Becoming Facebook: The 10 Challenges That Defined the Company That's Disrupting the World

"Becoming Facebook" is the inside story of the company's rise to prominence, written by someone who had a ringside seat for years. Hoefflinger was a key part of the Facebook team. He saw how the company fought off competitors, stumbled, found its feet again, expanded into new areas, and reinvented itself a number of times.

Hoefflinger relives this experience, breaking down Facebook's journey into 10 business challenges and lessons learned, and offering tips on how we can apply these lessons to our work lives. He takes readers inside Facebook's offices at Menlo Park, California, and profiles the visionaries, tech gurus, and leaders who helped grow the company into the giant it is today. He also looks into the future and suggests how new technological waves may impact Facebook and companies like it.

So, who's this book for? First and foremost, it's for anyone who has an interest in business, and wants to learn from a hugely successful company that's winning in the digital space. It's also for those who want to know what defines a great leader. Like Apple's Steve Jobs, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has become a business legend and a celebrity, whose social awkwardness and bumpy rise to the top were profiled in the 2010 film "The Social Network."

On a more practical level, "Becoming Facebook" is for anyone who runs a company, department, or team. Although Facebook operates on a massive scale, Hoefflinger shares lessons that are relevant to businesses and teams of all sizes.

Mike Hoefflinger spent almost seven years working at Facebook, joining the company from Intel in 2009 as Head of Global Business Marketing. During his time there, he helped to grow Facebook's advertising business in a dramatic way, working alongside Chief Operating Officer, Sheryl Sandberg. He's been in Silicon Valley for 25 years and is now an entrepreneur-in-residence at XSeed Capital, which helps innovative technology companies to grow.

So keep listening to hear how Facebook added and kept millions of users, how it can afford to play the long game, and how it's winning the talent wars by keeping its employees happy.

With a character like Zuckerberg at the helm, it would be tempting to write about him on every page. But "Becoming Facebook" is much more than a biography of the company's founder. Hoefflinger is careful not to make the whole book about Zuckerberg, and he profiles other prominent members of Facebook's team who were integral to its success. That said, the author knows that the maverick Harvard-graduate-turned-billionaire makes for a good story, so he begins with some insights into Zuckerberg's leadership, alongside some tips we can take away.

Zuckerberg is a visionary, a doer, and a man on a mission – to make the world more open and connected. He looks to others for advice, meeting with the likes of Intel's Andy Grove and Jeff Bezos of Amazon, and with Bill Gates to discuss philanthropy. He controls Facebook's board of directors, but he likes to have people around him who'll challenge him.

Hoefflinger is kinder to Zuckerberg than the makers of "The Social Network," although Zuckerberg has matured since his teenage years into a successful businessman with considerable influence. He speaks at the United Nations, hosts world leaders, lectures in China in Mandarin, and prefers hard questions to easy ones at his weekly encounter with employees, Hoefflinger says.

This picture of Zuckerberg's personality and leadership style draws the reader in and sets the scene for the author's discussion of Facebook's 10 challenges and lessons learned.

Hoefflinger looks at how Facebook turned down a billion-dollar takeover bid by Yahoo, and then built a $10-billion business in three years by allowing advertisers of all sizes into its News Feed. He also shows how it fought off Google's bid for a slice of its space, and how it disrupted itself, by buying and integrating Instagram before anyone else did.

He explores the secret of Facebook's rapid growth, its long-term approach to cracking China, and how it keeps its employees happy. We're going to take a closer look at these last points now.

Nobody would deny that Facebook is a hugely powerful company and the dominant player in its space. But with so many new technologies fighting for the attention of the world's internet users, its success was by no means guaranteed in its early days. And there was a time, back in 2007, when the company's growth stalled. So how did Facebook get over that hump, keep adding new customers, and hold on to them?

The Facebook team figured out that their growth depended on three factors: finding the company's North Star Metric – the single piece of data that would be the focus of their growth efforts; identifying its Magic Moment – the experience that gets people hooked onto a product; and its Core Product Value – the daily delivery of value that keeps users loyal.

The North Star Metric is the number that's fundamental to your long-term success. For the hospitality service Airbnb, this might be the number of nights booked. For taxi company Uber, it might be the number of rides, or the number of messages sent for WhatsApp.

Facebook decided its North Star Metric was engagement data – the number of people who saw enough value in Facebook to return to it on a regular basis. As the company grew, its ways of measuring engagement became more and more sophisticated. But the focus was always on understanding why some people kept coming back, and how to turn half-hearted users into fully engaged ones.

Facebook worked out that the Magic Moment for its users was seeing their friends in their News Feeds. So it threw its energy into making sure new users connected with others and grew their number of friends fast. By way of comparison, Hoefflinger says the magic moment for Airbnb users might be when they find a lovely place to stay that's easy to access, filled with character, and doesn't feel like a hotel. Or, for Uber customers, when they press a button and see a car show up a few minutes later.

