Andy Kessler

WSJ: Weekend Interview with Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg

Where are you from? “Dobbs Ferry.” What’s your major? “Mostly computer science but also psychology.” Where did you live? “Kirkland House at Harvard.”

I’m meeting with Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of Facebook, and have already run through the extent of my social networking skills from college. If that didn’t start a conversation, I usually headed back to the bar. Fortunately, Mr. Zuckerberg is not only a programmer, but a talker as well.

On the third floor of your average downtown Palo Alto building, I meet Mr. Zuckerberg after walking through a large room filled with tables and lots of large screen monitors manned by mostly young men wearing the only thing that distinguished this workplace from a hedge fund—T-shirts.

Mr. Zuckerberg’s creation, an Internet service that allows students to post personal information and photos, is nothing short of a twister sweeping college campuses, keeping millions up to date on their friends’ lives and dating status. There was a reputed $1 billion plus offer from Yahoo!, turned down, natch.

Even more remarkable is that Mr. Zuckerberg is all of 22 years old. What is it that made Facebook become so valuable in less than three years? And will 22-year-olds with 200 employees come up with all the good ideas from now on?

Wired: Make Backdating a Thing of the Past

How the tax man can help get us out of this options mess.

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/15.03/start.html

As you read this, hundreds of Silicon Valley CEOs are under their desks in full duck-and-cover mode, fearing that the Department of Justice or a shareholder mob might pounce at any time to cart them off for "backdating" or "spring-loading" stock options. The paranoia has gotten so bad that corporate lawyers from San Francisco to San Jose are charging $600 an hour to scour records, all in an effort to clear companies’ reputations before they get besmirched. And it's a good thing — the "everyone was doing it, even Teflon Steve Jobs" defense doesn’t appear to be working.

Whose fault is this? Greedy CEOs? Ambitious human resource pros? The Securities and Exchange Commission? The Financial Accounting Standards Board? Congress? The Immigration and Naturali­zation Service? In some respects, all of them, but the root cause may be the Internal Revenue Service. And that agency holds the key to avoiding the problem in the future.