And for three years thereafter, I was one of his mentors. He wanted to find out how he could keep the company independent. And that was the reason he was there to see me. Long story short, it turned out that Yahoo had offered a billion dollars, and, as I had predicted, everyone told Mark to sell the company. And you know from television how painful silence can be when you’re expecting a response from someone. And in this particular context, he decided to think about what I said before he reacted. Mark, one of his great strengths is he does not act without thinking things through very carefully. What followed that, Amy, was the most painful five minutes of my entire life. And I’m here to tell you that if you want to see your vision come to fruition, you have to do it yourself.” But before long, either Microsoft or Yahoo is going to offer a billion dollars for Facebook, and everybody you know is going to tell you to take the money. I said, “Mark, before you say anything, I’ve got to tell you why I took this meeting.” Because, I said, “I think you’ve got the most important thing since Google. And I tell this story in the book I’ll give you the very short version of it. So I was really excited to meet Mark.Īnd he comes into my office. I was convinced that the requirement that you had to be who you said you were, with authenticated identity from your school email address, and the ability to control who could see your private information - I thought those two things changed everything and would allow Facebook to eventually be bigger than Google was at that time. I was really excited about the idea, because while I could not use Facebook - at that time, you had to be a student with an email address from your school - I was convinced Facebook was the next big thing. Would you be willing to take a meeting with him?” I got an email from one of Mark’s colleagues saying, “My boss has a crisis.

And it was a normal thing for me to be consulted by young entrepreneurs who just wanted some perspective on how Silicon Valley worked.

I had already spent 24 years, nearly half of my life, investing in Silicon Valley. ROGER McNAMEE: So, Amy, when I met Mark, it was in 2006. So, talk about how you met Mark Zuckerberg, and talk about the evolution of the company. He has had a 34-year career in Silicon Valley, was an early investor in Facebook. I’m Amy Goodman, as we continue with Roger McNamee, author of Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!,, The War and Peace Report.

Zucked by roger mcnamee