Finally, Facebook understood that its Core Product Value – the third growth factor – was the feeling of connectedness that users get from seeing their friends in their News Feeds. So they made sure they delivered that value, day after day.

We like this strategic, threefold approach to growth, and we especially like how Hoefflinger offers comparisons with other successful, disruptive businesses like Airbnb and Uber. This drives his message home, and makes it easy for readers to apply Facebook's lessons to their own lives.

Let's now look at how Facebook plays the long game in order to crack huge but resistant markets like China, Japan, and India, while taking care of its core business at the same time.

When it comes to challenges, China is a big one for Zuckerberg. China blocks Facebook's services, and competition from local social networking companies is tough. There's also the problem with censorship and control of information. But the Chinese market is massive – the country has close to 700 million internet users. Even if Facebook had just 30 percent penetration – half what it has in the United States – China would be its largest country in terms of users.

Japan and India also offer potentially lucrative markets, but present big challenges for Facebook. Competition is fierce in Japan, where local providers dominate, alongside YouTube and Twitter. But the chance to increase its share of a massive advertising pie in Japan is enough to convince Facebook to play the long game there.

India is a different problem altogether, because only 30 percent of the population is on the internet. But India ties in with Facebook's mission to connect the unconnected, so it's determined to crack the market there, through infrastructure projects, partnerships, and services that require low bandwidth.

Facebook is committed to penetrating these countries, even if it takes time, and to finding ways to navigate the various obstacles. But the key is: it can afford to do so without damaging its core business. And that's the lesson Hoefflinger wants us to learn.

He suggests we plan our growth by dividing our business into four categories: fundamental projects at the core of our mission; adjacent projects that expand our mission in clear ways; essential projects, which we can't lose, or which make us vulnerable to competition if we don't pursue them; and non-essential projects, where failure doesn't harm our business in a fundamental way.

Let's see how that fits with Facebook. First, the company connected people in the United States and Western Europe, and grew advertising spend in those markets. Second, it expanded into an adjacent market – direct messaging – by developing its homegrown service Messenger and buying WhatsApp to protect itself from rivals. Only then did Zuckerberg turn his attention to China, Japan and India, but in a way that wouldn't harm the company's core business, even if he failed.

We don't all have Facebook's deep pockets, or its global mission, but this strategy of taking care of core business is a sound one, even if it's not new.

As we've heard, Facebook cares about engaging its users. But what about its employees? How does the tech giant attract and keep the best talent and get employee engagement right?

If you run a business or team, you'll know how important it is to keep employees or team members motivated and engaged. These days, it's easy to switch companies, especially in sectors like tech and digital, where new businesses are springing up all the time. But a high churn rate is costly and it can drive down team morale.

Facebook wins the talent war by making sure everyone is doing work that plays to their strengths, and keeps them in the mental state of "flow" as much as possible. Flow is that optimal state of consciousness where we feel focused and perform at our best, as time flies by.

Hoefflinger credits Lori Goler, the woman in charge of human resources and recruiting at Facebook, with matching employees' strengths with their roles. He says she built Facebook's reputation for delivering job satisfaction for all. Even Zuckerberg and Sandberg follow the strengths-based approach, focusing on areas that match their talents, the author says.

One of the hallmarks of Facebook is its rejection of the traditional career ladder approach, in favor of a "jungle gym" model. So instead of climbing up a pyramid with limited space and roles at the top, employees have opportunities for personal and professional development in all directions, often moving sideways, taking on new challenges, and learning new skills.

Facebook came in second overall in an anonymous survey of best places to work in 2017 by Glassdoor, and it came first in the category of technology, so its approach clearly works.

It's useful to have an insight into how Facebook wins the talent war, from someone who worked at the company for so long. Much has been written about employee engagement, but it's good to be reminded that employees feel more fulfilled when they're given the opportunity to play to their strengths and develop new skills.

Hoefflinger mostly does a good job of extracting lessons from Facebook's experience that can be applied to other industries, smaller companies, and teams, and the book's structure helps with these parallels. Each chapter begins with a summary of the challenge, the lesson learned, and a question – called a Thought Starter – designed to get readers thinking about the changes they can make in their own work lives.

You might find yourself making notes about how you could engage your team, move into new markets, or give your customers a Magic Moment. That said, we think the author could have developed some of these Thought Starters further, to make the book relevant to a wider audience. In a few of the chapters, they feel like afterthoughts.

To Hoefflinger's credit, he doesn't shy away from discussing Facebook's failures, including its initial public offering that flopped in 2012. He also gives us a fascinating insight into the future of technology, and how Facebook might fare in the face of further disruption. The author is a good storyteller, and Facebook and the world of technology provide exciting subject matter.

So, whether you're a Facebook fan, or simply interested in learning best practice from a business giant, we think you'll get a lot from this book.

"Becoming Facebook" by Mike Hoefflinger is published by AMACOM, the American Management Association.

That's the end of this episode of Book Insights. Thanks for listening.