Next month will mark the third time that Facebook CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg will sit down with me for a Web 2 interview. (The first is above, the second can be found here). Last year Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg joined me, and she was great, but I’m eager to speak with Mark again, given all that has happened in the past year. If you watch his interview in 2007, then a year later, and then his recent appearances, you see a guy who’s really matured as a public figure (and yes, that has a lot of nuance when you run Facebook). Yes, he had a uncomfortable (and famously sweaty) conversation at D earlier this year, but lately I’ve noticed a confidence that I’m going to bet will be on display next month.
Not that we won’t have a few items to cover that will test Zuckerberg’s newfound stage presence, what with congressional inquiries, unflattering Hollywood portrayals, and platform outages to discuss. But if you’re CEO of a very public (though still financially private) company, dealing with these things comes with the territory.
So what would you ask Mark Zuckerberg? Leave your thoughts in comments, and please do the same for Baidu’s Robin Li, Yahoo’s Carol Bartz and Google’s Eric Schmidt. Next up will be Yuri Milner, CEO of DST and major investor in Facebook, Groupon, and many others.
Here are some thought starters for Zuckerberg:
– You recently stated that the company is run basically at break even, and that’s OK. Can you unpack that for us? Investors like DST expect a lot more than that at some point, no?
– While we won’t focus on the movie, it’s a hit, so what does he make of it?
– The question of privacy and in particular user controls. Is he satisfied Facebook has done all it should with the new dashboards?
– Instrumentation – why didn’t “friend lists” take off? The new Groups. Is it working?
– Faecbook Open Graph. Will TripAdvisor type integrations become the norm?
– A Facebook ad network off domain. Is that coming, when?
– Google.me. Thoughts on this?
– Twitter…same. Is the Interest graph of interest?
– What is next for the Facebook product? Mark famously loves to work on the product. So what’s he working on?
Please leave your comments here, so Tim and I can do the best interview possible! Thanks.