Mark Zuckerberg, Sarah Lacy Interview Video
Posted by Nick O'Neill on March 10th, 2008 12:40 PMSince the keynote interview between Mark Zuckerberg and Sarah Lacy yesterday, everybody has been talking about what went wrong as well as what went right. I was approached by one blogger yesterday after my post went up claiming that it was a cultural misunderstanding and that my post was unfair. I still stand by much of what I said and by definition I think the interview was not a good one as a result of the mob mentality that ensued following the interview.
Regardless, I’m sure that this will be one of the more memorable stories of SXSW this year. After running around all of Austin looking for good internet service, I finally found some today in the journalist lounge at the event. I was able to upload a copy of the video that I recorded. There is about one minute missing from the end of the video but the majority of what went on happened prior to the last minute. Watch the video for yourself and let me know if you think this was a good or bad interview.
Viddler has not set the ratio on this video properly and I will be posting an updated version but at least you can watch and listen for now.
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haha
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Screw you too, Sarah.
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Lesson learn: always go to the source and judge for yourself.
Thanks for posting this video.
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The one comment I think stands is Sarah's about the "Digg-style community management." As much of a non-issue as this should have been, the crowd was quite immature.
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2) Ask questions, step aside and allow your speaker to engage directly with the audience...even if the speaker is not the most practiced. "Mmm-hmms" and interruptions are unnecessary and detract from what the audience wants to hear.
3) Remember who the audience is there to see. Leave your own book, TV show, etc., out of the conversation. It wasn't a panel, it was a keynote.
4) If the audience isn't as professional or mature as you'd like them to be, don't be unprofessional or immature back to them.
5) Twirling the hair, jokingly threatening to throw water at the keynote, belittling/laughing at the keynote, yelling to someone else in the back for clarification, saying "screw all you guys" to your audience: COMPLETELY UNPROFESSIONAL AND UNBUSINESSWEEK.
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Here's my sense of it as I watch it now for the first time:
Starting right in, some awkwardness. The story about him sweating him hit a bad note, the stuff about his age gets old, and the French announcement was a flub.
But, the rest of the first half wasn't bad. Seems like she's interrupting mostly because she wants to cover a lot of ground. He's actually talking quite a bit throughout most of the first half, not very shy at all. I've been following facebook's progress for a while now and I'm getting a lot out of it. He's giving a great sense of what he's trying to do with the site, and I feel like most of the people commenting are just not reading into it the things that I am reading into it.
Things seem to take a turn about halfway through when she interrupts to ask about music. She's condescending more now, and that is what's really losing her points. After the remark about 45 minutes, it slips some more.
"Presale on amazon", Hackathon "disgusting" - now she's sinking fast.
The 15 billion dollar talk comes next. He's not interested, the crowd isn't particularly interested, and here is the hair twirling, impossible to ignore. This crosses some kind of ditz line.
After all this 'efficient communication' and 'user control' talk, I am wondering why we haven't touched on the obvious question of when the site will put the public/work/family/school separation of profile data front and center. That would make facebook suitable as a business network and a friends network at the same time, and I'm betting it's the first thing most users would want to ask him.
Not that the crowd is hating her for the sins above, the little things start piling up, unforgiven. I imagine the twitters serve as a huge amplifier. People are not thinking, "does everyone else think this is going bad?". They're seeing proof that everyone else thinks it's going bad, and it's making them all a little bolder by the minute.
Now at 38:12, another nonquestion elicits a simple "ok". This might be fine for a lot of subjects, but by now we all know that Zuckerberg won't take that and run with it - 'you have to ask questions'. Her awkward laugh as she crosses her legs is like a parody of herself. Things build some more and the crowd is definitely laughing at her.
Telling him to read her book, digs a little deeper...
41:46 Giggling for no apparent reason? Gets an audible reaction...
Around 43:00, with the "yeah"s and "mm-hmms", she is obviously just waiting for her turn to talk... (happens several times throughout)
Now with the major softballs, "is [beign CEO] hard for you?" etc... noboby cares, although it actually gets a good answer in my opinon
Now the questions are getting better again, and the answers are good too. I think people at this point have lost the patience to listen to her talk and it doesn't matter much what she says.
By the way, it's funny how often Mark says, "empathy"
"One thing a lot of people don't know about Mark..." ok now we are headed back downhill...
The trouble with this story about the books is that she just wants to tell the story, so he sits back and listens. And there's the hair twirling again. She realizes that it's his interview so she tries to get him to pick up the story by saying, "right?" And as she should know by now, you shouldn't do that with this subject.
I heard an episode of "This American Life" titled "Fiasco". In it, they describe the tipping point moment, where a situation turns from an ordinary disaster in to a Fiasco.
The obvious candidate for tipping point comes right here (49:00), when he tells her to ask questions and the crowd cheers for half a minute.
But the real tipping point comes after right after 51:35 ("you made that up!") when she yells to the back of the room to try and defend the claim that Mark burned his books. As she would say, WTF? Now the crowd is openly heckling her, and it's all over.
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Or a tag cloud, or the full text of posts...
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Mark is not an easy person to interview. Find out what gets him excited and focus on that. Sarah kind of tooted her own horn several times where it was inappropriate; the people are there to see Mark, not her.
Overall, it was definately blown out of proportion, and it was not really that bad. She interviewed like a blogger, when she should have interviewed like a reporter (since she has background at BusinessWeek and Yahoo finance). Chalk it up to experience and get it right next time.
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I'm on Sarah's side.
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A good resource for whiling away hours that could otherwise be spent productively? Perhaps. A ground-breaking innovation that will reshape how humans interact? THAT is funny stuff!
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