SXSW: Zuckerberg's avenging audience

(Zuckerberg and interviewer Sarah Lacy)

Today's main event, and possibly the most anticipated and well-attended event of the festival's interactive portion, was a keynote interview of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg by BusinessWeek writer Sarah Lacy. As it turned out, the interview ended up being more about Lacy than Zuckerberg, a switcheroo that the audience wasn't so jazzed about.

Lacy, 32, who has a book coming out about Silicon Valley's rise from the dot-com ashes, seemed at times — or really, for the whole thing — to treat Zuckerberg, 23, like a child rather than what he is: one of the tech industry's most powerful businessmen and perhaps its most innovative thinker. 

Early on, Lacy told a story that felt like an attempt to let the audience know who the grown-up was.  Interrupting his answer to her own question about Facebook's philanthropic goals, she said:

The first time I ever interviewed Mark, it was so awkward. 

[To Zuckerberg:] We'll get back to you in a minute.

So I’d talked to him on the phone before but never met him in person. When I'd talked to him on the phone, he was really ballsy and out there. So I was expecting this brash, punk, outspoken kid. He was so nervous. He was wearing a white T-shirt, and it was sopping wet by the end of the interview. He sweat through his shirt!

She went on about how difficult it had been to elicit long answers out of him that time, and how she'd reached a point where she'd frustrated him so much that a nervous tic emerged — “he kinda does this thing,” said Lacy, jerking her head back and forth. “Like a bird.”

Soon she told another story about another interview she'd done with Zuckerberg at Facebook headquarters. "The place was disgusting. There was pizza on the floor. ... It was like a tornado had come through."

Zuckerberg was a good sport through the whole thing, including Lacy's multiple references to his age, his status as the world's youngest billionaire, and Facebook's embarrassing privacy episode with its Beacon advertising service. On Facebook's oft-touted $15B valuation, Lacy opined, none too objectively: "I love Facebook. I use it all the time. But you don't actually think it's worth $15B, do you?"

(To Lacy's credit, she did throw him some curveballs — how applications being generated for Facebook have become frivolous and sort of useless; Zuckerberg's tendency to fire managers he doesn't like; and how Facebook might help stem terrorism.)

Then she brought up Zuckerberg's journal-keeping habits. He apparently writes his plans and ideas out longhand in bound books. Nothing too crazy there. Still she stuck to the topic, arguing with Zuckerberg about whether or not he burned the books when he was done with them.

Finally someone in the audience had had enough:

"Talk about something interesting!" 

Listen to the bit here:

After that, Lacy lost her cool a bit, sounding defensive about the session — especially after an audience member asked, "Other than really rough interviews, what is the biggest obstacle that Facebook faces?" (The audience cackled.)

"Can somebody send me a message later about why exactly it was that I sucked so bad?"

"What is your e-mail address?" the questioner responded.

It was, once again, an "awkward" scene.

If I had to weigh in, I'd say that Lacy played a little too fast and loose with the adversarial questioning and poking fun at Zuckerberg. She was probably trying to be hip and edgy.

So yes, it backfired.  But did the thousand-member audience's decision to gang up on her make things any better?  I happen to agree with her that her job is pretty tough, and it doesn't get any easier when the people you're trying to inform start going e-mob on you.

Comments

[Jason]

The talk of the conference is this interview. Someone said, that when people think back to SXSW 2008, this interview is what they are going to remember.
This blog post reads just like all the twitters messages that came from the audience. Thanks for posting some of the audio portion, it totally captured the feel of the audience reaction.