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Plan B: How to Hatch a Second Plan Thats Always Better Than Your First: David K Murray: Books. IntroductionPlanning for the Plans to Change The kid looked out of place. He wore a hooded sweatshirt, dirty jeans, and T-shirt with something pithy written across his chest. He was slouched over in deep thought, so I couldn’t read what the shirt said. The wrinkled clothes, dark circles under his eyes, and apparent lack of self-awareness made me think that he hadn’t slept in days. I figured he was a courier or bike messenger. We were all in a small waiting room; my business partner, the kid who hadn’t slept in days, and me. The posh office was the headquarters of Accel Partners, a multibillion-dollar venture capital firm in downtown Palo Alto. They’d funded start-ups like Macromedia, Rhapsody, and Veritas Software. We were there to pitch our own start-up, an online tax preparation company called TaxNet. We’d had a successful first year, had more than 120,000 customers, and now needed funding for product development and aggressive marketing. We were making the rounds in Silicon Valley, up and down Sand Hill Road in the hope of getting $20 million to fulfill our strategic plan. As we waited, the kid leaned back in his chair, and I could see that his T-shirt read CODE MONKEY. Aha, I thought. He wasn’t a courier, he was a programmer, and he was there to pitch a business just like we were. He was the competition. “Do you have a company?” I asked him. “A company? No, not really,” he answered, never looking up or making eye contact. Then he thought for a moment and said, “Well, sort of…I guess.” Before I could probe any further, Andy walked into the room. Andy was an analyst with Accel, and Tom and I stood up to shake his hand; the kid did not. “We’ll be ready for you guys in a few minutes,” Andy told us. Then he turned to the kid and said, “Come on in.” Later in the day, Tom and I learned that Accel had approved the funding of the kid’s “sort of company” and he had been there to sign the paperwork and get $12 million for a minority share of his start-up. I remember Andy trying to explain the business model to us. It didn’t really make sense to me. When I asked how it made money, Andy said it didn’t. It seemed absurd, that Accel would take a minority position in a company with no revenue stream. It also made me think that we had a much better idea than the kid who hadn’t slept in days. I didn’t know it at the time, but I had just witnessed a historic moment in the history of Silicon Valley. Today, Accel’s $12 million investment is worth billions, and the “sort of company” is better known as Facebook, while the kid is now a multibillionaire, better known as Mark Zuckerberg. Today, whenever I see an interview with him or a mention of him in the press, I think back to that day and then ask myself this question: How did Zucker-berg get from the waiting room where I met him to a place on the world stage where his idea is used as a means of communication between friends and family while at the same time it’s being used to engineer the nonviolent overthrow of oppressive government regimes? Or, more simply: How did Facebook evolve so successfully? The story of Facebook is well known. Hell, it was turned into an Oscar-winning screenplay. So there’s no need to recount it all. What is especially interesting and does bear attention here is the methodology that Zuckerberg used to drive the evolution of his business model. You see, Facebook didn’t just appear fully formed in his mind one day; and, contrary to popular belief, he didn’t steal the idea for it. He followed an evolutionary process to build the site, a practical way to manage the day-to-day operations of his business that was combined with a deeply theoretical and strategic understanding of social networking. From the beginning, Zuck-erberg was involved in the develop
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