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Facebook Talent

Written by Aneed Hasan

It’s all about buying talent

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg asserts that “Facebook has not once bought a company for the company itself. We buy companies to get excellent people.” He was speaking to an audience at Y Combinator’s Startup School.
Facebook chief is in an exploration for top talents and for that he decided to absorb the companies that engage a polish team. Until this year Facebook took on only

two companies since its inception. However it now owns seven companies including Hot Potato and Nextstop that were acquired in July this year. It is widely believed that Facebook took over Nextstop only to add more superlatives for Zuckerberg’s brainchild.
Over the years Facebook’s hasn’t changed its strategy of agglomerating firms to bring in the very best people in their respective fields. And why should they change this strategy that has yielded such massive dividend for Facebook? When Zuckerberg lifted Parakey, a startup run by Mozilla Firefox co-founders Blake Ross and Joe Hewitt. He not only gained the company but two leaders. With Parakey’s two leaders under his wing, Zuckerberg mustered in Ross to spearhead Facebook’s internationalization, and Hewitt to build Facebook’s mobile apps. As expected, these two masterminds produced brilliance for the social networking site. Facebook went on to celebrate a massive fame in both the international and the mobile markets.
However, all said, Mark had this feeling in his mind that buying the best company does not always ensure that the drawing cards will follow. So it wasn’t all too easy for the CEO. He had to convince ‘the best and the brightest to join the growing empire.’ The Financial Times puts it that it is the $33.7 billion valuation that attracts the very bests. But as Zuckerberg puts it, “A lot of the best people come to Facebook because of the culture we have and because we have enormous leverage … I can’t think of another company where each engineer services more than a million users.”