Eduardo Saverin: Roommate Does Not Mean Best Friend

Image via CrunchBase

Mashable: The Other Facebook Co-founder Speaks Out: Instead of moving out with Zuckerberg to Palo Alto to grow the company though, he decided to work as a finance intern and the two began to have major conflicts over the direction of Facebook. Eventually the company was restructured, leaving Saverin out in the cold. His co-founder title was stripped and his share of Facebook reportedly dropped from 30% to less than 5%, for which he sued Facebook in 2009..... making his net worth somewhere in the range of $1.1 billion to $1.3 billion.... Even his Facebook page is bare; it only has two posts. All it says is that he’s a “technology entrepreneur and investor.”

I don't believe companies have co-founders. It is rare for a company to have a co-founder. The title co-founder denotes equal status, and that almost never happens. Paul Allen was not a Microsoft co-founder. Bill Gates was the founder, the indispensable person, the person who saw where the company might be in 20 years. Bob Miner was not an Oracle co-founder. Larry Ellison was the founder. Bob Miner never was able to make peace with the fact that at some point his net worth surpassed a million dollars. That was not a co-founder.

The big bang of Oracle happened with Larry Ellison and Bob Miner happened to be nearby. Paul Allen happened to be nearby. The big bang of Facebook happened with Mark Zuckerberg. Saverin was not a best friend, not even a friend. Saverin was roommate. He happened to be in geographical proximity. He is the accidental billionaire. The guy did not get the idea. And by that I don't mean to suggest the idea of Facebook did not originate with him. What I mean to suggest is the guy did not "get" it. He never got it, until he realized Facebook was getting really big, and so he sued. His billion should go straight to charity.

The two idiot twins should not have received any money. The justice system is flawed that they ended up with any money.

To some extent Paul Allen was there, he was number two. Bob Miner was with Oracle for years. He did work. These Facebook drama clowns did nothing. The twins were rowing the boat. Saverin had all the wrong ideas about where Facebook needed to go. The guy, if anything, was not even a non founder, he was an anti-founder. If o-n-e of his ideas had been incorporated, Facebook was gone down the tube.

I want the money back.

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CNBC: Facebook Co-Founder Speaks Publicly: What I Learned From Watching “The Social Network”

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• Facebook to Saverin: "We Wish Eduardo Well" (blogs.forbes.com)
• Eduardo Saverin Responds To The Social Network (allfacebook.com)
• Facebook co-founder Saverin: Who cares if The Social Network is true? (venturebeat.com)
• The Other Facebook Co-founder Speaks Out (mashable.com)
• Eduardo Saverin, Facebook Co-Founder, Responds To The Social Network (mediaite.com)
• Facebook's Eduardo Saverin on What He Learned From Watching 'The Social Network' (blogs.forbes.com)
• Estranged Facebook Co-Founder No Longer At War With The Social Network (techcrunch.com)
• Facebook Co-Founder Speaks Publicly: What I Learned From Watching ... (Eduardo Saverin/CNBC Guest Blog) (techmeme.com)
• Eduardo Saverin: Facebook co-founder (rightcelebrity.com)

An Online Social Media Instructor

I am one of the instructors. I think I might be the very first one, definitely one of the early ones. It feels good to be on the ground level. This is a social media startup. The classes will be online. That is not acting cheap. That is not going for the second choice. It actually makes no sense to conduct social media classes in the traditional bricks and mortar setting. You want the instructor online. You want the students online.

I am one of the top 100 people in New York City on Twitter. (@paramendra) I am really into social media. If you are a people person fascinated by technology, social media comes naturally to you, as it does to me. Social media is as much about people as technology. If you have poor people skills that is not to say you are not going to be good at social media, but that is to say you are going to have to work on your people
Image by paramendra via Flickr skills just as hard as you might work on the
technology part. Just setting up a Twitter or a Facebook account is not going to do it.

I have seen people and organizations set up blogs, and all they do is post what used to be press releases. That is not my idea of blogging. There is a great way to tweet and blog, and there is a so so way to tweet and blog, and there are some lousy ways. There are so so Facebook pages, and there are Facebook pages that grip you.

You don't need a million page hits to your blog. You don't need 10,000 followers on Twitter before you can be a social media success. Social media for small businesses is as much about customer service as customer acquisition. Social media is about making intimate conversations with customers possible. If you really, truly care about your customers, intimate conversations are not chores. If they feel like chores, you need to step up on the customer service pedal. Social media does not solve that. You can have a social media presence and still have a lousy customer service. Stale Twitter and Facebook accounts, and stale blogs are not my idea of getting social media.

I responded to a Craig's List ad by Duane Wells, the founder, and that is how I got started with the Social Media Learning Institute. I have every reason to believe he is pretty ambitious with it. And I like that. I wanted to be talking to an entrepreneur at heart before I signed up. We are still talking, we are still chalking out the details. And the guy is in Pittsburgh. We use social media to communicate. We are eating our own dog food.

(Posted at The Social Media Learning Institute posterous)

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