It is no more news that Facebook founder, Mark Zuckerberg
took a dramatic entrance into Nigeria in style, but what's important is
the result of his epoch making visit and business interactions with
Nigerian youths.
On day 2 (Wednesday 31 August) of the visit of Facebook
founder/CEO, Mark Zuckerberg to Lagos, Nigeria, he had a very busy day
beginning with a jog with some friends, partners and aides across the
Lekki-Ikoyi suspended bridge.
The tech wizard and seventh richest man in the world later
had a town hall meeting with developers and entrepreneurs at Landmark
Event Centre in Oniru Estate, Victoria Island.
Zuckerberg in his opening remarks at the signature town
hall meeting said that in Lagos, and across the continent, things are
changing really quickly.
According to him, the economy is shifting from a resource
based economy to an entrepreneurial and knowledge based economy with
Nigerians leading that change on the continent.
He later met with some select member of Nigeria’s
entertainment fraternity, specifically Nollywood luminaries such as
Richard Mofe-Damijo, Kunle Afolayan, Rita Dominic and stand-up comedy
great, Basketmouth.
However, before meeting those entertainers, Zuckerberg
fielded five questions thrown at him from the online community during
the town hall meeting streamed live. He shares his opinion of Nigeria,
the people and culture, the vibrant developer and entrepreneurial
ecosystem and most important, his fascination about Nigerian movie
industry, the Nollywood.
Q: What impressions do you have of Nigeria and its people
since you came? Do they align or contrast with the impressions you had
before your visit?
The thing that is striking for me about Nigeria is the
entrepreneurial energy. When you are trying to build something, what
matters the most is just who wants it the most. Here in Nigeria, as soon
as you get off the plane and start talking to people, you feel the
passion and that entrepreneurial energy. I can tell you two stories just
from last night when I talked to probably no more than 100 people and I
was really blown away. First story, I stopped by at this training
programme by Andela that my foundation invested in to help train really
talented folks across the continent to be world class engineers and work
for companies around the world. I sat down and had the opportunity to
meet Blessing Eboye, she told me the story of how she applied to the
programme. The first time she didn’t get in and that didn’t stop her.
She showed up again next time and they figured out that they had to give
her a trial. She was allowed to go ahead for the training programme and
she crushed it. Now she is a top engineer working for a multinational
company. If you have that attitude you win. The other story was when I
went down the street and stopped by this little store. I met Rosemary
Njoku who is selling (internet) connectivity to people nearby. She
already had a shop selling things to people and she chose to grow her
business further, so she got hooked up with folks who worked with
Facebook and the Express WiFi programme that we set up to empower local
entrepreneurs to spread connectivity. I asked her how she was able to
make the transition in her business from selling one thing to also
telling people that she provides connectivity. She said it wasn’t easy.
She had to printout flyers and go around town evangelising about her
business. She even had to hire dancers. She told me she now has about
3000 customers paying for connectivity. Her connectivity part of the
business is now bigger than the original business that she started out
with.
What's really important are the hardwork and the drive I feel you have here in Lagos.
What's really important are the hardwork and the drive I feel you have here in Lagos.
Q: When you started Facebook and you were still writing
codes, how did you handle marketing when the company was still a
startup?
What we did was to get people who use our product or
service and enjoy it to evangelise to their friends. This by far was the
most effective way to market a product. We are actually a little bit
lucky because that is what our product is, helping you communicate with
your friends. We tried a lot of different things at Facebook. We used to
have a traditional marketing team that helped grow our communities. We
still have that for other things like helping to explain what the
company does. But we used it to grow our customers rather than our
communities. We found out that we can actually make bigger impact by
having an engineering team that was focused on building products that
empowered people in our communities to spread Facebook to the people
they want on Facebook. That actually worked a lot better. That’s one of
the biggest secrets to Facebook marketing. If you are building a social
product, one of the biggest features of a community like Facebook is
that your friends are there. That was one of the key things that we
needed to do and I know there are lessons for that and all the different
businesses that you are thinking of building. Having an engineering
style growth team is been a really valuable thing and thinking about
this as an engineering problem rather than a traditional style is a
really powerful way to approach the world.
Q: You predicted the future with Facebook. What do you see happening ten years from now and how does Mark want to be remembered?
One of my favourite technology quotes is that the best way
to predict the future is to create it. It is much easier to predict what
is going to happen in the world 20-25 years into the future than to
predict what is going to happen five years into the future. The mission
that I care about at Facebook is still very much the same as in the
beginning, though I didn’t think we could do it in the beginning but now
I think we might. When I was getting started in college, we could talk
about connecting the whole world but you don’t actually think about
spreading internet to people who don’t have it. As a college student you
are just happy when people use your service over the internet. But here
we are, 12 years later we have almost 2 billion people using Facebook
and we have built a company that is pretty successful and we make enough
money so that we can make long term investments which may not be
profitable in the next 10-15 years. And I think through those
investments, we are making partnerships with non-profits, mobile
operators and governments all over the world. I think that this dream of
getting everybody connected is possible in our lifetime.
Q: What is Facebook’s plan for the media, news and
publishing platforms in Nigeria who are currently going through the
transformation from news print to online?
One of the big things I think we need to do to connect
everyone is make sure there is good content representing all cultures
and languages. The internet in order for it to be useful you need to
have good content that you understand and you want to interact with. One
of the things I am mos
Q: Name one thing that was a game changer for you that you did differently while building Facebook?
You’ll never know as much as you need to in the beginning
no matter what. This was especially true for me because when I started
out, I was 19 years old and I didn’t know anything about business. There
were a lot of stuffs I didn’t know. The only way we were going to
succeed was if I focus on not what I thought I knew but on making sure I
learn everything else as quickly as possible. The secret here is that
learning is a process. When you try things and you fail, you shouldn’t
be afraid of failure, you should fail and learn from it and make sure
you are doing what you can to learn as quickly as possible. I do think
that’s why Facebook has been able to evolve so much. Facebook started
off as a service for students and it has made a lot of transitions and
you only do this by focusing on learning as much as you can.
A lot of times people think these things are straight lines
but the best entrepreneurs and the best organisations I have seen are
obsessively focused on learning as much as they can every day. As
entrepreneurs, engineers and developers, you don’t have the success you
are having by making mistakes along the way and rebounding from them and
that takes certain persistence and mindsets that you are going to get
it done. So I think, if you just stay focused on that, you will succeed.
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