Back in 2006, Facebook was only a shadow of the company it would become, tech giant Yahoo was attempting to buy the social network for $1 billion — and Dan Rosenweig was the man who got Zuckerberg’s handshake on that offer.
Rosenweig the Chief Operating Officer of Yahoo from 2002 to 2007 — Facebook founder to acquire the company — an offer which Zuckerberg accepted at first, but declined after Yahoo lowered the price.
“I’d like to think I was way ahead of the curve of most people, because they only had four million users and zero revenue and I did offer them a billion dollars,” Rosenweig said during a brief conversation with a group of journalists in the parking lot of Facebook HQ before heading off to a scheduled interview.
“I assure you as ahead of the curve I thought I might have been, I don’t think anybody would have imagined all of this,” he said shortly after Facebook’s stock went up for sale Friday.
Zuckerberg reportedly accepted Yahoo’s $1 billion offer with a handshake. Yahoo’s stock tumbled shortly after, and the company lowered its offer to $850 million — an offer which Zuckerberg refused. Yahoo had reportedly separated into two camps on the issue, one that believed in the future of Facebook, and another that thought a $1 billion investment in a network that was currently making no money was unwise.
Rosenweig built a relationship with Zuckerberg during the time Yahoo was considering the acquisition, and impressed him with his forward-thinking. When most people were still thinking about building single applications, Zuckerberg was thinking about building a platform.
“He was talking about a platform before platform was cool,” says Rosenweig. “He had a vision for connecting people of all kinds.”
At the time, Facebook was only available to college students — and only allowed them to connect to students at their own school.
“He had pretty big ambitions, and I think it’s pretty clear he was way ahead of everybody –- and still is frankly.”
Rosensweig described Facebook’s move to Menlo Park as representative of a rebirth in the area. “When I moved here 10 years ago this building was Sun Micro, and it’s sort of the changing of guard. Menlo went from Sun Micro, to being sold to Oracle, to now resurrecting it as Facebook.”
Would Facebook would be following in the footsteps of the building’s previous tenant 10 years from now and moving out? “My guess is only if they need a bigger building,” Rosenweig said. The number of developers growing up today would only help grow companies like Facebook in the future, he added.
“It’s an absolutely wonderful time to be in Silicon Valley … A lot more of these companies are generating revenue. A lot more are generating profits. That wasn’t the case 10 years ago.”
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