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.
March 10th, 2008 at 1:45 pm
I actually think the interview was ok. Lacy’s attitude and casualness allowed Zuckerberg to relax a bit and speak more freely than he typically does. Sure it was unusual, but it was effective. I honestly believe that is what her intent and it worked. We did get a more candid Zuckerberg than usual
March 10th, 2008 at 1:59 pm
The interview is fine. Zuckerberg is just a dick.
March 10th, 2008 at 2:16 pm
After watching this, it’s clear that this whole story is sensationalized. As usual.
March 10th, 2008 at 2:45 pm
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ccLJnICdJGI
haha
March 10th, 2008 at 2:46 pm
Talk about being immature.
Screw you too, Sarah.
March 10th, 2008 at 3:54 pm
yeah there is a minute of video missing - wheres the guy who made the remark about rough interviews?
March 10th, 2008 at 4:21 pm
The interview was fine. What the hell are the people upset about. Lacy let zuckerburg talk most of the time…
Lesson learn: always go to the source and judge for yourself.
Thanks for posting this video.
March 10th, 2008 at 5:37 pm
Good interview immature faceless people making negative comments. Mark is a better speaker now than a year ago and Sarah is always good.
March 10th, 2008 at 5:42 pm
Just watched the interview. The disruptions were only a fraction of what I thought they were, considering how much Twitter erupted over it. Sure, maybe the interview was a bit awkward, but it wasn’t a bomb. It’s all blown out of proportion.
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.
March 10th, 2008 at 5:42 pm
…if it wasn’t for everyone looking for blog-fodder, this would have blown over.
March 10th, 2008 at 6:09 pm
1) Understand your audience, regardless of what you think of them. If you have contempt for them, keep it veiled. This group: pretty vocal.
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.
March 10th, 2008 at 7:10 pm
This isn’t what I expected, after reading all the negative buzz. Maybe that’s due to lowered expectations?
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.
March 10th, 2008 at 7:21 pm
Know what would be cool? Some kind of crowd mood monitoring system that crawls the twitter feeds, does some text analysis, and controls some simple display up on stage. Could be as simple as a mood light that glows red for bad and green for good, and gradations in between, so you can watch what the mood of the crowd is doing.
Or a tag cloud, or the full text of posts…
March 10th, 2008 at 8:10 pm
To be honest, the interview isn’t the disaster that it was portrayed to be. Still, I found Lacy’s interview style to be so informal to the point where it takes away from Zuckerberg. My take is she was trying so hard to be Zuckerberg-friendly that it probably rubbed some people in the audience the wrong way. As an former journalist, my other reaction is Lacy’s interview style is less than polished. In some respects, she comes across as unprofessional.
March 10th, 2008 at 8:13 pm
I thought the interview wasn’t that bad. The questions have already been asked in previous interviews, and it really just rubbed sand in the wound (especially with Beacon). With these sit-down casual sessions, the feeling should be light, but there is still a line that reporters should not cross. There was a lot of awkwardness going on here, and Sarah clearly lost control.
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.
March 10th, 2008 at 8:22 pm
She didn’t suck at all… it was a 20something-ish interview, get over it you geekish, blog-happy, overly critical wanna be’s.
March 10th, 2008 at 9:40 pm
I think the audience got her heart wrong. I think she was only wanting to help because of his awkwardness. I would be curious to see how many women in the audience thought she was trying to make herself the story.
I’m on Sarah’s side.
March 10th, 2008 at 9:49 pm
Mark Zuckerberg is full of shit. He’s just spouting the next generation of B2C crap. He’s Geoff Yang but 15 years younger.
March 11th, 2008 at 12:37 am
Boy was that painful to watch! I think Mark handled it the best anyone could have under the circumstances. Lacy needs to learn how to actually ASK questions, not make statements. Half of her statements/questions were very awkward, many based on inside personal information she thought she had about Mark that we are not privy to, some were down rite rude & condescending, or just plane put words in Mark’s mouth. I’ve never seen her interview anyone else before. Is this typical of how she operates?
March 11th, 2008 at 7:36 am
he’s shy, and she’s dumb. I hate his up-accent and she sounds uneducated with her constant “like”. But the whole interview isn’t as bad as those morons on twitter and some bloggers made it out to be.
March 11th, 2008 at 4:00 pm
The sad thing is that Zuckerberg and his lackeys are being touted as innovators for what? Putting some eyeliner and rouge on the concept of IFrames and social networking 101?
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!
March 12th, 2008 at 3:57 am
Hey the guy is 23 man give him a break! Thought it was a good interview.
March 12th, 2008 at 1:51 pm
I was in the audience and one thing the video fails to capture is the palpable mood in the audience: thinking “this is dreadful,” wondering “does anyone else think this is as awkward as I do?” Then at around the 30 minute mark, people just started getting up and leaving, and not just a few people, a lot of people, something that you wouldn’t expect for a major keynote speech. There was a sense of tension in the room that this interview was terrible and that it’s actually making us all uncomfortable. Early on in the interview I felt like the whole thing was a bit scripted, but things continued to go downhill. She’s promoting herself, interrupting him, alternately acting like a flirty schoolgirl and at others openly deriding Facebook, asking questions that don’t really seem to be questions. And everyone begins looking around, wondering if other people are feeling as uncomfortable as they themselves are. Finally, someone just said what we all were thinking. “Talk about something interesting!” And everyone suddenly felt this huge rush of relieve like “yes, thank you, seriously.” It’s not that it’s just that she was a poor interviewer, though she certainly was that. I’m pissed that she squandered this incredible opportunity for Mark to talk to a thousand of his most passionate users, to hear from them and inspire them. It was just such a waste.
