I noticed an article on Techmeme this morning titled Zuckerberg: Facebook Will Have A Business Plan In Three Years.
At face value the title would suggest that the author, Kafka, thinks that Facebook currently doesn’t have a business plan. In the blog post’s first paragraph, he confirms his thought.
If you’ve had a nagging suspicion that Mark Zuckerberg really doesn’t know how he’ll turn Facebook into a business, wonder no more. You’re right. Here he is talking to German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.
I’ve said it before, just probably not blogged it for prosperity, but any company that has raised funding (including Twitter) has a business plan. There is no way a company would raise money without one. It’s also just insane business practice to not have one.
In fact, in the section of the interview that Kafka quotes, I can see that Zuckerberg has a business plan that outlines several revenue models.
But we are experimenting already. One group is very focused on targeting; another part is focused on social recommendation from your friends. In three years from now we have to figure out what the optimum model is.
A business plan is always in flux. So it’s reasonable that in a industry like the Internet that a company has some flexibility in it to work out the “optimum model.”
OK, so I might have just been sucked in with some clever link baiting, but to suggest that Facebook doesn’t have a business model is just not right (or is clever link baiting).
