am amazed at how they've grown and what they've accomplished. But we're the same generation and we can do so much more. Don't forget, money is for poor people.
I'm glad that was awkward. If he got 1600 on his SATs, started a 50bn company, and was a gifted comedic actor...I'd be pissed off. And a little sad for myself.
I liked how he totally loved his own joke about having invented poking ("I invented poking! :-D"), and after a second of silence from the audience, realized that he should be in character, and went back to trying to look serious.
To be fair, it was a pretty good line. One thing I like about comedians like Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David is that they both realize when they've said something hilarious and can't help but giggle a bit. It works for Zuckerburg too, although I guess the audience didn't care that much.
I thought that bit about poking came off pretty awkward. As did the rest of his appearance. That doesn't really matter though, he is very successful outside comedy and public appearances.
Not to sound like a fanboy (thought that might be a lost cause), this reminds me of how good a showman Steve Jobs is - as seen in the 1999 Macworld Expo with Noah Wyle (in very similar circumstances - Wyle had played Jobs in 'Pirates of Silicon Valley').
So what happened to Zuckerberg receiving a bunch of PR lessons and not being so awkward? I get that this isn't his thing, but... ow.
I actually think Zuck should just hire Eisenberg to be him anytime he has to appear in public. And get Sorkin to write his speeches. He'd be far more entertaining that way, and he would get to stay at Facebook doing what he does best.
I actually find Zuckerberg about as "awkward" as Bill Gates. I think people understand that, well, Mark is a nerd, and his nerdiness isn't going anywhere.
So if he just stays nice, and do charitable things, people will eventually like him. It has already started, The Social Network has been huge boost for that.
So aside from execution, what's the difference between the portrayal of Zuck in TSN and that of Gates in Pirates of Silicon Valley? Both characters come off as more interesting and in a weird way, likeable than their real-world counterparts. Even Jobs is far more charismatic in PoSV than in real life. PoSV came out when Microsoft was in its prime and its portrayal of Gates was in many ways similar to that of Zuck in TSN, but it didn't seem to hurt him any.
I'm not sure.
PoSV is more a movie about Steve Jobs than anything else. TSN and PoSV both show to the public that "he (Bill & Mark) is not an evil blood/money-thirsty being, he had some opportunities and took them".
If PoSV was made about Bill, it would have been even more similar to TSN.
Being funny on command is tricky, even when you have done it professionally for a while. I lived public speaking like some students live football, and I can barely keep on a game face for a few hundred people in a conference: TV is totally another ballgame (and can be perceived entirely differently inside and outside the studio).
He also has to be funny within the confines of a script which his PR advisors can't actually allow to be funny. e.g. the line "Liked the movie, particularly that line about buying my enemy's house so I could use it as a pingpong table. Where do you live?" would be funny, but PR would go nuts when they saw that script.
He obviously is geeky and awkward. It's worked very well for him. For some people there just aren't enough lessons in the world to pull off an unauthentic personality. For most of us we have to learn to deal with it but when you have $50B in the bank I'm sure it becomes less of a priority. I suspect the only reason he's involved in any of these PR efforts is because he calculated that a bad personal reputation is bad for Facebook too. Sometimes you really need to cut people some slack when they're in these extraordinary positions. There's no handbook for 27 year old billionaires. The best advice anyone could give him is to just be himself and let the rest of the world deal with it.
I just hate the idea that the whole world has to be structured to maximize our personal entertainment and comfort. It's part of the problem. Just because someone is geeky and awkward doesn't mean they should be assumed to be a bad person. I know that's not what you're suggesting but it is part of a real problem. We all need to collectively accept the smartest guy in the room might be the one who hasn't spent many mental cycles on being the most lovable person in the room.
I actually think Zuck should just hire Eisenberg to be him anytime he has to appear in public. And get Sorkin to write his speeches.
Goodness gracious, I couldn't disagree more. I thought Eisenberg played MZ like an angry cartoon character. And Sorkin's incessant zingers were classic bad "good" writing calling attention to itself, the writer trying to wedge himself in as one of the stars of the movie (which worked, judging by the attention he got for it).
I couldn't disagree more with you. Sure, Eisenberg being hired by Facebook would be completely ridiculous, and was clearly written as a joke, not as a serious suggestion.
But as to Sorkin's writing, he's always written that way, right back to fairly unsuccessful TV writing in the 90s. Personally I love it, and have loved everything he's done, he is in my view the best TV/film writer currently working - and I know I'm not alone in that view.
Obviously, his quality is subjective and therefore debatable, but having watched The Social Network a few times, I haven't seen anything that strikes me as anything but classic Sorkin.
The reason he's "wedged in as one of the stars of the movie" is partly because the writing was so good that he's winning awards for it, and partly because many critics share my view of him, so they rave about him. To give some context, before Studio 60 On The Sunset strip aired (in 2005, I think), critics hyped it up SO much, simply because it was created by Sorkin. (And I think that was one of the reasons it was cancelled after one season - it wasn't too bad, but compared to expectations, and his normal work, it just wasn't good enough.)
So, nothing new to how he writes, or to the fact that people pay a fair bit more attention to him than to the average screenplay writer.
Would you say that Juno had bad writing, or anything by the Coen brothers or Joss Whedon? All of those feature the kinds of conspicuously zippy one-liners that you seem to feel constitute bad writing.
Good question. I didn't see Juno. I loathed what I saw of Joss Whedon, so you're probably right there. But IMO the Coens are far greater artists than that. I don't have any unified theory of why, but I'll point out one thing. Lebowski has lots of zippy writing (different than Sorkin's, but I'll concede the point) but True Grit, to take the obvious recent example, does not. Neither did No Country. In other words the Coens have the discipline to subordinate their cleverness to the needs of the genre and the story. In fact this is one of their distinguishing features. Sorkin by contrast seems to have this adolescent need to prove how smart he is in every context, and is quite willing to turn his characters into caricatures in order to do it. It's a form of incontinence.
"Lebowski has lots of zippy writing...but True Grit...does not."
Did we watch the same movie? True Grit had some of the wittiest, zippiest dialogue I've seen in a long time. The writing was incredibly conspicuous, in a good way.
I disagree with your notion that conspicuous writing makes for a bad movie, just as I would argue that conspicuous editing, or score, or cinematography, or acting can lead to an excellent movie.
I'm pretty sure he was way less awkward up there than I would have been :-) Can someone describe what about his behavior was considered awkward? Because I completely didn't catch it.
Read Trust Me: Four Steps to Authenticity and Charisma by Nick Morgan. It's a really good book, and touches upon that point very nicely. It might seem paradoxical, but EVERYONE who's in the spotlight is trained to act "genuine and charismatic." Some people learn faster than others, but in the end, before you do something like host SNL, you will have received a lot of coaching.
He's definitely come a long way, though. I remember watching him on stage at F8 and being uncomfortable with how terrible of a speaker he was.
Fast forward, and he's definitely learned at least the rudiments of being the center of attention and speaking without sounding like he has zero social skills.
the zuck is having trouble being a fanboy on here. i think thats where the real comedic value stems from for those of us in the valley who have met him, or at least heard him speak.
He's come a long way in his public speaking skills too, he was pretty natural and comedic during his talk at Startup School. I think he's only going to get better from this point on too.