"Mark Zuckerberg is the One"

The biggest reservation I have about investing in Facebook is not discussed in the post below: Mark Zuckerberg controls the company through its tiered-stock structure. When you buy Facebook, you're investing in him, not only his technical genius but also his management prowess as a CEO. If he mismanages Facebook, he can't be removed.

Some are on board with this set-up:

“I think Mark Zuckerberg is ‘The One,’ ” says Roger McNamee, a longtime Valley venture capitalist whose firm, Elevation Partners, is an investor in Facebook. “Like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, he has set a tone that everyone else has lined up behind.”

This Bloomberg News article describes how Mark Zuckerberg avoided strategic missteps along the way to tomorrow's largest IPO in stock market history. It should be comforting to investors how he

1) Foresaw Google as the main competitor back in 2007 and allied with Microsoft;

2) Brought in foreign investors who allowed him much more freedom than American venture capitalists;

3) Hired a complementary Chief Operating Officer, Sheryl Sandberg, instead of a seasoned "wise head" [think how Steve Jobs and Tim Cook complemented each other in different areas];

4) Stuck to his vision by adding features (e.g., news feed, status update, "Like" button, login to other sites using  the Facebook ID) that eventually brought more users to Facebook;

The fifth factor is idiosyncratic for a billionaire CEO who has important things to do: he's again writing code. It's grunt work, but it brings him closer to Facebook's engineering talent and may inspire future products. I like how he thinks.

The 1990's and 2000's were the decades of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, respectively.  The 2010's could turn out to be the decade of Mark Zuckerberg. He just may be the One.