My visit to Facebook (the company)

I visited Facebook last week.  I've gotten a lot of emails asking me about how my visit was so I promised everyone that I'd do a blog post about it.

It was a very interesting experience.  I went there to see a friend who is working in the R&D group.  What I saw there was a great feeling of team, bright individuals, innovation, energy, and openness.

It reminded me of EDA in the late 80's -- at least my experience in VLSI's software group.  VLSI was a renegade semiconductor company which started the ASIC model along with LSI Logic.  Everyone viewed us as they view Facebook today: "This is all cool stuff, but how are they going to make a profitable business out of this?!!

At that point, VLSI only hired the best from the best schools (as Facebook does today).  We were mostly in our early 20's (as Facebook today).  We worked together, had lunch together, partied together, shared housing together, even dated (as in Facebook today): Work was more than just work (and in fact to this day some of my closest friends post-college are those I met at VLSI).  As my friend and I had lunch in the Facebook café (yes, it was free food!), I noticed a lot of similarities with those days in EDA.

As it always happens, EDA matured (as semi had before that) and companies became "corporations".  Work became just work.  It really makes me wonder about the whole dynamic around corporations: less entrepreneurial, closed, paranoid, ....  I always wondered, for example, why don't corporations use Macs.  Macs are better (performance), must safer, cost compatible, and open.  My thought: Macs just don't fit the bill because they're just not "corporate".  As it turns out, corporations are also having a hard time today dealing with Facebook, or social networking in general - Facebook is not "corporate" either.

In the mid 90's, corporations were struggling to deal with "this internet thing".  A lot of companies were limiting employees access because they feared employees would just waste their time browsing.  I used to hear that argument all the time.  Could you imagine if someone would limit the use of the internet at work today?  All employees (and management) would be up in arm asking "how'd we get our jobs done?!!"

So 15 years later and now corporations are questioning Facebook.  They're looking for ways to limit employees time on Facebook, or other social network/media for that matter.  Instead they can be greatly leveraging it.  There is an insightful article in FastCompany magazine this month about how Cisco is embracing social network within the company to dramatically invigorate innovation and leadership.  It's a bold move by John Chambers (Cisco CEO), one that requires openness, something not typically "corporate".

Cisco's vision is highly appliable to electronic design companies.   Xuropa is enabling professional networking dynamics built around technology-networking (a la social-networking) focused on the entire electronic design supply chain.  Xuropa's platform is something that electronic design companies can leverage (just as Cisco's already doing using other social/professional networks), to revitalize innovation and leadership, and significantly impact the bottom line.

Back to Facebook:  We, as high tech professional, have been taught to believe that someone needs to have a need first, and then we'd create the solution -- and more complicated the solution the better.  As I talk around the industry, I run into people who are upset (and even belligerent) about why Facebook is getting so much attention.   "What are they trying to solve?", I'm often asked.

What I find Facebook's genius to be is that they (most likely by luck, and perhaps because they just didn't know anything different) identified a trend (that people spend more time on the web than TV, phone, radio, writing letters, reading books, etc. combined) and created a fairly simple platform to enable what people would usually do on TV, phone, etc.  They didn't wait for a problem, they just closed their eyes and imagined "what if ...".  That is really the genius behind the Facebooks, the Nings, and the Xuropa's.