Saturday, November 5, 2011

Afternoon Keynote from Katie Mitic, Director, Facebook


Thanks Katie for joining us from facebook.  Katie is an HBS alum and now Director of Plaform and Mobile Marketing at facebook.  Welcome back to HBS!

Selected topics from her speech today.

Part of the facebook mantra is taking risks. 
  • What would you do if you're weren't afraid?
  • Move very fast and break things
  • Hackathons still happen at facebook, and a lot of good ideas come out of these hackathons
Social aspect of facebook
  • A lot of people have more fans on facebook than on their websites, because it's a place where they are social and it's natural 
  • We've look at getting people to the magic number of friends, at which point it's worth it to them to keep logging back on the site.  It was important enough that Mark put people on this to just focus on this problem - how do we get people to have at least the magic number of friends
Competitive Landscape
  • The companies that have been most successful in the Valley have strong product focus and dedicated company mission
  • Companies live and die by product.  You can have a great product and nothing else, and still be okay.  The inverse isn't true.  You can have great monetization, but without a great product, you're  nowhere.
Other Thoughts
  • facebook doesn't editorialize on apps, it lets the people get the word out about apps
  • facebook is successful, in part, because everyone at the company is so social and so dedicated to the mission
  • Something to think about is, "If I was starting a product in a garage today, without the assets of facebook, how would I build it?"



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