"Facebook’s board would have forced Zuckerberg to take it"

Doesn't Zuckerberg have majority control?

Sure; but (IIRC) at the time Facebook was burning cash and the board could have threatened future funding if he refused the offer. He may have been able to get more funding anyway but the larger point is these things are never as simple as the legal docs might imply.

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manquer 4 days ago | parent [-]

Yup It is power dynamics always, legal documents only matter in court.

At the time in 2006 there were plenty of competing networks and any one of them could have climbed to the top.

Facebook wasn’t unique tech wise by all accounts one huge 20k line main file not like Google with PageRank or pegs viaweb written in Lisp or Amazon with early aspects of AWS.

FB could have been replicated and with right money scaled by anyone else , the challenge was there were series of spectacular growth and failures in the social network space

The tech innovations started first with Hack as a PHP compatible language couple of years later then things like relay , graphQL, react and so on.

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sthuck 4 days ago | parent [-]

Where I live, the early Facebook apps were the killer feature of the early days of Facebook.

Genuinely asking, what other software company did something like this back then? I'm tempted to say (tounge in cheek) FB was the original PaaS, but maybe im not old enough

	▲	manquer 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		Flash Apps hosting which was Facebook did then was not ground breaking at all, There were many other competing flash hosting sites . The killer thing others couldn’t do Facebook did was make available social APIs for the app developers to integrate into their platform to make the apps viral, which benefited both them and Facebook. OG PaaS in the Web 2.0 age IMO was the google app engine , it predated all AWS offerings and gave an actual application runtime .

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Ifkaluva 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Recall that Kalanick had majority control at the time that he was ousted.

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Barbing 4 days ago | parent [-]

Travis Kalanick of vibe-physics near-breakthroughs fame?

	▲	function_seven 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		Ha! I don’t listen to the All In podcast, but I did see this: https://youtu.be/TMoz3gSXBcY