The next day I saw Mark Cuban interview Michael Eisner, and Cuban showed exactly how to conduct a proper interview. Cuban took a guy who would ordinarily have trouble speaking to a young, web-savvy crowd, and made him and his message relevant. Cuban was witty, insightful, intelligent, a though he easily could have, he didn’t let his charismatic personality overpower Eisner’s. THAT’S how it’s done.
March 12th, 2008 at 2:40 pm
Seeing the video, it wasn’t nearly as bad as you would have thought from the reactions. But,I thought Sarah was pretty
terrible. I saw the central problem as being that she interviewed like a chat show host,(not like a blogger,as Ian says), & not like a serious interviewer. I lost track of the number of times she laughed…. & about nothing.
The audience bad feeling & general reaction was because the ground rules for the interview were understood differently. Sara was acting the chat show host when the audience was expecting a serious & rather more formal interview.
Sarah’s big mistake was that she tried to combine the two & couldn’t bring it off. A more skilled & experienced…or just plain better… interviewer might have succeded, but what she amply demonstrated was that she didn’t have the skills to do it.
March 13th, 2008 at 11:18 am
The last five minutes is how the entire interview should taken place. Great questions and real questions from practitioners developing in facebook. It was great to see Mark light up when he heard real issues from real users, developers.
March 13th, 2008 at 1:55 pm
not the government in Colombia.. FARC is not the government.. my G-d what ignorance…
March 13th, 2008 at 11:47 pm
All these comments remind me how a video IS NOT reality. I was in this crowd, and being there you could feel the tension mounting for 49 minutes and frankly, she was pretty unbearable. This wanna-be-couch-type conversation missed to seriously address what people were expecting: Privacy -big P (beyond the media training-responses Zuckerberg had about ‘people control of their information’), financial backing for the project, future of facebook-type social networking (and not only features), etc. Actually when talking about Facebook, Mark did answer some of those but it’s maybe her attitude which made it all unbearable, especially to the ear. And her reaction even worse. She was oblivious to anything except maybe her and Mark.
March 17th, 2008 at 12:01 am
[…] in the blame game, I know that even I became a participant of the mob mentality. After watching the Sarah Lacy, Mark Zuckerberg interview again, I heard myself demand that they open up the interview to the crowd for questions and […]
March 19th, 2008 at 12:42 pm
Her body language and casualness was not at all professional. Her approach as an interviewer was mortifying (not sitting upright in her chair? c’mon). She has a lot to learn. She seems like a 12 y/o doing a grown-up job.
March 25th, 2008 at 10:30 am
There were instances that Sarah Lacy showed no interest in what Mark was saying. The one who is conducting an interview must at all times focus to the person he or she is talking to.
March 27th, 2008 at 11:39 pm
what the hell is all the negative buzz about? if it wasn’t for several of her direct and sometimes challenging questions, then this entire piece (interview and issue) would be one big yawn…Zuckerberg obviously has a problem speaking beyond anything other than canned, boring talking points. We all cn likely presume where these are coming from…Again, her questions, notwithstanding the casual demeanor (twirling of hair, etc.), clearly challenged him AND more importantly spoke to relevant business/industry questions and issues. I can see why Facebook/Z-berg groupies would have a problem with this however…get over it and get off her back..I’m all for challenging icons…they’re big enough to become and be icons, let them be big enough to handle this woman’s simple, relevant and straight-forward questions…
March 28th, 2008 at 1:40 pm
I was there and she was bad, period.
She flirted with him the entire time. She talked over him and cut him off. She tried to hype her book and her career. She asked the same question multiple times despite the fact that he continued to give the same answer. She tried to embarrass him. She made bad jokes like threatening to throw water at him. SHE FAILED TO RECOGNIZE HER AUDIENCE AND ADAPT DURING THE COURSE OF THE INTERVIEW!
People were literally groaning when she asked him about the 15 Billion valuation the second time. She still asked it again later on. She was bad, it doesn’t make her a bad person, just a bad journalist in this particular occasion.
I think 80% of her questions led to the response “We want to help people communicate effectively”. Maybe ask some other questions?
Obviously just watching the video doesn’t do it justice. When you hear something was bad you expect blood. It’s no different than hearing a movie is amazing and then hating a good movie because it wasn’t the best thing you’ve ever seen. You had to be there to get a true sense of how bad it really went.
April 23rd, 2008 at 8:38 am
Wow, zuckerberg is an moron. Could he overuse “communicate efficiently”, and “empathy relationships” any more? And what is up with this typical “arrogant/nerdy IT crowd”. Typical.